Making it count

Happy New Year! May 2011 provide you with unlimited blessings and opportunities to exercise the power of your intentions.

May you be encouraged (gently) to strip away what is nonessential to your being, and wildly encouraged to live your deepest passions.

May you look back at the year just past, this time next year, and say "wow, look what I did!"

The waking dream

The shamans of Peru talk about how the world is as we dream it -- that the problem is we're dreaming the wrong dream. That we need to wake into a new dream. Was it Emerson who wrote "our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting"?

Buddhist teachings, not to mention the odd western mystic or philosopher (I believe it was Bishop Berkeley who remarked that we are all figments of God's imagination, or something to that effect), say similar things. Essentially, that what we perceive as reality is just that: our perception. That the things we "know" to be true are the product of a consensual and group imagination.

Imagine the possibilities if you could, in fact, dream a new world into being. What would you dream of? In my dream, there are mountains and forest and clear running water, and animals and birds and most importantly (in my dream) people living joyous, BIG lives of creativity and passion and laughter, with no worries about the next meal, or a roof over their children's heads. Other people's dreams of waking dreams might include a world full of pets wanted by every owner, or no abused children, or people with every 't' crossed and 'i' dotted and tons of peace and quiet and classical music on every corner.

Of course, how we create a waking reality out of our dreams is the tricky part, and it's one reason I suggest volunteering. Maybe you can't see your way into a veterinary degree just yet--not with bills to pay and kids to raise, or an early retirement in your sights. But you could volunteer with the ASPCA, or the Humane Society. Maybe you aren't sure a career in hydrology is for you, so you spend a few weekends instead on river cleanups. Or taking that law degree and writing petitions for the local NIMBY group.

So that's your homework this week, while you're getting those New Year's resolutions mapped out and marked down. Take some time to sit (or lie) down and dream a new world into being. Then get up and start the work.

Pay attention to your dreams

Not the waking kind. The "I'm asleep and would like to stay that way" kind. Have you ever had a dream that was so vivid, so interesting, so...whatever, that you didn't want to wake up from it? Couldn't wait to go back to sleep in hopes of repeating the experience?

Those dreams can tell us something about our waking experience. While one type of dream has been identified by dream researchers as processing information that our conscious mind didn't get to during the day, another type -- far more important, I think -- is our subconscious trying to get through and nudge us into action. (I've identified two other types of dreams in addition to the classic ones, all of which have their place.)

When you set your mind on a particular intention--say, trying to pinpoint a part of your life you want to open up your path on--your subconscious mind often swings into action while you're sleeping. I think it's because during our waking hours, our conscious mind is in charge, and it's the part that has identified all the reasons "you can't do that" (in its words). But in the wee hours of the morning, your walls are down (this is why deep meditation also works for this) and the truth can creep through. You may have to dig in to find the Truth (note capital 't'), since you are still filtering it through images your mind / brain finds familiar, but it's there.

Dream journals are often handy references for this: keep a notebook by the bed, and when you wake up, jot down as much of the dream as you can remember (at first, especially, this may be only the big images). Make note of patterns as they develop, or dreams that occur in groups (three tends to be a significant number). What do they have in common? How do you feel in the moment of dreaming? Elated? Frightened? Exhilarated? Strong emotion is an indication that the dream has some importance.

Also pay attention to whether some element of your dream appears in your waking life: it may be something you've avoided consciously noticing (such as the 'volunteers needed' sign at the local food bank). You can also use part of a dream to set your intention for the next night's dream. This usually takes some practice--follow-up dreaming, that is--so don't be surprised if you are less than successful the first few tries. Remember, your subconscious is in control here, and generally is going to bring up images you need to see, even if you hadn't planned them.

When you identify things that potentially are important to your intention, hang on to them. Start exploring them in your waking hours, either as hobby pursuits (easier to learn woodworking on a birdhouse than on the family home) or volunteer work (or you could help build a Habitat for Humanity house). Then see where it leads.

Meeting the center

One of the most powerful tools for living consciously is, of course, meditation. But there's another simple tool you can use to start, and use throughout, your day even when you a) don't have time to meditate, b) can't get your brain to shut up during your meditation, or c) whatever your reason is for not meditating.

The tool (practice) is called "grounding and centering," and it's just as handy for getting your toddler to calm down as it is for getting your inner toddler to calm down. The practice. common to several religious traditions, is used to sharpen focus and open yourself up to divine intervention/guidance.

The two parts can be done together or separately as you need, and only take a few minutes (less time with practice) to bring you back to yourself, regardless of the distraction.

Grounding: the practice of grounding involves feeling yourself connected to the earth (thus enhancing stability). A good way to start is to imagine yourself sitting on the ground leaning against a tree or large boulder. Feel how strong that is, how rooted. In your imagination, now, let yourself merge into the tree or boulder. Now you  are the one who is rooted. Just the imagining of this can relax your body.

Centering: centering can be used to focus when your mental energy is jumping all over the place, or when you're feeling attacked and you need to present a clear case (attacks of nerves count). This practice uses the traditional 7 chakras as a guidepost: you're looking for the solar plexus chakra, which can be imagined as a clear yellow light (it is, of course, located roughly at the solar plexus, or right about the center of your body). Of the many areas governed by this chakra's energy, the one that deals with will/focus/personal boundaries (depending on your situation) are what you're looking for. Mind you, it works just as well even if you think the chakra system is a bunch of hooey. Locate this center, imagine the yellow light. Now imagine the light spreading throughout your body. The brilliance loosens up all those irritating little energy blocks that are keeping you scattered. When your body is full of yellow light, start to pull it back in to your center. When it's back in place, in a nice, bright, yellow ball, take a few deep breaths.

Used in the morning, the dual practice is one way to get the day off to a clear-headed, focused start. During the day, when demands on your time start to pull your focus off your path, you can use one or the other or both to walk yourself back to where you need to be.

What's stopping you from starting?

A lot of people seem to think that the things that hold us back apply only to the actual living of the dream.

Uh-uh.

The same things that will keep you from living it, will keep you from finding it, too.

Yes, I know--you're madly trying new things, making dream or bucket lists, seriously in search of your passion. And that's great. But I invite you to slow down for a minute and ask yourself one question: what if I slowed down and let one of these things be the passion?

Just to see what it feels like. It might feel wrong. It might feel right. But I suspect that some if not all of the time, we KNOW what our passion is; we just stop it there and pretend it isn't happening. I think there are two possible reasons for this--for the not-finding, not-recognizing. The big one is fear.

Yes, fear. Which we think is what would stop us from reaching new heights, from starting the work of living consciously. But I think, too, it stops us from recognzing our true passion when we find it. Now I know this doesn't apply to everyone, but I know it applies to someone besides me--I'm just not that special. So how do you know when fear is keeping you from recognizing The One True Thing You Are Here For? At a guess, you could start with your excuses. If even your excuses have excuses, there's a good chance fear is stepping in to stop you.

I'm not going to ask you to psychoanalyze yourself, to ask you why you're feeling that fear (or what you're really afraid of). But do ask yourself: is it right in front of me, and is fear holding shut the door?

Willing to be "wrong"

When you follow your heart, your passion, someone's going to disagree. That's okay. The only way to appeal to everyone is to appeal to no one. Be willing to find your tribe, that group of people who are willing to drink your kool-aid (which you, of course, have filled with all the goodness and wisdom of life, not the icky stuff of chemical coloring, sugar, and the occasional lethal dose of dogma) and sing your praises.

I don't care if your goal is to be the world's greatest accountant, the lead soprano in a touring Gilbert and Sullivan troupe, or godmother to the world's wild orchids. Do it for yourself, do it for your soul, and do it for the people who like your style.

Don't waste your time trying to sell your art to someone who doesn't appreciate it. It diminishes both of you. Just do your thing and do it in the way only you can do it and THAT is your contribution to the world--and it's beautiful.

The Bucket List

No, not jumping into movie-mode again. Talking about "the list."

There's this pop psychology trope that runs along the lines of "if you knew you were dying tomorrow, who would you call, what would you say, and why aren't you doing it today." Not getting into that, because seriously, I think knowing you're dying tomorrow lets loose a whole lot of restrictions that might make you act in an otherwise bad-idea way. And besides, we'll discuss this "live like you're dying" idea another time. Where I'm going with this is that this idea of acting because eventually you will die shows up frequently, and it sometimes takes the form of "the bucket list" (what do you want to do before you kick the bucket). And that's okay, as long as you don't get hung up on the form of it or start counting.

Because, here’s the thing….you gotta DO the stuff on the list, or what’s the point of the self-realization?


Bucket lists are good for one thing, at least—defining, clarifying, what’s really important. In Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles, one of the steps is to make that list: 100 things I want to do, see, experience, etc. before I die. Does anyone ever actually get to 100? That's what I mean by getting hung up on the form. Regardless, I did this exercise about five years ago and dropped a time-consuming, expensive hobby because of it. Not ONE of the things on my list had anything to do with the hobby that was taking up several weekends a year, time creating things to go with the hobby, money spent going to events that were centered around this hobby, and so forth. And I didn’t care enough about it to have any achievement related to it on my list of 100 things to do before I die…a list that topped out somewhere around 60, and I was including titles of books I wanted to write!

As long as you're thinking about exploding this year into the record books by finally finding (if necessary) and living your passion, go ahead and make that list. Challenge yourself to come up with 100 items, but remember, it's okay if you can't find that many. After all, "find a cure for cancer" only takes up one line, but it would be a hell of a thing to get done.

New Year, new plans part deux

Making Good New Year's Resolutions


Then there are some goal-setting strategies that may help. I got this list of tips off a website called mygoals.com.



1. Create a Plan

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done and Making it All Work, says you have to get the day-to-day things working, or you’ll never see past the piles of stuff to do on your desk and to your loftier goals. (That’s the gist of GTD.) But to put it in reverse (this part is from MIAW): purpose/principles, vision, goals, projects, next actions. If one of these parts is missing, you may lose the whole thread. Your new year’s resolution could be as grand as sorting all that out and finally pursuing your vision, or it may be that you’re well underway living your vision AND goals, and just need to set out this year’s projects.


2. Create Your Plan IMMEDIATELY

New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. ~Mark Twain

Twain might have been overly cynical, but you probably get the point. Putting off starting a goal at any time is a recipe for never getting anywhere with it.


3. Write Down Your Resolution and Plan

Writing things down seems to help our brains look on the goals as more of a commitment if we write them down. It’s also useful to schedule the steps for your goals into your calendar if that’s appropriate (setting aside time to exercise, for example).


4. Think "Year Round," Not Just New Year's

New Year's resolutions should be nothing more than a starting point. Think of them as an outline for your year.


And finally...


5. Remain Flexible

Expect that your plan can and will change. Life has a funny way of throwing unexpected things at us, and flexibility is required to complete anything but the simplest goal. Sometimes the goal itself will even change. In fact, there’s a good chance that if it does, you’ll most likely recognize that at some step, you misidentified something in your big picture: maybe your vision isn’t to bring the world a better mousetrap, maybe it’s to rid the world of mice.

But also recognize the progress you do make—sometimes we underestimate how long something will take. Going slowly isn’t a failure unless you’re trying to beat everyone else—if your goal is to finish the race, then you can work on your timing next year.

Another tip for visualization success: when you picture where you want to be a year from now -- or ever, as we start talking about vision and purpose in the big picture -- don't just imagine the visual. Imagine the emotion. The visual isn't nearly as important. If your purpose is to, for example, bring healing to the world, don't just focus on how you'll look in nurses' scrubs or a white lab coat. Imagine how it will feel to change a life.

As you may have guessed by now, although my goal with this blog is to help you find and fulfill your passion, we'll spend a fair amount of energy also talking about the day-to-day stuff. Those down-and-dirty details are what will help you realize your vision.

New Year, new plans

"We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.  Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential. ~ Ellen Goodman

The new calendar year is a good time to set new plans / goals of your own in motion; you know, take advantage of the momentum created by everyone thinking, talking, and doing the same thing. Of course, when other appropriate times for reevaluation come up (more on this over the next several months), putting things off UNTIL the new year is just making excuses and giving in to fear or complacency.

As promised, today and tomorrow I'm going to drop in here an article (in two parts) I wrote for my company newsletter. It's pretty standard goal-setting information, but hopefully you can glean something helpful from it...and feel free to leave questions in the comments section.


New Year’s Resolutions: Making a list and checking it twice?


It’s like an annual curse we visit on ourselves: we make our new year’s resolutions, then follow it up with the promise that Santa’s also “making a list” to check up on us.

Never mind that Santa is just as mythological a figure as the successful new year’s resolution (that is, the odds seem to be against his/its existence, although there are claims to the contrary).

The numbers: 40 to 45% of American adults make one or more resolutions each year. Top resolutions include weight loss, quitting smoking, saving money, and paying off debt. After six months, fewer than half the people making resolutions are sticking to the plan. And yet, the same studies show that people making resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t explicitly make resolutions.

Okay, maybe a slightly-less-than-half rate of adherence isn’t all that bad. But how can you up YOUR odds of being one of the successful ones?


What would I do over?

First, psychologists say to recognize that what you’re doing is making a change. Duh. You knew that, right? But it seems a lot of us act as if change happens to us, not by us. Change is hard. It requires the repetition of the new behavior many times before the change is set—perhaps six months down the road. We get set in the old behavior. It’s comfortable to us, and even if we know it’s not good for us, even if we really, really want to do something different, it’s tough to create that new pattern of behavior.

Second, some suggest that looking deeper than the behavior you’re changing can help. For example, say you want to quit smoking. One way to look at it is all the good things you’re creating in your life by dropping that habit. Another way is to think of it this way: what do I want to be different? One psychologist uses this with clients about to undergo plastic surgery, because it really targets the motivation. Back to smoking. What do I want to be different? Or, as Miller does with her clients, what do I wish were different from my past? Did you start smoking to be cool, as so many high schoolers do? Stress relief? If those are still valid desires, can you replace the smoking with healthier options? (Yoga is very trendy, and accomplishes both at once! And I can guarantee you, you can’t smoke and do a hot yoga practice at the same time, what with the whole breathing thing.)

Navel-gazing not for you? Think about things you’d like to be doing, and why, and how they do or do not fit in with what you’re doing now.

Take some time over the next few days--just a break from the holiday bustle--to think about where you'd really, really like to be this time next year. Tomorrow, we'll jump into some tips for successful goal setting and achieving.

When other people's priorities matter

I read someplace—don't remember where, sorry, but probably a book by a Buddhist teacher—that even the highest purpose ought to be abandoned if what we once did with love, we now view as a duty.

I think there's another way to look at this: there are thousands, if not millions or billions (perhaps one for every person) of ways to serve others. And our own evolution need not be thrown out the window just because we once made a decision (there's that choice thing again) to serve in one way. The trick, of course, is to determine what is the reason you want to change (and to what degree). An example: let's say you're a doctor. Years of medical schooling, practice, all of it, and for years you loved what you were doing. One morning you wake up and hate your job. Loathe it. Now what?

Well, why? Perhaps the answer is not to leave medicine and run off to Tahiti to be a painter. Perhaps the answer is to become part of a different way of practicing medicine. Perhaps your spiritual growth has taken you in a different direction. Perhaps you feel stifled and un-helpful because of the bureaucracy. Perhaps, perhaps. Here's where you get to explore the options. What would you do if you could do anything?

That's when you have a calling, perhaps, or perhaps the change in question has to do with someone else's well-being. In those cases, I think a long hard look at what is blocking your engagement is very valuable—not just the what, but the why.

Is minimalism the new black?

The new black. Whatever that means. I saw a reference to the saying recently with regards the trend of the minimalist lifestyle. Maybe "the new black" means it matches everything (or everyone), or that it's just the latest greatest trend.


Not so sure about either of those. Let's start with the "trend".

Certainly there are people who will embrace it for a short time, then go on to something else in their search for external meaning. Others, though, I think come to it as "simplicity," after decades of struggling against the consumerist tide, finally comes ashore as a wave of its own. I think that perhaps one offshoot of our general affluence is that at some point, many people come to realize the stuff in their life really does run the show: you have to have a house big enough for your stuff, you have to store it, you have to buy more of it when you can't find that what's-it you just knew you had.

And we downscale the stuff in our lives to make room for the living of them.

Minimalism is downscaling to an extreme. I don't mean that pejoratively, but factually. It's simplifying until you can't simplify any further.

To some people, that's probably going too far, but it's worth exploring as part of intentional living: how much stuff do I need to be happy? This is a question that comes up as part of the frugality and simplicity lifestyle considerations, too—but these three topics are not entirely interchangeable (perhaps 95%, so far as I can tell, but not entirely), so for now, we'll stick with minimalism.

First, it's about getting rid of the clutter. Our stuff. The stuff that makes us oh, so happy to see around us, until we realize it's just stuff. This can happen in a variety of ways. One friend realized how little her stuff meant when she had to put it all in storage for several months. And didn't miss all of it. (Of course she missed some of it.) In my case, living for the past year in a house that was big enough to unpack all my stuff for the first time in years, with nothing in storage except the things that needed storing: Yule decorations, camping gear, that sort of thing, made a huge difference in how I viewed my stuff. For example, I love my books. And other people's books. I've been reading since I was two or three years old. And my shelves were filled with books I'd loved...and hadn't read in six or eight years. Huh. I already know I don't NEED all these books. Maybe I don't even want them.

Minimalists will tell you they own what they need and nothing more. "Need," of course, is loosely defined here (see Miss Minimalist's couch post, for example), since I imagine some do take it to the extreme (we need food, shelter and clothing), while others define their needs to include art (although a minimalist will probably own just one or two pieces they really love) or other items that have some particular meaning to them. I think the important factor joining the minimalist extremes, though, is not being owned by their stuff. Often, the fact that not owning all this stuff makes their lives more flexible (choice of jobs, travel, etc) seems to play a part.

If you're interested in exploring minimalism, check out Becoming Minimalist for a wide variety of posts and articles exploring the different sides of minimalism, as well as the above links to some interesting websites (zenhabits.net is worth checking into for many, many reasons)

Do your priorities match your life?

Do your priorities match? While you're thinking about that, let me follow up on yesterday's topic.


When we consider whether other people's priorities are running our lives, we're not talking about being selfish (necessarily). Others' priorities and others' well-being are not the same thing (and we'll talk about those another day). What I'm talking about is when our obligations to other people do not benefit us and perhaps hinder us. Even when they don't reach the height of George Bailey's problems.

For example: are you stuck with other people's stuff? I am ... oh, boy. I have, for example, some antique furniture. It was my grandmother's (it's not very antique: early 20th century). Fortunately, I love this furniture. But still, I feel like it isn't mine. I can't just sell it or give it away if I don't want it. It's a legacy. Perhaps you're storing something for a friend or family member. Done that, too. Here's where it gets tricky. They gave it to you because THEY didn't want to get rid of it (perhaps it's their legacy stuff). They're just shuffling their burden off to you. Now you can't get rid of their stuff, and they don't have to worry about it. Other instances: you volunteer to watch a friend's kids so she can get some alone-time. Then you do it because she asks. Can you say no? Or do you put aside whatever your plans were because "they're not important" and answer to your friend's convenience? Because you know what? It may be just that—a convenience. You're free, so she doesn't have to find a babysitter at $15 an hour. She doesn't have to schedule her plans for another time (because you did).

Why does this matter? It matters if—and only if, because really, it's not a bad thing to help out friends—you never get around to what's important to you, because what's important to others has become your only priority.

Got it? When you take home extra work that can wait until Monday, or if you freelance, you take on a project not because it meets your goals, but it makes it easier on the client, when you tell someone who is willing to meet you halfway that they don't have to go to the trouble—you'll do all the work (or driving or whatever). That's when you start getting in your own way.

So what are your priorities, and do they match? If your priority is to write the great American novel, and you spend your weekends taking on extra work, volunteering because "they need the help" (guess what? Someone else will do it if it really needs doing.), not because you find real fulfillment in the work, you just put other people's priorities (the school carnival, the unpaid take-home) ahead of yours. If your priority is health, and you put off eating better until tomorrow, your priorities don't match. If your priority is a bigger, deeper life, and you spend as much time as possible watching TV and playing computer solitaire, your priorities don't match. Turns out your real priorities are watching TV, playing solitaire, eating junk food, and avoiding the hard work. Is that who you thought you wanted to be?

The thing to do at the time

So in our own sweet, harmless ways, a lot of us have that streak of George Scrooge (like how I made him one person?) in us: we perhaps drift into something, or we choose something that seems like a good idea at the time. We do this with jobs, learning opportunities, relationships, kids, all sorts of things. And somewhere along the way, we feel like our choices have disappeared. We may not consciously grumble about it. In fact, we may be mildly okay with it.

We forget it doesn't have to be this way. We've talked about this before—finding options that allow you to do what you love—and I'm not going to rehash it here (maybe later). For now, we'll leave it with this: every decision you've made – every one of them – CAN be changed. You do NOT have to do the things (or do things the way) everyone expects. Even the kids, although as a rule, polite society frowns on that sort of thing.

But mostly what I want to talk about today is a particular kind of drift, because I do this frequently, and it really can be painful—not just the emotional torture of wondering WTF you were thinking, but detrimental to your goal of living a life of conscious joy (and sanity). It's the drift we find especially glaring in George Bailey's story: the drift of meeting other people's expectations.

It's not just becoming a doctor because your parents expected it. The worst, most pervasive and perverse is when other people's expectations—in the form of their PRIORITIES—become your to-do list.

Instead of saying 'no,' we say 'yes.' Instead of sitting down to write the great American novel, we write to the market (this is not bad, by the way, if your goal is to be a bestselling author, but it is bad if your goal is to write a particular story and you don't). Instead of eating the way that makes your body feel its best, that puts you at peak performance, you graze to be polite (again, not so bad, perhaps, if you're at an intimate dinner, the host/hostess are great friends, etc, but really, at a party? Who cares if you munch on carrots and cheese cubes instead of those little quiche thingies? And if they do care, why do YOU?)

We do things that will make us look cool (every generation has its cool), instead of things that make us happy. We listen to Bach when we really want to listen to Twisted Sister (or vice versa). And so on. We schedule our lives around the convenience of other people and we don't walk away when we're unhappy because "what would people think?"

If you are anything other than completely thrilled with your life right now, I invite you to take advantage of the season, the day, the whatever to decide on just one thing to say 'no' to. Just one. Give yourself permission to not be the person everyone else wants you to be or thinks you ought to be, at least in your imagination.

It's YOUR life.

A Christmas Carol

No, it's not turning into Lorena's Favorite Christmas Movies Week (although ACC ranks there--especially the George C. Scott verions, which I've been known to watch multiple times in one season, taking breaks only to see Patrick Stewart in the role). Or favorite novels, either, although I do feel obligated to point out this factoid which I saw on the news the other night: A Christmas Carol took all of six weeks to write.

I am officially jealous of Charles Dickens. The more so, because it's freezing here (it's last winter all over again!), and so I can really relate to the whole London in winter general ickiness.

But really, it's not about that. The theme for the week seems to be shaping itself into choices--intentional or accidental--and how they shape our (and others') lives.

Which is what A Christmas Carol is about. Sure, it looks like it's about friendship and love and generosity (hmm, similar themes in It's a Wonderful Life...), but it's really about living life to the best of our ability, doing what we need to do to protect ourselves, and when we have the chance to see what it might be if we hadn't done it that way (George, looking at what would have happened if he hadn't been born)...or what it might be if we keep going the way we are (Scrooge), and CHOOSING to do things differently--or from a different perspective--than we've been in the past.

Later this week or early next, I'll post the article I just finished writing for the company newsletter on New Year's resolutions. There's just one question I want to leave you with, that forms--I think--the base from which we can make these kinds of decisions. It's the question George and Ebenezer both ask through these two movies: what would I do differently?

This question isn't necessarily a look back and saying I should have done everything differently: it may be a simple jumping off point for the next path, or the next year's projects / plans: I had a great year, what would I do differently this year to take it higher and deeper. That's what we want our lives to be about, right--higher and deeper and bigger and braver?

It's a Wonderful Life

Saturday, out running errands, I saw two different cars—in two different parts of town—with two different sizes of the same bumper sticker: Life is Great.


Saturday night, It's a Wonderful Life was on television. (I don't have cable, so there aren't as many classic movies on television as there might otherwise be.) Now, IaWL is not my favorite holiday movie by a long shot. It's also not my favorite Jimmy Stewart movie. In face, I find it rather grim, and this year is only the second time I've watched it from start to finish for that reason.

If you've never seen the movie, here's the movie poster version (or not): George Bailey has found his life to be one long series of disappointments. He is selfless, yet a jerk, as he gives in to what life brings him, changing plans, giving up dreams—I don't really know what drives him: perhaps an overwhelming sense of duty? He constantly harps on wanting to leave his hometown for the big, bad world, yet every time he starts to, something gets in his way: he's heading off for college when his father dies; in order to keep the meanest man in town (who never gets his, by the way) from taking over everything and destroying peoples lives, he gives up college and stays home to run the family business. And so on. He gives his college money to his younger brother, expecting to go himself when Harry finishes and comes home to take over. Harry doesn't. Eventually WWII comes along and George, with a 4F card (deaf in one ear from saving his brother's life) stays home and keeps things going. Friends and brother are off saving the world, building industries, and living their dreams; George stays home and tries to keep it all together. And no, he's not happy about it. Really, this is not a film of touching perseverance because George, frankly, is an ass.

And on Christmas Eve, when the last straw is put on his back—mixing metaphors, here—in the form of an $8,000 deposit that goes missing (Mr. Potter, the guy who wants to run everything and destroy the Baileys in the process, ends up with it, but is he found out? Oh, no....), decides he's worth more dead than alive and in a drunken stupor goes off to kill himself. Enter an angel (Clarence) out to earn his wings. He forces George to save his life instead of ending his own (good old selfless George) and then takes him on a tour of what things would have been like if he (George) had never been born.

And there's the epiphany. George, who's tried so hard to do good, really has. And despite his general surliness, all the people who've benefited from his generosity through the years, come through for him when he needs it, too. I think he realizes there's something to building a community, not just a business. At any rate, he ends the movie much happier than he is through about 9/10s of it.

So what's the point? Without reading too much into the movie, here's a takeaway for you: our lives are a series of choices, and every choice leads us to something else. Everything that went "wrong" by virtue of George not being there involved a decision on his part: saving his brother's life as a child, understanding the pain of his employer had caused a potentially fatal mistake (and preventing it from happening), choosing to run the family business instead of going off to do his thing—every one of these actions had repercussions he did not realize. In other words, he created new realities through a series of choices, not a series of accidents. He could have saved his brother's life, but then chosen to ignore the poison pills later by paying more attention to something else. He could have insisted on going to college when it came up, instead of staying home—there was no point at which something happened accidentally, even when it felt that way.

Yes, I believe in fate—but I believe that the fate-directed intersections in our lives are rarely set in stone. Those that are, we find ourselves directed to again and again (like meeting someone for the first time, and discovering you've lived in the same six cities and maybe overlapped but never met, although you should have.) Mostly, I think the intersections—the places where choices can be made—are meant for conscious creation (free will, if you like) to set the new course. Doesn't mean we always make the "right" decisions, but they are the places where we change our, and others, lives, even if we don't realize it.

If you don't like where you are, if you realize you got here due to a conscious decision, I think that's very optimistic—because it means you have choices about where to go from here.

Moving forward

Seems sort of apropos that the last post (nine months ago!) was about making choices and discovering not only what suits us, but what doesn't.


I spent most of this past year exploring that latter bit. I now know LOTS of things that don't fit my visioned path, because I spent a good chunk of my time doing them. Not intentionally. Or at least, not with my highest and best intentions!

Drifting into life "at the last minute." We do this a lot. Or at least I do this a lot, and I doubt that I'm the only one. Life at the last minute is life in what Stephen Covey calls "urgent" (some important, others not, so I'm not going to assign it a specific quadrant).In other words, we're doing things when they HAVE to get done: bills paid "at the last minute." Gift shopping or holiday prepping "at the last minute." Walking at the door at the last minute that gets us to work within five minutes of being on time, not taking the car to the shop until we can't ignore that noise or us to the hospital because that pesky cough won't go away.

It's life according to deadline, which is something I'm very good at. It comes in handy sometimes, because it does mean you don't freeze at the thought of a deadline, but if you aren't careful, they sneak up on you because you're so busy dealing with the rest of the "last minute" that you don't put in the time you need to on the next thing.

This hurts when you're trying to, say, write a novel while you're doing edits for the last one. Or plan a new campaign for your business while you're struggling to figure the ROI in time for the board of directors meeting on the last campaign.

One of the things we'll explore over the coming weeks is how to move out of "last minute" living and into living in the present (the two are not the same), while creating the next "present" (aka planning for / creating the future).

Having spent a fair amount of time this year doing things that don't move me toward my goals had this effect: in the midst of grumbling to myself about it over the past few days, it narrowed down for me the focus of this blog: over the next several months, we'll be talking about things that center on conscious lifestyle choices (not just mine, but any interesting ones I come across, such as minimalism) and how we make choices that move us in the direction of our passions, of broadening our vision but narrowing our focus. We'll talk about hopes and fears and overcoming the challenges of both. I hope to do some interviews with people who found their passion, the later in life the better, and how they turned dreaming into living. Their conscious sanity.

Welcome back.

Too much to do: exploring your passions

I have what I like to call an empty calendar allergy. It's stronger than an aversion, more like a compulsion. Even as I'm spinning in circles (like a Sufi dancer, I hope--enlightenment / ecstasy to be obtained in the process), hoping for some downtime, it's almost impossible for me to accept HAVING it.

There's too much to do, so little time. As Lynnette pointed out in her comment yesterday, we can have quite a laundry list of 'passions' to occupy us....and how do you know what the 'one' is? Maybe it's like knowing 'who' the one is when we meet him? Maybe it requires trusting your intuition to pull you in the right direction, no matter where that direction leads, accepting life as an exploratory adventure as much as a well-lit path with a certain destination.

It's not about drifting. It's not about learning to like something. It might be about trying something, just to discover it consumes you. I gave rock-climbing a try last month. I'd been dying to do it for years--I loved the memory of clambering up rocky hills and bluffs as a kid, loved living near the Rockies as an adult--mountains within reach, so beautiful it almost hurts to have all that rising up in you and in front of you. I truly love mountains. Although apparently not enough to move to one. Same with forests. Love being amid the trees and rocks of a northern woodland. Not crazy about hanging out in the woodlands of Florida (remember that fear thing? I really am okay never facing how I feel about reptiles. They have their place in the world, and we / they should not be occupying it together. Just sayin'). Yet, I live in Florida, because of all the things I love and want to do / be / whatever...most of them sit here. If I won the lottery (I understand...playing increases those odds substantially), I might not live here, so I guess part of what I care about is my job.

But back to rock climbing. I wanted to climb. I could see myself doing it, even though heights terrify me. This, perhaps, is key--if you are willing (or anxious) to try something despite your fear, and not because of it (in other words, it's about the doing, not the facing of the fear), that's a good sign it's something you should do more of. But that doesn't make it a passion--makes it something worth doing. Rock climbing? I liked it. Will do it again. A passion? Not to the extent of consuming my life. Not something I'd take vacations to do, although I might make it part of one spent doing something else. See the difference?

I think we'll be looking at this more deeply--it seems like a lot of people have a lot of things they care about, and spend a lot of time doing...and it seems to divide their energy. Some of the people I admire most have one or maybe two deep passions, and it consumes their life. Not saying that's good or bad (might depend on the person), but it's definitely worth talking about.

Opening up and taking in

Hat tip to Jennifer Todd of Just Breathe Orlando for making me see chakras from a different perspective. She's doing a series of classes on the chakras, and I've missed all of them except last night's on the brow chakra (aka the third eye). There's definitely something for me to explore there--a new way of looking at how our lower chakras (lower on the body, I mean--that is, root through solar plexus) open to place us in the world and in our reality. If you're in the Orlando area, check her out.

I'm also in the middle of a book called Advanced Chakra Healing (the author escapes me at the moment, and the book is in another room). It's part of why I went to Jennifer's class last night.

While I spend a fair amount of time talking to people about their passions, and what living their truth means to them, I sometimes forget to check in with myself--I often end up drifting into things that are good, are helpful, aren't 'me.' One of the paths that turns me on is energy work. I have a hard time seeing how I can use that as anything more than interesting fun (emphasis on 'I'), so it gets shoved to the back except for almost daily Reiki on myself and when requested by others. Journeying is another love. A lot of the journeying I do for healing (of self and others) includes energy work, which is probably not typical for shamanic practice, but seems to be just right for me. So now I'm consciously checking in with Jennifer's work, and the work laid out in this book, to ramp up how I combine the two practices--it feels right, so I think I'm onto something.

'nough about me, though--how about you? Do you see a glimmer of what you could really love to do a lot of?

Intent: be selfish

Today, do just one thing that means everything to you, whether it means anything to anyone else.

Fear and consequences

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt

I don't know the context of that line, so I'm going to make one up. I don't think it's the same as saying you have to face your fears--really? Stand outside in a lightning storm just to prove you can?

But I do think that when it comes to making your life take a path that means something to you--when it comes to creating a life of passion and meaning--you cannot let what scares you hold you back.

Unfortunately, I think a lot--maybe most--of us do exactly that. We are afraid to be great. Afraid that if we do this, that we will be expected to do it more than once--and what if once is all we have?

Once might be enough, you know. Harper Lee changed the world with To Kill a Mockingbird.

But worse--what if you never try? What if trying once led you to a place where doing exactly whatever it was you were meant to be doing was all that was in front of you? What if the gods were just waiting for you to be right there to shower you with blessings beyond imagining--you just had to be standing under the right waterfall thinking the right thing?

What draws you--what creates the path in front of you--is always important, or you wouldn't be doing it. I've said it before--paying the bills is a strong motivator and a great reason to do whatever it is you're doing. But somewhere in your life, immerse yourself in what matters most.

The one(s) that got away

Regret for the things we did not do is inconsolable...or so I've read.  I suppose that depends on whether you feel regret--or perhaps, whether you can instead let go of it and recognize (among other things--I'm typing VERY fast this morning, so trying to keep it simple while I eat breakfast and rush off to work) that just because you didn't act on an option in front of you--even one that made all your senses sing--doesn't mean you made a bad choice.

I was proofreading an interesting computer book the other day (yes, actually interesting) and remembered the classes I took in college and kind of wondering whether if I'd done something with that, if I'd have ended up doing something interesting, important, and lucrative.

Then I remembered that 99% of the time I find computer manuals really, really boring, and I'd have to know the boring stuff to get to do the interesting stuff. So in the end, that was easy.

But some choices aren't so easy. I suggest that when we feel regret for something we didn't do (or did, for that matter), that we sit with the question 'what if' for a few minutes. See how it feels to have lived that choice. If it feels really, really good, maybe that's a sign to do something about it--there is very little in life that is too late to do (major league baseball and other people's spouses or jobs being among the things you probably should just let go of) -- but was your passion really to run WalMart? Or was it to own a successful business, supplying whatever it is that you think WalMart supplies? Was it to be curator of a great museum, or was that a cover for fear of an archeology degree and digging in the dirt (or vice versa)?

It's easy to let go of the choices that "might have been" if you concentrate on "what do I really want now."

No teacher but myself

Wednesday's post came from a section in Pema Chodron's book where she's discussing teaching the dharma to yourself. And then I opened Spiritual Liberation to this: Beckwith talks about opening ourselves up to Spirit (having an 'existential encounter'), to filling ourselves with "fire from heaven" and listening to the messages of Spirit in cultivating particular qualities (or fill in the blank with any message you like, I suppose—if you're looking for clarity on a life path, for example). And then observing throughout the day where we stand. Asking ourselves, he says, "Where is my consciousness?" I think we forget—I know I do—that although the teacher is helpful, sometimes even necessary to provide us with some idea of where to go and what the path might look like along the way, we don't really need an intermediary of any kind—no teacher but ourselves, no tool of divination but our own willingness to sit on the cushion and check in.

Starting where I am ... wherever I am

"Each time you're willing to see your thoughts as empty, let them go, and come back to your breath, you're sowing seeds of wakefulness, seeds of being able to see the nature of mind, and seeds of being able to rest in unconditional space. It doesn't matter that you can't do it every time. Just the willingness, the strong determination to do it, is sowing the seeds of virtue." (Pema Chodron, Start Where You Are, p 86)

Finding random bits of wisdom

Michael Bernard Beckwith is one of those shining lights of truth and magic. Every once in awhile, I actively remember that and go pull my copy of Spiritual Liberation off the shelf and open it randomly, seeing what Spirit pops me with. Sunday, I did that, pulling off the same shelf Pema Chodron's Start Where You Are and Gregg Braden's The Divine Matrix ... looking for random bits of wisdom to post this week while I sort some things out and decide if anyone but me is interested.

So I opened Spiritual Liberation to this: Let us not make excuses for ourselves. ....Gandhi....the Dalai Lama, and other emissaries of peace...are all ordinary people who have responded to life in an extraordinary way. Their mothers weren't virgins; they didn't arrive on the planet by special means. ... It is not necessary to don monastic robes or clerical collars...to be counted among the growing number of spiritual revolutionaries. ... Start Right Where You Are [header] (Spiritual Liberation, pp 124, 125)

Huh. Here I am in the middle of a periodic reevaluation of what's going on and how (or whether) I'm contributing anything to the spiritual well-being of the world (and beating myself up over the lack of progress on several things over the past couple of months), and I open this book at random to find a heading staring at me that is similar to the title of the next book in the stack. And it's a great reminder: Start where you are. Not being a terribly accomplished quantum magician, I'm pretty sure I do not have the ability to go back and change anything. I have to start where I am. Truthfully, I've started from worse places, so I suppose that's an improvement.

Blaming it on the weather

I'm blaming it on the weather. Note the date of my last post: Groundhog Day. Nearly six weeks ago (I've been counting). During that time, it has continued to be cold and icky and windy, and....really, what's up with that? I LIKE winter in Florida. I LIKE being able to open my windows and turn off the heat and air conditioning both. I do NOT like two solid months of what we've had for the past two solid months.

It's thrown me off balance, off track. Which feels like an excuse, and not a good one. The last time I felt this knocked off balance (by the weather, at least), it was the fall of 2004. You know, after three hurricanes in six weeks.

So Saturday night, driving to an event where I was doing tarot readings, I was talking to myself in the car (out loud, which is the only way that counts...just thinking a conversation isn't the same thing): I refuse to be defeated by the weather. Not sure that matters, now that it's finally starting to warm up. But more than that, I've decided to take my own advice. In my creativity workshop, I tell people: when you can't be creative—when it just isn't flowing—do it anyway. (Whatever 'it' happens to be.) Even if you can only do a little—since I'm generally talking to writers, the advice is to write 100 words a day. Because the doing will bring about the creativity and spark to do. So it might be a week of 'random bits of wisdom,' but I'll blog. I went to the farmers' market Saturday, in defiance of my (overscheduled) calendar. Went for a hour-long walk yesterday (my intention is to walk for an hour each day—I did it on a treadmill at the gym, I ought to be able to find the time to do it without the drive!). And I opened myself up to some random intersections of truth (more on that issue another time) to propel me along the path. Whatever the weather.

Groundhog Day

Leaving aside the question of whether a groundhog can predict the weather (six more weeks of winter? EEK! Have I mentioned I'm kind of over winter right now?), I'm going to dive off the usual path and do an existential review of the movie. You remember it, right? Bill Murray plays an overwhelmingly self-assured weatherman who finds himself stuck on the same day (with Sonny and Cher waking him up every morning) until....ta-da!...he makes some big changes. Not just playing the piano, or finding out what Andie McDowell's favorite drink is, but somewhere along the line, he starts doing good and having fun and enjoying other people...for the sake of doing good and having fun and the other people--not just whether it's going to get the girl. Only when he has a complete inner transformation, AND resigns himself to the circumstances (he's aware he's repeating the day), is the spell, curse, whatever, broken.

Classical magical fairy tale: transformation requires love, faith, and frequently a crap-load of pain, but it's only by going through it that we move beyond it and return to (or discover) our true selves.

Positive Thinking?

Actually, it’s the power of thought. Thought precedes formation, right? At least nine times out of ten? Of course, casual accidents happen too (those unconscious choices, perhaps). I’ve never been entirely convinced about this, though (for the next few sentences, please ignore Monday’s post). Where’s the evidence? No, more evidence than that. The born skeptic that I am, it’s not enough for me to hear that X created a million-dollar-empire (usually by preaching the power of positive thinking) simply because he envisioned it. Because never mind that he DID (there are some pretty good examples out there, by the way—it’s not that I’m being sarcastic), I’m just not sure it can happen for me.


Quantum physics playing a role? Who knows? I’m fascinated by the possibility (oh, boy, am I fascinated by the possibility), but a) I’m not a scientist, and b) well, I’m not a scientist. I simply don’t know. And I can’t seem to hold onto the thoughts long enough to see what happens. Except sometimes they do. But then there’s random occurrence, so how do I know that what happened this time wasn’t a fluke, a coincidence?

Yes, this is very open ended. I’m looking for…I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m not looking for “The Secret” or one of its off-shoots. I guess I’m looking for hard evidence, not a sign, but a pattern, that thought can create physical reality in more than the inspired-inventions sense.

Ah, but there’s the catch (or a catch). See, inspired inventions are an excellent example of thought creating form. Not in the sense of “poof” (wouldn’t that be cool, though? THAT’S what I want!), but in the sense that someone thought “this could be” and found a way to make it happen. The first guy to think of an automobile. (Or maybe the guy who thought of the internal combustion engine.) Nicola Tesla. Albert Einstein. Thought creates form if we are willing for it to. If we have a vision so strong, it withstands hundreds of attempts (think Edison and light bulbs. I don’t recommend thinking Edison and electric chairs, though, because that’s just disturbing.).

Note to self: experiment with—silly as it sounds—cutting all negative thought off at the pass. Positive focus only. What might happen?

Getting it in writing

I realize not everyone writes everything down the way I do. I don’t understand it, but I do realize it. I also realize not everyone analyzes stuff down to the subatomic level I do. Frankly, I suspect that’s a lot more comfortable. Except analyzing stuff, asking questions, is kinda fun. So, go figure.

But you don’t want to get stuck there, right? You don’t want to spend the rest of your life dreaming about climbing a mountain, only to die with sixty versions of your ideal scene (containing the “I climb mountains on holiday” intention), forty lists of what to pack and “get passport” on every to-do list for the past decade…and no travelogues of your own.

Writing it down doesn’t get it done. It does, however, help us create a picture to align with. It can help firm up our intention. It can make us feel so damned guilty that “get passport” is STILL on the to-do list (I do my to-do lists in Excel so I can easily prioritize and update them. Is that a sign of weakness?) that we either cross it off undone so we don’t have to look at it any more (consciousness!) or go get a picture and fill out the paperwork, no matter that we still have twenty pounds to lose and no money for an airline ticket to Nepal.

Writing it down doesn’t get it done, but it can goad us into action. Partly this is because we’re programmed to avoid cognitive dissonance, and creating a picture of what we want creates dissonance that we will try to resolve. And there are only two ways to resolve it: change, or pretend change isn’t necessary. (Cognitive dissonance often results in something like Douglas Adams’ “someone else’s problem field,” which is the idea that we will ignore really weird things if we don’t think we need to do something about them.)

So go ahead, write it down. Once. Review it as necessary—maybe once a year. Create new heights to aspire to, new views to admire. But then go out and do the things that need to be done. Writing it down won’t get them done. Only doing them will.

I did what???

So here’s the thing with that great view in front of you. You got here because of a series of choices. The same goes for any not-so-great view, perhaps the same one you’ve been staring at for more years than you care to count. Doesn’t matter whether you’re desperately trying to create the life of your dreams—your own consciously sane style—or whether you’re there and just popping in to say hi, how ya’ doin’.


What matters is, you’re here (wherever “here” is). And, as I said, you’re here because you made choices. If your life to this point has been unconsciously insane, you may not have known you were making the choices you did—or they seemed like a good idea at the time. We drift into choices an awful lot.

It can be tempting to spend more than a few minutes (more of that over-analysis stuff) wondering how we got here and what we should’ve/could’ve/would’ve-if-we’d-known done differently.

Don’t.

It’s a waste of time and energy. Voice of experience talking to herself here. I am the queen of woulda-coulda-shoulda (It’s a beautiful country, but the view doesn’t change much; don’t like the weather? Tough. It’s not likely to change.) but I decided this year (finally) to abdicate my throne. I’m hoping it will get covered over with ivy and grass and other sorts of useful things for birds to nest in.

Where was I. Oh. Right. The view.

No matter what the view is—no matter what peak you’re perched on, how you got there is important for two reasons: one, you learned something that will help you create the path to the next peak, or two, (its inverse) you learned something you don’t ever want to do again. Ever. What keeps us stuck in the “what if,” though, is when we think about all the lovely trails we didn’t go down on our way here. Why do we think about them? In my experience, there’s only one real reason to “what if” the other trails (this is slightly different from the woulda-coulda-shoulda, which often carries a boat load of regret with it): we didn’t plan on reaching this point, it wasn’t where we thought we were going, and we aren’t sure it’s where we want to be (yes, that’s only one reason!). In other words, all the time we were hiking the path, we were unconscious of what we wanted.

This is NOT the same as exploring, or indulging curiosity. This is drifting. This is working, loving, living in a way that we just haven’t thought about, but maybe someone else told us it was the thing to do. And suddenly we’re here (wherever “here” is) and not sure why.

So, what next? No idea. But here’s a suggestion. Take a look around. Find the part of the path you most enjoyed walking. Find the particular angle of the current view that appeals to you most. Then let go. Realize that if you really want to, you can always walk back down the path and pick one of those trails (there are a few that are impassable by now, but only a few, and…well, as the saying goes, suck it up, because you’re here, not there) to explore. But also realize that it’s always possible you made the right choices all along.

Stop to think...or not

Sometimes, you just have to stop thinking. Granted, most people’s problems seem to be related to them not stopping AND thinking, but sometimes, you get stuck because you think too much.


There are two ways to over-analyze something. One (my personal favorite) is to pick up all the little things no one else notices and give them a good long look. This is often aggravating to the person (or people) otherwise involved for a variety of reasons. But sometimes it results in little gems that lead you to a whole new place to view the world from.

That’s the point at which you should stop thinking. It’s the point at which a lot of us stop and do more of it instead—usually along the lines of “how did I get here, where do I go next”—instead of taking a breath and a bottle of water and fifteen minutes or so to enjoy the view. Worse, we sometimes follow “how did I get here” with “what should I have done differently?” (More on this particular bit tomorrow.)

The other way to over-analyze something is to keep thinking about it—planning, planning, planning. Writing lists and goals and ideal scenes and lists and goals and oh-look-at-that-way-to-do-it and lists … you get the idea. The point of a to-do list is to, well, DO. I love lists—write ‘em all the time. But we often spend too much time thinking about what we want, and not nearly enough time creating it. Trust me, if writing it down was what made it happen, I’d be the richest size six on the planet. (More on this later, too. The writing down stuff, not the size six stuff.)

Sure, to be conscious about your life, instead of drifting through, you’re going to have to think about it. But to create it, you’re going to have to stop thinking and just do.

Is anyone watching?

So I have these weeks….


Right. Don’t we all? Where we can talk about what we’re doing, or we can do it, but there isn’t time for both? Or is that just a matter of organization or getting too-easily distracted??

What's even worse is that was the beginning of YESTERDAY'S post. Sheesh. You'd think I didn't like to talk, or write, or something.

I do, of course. Both. So when I got home last night, it was all about the priorities--writing, editing, proofreading. New proofreading project (big one) due Monday, edits for a novella due back to the editor ASAP because it's the final round and now we can go to galleys, and the book-of-my-heart project (two sequels and a three-novel story arc already taking shape in my head).

And then this morning, rushing around because I'd let my brain get wired up and couldn't fall asleep and so overslept, I remembered: people are watching me.

No, not in a paranoid sense. Please, if you have paranoiac tendencies--even if they are really after you--what I have to say is all good, I promise! But over the last few weeks I've caught myself many times grumbling along the lines of 'no one even notices what I do.' Which of course isn't true, but it was true enough for me that I was bitching about it. (Note to those of you who know, love, and are laughing at me: I do try not to bitch about things that aren't real.)

Then, quietly, snuck in when I wasn't expecting it, I started getting 'good job' nods from people who had some say over the work I was doing. An editor double checking the novella for a second pair of eyes loved it. The proofreading coordinator I was freelancing for told me. My boss told me. But yesterday was the kicker: people I didn't even know should be paying attention told me. Not in words, but in actions. In a meeting yesterday, we got a look at website stats for December--hundreds of people were hitting the blog I post for work. People I didn't know were paying attention were paying attention.

Granted, that's a nice ego boost (since they weren't leaving nasty comments), but it was also the reminder I needed: do what you need to do, and trust that it's seen where it needs to be seen. Whether it's an act of ego or service (with writing books, that line gets blurred, especially since I tend to loosely define service as "that thing you must do for yourself whether anyone likes it or not, but it's best if it helps other people"; in other words: what you are here for), someone, somewhere, is going to be touched by what we do. A test of your own truth, I think, is whether you'd change what you were doing based on what you know about who's watching. If you wouldn't--if you are pouring yourself into it (and adjusting where need be--want a reminder it's not all about you? Sit through a round of book edits!), regardless of who's watching: that's the truth. That's where you should be. It may not negate the need for an audience on a practical level (if your truth is teaching, you must have someone to teach--but the deeper truth is how/why), but it's done REGARDLESS of the audience.

Doesn't really matter whether we know about it or not.

Guided by intuition

Been kind of a weird week, and every time I sit down to write blog posts, whoosh!, there goes another day. But I'm here now, it must be meant to be.

Signs and portents everywhere. At least, that's what some people will tell you. I see them myself, although I admit that I'm more often skeptical (that's my next book--The Skeptical Mystic. Or maybe not.) about what I, or anyone else, might consider "a sign."

I'm also skeptical about what my intuition tells me. I don't know if I was born hyper-analytical--Mom didn't put anything like that in my baby book. You know: Lorena spoke her first words today. I was hoping for "mama," or even "dada," but imagine my surprise when the first thing she said was "prove it!"

Okay, I'm not quite that skeptical. And there are probably a lot of people who look at what I believe (or they think I believe) and assume I'm not analyzing any of it, since of course it makes more sense to believe it their way (post on the comparative 'huh???'s of religion, atheism, and what-have-you to come later when I don't mind ticking off everyone I know). For now, back to intuition.

The tricky thing to following your intuition is actually two-fold, which conveniently creates a middle way to follow. First, you have to trust what it's telling you (this is the part that gets me, because I'm over-reliant on step two). You also have to trust that what it's telling you is significant, rather than stating a preference OR presenting you with a thought based on a projection of what you want. I tend to worry about this part a lot, which means I don't really trust what my intuition says until something or someone confirms it. So if my intuition is screaming at me (I can be a little hard of cosmic hearing), I look for signs, and then I worry about coincidence and projection and all that and I'm back where I started.

So what does a skeptic who understands that there is something to this intuition business, but isn't really sure it applies now, do?

I suggest going with it. Take notes if you want--teachers seem to always recommend journaling things like intuitive moments--or moments that you think are intuitive, at least--and dreams. This gives you a record, which can be kind of handy later. It's also handy if something happens that you think might be related to your intuitive impulse, because then you learn to build connections between your symbols. Getting things "wrong" uses the same probabilities as getting things "right." So if intuition is saying "wear red" (or your subconscious is perhaps projecting a preference) and you wear red, and there's an unexpected meeting called and it goes well (red being a power color), then the next time intuition says "wear red," you say, "huh. Maybe I should wear red. Might be nothing to it, but maybe the Universe is letting me know I need to be on my best game today." And you see what happens, and you pay attention to the difference in feeling so you learn to distinguish between intuition and subconscious statements of preference (making them conscious).

This is not superstition, by the way--it's not the same as ritual behavior that must be done before you make a move. It can be, of course, but then people can create rituals out of anything, including looking for inner guidance. But "I must wear red" isn't the same as "I must spit on my lucky shoes before the first pitch." In the first case, the intuition comes, and you act without particular expectation as to the outcome. You simply say, this may be an indication of xyz. In the second case, you assume your actions must be done in a particular way in order to affect the outcome. Wearing red when you know the meeting is scheduled is only superstitious if you think of it as your lucky color, not as a color that has been shown to psychologically impact people as a power color.

Intuition--whether it's your subconscious mind uncovering information you've taken in through the usual channels and stored, or the voice of God letting you in on something no one else knows--is real. It's worth learning how to maneuver past the tricky parts to allow yourself to be guided by it well.

Following your heart

Okay, before we get into what I really want to say, I want to make one thing very clear: you might need a vacation.


Sometimes we get caught in the daily grind and get to a point where we’ve forgotten to take care of our Selves, our innermost beings, adequately enough. Sometimes, what’s wrong isn’t so much that something’s wrong as that we really need a break.

It seems like it shouldn’t be that way, and maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe living a life of sanity—of inspiration and enchantment and entrainment with Source should be so fulfilling, that taking a vacation really means just getting a different view to look at for a few days, because the rest of it’s going exactly the way it ought to be. It may be that most of us are somewhere in the middle—moving toward that space, but still holding our obligations and commitments in a space where they drain us and we have to recharge.

So I just wanted to make clear that just because right now things really are sucking lemons (if they are) or even if you’re just worn down, it might be that you need a different view—it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong.

Because you are following your heart, right?

What does that mean, anyway? Like the old line “if it feels good, do it”? Isn’t that just a copout on our commitments and choices and an act of selfishness?

No. Not if it’s true. If you are truly following your heart, you had better be walking away from the things that don’t nurture you. But more, you should be walking TOWARD the things that DO. Following your heart isn’t a reaction to boredom. If your soul is restless, it’s not because the sex isn’t as good as it used to be, or the job has turned into the same old-same old. Your 9 – 5 completely mundane job at the supermarket can be as fulfilling as … oh, pick a profession. Whatever you think is glamorous. It doesn’t matter. Because unless your heart is telling you “be a doctor,” who cares if you pay the bills by bandaging knees or pay them by selling bandages? If your path and your passion is writing mystical poetry, spend what time you can writing mystical poetry, and the rest of it finding inspiration.

Making room

Dark moon today (new moon is at 2:12 a.m. tomorrow). Excellent time to think about the dark spaces in our lives.


It’s not that there’s nothing there, any more than a dark moon is equal to no moon at all. We just can’t see what’s there. Or maybe we refuse to look. Or we look in the wrong direction.

Or maybe it’s stuff we should be letting go of.

Maybe we look at that dark-moon space and think—I could put something there. I could fill that with love and joy and creativity and…but then you go there and discover that there’s something already there, you just weren’t paying that much attention to it. You thought you didn’t spend that much time watching TV, for example, until you go to block out play time, or writing time, or whatever-it-is-that-fulfills-you time, and catch yourself in an old habit of, say, Criminal Minds. Not that I spend any time watching that, or anything. Or Life After People. We create this dark hole of background in our lives—reading the paper, watching TV, surfing the net, playing that silly bubble-shooting game until our brain looks like we’ve been doing crack. And we don’t realize that the hole has become the whole until we try to put something in the corner it occupies.

We often think we “can’t do without” whatever it is that takes up space—whether it’s energy space, time space, or physical space—even though if we looked at it objectively, we’d realize that just like the statisticians say, 90% of the time we wear 10% of the clothes in our closet. And the reason we haven’t written the great American novel or trained to run the Boston Marathon is that we spend our time doing things that in the end—or even in the now—mean next to nothing to us.

If you skipped the news, how much time would that free up? If you stopped watching TV, or cleaned out your closet, or did away with gossip, what changes in the paradigm of your day? If you let go of the things you don’t care about, how much room would you have for the things you love?

Not-so-random Wisdom

Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life. Thich Nhat Hanh

Escape?

Is it possible to use good-for-you things as an escape from the daily grind?


I think it is, believe it or not. I think it is possible to spend too much time meditating, too much time exercising, too much energy doing whatever it is that looks like something you ought to be doing to make your life work.

Note: it is not possible to spend too much time doing whatever it is that DOES make your life work, only those things that LOOK like something you ought to be doing.

In other words, if you need to train five hours a day for that marathon that will fulfill you, that’s good. Do it. Enjoy.

But if you’re training five hours a day when one is sufficient, and you’re using the other hours to avoid something (anything) else, like the fact that if you were truly yourself, you'd be off on a meditation retreat getting in touch with your childhood trauma and inviting it home for tea, that might be a problem.

If the good you are doing is moving you closer to your truest self, to living your life feeling loved, connected, and joyous, it’s good. If it’s helping you avoid the part(s) of your life where you feel unconnected, unloved, or in pain…maybe not.

Letting go of choices

Like it or not, there isn’t room in our lives for everything.


Some things are mutually exclusive: you cannot be a vegetarian and eat Kobe beef, for example. Some things are not-so-mutually exclusive: to some extent, you can be a couch potato and have a yoga practice.

For some people, letting go of the option of making a decision about things to include and exclude in their lives is essential—or at least really damned useful. Gretchen Rubin, of The Happiness Project, suggests that some people are abstainers and other people are moderators—that is, some people need to give up chocolate altogether to kick a candy habit, other people can be satisfied with two M&M’s a day (I have friends like that. I don’t understand it, but I have witnessed it.). Some people have to quit smoking cold turkey, others can gradually let go.

I am an abstainer, for the most part. When I’m making a change slowly, I tend to be very conscious of WHY I’m not doing it all at once. For example, if I were to make the decision to become a vegetarian, it’s impractical for me to simply empty my cupboards and refrigerator and restock with all veggies. (unless you’re doing it for a health emergency, in which case the priorities change drastically, don’t they?) What IS practical is to make buying meat a non-option. In other words, I can cook what I have, but there’s no more coming in. This way, I don’t have to think about how much I’m buying to stay 'on track' (I’m having two meat meals this week, so that’s….you know what I mean), nor do I have the option of heading to the grocery store later in the week just ‘cause I feel like it. It’s not an option. I might have six weeks’ worth of steak in my freezer because I went shopping before I made the decision, but there won’t be any more coming in.

Part of being consciously sane is deciding—since there isn’t room for everything—what isn’t optional and making that happen. You do this, in part, by forming a complete picture of how you want your life to feel, and then doing only that. It’s like the old story of the guy talking to the sculptor about how he creates, and the sculptor says “easy, if I want a sculpture of a horse, I just cut away everything that doesn’t look like a horse.”

That third ear? Not an option.

Finding passion--making the path

Some people, it seems, have it easy. They know what they want, have always known. Don't necessarily do it to pay the bills, but it's so all-encompassing, that there's no question in anyone's mind: this is her passion. My friend R is like that. She travels as part of her career path because it's one way for her to honor and feed her passion: the paranormal. Ghosts and UFOs, big creatures, that sort of thing. Another friend combines her passion for inner knowing with a strong sense of justice: she's a psychic detective. I have friends who are doctors, or cops, because they simply couldn't be anything else.



Some people know what they love, but don't have the courage to leave what they're doing now—or stop something else—to make room for it (this is your year to change that, you hear me?).


Other people, as one friend commented the other day, don't know what their all-consuming passion feels like.


There are books, and organizations, designed to help you find it. They'll tell you to make lists. To think back to what you wanted to do when you grew up (when you were five. I think I wanted to be a pioneer.). "They" make it sound so easy.


But what if it isn't that easy? What if you buried your true self so deeply that it's like exhuming bones from an ancient burial site? And what if you did this before you were conscious of any of it? What if the path to discovering your true passion is actually part of your journey? And what if you gave yourself permission to just take a couple of day trips to check it out?

Fearlessness

I am in the right place at the right time.

That can be a hard thought to hold, sometimes. Seems over-simplistic. A little too crystal-bunny-hugging Pollyanna-ish. Right place, right time, when the world is falling apart?

What if you dove into the thought, truly believed it? Can you find a reason, or at least a kernel of faith, that this might truly be the right place, right time?

Sometimes we end up in places--relationships, experiences, actual geography--for reasons that are unclear until farther down the path when we turn around to see what got us here and realize we wouldn't have been here "if not."

Not-so-random Wisdom

Acknowledging that we are all churned up is the first and most difficult step in any practice. Pema Chodron (The Places that Scare You)

Finding your path

Originally I was going to post a short journey/meditation, but after a conversation with my friend K2 yesterday, it seemed like a good time to explore the path of passion a few steps further (it's still a journey!).

Rumi: let the beauty you love be what you do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

This is absolutely one of my favorite observations. Let the beauty you love be what you do. There are a million paths to Source (actually, 6 billion and counting)...and THAT is all that is required of you. THAT is where your passion leads--to being so connected with Source that everything else falls into place. It is, for most of us, a life-long journey just making our way to where we are aware of the connection once in a while. Your particular path--your passion--is to walk as closely to Source as you are aware. To make/have/live in as many enlightened moments as possible.

For a lot of us, those moments are rare. For a lot of us, we don't put that name to them--we're just living what makes the most sense to us and we feel good about it. Picasso may not have been aware that he connected to the divine every time he put brush to paint, but do you think he was painting because he wanted to be doing something else?

Let the beauty you love be what you do...bring a sense of sacred to the things that matter most to you. Your grand passion might be raising a child to be a compassionate warrior; it might be raising yourself to be one. It might be art, or music, or making sure the world-as-we-know-it runs smoothly and that your pleasure is showing others how to have fun.

The path is the practice.

"This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.” (Rumi)

Reminder

Short-n-sweet reminder: everything I need is here.

Happy New Year!

Let's talk about passion for a minute.

In the tarot, the suit of wands or staffs represents fire (yes, to some of you it represents air, but if that's the case, pretend I just wrote "swords"). One of the areas the suit addresses when you get the cards in a reading is "career." To me, though, this isn't just about the job--about what you get up and do every day. It's really about why you do it. Your passion.

In some cases, the "why" might be as simple as a desire to keep clothes on your body, food in your belly, and a roof over your head, to whatever degree it's possible. Not all of us are working jobs we love for great rewards (volunteer at a homeless shelter sometime if you want to see bare-survival as a passion). But whatever it is, whatever drives us, THAT is the reason we do what we do, or dream of doing something different.

Make this the year your passion makes a difference.

If you are already living your passion 24/7/365 -- great. This is the year you'll see it blossom into something foundational. I really believe that. For those who've been letting their passion slide, I think this is the year it's going to become a conscious choice--do I keep doing what I've been doing or do I make the leap of faith?

I'm not saying that if you're an accountant who wants to be a musician that you should quit your job and go on the road with guitar in hand. I mean, do it if you want, but a leap of faith does not necessarily mean cutting all ties to what you've got going on (although we somehow always feel that way). A leap of faith to embrace our passions is based on just a couple of things: one, to make a complete fool of ourselves (in this case, the holy fool, a la the fool card from the tarot, which is all about starting that new journey); two, to want it so badly that even if you're wrong, you win. Or maybe it's about being willing to want it that much. Too often we let being afraid of being hurt hold us back--not just in human relationships, but in becoming our fullest selves.

If you've always dreamed of being a musician, and don't do it, what's holding you back from it? Being a lousy musician? Nope. Bad reason. Really, just turn on the radio sometime ... be willing to find out you can't do it. Be willing to throw yourself so fully into the love of it, that in the end, it doesn't matter whether you win awards, get contracts, or even get out of the shower. Want to climb mountains? (I do, and I've been using this as an example a LOT lately, which tells me this might be the year to suck it up and give it a go.) Maybe you--maybe I--find that really short hills are all that's possible. But you know what? If you don't try, you aren't being your truest self, and THAT -- that ALONE -- is what matters.

NPR used to do this series called "This I Believe." I loved listening to it. My manifesto is probably pretty short--but this is what I believe: It is through being our truest selves, no matter what, that we will evolve. It's scary, perhaps, it's hard, absolutely; but it's exhilarating--how can it not be?--and if we are to evolve, spiritually, it is what we must do.