SlackerMom

Forget the blind leading the blind. We have the distracted leading the . . . squirrel!

2011-11-18T16:37:00.001-08:00

I've mentioned before that I have ADD. Not ADHD - I've never been hyperactive, just easily distracted and overwhelmed. Back in my lawyer days, I think most people who didn't know me well would have been surprised by my diagnosis. I used to be good at pretending that I had it all together. I generally seemed to know what I was talking about. I produced good work. I worked well with others. But what most people didn't know, was that just getting through a day back then took a tremendous personal toll. The energy that it took to hold my life together was ridiculous. I was constantly checking and double-checking things. Fixing (and, unfortunately, sometimes hiding) mistakes. Worrying that something would fall through the cracks. Freaking out when things inevitably DID fall through the cracks. I ended up taking more pharmaceuticals than a depressed Beverly Hills housewife. And yet I still never felt right.

Back in those days, I worked while my then-husband stayed at home. He took care of a lot of things at home that I simply couldn't handle. We had, I thought, a pretty good division of labor. But my ex was also an abusive son-of-a-b*, which I've spent too much ink on. He constantly reminded me of my limitations, as if I needed any reminders. I thought that once I left the high-pressure legal profession and my high-stress marriage, things would calm down in my life and I would be better able to handle the day to day crap better.

But, according to Buckaroo Bonzai and Jon Kabat-Zinn - "wherever you go, there you are." It's easy to blame things outside of ourselves for our problems and think that if we just get rid of the bad situations, and away from the bad people, things will be all better. But the reality is that if we don't deal with our own shit, it doesn't really matter how many external changes we make in our lives. My ADD affected my life as a lawyer and wife. It affects my life as a massage therapist and a divorcee. It is part of who I am and isn't something that is caused by external events or the people in my life. So, even though I love my job and I don't have to live with someone who makes me feel like crap on a regular basis, I still have ADD.

Adding further complication to the situation is the fact that my older daughter was diagnosed with ADD and is struggling in school. Throw in the fact that my ex has recently decided that he doesn't want to be a parent anymore, making me a 24/7 single mom and my life has suddenly become very stressful again. All the things my ex used to do for the kids - even after the divorce - are now my sole responsibility. Plus I'm starting my own practice and I've never, ever run a business before. I think anyone in my situation would find it difficult to manage. But for someone with ADD this situation is unmanageable. And it feels like it's getting worse by the day.

Although I'm not responsible FOR my girls, I am responsible TO them. (And maybe the explanation of that needs another post . . .) I need to be the best mom that I can be in order to guide them through their teen years and get them out into the world as happy, healthy, productive adults. And right now it really feels like the blind leading the blind (or the distracted leading the distractable). How can I get my kids - especially the one with confirmed ADD - on a schedule and organized, if I can't do the same for myself? We constantly lose things. It takes so much energy for me to remember all the things that have to be done for the kids that I rarely have energy to do things for myself. I haven't had my "annual" check up in years. My mother comes to my house to visit and spends the whole time cleaning up because the apartment is a disaster. How can I teach my kids to keep a reasonably organized house if I can't even do it myself?

I'm a huge believer in natural remedies. I've gotten myself off of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds more than once. In the past, I felt guilty for taking ADD medication because I know that if stopped eating all processed foods, ate only organic whole foods, did yoga every day and meditated regularly, I might actually be able to get the ADD under control without resorting to pharmaceutical management. I'm sure there are people out there who are willing and able to make the sacrifices that lifestyle requires. But in my world, those sacrifices seem too great to make right now. I have two busy kids. I'm starting a business. The work, time and money it would require to eat only organic whole foods is too much for me. And the protest that would erupt in my house if I tried to make the kids start eating only organic whole foods would rival the Occupy Wall Street protests.

So I made the (clearly not easy) decision to go back to medication to help me manage my ADD symptoms. If I can't model good management of my own symptoms, how can I expect my daughter to manage her own symptoms? I don't want her to feel bad about relying on medication. There's no shame in needing help. I hope that medication is a short-term solution. I hope that things will settle down, at least a little, so that I can feel like I'm in control again. And once I feel in control, maybe using natural remedies won't seem like an insurmountable goal.

Change the picture, change your mood

2011-11-14T16:34:00.001-08:00

Lately I've felt like my life has gotten a bit out of control. Every day I was living life in such a way that I felt like there was no room for error. So when the inevitable bumps in the road happened I would fly off the handle. I'm a single mom to two busy, easily distracted girls and I'm starting my own massage therapy practice - bumps in the road happen every single day. So I was flying off the handle - every single day. The anxiety was getting to me and to my girls. I started imagining my life as a bobsled race. I was the captain, my girls were my teammates and we were careening down an icy course. One wrong move on my part and our very lives would be in danger. It's no wonder I was a complete freaking mess. Daily. On top of that, we are still struggling with living in a much smaller apartment than we used to have. It's been hard to pare down our belongings and hard for the girls to clean up after themselves when there's so little space to put things. My mental, emotional and physical spaces were closing in on me.

At yoga the other day, my teacher talked about making space. Metaphorically speaking. Doing the poses helps make physical space in our joints and our spines. Meditating and taking time for recovery hopefully helps us make space in our minds and our souls for the inevitable challenges of daily life.

By the end of class I realized that it was my own imagination that was making me anxious. I'm not a bobsled team captain. My girls and I aren't in a bobsled race. But keeping that in my mind made me feel physically as if that's exactly what we were. I can choose to dismiss that picture from my mind and I can choose to replace it with something much more peaceful. Something with space.

At first I thought of cross-country skiing. (And what is it with me and winter sports? I hate to be cold and I don't even ski.) But then my heart started pounding at that thought so I realized that wouldn't work. I changed the picture. I imagined that my girls and I were walking in a boundless meadow. On a sunny - but not too hot - day. I knew that if we needed to change direction at any time, that would be fine. No obstacles. No ice. No scary, blind turns. Just grass and flowers and sun and happy. And calm. Lots and lots of calm.

I'd love to say that since then I've been unflappable. Calm and peaceful as Ghandi. Not so. But I've been better. And improving every day. Because I know that when that bobsled racing, no room for error thinking starts creeping into my mind, I can change it. And the meadow is always there to calm me down.

Finding joy in the music of your own making

2011-11-10T09:40:00.001-08:00

Say hello to Uncle Jimmy. That's probably not his real name, but it seems to fit. A friend sent me this picture yesterday and more or less dared me to find in it some inspiration to write. I'm not one to wimp out on a dare.

Of course this picture is meant to be a joke. We're supposed to laugh at Uncle Jimmy. And I did laugh when I first saw it. What's not funny about a half-naked fat guy playing the flute and dancing in the street?

But when I really thought about, I realized that the picture makes me uncomfortable. Things we find humorous usually do, on some level. Looking at it, I feel like I'm seeing something that should be private and I'm not really talking about his nearly naked body. (Which wouldn't even be an issue if he had a six-pack. Consider what that says about our culture's body image issues.)

The thing that makes me most uncomfortable is his abandon in the moment. His joy in the music of his own making. When is the last time you allowed yourself to just be exactly who you are, doing exactly what you love to do and enjoying it - in public - without worrying what other people thought of you? When is the last time you did that in private?

Go out today and play your version of Uncle Jimmy's flute. Dance half naked. Hell, dance naked (but I suggest you do that in private for legal reasons). Do whatever makes you feel good in the moment. Push aside that voice in your head that tells you that you're doing it wrong. Let go. Find your inner Uncle Jimmy. Find your joy in the music of your own making.

Surrender - but don't give up

2011-10-26T12:46:00.000-07:00

To let go of struggle. To give up control where I have no control. To stop trying so damn hard all the time. To do what needs to be done and let the chips fall where they may.To understand that when things don't go as planned, it often means that the universe had other - better - plans. To let things be what they are and not wish them to be different.

I want to see surrender in those positive ways.

Instead, I keep seeing it as failure. As my inability to organize things correctly, think about things in the right way, or consider all the possible obstacles and the ways in which to overcome them. I see it as giving up. As being lazy. As not wanting it bad enough - whatever it is. After all, that's the American dream, right? Want it bad enough, work hard for it, never say die and you'll be successful. But if you let go, give up, let things happen instead of trying to make things happen then you're not going to be successful. And you only have yourself to blame.

Strangely, I'm getting better at letting go of the big things. Although I'm in the middle of a custody battle, I'm not fighting. Not really. I'm letting the lawyers and therapists work with my kids and figure out what's best for them. I just listen and help where I can but I'm letting other people do the worrying and fighting. I know in my heart that my kids will be fine. All the rest is details. In addition, I have some financial issues. Right now I'm dipping significantly into my savings in order to take care of myself and my kids. But I'm not worrying about money. Not really. I'm doing what I can do to set up my business, get clients and work the hours I can work given my single-mom schedule. I know in my heart that I will always have enough money - however much (or little) that is. Those are huge issues. But they don't really stress me out - not day to day anyway.

It's the little things that are driving me absolutely nuts! My daughter having to scramble to finish her homework in the morning because she "forgot" to do it the night before (despite my repeated questioning that night about the status of her homework). Not having the basketball practice schedule even though the season starts in less than a week which makes it hard for me to plan anything. Streets and Sanitation randomly closing streets near my kids' schools during drop off time creating huge traffic jams. My computer freaking out the day before I'm leaving on a 5 day trip. Bike riders not following traffic rules.

One of the things I learned in an ethics class recently is that I'm responsible TO other people but I am not responsible FOR them. (Easier said than done when it comes to my kids but important nonetheless.) All of those little things are the responsibility of other people. My daughter might get a bad grade for not finishing her homework on time. But hopefully in getting the bad grade, she'll learn a lesson about doing things in a timely manner. I can't force the basketball coach to get the schedule done but if my daughter can't attend a practice because I can't pick her up when it's over or I plan something else, that will have to be ok. If the coach is missing one of his best players because he didn't get the schedule done in time for me to plan ahead, then maybe he'll learn a lesson. Or not. Not my issue, I think.

I don't like the saying "Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's all small stuff." First of all, it isn't all small stuff and the small stuff adds up. It's hard to be bombarded regularly with things that are not your responsibility, are not within your control but impact things that are your responsibility.

Maybe the best thing is to be ok with the fact that the small stuff bothers me. Maybe it will be easier to get over the small things if I stop trying so hard NOT to let them bother me. It's ok to be pissed off at the bike rider who flies through the stop sign requiring me to slam on my breaks and nearly have a heart attack. It's not ok for me to let it ruin my day. Learning to surrender doesn't mean I can't ever be angry or upset.

Learning to accept things as they are doesn't mean I can't work to change them, where appropriate (and possible). I can accept that my daughter is forgetful sometimes. I can love her despite that (god, I hope so since I'm probably 10 times as forgetful as she is). But I can also try to help her come up with strategies to improve her memory and be more organized.

I can surrender but I don't have to give up.

Who do I think I am?

2011-09-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

So I've been talking about fear and how I've let it hold me back. What I'm slowly beginning to realize is just how much of who I think I am has been shaped, in some way, by fear. The way I dress, the decisions I make for myself and my girls, the ways I spend my time. The people I spend my time with. All of those things are determined by my fear of not fitting in or living up to expectations or disappointing people I love. Or being thought strange by people who's opinion I couldn't care less about.

I have an image of myself. That image represents who I think I am. And when I want to do something, I consider that image and try to figure out whether someone like "her" would do something like "that." Would she wear colorful clothes that show some cleavage? Would she wear clothes that show off her curves? That might attract attention? Or would she wear loose fitting clothes that hide the figure she doesn't think is good enough to show off? Would she go out with the smart, cute, funny, interesting guy who gives her butterflies but happens to be quite a bit younger than her? Or would she stick with the safe guy who looks good on paper, who would please her family, but bores her to tears? Would she get the tattoo she's wanted for years or does she decide not to because her teenage daughter thinks it's weird for a mom to get a tattoo?

Like a lot of people, as I was growing up, I conformed to other people's expectations of me. It was like someone built a box of expectations and I jumped right in and stayed there too long. So long, in fact, that I forgot who I really am. Living an unauthentic life is painful. And exhausting. It's easier to just accept it and adapt. And somewhere along the way I started thinking that the life other people wanted for me was the life I wanted for myself. It was easier that way.

Lately I've been thinking about The Matrix when Neo first meets with Morpheus. And Morpheus offers him a choice: "You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." Or, in the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy sees that the Wizard is just a man hiding behind a curtain. I took the red pill. I see Wonderland. I know that there's no big, scary Wizard of Oz that we have to obey. I'm out of the box and there's no going back.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. But do it anyway.

2011-09-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

So, I guess that my last post wasn't the catalyst to regular writing that I had hoped it would be. I sit down to write. I write a few sentences. I decide that they suck. I delete the sentences. I go do something else. And nothing ever gets written.

I want to write. I truly believe that I have something to share and that writing is the way I need to share it. I've written things that people like. On occasion. I have ideas sometimes. I can tell a good story now and then and if I try, I can get it to sound as good on paper as it does when I tell it out loud. When I'm not writing, I feel like something is missing in my life. And since I haven't been writing for months, there's a big gaping hole that's only getting bigger.

There's only one thing that's stopping me. It's as common as hay fever in August. Which makes it a cliche. I hate being a cliche. I hate being in the same zip code as a cliche.

My albatross is fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear that even if I happen to write something half way decent, everyone will eventually figure out that I'm a fraud and any good writing is just a fluke. Fear that if people do like what I write, I'll have a reputation to uphold which will require me to keep writing stuff people like. Regularly. And what if I can't? What if I run out of things to say? (Well, anyone who knows me in real life will know that one's not likely.)

I was talking to my teenage daughter about making fear-based decisions last night. Actually we've been talking about it a lot lately. Or, more accurately, yelling at each other about it a lot. She's in the process of making a fear-based decision. There's something I'm pretty sure she wants to do but she's convinced herself that she's not ready. That she can't do it right now. That she needs to do something else first and get herself ready and THEN she'll do this thing. Next time. After much "discussion" about it she admitted that she's afraid - people expect big things from her and she's afraid she won't measure up. She's been a big fish in a little pond in some ways and now she's swimming in the ocean. She can't bring herself to try because fear of failure has overwhelmed her. Fear has led her to question whether she even wants to do this thing at all. That's where fear is the most dangerous. It makes us hesitate to work towards our dream and then convinces us we never wanted that dream anyway.

I'm in a pickle with this situation. On the one hand, if I push her to do this thing she'll likely resent me and it will hurt our relationship. And maybe not doing it is the right thing for her anyway. On the other hand, if I don't push her to move past her fear, her comfort zone may get smaller (and smaller and smaller) until she's afraid to take any risks. And isn't it my job as a parent to help her make good decisions? Decisions that will help her get where she wants to be, wherever that is? To help her evaluate her options, work through her fears and make the best decision for herself (even if it's not the decision I would have made)?

But, really, who am I to be counseling her on dealing with fear anyway? Fear has my number. Fear has had me in a choke hold for years. And I'm trying to teach someone how to deal with it? It's kind of sad, if you think about it.

So this morning I decided that the best thing I can do for my daughter is to wrestle down my own fear. To work on my own issues and, maybe, be able to show her by example how to do it. I'm still afraid. But I'm going to do what I need to do anyway.

It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be.

2011-08-19T10:22:00.001-07:00

I've been away for a long time. A very long time in blogging years. It's been about 10 months since my last post. And even before that I hadn't been writing very much. My excuses are many and varied. In the twelve months or so I started (and recently finished!) massage therapy school. My divorce was finalized. I moved. Twice (sort of). And just when I thought my 50/50 custody arrangement was working out, it stopped working out (for reasons I will probably write about at a later date) and I am now a full time single mom. I'm also trying to find a job and start a massage therapy practice.

I think we can all agree that those are pretty damn good excuses for not blogging a lot. Or at all. On the other hand, since I tend to think of blogging as therapy, maybe I should have been writing like a fiend. Really what I've been doing, in some ways, is hibernating. I was making the transition from being a lawyer to being a student again. From being someone's wife to being single again. From living in a kick ass condo to renting a one-bedroom apartment. Again. Not that I'm complaining. This is all necessary. It's part of my journey and it's all compost for the beautiful garden that is my life. I just wasn't in a place where I could share it in writing.

Several months ago I decided to start blogging again. I had it all planned out - I was going to do my first post in the spring and talk about how I was coming out of hibernation. It was going to be the ideal post for returning to blogging. It was going to be perfect. Spring came and went and so did my idea of the perfect "coming out of hibernation" post. So I tried to come up with another perfect idea for a summer post. And that was a bust (see above list of excuses for why I failed to come up with anything brilliant). Then the other day my daughter picked up some knitting she had started months ago which inspired me to pick up one of the many knitting projects I have in various stages of completion. The one I picked up is a lovely pink baby blanket that I started making for no one in particular last year. But now my sister is pregnant with a girl and it will be a lovely present (hopefully I can get it finished by the time she's born sometime around the end of this month).

As I started working on it again I realized why I had abandoned it in the first place. It's a somewhat complicated pattern involving yarn overs, slip stitch knitting and other increase/decrease shenanigans. At some point I "lost" about 18 stitches and the pattern won't work unless you have the right number of stitches on the needle. I've been known to "unknit" several rows of fabric or start projects over (several times if necessary) to get the pattern right. Sometimes I don't mind it. But there's no way I'm starting this one over - too much is done, it's too complex and if I do, I'll never get it done in time. So I did a work around (which I also do a lot). But because I didn't do it exactly right, the work around left distinct holes in the blanket. Small ones, but noticeable to me and anyone else who does more than just glance at it. I had a decision to make. I knew that if I started unknitting again to try and get it right, I would probably get so frustrated with it that I'd just put it down and not pick it up again for years. Or I'd simply not get finished in time to give it to my sister while her baby is still a baby.

I was close to tears, ready to scrap the whole thing and then it came to me - It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be. Once it's done, my sister and her baby won't care about the little holes in one row of an otherwise lovely blanket with lacy hearts all over it. They won't care at all. I could buy them a perfect blanket but that would have a lot less meaning than the blanket I made by hand with lots of love (and more than a few tears of frustration but they don't need to know that). If I wait until it's perfect, it will never get done.

Which leads me to another "a ha" moment. I've been putting off a bunch of things - like blogging - waiting until I had the perfect idea, or the perfect circumstances to start. I realized that perfect ideas, circumstances, situations or opportunities are extremely rare. If we wait for them, we may never get anything done. Mark Silver from Heart of Business recently wrote that we shouldn't be afraid or resentful of imperfect circumstances, because they are the doorway to profound opportunities to serve and love.

So my blanket for my little niece won't be perfect, but it will be. And I know my heart will be happy when I give it to her, imperfections and all. My first blog post after a long hibernation may not be perfect. But it exists. And I'm happy to be writing again, imperfections and all.

How my left pinky taught me a lesson in humility

2010-10-07T19:28:00.000-07:00

So, hi. I know it's been awhile but I'm busy with school and stuff and haven't really taken the time to write. Sorry. Hopefully I'll be back soon with more regular posts. But I learned something today that I felt like sharing.

Yesterday was my first day of Sports Massage technique class. Which is a lot more physically demanding than I thought it would be. I've had two weeks off school and I'm a little out of practice with some techniques. Not surprisingly, I overdid it a bit during class and when I woke up this morning the knuckle of my left pinky was sore. (I have no idea why that was the only sore knuckle I had. It's a bit odd but it is what it is.) I immediately figured that what it need was a good massage. And some movement. Movement is good for joints, right? So I spent a bunch of time this morning massaging my hand and really working that joint. Instead of helping it feel better, the massage and movement made it worse. I was in so much pain by the afternoon that I could barely sit through my Physiology lecture. And I love physiology! (I mean, what's not to love? Cell metabolism? The inner workings of the lymphatic system? Totally cool stuff).

When I got home and finally got an ice pack on it, I thought about how, despite my good intentions, I made a mess of things. And then it hit me - just because I'm a massage therapist (in training), doesn't mean that every ailment that crosses my path can be helped by massage. There are some things, like a sore pinky, that just need to be left alone for awhile. To rest. In my desire to "help," I lost sight of my limits. I'm just thanking my lucky stars that I learned this lesson without hurting anyone but myself.

Our bodies have an incredible ability to heal themselves - if we will just get out of their way and stop expecting too much of them. Sometimes when we have a minor injury or we're feeling not quite right, we don't necessarily need a doctor or a medication. We need to stop doing what injured us in the first place. We need to slow down and let our bodies rest. We need to stop interfering by trying to "make" ourselves feel better - no matter how good our intentions may be. Sometimes what we really need is to "do" nothing and let things be.

This is an especially important lesson for "healers" (I put that in quotes because I don't think I heal anyone, I just facilitate their own healing but "healing facilitator" just sounds silly and clinical. So anyway . , ,). We want to help our clients (and families and friends and random people around the world) to feel better. That's why we became healers, because we're helpers at heart. Which is why it can be hard for us to acknowledge that there may be times when we can't (or shouldn't) try to help. There are times when our clients just have to get themselves through a certain phase on their own. Their current problems may be above our pay grade. We may not be the right healer for them. (My friend, clairvoyant healer Debra Taitel, wrote a great post on this issue.)

The bottom line for me is that I have to learn to let things just be without meddling all the time. I have to learn that sometimes nothing is better than something. And even little pinky fingers have something to teach us.

Do as I say, not as I do

2010-09-03T15:42:00.001-07:00

The phrase "Do as I say, not as I do" is usually associated with parents and children. But, for those of us who advise other people in some capacity, it takes on a broader meaning. Recently, this has been a theme for me, not only in my role as a mother to two girls but also as a friend and lightworker.

I'm pretty good at telling other people what to do and how to do it when it comes to dealing with issues that pop up in their lives. (Yeah, I'm bossy that way - it probably comes from being the older sister to two brothers.) I think, at least some of the time, I give decent advice. With respect to my kids, it's sort of my job to tell them what to do. And what not to do.

But, truth be told, I take very little of my own advice when it comes to running my life. Which means I haven't been eating well, sleeping enough, keeping myself organized or doing the creative stuff (like writing) that keeps me sane. And because of this, I'm struggling with the fact that - like it or not- I'm a role model for my kids and, to an extent, my clients.

A quick side note about the role model thing . . . I'm currently in school to become a massage therapist. At school, we have those horrible vending machines that sell unhealthy sodas and snacks. Lacking will power and loving Mountain Dew makes it difficult for me to stay away from that particular sugar/caffeine infusion on the days when I'm at school. One day I let it slip in front of my daughter that I was drinking Mountain Dew at school. She knows how bad it is healthwise. We don't keep soda at home. I rarely let the kids drink it - I'm constantly extolling the virtues of water as the preferred beverage. She, rightfully, got ticked off at me. Then I got ticked off because, frankly, sometimes it sucks being a role model. (And because I was stupid for saying something in front of her. I mean, it's ok for parents to have a few secrets from their kids, right?)

It boils down to this: How can I counsel people on how to be healthier, take better care of themselves, be more mindful about how they spend their time and live more passionate lives when I'm not always walking the walk?

Several weeks ago I was whining on Twitter about the fact that I don't follow my own good advice and my very smart friend, Lisa Miles Brady, stopped me in my tracks with this question: What advice would you give me if I was having the same problem?

It took me awhile to figure out a good answer to that question. And here it is: stop trying to do it all on your own. It's not only children who benefit from being part of a village. As adults, we benefit from being part of a tribe. What good is having friends if you can't turn to them in a time of need? And yet, this is so hard for me. I love to help people. With my friends I try to reach out to help even when I'm not asked. But when I need help, I don't always reach out. And I'm really good at pretending everything is hunky dorey (even if I can sometimes admit - at least on this blog - that they're not). My friends don't always know when I need help even though I know some of them would reach out to me if they knew.

There's a reason that we go to healers and life coaches or ask friends for advice. It's not always because we don't know what to do or how to heal ourselves or how to kick our business up a notch. It's because we often need a different perspective to help us choose the right path out of the many before us. When we're stuck, it's usually because we're too emotionally involved in our own lives to see clearly. If you're wandering in the forest, it's great to have someone else with you to rise above the trees and point you in the right direction. Or at least give you an idea of the obstacles you might face if you choose a particular path.

One of the catalysts for this realization came from recent discussions I've had with the lovely and smart Gina Loree' Marks at Embody Grace. (By the way, Gina has been the catalyst for several good things in my life over the past year or so. She's part of the reason I'm in massage school and has helped me along my path in ways big and small. She's one of my heroes. You should all go check her out.) Gina is working on a new business helping healers develop a web presence. She asked for volunteers to help her figure out what healer-types might want and need in this area. Because I love to help and because this is an area where I'm struggling, I volunteered. We chatted on Skype for awhile about what I want to do with my web presence and the issues I'm facing.

Gina noticed during our talk that I need help with something other than my web presence. She sensed that I'm struggling with some of the most basic issues having to do with starting a business as an independent service provider. As a former corporate lawyer, I was comfortable with stuff like forming the corporate entity, getting the paperwork done and hiring an accountant. But I'm floundering with marketing myself, planning a budget on a freelance-type income and coordinating the several different income-generating projects I'm currently working on. Since Gina is a Shiatsu practitioner with her own practice and has been down this road before, she's in a great position to help me through this particular forest.

It isn't that I don't know or can't figure out the nuts and bolts of those things on my own. I could, intellectually at least. But I was stuck in a rut - paralyzed by fear and inertia and a general sense of overwhelm. So Gina offered to help me by being a sort of "accountability partner." She's breaking down the tasks for me into bite sized pieces that I can handle. And she tells me that it's ok if I don't have all the answers now. She reminds me that just putting one foot in front of the other is all I need to do right now. But she also holds me accountable. She reminds me (gently, of course) when I'm not addressing an issue I should be thinking about. We're in the early stages of this partnership and so far it's going great. And once I get a better sense of the services I'm offering, who my "right people" are and, just generally, what I'm all about these days, then we'll work on my web presence. One thing at a time. Or maybe two things.

And because I just love synchronicity, I have to mention that while I was working on this post, I read this great post over at The Complete Flake. LaVonne was talking about hitting a wall and not knowing what to say or do next. Instead of shutting down, she reached out to a friend who helped her move forward. It made her realize the importance of this: "Ask, and allow others to help you, encourage you, love you." That's what it's all about.

We don't have to do everything all by ourselves. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Blog, interrupted

2010-08-10T21:29:00.001-07:00

I didn't intend to take such a long sabbatical from blogging. It kind of just happened when I stopped writing over the 4th of July holiday and then didn't start again until now, six weeks later. I have a good excuse handy. I started massage therapy school right after the holiday. There's a fair bit of homework and all that. And I'm still working part-time as a lawyer. And I'm a mom. So I'm busy, busy, busy. So, yeah. Sounds good right? Well, it's bullshit. I mean it's true - I'm busy. But it's bullshit that I didn't have time to write. The fact is, I couldn't. Or wouldn't. Or whatever.

I had a bit of a . . . thing . . . with my family over the holiday and it knocked me way off center. Holidays are hard for me generally. Try as I might, I can't seem to get rid of my high expectations for holiday cheer. Even though I've never, ever had a Norman Rockwell family experience, there's a part of me that holds onto the hope that my family can be that loving "together" family of my dreams. Ever since the "thing" on July 3rd (which dashed my holiday hopes yet again) I've been struggling to write. I needed to write about my family but I didn't want to. But I couldn't write about anything else either. When you try to ignore the elephant in the room, it just keeps getting bigger until you can't see or even think about anything else.

So why don't I want to write about the "thing" with my family? Because I keep hoping that I can somehow make this blog non-anonymous. It's not really anonymous now, most of my readers know my real name. Hell, most of you are Facebook friends. But most of my off-line friends and family don't really know about it. Not that I would be upset if they stumbled on it but I'm hesitant to write personal stuff about my family and then make the blog more public to people who know them. On the other hand, pretty much everyone who knows me knows at least part of the story. So f**k it.

I was estranged from my dad and my brothers and pretty much most of my family for the past 12 years. Part of it had to do with my family not getting along with my husband and my feeling that I had to choose between them. (I was 7 months pregnant with my first child when we had a big falling out. I chose my husband.) Part of it had to do with everyone being stubborn and no one wanting to admit that they were wrong. For the record - and I've said this to everyone involved - I take responsibility for my own part in the whole mess. Also for the record, no one else in my family has been willing to do the same. But whatever. Life is too short. I'm willing to let it all go and just start fresh. I thought everyone else could do the same.

To the extent that I ever thought about it during those 12 years, I guess I saw myself as a puzzle piece lost under the couch. Once I was "found" I could just fit back into my very own tailor-made spot. But life isn't that neat and orderly. The puzzle changed. I changed. And I don't fit so neatly into the slot I once occupied. I missed a lot of stuff that went on so I wasn't there for various people in my family during some tough times. There are hard feelings. (Never mind that they weren't there for me during my hard times. But, like I said, whatever.)

What happened on the 3rd of July is kind of silly, in retrospect. My kids and I were supposed to go to my dad's and hang out with family. But some of my family members were going through another one of their tough times. And they only wanted "immediate family" around. I'm no longer considered immediate family so my kids and I were uninvited. I was disappointed. And really, really, really hurt. My kids couldn't have cared less. So that's good. I guess.

After six weeks of reflection I'm able to see that this has very little to do with me and a lot to do with them. I can sort of look at it objectively. Sort of. Here's what I've learned:

You can go home again. But you can't expect it to be as if you never left in the first place.
I've done the right thing - for myself - in forgiving them even if they can't forgive me. Life is too f**king short to hold grudges.
If the family you were born into doesn't fill your needs, build one that does. Surround yourself with supportive friends who love you unconditionally. If you look, you'll find them.
No matter how hard you try to stay grounded, something will come along to knock you off your feet. The key is to get back up and find a way to get grounded again.

So it has taken me awhile to regain my footing, so to speak. But I'm back and feeling stronger, and happier, than ever. Now that I've gotten the elephant out of the room, maybe I'll even start writing regularly again. Not many things would make me happier.

The Happiness Plan

2010-07-01T11:18:00.001-07:00

The past few days I haven't been feeling very good about myself and I've been struggling to figure out what to do about it. So this morning when I woke up, a question popped into my head. "When you've felt good about yourself in the past, what's been going on and how can you replicate it?"

I was surprised and dismayed by my answer to the first part of the question. "I feel good about myself when other people are happy with me or when I'm in love (which usually means someone is in love with me)." The fairly obvious problem with that is that my happiness with myself is entirely dependent on other people. So the only way to replicate that feeling is to "make" other people praise me or fall in love with me. Clearly this is not realistic (especially given my lack of a life time supply of Love Potion #9).

So I dug a little deeper. "What was going on the last time you fell in love or when you had the kind of positive connections that you're looking for?" Because those things don't happen in a vacuum. When we're doing what we love to do - when we're happy - we attract positive connections. I guess that's what all the Law of Attraction proponents say. Maybe they're on to something . . . What I need is a Happiness Plan!

Although I don't want to base my self-worth on my interactions with others, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing things to make myself a little happier which will hopefully help to attract the connection that I want and so clearly need in my life. I have to be careful, though, that I don't start doing things that might make me happy in the short-run (instant gratification) but sacrifice my happiness in the long-run. I've never been much good at delayed gratification it seems. So my Happiness Plan has to incorporate things that will make me happy in the long-run even if they might make me whine in the short-run.

I've talked about my tendency to break promises I make to myself. When I do that, it makes me unhappy. And lately, I've been breaking all kinds of promises. On the one hand, I don't want to be too hard on myself but on the other, I worry that I'm too easy. There has to be a happy medium somewhere. I think the key to that is to make sure that I'm making promises (to myself and others) that are doable, consistent with my goals and values and flexible enough to take changed circumstances into consideration.

With my one week on/one week off custody arrangement, I have to schedule my promises with the understanding that when I have the kids, I have less time for things like writing. I simply can't write 2500 words a day when I have custody of the kids. If I expect to be able to do that, my conflicting goals are going to make me crazy. I want to spend time with the kids. I want to write a lot. But they can't both be my highest priority at the same time. If, by trying to do one I sacrifice the other, I will never be happy. But I'm in control of my promises to myself and I'm in control of determining how to meet my goals. Which means that I can wave my magic Glinda wand and say "When I have custody of the kids, I don't have to write 2500 words a day." And it's done. The pressure is off.

Managing my expectations about my ability to do stuff is only part of the Happiness Plan. The other part is to step up my game in areas that can't be waved away with my magic wand. As much as I'd love to make my bills disappear, every month my mortgage lender expects to be paid. And no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that.

It should come as no surprise that I've been slacking off some in the work department. Mainly because I still, technically, have a "day job" that I don't love but that pays the bills for now. I get paid hourly so I can work more hours and make more money. As much as it pains me to say this - if I had more money, I would be happier. It's not ALL about money but I hate worrying about money. I need just enough so that I don't have to worry about making next month's bills. Not worrying as much = happier.

The other slacking off area is organization. (Organization = bane of my existence). This is where short-term happiness vs. long-term happiness becomes a real issue for me. Short-term, few things make me happier than NOT cleaning and organizing (NOT exercising is close, though). Clearly, this is not a good set up for long-term happiness and effectiveness in life. I'm trying lots of different techniques to trick myself into getting stuff done but what I really need to do is JUST DO IT. Seriously, I need to put on some big girl pants and clean my room. It's sort of scary that I'm 45 years old and still need my Mom to yell at me before I will actually clean up the clutter. Sheesh. I know, deep down, that I'll be much happier and more relaxed if my surroundings are less cluttered. Apparently I somehow need to convince the part of my brain that actually controls my actions. Haven't figured out exactly how to do that consistently, though.

No Happiness Plan is complete without fun stuff. If there was no fun stuff, it would just be another to do list. (And if I've learned one thing in this life it's that to do lists suck.) When I'm not happy with myself, I start to feel like I don't deserve fun things. Somehow I figure that if I deny myself fun stuff, I'll get to work on the not-fun stuff so that when the not-fun stuff is done, THEN I'll deserve fun stuff. Not only is that sentence hard to read, that tactic does not work. Ever. Fun stuff has to be a part of every day in the Happiness Plan.

So here's my current Happiness Plan:

1) Think about the promises I've made to myself (and others) and make sure they're doable, flexible and consistent with my values and goals.

2) Step it up by working a few more hours each week and cleaning my freaking room (preferably with a minimum of whining).

3) Spend time outside every day - even when it's raining. (Because I'm always happier when I get out of the house even if I think I want to stay inside.)

4) Listen to my favorite music every day. (When I work at the office, I always play music but when I work at home I sometimes forget to turn it on. Music = fun.)

5) Talk to at least one friend a day. (It's easy for me to just chat on Twitter or read Facebook or email. But I feel so much more connected if I actually talk to someone. Connection = fun.)

The Happiness Plan will evolve over time (just like the dreaded to do list). But so long as the point is seeking happiness and not just getting things done, hopefully I'll be more likely to keep up with it. Now that I've developed the Plan, I'm going to clean my room with my favorite music playing!

Do you have a Happiness Plan? Share it here - I love sharing!

Multislacking (or why I love Twitter)

2010-06-24T16:35:00.000-07:00

Here's what I asked Twitter today - If I procrastinate on more than one thing at a time, do I get extra points? My favorite answer was from @SquiggleJay - she said "Multislacking". I immediately started following her because that's awesome. (She says she probably heard that term somewhere so I don't know who coined it. If you know who coined it, tell them thanks from me!)

Anyway, a new competitive sport is born. Seriously, I think I could turn Multislacking into a national pastime rivaling baseball. (Mainly because I think baseball is boring unless you're in the bleachers at Wrigley drinking bad beer). I can't tell you how many people are into this sport and probably don't even know it yet.

Fact is, I'm a serial committer - meaning that I commit to a lot of things but I have a problem with follow through because I'm also a Multislacker. I am so good at procrastinating that I can procrastinate on several things at once. And the more things I commit myself to do, the more things I can procrastinate at any given time. I would totally win the Stanley Cup of Multislacking if we had one.

I'm a little concerned that this sport may not be very healthy. It's kind of like rugby only it probably doesn't involve serious physical injury. It could involve incurring financial penalties and a significant rise in the divorce rate. But that didn't stop horse racing did it?

There are just so many things that need to be done that I really dislike doing. And many of them would otherwise interfere with things I love, like long mid-week lunches with friends and movie watching. What's a girl to do?

As much as I'd love to stay at the top of my game, greats in all sports have to scale back or retire at some point. I think it's time for me to break out the kitchen timer and go back to my modified Flylady program that worked for me in the past. The basic premise is that you can do anything for 15 minutes. Pick a project, set a timer and go for it. Flylady has lots of other strategies for recovering Multislackers, too.

I struggle with this because I really don't want to change my essential nature - spontaneous, passionate, fun-loving, creative. And, like other creatives, I fear that any kind of structure will kill my buzz. I think that all my years being a lawyer and trying to live a life that didn't fit makes me extra sensitive to this issue. But I also know that I have to be a grown up and we all have to spend some time doing stuff that isn't fun just because it's a part of life. And also learning to delay gratification is a good thing. Sometimes. (And for a REALLY funny take on this, you have to read Hyperbole and a Half).

Yesterday was a 24-hour procrastination fest. (But I do feel rejuvenated today so maybe that's the silver lining). One of the things I procrastinated on was the Consciousness Cleanse. I kind of did Days 8 and 9 but didn't really have anything interesting to write about them. Like some of the first few days, there just wasn't anything new there for me. Day 8 was the Power of Liberation. (Been there, done that. Liberated from my job and my marriage. Can't get much more liberated . . .). Day 9 was the Power of Responsibility which is where you take responsibility for taking care of yourself. I guess it's relevant to what's going on with me right now. My struggle between needing to be an adult and not wanting to act like a grown up. I'm feeling like this consciousness cleanse might have been more useful to me a year ago.

So today is Day 10 - The Power of Humility. I guess calling myself the Queen of the Multislackers on Twitter this morning wasn't very humble. Sorry. Actually, this day is about realizing that it takes a village. Not only to raise kids. But to really take care of ourselves. We're so afraid to be vulnerable, to admit we don't know everything, that we put up a wall that cuts us off from connection to other people. We need to let our defenses down and let other people in so they can support us on our journey. I clearly used to have that problem, not sure I do anymore. Just in case this isn't already abundantly clear - I hereby admit that I don't know everything and I need all the help I can get. And we already know how much I crave connection. So I think I have this day covered.

Now I am off to an Abundance Meditation workshop led by my friend Debbie Taitel who is awesome. She's part of the growing clan that is supporting me on my journey. Go read her blog and follow her on Twitter @spiritlightmuse.

It's about connection! Now what?

2010-06-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

I know I'm supposed to be writing about the Consciousness Cleanse that I'm doing and I'm two days behind but I'll get to it, maybe later today. Maybe not. But in the meantime I just had an epiphany walking home from the grocery store listening to Amazing by One EskimO. (Which is really an amazing song. Seriously.) The epiphany is this: It's about connecting to other people! That's it.

For some of you, this may not seem like an earth-shattering epiphany but for me it was and this is why. I'm really independent. Have been since I was a kid [insert sob story about divorced parents, blah, blah]. I had to do a lot of things on my own so I got used to being alone. And sometimes I actually do need to be alone in order to recharge. But really, deep down in places I don't talk about at parties (well, maybe I do), I'm a people person. I need to be around other people. Actually, it's more than that - I need to connect with other people. So it isn't enough to just go out and walk around the city surrounded by other human beings. I need to connect on a personal level.

This is related to my recent realization that I'm afraid that I'll spend the rest of my life alone. It's not that I can't live by myself or go out to dinner alone. It's not that I'm afraid of supporting myself (although if anyone wants to apply for the job of Sugar Daddy, the position is wide open). I'm just figuring out that I have a deep-seated need to share my life - my day-to-day existence - with other people.

It isn't necessarily that I need to get married again or even have a serious romantic relationship - although that would be great. But without a "partner" of some sort, it means I have to work harder to get that connection I need. That's probably one of the reasons I waited so long to get divorced. An unhealthy connection is still a connection. Having someone to come home to, even if all you want to do is avoid them, is still easier (I didn't say better) than having to do the work of finding someone else to spend time with (or ignore, I guess). I never said it was a good reason to put off getting divorced . . .

I would probably be really happy living in a commune. Assuming the other people living there didn't annoy me too much with New Age music and assuming I wouldn't get kicked out for wanting to keep my one pair of Jimmy Choo's. But if I could find the right tribe of people to live with, I'd be great.

The wonderful thing about my new career path of being a massage/Reiki therapist is that when I am working, I can't help but connect with people. Being a healer allows me to use my hands, heart, mind and spirit to work. Being a lawyer - I used my mind (and my hands if you count drafting boring documents using my hands). When I was working at a company, I was in meetings all the time. Most people hate meetings. I hated some of them - when they were pointless and boring. But mainly, I loved that part of my job and now I know why. It was the part of my job that involved connecting to other people. Helping them get stuff done. Helping them work through issues. That's what I love to do.

But right now I'm spending a lot of time alone, writing and trying to set up an online business. So how do I deal with it? Two words: Facebook and Twitter. Isn't the Internet wonderful? On Facebook, I've reconnected with all kinds of new and old friends, near and far. I connect with all kinds of people - sometimes on a deeper level than some in-person relationships - on the Internet. Just a few of my relatively new Internet friends are Gina, Miss Mandie, LaVonne, Peggie, Jesse, Kevin and Tony. These are real people who could totally call me up if they were in Chicago and I would drop everything to meet them for coffee. I might even consider donating a kidney if one of them needed it. Or maybe just offer to edit their eBooks. But I've never met them "in real life" and it doesn't matter. They're just as much friends as many of my other "real life" friends are. Which is why I spend way, way more time on Twitter and Facebook than I really should.

The really important thing this epiphany does is shine the light on the things I do when I get lonely. And I get lonely a lot these days when I don't have custody of my kids and I haven't made the effort to get together with friends. What I end up doing when I'm lonely is eating crap and messing around on the Internet. And it never seems to fill me up because "you can never get enough of the things you don't need." (I don't know who coined this phrase but it's a good one). The point is - as much as I love my tortilla chips, if I'm eating them to assuage the loneliness, I'll never stop eating them. I will never be able to get enough because they will never get rid of the loneliness. The only thing that gets rid of the loneliness is connecting. What do I do when it's late at night, none of my friends are on Twitter or Facebook and I start feeling the need for connection now that I know I shouldn't grab the chips (or start playing computer games)?

I don't know. I guess we'll see tonight. (I really, really wish I had a good answer for this - maybe someday soon I will).

Wherein I tell you that it's ok to be a Badass Bitch and show you how Glinda the Good Witch can help you feel powerful

2010-06-19T22:25:00.000-07:00

I've made it through six days of my Consciousness Cleanse, can you believe it? I've actually stuck with it for almost a week. Amazing. I know. Day 6 is The Gift of Surrender where we stop resisting our emotions and . . . yes, "surrender" to them. Although I haven't written directly about this, I have written about letting go and being ok with not being happy all the time. So, yeah. I get that it's important to acknowledge and accept ALL of our feelings - good and bad. And feel all of our feelings. Bad feelings don't go away when you ignore them. In fact, they stick around because you ignore them. Because "what you resist, persists." Whether you like it or not.

So let's all quit pretending to be Little Mary Sunshine all the time and let our Badass Bitch have the floor every once in awhile. It's healthy. (Maybe not for the people around you on Badass Bitch Day but if you can't score a little "alone" time when she shows up, Little Mary Sunshine will make nice later. Don't sweat it.) In all seriousness, stop feeling like you have to be happy all the time. Stop denying your dark side. It's ok.

Ok, I said I was going to blog about doing the Cleanse and now that I've gotten that out of the way, I want to talk about something else. I want to tell you about Glinda the Good Witch and how helpful she can be in helping you get free of unhealthy attachments to people and events.

Is there a person in your life who triggers strong negative emotions in you time and again? Is there an event from the past that, whenever you think about it, causes major heartburn? Do you feel powerless to stop your painful reaction to those people and events? With the help of Glinda, you can stop the painful reactions. Or at least diminish the pain.

There is a scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy is with Glinda in Munchkinland. The Wicked Witch pops in and threatens Dorothy. Glinda laughs and says "You have no power here. Be gone. Before someone drops a house on you, too." I've tried to find video of this scene because how she says this and the way she laughs is important. Glinda says this line with perfect authority and just a little bit of smug dismissiveness. The Wicked Witch has no choice but to slink off - and without the ruby slippers, too.

This may seem totally weird but I swear it works. Here's what I want you to do. The next time you're with a crazy-making person and he or she starts to do the stuff that drives you insane, I want you to either picture Glinda saying this line to that person or silently say the line yourself. If it's a past event, whenever you start reliving it, have Glinda say the line or you can even say it out loud. (I've tried saying it out loud but the problem is that I can't seem to get the laugh right and it kind of ruins it. So usually I just have Glinda say it.)

The fact is that these people and events only have power over us because we let them. As hard as it sometimes is to see, we really do have a choice in how we react to the actions of other people. Glinda helps us remember that the only person with power over our emotions is us. No one else has any power in our head unless we give it to them. If you've given some of that power away, Glinda helps you regain it.

Try it and let me know how it goes for you. Once you start, you'll find so many places that this can be used to help you stop feeling controlled by situations. Using this trick doesn't mean you'll stop feeling angry at your ex when he does that thing he does that always pisses you off but he does it anyway and probably on purpose because he knows it pisses you off. You may still be angry but it won't eat you up for three days after you see him. And you might even get to the point where it just doesn't bother you anymore. Because he will not have that power over you anymore.

Trust me. This will work. In fact, I'm beginning to think that the sillier and more fun something is, the more powerful its magic. And I find that really exciting.

My body is a temple, blah, blah, blah. Pass the chips.

2010-06-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

We're on Day 5 of the Consciousness Cleanse and today's focus is reverence for our bodies. We're asked to write a letter of apology to our bodies, keeping in mind the question: "If you knew your body was the Holy container of the Divine, what do you need to say you're sorry for?"

*Sigh* I'm not sure what to think about this issue. On the one hand, I totally owe my body an apology. For lots and lots of things. I have not been very nice to it over the years. But I'm having a weird reaction to the idea of apologizing to my body. To a certain extent, my body is me. I guess I could apologize to myself for a life time of bad eating habits and my refusal to get over my well-known addiction to Hint of Lime Tostitos. (They are the crack cocaine of food. Captain Crunch with Crunchberries is the primo weed. And using the word "primo" probably dates me more than my crow's feet do. But I digress. )

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from C.S. Lewis that pops up on Twitter all the time: You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

So, my soul is the Divine and my body is the container for my soul. I've known that for a long time. And yet I still often treat my body like a landfill. And I guess I should be hunkering down to write that apology to my divine soul but it just feels . . . weird. I have no problem with recognizing that I only get one go around in this body and if I don't take care of it, my go around could be cut short.

Maybe this is giving me trouble because it's not new to me. There's no revelation for me in today's Cleanse. It's kind of "same old, same old" - my body is a temple, blah, blah, blah. Pass the chips. I'm just not that into it.

I'm exaggerating of course. I do try to take care of myself most of the time. I'm doing non-sucky yoga regularly. I quit smoking and got off anti-depressants. I'm learning to meditate without having to beat my ADD brain into submission. I'm taking better care of my body because it makes sense. Because if I don't, I won't be able to walk my life's path of being a healer. And if I don't, I'm not setting a good example for my kids. The idea that my body is a container for my soul just doesn't do it for me. It doesn't motivate me in the least. I'm not sure why not but there it is.

I'm still working on the outer goal (getting paperwork done) and the inner goal (feeling peaceful) that started with Day 1 of the Cleanse. Today I got some stuff done towards getting my work area more organized. Right now it actually looks worse than it did when I started but I know I've made progress (packed two boxes of books for storage and set aside a bunch of books to sell to the used book store). Oh, and the books I'm selling? They're all self-help books about PMS and PMDD and peri-menopause. I got them because someone told me I had a problem with my hormones. I didn't have a problem with my hormones. I had a problem with the someone. So the books (along with the someone) are outta here. As far as feeling peaceful . . . that's been a little more difficult. Driving in rush hour traffic during the storm of the century didn't really help. But sitting on a friend's porch after the storm and watching the fireflies flicker? Now that felt peaceful.

Technical difficulties make me sad

2010-06-17T22:31:00.001-07:00

I thought I'd spiffy up my template but in the process, I seem to have lost all my hyperlinks - including the link to the comments. I'm praying to the technology gods tonight that I will be able to fix this problem because I loooove comments. And I'm very sad that I can't get any right now. So hopefully comments will be up and running again soon.

In the meantime, you can send me mini comment love on Twitter if you're so inclined (@slackermomspeak).

Thanks for your patience :)

And now the problems are fixed! Thank you to the anonymous person on the Blogger Help forums who is also up in the middle of the night and took the time to fix my blog. You are most awesome.

Let the comment rumpus begin!! (Or something like that.)

The power of forgiveness and releasing resentment

2010-06-17T14:47:00.000-07:00

Today's Consciousness Cleanse is about forgiveness. Debbie Ford says that forgiveness involves "releasing the invisible ties to those who have left you, betrayed you, disappointed you or hurt you" and that if you don't "cut the cords of resentment you continue to be imprisoned by" those people and situations you've presumably been trying to get away from. Hmm, that sounds familiar. I wrote recently about being connected energetically to old, unhealthy relationships and how important it is to cut those cords in order to be truly free. My post was mainly about ex-spouses/lovers but the same principle applies to all old relationships where you were hurt in some way.

One place where this kind of forgiveness and detachment might be useful is with our parents. In some ways, it's easy to detach from an old relationship with someone who isn't around us anymore - like an ex-spouse. Out of sight, out of mind does work in many cases. But what if you still have a relationship with someone who has hurt you or disappointed you? Unless you had really exceptional parents they probably did both at one time or another. No matter how much you love your Mom and Dad, you may find that you're carrying some sort of resentment towards them for something. Unless you release that resentment it has a negative effect on you. It poisons you, your relationship with your parents and maybe even your relationship with your own kids or spouse.

For the longest time, my Mom could get a rise out of me for what seemed like the littlest things. She would make some random comment and I would fly off the handle and get angry. She'd get defensive, I'd get angrier and our relationship suffered. I didn't realize until fairly recently that I was holding a tremendous amount of resentment towards her for things I thought I had long forgotten. But the truth was that although I may have (for the most part) forgotten things, I hadn't forgiven her. That's why I would jump to anger with seemingly little provocation.

Some of the things I was still pissed about were really small. Like the fact that she "wasn't available" to come with me to buy a prom dress until my step-mom offered to go with me. Then she was suddenly available. Seriously, I was still pissed about that 25 years later. Some of the things were pretty big like the fact that when she and my Dad got divorced she moved out of the house while my brothers and I were away at summer camp. Even though we knew she was leaving, it was pretty crappy of her to do it that way. It took me over 20 years to realize that I was angry about it and another 10 or so years to have the courage to actually tell her that I was angry about it. Looking back I feel silly for having held onto that resentment for so long. It was poison for me and everyone around me. And there was no reason for it. When I finally told my Mom that I was upset about those things - big and small - she apologized. I know she was doing the best she could at the time. I still think what she did was wrong. But I forgive her. No amount of telling myself that I shouldn't be angry for what happened so long ago could ever set me free. It wasn't until I accepted the fact that I was angry and truly forgave her that I could be free of the resentment and its effect on my life.

You may be in a situation where you can't talk to the person who has hurt you. Your parents may have passed away. It may be dangerous to talk to an abusive ex. The Cleanse for today recommends that we write a letter detailing all of the pain and hurt we've experienced and in the letter ask our highest selves for release from the prison of resentment. I think that's a great idea for situations where you can't actually confront the person who has hurt you.

If you're not comfortable writing things down or it just doesn't work for you, you can achieve the release another way. Try sitting quietly, with one hand on your heart and one hand on your lower abdomen. Tell yourself your story of hurt and pain as if you were telling a good friend. You can do it out loud or silently, whatever you're comfortable with. I don't think you have to dig deep into the details unless you want to and feel ok doing so. Talk about why you were hurt or disappointed. Don't let your internal critic tell you that your feelings aren't valid! Your internal critic is an idiot - never forget that. Don't judge your feelings - it won't make them go away and it won't help you heal anyway. When you're done with your story, tell yourself "I'm sorry you were so hurt. But it's ok. It's over now. You can let it go. You don't need to carry the hurt anymore." Or you can simply say "I accept that [this thing] happened. I accept and acknowledge my hurt and anger. I now release all resentment, anger and hurt feelings from [this thing]."

Remember that you can forgive someone without telling them (or yourself) that what they did was ok. Forgiveness is the simple act of letting go of the anger and hurt and sadness that is attached to whatever or whoever hurt you. For really big stuff, you may need to do this exercise more than once or twice. There's no magic pill to make these toxic feelings go away - there's only acceptance and release. And however long it takes you to get there is perfectly fine. The important thing is to keep working at it a little at a time.

My Mom recently said to me (right after I signed up for massage school), "You know there's probably lots more jobs for lawyers than there are for massage therapists." That's the kind of thing that would have sent me into a tizzy before. Partly because she was totally and completely wrong. But really because she wasn't supporting me in my attempt to make a happier life for myself. She was being selfish because she liked saying "My daughter, the lawyer" and didn't want to have a daughter who was "just" a massage therapist. She was the one with money issues, not me. And on and on. But none of that came up for me in the moment. Instead, I smiled and hugged her and said "I know you're worried about my financial well-being and I love you for that. But I don't want you to worry. I just want you to be happy for me."

That's when I knew that the resentment was gone for good.

My consciousness is getting cleaner by the day . . .

2010-06-16T07:24:00.001-07:00

So yesterday (or was it the day before?) was Day 2 of the Consciousness Cleanse. Now that I'm not working at a 9 to 5 job, I sometimes find it hard to keep track of what day it is. Especially when the kids are out of school.

My flakiness aside, I did Day 2 but found it surprisingly difficult. Day 2 is the day of self-awareness. We're counseled to "invoke the agent of change called self-awareness" and begin to "digest" some toxic stuff or something. I have to be honest. That's the kind of self-help mumbo jumbo that turns me off. I get it - we can't begin to change unless we know who we are and what we want to change. Right? If you know you want to get to Point B, you need good directions. But the directions will be different depending on whether you're on Point A, Point C or Point Z. And that's where self-awareness comes in.

Day 2 also involves changing our perspective on our lives and the decisions we've made along the way. We're supposed to pretend that our lives are movies that we're watching without judgment. And once we stop judging things to be good or bad we can, presumably, release the emotional attachments to those events that are holding us back. See - I can totally talk the talk. I read this stuff, I can explain it to other people in words that (I think) sound pretty good and I really do understand what these exercises are supposed to accomplish. But it doesn't seem to work for me.

There's really only one thing I regret in my life and that's the fact that I wasted a lot of energy in my late 20s/early 30s worrying about the future. Two things in particular - getting the right job/career and finding a husband - a father for the children I wanted so desperately to have before it was "too late." But I don't judge myself poorly for that. I think. I bought into the cultural party line that was, and is, so powerful. I wasn't alone. I feel kind of sorry for younger me in fact. She missed out on a lot of amazing adventures because she wasn't focused enough in the "now." She made decisions she thought she had to make in order to have the future she thought she wanted. She was somewhat delusional. All the other stuff - the little and big things I would have done differently - it all comes from excessive worrying about the future.

So Day 2, for me, didn't really lead to any epiphanies because I'm already fairly self-aware. I already know what things limit me and I'm working on changing those things. In fact, I think my problem with getting paperwork done stems from living too much in the "now." I'm not thinking enough about the future and the work that needs to be done today in order to have a more peaceful and happy tomorrow. So I guess I just didn't get much out of Day 2. I did make a little more progress on my paperwork monster (a little, tiny bit) and I reminded myself - several times - of the Reiki principles to try to keep myself in a peaceful mood. So it wasn't a complete bust.

On to Day 3 which is the Gift of Release. This is where we take the limiting and toxic beliefs and behaviors and release them so that we can move forward. One of the concepts Ford talks about is that all the negative things that happened to us and all the negative self-talk, release toxins into our psyche. By the way, that's the same principle that Don Miguel Ruiz talks about in Toltec wisdom book (also known as The Four Agreements). (I highly recommend this book, by the way. My friend, the fabulous Judah Kurtz at Judah Buddha, recommends it to all his clients. If I had money, I would be a client but I don't so I just take advantage of his good advice as a friend!)

The Four Agreements resonates more with me because although the book is totally woo woo, the agreements themselves are very down to earth and easy to follow. I won't go into all of them (that's a post for another day) but the one that's relevant to today's Cleanse is "Be impeccable with your word." I think most people read that initially as meaning "don't lie." And it does mean that. But it really means to be very careful about what you say. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Do not speak poorly about yourself (even in your head). Don't gossip or be mean to others. "Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love." I don't know about you but I think that the world would be a much better place if more people did just that.

So I'm already working on being nicer to myself (and everyone around me). I already know that the only thing standing between me and the life I want to live is fear. I have a daily wrestling match with fear. I stopped keeping score awhile ago because you know how much I hate keeping track of details like that. Fear is pretty strong and he's had the best of me for a long time. But the daily wrestling is making me stronger and I'm gaining ground. Haven't found his Achilles heal yet but I'll keep trying. Now I'm going to do some more paperwork stuff - baby steps. And then I'm going to do some yoga to help me feel more peaceful.

Now I'm curious about you. What are your self-limiting beliefs? What can you do today to start getting out of your own way?

Seeking that peaceful, easy feeling

2010-06-13T20:52:00.001-07:00

The other day I mentioned that I "found" Debbie Ford. I haven't read any of her books but some of the articles she's written really resonate with me. She wrote a book called The 21-Day Consciousness Cleanse: A Breakthrough Program for Connecting with Your Soul's Deepest Purpose* (affiliate link). It's not a new book but on her Facebook page yesterday she mentioned that she is going to do the Cleanse over the next 21 days and blog about it. So, because I'm a sucker for self-help programs, I thought I would do it too. Also, my consciousness could use a good cleaning. I don't have the book but it just so happens that she has some exercises from the book on Oprah.com starting with Day 1. I've been kind of bored with the stream of consciousness writing that's been helping me meet the 2500 word challenge and I'm hoping that this will give me more interesting stuff to write about.

Day One is The Gift of Desire. For today, the exercise involved writing down two things - an outer goal and an inner goal. To figure out the outer goal, I needed to choose the area of my life that most needs my attention right now. For the inner goal I needed to choose one feeling that I desire to feel the most this year. Then I write a bunch of stuff about what my life would look like, how it would be different and how it would impact other people if I achieved my outer goal. And I write about how I would act if I was feeling my desired feeling and how that would impact my life and the people in it. They say you're more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down.

I didn't have to think very hard about the outer goal. The area that most needs my attention right now is paperwork organization. Ack! Iguanas! (Iguanas - as defined by the wonderful Havi at Fluent Self - are annoying things that we avoid because we really don't want to do them for whatever reason). Paperwork is a big, fat iguana for me. I've tried to come up with a metaphor for paperwork to help me get around my stuckness and general inability to organize the paper in my life but it hasn't really worked. I'm not even sure where to begin to explain why my paperwork is in such disarray. I could so easily blame my ADD but that's not the entire problem. It's just a convenient excuse. I could also blame my fear that if I were to get my paperwork organized, it would represent such a massive change that it might actually cause a tear in the space/time continuum. Which I'm pretty sure would be bad. I imagine that I could write a really long, boring and whiny book about why I don't like to do paperwork. But I'll spare you. Let's just say I have issues when it comes to paperwork.

When I get a handle on the paper in my life, I won't randomly panic about money because I will know where I am financially. In the old days when I made lots of money, I didn't really worry about it because, well, I made lots of money. And because my ex-husband did enough worrying about money for the both of us. Now I make not a lot of money. I'm about to spend a chunk of the money I don't really have to pay for massage school. And I don't work as much at my part-time job as I could (or should) because I dislike it so much and would much rather do pretty much anything else (except personal paperwork). But it does pay the bills for now so . . . anyway. When I get my paperwork in order, I won't fear that things are falling through the cracks. I won't have to pay late fees or penalties or overdraft charges. (I haven't gotten to that point but it will happen if I don't start fixing this).

When I get a handle on the paper in my life, I will feel like a responsible adult instead of the irresponsible teenager I feel like right now. I swear, I hear my mother's voice in my head telling me to clean up my room. And I react to that imaginary voice the way I reacted to the real voice when I was 14. "Oh, yeah? Make me." I'm real mature like that. I guess I have to remind myself that if I become a responsible adult, it doesn't mean I can't have fun and do goofy stuff and embarrass my kids. Those things aren't mutually exclusive. Organized people have fun all the time. In fact, they probably have more fun because they don't have the voices in their head telling them they should be cleaning their room instead of being out having fun.

When I get a handle on the paper in my life, I will be a better role model for my kids. First of all, I will be taking better care of myself. Second of all, I'll be setting a good example. Kids learn by watching us. They don't listen to what we say, especially when what we say is inconsistent with our actions (do you blame them?) So if I talk to my daughter right now about how important it is for her to keep her school work organized, she would have every right to tell me to stick it. I gotta walk the walk if I want my kids to listen to me.

When I get a handle on the paper in my life, it will make room for more creativity and growth in my business and my personal development. I think I'll feel more confident if I'm more "together" on this issue. I have an accountant, I have a financial planner even. But neither of them can help me until I do the work of getting crap organized. I owe them both information and documents but I've been procrastinating. Because I don't really know where the stuff is and I don't have it organized enough for anyone else to look at anything. It's embarrassing. I'll have better follow-through because I won't be feeling overwhelmed at the thought of finding stuff like my retirement account statements. I'll be able to send my accountant reports at tax time that will make his job easier and might mean that I actually file my returns on time. And because my accounts will be organized, I won't stress out for months on end about getting my tax stuff done. My part of getting the taxes done will already be complete! That's the beauty of being organized. That's what I want. That's what I need.

For my inner goal I decided that what I want to feel more is peace. When I feel peaceful, I am less reactive and more thoughtful. I am grounded and strong. Day to day events don't knock me off my feet. I can bend but I won't break. This will benefit the people around me because I'll be less sensitive. Less likely to bite someones head off. (I don't do that all the time but it happens. On occasion. Sometimes. Ok, more often than it should.) I guess approaching life from a place of peace is kind of a touchstone for me. I will be a more effective healer because I'll be exuding peace. This world needs more peace and so do I.

Of course the Consciousness Cleanse requires more than just thinking about these goals. I'm supposed to choose one action I can do today to move me one step closer to my goal of getting my paperwork organized. That step is to gather all my piles of paper and get it all into two piles - urgent and not-so-urgent. And because some traditional paperwork isn't really on paper anymore (i.e. some of my receipts for my business are electronic), I'll also pull together in an electronic file or write down on a list all the information that I need to organize as well. Pulling everything together doesn't seem so scary. That's one thing I can do today without too much pain.

For my inner goal I need to come up with an action or a thought I can think to support me in feeling more peaceful. One thing that helps me feel peaceful is reciting the Reiki principles. I try to briefly meditate on them once or twice a day but lately I've been skipping it which isn't good for me. Here are the Reiki principles as I recite them (there are several different iterations - this is my personal adaptation): "Just for today I will not worry; I will not be angry; I will be mindful and diligent in my work; I will be grateful for all that I have, all that I am and all that I can be and I will be kind and compassionate to every living creature - including myself." So my action for today is to recite the Reiki principles.

I hope this isn't just another thing I flake out on after a few days. I think it's a good exercise for me to do. There is a lot of junk still hanging around in my consciousness that needs to go. I'm starting school in about a month so getting this going now will help clear the decks and make room for all the information about anatomy, physiology and massage technique that I'll be learning. And will hopefully help me deal more effectively with the stress of balancing school, working part-time for "the man", running my own business and - most importantly - being a mom.

Shower the people you love with love

2010-06-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

This morning I helped serve breakfast at my kids' school to a gathering for the whole middle school to celebrate the graduating eighth graders. I have a seventh grader and I don't know most of the older kids. I wasn't thinking about graduation because I'm just so focused (or not) on the million other things going on in my life right now. One of the other seventh grade moms was talking about how emotional she was feeling even though her daughter wasn't even graduating. I laughed thinking that I'm usually the emotional one and wasn't it funny how I wasn't feeling it.

And then they played a slide show created by two of the eighth graders featuring pictures of themselves and their classmates from the time they were babies until now. I think it was the music that did me in. As soon as the first baby picture came up and they started playing Seasons of Love from Rent, the tears started falling. It wasn't until I started crying that I realized how I was actually feeling. I'm kind of weird that way - the physical reaction comes before I recognize the feeling. Or maybe that's not strange at all. In any case, I was realizing the obvious - it all goes so damn fast. Watching those baby pictures fade into pictures of the young adults they are becoming brought it all home for me. My babies are growing up. And I haven't enjoyed my time with them near as much as I now wish I had. (This would be a whole lot easier to write if the tears didn't keep blurring my vision).

So here's what I wrote on Facebook and Twitter: Cherish the ones you love. Some will be in your life forever and some only for a season. You don't always know whether your time with them will be short or long. So while it lasts enjoy it. Savor it. Make it count.

Then, somehow, following the crumbs of Twitter click-throughs, I ended up at Debbie Ford's site and read this article called "Self-love: The Key to Being an Extraordinary Parent." It made me realize that in order to be the kind of parent I want to be, I need to love myself the way I love my kids. With no reservations or judgment. With a full heart. And if I want them to believe in themselves, I have to believe in myself. If I want them to treat themselves with loving kindness, I have to treat myself that way too. Whether we realize it or not, whether we like it or not, our kids learn far more from what we do than anything we ever say.

In the article, Ford talks about our two internal maps - our Vision Map and our Default Map. Our Vision Map represents the kind of person and parent that we want to be. The Default Map is, well, what we default to when we're tired and stressed. It's what we learned from our parents and the other adults around us but isn't necessarily what we've chosen for ourselves - or what we want to teach our kids. The Default Map is reactionary - it's how we operate when we're not being proactive about our own behavior and habits.

I'm the Queen of reactionary behavior. It's probably because of my well-documented scatterbrain tendency. I am "focusing" on so many things at one time, it's hard to be proactive about things that are not in front of my face (or tabbed on my browser). Being proactive requires time and space for quiet thinking. It requires contemplation and self-knowledge. At the very least, it requires forethought. I am not the Queen of forethought.

I would do anything for my kids. Most parents will tell you the same thing and we all mean it sincerely. We run around like banshees taking them to activities, we scold and cajole them into finishing their homework, we feed and clothe and hug and kiss them goodnight. We do so much for our kids (some of us, too much). But what we often don't do for them, is take care of ourselves. What they tell you on the airplane (during the speech you've heard so many times you don't even listen any more) is true - put your oxygen mask on before you help anyone else with theirs. Take care of yourself and your kids will learn how to care for themselves. Isn't that what we want to accomplish as parents?

I guess I'm trying to make two points here and they're getting kind of muddled in my mushy emotional state:

First of all, cherish your children (and if you don't have your own kids - cherish the people you love young or old). You will not be around forever. They will not be around forever. Make your time together count.

And second, the greatest gift you can give your children is to teach them to love themselves. The only way to do that is to show them by loving yourself. Give yourself time, space and freedom to be proactive about your life. Show them how to live a life of passion and devotion to the people and activities and causes that they love. Be the kind of person you want your children to grow up to be.

"Father and mother, sister and brother if it feels nice, don't think twice. Just shower the people you love with love. Show them the way that you feel. Things are gonna work out fine if you only will." James Taylor - Shower the People

Scatterbrain - treatable illness or personality quirk?

2010-06-08T06:41:00.000-07:00

If you're a regular reader, you know that I was recently diagnosed with ADD. I've been somewhat flaky and scattered my whole life but it wasn't until I was working in a large law firm that was not the right place for me culturally that it became a huge problem for me. Until then I had always managed to keep things together enough to get the job done. I was pretty good at what I did. Also, the fact that I'm a nice person who gets along with pretty much everyone helped a lot when I needed people to cut me slack for my lack of organization.

I was taking medication to "control" the ADD but frankly, it didn't work all that well and it's expensive especially when you include having to pay to see a psychiatrist every month just to have them write the prescription. Once I got my Reiki attunement, I felt that I no longer could tolerate taking medication for my ADD. I needed to figure out if this is really an illness that should be treated or if it's just part of the weirdness that makes me who I am. For better or for worse. If I were to get a full-time office job again, I would need to be medicated in order to function sufficiently. Does that mean there is something wrong with me or does it mean that I probably shouldn't have an office job? For now, I'm going with not getting an office job.

It's all well and good for me to accept myself for who I am. I'm cool with not having an office job. However, I need to pay the bills somehow. With no sugar daddy in sight, I have to do something that people will pay me for. I'm thrilled to be trained as a Reiki practitioner. I love the essential oil products that I'm starting to sell (SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT: In fact, check out my website here if you're interested in buying some fabulous oils and aromatherapy products!) I'm enrolled in massage therapy school that starts next month. So I've been moving - slowly - in the right direction in terms of giving myself a way to make a living that doesn't involve an office job. However, I'm finding - much to my dismay - that if I'm going to be successful as my own boss, I still need some semblance of organization and structure. Currently, my days are rather unstructured and to say my stuff is disorganized would be a HUGE understatement. Clearly, something needs to be done.

Yesterday, a Tweet from @starbucker caught my eye. He linked to this article in the NY Times about the over-use of technology and how it's affecting our brains. Multi-taskers (like me) will argue strenuously that multi-tasking helps them get more done in a day. But studies clearly show that when we try to do more than one thing at a time, our performance suffers. In addition, some of us are simply addicted to the stimulation that our gadgets provide us. The more we try to do with our gadgets, the less we're able to concentrate on getting things done.

This is really embarrassing but I'm going to tell you anyway: right now I have two browser windows open. One of them has 15 tabs up and the other has 14 tabs. I also have two Word documents, a PDF and Outlook open. Oh, and Tweetdeck which supplies me with a pop up every time one of the 163 people I'm following has something to say. God forbid I should be without my constant Twitter chatter. Of the browser tabs, four are Facebook pages, two are email accounts I check regularly and three are Blogger so I can write this post. All the others are basically stuff I started to read but didn't finish or want to read later or opened when I clicked on a Tweet I don't remember clicking. One of the Word documents is the flyer that I need to finish so I have something to hand out at my Reiki presentation thingy on Sunday (if you're in Chicago you should totally stop by!) The PDF is one of the worksheets from Awesome Fear Wrangling. I started reading it the other day and never finished it. I really, really want to finish it. I want to jump into all of it. And the Question the Rules. And the Firestarter stuff that I bought but haven't started. I still have legal documentation for my business the needs to get finished. Plus I have to get my accounting records straight so I can make sure to pay the right amount of taxes. Do you see a pattern here? I actually tried to write this post yesterday but I was too scattered to get it done. Funny, but I'm totally not kidding.

Now I could give you all kinds of excuses. Even though it isn't my custody week, I'm staying with my ex and the kids because he's out of commission with a severe calf muscle injury. I had to get the kids to and from school. I had to make sure my ex got food and stuff. And I spent hours in the car yesterday taking him to Costco to buy fruit for his store. (Yes, I just happen to be a really nice ex wife). And we had to spend some time arguing because that's what we do best. But if I'm being honest with myself (and you), I could get a lot more done if I wasn't so scattered. I check my email wayyyy too many times during the day. I spend too much time on Facebook and Twitter. I read a lot of blogs and other websites (which I really enjoy doing and learn a lot from but still, too much time). But like the guy in the NY Times article, I get distracted by random headlines and Tweets that are of no use to me. I tend to significantly underestimate the amount of time I spend playing games and goofing around on the Internet. And in times of stress, I'm also drawn to computer games when that is the last thing I should be doing.

I am trying to write 2500 words a day which takes a chunk of time but some days I feel like it's a waste if I'm just writing stream of consciousness stuff. If I'm spending that kind of time to write, shouldn't that writing be somewhat useful? Every once in awhile stream of consciousness is good because it can unveil thoughts and feelings that were otherwise kind of hidden. But usually it's just crap. Because part of my business is online (or at least I want to be able to make some money online), I need to write and be connected through social media. And I like doing that. So some balance is necessary between just writing anything to get 2500 words so I can say I did it and actually writing something that's worth publishing. As important as the online writing and connecting is, there are still "real world" things that need to get done and the online stuff can't always take precedence. (Ok, just got distracted by an email that popped up that I didn't need to read right now but I did because "Ooooh, look - shiny things!")

After all this, I would love to say I have the answer for how to keep myself from getting distracted from the task at hand. I don't. But I guess I'm hoping that by recognizing it, and writing about it, I've acknowledged that it's an issue. And I can start to figure out what I need to do - short of medicating myself again - to bring a little more focus and organization into my days without crushing my very fragile creative spirit. I do have some ideas of things to try which have worked with varying degrees of success in the past. To give myself a little structure for this blog for the next week or so, I'm going to try a few things and let you know how they work.

What about you? Do you ever have trouble focusing? What do you do to help get things done when you're feeling scattered and pulled in a thousand directions? I'd love to hear your strategies and your advice!

Grounding Color Chakra meditation

2010-06-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

This is a departure from my usual type of post but I've been working with some meditations lately and really wanted to share one with my readers. This one is designed to help you feel more grounded and replenish your energy. So if this kind of thing interests you, read on!

I want to help other people heal their pain, learn to care for themselves using natural methods and just generally be happy and healthy. That's my passion and what I hope to be my life's work. Most of the time I feel more energized after I work with someone. But sometimes, if I'm not careful, my own energy stores get depleted. This tends to happen when I'm working more with family and close friends. I'm learning that this is something that happens to healers so I'm learning how to protect my own energy.

In addition to protecting my energy, I'm also learning how to replenish it. This is something that I think everyone could benefit from. Most people lead fairly busy lives doing lots of things that can drain energy. The easiest way to replenish energy is to get plenty of good sleep and eat well. But most of us don't do as well as we should in either category. And even if we do get enough sleep and eat a healthy diet, we can still feel like our energy is low if we aren't engaging in activities that energize us. As much as I love watching television, and I'll swear to you how much it relaxes me, I know that it does nothing to replenish my energy and may in fact do the exact opposite.

Meditation is a great way to build up energy. But a lot of people - myself included - find it difficult to do. For some of us, it's hard to sit still for long periods of time. Others feel uncomfortable sitting quietly or they don't know what to do and feel bad because they think they're doing it wrong. I'm finding that there are as many styles of meditation as there are human beings who meditate. There is no one right way - there's only a right way for you at any given moment. And what works one day, might not work another day. So I recommend to people that they try meditating different ways and find a few that work for them.

This meditation can be as long or as short as you want it to be (but I think it would take at least five minutes to really go through each step). You just need to have a place to sit comfortably. It doesn't even need to be quiet in the room - you can have music on or you can be sitting in Starbucks. The only requirement is that you be able to concentrate on the meditation. Sometimes it's easier for me to concentrate on the meditation if there is music playing - it distracts my ADD brain just enough that it lets me sit still. But other people will need a totally silent room. Also, this meditation requires visualization. The better you are at visualizing things, the more effective it will be. So really try to picture these things as best you can.

Finally, not only is it ok to have a sense of humor while you're doing this, a sense of humor is required. If this isn't fun or at least pleasant, it won't do much good. If I tell you to picture a golden cord and you'd rather picture a candy cane or an oak tree, then do that. This may feel strange at first. It may feel totally "woo woo" and out there. But give it a try anyway. If you really put yourself into it and have fun with it, I guarantee you will feel more energized when you finish.

Ok, enough introduction - here's the meditation:

Sit comfortably. If you're sitting in a chair, put your feet flat on the ground. Take a few slow, deep breaths. Keep breathing calmly (but not super deep) throughout.
Imagine yourself in a clear bubble that extends about three feet all around you. Imagine that the bubble is attached to the center of the Earth with a golden cord. Really try to picture the cord. It is thick and solid and strong.
Now you're going to start filling the bubble with various colors, starting with crisp, clear white. Imagine that the color comes up the cord and into the bubble. Once the bubble is filled, feel the color infusing into your body. When you feel ready, move on to the next color. The colors are in the order of the rainbow (remember ROY G BIV?). Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. You don't really need both indigo and violet, you can just pick your favorite shade of purple and go with it.
Pick your favorite shade of each color - the more vibrant the better. It sometimes helps to picture a "thing" to represent the color for you. So for red you can picture rose petals or the very last rays of sunset on the beach or your favorite red dress. I shouldn't be admitting this but for orange I picture a tequila sunrise drink. I love that color orange!
Take as much or as little time with each color as you feel like. When you're done with indigo/violet, finish with bright golden sunlight energy.
Imagine a golden sun above you and fill the bubble with as much of that light as you can. Breathe it into your body for as long as you want. When you're ready, get up and get on with your day!

That's it. Easy. You should feel relaxed but energized when you're done. Remember, there is no way to do this wrong. You may need to play around with it a little to make it more effective but that's the fun part.

Let me know if you try this and how it works for you. Also let me know if you're having any kind of trouble with it - maybe I can help!

Promises, promises

2010-06-01T15:41:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I read this post at Fierce and Mighty. In it, Kevin talked about being upset with himself for not being as organized as he felt he should have been and missing out on something as a consequence. True to my nature, my knee-jerk reaction was to tell him he was being too hard on himself and I said as much in the comments. But then I thought about it last night and I realized that my reaction had very little to do with him and everything to do with me.

There are times when I am clearly too hard on myself - fatalistic, even. It goes something like this - "I forgot to pay that bill on time and I have to pay a late fee. I am the biggest flake in the entire universe and I'll never be good at anything. Ever." In other words, I engage in a total waste of mental energy that leads me nowhere. Having been in an emotionally abusive marriage, it's not surprising that I would get to that place sometimes. But I'm not making excuses. I'm an adult and I know how silly and over-dramatic it is to say those kinds of things to myself.

But more often, I cut myself a hell of a lot of slack. When I flake out on something, I tell myself it's ok. Tomorrow is another day. You'll do better next time. Blah, blah, blah. It's true that I've been through some hard times over the past couple of years. And there were times when - for the sake of my mental health - it was necessary to cut myself slack. But I'm at the point now where it's time to buck up a little (or a lot). It's time for me to really and truly stop thinking (and acting) like a victim of my circumstances and get a move on.

As I've written about recently, I'm participating in The Complete Flake's 2500 word challenge. I've committed to write 2500 words a day, every day, for at least a month. Yesterday was the seventh day for me and I hadn't written anything as of 11:30 pm. And I was falling-asleep-at-the-computer exhausted. So I started telling myself it was ok to skip it. It had been a long day. The girls had friends over early in the day and we went to the movies. Then I spent the afternoon and evening at a Memorial Day party at my Dad's. By the time I got the girls into bed, it was very late. No one would have blamed me if I didn't write my 2500 words. The other challengers would have been very supportive. It would have been so easy to slack off and just not do it. That's what I've done a lot of times in my life. In a lot of different scenarios. But last night I decided it was time to do something different.

Living with integrity involves keeping the promises we make - not just to others but to ourselves. It's important that we be mindful when making promises so that we're not over-burdening ourselves or doing things that aren't in line with our values or goals. But once we make a promise, we need to keep it - even when (maybe especially when) it's difficult or inconvenient to do so. I'm not saying that there aren't times when keeping a promise is impossible or is so difficult or inconvenient that it might as well be impossible. And I'm not suggesting that we beat ourselves mercilessly if we fail to keep a promise. But what I'm saying is that we (I) should be as mindful about breaking promises as we should be about making them.

All this is to say that I wrote 2500 words last night. It was complete and utter crap - mostly things like "I am never going to be able to write 2500 words tonight because I am falling asleep" and "why the hell didn't I start this writing crap earlier so I wouldn't be doing this in the middle of the freaking night." So it wasn't great literature or even great blog post material. The point was that I made a promise to myself and I kept it. And I feel pretty good about that. (Oh, and you can bet your sweet boopie that every one of the 889 words I've written here will count towards my 2500 words for tonight.)

What I'm hoping is that I'll be able to apply this in other situations. I'd like to be eating better but sometimes when I get tired and cranky, I turn to Hint of Lime Tostitos for comfort (those things are awesome, by the way) instead of doing something healthy. Like getting enough sleep. Or taking a walk. All that means is that there are times (when I'm tired and cranky) that keeping my promise to myself (eating better) becomes hard and inconvenient. If I can write 2500 words when I'm exhausted simply because I promised that I would, then I can turn away from the chips for the same reason. Now, if I can apply this to getting my files organized, I will officially be in love with myself.

What about you? What promises have you made yourself and how are you about keeping them? Do tell.

How my devil and my angel make me crazy and what I'm doing about it

2010-05-29T16:45:00.000-07:00

I've been keeping up with the 2500 word per day challenge and I have to say, some weird stuff seems to be coming out as I pour out enough words to get to the daily goal. I write as if I'm journaling so it's mostly stream of consciousness with a little bit of editing.

Yesterday I had a whole conversation with myself about my life. I would post it but it's really embarrassing. But one of the things I discussed with myself is the fact that I want to be a fun person. And to be a fun person, I have to do fun things. I'm usually up for stuff if someone else makes the plans but that's kind of a problem now that I'm divorced from the person who used to make the fun plans. So I reminded myself that if I want something in my life, I'm responsible for figuring out how to make it happen. So thanks to myself (with a little nudging from a friend), I rented a guitar today. I have two months to try it out and decide if I want to continue learning. At that point I'll either buy a guitar or move on to my next hobby (or back to one of the million hobbies I've already started).

Today I started writing about why I sometimes feel like I have multiple personalities. For a long time, I've felt that I have a devil who hangs out on my left shoulder and an angel who hangs out on my right shoulder. The devil isn't evil – just mischievous. When I think back on the times I've gotten myself in trouble, I can usually trace it back to something he said or suggested. He’s the one that dares me to do stuff that my angel thinks is a bad idea. He’s the one that says that everything will be okay while the angel worries about the consequences. Usually I listen to the angel. But not always. Sometimes the devil can convince the angel that something she doesn't want is okay. And sometimes I just tell them to shut up so I can figure out what’s right.

The problem with the devil is that he doesn't really think about other people or the consequences of various things. He thinks of stuff that would be fun or exciting. He wants adventure. But he forgets that I’m a mom. He forgets that I have a job. He likes music and reading and eating and drinking. He likes hanging out with friends and watching movies and tv. He likes being lazy, lazy, lazy. He hates paperwork. He hates cleaning. He hates order and efficiency. Loves chaos and mayhem. He likes to dance like a madman. He’s the one that wants the tattoo.

My angel thinks about other people constantly. She’s the responsible one who pays the bills. And tries hard to get the kids to school on time. She likes it when things are organized and orderly. She completely freaks out when I don’t keep my promises but she’s the one who gets me to over-promise in the first place. Because she wants everyone to love me. She wants me to be a good girl who never lets anyone down. She doesn't want me getting into trouble. Or making trouble. She thinks a tattoo is a horrible idea because some people might not like it. Some people might think it’s silly or weird. People might think I’m not acting my age. Like I said, she wants everyone to love me. Or at least like me. She wants to fit in so badly. My devil doesn't give a rat's ass about that crap.

It's no wonder I feel nuts. Sometimes they yell at each other so loud I can't hear myself think. And sometimes they refuse to speak at all and I feel lost. Lately I've been listening to my devil more often. First of all, he's a lot more fun. But also I'm kind of pissed at my angel because she sort of fucked up my life. If I hadn't listened to her I probably would have gotten out of my marriage sooner. Then again, maybe this is all just a neat trick so that I don't have to take responsibility for my own decisions.

One of the problems is that the devil and the angel each have their own agendas. They aren't always thinking about what's in my long-term best interest. If I listen to one or the other of them too much, my life gets out of balance and I get off track. I think the key for me is to develop a set of values - touchstones - that I can refer to whenever I'm feeling stuck about a decision. The devil and the angel can debate all they want. I can feel better about whatever decision I make if it stands up against my touchstone values.

It isn't that I don't have any values. I do. But I've been so ungrounded (for lack of a better word) for so long that I've lost touch with the core of who I am and who I want to be. When I'm not grounded, I'm almost at the mercy of whoever talks loudest - whether it's my angel, my devil, my kids, my boss or my ex-husband. For years I felt like I was standing chest deep in the ocean, struggling to keep my footing. I was constantly buffeted by the waves with the tide pulling at me. At my lowest, I thought about giving in and floating away - or worse. When I felt strong, I would tread water, fighting to stay in what I hoped was the right spot. I finally feel like I'm on solid ground but still somewhat subject to the wind and shifting sands.

As I was thinking about this, I remembered why I started reading one of my new favorite blogs - Fierce and Mighty. It was this post that hooked me. Specifically, it was this:

"I am the sort of person who believes that in order to have a successful and fulfilling life, it’s important to have a set of principles on which to ground yourself. I think that’s a lot of what helped me through some of my rougher times – that foundation of knowing who I was and who I wanted to be.

I want to be the guy who treats people the way I want to be treated… even if that other person is a douchebag. I want to live with honor. I want to live with integrity. I want to live with determination. I want to never be afraid to risk getting my heart broken because if I hold back, I’ll never get the chance at experiencing great love. I want to live in balance (this one is hard for me). I want to never forget how much of this life is a gift and I should never, ever, EVER take that for granted… because I've seen how life can jump up and kick some amazing people in the teeth without any provocation or sense of it being deserved. Anyone can suffer that fate… so embrace the good and the opportunities you see now."

I'm always impressed with people who know who they are. And knowing your own core values is essential to knowing who you really are. So what are my touchstones? I haven't quite figured that out yet. (I thought about waiting to publish this post until I figured it all out. But that would certainly mean that this post would never get published. And I'd probably stop thinking about my touchstones all together and go back to treading water).

It would be easy for me to just adopt Fierce and Mighty's values as my own - they're great. They sound good and seem like values I "should" live by. But that would be cheating. And really won't get me on solid ground because they won't be mine really. I'll always know that they're his so I'll wonder if I'm applying them right or something. So I'll have to think about it for awhile. Sit in Remembrance and see what my heart says. I know that I'll come up with a few things eventually. And I'll be on my way to solid ground in no time.

What are your Touchstone values? Please share - I could use some ideas!

On my own

2010-05-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

As I was writing my 2500 words today, I was struck by the realization that I am afraid of being alone. Not scared of the dark afraid. Not afraid to go to the movies or have dinner by myself. Afraid of spending the rest of my life without someone of the opposite sex to share it with. My divorce is almost final and then I'll be officially on my own. I wanted the divorce so it's not that I want my ex back or anything. And I thought I'd be psyched to be on my own and have some of the freedom I was lacking. Which is why I was surprised by that realization.

I thought something deeper was going on and wanted to figure out where the fear was coming from so I sat in Remembrance on it. Remembrance is a wonderful Sufi meditation practice of connecting with your heart which is taught by Mark Silver. After just a short time in Remembrance, I had some interesting revelations.

The first thought that popped into my head was "Being alone means death." That might seem a bit over-dramatic unless you look at it from an ancient human DNA standpoint. When humans were living in the wilderness, being exiled or separated from the tribe meant certain death from starvation or hungry wild animals. Women needed a provider to take care of them and their children. Even though it's not at all applicable to me in this life, it's probably something that comes from my 'lizard brain' that doesn't want to be ignored. (The lizard brain is the part of our brains that has been with us since the beginning of our evolution as a species and it's most concerned with survival. It's the part of our brains that makes snap judgments about the safety of people and situations and helps keep us safe from a hungry tiger. Which is generally not relevant to life on the streets of Chicago. But you never know, I suppose.)

I thought about how the need to be part of a "tribe" might apply, even if tangentially, to my life today and it occurred to me that most people have an innate drive to connect with other people. It might be the lizard brain tribal inclusion drive. Or it might be more emotionally-based rather than survival-based. I know that I have a strong need for emotional connection and I don't think I'm alone. The growth of social media bears that out. I know there are a lot of people that use Twitter and Facebook and the like to make money but far more people are using them to connect to other people in some deeper way. For some, online relationships are a poor substitute for the "real thing." But some of my online relationships have been deeper, more interesting and more life-changing than many off-line relationships. That said, romantic relationships that are solely online leave something to be desired. (And let's leave it at that, shall we?)

So I went deeper into Remembrance and realized that I've been avoiding some things related to my being on my own. As part of my divorce, we need to sell our condo and get our own apartments. We're separated but we share the condo and a one-bedroom apartment nearby. Whoever has custody for the week lives with the kids in the condo and the other lives in the apartment. And then we switch. (It's called "nesting" which is short for "something done by parents who can't live with each other but can't bear to make their children move"). It's been a great transition for the kids but frankly it's been a royal pain in the ass for me. I lug all my business and personal stuff back and forth every week. Despite the difficulty, I've been avoiding doing some things that will help us get our condo on the market and I haven't even started to look for my own apartment. So I asked my heart what was up with that. And then I did the math. I've lived with my husband for seventeen years. That's almost half my life. Before that, I was on my own for only a few years because before that I lived at home or with roommates or in a sorority or a dorm. So in my entire life, I only lived alone for a few years. That's it. Now I'll be responsible for my own housing. Picking the right place, decorating it, taking care of it. For some people that's probably exciting. I thought it would be exciting for me, too but it's not. It's honestly terrifying. But until I really sat with my procrastination and anxiety and asked my heart about it, I had no idea what was going on. (You probably can't imagine what a wimp I feel like right now. I mean, what is the big deal? Eighteen year olds barely out of high school are able to get themselves into apartments. What the hell is up with me?).

I wish I could say that in all this I came up with some solutions to getting past my fear that I could share with you. But I didn't. Not yet, anyway. As with my habit of over-apologizing, knowing is half the battle. Now that I know about my fear and know that at least some of it comes from my reactionary, fraidy-pants lizard brain, maybe I can manage it better and move forward. I've found that once I accept the fact that I'm afraid about something, the fear isn't as intense anymore. Our fear is there to protect us so if we don't pay attention to it, our fear will get more and more intense until we do pay attention.

So, Fear, I hear you. I get that you're afraid I'll die if I'm all alone (and I promise I'm not laughing at that feeling even though you have to admit it's kind of funny). And I understand that you're afraid I won't be able to handle all the things that go into living alone - what with my ADD and bad habit of avoiding paperwork and other boring yet important things. But I promise you I'll be ok. Really I will. It would be fantastic if you could go over and talk to Procrastination about all this and maybe the two of you could give me a break for a little while so I can get some stuff done. Maybe you two can take a vacation somewhere nice? Stay as long as you like. Alrighty then. Are we cool? Cool. Glad we had this talk.

I love a good challenge

2010-05-26T20:27:00.001-07:00

Here's a secret about me - I have a really hard time not taking a dare. It probably won't come as a surprise to anyone why I've kept that close to the vest. Maybe someday I'll write about the trouble that particular personality quirk has gotten me into. A similar and somewhat less troublesome quirk of mine is that I love a challenge. So when LaVonne over at The Complete Flake tossed out a challenge to me the other day, I took it.

I was whining about not writing as much as I wanted to and she told me to write 2500 words a day. It had worked for her in the past so I figured it was worth a shot. So I did it last night and managed to finish a post I had wanted to write for a few days. When I told her that I had taken her challenge, she was inspired to take her own challenge. So tonight we were twittering about it and she decided to issue her challenge to all her readers - write 2500 words a day. About anything. About nothing. About whatever comes to mind. Trick your inner perfectionist into letting you write without editing. I've done it two days in a row and so far so good. (I already did my 2500 words tonight and this post is IN ADDITION. I am a writing rock star right now.)

If you want to jump start your writing or take it to a higher level, feel free to join us. Comment here or over at Complete Flake or tweet using #2500 and let us know you're in. And then tell us how it's going. I can't wait to see what happens!

No apologies, no excuses

2010-05-23T20:07:00.000-07:00

The past two weekends I've had unusual conversations with near strangers. Two different people (both happened to be younger men which may or may not be relevant) told me that I should stop apologizing for myself so much. Hmmm. I kind of knew I had this problem - it's been mentioned before. But instead of getting better it has apparently gotten worse because it's now obvious enough that people who have just met me think it's worth mentioning. Hmmm again. (I have to say that both of these guys were very sweet and truly were trying to help me. They weren't being mean or anything and I totally appreciate their willingness to be honest with me about their perceptions.)

I could give you a bunch of reasons why I apologize a lot. But it would really sound like I’m making excuses. And I would be, sort of. I first started over-apologizing because I felt like I had no choice. Now that I actually have a choice, why am I still doing it? Habit. It’s a really bad habit. But it must also be doing something for me or I would stop at this point. I mean, it’s embarrassing to have people tell me to stop it. I know that it’s self-defeating and I think that's exactly the "benefit" I get from it.

If I put myself out there and fail, that would hurt. But if I only kind of, sort of put myself out there but tell people upfront how lame I am anyway and THEN I fail, it won’t hurt as much. Because I've already prepared myself to fail. If I make excuses upfront, I also don't have to worry that people think I'm full of myself. I don't want people to think that I think that I'm better than I really am. I want to make people feel comfortable with me. I don't want people to feel threatened by me. I've been told that I can be . . . overwhelming (mostly by men which may or may not be relevant). (And just where do I get off trying to control how other people feel about me. Hmmm yet again. But I think that's something to consider in another post.)

One of the worst things about this habit is that if I do happen to succeed even though I wasn't doing my best, then I don’t give myself any credit for succeeding. I chalk it up to being lucky. So even if I win, I lose. And that sucks.

Now that I know why I do it, how do I stop? I've taken the first step – recognized and accepted that I have a problem. Like any other bad habit, it will take some amount of willpower to stop. The problem is that I've never been known for my willpower. Basically, I don’t like being told I can’t do something – even if that something is a self-defeating behavior. I hate when people say this but seriously, I need to put on my big girl pants and get over it. It’s one thing to rebel against my parents and a controlling husband. But to rebel against myself with something that’s in my own best interest? Ridiculous already.

So . . .
Step one: Recognize the problem. (Check.)
Step two: Grow up. Stop apologizing and stop making excuses. (Working on it.)
Step three: Be kind to myself when I fall off the no apologies/no excuses wagon. (That I think I can do.)

Are you holding yourself back in some way? What do you get out of holding yourself back? What do you do to get out of your own way? I'm wide open to suggestions!

(By the way, I want to mention that LaVonne Ellis over at The Complete Flake helped me get this post done without really meaning to. First she wrote an awesome post about how we resist going for our dreams. And then she told me that if I want to write, I really should try writing at least 2500 words every day. So I started today (2513 words!) and this post was born as part of that. Thanks LaVonne!)

Wherein I convince myself that I am not a snake oil salesman even if I'm afraid my Not Right People might think I am

2010-05-20T11:29:00.001-07:00

I feel like I've been totally unproductive today when, in fact, I've actually been fairly productive. I didn't do the things I promised myself that I would do (like work that I actually get paid real money to do right now and cleaning the house but *yuck* who likes to do that?) and that's why I feel like I wasn't productive at all. What I did do is this. I wrote an article (it's short and it's on Facebook but I can still call it an article, right?) about essential oils and why I like them and want to sell them to all my friends. (I would totally give them away to my friends but I'm not Warren Buffett or Steve Jobs so I have to make a living and that's ok, right? Right.)

And there's the real problem. The fact that I felt like I even had to ask the question of whether it's ok to make money selling essential oils to people. I am so not a "salesperson." When I even think about that term, that job, it brings up all kinds of icky feelings. And selling essential oils . . . does the term "snake oil salesman" come to mind? Of course it does. Which makes the icky feelings much worse.

I really believe in the power of essential oils to make us happier and healthier. I use them myself and although I'm pretty new to all this, I can already feel the benefits. I know (kind of like spiritual knowing and not book-knowledge, hard science knowing) that lots of people would be healthier and happier if they used more natural products and less chemical-laden crap. I have a burning desire to help people get there. But translating that burning desire into getting myself to do stuff that would actually sell products to people is really, really hard because of the aforementioned "snake oil salesman" icky feeling.

This is all tied into some of my issues with charging for my services as a healer. I think about people like Mother Teresa dedicating her life to healing the sick without getting paid. And even though I'm certainly no saint, I start to feel bad about charging for something that everyone should have access to. I know that's being way too hard on myself. There's nothing wrong with getting paid for my services. I'll be donating my time and money to charity as I see fit and can afford. That's what most people do. Why is it that I think it's ok for everyone else but not for me?

It was hard for me to write that Facebook article today. It took a lot longer than it might seem given the lack of length and wordiness. It was mainly because my first couple of drafts felt too salesy. And I just couldn't hit the Publish button. So I took a break, goofed around and came back to it. I made it, hopefully, more educational and more personal. Instead of having the link to my website at the top of the article, I put it at the end. Maybe it seems a bit defensive that way - as if I'm embarrassed about asking people to check out the website. Which I am, a little. But I want people to know that I'm not just pushing a product to make a buck. I believe in the product. I believe in the company that makes the product. I want to talk to people about a problem they might have (in this case, the over use of anti-bacterial soaps) and how my product can help them solve that problem. When I think about it that way, I don't feel so icky about it.

I think the bottom line here is that I need to get my message out to my Right People. Those people won't think I'm a snake oil salesman. My Right People are interested in better health for themselves and the planet. My Right People are ok with spending a little more money to get something that is pure, natural and healthy. My Right People understand the benefits of Reiki and other forms of energy healing. And they want to support me in my little business because they think what I'm doing is cool. So here's the thing - I'm asking the universe to help me find those Right People. I'll put myself out there which is scary and hard. But I'm doing it because I know that my Right People are out there somewhere and if I don't put myself and my message out in the world, they'll never find me. And that would be far worse than having a few people -my Not Right People - think I'm an icky snake oil salesman.

Oh, the drama . . .

2010-05-18T06:52:00.001-07:00

There was much drama in my house this morning. I have a 12 year old daughter so drama is par for the course. But today's drama was particularly dramatic with lots of tears and screaming on both our parts. I could just dismiss it as typical mother/pre-teen daughter crap and go on about my business but then I would miss whatever lesson is in this for me. For both of us.

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you know that I have ADD. It's not too severe - I managed to get along pretty well for over 40 years of my life before my diagnosis - but it does affect me. Mainly I'm not very detail-oriented. I tend to be a bit flaky, disorganized and somewhat forgetful. I was taking Adderall but recently stopped as part of my physical "spring cleaning." I didn't think the Adderall helped all that much and I don't love the idea of taking amphetamines regularly. (I also don't love spending thousands of dollars a year on a psychiatrist who does nothing but prescribe said amphetamines. Literally. It's a racket.) This morning's drama has me rethinking that decision.

To fully understand this morning's events, you need a little background on my soon-to-be-ended marriage. As I've written about before, my ex was abusive emotionally and physically. He has very high expectations of those around him (and, to be fair, of himself as well). It is his strongly held belief that when people make mistakes, they should apologize. That is reasonable and I'm all for that - the world would be a better place if people were better able to give a good apology. However, in our house I think it was taken too far. Every little mistake was pointed out - not always nicely - and apologies were demanded. And if the apology wasn't up to snuff, there was much yelling and screaming and then demands for apologies for the mistake of not giving a good apology. I now apologize so much that near strangers tell me to stop it. (Seriously - I was in Vegas for a wedding last weekend and a friend of the groom who had known me for one day gave me a - very nice - lecture about how I need to stop apologizing so much.) Of course my girls grew up in this house so they learned - very early - about the "need" for apologies.

Now that my ex is out of the picture, I guess I hoped that my girls and I could become a kinder, gentler family. But my kids - especially the 12 year old - learned a lot from their dad. The 12 year old thinks that every mistake should be pointed out and accounted for. She gets upset when I let her little sister get away with things she thinks are wrong. She begs me to call her on things she does even though I tell her that I think it's healthier to learn to let certain things go. Pick your battles and all that. Her response is to tell me that I'm coddling her (because I let her "get away" with stuff) or that I'm requiring her to "eat her anger" (because I tell her that it isn't worth it to fight over stupid stuff).

So this all collided this morning when I tried to help her make their school lunches. The oldest usually makes the lunches (because the youngest has a hard time getting out of bed). Every day they bring baggies of snap peas and carrots for lunch. She's told me in the past how many peas and carrots to put in the baggies. But she never gave me specifics, she just showed me the baggies and said "about this much." So this morning I put what I thought was a reasonable amount of peas and carrots in the strainer and rinsed them. When she came into the kitchen, she looked at it and said (in that snotty way that only 12 year old girls can do) "Mom, there's too many carrots and not enough snap peas!" I snapped back at her with some totally immature retort about not being perfect. Somehow - and I really wish I understood how - this exchange turned into a huge blowout that had nothing to do with peas and carrots.

She was angry because I didn't immediately apologize for making the mistake of not rinsing the "right" amount of vegetables. (I use the quotes because it's a subjective thing, there really isn't a right or wrong here.) She felt that it was a mistake because she had told me before how much to use and I still got it wrong. She made it clear that she wasn't angry that I made the mistake, she was angry that I didn't apologize for making the mistake.

I was angry because she was rude to me in the way she pointed out the mistake. I was angry because it's such a small thing that it didn't even need to be pointed out. I was angry because she expected me to be able to remember a detail like that. And I feel guilty that I can't remember stupid details like that. Because if I was a good mom, wouldn't I know exactly how many fucking peas and carrots my kids like to bring to school? Especially if they've told me how many they like? (If I took the Adderall, would I remember? Maybe. Should I take expensive and possibly toxic pharmaceuticals to fix something that I kind of think isn't that big a problem but is apparently a problem for my kids? Maybe. I honestly don't know.)

Part of my anger comes from the fact that she won't even consider the possibility that my view on the issue of apologies is as valid as her father's. She insists that I expect her to "eat" her anger which couldn't be farther from the truth. I am trying to teach her that she doesn't need to be so angry. And that's a really hard lesson to teach. Especially to a child who grew up in an angry home. I see this as an issue of tolerance and inner peace. She sees it as an issue of standing up for yourself and making people accountable for their actions.

I was hoping that by writing this I would come to some sort of conclusion about how to handle the situation. I often have epiphanies by the end of a blog post. But this time, I'm not so lucky. I have no idea what the right answer is. Actually, I do - the right answer is that there is no right answer. We're both right. We're both wrong. Pretty zen, huh? But how the hell am I going to fix an argument with a 12 year old without some sort of bottom line? I guess that's the lesson for us both - we need to learn to live together and be tolerant of our differences. I have to let her be angry when I make mistakes but I don't have to let her be rude. And she'll need to accept that she and I have a different world view here. Maybe if I practice, a little more often, the tolerance and inner peace that I preach, she'll learn by example. And even if she doesn't, at least I'll be a little more peaceful about it.

Learning to fly the plane while it's in the air (or practicing what Johnny & Lee preach)

2010-05-11T10:34:00.000-07:00

This whole starting my own business thing is freaking me out a little. More than a little. I'm not much of a risk taker by nature. I suck at downhill skiing because I stay on the baby hills. I hate roller coasters. I've never been camping. When I go on vacation, I tend to visit places that have spas. I admit it, I like comfort. I like safety. It makes me feel . . . comfortable and safe. But starting a business - not comfortable or safe. And even though I know deep down that this is the right thing, that this is good for me, I'm still freaking the hell out.

Last month I organized the corporate entity for my company. Got my level 2 Reiki certification. Got my domain name and all that blah, blah, blah (but no website yet . . .). And then. Nothing much. I've been procrastinating. Finding other things to do. Not getting all my documents done. Not moving forward. Even my metaphor of assembling my trampoline wasn't working for me.

Some of the other things I found to do involved spending money on a few programs that some of my readers will be familiar with (so far, money well spent). First is Danielle LaPorte's FireStarter series which just came today (yay!) so I don't have enough experience with it to talk about it . . .yet. But then I signed up for Johnny Truant and Lee Stranahan's Punk Rock Question the Rules series. (If you're so inclined, you can click on this affiliate link right HERE and I'll get a little somethin' somethin' if you buy it but you can also buy it from Johnny and Lee directly or not at all if it's not your thing. So far it kicks ass.) I started listening to it yesterday and today I applied the first lesson I learned from them. It's ok to learn to fly the plane when it's already in the air. Scary? Yes.

There are times when I feel perfectly comfortable flying by the seat of my pants. (What's with all the flying metaphors today?) In law school I deliberately did NOT read the cases for one elective class the entire time just so I could see if I could wing it in class and still participate intelligently (ok, sometimes I skimmed them but never read them all the way through or took notes or anything). Damn if I didn't get an A in that class. What did that teach me? That I'm pretty good at bullshit. I can kind of make stuff up and make it sound good as long as I have a decent grounding in the basics. But in that case, I didn't really care all that much what the outcome was. It was an elective. It was my last semester and I already had a job waiting. I knew I'd be ok so it wasn't as big a risk as it sounds. Also, it was fun.

But now the stakes are higher. I have two kids I need to support. My chances of getting another job as a lawyer aren't real high (partly because I really, really don't want to do it anymore). I don't have a big pile of money saved up (most of it went to divorce lawyers and living expenses for a year without a job). There's not much of a safety net here. I care a lot about the outcome - as much as I'm trying to let go and trust in the universe, I want things to work out well.

So I've been a bit stuck until yesterday. A week or so ago I had gone to an Argo Tea near my apartment and tossed my business card into a container trying to win something free. Then I forgot about it. So yesterday I get an email from the manager telling me I didn't win the free whatever. BUT she told me that Argo Tea partners with other businesses in the community that share the same goals of wellness and sustainability (who knew?) and she asked if I would like to come over there one day and speak to their guests about Reiki. Oh.my.god. Does the universe deliver, or what? So my first thought is Yay! Rapidly followed by Shit! I don't have brochures or anything prepared for a presentation! My website isn't up yet even though it's already on my business cards! I'm so unprofessional! I haven't had any paying clients yet, who will take me seriously! SHIT! Then I took a deep breath and remembered: Sometimes you have to learn to fly the plane while it's in the air. And that's ok.

Today I got hosting for my website and then pulled together something that is pretty crappy but is at least something better than random ads for GoDaddy products. You can look at it here. If you want to. But remember that I know it sucks and don't be too hard on me because I'm not a web designer and I have no idea what I'm doing. So I was TERRIFIED to push the Publish button because it's not exactly what I want. But it's what I can do right now and I need to just keep moving forward and it will eventually be a beautiful website with pictures and links and information and a blog and hopefully you will all LOVE it and send it linky love. But for now, it's just a baby website. That needed to be published because I need to learn to be scared shitless but do it anyway. Learning to fly the plane while it's in the air allows you to get started without waiting until every little detail is in place. Because if I waited for that, I would never get anything done with this business.

The other day my daughter brought home a quiz where she had gotten one multiple choice question wrong. It was a vocab word and she didn't know what it meant so she didn't put anything down. When I asked her why she didn't guess, she said she had no idea what the answer was so she didn't feel right guessing. I explained to her that with 4 possible answers, she had a 25% chance of getting it right if she guessed but 0% chance of getting it right by putting nothing. I know it isn't a perfect analogy but it kind of applies to what's going on with me. So my first website isn't the perfect website. But it's there and it looks a heck of a lot better than the GoDaddy ads with half naked women that were there before. My first presentation won't be perfect either and that's ok. I'll learn from it and get better next time. But if I don't try, if I don't put myself out there, I have 0% chance of being successful. And I don't like those odds.

Still connected to your ex?

2010-05-01T13:26:00.000-07:00

I happened to notice my Twitter description the other day and was pleasantly surprised. I hadn't looked at it in a long time - I wrote it about a year ago on a whim. It says: Turning life crises into growth and opportunities for positive change. When I wrote it, I was talking about myself. I was trying to turn my own crises into something good - still am. What struck me, though, is how much it sounds like an "elevator speech". That's the short description of what you do that you have prepared for times when you only have an elevator ride's worth of time to tell someone what you do. A friend has been telling me for weeks that I need an elevator speech. I didn't realize that I already have one in my Twitter description.

You might wonder what this has to do with Reiki healing and massage therapy which is what I do (now). Short answer: Not much. Or, everything. Or really - I don't know. Because my path is still unfolding and nothing seems to happen to me in a logical way, I'm not exactly sure what it means. I know it means something. I know that my path has something to do with helping people do what I'm trying to do for myself - turn the crap in their lives into compost and grow a beautiful garden. (Thanks Gina).

I've realized that people in transition seem to be coming into my life lately and talking to me about their lives. (Which is awesome.) Maybe it's that my honesty about my own situation makes people feel comfortable talking to me about their struggles. Maybe I've somehow advertised on the Universe's equivalent of Craig's List that I'm open for business and here to help people work through various life crises. I'm not sure. Whatever the reason, I've been talking to people about their relationships. More specifically, the end (or near end) of relationships and how hard it is.

I think we all understand that ending a serious love relationship is emotionally painful. We may not know just how emotionally painful it is until we're going through it but we expect that kind of pain. What we don't necessarily expect is the physical pain. And most people don't understand the hit their "energetic body" takes when a relationship ends.

Sorry - I hate to use "woo woo speak" but I couldn't think of another way to say it . . . what I mean by "energetic body" is this: we're all made of energy. To way oversimplify it - when you break us down to our smallest parts, past the cells and beyond the molecules that make up the cells, you get energy. Not only are we made up of energy, we're affected by energy - especially the energy of other people. Especially, especially the energy of other people that we love.

When we start a relationship, we connect to our significant other energetically. I "feel" that connection like a cord coming from the center of the chest. At the beginning of a relationship, the cord is thin but as the relationship grows, the cord grows with it. The more our lives intertwine, the more our "energies" intertwine as well. When a relationship ends, the cord has to detach somehow. We unwind from each other. Untangle our lives. Sever the cord. And it's painful. The problem is, it's a kind of pain we don't expect and we often don't recognize it or worse, we ignore it. We don't deal with it and that leads to problems.

Some people never cut the cord of old relationships so that they're still energetically (and emotionally) connected to their exes years later. A friend mentioned yesterday that her parents - who are in their 80's, have been divorced for over 30 years and are both remarried - still hate each other so much they can't be in the same room. What that says to me is they never actually disconnected from each other. Just because they're legally divorced and physically separated doesn't mean they're emotionally separated. I don't think it's possible to hate someone you aren't somehow attached to emotionally (or energetically). People we aren't attached to simply cannot generate that kind of animosity in us. They might annoy us. Maybe we just don't like them as people. But hate? Being unable to be in the same room for any period of time? That's emotional attachment. Very negative emotional attachment.

Another example - a friend was engaged to be married a few years ago but broke it off. It was a very unhealthy relationship. She's now about to get married to someone else - a man who is much better for her. A man she loves. She's happy. But she hasn't been able to bring herself to tell her ex that she's getting married. They aren't friends - she doesn't talk to him or see him. He sends her messages (sometimes nice but mostly snarky), she doesn't reply. She knows that she shouldn't care about telling him and yet she's agonizing - has been for weeks - over sending him an email. She's still connected to him.

Why do we stay connected to old relationships? Partly because we're afraid of change and addicted to anger and/or victimhood (topics for a later post perhaps). But also because we don't realize how we're still connected and so we don't know how to disconnect. We may think that it's enough to get legally divorced and move out, but it isn't, as the two stories illustrate.

I think that in order to dissolve an energetic connection, we need to do three things: realize, acknowledge and accept that the connection exists, explore whether there are other reasons we're staying connected and consciously work to - gently - cut the cord.

Realize, acknowledge and accept

Remember that "what we resist, persists." If we resist the idea that we're still connected to someone we've divorced, the connection will persist. And we have to accept that the continued connection is ok and understandable. Even bad relationships usually have good components. Or they were good at the beginning. Whatever it is, the relationship served a purpose while it lasted and the connection was created. Just like the first step for an alcoholic to kick the booze habit is acknowledging he has a problem, the first step to separating ourselves from an old relationship is to acknowledge that we're still attached. It's also good to acknowledge and accept the fear that probably surrounds

Consider why you're still connected

There are a lot of reasons we might still be connected to a former love. Some possible reasons are simple. We may be the dumpee rather than the dumper and we're still in love. Some are more complex - we may be the dumper and feel guilty about the dumping. So we stay attached because we feel responsible for hurting the other person and we somehow think that by staying connected to them, we're doing them a favor. It could also be that maintaining the old connection keeps us from making a new connection. I know that seems odd at first blush but think about it. We got hurt in our old relationship so we're probably scared about getting hurt in a new one. If we're still "married" to our past relationship then we're not really available to be fully into the new relationship. If we're not fully in the new relationship, maybe we won't get hurt. If you had children together, to a certain extent you'll always be connected. But maybe the connection is stronger than it needs to be for those purposes.

It's important to consider the reasons why you're still attached. You don't want to start cutting the chord without knowing what it's purpose is. Not to be overly dramatic but that would be kind of like trying to diffuse a bomb by cutting wires willy nilly. The connection serves a purpose, you'll want to understand what that purpose is so you can address it while you're severing the connection.

If the purpose isn't immediately apparent, try to sit quietly and ask yourself the question. If you aren't used to talking to yourself, give it some time. It may take a few tries before you get a coherent answer. Or talk to a friend about it. Sometimes our friends see things in us that they don't want to tell us without being asked. (Be careful which friend you ask. Don't ask a friend who hates the ex. They'll have a hard time being unbiased. And they might make you feel bad for still being attached. What if you don't have any friends who don't hate your ex? Send me a note and I'll talk it through with you. I'm good with stuff like that.)

Cut the cord - gently

This could actually be the easy part. Or the hardest part. It really depends on the reasons for the connection. For some people, just realizing that they're still connected is enough to help them let go. More likely though, it will take some time to dissolve the connection. Especially if it has stuck around for a long time. So be kind to yourself during this process.

Sit comfortably with your eyes closed. Try to picture the connection to your ex. Like I said earlier, I tend to "feel" it (in myself and others) as a cord (or rope or fishing line or even a rainbow) connected at the center of the chest. But yours might be different. (Or I might be hallucinating, you never know.) Focus on your breath, trying not to get sucked into any heavy emotions when you think about your ex. If feelings do come up, acknowledge them and try to let them go. Before you let them go, see if you can figure out where, physically, those feelings are coming from. Picture that area of your body and visualize some kind of cord or rope coming from that area and connecting to your ex. Then try to visualize the connection dissolving - like a rope unraveling or melting or just disappearing. Whatever works and feels right.

Keep in mind that meditation and visualization don't have to be deadly serious all the time. In fact, if you try to have a sense of humor about it, the process is easier. So picture the cord as licorice with you unwinding the strands and feeding them to Munchkin children. Or something. Just don't feel like you have to be all serious. Unless you want to be. Which is fine, too. It's all about you.

Another method comes from Havi's way of dealing with fear. Talk to your connection. Tell it that you understand it's trying to protect you or help you. Let it know that you don't need the protection anymore. Remind it that you aren't responsible for protecting your ex anymore. Ask it what it needs in order to go away and leave you alone forever. Write it some notes. Draw it some pictures. You'll be surprised at what you learn about yourself in the process. You might find out more about the reasons behind the connection and some things you can do to fill those needs in a healthier way. Once those needs are filled or acknowledged, it's easier to disconnect.

There are different ways to approach this task, try a few things and use what feels most comfortable to you. Be nice to yourself and patient during this process. It isn't easy. It isn't always fast. The most important thing is to actually do it - because these old connections are huge energy vampires. They hold us back from being our best and strongest selves.

One Thing Plus

2010-04-28T20:25:00.000-07:00

Zen Habits is one of my favorite blogs. Leo Babauta is a simplicity rock star and I've learned a lot from him. But today, for the first time, I was disappointed in what he had to say. Today he wrote about killing your to-do list. He suggests that instead of having a list, you wake up in the morning and decide what One Thing you're passionate about for the day and get that One Thing done.

I'm not exactly sure what kind of world he lives in. But in my world, someone has to get the kids to school, do the dishes, take out the garbage, pay the bills. There are things that have to be done daily, weekly or monthly that will never, ever be the One Thing that I'm passionate about on any given day. I can come up with all kinds of great metaphors for doing my taxes but tax prep will never be my One Thing. If I followed his suggestion, I might be a little happier but I would get even less done than I already do (which would be amazing considering how little I actually get done most days).

I know that even though he didn't specifically say it, I'm sure he understands that the One Thing system won't work for everyone. (He does say you can keep a list of routine items that you can look at once a day if you "don't feel safe" without it but that's sort of insulting to people, like me, who need reminders to pay bills and stuff). Honestly, I don't think I know any normal person that could successfully use that system. Maybe I'm just surrounded by people who, like me, have relatively complicated lives (or short attention spans and an inability to remember to do boring but necessary stuff). And so the idea of totally doing away with to-do lists is terrifying and not particularly helpful.

Because I don't want to be the kind of person who just shoots down someone else's ideas without offering something of my own, here's my idea for improving on Leo's One Thing. I call it One Thing Plus. What if we kept our to-do lists but made sure to make room in each day for our One Thing? It would be great to know that when you wake up in the morning, you pick One Thing that you're excited about that day and you get to spend some time working on it. Because it's already on your list. And maybe it makes the rest of your list easier to get through if you take some time to do something you're passionate about.

I'd love to hear about your systems and whether you make time for your passions in your day to day life.

How important is being important?

2010-04-26T18:08:00.001-07:00

While I set up my new business, I'm working part time as a lawyer. An old boss was nice enough to hire me to do some basic work. The work I'm doing (drafting board meeting minutes) was pretty much my least favorite part of my old job but people with no way to pay their mortgages and divorce attorneys can't be too choosy, right?

Really, I'm not complaining. I can work pretty much whenever I want to and they pay me well. I have plenty of time to ~~procrastinate~~ work on my business, do yoga, hang with friends and spend time with my kids. I can work from home most of the time but I do have to go to the office now and then. Lately I've been avoiding the office like the plague and today I realized why. When I first started to work part time, they had me in an extra office. It wasn't as big as my old office (and didn't have a window) but it was a nice, private office. They recently hired a new attorney so they moved me to a cubicle. It doesn't really matter - I'm not at the office all that much anyway. But today was my first day in the cube. And it was harder than I thought it would be because it reminded me of how much things have changed.

I'm still struggling with letting go of my old image of myself. I used to be Vice President, Associate Legal Counsel at a decent-sized, national company. I was becoming "known" within my legal specialty. I jumped ship from there to a large, well-known, national law firm where I was a Partner. (Yes, with a Capital P). Big time, hard driving, rockin' the high heels, briefcase, Blackberry, working mom, having it all, Big. Firm. Partner. I made really good money. I had an office, a secretary, an expense account. I was well-respected. And, while the market fell apart, my life fell apart. I got fired. And suddenly I wasn't a lawyer anymore. I filed for divorce. And suddenly I wasn't a wife anymore.

The past year has brought a raging river of change and growth for me. I'm starting a new life and building a new image of myself - for myself. But being back at my old office - the place where I became the person that I used to be (if that makes any sense), is really hard. I love the people there and everyone is wonderful to me. But - (and I know this sounds awful but in the interest of being honest, I'm going to say it anyway) - I miss being important. When I was a lawyer there, everyone needed me. All the time. Big parts of the business couldn't happen without my involvement. What I said and thought mattered. Clearly, I wasn't irreplaceable but I was an integral part of the business. And now I'm not. They're glad I'm there to do the stuff that no one likes to do (and I'm good at it). I'm glad to be working there so I have a little money while I create my new life. But it isn't the same and it never will be.

That's ok - I don't want to be that person anymore. I paid a steep price in terms of mental health and happiness to be important in that way. I would love to be able to say that I'm over being important. Now that I'm doing all kinds of yoga and meditation and becoming all zen-like, shouldn't I be able to tell my ego to take a hike and get over herself? That would be nice. But that isn't the case. I like being important - I like to be needed. So sue me.

Is there a way I can give my ego just a little bit of what she wants without selling out? Can I allow myself to be needed without (again) becoming something I don't want to be just to stay needed? I think so. I think - I hope - that just by being aware of that desire, by accepting it for what it is, I'll be better able to navigate situations that bring it up.

Now that I think about it, the need to be needed comes up a lot. It pops up with my kids, with other relationships, with my work - new and old. Maybe there are times that I should let my kids struggle and come up with solutions on their own but I insert myself in order to keep them connected to the proverbial apron strings. Maybe I give my friends unsolicited advice as a way to get involved in their lives and feel needed. Maybe I take a job that isn't really my thing because . . . well, you know.

I hope that as I move along my path to becoming a healer, I'll work with people who benefit from my services. And maybe they'll come back and become regular clients. I'll be important to them as a service provider they respect and like and come back to and maybe even recommend to their friends. I'll continue to build the online community I've started to build here. It's about connections. Wanting to be connected is human. Trying to get people to need me - especially if it involves changing myself - is unhealthy. But making connections and building a community of people who care about me for who I really am - that's healthy. And a lot more fun.

It's not always sunny over here and that's ok

2010-04-24T09:11:00.000-07:00

If you've been reading here for even a little while, you probably know that I've had a lot going on over the last year or so. I lost my job. I got divorced. I'm starting a new business.

Losing my job was a blessing in disguise. I needed a kick in the ass to get out of the life I was living. I was miserable. I was taking anti-depressants and mood stabilizers and I was still unhappy and mentally unstable (not "kill-your-neighbor" unstable but, you know, really, really moody). The reality was that I made so much damn money and had such a "good" job that I couldn't bring myself to quit. Even though I knew it was literally killing me. Once I got over the shock of being fired for the first time in my life, I realized that I was being given a golden opportunity to finally do something that I was happy doing.

Losing my job - and surviving it without being hospitalized in a straight jacket - finally gave me the courage to file for divorce. (Also, being with him 24/7 was a nightmare). I knew my marriage wasn't working and wasn't ever going to work. We had been to marriage counseling but it actually made things worse. I had wanted to get divorced for years but didn't have the guts to pull the trigger. I was scared. Scared of my husband (for good reason). Sacred to disappoint my kids. But more than that, I was afraid to be on my own. I was so convinced of my inability to take care of myself and so convinced that I was nothing without him, that I couldn't envision a life on my own anymore. (Forget for a moment that I was 31 years old when we got married. I had lived on my own in NYC for years before going to law school. I was perfectly capable of being on my own. I just had gotten so far away from myself that I couldn't remember that independent person anymore).

The hardest part of it all has been the letting go of who I thought I was. I had this image of myself - successful big firm lawyer, happy wife (bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan type, you know?) - that was shattered. And even though the shattering of that image is the best thing that has ever happened to me (with the exception of having my babies), it is still very difficult to go through. It feels kind of like losing a limb. You know how amputees say that they can sometimes still feel an amputated limb? I can still see that woman - she looked so happy and confident. And I admit, I kind of miss her. (And I miss her money. I hate like hell to confess it, but it's true.)

I'm building a new image of myself now. One that I hope is truer to who I am inside. But before I can really do that, I have to let the old image go. I have to mourn the loss of that person, that life - even if it wasn't all that happy or healthy. There were good moments - more than just a few. I have to mourn the loss of my marriage and my job. I have to let the old me go before I can move forward and truly become the new me.

Lately I've been so busy enjoying the growth and energy of my new life that I haven't given proper attention to the dark side of all this change. The sadness and the anger. You can't ignore the dark side - it will come out whether you like it or not. And when it does, you might not recognize it. For me, it's been coming out in annoying rashes on my legs, severe hip pain and moodiness. It's begging for recognition and acceptance. I want so badly to be writing about happy, inspiring goodness (probably for the wrong reasons) but I've had some mega writer's block. And maybe this is why - maybe what you all need to hear is the not-so-good. The sad and mad stuff. You don't need sunflowers and butterflies from me. What you need is something real. And sometimes being real means allowing the dark sides of ourselves to show.

Remember, if it wasn't for the darkness, you wouldn't - couldn't - appreciate the light. And as a friend wrote in a great post the other day: "There is a use for all of it, a way to turn everything into compost and therefore a beautiful garden." So I'm going to allow the darkness its due. I accept the sadness, the anger - everything that isn't necessarily pretty. I'm letting go of the old me and it will be ok.

I'm going to stop trying to pretend everything is sunshine and lattes all the time. It's a perfect day for it, too. It's raining and I'm out of coffee.

Scattered . . .

2010-04-22T13:34:00.001-07:00

Lately, I feel like all my best writing is in comments on other people's blogs and in email conversations. I say something and think "Wow, that's good. I should write a blog post." But when I get here, I can't seem to put together a coherent sentence. There seems to be so much going on in my head - so many ideas, thoughts, conversation threads, grocery lists and random song lyrics - that I can't figure out what to say in a post.

I think it's pressure - I'm starting to feel pressure to write here. It's not so much that it turns into a "should" (which, as my readers know, are evil). I love writing. As much as I love talking. And I love talking. Just ask my family. When it gets hard is when I start feeling like the writing has to be more than good (because I always want it to be that), it has to be meaningful. And not just meaningful to me. It has to be meaningful to other people. That's where I get into trouble. Instead of just writing for myself and hoping it helps someone else (which is why I started this blog in the first place), I try to write for recognition. That's when my brain freaks out and freezes. Because my brain knows that getting attached to an outcome is a dangerous thing. It could lead to disappointment. What if I wrote this post that was so full of meaning it could barely stand itself and no one read it? Or worse, people read it and hated it or ignored it. I didn't get the recognition I set out to get. That would mean I failed. Two things I don't particularly like - disappointment and failure. It's not surprising I can't write anything when my brain goes through that analysis.

A bit of this is coming from my new venture. I want to have a writing/web site component to it and I know that in order for that part of it to be successful, the content will need to be meaningful to a certain number of people. And I'll have to come up with new, meaningful content on a regular basis. That's reality. And if I can't deal with that, then maybe the writing part of this business isn't for me. To what extent do I use positive thinking to move forward here ("Of course you'll be able to do it! You're a great writer!") and, if it doesn't work, at what point do I accept that maybe I'm not as good a writer as I hoped? Now we're getting into one of the things I wanted to write about today - my response to Gina's beautiful post over at Embody Grace. But since I don't feel I can do it justice in my current addled state of mind, I'm going to let that percolate until it's ready.

There are going to be times when we do something in order to achieve a particular goal. I'm not saying that it's always bad to do something hoping for a particular outcome. But writing - at least for me, in this space - can't be about an outcome. It can't be about what someone else wants because, let's face it, I'm not smart enough to know what you people want. Or what you'll find meaningful. All I can do is share my story with you and hope something resonates. So I guess I am writing for a goal - I'm writing to connect with other people. But it's the process of doing the writing that connects me. It's putting myself out there. So, hi, who ever is out there! I hope I've connected with you in some way.

Epiphanies involving Julie Andrews, trampolines and three ring circuses

2010-04-20T13:51:00.000-07:00

I've come to realize that some of my best writing comes when I'm commenting on other people's blogs. I'm not sure why. Anyway, was just visiting future-smiling and had an epiphany that I thought I'd share. I'm working just as hard now - if not harder - than I was during my lawyer life. But there's a huge difference. Back then I felt like a slave lugging stone up a pyramid with an overseer lashing at my back. Now I'm more like Julie Andrews dancing up the hill with the sun shining in my face. Or like the Seven Dwarfs - (most likely Sleepy these days) - whistling while I work. Or Jane Banks sipping a Spoonful of Sugar with Mary Poppins (Mmmmm, Rum Punch! My favorite!). Or any of the several other musical theater analogies I'm sure I could come up with. (I do love musical theater.)

Living your passion doesn't mean slacking off (although I'm still really good at that). Living your passion often means working just as hard but with joy instead of obligation. Just because it's work doesn't mean it can't be fun. I'm not saying that there aren't things that I really dislike doing. Filing is one of them. Tax prep is another big one. Probably because those are "shoulds" and rebels like me (ha!) really don't like "shoulds." We like "want tos" but not "shoulds." So my struggle has been how do I turn pumpkin-like "shoulds" into beautiful, sparkly, horse-drawn carriage "want tos"?

Well, first I visited my fairy godmother (and her duck). There I learned about Metaphor Mouse and the Pirate Tax Cave. Metaphor Mouse helps you work through your issues with things like "shoulds" and find a way to deal with them. That's how I got through my tax prep issues (Yeah! Got my tax stuff to the tax dude). But I was still struggling with the wide array of shoulds that pepper my to do list. So I came up with my own metaphor (with help from Bryna and Todd, my financial advisers - yes, even though I have no money I have financial advisers! They're awesome.)

My business is like a trampoline. I can jump around and do flips and spins and seat drops and have all kinds of fun. But if the trampoline mat is sitting on the ground, I won't be able to jump much. And the seat drops will hurt like hell. So doing the paperwork, setting up the systems, getting my ducks in a row - all the shoulds - that's building the framework for my trampoline. That's doing the stuff that's necessary to make the trampoline fun. And also (because I like to beat my metaphors to death), by setting up rainy day savings and insurance and all that stuff, I'm putting up a net around my trampoline to keep me from falling on the ground and hitting my head. Because concussions suck.

I'm off to tend to the elephants. Now that I have a trampoline, I've decided that I want a whole three-ring circus around it. And of course, I'm the Ring Master (Mistress?).

Riding the rapids

2010-04-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

Last week I was having a crisis of faith in my abilities as a healer. And the universe, being the show off that it is, gave me just what I needed soon after I published that post. The next day, I went back to the Reiki training center and attended a free Reiki share given by the head of the center. She gave me the encouragement I needed and reminded me that Reiki is a slow and steady kind of healing. It helps the receiver relax and allow his or her body to heal itself at its own pace and in its own way. Reiki is not an immediate miracle kind of bodywork. Instead, the Reiki practitioner provides gentle and loving energy to her clients allowing the client's bodies to access their natural healing abilities.

Armed with my new found faith and strength of purpose, I spent the next few days agonizing over my next steps. The road block I had set up for myself was a common one - I simply couldn't do anything to start my business as a healer until I had a name for the business. You can't organize a corporate entity without a name. (And, of course, being a lawyer for 15 years I can't allow myself to do business without a corporate entity.) And since all the good company names have been taken, I knew I was doomed.

So I whined to my sister as I drove her to work last week about how I was never going to come up with a name that wasn't cheesy or boring. I meditated and tried to still my monkey brain long enough to receive some divine inspiration. All I came up with were names that were already taken or were just too foofy and out there for me. Finally, in desperation, I decided to do something that self-help gurus always say to do in situations like this (I try really hard not to do anything that gurus say to do. It's my way of rebelling against the "shoulds" I guess). I spent an hour or so brainstorming. Just writing down words that came to me when I thought about what I want to be doing. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

That evening I was walking down the street not thinking about anything in particular when it came to me. It just popped into my head. The name of my company. Maybe I should have listened to myself when I talked about the importance of releasing the tension and not striving so hard. I owe thanks (for this and many other things) to the lovely and talented Deb Owen because it was this post of hers that put the idea for the name in my head.

So I have organized the company, reserved the web domain and even got a blog address at blogger.com (so I can start writing before I get my website set up). And now the real work begins. I feel like I'm shooting the rapids now everything is happening so fast. It's scary! And fun! And terrifying! And exciting! (And it really is amazing how you kind of need money to make money - I just spent hundreds of dollars laying the groundwork for this. Which is good in a weird way. Now I know I have to go out there and get some paying clients. At this point, if I make enough to cover the costs, I'll be ecstatic. And then it will be time to set some bigger goals.

Oh, yeah - I almost forgot. The name of my new baby: True Horizon Healing and Bodywork. Look for more from me and my baby soon!

Letting go

2010-04-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

Recently I've been trying out some Yin Yoga classes. For those of you who read the wonderful Havi Brooks, you'll know this as "non-sucky yoga." Most yoga classes at health clubs and spas are variations of hatha yoga which basically works to stretch the muscles. (I know, it does a lot more than that but this isn't a yoga theory blog so, whatever). You get in a position for a minute or two and then move to another one. While there is "resting" in poses, it's mostly movement from one pose to another. Some forms, like "power" yoga, are workouts that get your heart rate going. All that stuff = yang yoga. Yin yoga is slower and more deliberate. It works deep in the joints, connective tissues and bones. You get into a stretchy position and stay there. For what seems like for.ever. but is really only like five minutes. There are lots of benefits to it but mainly, depending on the postures you use, it works to open the hips and pelvic muscles and to limber up and protect your spine. Those are the basic physical benefits. But the mental benefits are the most interesting.

Yin yoga is about accepting things the way they are but ever so gently pushing against the status quo. It's not about forcing change but allowing change to happen. Sometimes we get so set on getting things done and making things happen that we don't sit back and evaluate our goals and methods. We could be pushing for the wrong things or in the wrong way and wondering why stuff isn't working. Yin yoga is about changing that mindset.

Here's how it works. You get into a pose - say, laying on your back, pulling your knees up and twisting them to one side. If you aren't very flexible, you could find your knees hovering inches (or in my case, feet) above the ground. Your spine is protesting. Your hips are swearing at you. But you eventually get to a spot where you can more or less comfortably stay for a bit. And you stay there. And you breathe. And breathe some more. And a funny thing happens - a release of sorts - you notice that your knees are closer to the ground, your spine isn't so pissed at you anymore. You feel muscles relaxing that you didn't even realize were tense. You let go. You stop trying to control everything. You let it happen the way it's supposed to happen. Do this with a few different postures for about an hour and you might start to realize all the places in your body - and your life - where you're holding on and not letting things be. Where you're pushing in the wrong direction. It isn't about things staying the same. You accept where things are now and put yourself in the right position to allow change to happen.

Where are you holding on too tightly in your life? Where are you resisting change or pushing for change in the wrong way? Anatomically speaking, we often tense our muscles as a way of protecting ourselves. When we try to hold ourselves together (literally and figuratively), we tense up. Relaxing our muscles can sometimes feel like we're allowing ourselves to be vulnerable. But if we continue to over-stress our bodies and minds, if we never let go of the tension, we're making ourselves vulnerable to poor health.

Pick one thing in your life that you would like to change and try letting go of any resistance or tightness you have as it relates to that issue. See what happens when you allow change to happen in its own way instead of forcing it.

In search of a miracle

2010-04-11T20:26:00.000-07:00

As a lawyer, I'm used to providing a concrete benefit to my clients. My client needs someone to draft an agreement. I draft an agreement. My client pays me. Easy as pie. (Boring as hell, but easy). I'm moving into a totally different realm now and I'm struggling with the fact that, for the most part, my results won't be tangible or measurable.

I think Reiki is great. The few times I've gotten treatments, I've felt the energy flow and I've felt clearer and calmer afterwards. Usually when I give treatments to other people, I feel energy flow. But, based on the feedback I've gotten, they don't always feel anything. I've been told that's normal - some people feel it, some people don't. To be honest, I haven't had as much practice as I'd like. Several friends have offered to be guinea pigs and I should be taking advantage of that to get more practice. But I've been hesitating because there's a part of me that has lost faith that I'm capable of healing. Because I can't "see" any benefits. Even if I don't charge for my services, I'm afraid of feeling like nothing more than a snake oil salesman.

If you read about Reiki on the Internet, it's usually characterized as a stress reduction and relaxation technique. That's the characterization I feel most comfortable with. But there are lots of claims about what Reiki can do to heal various diseases. Claims of miraculous healing. Part of me is disappointed that I haven't been able to miraculously cure myself of my symptoms of withdrawal from anti-depressants. My 12 year old tells me she doesn't like Reiki even though she's never allowed me to give her a full treatment. She says she likes "real" massages. If Reiki was so great, wouldn't she immediately love it? And if she doesn't love it, maybe that means Reiki isn't real or (more likely), that I'm no good at it. But therein lies the rub (I don't even know what that means but my Dad always used to say it and it seems like it fits here) - I'm afraid to even practice on people because I'm afraid I'm not very good at it. But how am I supposed to get good at it, or even get any level of comfort with my skill level, if I don't practice? (And, of course, maybe it doesn't make sense to base my whole career path on one 12 year old person not liking it.)

I was watching re-runs of Top Chef Masters last week. Last season's winner, Rick Bayless, talked about his favorite mole sauce which has like 8 million different ingredients and is really hard to make. He said that it took him 20 years to learn how to make it right. TWENTY YEARS. That's a lot of practice. And maybe at the beginning he even made something that was inedible. But he kept working on it because he wanted to be good at it. He believed in himself enough to keep trying.

While it's good for me to remember that it takes practice and work to get proficient at most skills, I still have to get over the desire for objectively measurable results. Whether or not a mole sauce is good is fairly objective. Whether or not a Reiki practitioner is any good is totally subjective. Helping someone relax and de-stress is a good thing. As a trained Reiki practitioner, I can help people do just that. Whether I can cure cancer remains to be seen. But what I can provide is hopefully enough for a few people to be willing to pay me for my services (once I'm ready for that). I just need to believe in myself enough to charge for my services.

Part of my struggle is that I'm still not sure I look like a healer. A true healer doesn't lose her cool when her kids act like crazy idiots. A true healer would never call her children "crazy idiots" either. When those kinds of things happen (when I act like a living, breathing human), I feel like I should give up and going back to "real" life as a lawyer. But I haven't given up yet because I believe in my soul that I've found my calling. I guess I just thought that once I found my calling, Once I acknowledged it, things would fall into place easily. But maybe the problem is that I haven't quite jumped into the water yet. I'm just dipping my toe in, keeping open my option of running away to safety. I don't quite trust in whatever this energy is that's pushing me down this path towards the water. Maybe it's time I just jumped in.

Defining my calling to find my people

2010-04-08T17:37:00.000-07:00

As I've said before, I'm trying to figure out what I want to do for a living now that I've acknowledged (grudgingly) that I'm a grown up. I know that I want to do something that involves not just my head (like being a lawyer), but also my hands, my heart and my spirit. Sort of an all-things-to-all-of-me kind of thing. For the last year I've been moving slowly along this path of finding my calling. Last summer I decided to become a massage therapist. Now that my divorce is just about final, I'm ready to start school (hopefully in July! Yay!) and should have my certificate in a year.

Massage therapy is the base on which I'm going to build my practice as a healer. I figure that, at least at first, I will get a part-time gig as a massage therapist at an alternative health care type place and develop my personal practice during my off time. So far so good. The real issue is my who-who-what and finding my right people (or, more accurately, helping my right people find me). But really, I can't find my right people and I can't fully figure out the who-who until I figure out the what.

Ok, in non-favorite-bloggerspeak, what I mean is that now that I've decided I want to be a healer. I have some other things to think about. The big one is figuring out just what kind of healer I want to be. That's a really big one. And the difficulty is that I'm like a kid in a candy store right about now. Although I have my Reiki Level One certification and I'll get Level Two this month, I'm not sure if that's the direction I want to go. Or the only direction I want to go. There are so so so many different kinds of healing (beyond traditional Western mediciney type stuff) such as (in no particular order): Acupuncture, Acupressure, Ayurveda, Shiatsu, Rolfing, Pranic Healing, Chios Energy Healing, Aromatherapy, Aura-Soma Therapy and Past Life Regression, to name just a few. I'm always picking up books and reading articles and websites about all the different modalities. I love Reiki. I love massage. But it seems like maybe there's something more or different that I'm needing to find.

The other thing I need to think about is what kind of people do I want to help. Even though it might seem counter-intuitive, it makes good business sense to specifically define your target market. I could just hang a shingle, so to speak, and announce that I'm a healer. And then try to heal whoever walks through the door. The problem with that is (as the very smart Mark Silver teaches in his who-who-what article) potential clients won't really know what it is I can do for them. And I won't really know who is a potential client. My right people and I could be passing each other like ships in the night. But if I define my services and the types of people it could help, then it's like sending out a beacon to all my right people and letting them know where to find me.

Although I know this will evolve as I learn more about my skills in this area, my gut instinct is that I can help women in life transition situations - going through a divorce, career change, empty nest. I also think I can help women in abusive relationships. This feels like a tough one for me - for reasons that deserve their own post. (Mostly having to do with whether I have the right to call myself an abused wife since it was mostly "just" emotional abuse. More on that crap another time.)

Part of the impetus for this post was having read Havi's latest brilliant piece of writing in which she says that when you commit to a mission stuff starts to happen. That's the way the universe seems to work. When you put your dreams "out there" and make them concrete, the universe takes the blueprint and starts building. So, with this post, I'm committing to my latest mission: Discovering the kind of healer that I am, the people I'm meant to help and how I'm going to help them.

There you go, Universe - do your stuff. Let me know what I can do to move this thing along the path, ok?

Honesty sucks when you're on the receiving end

2010-04-07T20:30:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for honesty most of the time. Especially in our important relationships. I'm also a big fan of white lies. I think they grease the wheels of civilization. For example, what good would it do to be honest with your co-worker who asks you what you think of her ugly hat which she obviously loves? None. Zip. Nada. "It's an interesting hat! Wow!" Best thing you can say. Now, if it was your sister and she was asking what you think of the hideous wedding gown she's about to spend $5,000 on, you'd better be honest. And hopefully your relationship is strong enough to survive if she disagrees with you and buys it anyway.

Can someone explain to me how I manage to digress in my very first paragraph?

Anyway, my point is that I'm feeling like a hypocrite right now. I want my close friends and family to be honest with me if I'm doing something that bothers them. Holding things in and allowing them to fester = bad. Getting things out in the open = good. So now that someone close to me has actually told me that I bug the hell out of him, is it wrong for me to wish he had kept his mouth shut? I mean, can't he just do some passive aggressive counter-moves like normal people? Apparently not. He has to be all adult about it and tell me that he gets anxious at family dinners/brunches/lunches/snacks with me because I'm "manic" and "talk too much" and it's like I'm "on crystal meth." Hmmm. He's "overwhelmed" by my "personality."

To his credit he said that he wanted to tell me this because he wants us to have a good relationship. He said that I can feel free to tell him all the annoying things about his personality whenever I want to. He kind of said all the right things and I think he was coming from a good place. I think. But I have to tell you. It hurt like hell to hear all that and it still hurts over two hours later. (The crystal meth reference really got to me and to my nine year old's credit, she said "It's not very nice to tell someone that they act like they're on drugs. If he was trying to be nice about it, he should have said it nicer." Damn she's a smart kid.)

Normally, something like this would knock me off of my feet and I'd be a wreck for days. I don't have time for that crap right now. So I'm trying to process it and figure out what to do with it. Here are some facts about me: I talk a lot. I talk fast. I have kind of a big personality (or so I've been told.) I'm not a shrinking violet for sure. When I'm excited about something, I suppose I could appear a bit manic. And this isn't the first time someone has told me I was overwhelming. Or the second . . . But it is the first time that someone in my family has said that. And that's what has me twisted in knots.

I've been estranged from most of my family for the past 12 years. Now that my divorce is nearly final, I found the strength to "go back home." And it's been great for me and my girls. I know my family is happy to have us around. But 12 years is a long time to be gone and my place in the family isn't the same as it was. Maybe I thought I was like a lost puzzle piece that was found under the couch. You take the puzzle out and I fit back in right where I was supposed to fit. Not to state the obvious but a puzzle is a static thing and a family isn't. Families are dynamic and everyone's role within the system changes over time. It's not that there isn't a place for me. I think that no one is quite sure what that place is exactly. Least of all me. So there are growing pains I didn't expect to experience at 45.

On the one hand, it's good that he expressed his feelings. On the other hand, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with them. If I'm being rude and talking over everyone, I need to cut it out. But I'm also never going to be the kind of person who sits on her hands and doesn't participate in the conversation. He's not asking for that extreme but where in the middle is the right place? Of course I'm replaying all the recent family meals in my head and trying to figure out if I've been rude by some objective measure or if he's just throwing some shoes my way. (Which is Havi-speak for when someone is mean to you but it's really just because he has his own issues that are about him and aren't about you really at all).

The question is: How much do I need/want to change in order to make him happy?

My first reaction was to feel like I should avoid going to big family gatherings. Again. Which doesn't seem like the right answer. My second reaction was that I just got out of a relationship with a control freak and who the hell is this joker to try to control me now? My third reaction was that I should be more enlightened about it and at least think about his criticisms as unemotionally as I can because he's my family member and I love him. My fourth reaction was to cry. Because really, I don't need this right now. And ouch.

I don't really know how to figure this out so I guess I'll let it percolate some more. I'll have to decide how much I want to change in order to help him feel comfortable around me. Hopefully, he'll get used to me again and maybe I won't seem so overwhelming after awhile. Maybe once I've been back in the family for more than a month I'll calm down a little and it won't be an issue anymore. Or maybe I'll continue to overwhelm him - even when I try to tone it down - and he'll just have to leave the room every once in awhile when I'm around. And I'll have to be ok with the fact that not everyone loves to be around me all the time.

I think the important lesson that I appear to have learned (or at least started to learn) is that just because someone doesn't like what you're doing or how you're doing it doesn't mean you automatically have to change what you're doing to make them happy.

I often believe six impossible things before breakfast

2010-04-06T06:58:00.000-07:00

I took the girls to see Alice in Wonderland in 3D last night. It is the best movie I have ever seen. Ever. It really was magnificent for lots of reasons that I'm sure I'll be writing about for days and probably longer. I promised my Facebook friends that I would post the impossible things I believed today. Here's what I posted:

Here are a few of the impossible things I believed this morning: It's never too late to repair broken relationships. Age 45 is not too old to start a new career and a new life. I can get my kids to school on time. One act of kindness can change the world. We're all connected - if I harm someone, I am harming myself and those I love. Exercise is good for you.

What impossible things did you believe today?

Do I look like a lawyer?

2010-04-05T07:04:00.000-07:00

Last week I attended a presentation on diversity in the legal profession and had an interesting conversation with the woman seated next to me. She said that, growing up, she didn't personally know any lawyers. It never occurred to her that she could become a lawyer until a woman - a lawyer - spoke to her high school class about the legal profession. She couldn't picture herself as a lawyer until she had an example she thought she could emulate. Maybe she thought that as a woman she couldn't be a lawyer. Or maybe she thought that she wasn't smart enough. Or tough enough. She had a picture in her mind of what a lawyer was like and it didn't match her picture of herself.

My experience was very different. My father was a lawyer. Many of my friends' parents were lawyers or doctors or "business people." Until I was in high school, I didn't know that not everyone went to college. It was a given that I would go to college - I thought it was a given for everyone else too. I knew - with a certainty that I didn't realize was somewhat rare in the world - that I could become a lawyer. Or a doctor. Or go to business school and do whatever it is that "business people" do (it was never obvious to me as a kid). I went to college and was pre-Med for two years until I realized that I hate hospitals and couldn't stand the higher level science classes I needed to take. It was a big crisis for me. I couldn't be a doctor. I didn't want to be a lawyer. I didn't know what I would do with an MBA. I didn't really see a lot of other choices.

I ended up going to New York and working in the entertainment industry (television commercial production mostly). But after a couple years of struggling in entry level jobs and feeling like I wasn't getting anywhere, I went to law school. Plan B.

It was easy to see myself as a lawyer or doctor. I had so many varied pictures of lawyers and doctors that it was easy to match them to my picture of myself. It was a path for which I had a good road map. I couldn't see myself as a film producer - which is what I really wanted to do at the time. I was scared that I didn't have what it takes to be successful in that business. For me, following that dream meant going without a map and at the time I didn't have the courage to do that.

Now I find myself in a similar predicament to the one I found myself in sophomore year of college. I don't want to be a lawyer anymore. I don't want to be a doctor. I don't really want to be a film producer anymore - it's kind of a thankless job and now that I'm a mom to a pre-teen, I have enough of that. (Although I still have a fantasy about winning an Oscar for Best Picture . . .).

My new dream is to be a healer. I don't really know what a healer looks like and I sure don't have a map for that particular path. I have a picture in my mind of what a healer acts like which is based mostly on assumptions rather than observation of reality. Whenever I don't behave in ways that are congruent with that picture, it makes me question whether I am capable of becoming a healer.

For example, this morning I totally over-reacted when my older daughter got pissy and obnoxious in the way that only 12-year-old girls can. I was over tired. I was anxious and feeling guilty because we were running late - again. I'm going through nicotine and anti-depressant withdrawal. She hurt my feelings. So I blew up. And yelled at her for way too long. And then she yelled at me. And we cried. And she refused to eat breakfast. So I said "You're not going to school until you eat breakfast." She called my bluff. "Fine. Take Meredith to school. I'll stay home." And I yelled at her again.

That is definitely NOT how a healer acts, right? A true healer gets all Zen and stuff. A real healer stays calm and says "Abby, I appreciate that you are exerting your independence but if I wasn't so Zen and stuff, you would have hurt my feelings. Please be nicer next time." Or something like that. A real healer would get enough sleep and would wake up on time with a smile on her face and a spring in her step. No bags under her eyes. No going on Facebook to tend to her farm before she makes breakfast for her kids. A true healer never loses her cool. Right?

Just like doctors and lawyers, I imagine that healers come in all shapes, sizes and degrees of mental stability. I think I need to stop looking for a road map outside of myself and make my own path. I need to look in the mirror and remind myself that I'm looking at a healer. Visualization is a strong tool for achieving dreams but only if it's used in the right way. Until now, my mental pictures have limited me in ways I didn't realize.

In what ways do you let your mental pictures limit you?

Home sweet home

2010-04-03T15:17:00.001-07:00

I'm sitting here crying and I'm not really sure why. I just read this post over at Fluent Self. One of my all-time favorite places to hang out. Because Havi and Selma the duck are amazing.

So the post that made me cry is about doing tax prep. The "have to" that I've been procrastinating on for months. It's a task that is now smoldering and about to turn into a huge fire. I didn't do last year's tax prep until October. Yes, October (after a bunch of extensions and all that). I don't want to do that again and my soon-to-be-ex will be (rightfully) pissed if that happens again. (He does the kids taxes and I do ours. It's an arrangement that works and I really am ok with it).

What is it about doing the damn tax prep that makes me so crazy? It has to do with money, numbers and paperwork. It's a thing adults have to do and, frankly, I'm sick and tired of being an adult. I hate being responsible for everyone and everything. I hate being responsible for paying for everything. I've been the sole financial support for this family for the last six years and I don't want to do it anymore. But now that I'm getting a divorce, there isn't anyone else around here to support me and the kids. So it's me. And these are the last taxes (I think) that my ex and I will file jointly. So getting the work done means finalizing the divorce. I want the divorce. I need the divorce. It's a good thing. But that doesn't make it easy. And that doesn't mean that I'm not sad as hell that that my marriage ended.

And here come the tears again. How can I be so happy about the divorce but be scared to death and crying about doing the final bits of work that will allow us to finalize it? I guess finalizing it means that I really am alone. I'm scared of being alone. And of having to do everything myself. I'm scared not knowing where I'll be and how I'll pay the bills. I want so badly to trust that if I follow my inner guidance, everything will be ok. If I'm crying and I'm scared does it mean that I don't trust the Universe? Does it mean that I won't be able build the life I want to live? Or does the fact that I can admit how terrified I am mean that I'm more likely to be able to let go of the fear and do what needs to be done?

No wonder I haven't been able to do the taxes. Because it's so much more than just taxes. I'm still tied to the dock right now but doing the tax prep will mean cutting another rope that holds me there. When all the ropes are cut, I'll be adrift. I'm not sure I have all the provisions on board yet. Do I have a motor? A sail? I don't even know how to sail. I don't know where I'm going. All I can see is open sea.

While I was writing that last paragraph, having my good cry, the song Home Sweet Home by Carrie Underwood started playing. And these lyrics made me cry even harder:

Just take this song and you'll never feel left all alone.

Take me to your heart, feel me in your bones.

Just one more night and I'm coming off this long and winding road.

I'm on my way

Home sweet home

I'm on my way

Just set me free

Home sweet home

The picture I got may seem backwards but it was of me sailing off in the sunset, on my way home. Wherever that might be. The long and winding road that I'm getting off is the familiar road. Now I'm taking a different path but it's the path home. Home to my true, sweet home.

Spring cleaning

2010-04-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's spring cleaning time. For most people that means dusting, window washing and cleaning the carpets in their house. I hate cleaning my house. I avoid it as much as I can without allowing it to get so bad that my friends call an intervention and try to get me on Hoarders. I'm talking about a different sort of spring cleaning. I'm cleaning out my body, sort of. No high colonics or anything gross like that. It's more of a physical, emotional and spiritual purification of sorts. And I have a lot of purifying to do . . .

I'm embarrassed to say that last year I started smoking. Okay, the truth is that I started smoking two years ago with a few months of not smoking in between. Disgusting and expensive habit. I think smoking was one of the ways I beat myself up for "failing" as a wife. For hating - and then losing - my very lucrative job as a lawyer. And feeling like I failed my kids because I couldn't keep my marriage together. I didn't deserve to be healthy.

I've been on anti-depressants for about 10 years. I think. I can't even remember when I started taking them. I've been on several different kinds. Sometimes more than one at a time. I couldn't even tell you if they helped at all. I sure wasn't happy during all those years I took them. I finally got myself down to one small daily dose of one anti-depressant. And one or two daily doses of Adderall to treat my ADD symptoms. I've wanted to get off of the anti-depressants for awhile but every time I tried to stop, the withdrawal symptoms would get so bad I couldn't deal with them and I'd start taking the drugs again. And my anxiety would skyrocket. I didn't know whether I was anxious because I couldn't seem to get off of the drugs or whether I had an anxiety disorder that needed to be treated by the drugs. I was confused. And I'm sure the Adderall - which is an amphetamine - didn't really help the anxiety much. It helped me think a bit more clearly but that's it. I was still a confused, depressed mess. I felt like crap. Looked like crap. I knew it was time for a change but I didn't know what to do. Then I found Reiki.

Reiki is a form of energy healing and balancing that anyone can easily learn to perform on themselves and others. I had heard about Reiki over the years but had never had a treatment. I was skeptical about whether the simple "laying on of hands" could actually do anything worthwhile. The fact that Reiki practitioners can provide distant healing was something that sounded like bunk. Even more difficult for me to understand was the idea that in order to learn Reiki, you had to be "attuned" by a Reiki Master. You can't just read a book to learn it. You have to pay over $100 to take a class. I thought that all seemed fishy at best; a moderately expensive hoax at worst. But despite my reservations, Reiki kept popping up in my life. People would talk about it. I'd stumble on articles and websites. I'd randomly think about it for seemingly no reason at all. But still I resisted it. I figured that I would learn about it during my studies to become a massage therapist. It was something that I would maybe do later. The universe apparently had other plans.

A few months ago, my father got sick. And then he got sicker. One morning I woke up after a dream in which I saw my father as a shaman - a healer. He was crying and reaching out to me. He asked why I hadn't learned the "lessons" yet. He needed me and I hadn't done what I was supposed to do in order to help him. I jumped out of bed and immediately started searching for Reiki lessons. It just so happened that there was a "Reiki share" that night where I could learn about Reiki and get a free mini treatment. I was hooked as soon as the practitioner placed her hands on my head. I could feel the energy transfer between us. That night, I signed up for the Level One certification class being held later that week. The next day my father found out he would need open heart surgery. I knew I was doing the right thing.

I got my Level One certification* the week before my Dad's surgery. I gave him treatments every day that he was in the hospital. I really have no idea whether the treatments provided any measurable benefit from a physical standpoint. (The surgery went great and he was out of the hospital 5 days later. He's at home and recovering well.) I know the treatments relaxed him and he enjoyed it. Giving him those treatments allowed me to feel as if I was doing something concrete to help him. And it let him know how much I care about him. Now I'm practicing on my kids (when they let me) and my friends. I plan to get my Level Two certification at the end of the month and hopefully start getting some paying clients.

I knew that giving myself Reiki treatments would probably help me reduce my stress levels and maybe help me get rid of headaches or other aches and pains. But it had an unexpected effect. Almost immediately after my attunement, smoking made me a little sick. It wasn't bad enough to make me quit but I was smoking less. And then a few days ago - about two weeks after my attunement - I started smoking a cigarette, took two puffs and put it out. The same thing happened the next day. And I haven't had a cigarette since. No cravings. My body just won't allow me to smoke any more. At the same time I decided it was time to give up the anti-depressants and the Adderall. I won't lie - the withdrawal symptoms from giving up the anti-depressants are kicking my butt a little. But I found a technique for dealing with that (which will have to wait for another post).

I just know - on something other than an intellectual level - that I need to be a clear channel for healing energy. And with the nicotine and the other drugs coursing through my system all the time, I was anything but a clear channel. Hence the spring cleaning. (Except for allergy medicine. This time of year, without a little Claritin, I'm not a clear channel for anything except mucous). I'm not following any sort of well-thought out plan here. I'm simply listening to my inner guidance which is telling me - loud and clear - that I need to clean house. So I am. And I'm feeling better every day.

Last year I decided that I want to become a massage therapist and get involved in alternative health care strategies. I'll be starting school in July (hopefully). But I've realized recently that my real calling - what I know in my heart of hearts that I need to do - is to be a healer. Becoming a massage therapist - without any of the spiritual healing, "woo woo" stuff - would have been a big change in my life. Add in the idea of being a "healer" - with all the "woo woo" crystals and auras and stuff - and you're talking about a HUGE change from my old life. I have no clue what my life will look like when this transition is over. Not. One. Clue. And it's scary. And incredibly exciting. Just writing that made my heart beat a little bit faster. But I've never been happier in my life.

*There are three levels of certification in Reiki. After Level One, you can perform it on yourself and others but you aren't authorized to charge money for treatments. After Level Two, you are authorized (but not required) to charge for treatments. You also learn how to do distant healing. At Level Three, you become a Reiki Master. At that point you can teach classes and attune others.

All for one and one for all

2010-03-25T14:16:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading Manifest Your Destiny: The Nine Spiritual Principles for Getting Everything You Want by Wayne Dyer. It's not an easy read. It meanders and rambles a bit and I have to re-read sections constantly. I'm not sure I can even summarize what the book's about. But I found a gem in there today. He talks about trusting in the principle that we are not separate from our "creator." There isn't a God there and us here. There is a universal creative energy. Or something like that. The point he's making is that we're not "separate" from the creative energy that surrounds us. We aren't really separate from each other either. We're all part of the same cosmic slush that is us and everything else in the universe. So here's the gem - he says that one way to trust in yourself and the wisdom that created you is to begin by admitting your confusion or failures. Remind yourself that genuine trust involves letting go of all conditioning that teaches you that trust in yourself is based on being "special or separate." In other words, even if we fail or are confused or make mistakes, we are still strong, capable, powerful beings. We can trust in that power. But we'll never really be able to trust that we're amazing if we keep thinking that in order to be amazing we have to be perfect. We'll never be comfortable with ourselves as long as we try to hide our imperfections. So here I am. In all my imperfect, messed up, confused, annoying, lazy, unorganized, funny, sweet, friendly, open, loving, perfect glory.

Yesterday I mentioned that I've been sharing my "story" - warts and all - with people recently. It's not like I walk up to strangers on the street and say "Hi. My name is Jessica. I'm getting a divorce and I have no job." And it's not like I spend all my time whining to my friends about how hard life is. (I do sometimes. Just not all the time.) What I meant was that when I talk to friends and acquaintances, I'm honest about myself and my situation. I've gotten an overwhelmingly positive response. People feel comfortable sharing more of themselves and their lives with me. I don't feel like I have to be someone I'm not or pretend I'm doing well when I'm having a hard day. I can just be. They can just be. It sounds so simple and it is. The problem is that many of us have become accustomed to putting up walls and it's a scary thing to stop hiding. But it's incredibly liberating. And opens us up to a connection with others that helps us know that we're not alone in our struggles and imperfections.

One issue I had to work through before this kind of honesty became a positive force in my life was my tendency to get stuck in a "victim" mentality. It's seductive - as a victim you get attention and people take care of you. You have a ready excuse for not doing things you should do but are afraid to do. You don't have take responsibility for your life if you're a victim. It's all somebody else's doing. If only my abusive husband would just realize what a jerk he is and start being nice. THEN I could be stronger. THEN I would be happy. THEN I would do all those things I know I'm capable of doing but just can't right now because I have this awful person in my life. I would do all those things I should do but right now, I'm a "victim" of my circumstances. At some point, if you're ever going to recover from bad life situations, you have to get out of that frame of mind. You have to realize that if you want your life to be better YOU have to take responsibility for doing what you can to MAKE life better. We all have choices. We all need to learn to make the right choices for ourselves. Just to be clear - there are going to be times in our lives when we're truly victims of someone or something outside of our control. The key is in how you survive those times, how and when you recover and stop being a victim. This isn't victim-bashing or blaming. The abusive things my husband did are part of his karmic debt that he has to deal with. But I can either continue to be a victim or I can get on with my life and stop using that as an excuse.

So now I'm in a place where I can share my struggles - not to seek pity or set up excuses for myself - but to show other people that they are not alone. And to remind myself that I am not alone. I hope that when I talk to people, it doesn't sound like I'm complaining or being negative. On the contrary, people are often surprised at my positive attitude when I talk about some really difficult subjects. That hopeful, optimistic, happy attitude comes from surviving hard times and coming out the other side a stronger person. Even though I don't have a job, I have no idea where I'll be living when we sell our condo and my savings is down to about nothing, I can honestly say that I'm excited about life. I'm happy about the direction that my life is going even if I'm not ecstatic about where it is right now. I'm trusting in my strength. I'm trusting my heart. I'm going where I should be going even if I don't know exactly where that is. And it's a beautiful journey.

Coming out of hibernation

2010-03-24T22:08:00.001-07:00

So I've decided that it's time I started writing again. My pending divorce - and the possibility of a custody dispute - was a convenient excuse for me to stop writing publicly. Unfortunately, if I'm not writing publicly, I pretty much don't write at all. It's almost like blogging primes the writing pump for me. Without it I can't seem to get started on any kind of writing. And I miss it.

I know a lot of people continue blogging through their divorces and I had planned on it. But given the possibility of a custody dispute - which is no longer likely (thankfully) - my friends and family counseled me to stop. I write from the heart. I write about myself and my experiences, good and bad. They (and I) worried that something I wrote could be used against me. And I could not take any risk when it came to custody of my kids. But the time has come for me to start writing again.

I've found that the more I share about myself with others, the more I get back. And, strangely enough, it seems that when I share the darker aspects of my experience it opens up a level of communication that isn't available when I only talk about the good things. We tend to see the best in others and the worst in ourselves. When we find out that someone else has similar struggles and doubts, we feel relieved. And we feel better about sharing our own struggles. I spent a lot of my life pretending everything was great. Don't get me wrong, I've had some great times in my life and, compared to lots of other people in the world, I'm incredibly blessed. But I've struggled with bulimia, depression, an abusive relationship, ADD. I've been through a lot and I'm still working through pain and anger and other things that have been with me for a long time. Writing helps me work through those things. And even if no one reads this, blogging helps me feel like I'm not alone - especially during those times that I can't call a friend. (Like now - 12:30 am on a week night when most of them are asleep).

Tonight's struggle is two-fold. For starters, my father is having open heart surgery tomorrow. On top of that, I'm basically out of work and trying to figure out what I'm going to be when I grow up. I'm trying not to worry about my Dad. Other than some heart issues, he's actually a healthy guy and he'll most likely recover very well. But any surgery is risky and I can't help but worry.

I was laid off over a year ago. I was spending time with my kids and dealing with my divorce until a few months ago. I'm now working part time as a lawyer for an old employer but I don't know how long that will last. Truthfully, I don't want to be a lawyer anymore. It's a struggle to do the work because I don't really want to do it. I've been a lawyer for almost 15 years. Been there. Done that. Can't do it anymore. But I have to have some way of making money. So I've been working when I feel like it, which is not really enough. I'm not at my most responsible right now, I guess. I've been the sole breadwinner for my family for over five years now and I guess I'm just on a sort of extended vacation right now. Hibernating, if you will.

There are so many things I want to do and a lot of things I enjoy. The question is what can I do that will allow me to support myself and my share of the kids' expenses while fulfilling the parts of me that have been unfulfilled for so long? As a lawyer, I just used my head. Not my heart or my hands. I realized that I needed something where I didn't have to be in an office and I could feel like I was actually helping people. So I decided last year that I want to become a massage therapist. I can't really start school until the divorce is final - hopefully this summer. But it isn't enough to just go back to school and then get another job. I need to develop a vision for my life. How do I want it to look? Feel? Do I want to be an independent contractor or an employee? Do I want to start my own business and have my own employees? How much do I want to work? How much do I need to work? This is all so overwhelming.

Unfortunately, when I get overwhelmed, I shut down. I stop doing anything. I stop doing the things I love to do because it never seems enough. If I spend some time knitting, I feel like I haven't gotten enough done. Or like I should be working. Or whatever I've made isn't good enough. For what or who I don't know. There are other projects I'd love to do but I don't because I'm scared. I'm scared that I won't be as good as I want to be. I don't give myself time to learn and get better. I don't give myself permission to be imperfect. I know - intellectually - that no one is perfect. I know that even the best artists struggle and create crap before they create something beautiful. But emotionally, I have a difficult time with it. Maybe that's one of the reasons I like blogging. There's an immediacy to it that somehow makes it easier to get through. If you don't write something, you can't post anything. And posts don't have to be long. Or perfect. They just have to exist. And then you hope someone reads it. But you're not sending it to an editor hoping they'll publish it. You're not trying to write a whole book. Just a post. A writing baby step.

Baby steps. My phrase of the year. Baby steps every day. But some days call for giant leaps. So here's my giant leap for today. I'm actually going to press the Publish Post button.

Counting Sheep?

2009-08-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if this is Day 4, 5 or 6. My first week on the 90 Day blog and I'm already losing count. My excuse for missing two days is that Friday was my daughter's 9th birthday. And Saturday was the day after my daughter's 9th birthday. So, you know . . .

Today's Stumble brought me to a kind of game called Sheep Dash that's on the BBC's website. This website has a Science & Nature section with a Human Body & Mind subsection in which there is a lot of information about sleep. The Sheep Dash game is designed to test your reaction time and they suggest that you test it first before a cup of coffee or tea and then test it again after a caffeine infusion. If you're tired, you tend to have slower reaction times. The game involves shooting a tranquilizer dart and sheep as they are trying to run out of a pasture. The sheep start out grazing in a group on the left side of the screen. Every few seconds one sheep makes a run for it and you have to click on a button to shoot the dart. The faster you click, the shorter the sheep's run for freedom. My fastest reaction time was .212 seconds - without caffeine. I haven't tried it with caffeine - if I drank coffee now, I wouldn't sleep until tomorrow morning.

One note on the impact of sleep on reaction time - I have read that sleepy drivers are just as dangerous as drunk drivers behind the wheel. So make sure you get your shut eye before you take a drive in my neighborhood, 'k?

Day 3 - a website with more than one page!

2009-08-13T15:34:00.001-07:00

On day 1 and on day 2 I stumbled on one page websites (well, day 1's site had other pages but not connected to my landing page). But today I hit a site with some meat to it but not too much which is good because I need to go exercise and I'm using my need to blog about today's Stumble as a procrastination device.*

*Ok well I didn't get around to exercising because writing this post took wayyyy longer than I expected. And also my friend came over with wine and pizza. Oh and this still counts as Day 3 because it's not midnight here yet!

Today's site is called Naturopathyworks - it's the website of Dr. Colleen Huber who is a Naturopathic Medical Doctor. In general, her site is good. There are fairly brief articles regarding various aspects of naturopathic medicine - Nutrition, Botanicals, Environmental Medicine, Homeopathy and Chinese Medicine. The articles aren't jargony and are easy to understand. Much of what Dr. Huber says is common sense. In the Nutrition section she wonders how we can expect our bodies to be healthy when we - as a society in general - eat such unhealthy food. Under Environmental Medicine she notes that in the last 100 years, humans have been exposing themselves to a staggering number of toxic chemicals and that we don't know what the cumulative effect of that exposure is or will be over the longer term. Not surprisingly, the article are written to persuade the reader that naturopathic medicine is superior to allopathic (traditional Western) medicine. To be fair, in her discussion regarding Homeopathic medicine, she discusses the assertions of critics and counters them as best as she can in a short, reader-friendly article. So it isn't as one-sided as other sites I've seen.

One thing in particular that bothered me was the following statement under Nutrition: "Until just a few generations ago our ancestors were wonderfully fit compared with present-day generations. The majority lived good, active, healthy lives and ultimately died peacefully in their sleep." I can't agree with that assertion. I guess it depends on who you count as your ancestors but if your ancestors were serfs in the middle-ages, I'm pretty sure they didn't live good, active, healthy lives.

Maybe a more fair comparison is Native American tribes before Europeans came and "civilized" them. I'm no expert. In truth, I'm kind of making this up based on the little I know about the history of North America. I suppose those people were fit and lived long, healthy lives. Except when they got caught by a saber tooth. Or a warrior from another tribe. Or ate the wrong berry. However, once the Europeans came to visit and brought small pox and gun powder and alcohol and gambling with them it was game over for the health of Native Americans.

I've always been skeptical of claims about the "good old days" of human history. I never really believed that things were so blissful way back when. Human beings are human beings - the details may be different but the same general principles of human nature apply. I really learned the fallacy of those claims in law school when I took a Law and Literature class. The class required us to read a book (in two volumes) by Charles Reznikoff called Testimony (1885-1915) Recitative. Basically, Reznikoff spent 40 years looking through law journals detailing the facts of legal cases across the country decided between 1885 and 1915. He then turned those facts into poetry - sometimes telling stories from more than one perspective (victim, witness, defendant). The poems don't judge innocence or guilt, they recite the facts which are sometimes brutal, sometimes funny but generally interesting from a historical point of view. To a certain extent they detail the trials and tribulations of the average person during that time period.

At the end of this (longer than expected) post, I've written out two of the shorter poems. These are fairly illustrative of the types of poetry in the books. Some of the poems are disturbing - tales of factory and railroad accidents involving children, stories about the treatment of blacks in the south. Most of them involve the same kinds of things that we hear about today - people killing each other, disputes over inheritance and property, divorces, affairs and just plain stupid behavior on the part of criminals.

Although this post started out as kind of a review of the day's Stumble site, I guess it's ending as an assertion that the good old days weren't really all that good. We're dealing with a lot of crap these days - bad economy, chronic health issues including an alarming incidence of obesity, rising crime rates -but the fact is that it's always been this way. It's the nature of humans to struggle with a variety of issues. Today we're much better off than our ancestors were even if we're worse off in some particular areas. On balance, though, I would take being alive in 2009 over living through the industrial revolution as a poor immigrant or living in the time of kings as a serf (maybe it would be ok to be queen, at least on days when no one was trying to kill me and take the throne).

I'm not suggesting that Dr. Huber is wrong about good nutrition being important to our health. But by invoking a false image of the good old days, she loses a little bit of credibility in my book.

Excerpts from Testimony Vol 1 and 2

Under Domestic Scenes:

The young man had been at work during the day
clearing land about their home:
it was a small, one-story log house
reached by a bypath from the road,
among some small jack pine and scrub oak brush.
The house was lighted by two small windows:
one on the north and one to the east.

His wife - a young woman of sixteen
who had been engaged to be married to a neighbor,
a man of sixty,
lighted the lamp
and spread a light meal on the table -
bread and milk. The meal over,
Peter took his accordion from the shelf
and sitting right opposite the window to the east
played "Home Sweet Home."
He had just finished playing it
when a shot was fired from the outside.
Several buckshot pierced his head
and death was so sudden
he still sat upright in his chair
with the accordion in his hands.

From Thefts and Thieves:

About nine o'clock at night, on his way to work,
carrying under his arm a pair of old shoes-
wrapped in paper-
he had passed the railroad tracks
when he heard someone running behind him on the sidewalk.
He turned to see who it was
and was struck in the mouth.
The man who struck him
grabbed him by the arm that held the shoes
and threw him down. He got up-
the shoes he had carried were gone-
and he went to a saloon nearby
to wash the blood off his face.

Stumbling into Day 2 of 90

2009-08-12T13:46:00.000-07:00

Today I stumbled up the World Sunlight Map web page. I was so close to re-Stumbling but I promised in my Day 1 post (which should have been Day 2 but whatever . . .) that I would write about whatever I happened upon. No matter what. Although I had to have some exceptions, I am a lawyer after all. We are trained to create loopholes. But this particular site didn't fall into any of my loop holes. It's just that, well, there's not much to it and I didn't immediately think of something to say about it. That's the point of this exercise though. To find something to write about pretty much anything that happens along.

This site shows you the current sunlight and cloud cover across the entire world. It's like your own personal global nanny-cam. Except that you can't see if someone is watching soap operas with your kid instead of playing those Baby Einstein videos you bought. You can see where in the world it is day and where it is night. I guess it's kind of cool but is there any practical use for it? I guess I expect "scientific" websites to have a point. Who's the intended audience for this site? When I last looked at the site a minute ago, it looked like night was just beginning to fall on the east coast of South America. Now what? What do I do with that information? How does that help anyone?

Before I started thinking about this, I would have said that I don't think all websites need to be practical or useful. But I've changed my mind. It seems to me that a website taking up bandwidth on the superhighway should have a point. Even websites that are purely there for entertainment at least entertain (or try to). Even this blog has a point which is to allow me to write all kinds of stuff - good, bad and god awful - in the hopes that someone will read it and connect to it. And it's to record my thoughts and experiences in case my kids are ever interested in seeing a different side of their mom. But why would someone use bandwidth to show what parts of the earth are covered in darkness and clouds? Maybe I'm missing the point. It wouldn't be the first time that happened . . .

I really am a slacker . . .

2009-08-11T08:32:00.001-07:00

So I decided to start this 90 day blog thing and promptly failed to write on day one. My excuse is that I was travelling yesterday. My other excuse is that a friend gave me 40 GB of music on Sunday night (yes, GIGABYTES). And a large portion of it is musicals. I *heart* musical theater! So I spent the better part of the evening going through the music and figuring out what stays on my hard drive (and goes onto my iPod) and what has to stay on the external drive for future use. (I think the jazz music will stay on the drive - I just haven't acquired a taste for it yet).

Anyway, here I am on the "new" Day 1 of the 90 day blog. Because I couldn't think of a theme, I decided that I am going to Stumble on a site each day and write about it. And I'm not going to cheat and stumble a bunch of times to find something more fun or easier or whatever. I'm going to write about the first thing that comes up. Unless it's porn. Or some topic that I find personally abhorrent. But I'll tell you what I stumbled on and why I didn't write about it.

So, my first Stumble is (drum roll please . . . .)

Sidewalk Chalk Guy - apparently this guy draws 3D paintings on the ground. In chalk. And they are incredible. Serious works of art. Unfortunately, the site these pictures are on(gprime.net) doesn't have any additional information about the guy. Like who he is and where he does his work so I did a little research (and by research I mean that I Googled "Sidewalk Chalk Guy" and found stuff - what would I do without Google?).

His name is Julian Beever and he has done his work all over the world. I can't imagine spending all that time and effort to create something so beautiful only to have it walked on and washed away. How do these "impermanent" artists live with that? What is it that draws them to that type of expression? I suppose it's permanent because it's photographed. And it brings great art to people who might not go to an art museum - it is truly public art. If I were to (literally) stumble on this as I was walking down the street, it would take my breath away. There's something magical about being able to connect with an audience in that way.

I spent about 15 minutes looking at pictures of his work trying to pick a favorite but I just couldn't pick one. I really hope I'm able to see his work in person one of these days.

Hello old friend . . .

2009-08-09T11:46:00.000-07:00

I miss writing. I miss this blog. I miss myself . . .

In my last post I said I needed to stop writing here because of my impending divorce. I was worried that I could write something that my soon-to-be-ex would try to use against me should custody become an issue. The fact is, I'm an excellent mother and there's nothing about me that would be cause for concern in this arena but I've become cautious lately and some well-meaning friends have counseled me to stop posting here. Or at least to stop writing about my ADD or my mental state in general.

I suppose I could be writing in a personal journal but I worry that the journal might be found . . . so I end up talking to myself which is not nearly as fulfilling. Or permanent. And in talking to myself, I sometimes talk myself into an unpleasant place but, for some reason, writing usually leads me to a more enlightened, uplifting place. So, what's a girl to do?

I stumbled on this post at Ken and Paper (one of my favorite blogs along with Ken's other blog, Mildly Creative). Ken is starting to do a series of 90 Day Blogs - he picks a project and sets out to write at least one sentence a day about that project. His current project is exercise. It got me thinking that if I could pick something uncontroversial (in terms of a pending divorce - so studying witchcraft would be out of the question), I could get myself back in the habit of daily writing and maybe complete a project or develop a new habit or just get myself out of my own head for awhile.

So my project for the next couple of days is to pick a project that I can stick with for 90 days. I have never been good at choosing things - picking out a birthday card is usually an hour long project for me. And there are so many good options - I could follow Ken's lead and pick exercise or I could write about aromatherapy which I've started studying. Or I could do something more general like "alternative health care" so that I'm more likely to stick with it for 90 days (because maybe I'll get bored with aromatherapy by next week - I sometimes burn out on things quickly). Other ideas I've been bouncing around for the blog - working on an article/book about my mom's generation, starting a business selling hand made items, energy healing, religious history, Broadway musicals (what I would write about that I have no idea . . .). Ack - there are too many things I'm interested in!

I'll just put it out to the universe and see what comes to me. So, Universe, what should I spend 90 days thinking about, working on and writing about? Any good ideas?

Where I've been . . .

2009-06-26T17:46:00.000-07:00

I'm still here. But I've decided to be very careful about what I write while my divorce is pending. My soon-to-be ex knows about this blog and probably reads it. He has said that he'll use the things I write "against me" (whatever that means). I thought I would keep writing anyway, just not about personal things. I've learned, however, that I can't write if it's not personal. My writing needs emotion. When I'm trying to stifle that emotion, the writing itself gets stifled. That's ok for now, I'll be back. Hopefully soon.

In the meantime, I'm spending some time reading, knitting, thinking, watching movies and - most importantly - hanging out with my beautiful daughters. They mean the world to me. Oh, and I'm also taking this great class from Deb Owen. Who is awesome. And the other people in the class are also awesome. It occurs to me that I overuse the word awesome. I think it's time for me to break out the thesaurus.

Suffering from "spiritual perfectionism"

2009-05-29T18:01:00.001-07:00

Today I read a great post over at Shaboom's blog. She talks about a few things but the part that hit me the most was her discussion of "spiritual perfectionism." That's when you're in transition from one way of viewing the world and your place in it and you expect yourself to be at the finish line of the new way before you're really there. So you try to pretend that you're there which isn't helpful to getting there.

Awhile back I talked about being addicted to seeing myself as a victim. Stuck in a "poor me" stance. I have been in an abusive marriage (that I'm finally getting out of) for 14 years. I recently lost my job. My friends and family are very supportive and they have been providing me sympathy that I was feeding off of. Thankfully I saw that I was projecting negative energy and decided to stop doing it.

Now when I talk about my current situation I try explain it in the positive way I see it - both these tough situations are huge blessings in disguise. I have the world open to me now. I can figure out who I am. I can build a life that suits me better. I am so lucky.

Despite my attempts to keep a positive outlook and project positive energy, I hit those inevitable times where I'm not feeling particularly positive. Where I just feel like crap about everything. And the fear and anger and sadness close in until I'm struggling for air. I want so badly to be able to be positive about things. To stop whining. Instead of accepting where I am with my real feelings at the moment, I start pretending that everything is ok.

The big problem with that is - I'm just getting back into the same rut from a different direction. I've always tried to pretend everything was ok. I tried to pretend my marriage was great. I pretended that I loved my job. I pretended I had everything together so that people wouldn't see how miserable I was. So people would like me. It got to where I didn't even know how I felt about anything. That's why I put up with an abusive relationship for so long - I was pretending so hard that it was ok, I even convinced myself.

Now I'm trying to live authentically. To figure out who I am and how I feel about things. In order to do that, I have to actually feel things. Positive and negative. Happy, sad, weird, angry, elated, annoyed, jealous, unloved, loved, loving, lonely, overwhelmed, peaceful and even neutral. It all is what it all is. Before I can be at peace with myself and know who I really am, I have to learn to accept my feelings and my moods, even if I don't like some of them very much. Maybe I can find a way to feel crappy about certain things in my life but still - at least on balance - project positive, loving energy to the Universe. But until I'm able to do that, I have to accept myself and my real feelings during those times that I can't muster up any of that positive stuff.

Is spiritual perfectionism holding you back?

The Pirate Queen strikes again

2009-05-14T12:18:00.000-07:00

Havi has done it again. She inspired me to think in new and unusual ways. And I had another "aha" moment just now reading Visibility. Invisibility. Power. More Pirates. (Can she come up with great post titles, or what?).

Havi says - "The thing I despise contains something I desperately need." She was talking about hackers that had invaded her website recently. She found some traits in those hackers that she felt she needed more of - the ability to be invisible and sneaky in order to protect herself and her website. I thought for a moment about things in my life that I despise and whether there is anything in there that I need for myself.

Of course the first thing that came to mind was my ex. I don't despise him - despite all the ugliness, I still care about him deeply - but I really hate the way he acts. Among other things, he is a very angry person. He's aggressive and uses intimidation to his advantage. He is not afraid to use whatever leverage he has at his disposal to get what he needs or wants.

So what is the good in there that I might need?

I need to be more angry. I haven't been angry enough and as a result, I haven't taken good care of myself and I haven't been the mother I should have been for my girls. Anger isn't bad in and of itself. Anger can be expressed inappropriately. But if it is expressed in a healthy way, it's ok.

I need to be more aggressive in asking for what I need. I've been a wimp in my intimate relationships for way too long. Again, there's a healthy way of being aggressive. I don't have to walk over other people. I don't have to be indifferent to their feelings. But I have to be strong enough to stand up for myself. To express my true feelings.

Part of being aggressive is not being afraid to use the leverage you have. I often feel that using leverage is somehow cheating and being manipulative of other people. But if I'm holding a winning hand, there's no reason I should lay down my cards just because I want the other players to like me.

I've spent too much of my life pretending to be what other people wanted me to be. I'm just coming to realize that inside, I'm a different person than the one I show on the outside. That just confuses me and everyone around me. I have to be true to myself and make good decisions for myself and (as my old therapist used to say), let the chips fall where they may. Other people may disagree with my decisions and I have to accept that. There may be consequences to my decisions that I may not love but if I've been thoughtful about my needs and the path I need to be on, then I can deal with those consequences.

It's a good idea for us to look deeper into the things we dislike about certain situations and about other people. We might find some conflicting emotions and in resolving the conflict, we can learn a lot about ourselves.

So maybe Blogging Rule #1 wasn't such a good idea . . .

2009-05-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

So I made this rule about blogging - no whining. And at the time it made sense. I was sick of hearing my own voice complaining about everything. I want to spread happiness and sunshine, not doom and gloom. I just thought that maybe if I wouldn't allow myself to whine here, I'd come up with more positive things to write. Soooo . . . I haven't written in 4 days. Apparently I've taken the old adage - if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all - too far.

As my friend Landismom said in her comment to that post, sometimes it's ok to vent. I blog in part to have a place to get things off my chest.

So, to the whining . . . this whole divorce thing sucks. We really wanted to make things amicable and although things could be much worse, I wouldn't exactly call our current state amicable. We are really just talking through email. Which is ok, but the emails are getting increasingly snippy, which is not ok. I'm trying to stay calm and not write things I'll regret later but it's not easy. The urge to defend myself and prove a point is soooo strong. So far I've resisted (mostly) but I'm not sure how long I can hold out.

Friends keep telling me not to engage with him and to just let the lawyers do the talking. But I don't want to overspend on lawyers (I am one, I know how we can run up the hours - legitimately, but still). And I'm concerned that using the lawyers too much will make things even more contentious. It's a fine line to walk.

I know this will be over soon - and we'll be on to the challenges of co-parenting, etc. But at least we can both go on with our lives. Transition periods are difficult for everyone involved. I know we'll get through this.

And after I wrote this post, here's what I did for myself:

1) I've gone to bed at a reasonable hour for three nights in a row.
2) I remind myself often that I'm ok just where I am and don't have to push myself to act happy all the time (that's part of what got me into this emotional mess in the first place).
3) I've told my husband's voice to get out of my head - I was reassuring myself that things will work out and then this voice would pop in to say "It's not going to be easy. There are obstacles." I realized that's his voice, not mine. I learned recently that optimists do better when they think happy thoughts and don't dwell on possible problems. So I kicked his pessimistic voice out!
4) I asked my mom to help me make and organize my lists. She's very organized (a trait I obviously didn't inherit). It was hard to ask for help - I have a real problem with that. But she was great. Now I just have to schedule a time with her - yet another thing to procrastinate!
5) I joined The Comfort Cafe which I love so far. It's run by Jen Louden at Comfort Queen and she's awesome.

So I guess I've done a lot towards getting myself in a good place. Even though they're baby steps, I'm moving forward and that's something to celebrate. So maybe I'm not in the mood to whine after all . . .

Untangling the yarn

2009-05-09T15:49:00.000-07:00

Soooo cranky today. I know I promised not to whine but it's harder than I thought! But I'm going to write anyway. And hopefully by the end of the post I'll have come up with something pithy and interesting to tie it all together and give you some food for thought or a chuckle or even just a smile so you won't feel like you just wasted a chunk of your precious time listening to me whine. Again.

The truth is, I'm on an emotional rollercoaster that I can't seem to get off of. One day I'm floating at the top of the world, making all kinds of realizations about myself, feeling in awe of the world, seeing possibilities in everything and just loving life in general despite its current difficulties. And the next day I'm plummeting down to the ground at 80 miles per hour, screaming in terror but feeling powerless to do anything but brace myself against the inevitable impact.

I know today's crankiness is caused by several things:

1) PMS (argggh - the one reason to look forward to menopause)
2) The fact that I stayed up until 2 in the morning working on a knitting project
3) The pharmacy ran out of long acting Adderall so until Tuesday I have to take the short acting which works ok but just isn't the same
4) I still haven't recovered from two round trips in two weeks between Portland and Chicago
5) That pesky divorce thing - talked to the ex today and although it wasn't a horrible conversation, it wasn't all that pleasant
6) Not knowing how I'm going to make a living once I'm officially unemployed at the end of Jun

Well . . . now that I look at the list I guess it's understandable that my emotions are out of whack. I just read this post over at Third Hand Works where Cairene talks about what happened recently when her brain didn't listen to her heart. Her post reminded me of what a physical therapist explained to me once: Let's say your back muscles are tight because you're carrying around a lot of stress and not doing what you need to do - get a massage, stretch, exercise, remove the stressors - your back will get tighter and more painful. Then you'll probably start sitting and walking differently because of the pain in your back. Then other muscles start getting tight and sore. Pretty soon you're a locked up mess of painful muscles and joints and you can barely get out of bed.

I guess the same thing applies to emotions. If one thing is out of whack in my life and I don't deal with it effectively, other areas of my life will start getting out of whack. And pretty soon I'm on that emotional rollercoaster feeling completely out of control.

So what to do about it?

First of all, I have to learn to meet myself where I am. I know I have a lot of decisions and a lot changes to make right now. There is no way I can do it all at once. And if I spend tons of time beating myself up (something I'm VERY good at), I won't have any time or mind space to do the life work I need to do.

I need to make a plan of some sort. I can't work through issues if I don't know what they are. Although I have a general idea of what needs to be done in various areas, I need to get some specifics. For example, I know I need to get a source of income. But I think I need to break that down into more manageable bites. There are several projects that in various stages of thinking about or working on. But I haven't written anything down about any of those projects. I don't have plan for any of them. And so I feel lost when I think about my financial future. That said, the idea of making a plan - a written plan at that - strikes terror in my ADD-addled heart. I guess that's one of those areas where I'll have to meet myself where I am. And maybe ask a friend - preferably a rather organized one - to help me make a plan.

I need to treat my body better. I haven't been eating well lately (and PMS makes it worse). I haven't been getting enough sleep (and last night's knitting binge didn't help). I haven't been exercising, although I have been doing some light yoga stretching a few mornings a week. And I desperately need a good massage but I'm afraid to spend the money (read: feeling guilty about spending money on something just for me that seems so indulgent). By the way, if anyone knows a good and reasonably-priced massage therapist in downtown Portland, I'm all ears :)

So now I've given myself three things to do -

1) Be kind to myself emotionally
2) Be kind to myself physically, and
3) Ask a friend for help writing down plans for the various things in my life I need to work on.

When I'm feeling emotionally overwhelmed my brain feels like a tangled thread of yarn. I can't see the beginning or the end and have no idea how to start to untangle things. Writing this post helped me see the beginning of the yarn.

Random Stuff Friday

2009-05-08T13:01:00.001-07:00

I'm always coming up with random things to write about but sometimes they don't really amount to a full blog post. I decided to try to keep a list of those miscellaneous thoughts and put a bunch of them together every Friday. So here goes . . .

I stumbled on this TV show last night and it was inspiring. Micheal J. Fox put together a special about optimism. One interesting tidbit: Apparently pessimists do much better after thinking/talking about worst case scenarios. They feel good about proceeding once they've thought about the obstacles they're likely to face. Optimists are the opposite. They do better with reassuring talks/thoughts before they proceed. The big insight: My ex is a pessimist. I'm an optimist. It drove me nuts that he was always looking at the potential problems when I just wanted to think happy thoughts. It drove him nuts that I kept sticking my head in the stand pretending nothing could go wrong. Hmmm.

My grandmother died yesterday. She was 99 years old. I haven't seen or spoken to her in 11 years (I'm estranged from my father - her son - which is a long, long story for another post or two . . . or ten). She came to this country with her family when she was 3. I found their entry on an Ellis Island manifest. I wish I had taken an opportunity to talk about that with her - even if she couldn't remember it directly. I wanted to mention it because it's a big thing but I guess I'm not ready to write a full post about it.

The Law of Attraction at work: With my marriage breaking up, I've been thinking about the importance of friends. For reasons that I should write about in a full post, I haven't been good about keeping in touch. But I must have told the universe that I need my friends because not one but TWO old friends contacted me this week out of the blue. Then today, a friend from San Fran who I had emailed recently asked if she could come see me in Portland. The mere thought that I might get to see her lifted my spirits - she's just what the doctor ordered.

I'm reading two great new blogs - Kimianak and The Peace Happiness and Love blog. They're written by two really nice women who are some of my first commenters and I'm among their first commenters so we're all in comment heaven with each other. So go over and give them some comment luv. Tell them I sent you :)

Procrastination - It takes many forms in my life. There are things I *should* be doing to get my working life back on track but I'm not doing them. (Blech, there's that dirty word again. I'm going to wash my blog out with soap now). Instead I spend lots of time reading blogs and websites about getting one's life on track. If only I could get paid for reading blogs I like. I could make a mint! But as Havi recommends, I'm meeting myself where I am and being gentle about changing things.

Ok, my daughter tells me it's time to eat lunch. And so it is. Have a lovely Friday wherever you are!!

Slackermom's Number 1 Blogging Rule: No whining!

2009-05-06T13:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a bad day. Plain and simple. My ex knows what buttons to push and I reacted pretty much how I've always reacted. I got hysterical. I fretted, worried, sobbed and yelled. I got my cellphone all wet with tears. Again. And now I'm really annoyed with myself. That said, I'm not spending one more second beating myself up about it. And I'm not going to whine.

The point of telling you that is this: Thank god I didn't write a blog post yesterday! It's bad enough that I was Twittering. (New rule: No Twittering while hysterical.) If I had blogged yesterday, I would have written a diatribe about my ex and his evil-doing ways. At best, I might have said some funny things. I'm sure I would have said things that a few of you can relate to. But really, it would have been whining. And who wants to read a whiny blog post? Not me.

Truth is, I was feeling sorry for myself. Poor me, I have a mean husband. So what. Everyone has problems - problems a lot worse than mine. I'm the one that stayed married to him all these years. I'm the one that put up with that crap and didn't respect myself enough to put a stop to it. I've been painting myself as a victim for way too long. The long-suffering wife who stays in a crap marriage "for the kids." Isn't she heroic? Nope. Not by a long shot.

Epiphany of the day: I felt safe as a victim. I didn't have to take any responsibility for my unhappiness. And therefore I didn't have to take any responsibility for making myself happy. I was just going through the motions of my life, waiting for something to happen to make me change course. I'm damn lucky that my wake up call was losing my job. I could have gotten cancer or been in a horrible accident or worse.

I spent hours at Border's Book Store today (that is one of my favorite things to do). I walked around picking up books, reading dust jackets and random pages. I ended up reading 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace by Wayne Dyer. I read the entire book standing in front of the Bargain Books table (it's a pretty quick read). If you've ever read books by Dr. Dyer, you know that he writes from a very spiritual point of view. You manifest the things you think and stuff like that. I'm not really religious and I'm still undecided about whether it's really possible manifest an open parking spot in downtown Chicago just by being one with the Universe. But this book really struck a chord with me. That's when I realized that I was attached to my victim identity. That I was acting like a victim and therefore bringing victimization on myself.* According to Dr. Dyer, I need to start behaving like I already have the life I want. I don't want to be a victim of physical and emotional abuse so I need to stop acting like one. I want to be a loving and loved member of my community. So now I need to start acting like I am. Hence my new Blogging Rule Number 1: No whining. No more acting like a victim. No more "poor me" crap. (At least not in writing).

*This is not to absolve my ex, in any way, of responsibility for his actions. He decided to be abusive and he owns that. I decided to allow it to continue and I own that.

The trick for me is finding balance. I can't expect myself to manifest rainbows and sunshine every day. The way things are now, I'm bouncy and happy one day and the next I'm a wretched lump of sadness and depression. Especially during this transition time in my life, I will experience a wide range of feelings. And all of them are ok - as long as I don't wallow in the negative or expect to much from the positive. I'll continue to write about the range of emotions but I'm going to try very hard not to whine when things are sucky.

Who am I anyway?

2009-05-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about this post and I realized something. I have certain "rules" in my head about how to behave in order to be a "good" whatever - mom, wife, friend, yada yada. When I think about what I want to be in this life, I think I want to be a good "whatever". Not to be all cliche or anything but I want to leave this world a better place for my having been alive. But I realize that all those rules I thought I had to follow - the musts and shoulds - are bullshit. They're bullshit because they were built on a shaky foundation.

In the legal world, we have a saying "Bad facts make bad law." This usually refers to cases where the facts of the case favor one decision but the precedent (the way similar cases have been treated in the past) favors a different decision. If you make decisions based on the facts of the particular case rather than based on long-standing legal precedent, you will end up with bad law. I know, you're wondering why this little diversion is relevant . . .

My rules are pretty much all based on the disfunction in my life. My parent's divorce, living in a blended family, having an eating disorder as a teen, being in an abusive relationship, blah blah blah. I created my rules in an attempt to cope with the situation of the moment. I tried to figure out how to make other people happy - primarily those people who were not worried in the least about whether or not I was happy.

I've felt adrift for much of my life and never really understood why. I think it's because my identity, my value system, has been tied to the wants, needs, thoughts and ideas of other people. It's not that I never act selfishly (I do that way more than I want to admit). But I never really came up with my own value system or my own rules for living. I don't know how to view myself separate and apart from how other people view me.

I guess it's time for me to come up with my own rules for living. I'll let you know what I come up with!

Listen to a friend even though it isn't easy

2009-05-02T19:02:00.000-07:00

Listen to a friend even though it isn't easy. That's the fortune I received from a Chinese fortune stick at the Portland Classical Chinese Garden . With respect to my upcoming divorce, my friends have been giving me lots of advice. Most of which I haven't been following because it's hard to do what they suggest. And I manage to convince myself that they don't really understand my situation and that's why their advice isn't right for me.

So this afternoon I happened to have a talk with another friend who just happens to be a therapist and a really smart lady. And she gave me some interesting advice that will probably be really hard for me to follow. She hasn't known me long - six weeks I think - but she said that when I talk about myself, I present myself by talking about what other people say about me. It almost doesn't matter what it is - it could be about my personality, my clothes, the way I raise my kids - it almost all comes out as a reflection of what other people say. For example, I'll talk about the fact that I don't wear much make up and say that my mom always tells me that I should wear lipstick more often. Or I'll comment that I'm not very observant and then say that my husband always tells me that. She said "I don't care about what other people say about you. I just want to know who you are."

She's right. I think of myself in terms of what other people think of me so it's not surprising that I present myself that way. At first I was inclined to dismiss her advice, like all the other good advice I've been getting because it's hard to change. But then I looked at the little white slip of paper with my fortune on it. Listen to a friend even though it isn't easy.

I have molded myself to the reflection I see in other people's eyes. I'm like a light colored building that has turned black from years of sitting in soot-filled air. What I need is a good sandblasting. It'll be like a chemical peel for my personality.

Dealing with fear

2009-04-21T13:33:00.000-07:00

Before you read this post, I want to say that I have been agonizing over how much to write here about my marriage and the reasons for my divorce. My ex is a private person and has always asked me not to talk about our relationship with anyone - family and close friends included. Although this blog is somewhat anonymous, it probably won't be in the near future. We're trying to make this an amicable divorce and I don't want to jeopardize that. I also don't want my kids to read this someday and be disappointed in me for being vindictive or disclosing too much.

But I've decided that, for me, healing requires complete honesty. Writing is my outlet. I'm not a private journal kind of person. For reasons I don't know, I need to write publicly. In order to successfully work through my current crisis, I need to write about my experiences in my marriage - good and bad. I will try to be fair and not use this space to vent my anger willy nilly. Everything I write is obviously from my point of view. If I've learned anything in my relationship it's that different people have different views of the exact same event or conversation. This is my truth and my truth only - his version of events will be much different and that's ok. I also need to say that in our 15 or so years together, we had some really, really good times. There were times when he was my best friend. He helped me in many ways. But he was also my worst enemy and hurt me deeply. Healing will require me to come to terms with those different sides of our relationship.

I'm hoping that by bringing my dark experiences into the light, I can rid myself of some demons. And maybe help other people get rid of their own demons in the process.

So, on to the post . . .

I've been reading lots of great stuff over at The Fluent Self which is this incredible blog written by Havi Brooks (who I wish I could meet in person because she seems like the coolest person to hang out with). Anyway, I was just reading this post about why some of us have a problem with the traditional advice that, to move past fear, you need to "face" it. I'm not sure what it means to "face your fear" because, ok, let's say I turn around to face my fear and say "Hello, fear." What do I do next? Do I push it down and run away? Do a roundhouse kick to its face? Do I plead with it? Use logic? Throw water on it and make it melt like the Wicked Witch? Facing it clearly isn't enough to move on and deal with it. You have to somehow make it go away or make your peace with it and move on in spite of it. That post got me thinking about my own fears, how I've dealt with them (or not) and how my ex often tried to "help" me deal with them.

One of the things Havi stresses is that we can't bully our fears and make them go away. She also stresses the need for loving compassion when we're trying to work past the things that keep us stuck in unhealthy patterns. This is the kind of advice I need. Mostly I try ignore my fears but sometimes I try to bully them, make fun of them and push past them. But none of that works for me. And the way my ex treated me often made things worse rather than better.

Throughout our relationship, my ex tried to get me to face certain of my fears. I think the goal was a good one - I have way too many fears that hold me back and I need to deal with that. Sometimes he was supportive but more often he was a bully. I called him Bobby Knight (the basketball coach known for his belligerence and violent outbursts both on the court and off). He took it as a compliment. After all, Knight got results - he has a great win/loss record. And lots of his former players would lay down their lives for the man because he provided the kind of tough love and motivation that those men needed at that point in their lives. But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of former players and others out there that have been damaged by his behavior.

My ex would yell at me, call me names, tell me I was incompetent and later he would explain that did those things to help me improve. He said I better develop a thicker skin because he wasn't going to "coddle" me the way my parents did (at least in his eyes). This was the way he tried to get me to (among other things) exercise more, be a more effective parent, eat right, face my fear of dealing with certain childhood issues, and, my favorite, to get me to stop making so many "stupid" mistakes. Again, to be fair, there were many times when he was nice, gentle, kind, loving, logical and helpful - but he was a bully often enough that sometimes when I think about dealing with some of those issues (like right now), I feel pressure in my chest, I have trouble breathing and I just want to curl up and cry. I hear his words, the derision and anger in his voice. I see his face distorted by rage. I feel the fear. And it consumes me.

I tried and tried for years to be the kind of person that could be motivated by that kind of coaching. I believed, up until I started reading Havi's blog, that I was lazy, stupid and incompetent. That a smart person, a person who cared about her family, would have made the changes he requested. After all, shouldn't I set a good example for my daughters by exercising more and eating right? It's a reasonable request. Shouldn't I deal with my childhood issues by talking to my mother about events in our past? Sure - that conversation was long overdue by the time we had it. Shouldn't I improve my communication skills and my common sense so that I don't make stupid mistakes? Of course. But one of the big problems I've had in dealing with my own issues is that his behavior and the way he treated me became the focus of my energy. In a way, he did the opposite of what he wanted - he helped me avoid taking responsibility for dealing with my issues.

I realize now that what I really need - from myself more than from anyone else - is kindness and compassion. We all need to deal with our issues at our own pace, in our own time. And there may be some things that we never deal with. And that's ok. I need to respect myself and respect my fears. Each fear is there for a reason. It's my job now to figure out what those reasons are and decide what to do about them. Instead of treating fears like monsters to run away from, I'm going to try to treat them like my babies. I created them, says Havi, so I need to be nice to them. Every once in awhile, I'm going to sit still so that I can hear what they have been trying to say to me all this time. And I'm going to listen, for once.

Motivation from an unexpected place

2009-04-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

This morning I was flipping through TV channels trying to find something to watch while I ate breakfast. I stumbled on a reality show called Made which is on MTV. I don't think I've watched MTV since college when we would all gather around the TV set in the sorority to watch Michael Jackson's Thriller (yeah, we needed to get lives).

This show is about teenagers who want to accomplish something - run a triathlon, become a rapper or a skateboarder - and MTV helps them achieve that goal. This episode was about an unpopular, heavyset girl named Alicia who wanted to be a cheerleader. She was an oddball at school, quiet and not confident in herself - pretty much the opposite of the cheerleader type. So MTV got her cheerleading and tumbling coaches and entered her in a cheer competition occurring 4 weeks from the beginning of her training.

Watching her at the beginning, I couldn't imagine that she'd be able to compete in just 4 weeks. She was uncoordinated, out of shape and didn't seem to have the determination to see things through. She cried all the time and whined that she couldn't do it. In the end, she not only competed, but she came in 6th out of 8 girls in the competition. She was confident, smiled more and projected a much better image in her day to day life. She didn't lose a lot of weight - they didn't talk about diet at all which was great. (Girls don't need another message about dieting and being thin). This wasn't about looking the part, it was about putting in the hard work to achieve a goal. However unlikely that goal may be.

If this was an afterschool special, I would have been downright angry about what would seem to be an unrealistic happy ending. Children's programming often does kids a disservice by implying that they can do anything but not showing the hard work that must accompany the achievement of a goal. This show tells them that they can achieve their goals but they have to be prepared to work hard and overcome many obstacles.

Alicia really put herself out there in pursuit of her cheerleading goal. Maybe you think that becoming a cheerleading isn't a worthy goal. That's what I thought at first. But watching this girl overcome her fears, come out of her shell and do something she really wanted to do was more motivating than a bookshelf full of self-help books. Sure, she had coaches that she might not have been able to afford without MTV. And being on TV can be a huge motivator when times get tough. But she did the work. She achieved the goal. And no one can take that away from her. It will benefit her through her entire life and that's what made me cry.

Watching that show got me off the couch this morning. I wrote. My daughter and I worked out. Then I wrote some more. I'm rededicating myself to my personal reinvention. If Alicia can become a cheerleader, I can reinvent myself and become the person I always wanted to be. And I have the rest of my life to do it.

Leonardo DaVinci and ADD

2009-04-11T10:01:00.001-07:00

We went to see the DaVinci exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry yesterday and it was fascinating. I knew that he was a prolific inventor and studied a wide array of disciplines in his life time. This exhibit highlights just a portion of his work and it's incredible how much he accomplished. And yet, it is well known that he had considerable trouble finishing projects. From the blog Procrastination Central:

Part of what made Leonardo such a "Renaissance Man" was that he was distractible as he was talented. Jacob Bronowski, the scientific historian, speaks about his procrastination. His talents and energy were often wasted in doodles and unfinished projects. The Last Supper was only finished after his patron threatened to cut off all funds. Mona Lisa took twenty years to complete. The Adoration of the Magi, an early painting, was never finished and his equestrian projects were never built.

Twenty years to finish the Mona Lisa! I don't feel so bad taking a year to finish a short story that doesn't even come close to the brilliance of DaVinci's most random doodles.

I've tried managing procrastination. I know I won't be able rid myself of it. At home I have a little kitchen timer that I sometimes carry around the house with me. I set it for 15 minutes and get as much work done in that time as I can. Then I set it for another 15 minutes and play on the computer or watch TV. The problem is that I often just ignore the timer when I want to keep playing. Discipline is not my strong suit.

I have some other projects that I've been avoiding. I am doing some knitting projects - hoping maybe that I can sell at least one of them to some higher end stores. I have lame excuses at hand each time I think about picking up the needles. It's fear. Plain and simple. I'm afraid of failing, I'm afraid of succeeding. I'm afraid of my own shadow.

So for me, it's more than the distraction caused by the ADD that keeps me from setting and achieving goals. It's the fear.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "All we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

And the ride continues . . .

2009-04-10T21:30:00.000-07:00

My husband just declared: "You're on your own. Don't ask me for help on anything." Hmmm. Well that's all well and good. I wish I was on my own and didn't have to ask him for a thing. But, you see, we're still connected. We have two children. We own a home together (that he's living in while I'm on the road with one of said children). We share finances (and BY THE WAY, he's financing a new business with OUR home equity line of credit - doesn't that mean I'm helping him BIG TIME?). I'm not at home. I don't have all my stuff. By definition I need his help in some way, shape or form. But ok. I'll just deal.

This whole divorce thing SUCKS. I have to get a credit card in my name. Our two main credit cards are in his name. The two that are in my name - one we use for the kids' business expenses (don't ask) and the other is the business card for HIS business. The business that he's made very clear I will not share in.

We're trying hard not to sell our apartment because we don't want the kids to have to move from the home they love while dealing with the divorce. But when he gets mad at me, he threatens to make things ugly for everyone. Including the kids! How is that the right way to behave? He wants me to toe his line or it will be my fault for making things difficult. Such bullshit.

Ok, I'm sick of the divorce. I don't want to talk about it anymore.

I want to talk about writing. I signed up to join a writer's workshop type of site today. You have to be accepted into the group. Then you have to submit your writing but you also have to critique other writers work. I'm scared to death - there are lots of really good, published authors on this site. But I think being scared is good. At least in this context. I have to step out and take some risks. Right? Right.

Riding the rollercoaster of divorce

2009-04-06T17:11:00.000-07:00

When you decide to get divorced, it's like getting on a roller coaster. There are lots of hills and valleys. There are times when you feel like the world is upside down and you're going to toss your cookies. You'll scream and cry that you just want to get off. But at some point, it slows down and you pull into the station. You're on solid ground and hopefully the world has stopped spinning.

Right now, I'm at the beginning of the ride. I've always hated roller coasters and this one is worse than the real ones. Yesterday was a straight drop down and by the time night rolled around, I thought I was going to crash right into the pavement. But this morning I climbed a hill and saw a beautiful view. I saw an amicable process where my soon to be ex and I were actually friendly to each other. And our kids weren't pulled in different directions. I really hope it wasn't a mirage. I'll try to keep that view in mind when I hit the next drop or loop . . .

When will I be closer to fine?

2009-04-05T12:11:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to put up a good front. I've always been quite the pro at pretending everything is ok. But the facade is starting to slip. The tears show up unexpectedly. I'll be fine one second and the next I'll find myself feeling so tired I can barely keep my eyes open.

I never thought I'd be divorced. I never thought I'd lose my job. I'm totally unprepared for this uncertainty about the future. My psyche was fragile to begin with. I hope to god I'm strong enough to make it through whatever it is I need to get through. I have kids. I need to be strong for them.

Maybe it's more than just ADD . . .

2009-04-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember, I've had a hard time finishing projects. I'll start knitting a baby blanket, put it down for awhile and then I'll start knitting a sweater. I have started writing several stories and one screenplay which are all in various draft stages. I'm in the middle of at least three books. I've always said that someday I want to own a knitting/coffee/bookstore and study world religions, literature and medieval history. I can't seem to settle on one thing. As I mentioned in my last post, I was recently diagnosed with ADD. The diagnosis made sense, in small part due to my inability to focus on any one hobby, interest or project for very long.

But maybe in addition to having ADD, I'm a "Renaissance Soul". I am so interested in everything that I can't focus on any one thing. The Renaissance Soul movement encourages Renaissance Souls to embrace their varied passions and ignore the conventional wisdom that adults need to settle down and focus. There's even a book that helps Renaissance Souls to plan their lives in a way that allows them to pursue several passions at a time.

I can't decide if this discovery is a good thing or a bad thing for me right now. It gives me an excuse NOT focus. I now have permission to jump from project to project without finishing anything. At this point in my life, I do need some focus. I have children to care for. After my impending divorce, I'm going to be on my own for the first time in a long, long time. Somehow I have to find a way to pay the mortgage. But I don't want to go back to a job that leaves little room for creativity. I would love to be able to make money while I pursue at least some of my interests. There's a little Pollyanna in me because I want to believe that if you pursue your passion, the money will follow. But right now, I'm frozen by the fear that I won't be able to make money doing anything other than being a lawyer. I don't mind working part-time or on a project basis, and I'm going to try to set that up. But I really, really don't want to go back to being a full-time lawyer.

The problem is figuring out what I can do to make money that fits the following criteria:

1) I like doing it.
2) It doesn't involve going into an office everyday and has some flexibility in hours.
3) It can be done from anywhere - i.e. via Internet/phone or shipping product from wherever I happen to be.
4) It doesn't involve large start up expenses.

Am I asking for too much? I hope not.

Roller skating!

2009-03-31T14:24:00.001-07:00

I tell my kids to go out and try things without worrying about what other people think. I don't want them to avoid experiences because they're afraid they'll make fools of themselves. Life is too short.

So today I needed to be with my daughter at a roller skating rink. The adults were invited to skate but only a few did. I was terrified I'd embarrass myself and fall on my face. But I followed my own advice and went out there anyway. It was so much fun! I felt sorry for the grown ups.

What will I do without it?

2009-03-29T22:28:00.001-07:00

RIP my darling laptop computer. We had fun while it lasted. I'm not sure how you died but my guess is that some evil virus or disgusting worm infected you while I was traipsing around the net. I thought I was protected, but apparently not well enough. So, until the techy-type people at my office do their techy magic (I'm still on the payroll for the next couple months -thank god - so I'm still using a work computer) and send you back to me all fixed up, I'll have to do all my online stuff on my Blackberry. Which kinda sucks but it is what it is.

I've been working on a post for the past week and a half but haven't been able to finish it. But I'm anxious to get a little content on this blog so I'm trying out Mobile Blogger. Maybe if I can post via email, I'll actually post more often!

The art of slacking off (or what I learned to do after I got fired)

2009-03-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

I'm SlackerMom and I'd like to introduce myself. I'm one of the legions of "laid off" lawyers wandering around the blogosphere hoping that our AdSense accounts start sending us enough cash to resume our Starbucks habit. (Click a few ads, will ya? This girl could use a latte.)

I'd like to think that my humiliating fall from grace as a partner in a large, prestigious law firm is actually a blessing in disguise. I loved law school and there were times when I actually liked being a lawyer. I had a good time as a young, ambitious in-house counsel. The fun lasted until I was older, more cynical and severely overworked. And underpaid, of course (aren't we all?) But then I started to really dislike being in-house counsel because all I ever did was go to meetings (interminable and BORING meetings) and tell other lawyers what to do. So, I did a brilliant thing. I decided to go back to a law firm but this time - THIS TIME - I was gonna do it right. No more mid-size firms with nice people and reasonable hours for me. Nooooo. I went big time, huge firm, lots of prestige . . . and floor after floor of assholes. They must have slipped me the Kool-Aid during the interviews because I bought the story about how they were unfairly portrayed by "rival firms" and rejected candidates from "unworthy" law schools. I knew I'd be overworked but at least they were paying me some serious money.

After a few months, I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. That not only did I hate being at that firm, I hated being a lawyer. After 14 years, I realized I did NOT want to spend the rest of my life reading boring documents, getting yelled at by clients who don't like hearing that their brilliant plan won't work because it's against the law and arguing about stupid crap that just doesn't matter in the big scheme of life on Planet Earth. But at that point, I was wearing the golden handcuffs. Two kids in private school. A great condo with a big mortgage. A mean Starbucks habit and a desperate love of vacations to Maui with lots of expensive spa treatments. (I know - I'm a cliche).

But I found out that life has a funny way of giving you what you want even if you don't know you want it. Or you're too scared to go get it. I hated my job but I couldn't bring myself to quit and, given the economy, there was (and still is) no way I was going to get a job. Certainly not one that would pay anything close to what I was making. So, the universe in all its wisdom, kicked me in the ass. And then, just for fun, it kicked me again - my husband and I are getting divorced. This split has been years in the making but the timing sucks (is there such a thing as a good time for a divorce?).

I would feel sorry for myself if there weren't people far worse off than me. OK, I'm lying - I feel sorry for myself all the time. I just hate to admit it because it's "indulgent nonsense" as my favorite American Idol judge would say. At this point, we still have a roof over our heads and some money in savings. I was given a relatively generous amount of time to "find a place where there's a better fit" so I've been getting paid without actually having to go to work (until mid-summer). Which is really awesome.

So, I spent 14 years working my butt off as a lawyer. I made good money but didn't spend as much time with my family as I would have liked. And my creative life . . . I didn't have a creative life. The main joy in my life is - and will always be - my beautiful daughters. Without them, I would have jumped ship long ago. Both the lawyer ship and the marriage ship. Now, here I am, forced to walk the plank off of TWO ships. At the same time. Kids, don't try this at home.

Now we get to the good part. The blessing in disguise part. It's taken me a few months of ceaseless and highly unproductive fretting, fuming, procrastinating and Pop Tart-eating before I realized that I'm being handed an amazing opportunity. I can start over. I can have a new life, with all the wisdom of a 40-something but the open book possibilities (and tiny bank account) of a 20-something. My grandmother just turned 99 years old. NINETY NINE YEARS PEOPLE! If I live to see even 84, I can live my whole life over without having to worry about learning to walk! Or Mrs. Williams, the mean 3rd grade teacher! Or puberty! Imagine that. If I'm thoughtful about things, I can do it better this time.

Being thoughtful is a new thing for me. My husband complains that I never take the time to just sit and think. I always have a book, crossword puzzle, knitting project, computer game - something, anything to occupy my mind so I don't have to think. Part of the problem is that I have Attention Deficit Disorder which was just diagnosed last year. It' s VERY hard for me to sit and do nothing. Especially when my medication is a controlled substance that makes me run around like a banshee.

My thoughts for now are centered on this: What the hell am I going to do to make a living? It's one thing to sit in your office, with your fat paycheck and company-paid Blackberry and dream of being a writer. It's another thing to actually do it. To actually be in the position where, if you decide to be a writer, you HAVE to make money. Failure is not an option. Besides writing, I have a few other business ideas but none of them alone will, at least at first, make much money. But I'm going to try (very, very hard) to stop worrying about money and start worrying about the health and well-being of my soul. I'm going to let go, relax a little, let my mind wander. I'm going to sit on the balcony and commune with the ladybugs. I'm going to think about the world of options that are open to me and I'm going to embrace it all. I am going to work hard at slacking off for awhile. And it really feels good.