The Long Way

 

"The long way is the shortcut."

-Seth Godin

Love the reminder from Seth Godin; shortcuts rarely work out and if we are always looking for the next shortcut, the work never gets done. 

Rough Draft

Today I have been thinking that in life, we take steps as the come. When we are little we don't have a lot of say in the choices that become written into our stories. When we get older and begin to make our own decisions, we are making them with little to no experience. Our stories were written through those experiences, and how we handle situations becomes habitual.
I am starting to think of life as a rough draft.
When we are young we have an outline of how we think life will go. But, when has life ever turned out the way we imagined? Unknown situations arrive and our inexperience can leave our stories full of plot holes (because we don't always have the full story) and spelling errors.
I am just realizing that I have been building my life on the habitual experiences that have been written into my story. Anger, frustration, self-doubt, self-worth, have been on automatic for much too long. Making decisions without even realizing the reasons behind my choices.
Now, as I am coming to the end of my twenties and approaching my thirties, I see that my life is in need of a second draft. I need to let go of the lines that are no longer relevant, and add in the experiences that will determine how my story continues.
I wish it was as easy as hitting backspace along the lines of what I no longer need; in reality it is taking a lot of self-reflection. It is opening old pains that need to be sorted through.
Believe me, I would rather leave some of the old lines alone, and pretend they are not part of my book, but that is not how life works. Opening those old pages is more difficult than I knew it would be. However, the alternative is far worse. The alternative would be letting my rough draft define this next part in my life; I won't let it. I am not a victim in my story. I am beautiful and I am love and I am a warrior. And though my body shakes while I write this, my heart knows I am more than my circumstances. I am strong and I am my own author, illustrator, and narrator. I will not be quiet and small and let someone else write my story for me. Yes, life come at me, the good and the bad always will, but I will not shy away from joy in the good, and the lessons in the bad. I will make my way through this, and the life I am meant to be living is waiting for me on the other side.

Remember Love

I feel like there is this moment right now and, we as a country, are looking into the unknown. And for the first time in my adult life, I don't know what is coming next. There are a lot of stories of hate, and it seems like those are the stories that are highlighted. I don't want to narrate on them, I think there is enough of that going around.

This time, right now, is when the seeds are being planted, and what grows from you is your choice. Notice the seeds you are planting. I am planting love.  I'm setting the intention behind all my actions, and my intention is love. Remember love.

Resistance

Resistance is funny, just when I think I am able to see it and step forward anyways, it finds new ways to sneak up on me. These last few days I have been mentally walking through mud. I came across a little quote that said "what are you doing now that's keeping you from your important work?" I almost had to laugh because this is what my mind looks like right now, "I started a 30 day writing challenge for myself (online and in a journal), and I need to stick with it. What should I write about today? Maybe I should look around for a prompt."
Five YouTube videos later (none of which were relevant) and resistance is still sitting on a blank page waiting for me. Meanwhile, my mind is throwing excuse after excuse at me on why I shouldn't be sitting here, finishing the challenge I started.
Recently, I have learned that my mind has never been my best judge. If the work isn't inspiring, my mind wanders. If I am inspired enough to put my energy into a project, my mind relentlessly throws self-doubt at me. If I want to try something new and exciting, my mind shows me everything that could go wrong.
How will we ever know which areas deserve our time if we never get past the initial resistance we feel towards it?
This post may be short, but it took over an hour for me to sit down and write it. Today that is the best that I can do, and today that is okay. 

"The office is closed.How many pages

have I produced? I don't care. Are they

any good? I don't even think about it.

All that matters is that I've put in my 

time and hit it with all I've got. All that

counts is that, for this day, for this session,

I have overcome Resistance." 

Steven Pressfield The War of Art.

We are...

We are stronger than we are given credit for.

Choose the Dialogue

Today I have been thinking about this little piece of advice that I seem to hear coming from every direction, "stop caring what people think." It's a seemingly impossible feat that comes through social media posts, past teachers and bosses, and other random remarks that conveyed that all I needed to do was to hear the message and then I would be able to let all my anxieties go. However, I believe it is the least helpful advice. Caring about where you stand in a community is deeply ingrained into our human DNA. Something older than civilization, and one little quote in pretty typography on Facebook isn't going to chance that.
For me, there was also this misconception that to not caring what people think meant hardening myself to the circumstances around me. Like Kat in one of my favorite movies, 10 Things I Hate About You; or countless other ways that story sunk in for me. But, it didn't work.
All that happened as I tried to step our of other people's commentaries was this negative cycle of retreating farther and farther into myself.
Then slowly, over time I chose to look at this differently. Without knowing where it would lead me.
I chose to be easier on myself and easier on the people around me.
When I try something new and I mess up, I skip the internal dialogue as soon as I become aware of it. Maybe the reason we adults are so afraid to try new things is because we mentally beat ourselves into a corner when it doesn't go well (and our first time at anything rarely goes perfectly). My own inner dialogue was mean, and the only thing it did was make it harder the next time I wanted to work on something.
The second part was when I catch myself judging others, I back out of that dialogue too and try to offer my unspoken support to that person instead.
And as I let those things go, I in turn felt more supported.
Soon after I had this thought; what if how much we worry that we are being judged by others is a reflection of how much we judge others (and/or ourselves)? 
Now, in my life when I want to try something that isn't what the group is doing. I honor that it makes sense to me in my body and I do it. And you know what happens when I do something a little different from the rest of the group? Absolutely nothing, nobody throws dirty glances or tries to correct me, nothing happens except that I did what made sense for me.
And now on the other side, I still care what people think (that is part of being human). However, I can trust that others are being as generous with their judgements about me as I am being with mine about them. Whether or not that is true, my unexpected side effect is, my self worth in no longer wrapped up in whether or not other people agree with my decisions. And I think that should be the point.

Creating Space

I have this journal, and as I write down my thoughts, doodles, or quotes. I occasionally skip ahead and open to a random page and write down a quote that doesn't make sense in my life at the moment, but seems important. Then I go back to my bookmarked page. What's funny is that as I go along in my journal, these quotes come up that I had forgotten about, but make so much sense in this moment; like someone knew I would need that advice down the road.
One of these that I wrote down was, "the lesson will repeat as needed." It didn't mean anything specific to me until I needed reminding. Lately, as I dream, or meditate, or go about my life, the same messages come through again and again. They come in clumps of the same message, until I finally understand the nudge and follow it's direction.
These past few months, and especially the last few weeks, the nudge has been to create space. It repeats that nothing new can ever get in until I let go of some of the negatives I have been holding on to.
I knew exactly what it was nudging me toward, I think we all know.
I see my body like my house, and over time, it has accumulated so much shit that I don't even know how it all got there. Hoarding emotions. I see it like tripping over the same mess over and over without picking it up. Or having a ransacked closet, and every time I go in to grab one thing, the whole mess falls out on top of me. I see it as those boxes in the garage that I don't want to go through. I know I don't need them anymore, but I hang onto them thinking I might need them one day (or maybe it's just that I don't know what I'll have left in my house if I get rid of all those things).
There was one box that whenever my eyes landed on it, I would quickly look away and pretend I hadn't seen it. Because it hurt to see.
There are hurts that we might complain about, then there are the hurts that we pretend aren't there. It was the latter for me.
There are so many reason to hoard our house of emotions. And the reason I didn't sort through my shit was, if I take that box down and take everything out, then I will have a mess spread all over my house. What if, when it comes down to it, I can't part with it? What if they don't fit back into the box?
I knew, when it nudged me, which boxes in the garage it was referring to. And I procrastinated, and messed around with the slightly smaller boxes and ignored the bigger ones. But, the same lesson kept repeating, and reluctantly I lifted that one off the shelf.
In the grand scheme of the world, the universe, it is a small box; nothing that anyone else would call noteworthy. But, it was the one taking up the space in my garage. I was 11 years old and I treated a friend so terribly that I can still hear the way she cried and I feel so so much guilt and shame every time I see the box. I opened it knowing that I can't undo what I did. When I looked I realized I can't even remember this girls name; that didn't make it any easier. I sat with it, I saw it, I put a name to it; shame. I tried to think about the lesson I learned from it, it was hard to see, but it did teach me that I didn't ever want to be that mean person again.
Then I said goodbye to it; it wasn't ready to go. It's still with me, slightly diluted.  And I realized it is going to take more than one 20 minute meditation for me to forgive. So I am writing it out, I am admitting my shame. And I am sending her love and my apology whenever that old thought comes back to my mind. Love is stronger than any other emotion. I'll continue to send her love until my heart knows she no longer needs it and we can let it go and forgive. After we will both be left with space in our homes for better things.

Realignment

I recently went to see my chiropractor for lower back pain and it got me noticing how the body is amazingly connected.
Over the last few visits he has told me (and I'm paraphrasing here) that a joint in my lower back was twisting in the wrong direction. And the joint on the other side of my back was twisting in the opposite direction to compensate. The result was that one leg was over an inch shorter than the other. He rotated them back, helping, but not fixing the problem. He adjusted my feet, legs, hips, back, neck, and shoulders. Making all these little tweaks, so small, that were causing all the trouble.
And it got me thinking that our bodies are like our life, a few bones were slightly off and it was shifting my whole balance.
He sent me home, but said to come back in a week, and repeat as needed. Because we can't expect to do something once and keep the alignment.
This last time he saw me he noticed that I was walking funny, but he didn't adjust my back or legs, he adjusted my shoulder.
Maybe it's not the areas you'd expect that need a shift, it's all connected. In our bodies and in life the big shifts can be important, but the little shifts realign.

4 Books

The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin 
"Because waiting is not waiting, it is life... I believe in appreciation for simplicity, the everyday- the ability to dive deep into the banal and discover life's hidden richness- is where success, let alone happiness, emerges."

Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton 
"Cour" in Latin mean heart, so the definition of courage is to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.

"Those hoops we become so exhausted from jumping through? We created them. We forget that our maker made us human, and it's okay-maybe exactly right-to be human... We sweep up our mess and hide our doubts, contradictions, anger, and fear before showing ourselves to God, which is like putting on a fancy dress and makeup to prepare for an X-ray"

Make Every Man Want You by Marie Forleo
This book is written about relationships, but I think it is an amazing perspective on the way you can look at life.

 "There is a law in physics that no two things can occupy the same space at the same time. In other words you can be complaining about your life... or you can be living your life... You cannot do both at the same time."

"...[we] have approximately 50-60 thousand thoughts per day and 95% of those thoughts are the same ones we had yesterday."

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Build your life around things worth keeping

"He saw them laboring, saw them suffering and turning gray about things that seemed to him entirely unworthy of this price..."

"All are grateful, although they themselves would be deserving of gratitude."

I Believe In...

A few months ago I witnessed myself becoming more spiritual. I say witnessed because it was not even a conscious decision, more like an experience that happened. Many, many little things happened along the way. Now you will find me watching Gabby Bernstein and Marie Forleo, reading, reading, reading, and having in depth talks about manifesting and spirituality.

This switch came as a surprise to everyone who knew me, but to nobody more than myself, a previously devote atheist.
There was a bit of rebelling against religion, but there was no "rock bottom" moment that was the catalyst for me to "turn my life around." It was much more subtle transition, one that I barely saw coming. I was making these tiny tiny decisions unconsciously until I became present to the experience and began to trust.

It started small (like all great things) with signing up for yoga; I wanted to start exercising. And that's what it was for about a year, I loved it, but thought of it only as a work out. Then a small thing happened; yoga helped me let go of cynicism and my repressed anger and begin to live a more compassionate life. I started eating vegetarian and with that came a new respect for life; animals, nature, earth, people, myself. It was as if I was letting go of pessimism and grabbing onto compassion; I could almost feel my body beginning to regain some balance.

Shortly after, I kept hearing the same prompt (that I now understand was exactly what I needed) and it kept saying, "meditate." I first considered it after hearing Chase Jarvis explain how he did it, visualize and practice gratitude, and that was the style that I picked up. Slowly, it changed my life. Anxiety, while always there, began to speak quieter. Love began to have more space and became more profound. Compassion, connection, self-love, all forms of love, all the things that had been lacking in my life began to find their way back.

I have a hard time explaining the switch that has taken place inside me. However, I will say whether or not it is logical is irrelevant. I came from a cold, insincere, judgmental (judging no one more than myself) place where I couldn't hold on to happiness; because it was always tied up in other circumstances. Now there is personal growth and vulnerability and connection and love and trust, everything that I had never been able to cultivate for myself in my attempt to do this all on my own.

I believe in love, and when has love ever been logical?

101

I have learned that when it feels like the Universe is talking to you, it is. I stumbled upon this shortly after writing my first post. It felt right.


credit: alex_elle