Your Courageous Life

Wow. Our assignment for Mondo Beyondo (yesterday!) was to post our lists. What a delicate thing it is. Even if I am in the business of holding space while helping others find their way to the other side of their fear, I notice that the fear does not necessarily dissipate for me easily (which is why I love the adjective “courageous,” which I define as “being afraid, doing it anyway”).

Last night while doing some process work, I noticed that what came up for me, from a very sad place, was a fear that I have “used all my wishes up.” I’m so lucky in so many ways, so fortunate, and have already had a number of amazing synchronous experiences that make for amazing stories to tell. Is it even realistic to hope for more and actually expect to get it? Am I selfish for wanting more despite all the good that I have?

This tapped me into realizing that I’ve resisted fully owning what I most want to do as a coach–I most desire to help other women who are, in so many ways, “just like me,” or who at least occupy the space that I used to occupy 24:7. Women who are smart and funny and big-hearted, who can make things happen and know they’ve done it before but who feel stuck for various reasons and aren’t sure how to make it happen again. Women who know that they have an amazing amount of potential, but they’re feeling sidelined by feelings of sadness or anger or just general powerlessness, and a therapy room isn’t necessarily the place they want to be because that’s a different type of work, perhaps work they’ve even done already, yet going it alone isn’t quite making the cut, either. Women who guilt the shit out of themselves with thoughts like, “I’m so lucky, I’m so fortunate, I’ve already had so many blessings…so what’s wrong with me, that I’m still not fulfilled?” Women who compare themselves with others and know it’s a losing game to do that yet still find themselves doing it, anyway, and then that part–the doing something that isn’t helpful even when we know better–spawns its own guilt and frustration. Women who have defined their lives by doing stuff and want to get off of that treadmill but who want to figure out what life means if they do that, step off the treadmill.

I think I’ve been telling myself for years now that I needed to continue with teaching not just for financial reasons but because the students that I teach, most of which need work on remedial skills just to prepare them for transfer level courses, needed me. Even if they thought I was the biggest bitch ever because I didn’t allow them to just do whatever they wanted, the important thing, the thing I have always known in the back of my mind, is that I cared. I have seen and read about any number of teachers who, bless their hearts, get so burned out or have so much life crap going on or just never really wanted to teach in the first place or who are bitter because they wanted a cushy Uni job but instead got this other job. I haven’t wanted to be those teachers. I’ve had this story that for my life’s work to be meaningful, it had to involve helping those who needed it most, and that had to involve helping people who had barriers in the race/class department.

I still believe that that is meaningful work to do, but through this practice of devoting daily time to really looking at what I want, I’m realizing more and more that it’s a subject I’m passionate about, and just not one that I’m fully invested in in this moment. What if that’s okay?

What if it’s just as meaningful to work with the women who don’t necessarily have all of these social forces working against them, but they are still in their own private hell (and from personal experience, I feel it’s okay to call it that), and that hell involves a constant barrage of self-criticism and feeling overwhelmed and scarcity around money and time and guilt because we “shouldn’t be” feeling that way?

What if it’s okay to just allow my heart to “want what it wants” and what it wants at this stage in my life is to let go of teaching and focus solely on the work I do as a Coach and workshop facilitator?

And with those questions, I noticed myself relax, and release, and a sense of peacefulness has followed me ever since this realization, even if I am aware that what follows is not necessarily quitting my teaching job tomorrow.

Let your heart want what it wants. Good things are there.

And, what follows is…my list!

1.) To have a relationship with Andy that is so strong and connected that it “leaves God speechless.”

2.) To fully heal and let go and forgive any past pain, especially with my parents.

3.) To lead one workshop a month, consisting of 20+ women, and for this to be my career and financial livelihood.

4.) To have a financially, creatively, and emotionally fulfilling coaching practice.

5.) To have a best female friend, with whom I can be completely loved and honored (and that I also completely love and honor).

6.) To publish my books and writing with editors and mentors who value my work.

7.) To own my own four-bedroom home in a safe area in the San Francisco Bay Area.

8.) To walk through the world with such big love that I connect easily and immediately with others and occupy a space of love and connection that leaves no one who meets me feeling like a stranger.

9.) To travel as often as I desire, without financial constraint.

10.) To have no aches, pains, or illness in my body.

11.) To have a healthy baby (Note to Universe: Feel free to put this one on hold for another 2-3 years!).

12.) To have complete financial independence (money in the bank) and financial freedom (freedom from the shame, guilt, and other ick that tends to surround money in our culture).

13.) To have a caring and committed tribe of friends.

I notice that I keep adding to the list, which I’m having a lot of fun with. I also notice that what I’m wishing for isn’t actually so far off from what I’ve got, and that’s really exciting to me. My relationship with Andy is one that is close and connected already, though we do fall out of integrity with it and there’s more ground to cover. I’m already doing the work of forgiveness and letting go. I’m already stepping into the dream of leading workshops. I’m already coaching part-time and with my newfound realizations around what I want to do career-wise, I’m planning to only teach part-time next semester. There are so many things on this list that I’ve already done a lot of prep and paving for, and that is exciting and beautiful.

Even if you didn’t sign up for Mondo Beyondo, I wonder: What’s your dream? (Totally makes me think of that guy at the end of the movie Pretty Woman, which is fun to laugh about. “What’s yo’ dream? Everybody’s gotta dream…gotta keep on dreamin’!”)

Photo by Vivienne McMaster

I so wanted to write over the weekend, or even yesterday, about my excitement with joining Mondo Beyondo.

I completely and totally believe in “mondo beyondo” thinking. I would be more inclined to call it manifesting, or creating one’s life as they wish, but the term “mondo beyondo” is a lot of fun, too. I see it as a term that encompasses both dreaming big as well as the magic of manifesting as well as what I would refer to as “mondo beyondo” moments, or synchronicities–those moments when something happens in this completely easeful way and I realize that my dream has movement and little signs are showing me that it’s coming true.

I first met Andrea years ago, when I made a trip to Davis, California, because I had been accepted into the UC-Davis graduate creative writing program (“mondo beyondo” moment–a college counselor had convinced me to go to graduate school for creative writing, after talking to me and intuiting that in fact writing was what I wanted to do. Rachel, I cannot thank you enough for that!). I made a side trip down to San Francisco, which I had always wanted to see (“mondo beyondo” here–I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and then went to undergrad near Chicago, and would you believe that people throughout my life have randomly told me, “You would really like San Francisco”?). I knew about Andrea’s beautiful necklaces via SARK books (though I don’t think Andrea yet had a blog) and since I was coming through, we arranged to meet for coffee.

She told me about how she met SARK during this meeting, and explained the game of Magpie. Excited, I went home and did it. It was a really, really tough time in my life. I was dating this guy who was a total sociopath, and probably a sex addict. He’d cheated on me a few times, sometimes with friends of mine, once in my own bed and once in my car, and–wowza–I kept taking him back, pretending to believe the lies he was feeding me about how he’d never done anything at all. Even when I made this trip to San Francisco, he was calling me on my cell phone and yelling at me if I couldn’t talk to him because I was shuttling between UC-Davis events or trying to see as much of San Francisco as possible before leaving. My friends had stopped speaking to me, something that was very painful but oddly enough, I kind of understood. I mean, I didn’t really think much of me. Why should they? I’d started doing freelance graphic design before meeting this guy, but then he was always wanting to go out, spend money on dinners, etc. I did poorly on some design assignments and my savings account dwindled because of all of these dinners (sometimes he’d make plans for us to meet up with friends but I’d say I didn’t have money. He’d say he would cover it, but then when the bill would come, he’d hand it straight to me, right in front of them, because he knew I wouldn’t protest about the bill with them sitting there!).

It occurs to me now that while I did write about problems in the relationship at the time, I actually was never brave enough to be honest with most people about what was really going on. Like I said, it was a really, really low point in my life.

But I had my writing, and I had discovered Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and something was dwelling in me that wanted to come out. I went home after meeting Andrea and played magpie, asking what it was that I needed to help me in my life, and landed on the word “credit.” The first listed definition was “Faith, belief.”

I wrote it on a post-it note, and hung it in my college dorm room. That post-it note has traveled with me to every home I’ve ever lived in, since. It has gone on every corkboard near my desk. At a time when I most needed faith and belief in myself, it seemed like something magic reached out from the beyond to give it to me. I so needed that. I still look at that post-it (now fading and a little gnarled around the edges) with utter kindness.

All of my biggest dreams have been the result of “mondo beyondo” thinking. Simply living the life that I am living today, which is a combination of photoshoots and life coaching and time for creative daydreaming and writing and my amazing partner who I admire and love so much…all of this came from a space of being willing to dream big.

I want to use my time with mondo beyondo to connect more. I love the idea of not creating in solitude any longer. I want to declare to the Universe that I need support, I need people. I have a lot of great skills that take me far, and I do let people help, but I still don’t sink into complete vulnerability in the ways that I want to. For instance, note that I said that I “let” people help.

I want complete surrender.

I have also realized lately that I have some big dreams to create. The start of a new semester of teaching English at the college level has only reconfirmed for me that it’s a great job, and yet it’s just not the space that I want to inhabit right now. What I do want to create is more space for myself for coaching (which has been so, so, so busy lately, with requests coming from all over, and it’s so hard to have the teaching demands that limit my availability when all I want to do is follow that energy!) and facilitating workshops (I’m so excited–I have found an alternate workshop space that is going to cut the cost of the workshop by almost half! Go see The Courageous Traveler for an upcoming announcement, and subscribe to the mailing list).

So here’s to “mondo beyondo” thinking, and stepping into a space that is about big-ness and expansion and creation. I am excited to see how the next five weeks unfold.

A little ditty that I put together for my friend Sven, and now, for all of you:

How to Create your Own Adventure Bag

I hope your weekend is full of adventures!

The one and only–my one and only–Andy.

I was excited to see this article on Elizabeth Gilbert making the Facebook rounds today. Commitment in relationships is a topic of particular interest to me, largely because when I envisioned myself as an adult in a relationship, I never in my wildest dreams envisioned the relationship that I am actually in with Andy, today.

Now, since this is not Andy’s blog and he’s entitled to his privacy, there are certain things that I just don’t share about our relationship, certain struggles that I personally think it would be okay to talk about, but that I recognize he wants to keep private as he/we work through them. So I give full disclosure with admitting that of course, we have struggles in our relationship that I don’t air here. That would not be fair to him.

But even at the same time that I say that, I also am so in awe of us, of what we have created. Sometimes, when we work through something particularly sticky and difficult, it feels almost holy or divinely protected. I’ll think, “Where did we get the strength to turn that around? We were so angry a moment ago. How did we do that?”

The answer lies in years of hard work, and of now maintaining that work and of really playing an active role in one another’s lives while also allowing one another a degree of space that, from what I understand of the things that have been shared with me/said, would not work for some other people (i.e., my trips abroad have put me away from my partner for weeks to a month at a time).

Even if I don’t want to share specifics that might compromise our intimacy as a couple, I do feel compelled, in the interests of the topic of commitment, to share a bit about what I see as the tools that help us find our way back to peace.

First, there are some general practices that we try to use in our everyday lives, with everyone we know, that become more important in an intimate relationship. Those include:

1.) Asking for our 100% (respectfully) and not attaching to the person’s response.

2.) Clearing withholds and resentments.

3.) Not taking things personally (i.e., if he’s in a pissy mood, I try to remember that that isn’t about me, it’s about him).

4.) Doing our own personal work to process out fear, shame, guilt, old wounds so that we don’t take out our triggers on one another.

Then there are some other practices, that are all about us.

a.) Asking “How can I support you now?” when one or the other of us is upset.

b.) Taking time a few times a week for a check-in that involves giving appreciations, clearing withholds, making amends/apologies.

c.) Saying “Re-do, please,” when someone says something disrespectful.

All of this sounds like a lot of work–all of the work on the self, the work on the relationship. At this point it doesn’t really feel that way, because it’s become a lifestyle. It’s no longer weird or different to use these tools, whereas at one point in time, one or both of us had resistance to using them and the effort of trying to do something new would spark more fights. But having established some kind of pattern with using them, they get easier (even if, I confess, a few times a year we still have those really nasty arguments that last for hours).

I guess that for the most part, we’ve arrived at a place where it takes less time for our 20-minute check in with one another a few times a week than it does to have one of those exhausting arguments that can last into the wee hours of the night and leave someone with an “argument hangover” the next morning.

But again, I never could have imagined, when this relationship began, that it would end up here. Movies and television and the filtered reports on relationships that I got from friends never taught me what a real, healthy relationship looked like. Certainly, I did not see it in my parents, who divorced at seven, and who maintained something like abject disgust for one another for several years following the divorce.

I am most proud of us at times such as the past two weeks, when Andy has had an influx of freelance work, and I have started a new semester of teaching, and there are days when we are like two ships passing in the night (quite literally, there are days when he is heading into San Francisco while I am home, and then I am heading into San Francisco when he’s heading back to the house!).

We checked in with one another last weekend about all of this–about the things that need to be done around the house, the watering schedule for the plants, how to meal plan and get cooking done, how to do laundry. And it suddenly dawned on me that despite all of our connection, we still separate a lot. We do separate bill paying, separate grocery shopping, separate laundry, separate chores. It was a surprise to realize that there are all of these things that we haven’t integrated, and that the idea of integrating them scared me a little–I was running up against an edge of my comfort zone, a little edge of intimacy that keeps me from fully integrating my life with his.

So, I took a step out of my comfort zone, getting a little more dependent and integrated in a kind of funny way: I asked him to make me a package of chicken once a week.

(I’m totally laughing at myself right now).

Since letting go of vegetarianism about a year ago, I still have never gotten over cooking raw meat. I hate it. I find chicken to be particularly disgusting, and I’m paranoid about getting salmonella juice all over the place. Andy cooks a package of chicken for us whenever he’s eating it, too. I’ve never asked him to make it for me just because I needed some help with meal planning and it was a task that I really disliked doing.

He agreed, without hesitation.

And this is where I get the gift of all the work that we’ve done to be connected–I feel truly appreciative to have a guy who would help me out by grilling up some chicken once a week and putting it in a tupperware container for me to parcel out during the week.

When I saw, earlier this week, that he was inundated with work, I took over watering the plants and sweeping up the grounds, even though this is a job that he normally takes on. And why? Because it needed to be done, my man needed help in that way, and I was stepping up. He was totally appreciative.

It seems to me that what so much of this work to be connected–and committed–is about is staying in a place of gratitude and appreciation for one’s partner. Even when we are having a rough time, we still always have these moments where we will laugh and laugh, or replay one of our inside jokes, or do something sweet for one another. It’s that thread of gratitude and appreciation that has carried us through tough times. Even in the hardest periods, I can always find something about him that I love and appreciate.

It is a scary thing to commit to someone in this way, and it involves a lot of dropping of Ego and my own crap and attending to the matter at hand. It is the most wonderful journey I’ve ever undertaken, thus far, and by far it has been the most rewarding, the most steeped in benefits.

“You are sitting on the earth and you realize that this earth deserves you and you deserve this earth. You are there–fully, personally, genuinely.” — Chogyum Trungpa

Deserve.

What a loaded word!

I have been thinking about it since starting “The Wishing Year” by Noelle Oxenhandler, which I finished a few days ago. The book has stayed with me, ever since. One of the things she explores in the book is deservedness. Who deserves to have their wishes fulfilled, and who doesn’t? And if one is not deserving, how does one become deserving? And how might carrying the very story that one is or is not deserving keep someone from having a wish fulfilled?

I like playing with this idea, because like most people, I have been trained by society to assume that I am automatically not deserving and that there are things I need to do to prove my worth. Note the choice of “things I need to do.” It’s assumed, when the very concept of deservingness is even brought into the picture, that deservingness is about action, not about being. Deservingness carries with it the idea that something must be earned.

Anytime I notice a rigidly held and limiting belief in myself that I realize to be completely and totally wrong, I always feel sort of giddy, even if I notice that little critters pull at me not to give up the belief entirely. Deservingness is such a belief. Even though little critters are quick to jump in with a chorus of reasons why someone (like me) must earn the right to be happy, must “pay their dues,” or must work hard to ensure that I stay deserving, some knowing beyond all knowing within me knows that it’s bullshit.

You are deserving. I am deserving. We are all deserving.

Even if no one can “prove” it to me, I know that at a core level, it’s true, and so it’s the space that I try to live in.

It was something of a shock to me when I realized that I did not walk around with the belief that I deserved respect. It was sometime last year that I fully grasped this. I was allowing students, family members, friends, random strangers, etc., to speak to me in ways that were disrespectful or to treat me in ways that were disrespectful. The comments or behavior would be endlessly frustrating, but I wouldn’t say anything about it because I didn’t believe I had a right to do so.

I was not conscious of this belief; it was simply something that I felt but had not taken time to identify as a lack of respect for myself or valuing myself. If someone flaked out on a commitment, I would be frustrated but I would think things like, “Oh, well, I’m supposed to be understanding. I’m supposed to be flexible. I’m supposed to take things in stride. I’m not supposed to have expectations.” 

I think that all of those things are true (just without the “supposed to” part; I prefer to substitute “can make a choice to”), and while I also want to hold understanding, flexibility, and lack of expectations in the palm of my hand, I also want to hold a place of honor for myself and being authentically true to myself. 

(Not the simplest thing in the world, huh?)

I also held a lot of fear that the people who loved me conditionally would no longer love me if I stepped into a space of asking for what I really desire.

There are all of these loose threads that I notice myself thinking about as I write this. Like, first I want to write something that tells anyone reading this how lovely they are, how deserving they are. Then I want to write indignantly about how I Stood up for myself! and Started speaking my truth! 

And then I settle on this phrase: “I make no apologies for who I am.”

I mentioned in my last entry this fierce lion RAWR that was coming up for me around working on me to get to a place where I feel fully in integrity around the choice to become a mother. And with this sentence, “I make no apologies for who I am,” I feel that RAWR in me again. It’s not a gentle RAWR, nor is it an aggressive, in your face, “Back off!” RAWR, so much as it is this sense of being very grounded in my power.

All of this, all of my life–it’s all journey, so I learn and learn and learn and fuckitup and learn, again (or re-learn). I realized a few months ago that I was walking through much of my life with this very scared person running the show. This scared person was doing so much of the talking that it was difficult to even get that she was in there, to distinguish her voice as a scared, frightened voice rather than seeing that voice as “me.”

This scared voice was sort of walking around with my life going, “Um, you know, if it’s okay with you–if it won’t offend anyone–could I, you know, make the decision to live my life the way I want? I promise I will try REALLY REALLY REALLY hard never to upset anyone else. Oh, wait–so you don’t think that’s right? Oh, you think I’m arrogant, selfish, awful, stupid, rude–I am so sorry. I really am! I swear I never meant to do [that]. Will you please forgive me? I promise it won’t happen again.”

As soon as an accusation of wrongdoing was lobbed at me, as soon as someone else was triggered, I was off and running, fearful, trying to tiptoe around and not set anyone off. I was aware that I resented it massively, and I was aware that I was not living powerfully, and I was working on how to communicate better with my Coach, but really I was working with what I knew intellectually rather than what I’d integrated.

In little bits and baubles, in a two-steps-forward and two-steps-back kind of way, I see how this lion RAWR of power in me is becoming more and more integrated. 

The lack of RAWR was showing up in my role as a teacher. For years, I have been afraid of my classes not going well and thus, I have committed Teacher Sin Number One more than once–giving people a lot of third and fourth chances, and then watched as that spiraled out of control. All it took was seeing a student give me a look like “God, what a bitch” and I felt this sinking feeling in my stomach, because the part of me that wants the student to be invested in the class and see that I care fought with the part of me that knew I’d set up a rule about attendance or late homework for a reason, and that as soon as I started bending those rules, I was out of integrity both as a teacher and with myself.

Lion RAWR says: Here are the guidelines of my classroom. I put them out there not to be mean, but because I want to run the best class that I can. If you don’t like those guidelines, you’re totally in choice to find another class. Additionally, I will lovingly support that choice. I will not shift who I am or compromise my integrity. (And I make no apologies for that).

The lack of RAWR has shown up in my friendships. I saw friendships where I knew I wasn’t giving enough and I kept pushing myself to give more because I felt I “should,” and I saw friendships where I saw that someone else was not giving/opening, and I chided myself for “wanting too much.” 

Lion RAWR says: It’s okay to want connection with others (and it’s okay for them to not want connection with me). And if they don’t want to connect with me in the same way, I don’t have to make apologies if I decide that I need to move on to find what I am looking for. When I sense that I’m not giving fully because I notice I don’t feel an authentic connection, I’m not a bad person. I am who I am. I need not apologize for that.

I saw lack of personal power in the way I allowed people to speak to me without respect. I accepted the accusation that if someone’s disrespect upset me, they were right: “I’m too sensitive; I shouldn’t let things bother me.” If they told me that they had a right to be mad at me because I had done XYZ, I took that as the Word. If they said that they wouldn’t speak to me respectfully because they were too angry and how could I expect them to not be angry, I went right along with it.

Lion RAWR says: I make no apologies for my feelings; I am not “too” sensitive. I accept that others may be angry with me while also knowing that I need to be spoken to respectfully. They can have their anger. What they can’t do is take it out on me.

With writing, photography, and creativity, the lack of RAWR showed up as constant comparisons of what I was doing to what others were doing, constantly setting up better than/worse than scenarios in which I almost always came out the loser.

Lion RAWR says: You show up and do the work that feels most authentic to you. They’ll show up and do the work that feels most authentic to them. No one is the winner/loser; we’re all people responding to our creative expression and because the world is such a varied place, you’ll find people who resonate with your vision and people who resonate with someone else’s vision.

I am stepping more and more into a space of making no apologies for who I am. This isn’t a “fuck you if you don’t like it” declaration. It is a declaration of being unwilling to continue self-hate in the form of apologizing, hoping, begging, punishing, pleading, if-I-just-try-harder-I’ll-be-better. 

It is a path of realizing that the response that feels best to me when faced with someone saying “Just who the hell do you think you are?” is…”I am magnificently human!”

It is realizing that whenever an accusation of imperfection is thrown my way, I have the power to just own and accept that yeah, I’m imperfect.

I’m working on me.

The hard part about stepping into this space is that until I’ve fully 100% claimed “me,” without apologies, the critics still have their sway. There is still a part of me–the part that is hooked into concepts like deservingness–that can start to question myself. It’s difficult to know that I am walking the world doing my best, and there will still be people who question that.

And it’s difficult to be someone who steps out from the pack. Doing this makes one visible. Stepping into a space of not apologizing for who I am because it doesn’t serve me is the kind of thing that can just make someone more vulnerable to attack. I’ve already felt that, more than once.

Isn’t that sentence–”Just who the hell do you think you are?”–a tough one to swallow?

For me, it can be–but I notice that it’s an easier one to swallow when the answer is…”I’m a magnificent human being!”…even if it takes courage to be willing to say that. 

However I live, I want to do so without resentment. The first person I don’t want to resent is myself, and whenever I go against my integrity or dull my flame and agree to live anything less than 100% fully alive, resentment follows.

Where do you place limits on yourself for what you deserve? Where do you notice others can “put you in your place” when you try to occupy a bigger space? Where do you notice you putting YOU in your place? Where’s your lion RAWR, that deep grounded growl of power in your gut? What would it take for you to claim yourself as magnificent?

Longtime readers of my journal might have noticed something–something glaringly different–that I have mentioned in these more recent posts. It’s something that I have struggled with for years (though it didn’t show up as struggle as often as it showed up as judgment): deciding whether or not I wanted to have children.

This is an incredibly tender topic for me to share about, but one that I feel such a dramatic shift around, that I can’t help but want to share the story of how radically this issue has altered my life.

For years now, I have been adamant that I did not want to have children–ever. The biggest reasons for this were twofold:

1.) I felt sure that if I did have children, my “life” would be over. That’s it. No more creative work. No more lazy Saturday mornings. No more throwing money at a sweater or something meaningless  when there were diapers to buy. No more sex or intimacy with my partner. I have felt convinced that my  life would become nothing but changing diapers and running after screaming children.

2.) I didn’t want to “fuck it up.” This was the phrase I used when I talked to people about it. “I don’t want to have a kid, because I’m pretty sure I’d fuck it up,” I said. I was not always being glib or rough when I said this. For some reason, that phrase “fuck it up” was the most authentic phrase I felt I could use. I walked with a belief that, for sure, if I were to have a child, I would “fuck it up” by yelling at it or not wanting to be as attentive as I should be or somehow passing along all of my flaws, pains, and hurts to that child.

As a result of being so adamant that I did not want kids, I was someone who could not be in a store with a screaming child. If I was out and about and a kid started howling, I’d grab Andy and say “Get me out of here–now.” And when another female friend of mine would get pregnant, I’d think, “Another one bites the dust,” because (unfortunately) it has been my experience that moms want to hang with other moms, people with whom they feel they have more in common. I felt judgmental of women who had kids and then complained about the duties of motherhood. I would then complain to Andy about mothers who complained. “They signed themselves up,” I would tell him in frustration. “God invented birth control for a reason. I’m sick of mothers positing themselves as martyrs just because they had kids.” You know that Sex and the City episode in season six, the one where Carrie’s shoes are stolen and Tatum O’Neal plays her friend who “shoe shames” Carrie? I watched that episode multiple times, always siding with Carrie. I’d felt the energy, too, of parents who believed that being a parent trumped all other cards. More than once, when talking to other parents, Andy and I would be asked what we were up to and if we said something like, “Oh, we got up, went out to breakfast, hit a few bookstores,” we’d get responses like, “Well, wait until you have kids–those days will be over!” I resented this attitude enormously because, it seemed to me, I did not invalidate their choices to have kids, so why were they invalidating my choice to be child-less? 

The energy,  felt very us/them, very polarized. And I heightened that sense of polarization with my resentment.

(If you are reading any of this and intuiting it as outright hostility, you’d be right–but keep reading).

Alongside this hostility, there were these other experiences that happened here and there. Experiences like:

* A recurring dream. In it, I am riding in the passenger’s seat of a car, at night. We are on the highway, and the orangey highway lights are fading in and out as we pass by them, illuminating things briefly and then fading out, illuminating, fading out. And on my lap there is a baby. She has a head of black hair and these dark eyes. She is wearing a little white t-shirt and a white diaper, and her head is near my knees and her feet are near my belly, and she’s just looking at me, watching me. And in this dream, I feel such a strong love for her, and she’s my baby and I’m just utterly in love with her. And then–I wake up. And over the years of having this dream, when I would wake up and realize that it was a dream and she wasn’t with me in real life, I would cry and cry, just so completely and totally heartbroken that it wasn’t true, that this baby was not my baby, and it had only been a dream.

* Not a dream: In my old chiropractor’s office years ago, a woman who was in extreme pain came in with her baby who was only a few weeks old. The secretary was holding the baby while the mother was being treated, and then all the phone lines were ringing at once, and suddenly I was holding this baby for the secretary. I held her facing outward, so that we were both looking the same direction, out the window. And as I held this little body against mine, and smelled her, and rocked her, it was the kind of simple pleasure that I don’t know I’ve felt under any other circumstances. It was, quite simply, fulfilling.

* I will never forget being 14 and watching my youngest sister being born, the way the entire hospital room was filled with the most beautiful, radiant energy possible, the way my mother and I held each other and cried nakedly at the most extraordinary experience of a new life emerging into the world. And I was the first person to hold my youngest sister, this small little football-sized being who sort of squinted out at the world, sort of like, “Yeah, I’m not so sure about this. But we’ll give it a shot.” 

* Feeling a complete thrill when a kid would give me a hug, draw me a picture, or ask to tell me a secret. Andy has remarked frequently over the years that I seem “very natural” with kids (note: screaming kids didn’t count).

Despite these experiences, which all fill me with a glow just thinking/writing about them, the “you’ll lose your life completely” and the “you’ll fuck it up” fears persisted, and continued to manifest as feeling judgmental about the idea of having children.

When I was in Florence this summer, my days knit themselves together with a lot of simplicity. Things were very…slow. It was delicious. I woke up in the mornings and looked out over the stone-tiled roof, listened to the birds chirping and roosters crowing, the lilting Italian conversations I might hear drift up from below. There were no city noise sounds. It was all peace. And I sunk into that peace. I simply sat and watched the world around me, or sometimes I would write in my journal.

A week into my trip, I made contact with some friends of ours who happened to be staying about an hour and a half away, in Anghieri, which is near Arezzo. I went down to Arezzo for the antique market and had lunch with them and with their small son, and then at the last minute they invited me to stay with them at their villa. I had no extra clothes and no toothbrush, but they said that they had a t-shirt I could sleep in and we’d grab a toothbrush at the store. 

The twenty-four hours that I spent with them showed me, for the first time, what raising a child could look like if two parents were committed to working together (my own parents’ marriage and subsequent divorce was not an example of this, and neither are some of the other parents I’ve seen). These two parents had established a rhythm with things, they communicated so well by asking questions about what one or the other needed. Their small son was included as part of our meals and conversations, but he was not the sole focal point. I happened to know that the two of them worked very hard on their relationship, both between themselves and with a professional. As a third wheel adult, I felt very easily and simply integrated into their lives, as opposed to the “you just wouldn’t understand” energy I’ve sometimes felt from parents. 

One of the things we talked about together were my feelings about being a parent. We talked about some of the difficulties I’ve felt with other parents, about the fears of it changing my life, and about how they made things work. 

I’d been having a rough time with jetlag–nearly a week in, and my stomach would still feel queasy. And at one point when I mentioned not feeling so great, the woman looked at me and said, “Are you pregnant?”

And I said, “No.”

And she said: “Are you sure?”

And I said: “I’m sure.”

And–right there–it occurred to me that I was a little…sad (!) that I was not pregnant, that I knew that pregnancy was not a possibility that explained the queasiness. This was, of course, such a strange thought–why would someone be sad they weren’t pregnant, especially someone who was convinced that a kid would change things in so many bad ways, leaving me with no life of my own and then guilt-ridden for not being a better mother?

I left Anghieri and over the next few days and weeks I continued to be slow, to meditate, to think, to write. And one day, out of nowhere, this thought came to me:

“I want to be a mamma.”

On the heels of it was: You DO?

And then, quite certain: Absolutely. I want to be a mamma.

Suddenly, I was laughing and crying at exactly the same time, my hands resting on my lower abdomen, and I was filled with excitement and joy and relief. Of course! Of course I want to be a mamma!

It felt very similar to when, ten years ago, I stopped putting so much energy into insisting on atheism and finally acknowledged that despite an utter lack of provable evidence, and despite the scathing condescension of non-believers,  I do believe in a higher power, some Universal life-source energy something that is not polluted with the “God” conception of society but that is all-knowing and all-loving. It was a sense of, “Oh, thank goodness I can just relax now and stop resisting and insisting!”

Resisting = what I felt to be genuinely true for me. Insisting = that I felt something different or that what I felt was wrong.

I felt sort of…nuts with this realization that I wanted to be a mamma. Over the next few days it would keep hitting me again and again: I want to be a mamma. That phrase, exactly–not “mother,” but mamma. And the reaction, again and again, was the same: laughter, and excitement, because–hey!–I get to be a mamma! I get to be a mamma, now! This is so cool! How exciting that I’ve realized this and now I know and I can just acknowledge how I really feel!

I kept checking in with myself–was I sure? Was I sure this was what I wanted? What came up was that I realized that I wanted motherhood and a family, the way I wanted other larger lifelong things, like publishing a book or having more connection with my family.

Spending time with my friends in Italy showed me that there is a way to have a child and not lose oneself entirely. I don’t think it’s easy. But I do think it’s possible. And once I saw how they did things, I started perking up and noticing other families, and how they did things, and then I realized that in fact, in my rush to resist the idea, I had missed a lot of examples of families that work very well. In my resistance/insistence, I had conjured up lots of stories of how awful parenthood had to be, and in fact, I was now seeing a lot of people who seemed to enjoy it, to take the frustrations of it in stride.

But then we get to the “I’ll fuck it up” fear.

And that is where I tell you that my life changed as a result of realizing that I want to be a parent.

For a few years now, I have been seeing a Life Coach named Matthew. I think he is the most wonderful and amazing human being. He gave me a series of daily practices to use as part of our work together. I would do them, but not consistently, and the ones that I most avoided had to do with processing out old angers and hurts. I just did not want to do those practices. I did not want to confront the anger or fear inside. 

Having acknowledged that I want to be a mamma, in Italy I began keeping up with those practices every day. There is a fierce lion rawr in me that says: I will not consciously pass on my anger and hurt and pain to my child! 

The scope of my life became larger. Suddenly, my life no longer feels entirely about me, anymore. It now feels like it’s about me, and about this child that I want to bring into the world–this child that I have some strange sense of already loving. It’s about wanting to love Andy more deeply, wanting to bridge whatever withholds we have created in our relationship (great as it is, they are of course there), to get to a core intimacy.

All because of this: I am unwilling to consciously damage my child. 

For sure, there will be ways that I will unconsciously hurt my child, simply because I’m human and I will make mistakes. But there is a limit, for me, and I see it as this: I know, for instance, that I am someone who can lose her temper easily. It is an old pattern for me to lose my temper when I’m feeling emotionally “leaky” rather than to consciously do process work to get out the hurt/anger/pain. I’m aware that I do this, and thus, to bring a child into that without doing work on it first would be so unfair. Will I lose my temper with my child? At some point. But what I’m speaking into is my unwillingness to continue on with patterns that hurt others, while I sit back and do nothing about them. I’m doing my work now, on a deeper and bigger level, because it would not sit right to me to become a mamma and then continue acting out old patterns without giving my 100% to changing them.

For me, the equation looks like this: Imperfect mom working on healing old wounds = Okay. Imperfect mom who is unwilling to work on healing old wounds = Not Okay. I feel that for me, I must be more conscious than that about my choice to bring a kid into the world. I must.

So now, nearly three months later, life feels very different. My pivot point has shifted. 

I am not pregnant and do not intend to be at any time soon. At the same time that I want to have consciousness around my habits re: relationships with others, I want to be conscious of the fact that I do want to travel for a year in 2010, and I do need time to work on  changing old patterns, and I do have creative goals that, objectively speaking, will be more easily accomplished while I am without child. There are lots of other factors that go into this, and the timing, for one thing, is a big one.

And, by the way, I shared all of this with Andy–who was shocked by the turn around, but who is happy because he has always envisioned himself as a father one day.

I now realize that all of my hostility and judgment was really just a reaction to how badly I wanted something yet how awful I felt about telling myself that I couldn’t have it, wanting to love THAT BIG yet being afraid that I would not really have that chance.

And so it is. My daily life changes little–I am still me, still following the same path of working on me, but noticing that I have fewer excuses. When resistance to doing my tools/practices comes up, I notice that just thinking for even a second of HOW BIG I want to love my family one day is enough to get me moving. It’s as if someone said to me if I apply myself for the next two or three years, at the end of it I’ll get a million bazillion dollars, and all I have to do is just put forth my very best effort. 

I never thought the day would come when having a family would be the type of thing I’d equate with getting a million bazillion dollars. 

I’m so happy that it has. It feels like a wider and truer opening up into who I am.

And, by the way, I want to say that I don’t believe that my life as a mother will be any more or less valid than the lives of those who decide not to have kids. I still support, and will always support, someone’s choice not to have children. As Elizabeth Gilbert said in a talk she gave in San Francisco last year, “The world needs lots of us Aunties.” I love that thought of creating a community, a family, that transcends bloodlines and ropes all different choices and paths into a circle of inclusion.

I am always reading three or four (or five or six) different books at once, but the one I picked up two days ago at a bookstore had to be a good one. What with being a house-sitter now instead of someone with a permanent address, the only books I keep with me anymore are those I know I’ll read (libraries become quite an issue as I have zero willpower in them). And so far, I’m loving it and predict that it will be the next Eat, Pray, Love -esque sensation:The Wishing Year by Noelle Oxenhandler.

It’s a book about her forays into manifesting, into making wishes. Arriving at a crossroads in her life, she takes a tip from her friend Carole and begins, tentatively at first, putting herself out there and daring to wish, pushing past all of the messages we’re fed about how we should “only wish for something holy” or “it’s wrong to wish for material things” or “you shouldn’t wish for things for yourself, you should wish for them for other people.”

The book doesn’t have as strong of a narrative line as Gilbert’s book, and I don’t find it quite as funny, but I relate to what she writes, because even though I would say I’ve experienced any number of manifesting miracles, I confess that I still have those little negative critters in my head. Most recently, I remember feeling incredibly guilty about traveling to Italy in June. There was so much on the news about layoffs and financial troubles, and somehow I had pulled in the money to take this trip and not go into debt. To be quite blunt, there were moments when I felt “like a total asshole,” as I put it to my Coach, Matthew.

He asked me why, and I explained that when people would ask me, “Aren’t you excited? Tell me what you’re going to do!” I would notice myself holding back, not quite wanting to say how excited I was, not quite wanting to say it was great, not wanting to own that I was proud that I had manifested the money and the time, that I had decided upon something I wanted, let go, released, and the Universe (because that is what I believe it is) just brought it to me with little or no effort on my part. It seemed almost…unfair. As a result, I was hardly saying anything about my trip, and I deferred a lot of conversations about it to some other topic.

But this struggle is not simply a recent one. It has been a lifelong challenge to simply be who I am–someone with a willingness to go after what I desire, wholeheartedly, and to sift through the feelings of fear and the possibility of failure and the ohshit moments–and then realize that this can be a huge trigger for others. A friend once told me that whenever we would talk, “you’d have three or four new things going on, and I’d just feel like with me, it was the same old thing every time.” And what she hadn’t realized  was that I didn’t really care about her having new things to report; I simply thought she was great and it had never occurred to me that her life was “the same old” anything (I promptly commenced with telling her this!). I genuinely enjoyed talking with her, laughing with her, window shopping with her, just…hanging out.

I’ve also been told, in both blatant and passive-aggressive terms, that in my joy, I’ve been guilty of selfishness–because I wasn’t keeping a focus on the fact that others were/are suffering. And this has been an accusation that, when lobbed at me, I find to be a little crippling, especially because the times when it has happened I feel clean and in integrity that I wasn’t bragging or talking about some stroke of good fortune in order to make myself feel good–I had only shared it, because I was happy and excited and because I hadn’t anticipated that the person I was talking to would be anything other than happy and excited alongside me.

It was only after some time with personal growth work that made any headway on it at all and realized that, hey, people who are suffering probably wish they weren’t suffering, and the most offensive thing I can do–as someone who was born into this lifetime with access to clean, running water; an education and subsequently a job; a family and partner who love me; a host of social options that come from being born with white skin; a host of options that come from being born into what is currently the richest and most powerful country in the world; a healthy body–would be to not enjoy that fully or to live a life full of nothing but guilt or to reject it in any way. Better to offer it all up in gratitude, loving it, praising it, being thankful for it. Better to continually ask the question: How amazing can my life be? And then: How much more amazing can my life be? And then encouraging others to ask the same questions.

I love it when I can exist totally in this space, and some days it is a challenge more than others. When I had this pre-trip session with Matthew, I was not existing in a good space. I was feeling guilty, worried that I would trigger others and that they might reject me in some way, or feel badly about their own lives.

[Notice, by the way, how laughable it is that I put myself and my own tiny little Ego at the center of so much of this!]

“So what if they feel bad about their lives?” Matthew said.

I think I might have blinked a few times and then said, “Come again?”

“So what if they feel bad about their lives?” he repeated.

“Um…I don’t want to make someone feel bad about their life.”

“How in the world could you do that?”

“Well, if someone else wants to travel but they can’t because they don’t have the money or time, they might feel bad if I talk too much about my trip,” I explained.

“So what if they feel bad?” he said. “Sometimes pain is just what we need in order to look around at our lives and decide to make changes.”

And then he pointed out to me that it wasn’t my responsibility to usher in other people’s happiness–that’s theirresponsibility–and no one else is responsible for my own happiness–that’s my responsibility–and that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t control other people’s feelings anyway.

The thing I love about Matthew is that he said all of this so lovingly, without any of the “So get over yourself, already” subtext that I find myself thinking of as I relay the session, now.

We live in such an odd society with so many mixed messages about happiness: what it means, what it looks like, how to get it, who deserves it and who doesn’t deserve it, how one can become deserving, the ways in which one can fall from grace and no longer be deserving.

I realize that I am stepping out of my comfort zone and into a bigger space when I declare this: 

IT’S ALL KIND OF BULLSHIT!

No, wait: IT’S ALL BULLSHIT!

Thaaat’s better.

The people who raised us, who made sacrifices both big and small, did not invest that time and effort and energy for any of us to live halfway. 

And I am hardly perfect, and don’t anticipate that I will become perfect tomorrow, and yet I am declaring right now that I deserve, absolutely, to live 100% fully alive because that’s why I’m here.

And I can’t imagine that you, reading this, are perfect, but I am declaring right now that you, absolutely, without a doubt in my mind, deserve to live 100% fully alive. That’s why you’re here, too.

I believe that we are at a place in time, especially with so many global crises occurring, where we need to do away entirely with this notion of who is and isn’t deserving. It seems to me that “the bad guys” are created by this very notion. People who have been taught that they are worthy and good in healthy ways simply do not become terrorists. I think of a bumper sticker I’ve seen several times now: “We are creating our enemies faster than we can kill them.” We create them through poverty and lack of the basic necessities. While I do not currently experience poverty or lack of access to basic necessities, I do know that when I am personally fulfilled–when all of my needs are attended to–I am a better person in this world. 

So why not live abundantly? Why not ask how much better life can be? Why not dream bigger? 

I think we need the world to be more committed to dreaming bigger than to disaster management. We need the world to be more committed to possibility than to shrinking away in fear.

I grew up in the Midwest, a place where one is conditioned to read words like this and have a response that is something along the lines of: “Enough with the hippie-talk. You don’t get somewhere through wishing and dreaming. You get somewhere through hard work and sacrifice. The hard work is what determines who deserves/gets what they want.”

While my “rational mind” tells me that this is the truth, some deeper knowing beyond all knowing that is in me has story upon story upon story of magic in my own personal experience, of times and ways that something I wanted, something I was afraid to want, something that seemed so BIG (too big!) to want, came to me–almost effortlessly. What I did time and time again was this: I was more committed to what I wanted, than I was to fear.

I always know that I am on my way to bringing something great into my life when I am more committed to the thing I’m bringing than I am to fear (and fear can show up as procrastination, excuses, outright fear, crying, a sudden predisposition for drama, critical voices…so many different things).

I also believe that the fear shows up in direct proportion to how badly something is wanted. If MONSTER fear is showing up, you can believe that there’s a MONSTER desire behind it. The fear is showing up big because I am dreaming big. 

I refuse to believe that dreaming big could ever be wrong.

So here’s what I’m currently wishing to bring into my life. Some of these things feel bigger and harder than others, and I’m trying to notice that and just believe that they are all the absolutely the same. 

1. Complete and total forgiveness, on a core “little kid” level, of my parents.
2. Greater intimacy with Andy. No more wasting time with the petty arguments.
3. Patience. Inner calm. More ease with tapping into my knowing beyond all knowing higher self.
4. To be a multi-millionaire. [**Oooh, does that one ever trigger the "Who do you think you are?" gremlins...]
5. To own a home in the Trestle Glen area of Oakland, which serves as a home base for Andy and I when we are in California, but which also allows some an artist or student to house-sit for us (in exchange for free room/board) while we are away.
6. To travel as often as I was inspired to travel–probably 3-4 months out of the year.
7. To have a child // To trust that I’ll be an amazing mother.
8. To teach classes part-time, and only at the college where I desire to teach.
9. To coach part-time.
10. To have a healthy, disease-free body. [I currently have this, and wish for the chronic aches/pains to let go of their hold, release their grip.]
11. To publish my writing–novels–non-fiction–short stories with a company who really desires my work and treats it well.
12. For my writing to be received well, understood, nurtured.
13. A wider circle of close friends who are committed to a shared vision for our lives/the world.
14. One very close female friend–the kind of best friend that seemed so easy to find at five years old. Utter trust, loyalty, laughter, joy, and a willingness to invest the time into the relationship.
15. To speak Italian fluently and effortlessly.
16. To travel to India this upcoming December.
17. To visit NYC this upcoming October.

That’s where I start. 

What about you? If you were to step outside of your comfort zone and declare boldly that you wanted something–something you know you’re terrified to want or something that you think you “shouldn’t” want or something you’re pretty sure would “never happen”–what would it be?