Your Life Speaks

A few years ago, I wanted–really desired–to be a working visual artist. I’d gotten back into painting, really loved it, and had had some minor success with some local art shows while working part-time as a teacher. Why not make the leap? I decided. I loved writing, painting, coaching, and photography. Why not make them all work?

I took a leave of absence from teaching and spent the next several months struggling with the newfound pressure that I had created in my life. Painting stopped being the thing that balanced out the stress that came up with teaching, and instead became the thing that was another source of stress.

I hadn’t realized when I’d decided I’d start really trying to sell my work that it required so many things–like a marketing plan. I spent all of this time pouring over books at the library, pulling together portfolios, CDs with high quality copies of my images, cover letters. I submitted my work to greeting card companies and I contacted galleries. The galleries were not at all interested. I did manage to get a few small shows at local coffee shops. This was really gratifying–and a lot of hard work. There was the work of creating 15-20 pieces (depending on size; lots of large pieces = fewer of them) and there were deadlines. While waiting to be brought to the show, the pieces needed somewhere to live, so this took up quite a bit of storage space. When it was time for the show to actually happen, usually the owners wanted us to come by close to closing time–10pm, 11pm, or right when they were opening. Then there was the physical work of hanging the pieces themselves. Add in the publicity of the opening night, the awkwardness of standing around when few people showed up (oh, my). Depending on the place, the owner of the coffee shop either monitored sales (and took their cut) or I handled the phone calls and inquiries; it really depended on the shop. When something sold, the owner usually requested that I create a piece to hang in its place.

When it was all over, anything that hadn’t sold needed to be taken down, brought back to the house, and stored.

Now, I do realize that some people might read this description and think, “Uh, what’s the problem?” Maybe it sounds really exciting to them.

Those people, I think, are the people who are far more aligned with doing the work of being a visual artist, than I am!

The thing is, I just really like to paint. I like to get messy with glue. I like to play around with color. I fell into showing or selling my work by accident–either someone made a request for a print online or I was asked to be part of a show. Things sort of went from there. I didn’t actually like doing the marketing, the pressure to create so much work at once, fielding phone calls from shows. I liked the creative part, and I really liked it when people would meet with me to collect their piece–it was so fun to see where something was going.

But that’s it.

So since that time, I’ve mostly been creating in a haphazard way. The biggest hurdle for me has been: “What’s the point?”

What’s the point of creating something that will just sit in my house? What’s the point of spending all of that money and time? What’s the point of making something no one is ever going to see?

That’s the inner critic that comes up, but something fiercer and stronger inside knows: the point is the point.

The point is just to make a point of getting messy.

The point is to play.

The point is to create simply because it feels good to create.

Why would I need to make myself wait for something more than that?

A new group of Across Mediums peeps will be beginning their journey this weekend. I’ve been tweaking the course since last time around, adding in bits and bringing more of that emotional component to it–what are our barriers to just creating for the sake of creating? Where do we use “what’s the point” as an excuse to back down?

Anyone else with me, here, on this “What’s the point?” feeling? I feel that I’ve really gotten over a lot of that by diving in and having fun–by practicing that simply by walking into creating, I see clearly what the point is. How about you?

Come Alive ~ Courageous Living Retreats from Kate Swoboda on Vimeo.

I’m opening up some new Courageous Play retreat dates for Summer 2010 in San Francisco, CA. There are so many fun and funky places that I love to show people in this city! What amazes me every time I give myself a weekend away to PLAY is how refreshed I feel afterwards. I come back thinking, “Now, why did I put so much effort into resisting that?”

The dates are: June 11-13th, 2010 and August 27-29th, 2010

Right now, I’m in the wait-listing stage, but if you want to be added to the list, contact me directly via phone or email (kate@yourcourageouslife.com or 510.827.0303) and I’ll add you to the list. If you want to learn more about the retreat and what it includes, click here for the PDF. I will make final decisions about retreat dates on May 15th, so please contact me ASAP if you’re ready to pack a bag and have some fun!

P.S. What’s your wisdom? http://ow.ly/1DgNA

All of My Days from Kate Swoboda on Vimeo.

When I made this video, it was after a period of sadness that had been really tough to wrestle with. When I was making the video, one of the questions that guided me was “What’s your wisdom?” with “What can you say you know for sure?” coming in as a close second. I consider asking these questions to be a sort of tool that is used during hard times. “Okay, I have no idea what to do about ABC. But what’s my wisdom? What tools do I have? What can I say I know for sure?”

This isn’t about speaking THE truth, some kind of absolute–just yours.

I’m working on a new video, and this time, I’d like to open up those questions a bit more, and include you.

What’s your wisdom?

Big, small, whatever–what’s your wisdom?

If you’d like to participate, here are the details:

1.) Please upload a picture to your Flickr account or website–upload it in some way that I can download it. VERY IMPORTANT: Please don’t email anything directly to me as an attachment.

2.) Come here, to this entry, and post in the comments. Post a link to the picture you’d like me to use, as well as your bit or bits of wisdom. Keep the bits to just a sentence or two at most.

3.) Another option: Email me with the link to the picture (again, please don’t send any attachments; they will be deleted by my spam catcher) and share your wisdom. Put “WISDOM” in the subject line of the email.

When will the video be ready? I’d like to receive everything by May 1st, and then start putting things together and hopefully have it ready by May 7th.

How will I get credited in the video? I’ll put your picture and words together, and use a first name last initial format. I.e., “Quote here,” — Kate S.

I’m so genuinely excited to see what people send through. Many of my Courageous Year participants will be participating in this project! If this idea resonates with you, please pass along the link! I’d really love to see as many people participate as possible. Can you imagine the kind of video that we would collectively create, what a wonderful lift it could be for any of us, or for someone else, to view on a rough day?

~ ~ You matter. ~ ~ Your voice deserves to be heard. ~ ~ You are courageous. ~ ~

Rich & Yvonne Dutra-St.John of Challenge Day

Last weekend, I had the honor and privilege of interviewing these two wonderful souls, Rich & Yvonne of Challenge Day. The Challenge Day organization primarily works with youth in schools–and their work, which I’ve witnessed live with young people–is just so fantastically amazing–but the primary way that I’ve worked with them is in their adult Next Step workshops. They have taught me an amazing amount, transforming my life and opening my heart in so many ways, and I am so grateful to them. They are some of the busiest people on the planet, so it was double the honor to be invited to their home and for them to take this time for an interview for my e-course, The Courageous Year.

Rich and Yvonne spend a lot of time asking people about their dreams. They ask because they don’t play life small. They are going to play life BIG. They stand for living big because there are so many opportunities to play a small game, to tell oneself that living the life of your dreams is really an impossibility, and they aren’t people who will validate that kind of thinking. So I was excited to get this opportunity to turn things around and ask: “What are YOUR dreams?”

There is this moment that was so beautifully captured on camera during our interview. Yvonne was sharing that she wanted to sink more and more into being present–to herself, her feelings, the world, the people, all of it. She looked right at me, down into me it seemed, with tears running down her cheeks.

“To just BE,” she said. And then she whispered: “What else is there?”

I felt tears coming to my own eyes, in the midst of this interview. It was this incredibly intimate moment that, when I watch the interview again, I feel as if it was its own small gift. Rich looking at Yvonne, Yvonne looking at me, then Yvonne and I looking over at Rich, acknowledging the BIGness of just BEing, not running the Stories about not enough money or time or not enough good within or not enough good in others or life is hard. Just BEing right in that moment and sinking down into it.

So often we think that to “be in the moment” we need to meditate for a long time, or have this really esoteric practice. I realized during this interview that to “simply BE” in a moment could also happen through the channel of really honest connection with another human being. I felt completely “inside” that moment.

We are so much more alike than any of us can imagine. All of us want simply to be heard, to feel safe, to feel loved, to be accepted and celebrated as we are, to be gently guided.

Experiencing moments like this makes me feel such an immense gratitude swelling through my body, simply for this gift of being alive.

One of the things that I love best about leading The Courageous Year is that inevitably, whatever the group is working on at that moment becomes something that I’m working on, too. Right now, Group A is in Level 2, and we’re working on Commitment & Accountability (the Year is divided into levels that devote time to particular topics). The funny thing is that we’re only a few weeks in, and that I didn’t even notice that I had just started a 30-day Bikram yoga challenge at the same time that they were starting Commitment & Accountability. Ha! I hadn’t even made the connection that I was starting something that would require me to be committed and accountable at the same time. And Group B is working on Level 1 right now, and their topic is self-care, and just by virtue of following along with them, I’ve noticed myself putting more attention and focus on self-care. Brilliant!

When I take on something new, I usually tend not to say anything about it, because when something is fertile and just being birthed, I’m clear that I don’t find it helpful to hear other people’s opinions (this is not a “right” way of starting something new that I advocate; some people find great value in talking things through with others before beginning). I did this when I started Bikram, swearing Andy to secrecy that he would not tell anyone, and I’m glad I did–because a few weeks after, when people did start to know, then come the judgements of Bikram. It would have been really discouraging in the first few weeks to hear people tell me that it was “so hard” or that they knew someone who had been injured while doing it, or that it was “dangerous” or…you know, whatever it is that people express when it’s negative. While people of course have a right to their opinions, I often notice (and practice noticing in myself) how sometimes the expressing of them isn’t always helpful, and try to see whether the expression is more about my Ego’s need to make sure someone knows how “right” I believe I am, or if it’s to provide an alternative or another insight. (And P.S. another good reason to notice whether it’s helpful to tell people what you’re doing in the early stages is because sometimes we unconsciously sabotage ourselves by telling people who we–subconsciously– know will downplay what we want to do).

The flip-side, however, is that at some point, we need to tell people about our goals, our dreams, our lifestyle changes, because again and again it seems that when we tell people what we do, we automatically become more accountable and more likely to commit to and then finish what we start. I urge my Courageous Year participants to declare what they are doing within the e-course, publicly, as well as other places in their lives. This is why I’m now publicly declaring that I’m ten days into this thirty day challenge. I’m getting right to the point where it’s hard–really hard–and I want to quit. I mean, of course I want to quit. Going from doing this 3-5 times a week to every single day? No breaks? It’s tough stuff.

So if you’re thinking about taking on any new endeavor or making a shift in your life, and you’ve noticed in the past that telling people has not brought you the support that you had hoped for, I encourage you to:

1.) Tell only the people who you trust will support you, and even among supportive people, tell few. Sometimes people think they are being supportive when they offer caution. Since I believe that my experience will be my experience, I prefer not to hear cautionary tales.

2.) At some point, do start being public. Declare what you are doing. And then be prepared to let other people’s opinions about it roll right off your back. Or–even better?–declare it while sharing that “at this time, I’m not feeling open to feedback.” True, people might not respect that, and yet there is such value in declaring for yourself what you need.

And with that, I now bring you: The Bikram Update. Warning. I am going to share some stuff below that’s a little raunch. Click away if it’s not your thing.

I’m on Day 10 of the 30-day challenge. Waking up in the morning is getting easier and easier over time. The biggest challenge is one that expresses itself outwardly, but it is all about within: CONTROL.

There is one thing, and only one thing, that currently makes this practice difficult: my desire to control that room. It drives me nuts when people don’t set up their mats in such a way as to allow room for others, even when there is plenty of space. It drives me nuts when the same people come in late, every day, and then want me to move my mat–me, who got there early to get the spot I wanted–to accommodate space for them. The woman who did this today is someone who comes in late every day. Normally, I could care less whether she comes in on time, but when she comes in late and then wants me to move, and crowds the space around me, I get ridiculously distracted fantasizing about ways that I could extend my leg and kick her and make it look like an accident.

Then I breathe, and chill out. But still.

Lately, the biggest challenge in that regard has been Ball Boy. You probably already guessed that I’m not calling him Ball Boy because he brings basketballs to yoga class. Nope, Ball Boy likes to come in, set up his mat directly in front of someone else (not always me, but a few times now it has been). Usually I set up my mat in the room and then leave and sit outside until class officially begins, and then he comes in and sets up his mat while I’m not looking. Hip to his game now, I have realized that if he does this again, I am going to physically move his yoga mat, the ultimate yoga faux-pas.

And why?

Because I do not want to spend another 90 minutes watching that guy grab his balls. Stop reading now if a discussion of someone grabbing their balls is not humorous to you. I find it both irritating as well as–I confess to being a bit declasse in this regard–funny, kind of like a well-timed fart joke. But not every one is me.

Seriously. It’s unbelievable. It goes like this: The instructor says, “Hands up, arms over your head for half-moon pose.” [grabs his balls before going into the posture, adjusts, arms go up] “Stretch to the right and left a few times. Each time you come to the middle, stretch up towards the ceiling.” [intermittent ball grabbing/adjusting with one arm as he stretches]. “Alright, take a deep inhaled breath, arms straight, and stretch your body to the right…inhale and come back to center.” [he stays in the posture but then when we get back to center, down goes one arm to--you guessed it--grab his balls ] “Deep inhaled breath, lock those arms, stretch to the left…back to center.” [balls, balls, balls ] “Inhale and drop your head back and just breathe for a moment; this is the first back bend of the series; your back may hurt a bit.” [I have no idea if he grabs himself here, because my head looks back for the backward bend, but I imagine he does] “Inhale and come back up to center. Keep your arms straight and bend forward.” [a quick, covert ball grab and adjustment of his shorts before leaning forward]

You get the picture.

This reminds me of the Sex and the City episode where Charlotte dates, briefly, a ball grabber and says: “Why do men DO that?”

I don’t think Ball Boy does it for attention or because I or any other woman happens to be behind him. I get the sense that he just does it like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to get comfortable, that’s it, perfect. Now I’m comfortable.”

Now, back to the control thing. Kate likes to control things. I mean, most of us do, and certainly this tendency in me has dialed down in the past few years, but still. Yoga brings up everything. When I’m not in class and when Ball Boy is not right in front of me, I can see the humor in how I’m supposed to be in that room, focusing on my health, on postures, concentrating, not passing out from heat, and instead, what am I getting upset about? Some dude grabbing his package.

Anyone care to join me in laughing at the ridiculousness of that? It’s quite funny.

And I think that if I weren’t picking on that detail, instead I’d find something else to pick on, because there are so many yoga = life and life = yoga connections to be made out there. Whatever we are working on in our daily lives shows up in the yoga room. I believe this. The people who come in late to class are working on lateness. The people who give up easily and fall out of postures after a few seconds are working on giving up easily. The people who are too intense with it and push themselves too far in the room are working on being too intense. The people who are inclined to blame an instructor for the way they feel in class are probably working on blaming external things in their daily lives. And here’s little old Kate Swoboda, working on control in her daily life and having success in so many ways, but boy howdy–put her in a hot room early in the morning and watch how the control comes out!

———-

So if you made it this far, here’s a challenge for you in the comments. I mention above that when you want to shift something in your life–follow a dream, meet a goal, change a focus–declaring it publicly reaps results, upping the ante of commitment and accountability. So, what would you be willing to publicly declare? What do you want to shift?

Either post it here in the comments or write about this on your own blog and then post the link to your blog in the comments.

A bit of randomness…

1.) I am hypermobile. This means that my body bends farther than it should. This is both bad news and good news. First, the bad news: if I am injured, it might take longer to heal because things move too much to keep everything stabilized and give it time to heal. The good news: I, too, will become stiffer with age like everyone else, but since I’m starting from an extra bendy-stretchy place, it probably won’t be so bad.

2.) I still have acne, in my 30′s. I photoshop it out of most pictures of me and am quite sensitive about people taking my picture. I have tried everything. Seriously, everything. It mostly went away when I started using Dr. Murad, and then with Bikram and all of the sweating and the detoxing, it’s like I’m living in Breakout City. I am praying it will go away. I am giving it a few more months. And if it doesn’t go away? I will quit Bikram. Nothing is worth living in perpetual adolescent hell.

3.) I am a classical musician. I started the piano at five. Flute at nine. Cello at 14. Viola and the violin at 16. (How could we afford this? The public school system had a funded arts program, which is why I will always–always–support funding for public schools–they make more of a difference than people can imagine). I was accepted to a music school after high school and passed on the opportunity because I was afraid I wouldn’t make any money. At nineteen, I quit playing altogether until two years ago, at which time I took up the piano again.

4.) I have been working on the Mendelssohn piano concerto in g minor, opus 126, a total of 6 years, and still am not even close to mastering it.

5.) I’m glad I quit music all of those years. The intensity with which I drove myself in my early 20′s would almost surely have killed my hands. I know that I would have been relentless to the point of abusing my body in the quest to be good.

6.) I was raised by a Catholic father and an atheist mother. Now here’s the part that’s easy to guess: THEY GOT A DIVORCE.

7.) I grew up in a “bad neighborhood.” Drugs. Prostitution. Gunshots. Thankfully, not a lot of gang warfare.

8.) Now I’ll add the part that I find more complicated to talk about: Being white in a predominantly black neighborhood (we can get into the politics of the word “African-American” later). The complicated and ironically backward layers of living right smack in the middle of a culture yet not being able to claim it as my own (any more than most people of color feel they can fully claim white “culture” as their own) and the years of hot, reactive anger I’ve seen from people who felt I had no right to even discuss such a thing as “minority whiteness.” It’s really odd, and really strange to see the politics of race that up close, and to realize–only after the fact, never when I was actually living there–that just as the statistics predict, somehow I did end up leaving while some of my playmates on the kickball field did not. How many opportunities have I been granted simply because of the color of my skin? I can never know.

9.) The summer I was nine, I ate nothing but pancakes, because that was what there was to eat. It was another 18 years before I ate pancakes again; the very smell of them used to make me sick.

10.) I love fruit cocktail, straight out of the can.

11.) I have no idea how I would contain the grief of either of my parents dying.

12.) Ha–notice I say “would” as if it is something that might not happen.

13.) The most beautiful moments in life move me to tears. I have had a strained relationship with crying. I was raised to believe it was weakness, and now I agree that it is a sign of vulnerability and within that, strength. My heart does this dance with opening through tears. Back and forth, back and forth.

14.) I say the words “shit” and “fuck” far more often than is ladylike. Or classy. Or, really, even appropriate for me. It’s a really bad habit.

15.) So is biting my nails (another habit I’ve not managed to break).

16.) A lot of my dreams circumnavigate around water. Tsunamis, rivers, wading, oceans, lakes, being underwater, water rising and needing to go up a level in a house to escape it. Sometimes the water is calm, sometimes it is blue, sometimes it is muddy, sometimes it is great, sometimes it is not. It’s not every night, but it’s often enough that a number of odd themes have emerged. The most recent? Something to do with Andy and I borrowing a powerboat from a friend (a friend we rarely ever talk to who, to my knowledge, does not own a powerboat) and riding around a lake.

17.) Speaking of dreams, I am a lucid dreamer, which means that I can rewind my dreams and do them over. (TALK ABOUT CONTROL ISSUES.)

18.) I believe in reincarnation, not because of any kind of proof but because somehow, it just “feels right.” But no, I have no memories of past lives.

19.) I have never smoked pot in my life.

20.) The most common reaction I get when I tell people that? “Let’s get you high!”

21.) I believe that my aversion to drug use is likely the result of being a heavy drug user in a previous life.

22.) I have touched the center of myself. I’d like to learn how to stay there.

23.) Sometimes I walk past an older woman who smells a certain way, and in one big rush it brings back the memory of my grandmother who died ten years ago, and right there in the grocery store, I’m trying not to cry.

24.) Thing I’d always wished I’d learned to do: dance. But I am doing just fine bopping around my office with impromptu dance parties, so it’s all good.

25.) I love, love, love The Biggest Loser. I frequently watch it (online) while sipping on a Frosty.

26.) I get occasional girl crushes, and yes, I have one on Jillian Michaels. (Andy was quite pleased to discover this).

27.) I love taking pictures.

28.) Sometimes, I really miss teaching. I miss my students. I carry their stories.

29.) I’m running out of steam at #29.

30.) Thirty seemed like a nice, round number. Now I want to know: What don’t we know about you?

A late Friday blog post coming, because I had too many thoughts about this topic to keep save them for next week, where the intensity and energy might not be the same.

Here’s the thing: don’t dull your flame.

I finished Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project last night. The latter chapters explore why it is that people resist being happy–why people will go to such lengths to even condemn or shut down the happiness of others. There are so many threads of this conversation that are all tying together for me, lately:  exploring the concept of non-support; tying together with my own feelings of surprise that when I started to feel better and brighter, after what felt like years of work climbing some kind of metaphorical arduous hill, to find that there is then a backlash against being happy, that I now run the risk of being called “fake,” of reading blog posts and tweets that mock people for wanting to step into a practice of reframing their lives more positively. This all tying together with the idea that others get to choose the experience they want to have of their lives, of others, of me, and I get to do the same, and when I step into that space, I’m willing to let someone choose their unhappiness if that is what they need to feel more authentic. And then this lovely blog post by Kelly Rae Roberts that I resonated with and understood and appreciated, because she so tenderly explores how she felt and yet I sense that she has some compassion for what it might feel like to watch someone have the success that she has had and want it for themselves.

I encourage you not to dull your flame. I would love to tell you that if you just “be yourself,” others will come around. I would love to tell you that the choices will always be easy.

They’re not, and that’s okay. Easy is usually less interesting.

But along the way, I encourage you not to dull your flame, not to make it about family or the current economy or the way that someone else might be threatened. I encourage you to burn bright, to live your life in a completely 100% fully alive kind of way, with the courage to trust that you could help shine some light for someone else.

Truly, just by being yourself, you may be someone else’s gift. Maybe they need to see you in all of your brilliant, lit up and glowing glory, rocking out your life, and maybe it needs to trigger the shit out of them, and maybe they then need that shift from resenting you to the process of looking at why they devalue themselves, put their projects on hold, prioritize their lives differently.

That’s their shit. I’d call it something else, something more lady-like, but I’ve been there–yup, I have!–resenting the success of someone else, and it feels like shit so that’s what I’m going to call it.

Good things do not happen because we are simply lucky, though I acknowledge the magical component. And even though I acknowledge the forces of sexism, racism, and classism that are so pervasive in our world, I refuse to take the powerless position that they cannot ever be overcome. (The day we take that position, our society is really in trouble–yet another shift I am making in my life is moving away from soapboxing about society’s problems and being a capital-V “Victim” in moaning that the corporate machine will never let justice prevail).

I don’t know how all of my dreams are going to come true in any specific way, and yet I won’t give up on being a dreamer, a big life liver, a possibilitarian, a courageous believer.

I won’t dull my flame.

Please don’t dull yours.

The people who know me the best, the ones who have known me the longest, know that there is one thing–one–that I have wanted every since I was a little girl. There has been one thing that I have loved above all other things, one passion.

Writing.

Before I could write letters, I drew my stories in a fat binder of dot matrix paper that my father brought home from work. I have had this passionate affair with the written word since as long as I could remember. My parents like to tell the story of when I was just two or three, and would plop myself in the aisle of a bookstore with a book from the shelf, “reading” aloud. I was missing words and making up some of the storyline, but apparently it was convincing enough that other customers really thought I was reading word for word. I love books. I love holding them in my hands and turning their pages. The Kindle and other electronic readers make me sad on so very many levels, because I can see how, because it is a cheaper form of producing something, it probably will take over the world and eventually (a long eventually, but still–eventually–) kill printed books the way newspapers have been pushed aside by the internet. This breaks my heart. I think we need books. I want the tactile sensation of books, of turning to a particular page in a bookstore, of smelling paper.

I was seven when I sent my first letters to book publishers, trying to interest them in a book. I took creative writing classes all through school. I was encouraged. In undergrad, I decided to try my hand at writing freelance articles. I was never particularly successful at it, but I was learning a lot about the process of sending my work out. I went to graduate school for creative writing and it was there that something shifted for me. Namely, what shifted is that I was no longer one of the 3 or 4 good writers in a class, as I had been during my undergraduate days. Now, I was walking among many other writers who were really good. It was with some embarrassment that I clearly realized that in fact, I was not even among the best writers in my cohort. In fact, I was probably somewhere near the bottom of the cohort in terms of talent or ability to communicate something that resonated.

Also, I sometimes look back and think to myself that of all the angsty years of my life, those two years in graduate school were tops. There was lots of drama about the creative process (which I was compelled to muse about and write about online, much to the snickering of some of the faculty and students I went to school with) and breakups and friendships and who am I? and all of that going on. Not so much on what I know are the fundamentals of creating good writing: read good writers + write daily.

Yet I knew that nothing quite makes up for lacking skill, like hard work. So, I finished grad school and I worked hard. I sent out my work. And re-sent my work. I did everything the books tell you to do. I identified which literary magazines I most liked to read, and sent my work to them, and then once I received a rejection I simply sent a piece on to the next person. I did not keep rejection slips. And I really did try my very best to improve my writing. I won honorable mention in one novel writing contest and at the awards dinner, I received encouragement that I sorely needed, having been out of the writing world for a little while. “Keep going,” they said at that dinner. “You’re really close.” Then one of the authors suggested an agent, who I of course contacted, and the agent wanted to see my book.

I sent it via next-day airmail.

Thus commenced 2 months of waiting anxiously for some kind of response on the book. To say that I prayed would be an understatement. It was around that time that I was gifted a consult with a psychic as a present, and the psychic told me that I was going to get my book published, so of course I was running around each day high as a kite with glee. “It’s finally happening, it’s finally happening!” I would think every morning, until it became clearer that what I’d written was apparently not such hot shit that anyone wanted to get back to me. Finally, I did the one thing the books tell you never to do–follow up–and received an embarrassed response from the agent, who had not yet looked at the book and who said she’d reply the following week. She did. No dice.

But still–no giving up! Writing is my DREAM I told myself. I continued to write, almost daily.

I attended a writing workshop, which (for me, in my experience) was not helpful in terms of agents or editors because everyone was clamoring for the attention of agents and editors and it was difficult to watch as some of those agents and editors clearly were courting attendees–but it was incredibly helpful to have this entire week really intensively focused on writing. Something shifted for me with that workshop, some synapse connected and I was able to edit my work with a more discerning eye, to see where there were lazy images that spread words across the page but that did not paint a picture or tell a compelling story. I published more writing in the year following that workshop than I had before. Photocopied formletter rejections were replaced by formletters that were on nicer paper, maybe with a nice little handwritten “P.S.” at the bottom from an editor: “This piece wasn’t a fit–but keep submitting!” and things of that nature.

Then came August of 2008. The months leading up to August of 2008 were hard. The economy was–what was it, again? The phrase everyone was using? Oh, yes, here it is–the economy was “going to hell in a handbasket.” I was trying my first stab at letting go of teaching. It was not happening so successfully. I was sending out my writing and getting little trickles and it was fantastic, yet overall, there was this need for reckoning in my life. I was just getting so exhausted with sending out writing, spending all of that money, using all of that paper, and often as not, not hearing back, or getting a generic rejection.

I decided to do the one thing I’d never allowed myself to do–not once, not ever–and that was take a break from writing. No more guilt trips if I didn’t write. No more pushing myself to send out work.

The thing is, writing had gotten too painful. It became too painful because I made it that way, focusing more on the result than on anything else. Also, I was pretty hung up on comparisons. Being in graduate school had been a wonderful experience overall, one that I’m thankful for because much was invested into me. The downside is that I got really into the game of comparisons. Who was succeeding first? Who was the most serious writer? Who did it every day? Who was getting extra office hours consultation time with the department chair? Who was already published?

I stopped doing something that I loved because I wanted it to perform for me in a certain way, and that is just no way to have a relationship.

So I consciously quit.

I knew that I was not “out of the game” of writing, and I still journaled, wrote on the blog, did a few things here or there. But I did not send out any work. I did not take on any projects.

When I came back from Italy last year, the number one thing I was itching to do was write. When I came back from Italy, I was in this headspace that was so freaking clear. I had this clarity about life, this absolute immersion in flow, that I have never had before and have wavered in and out of since (it’s a practice, people). What I knew when I got back from Italy was this: I needed to write. For awhile, I sat down each day and tapped the keys. The writing flowed.

Then, you know. Life. We moved (again). Letting go of the job, getting a new business set up. The holidays.

I sat down yesterday for the first time in months and opened the old files. I re-read everything I’d written during those post-Italy days. The process took several hours. When I was finished, I felt out of my mind, walking out of the library on wobbly legs like I’d just lost and found my mind, like an endorphin rush, like a really good stretch that sends fresh blood flowing.

I realized that I had fallen in love again.

I realized that I am ready.

“Don’t take it personally.”

“It’s none of my business what anyone else thinks of me.”

“Don’t give your power away to what other people think.”

I’d hear these things, and I’d think: Yeah. But HOW?

I wrote here about how I gave power away to what people think, how this was my kryptonite, and it was an issue that I continued to turn over and play with. Turn over, turn over, turn over.

And then, the A-ha moment came. Jesus Christmas! Finally!

It started when a project that I was working on was met with feedback couched in anger directed at my pretty little head. I kept wanting to call it “being really mean.” My Coach kept encouraging me to call that feedback “that person’s experience.”  I kept arguing with him in my head after the session was over: Dude, quit playing semantics–the feedback was mean. If I told you that I had said those things to someone, you’d be all, “Kate, let’s have a talk about integrity.” But someone else does it to me? And you’re all, “that’s just their experience”? Ex-CUSE me?

Yet I knew that he was choosing the more powerful position–the feedback, even the anger, was not about me. It was about that person and the experience they were choosing to have. Why make it about me? Ah, Matthew. My coach, my guru. (He loves it when I call him that).

Then I got into a heavy-duty moving session of process work in which I went in with one goal: I knew I was holding some long-standing resentments, like years-long, towards someone, and I wanted to let them go. So I plopped myself down and prayed and cried and hit things (to a great musical soundtrack) until, as often happens after crying, a nice wave of clarity came over me and I “got it.” What came out of that session was realizing that the things that had happened in those relationships were not personal. It was never personal. It just wasn’t a match. That was okay.

And, in fact, something else took hold of me: People get to have the experience they choose to have. That includes me. That includes you. That includes your mother, the cashier at the store, the neighbor down the street and that dude who just cut you off in traffic.

I began playing with this phrase: People get to choose to have the experience they want to have.

The more I played, the more I liked: Yes! Yes! People get to choose the experience they want to have!

Getting here has been one of those experiences in life where something just got too painful to hold on to. Here was my project, my baby, this thing I was excited about, and I’d felt as if it was punched. Some synapses connected and I “got it”: It is too painful to live that way, any more.

It became clear: If someone does not like the project that I worked on, they choose that experience of not liking me or the project. They choose their level of involvement, how much they will try to effect change, or if they will choose to complain. They choose whether or not they will give me feedback at a point where I can actually respond, or if they’ll wait until things are done and then be pissed and resentful because there’s no way to go back and change it (talk about sabotage!).

People choose the experience they will have of me. I know that I walk the world human. I want connection and love, that’s my desire, and I’m going to fall short of that at times. Will someone choose to have the experience of “Kate is loving at heart and imperfect” or will someone choose to have the experience of “Kate is the sum total of her mistakes”? They get to choose. I don’t need to play any part in their choices, their orchestration of their lives.

And–to bring it back to personal responsibility–I choose the experience I have of other people! How often have I made assumptions about people because of one bad experience? I get to choose to have an experience of stepping into my vision for my life, or of just reducing myself to negative judgements. If someone cuts me off in traffic, I get to choose whether or not I’m going to invest energy into being annoyed, judging that person, getting irritated, or taking on a belief system that “people are so inconsiderate!”

All of the statements I made at first: Don’t take it personally, etc., are all statements that essentially mean the same thing as what I’m writing now. For some reason, this statement: “People get to choose the experience they want to have” rings most true.

It feels like freedom.

Where do you notice yourself taking things personally the most?

From bikramyoga.com

There are a number of ridiculously hard poses in the Bikram sequence–ridiculously hard to be doing even when one is not in 105-degree heat, much less when one is.

One that I particularly love is Standing Bow Pulling Pose, which frankly always looks easier to me in pictures than it actually is. I love this pose because when I can do it, I feel like a total rockstar. Finding the balance in that posture is, to me, the closest human beings must ever get to flying. When I’m in it, I feel light and weightless, as if the one leg supporting me no longer exists and I am suspended in air.

Years ago, I was taking a YMCA yoga class and the teacher was leading us through another pose that I love, tree pose. In one class in particular, I figured something out that would be valuable to me forevermore: balance is breathing.

I was wobbling and falling out of tree pose, trying so hard, efforting to balance on that one leg. Suddenly, something in me noticed that when I would breathe in such a way that my inhale felt like one long breath that was traveling up through the center of me, as if my lungs had turned into a column of air, that core would completely stabilize me. The trick was to focus on that breath so that I could establish that core and stabilize.

An older gentleman comes to our yoga class, sometimes. He seems a little grumpy, but he must like coming because he has continued to come for awhile. He has trouble balancing, lots of it, and as he tries to go into the posture and falls out again and again, he gets more and more frustrated and I can hear it in his breathing–the exasperated puffs of air, the grunting and groaning. If I take my focus too much off of my own breathing, I start to wobble all over the place, falling out of the posture myself.

So my mantra becomes: Balance is breathing. Balance is breathing. Balance is breathing.

As in, if I want to stay balanced, I gotta breathe. (And keeping the focus on myself, rather than someone else, certainly does not hurt!).

It occurred to me that this is another one of those yoga = life moments, where some thing that is true to get you through a posture is equally as true in the daily world. I try to notice how often throughout any given day, my breathing gets more shallow and I’m not taking full inhales and exhales, even though it’s so good for my stress levels, my respiratory system, my blood, my circulation.

On the yoga mat, when I remember to breathe, the rest of the posture seems to mostly take care of itself. I’m curious to see how much this is just like life–where, if I focused on just breathing, just staying with that inhale/exhale pattern, other things might “magically” take care of itself, as well.

Where in your life would you like to have more breathing room?

I’ve been a fan of Danielle LaPorte from White Hot Truth for some time. I resonate deeply with people who are stepping into who they are, where they are, and being honest about that process (even if it goes against the status quo. Even if it might not always be “perfect”).

She’s starting a new program (a world wide premiere, in fact) of Fire Starter Sessions via digital book, and presented the opportunity to fans to interview her about who she is and what she does and why she does it and how she does it and…you get the idea.

The interview is here for you to listen to–this is a basic embedded sound file, so hopefully your computer’s music software will support it! There’s lots of great stuff in here, including some wisdom on stepping into speaking your truth: “Truth never attacks.”

Truth Never Attacks: An interview with Danielle LaPorte from Kate Swoboda on Vimeo.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:

* The Courageous Marketing Manifesto

* Passion & Play

Time for some truth-telling, of the highest order:

I had no idea, when I created this video, that it would resonate the way it did. I had reached this point where I was quite tired of juggling things–the Bikram, the workload, social time, time with my love, remembering to call my family, get the laundry done. It is not even that difficult of a list, but I’m not going to indulge in much inner critic chatter on that point. I am being gentle with myself about the changes and transitions that I’m working through in my life. Working for myself is the scariest thing I’ve ever done. It pushes every single trigger; it questions every assumption that I had been taught to make as I was growing up. Doing the work of looking at those issues while still in a relatively comfortable safety zone is, as I have discovered, a totally different body of work than being right in the thick of it.

So I approached Andy and asked that we take a weekend together, because I needed some time where, even if I was taking a computer hiatus, I was not even looking at my computer, not even looking at my desk. To care about something so passionately–this body of work, this course “curriculum” of sorts, to want it to reflect your best pieces in every way–my goodness, but I was putting pressure on myself. I knew it, and I knew that the usual tools weren’t enough. It was my financial advisor, actually, who suggested that I take a weekend. And I thought, “You know, if your financial advisor suggests you take time to frolic away somewhere, it’s time to Get Your Frolic On.”

It was time to get out of town.

Andy said no, initially. He had a soccer game he didn’t want to miss. In response to this, I turned into MegaBeast and resorted to condescension and resentment of the highest order. My overworked synapses simply could not comprehend that I would feel such relief at the idea of getting some space and then be told “No.” So I stepped into a space of, “Okay, I am in charge of me, I’ll go alone, then,” and noticed that I just resented the hell out of him for that. This became more to work through.

But we did work through it, and after checking for the umpteenth time that we were working out some kind of sense of equality here–that there was no people-pleasing involved and he was supporting me by taking the trip and I had paid my dues all of the other weekends when I’d suggested we do something or other and a soccer game had been the thing that had blocked us from doing it–once that was in order, we were ready to get out onto the open road.

The tension melted from my shoulders. There was time to play, to rest, to eat good food. We camped out in a motel room and watched Keeping up With the Kardashians, which was–and I don’t think anyone has ever written this about that show, so here it comes–it was a lovely experience. Seriously, it was lovely. Heaven. Absolutely no brain cells are required, to watch that show. My mind felt at rest.

I already told the story of how it was that the video came into being–I was painting, and then inspired to start compiling bits and pieces from our trip and other places. What I didn’t mention in that post was that before I was brave enough to post the video, I hesitated a lot. I hesitated in speaking into my sadness. Inner critic stuff came up. “Oh, no one wants to hear about you being a sad sack,” I thought.

There was something really powerful in getting to a place where I was just owning right where I was at, which is what happened when I hit “post.” The video came together very quickly and I didn’t hesitate too long; I went ahead and just posted it and let it go out into the world.

I want to write a love letter to all of you–all of you who have tweeted or passed it along or written posts about it or written me emails. Truly, I had no idea that it would hit where it did, that it would bring up tears, that it would bring up inspiration. (And I definitely hope that Alexi Murdoch is hitting paydirt these past few weeks on iTunes! His album is fantastic!).

I think that this is just proof that you never know when, just by being yourself, you might be someone else’s gift.

Thank you ~ so much gratitude and appreciation for your words ~ All of you are amazing.

~ Kate

It is okay…

…to not be ready, yet.

…to change your mind.

…to speak your truth (respectfully).

…to think you’re ready and then realize you’re not.

…to take a few steps forward and then a few steps back.

…to BE your journey, wherever you are at, wherever that is, in whatever part of the process that is.

…to apologize.

…to get vulnerable.

…to feel angry or sad.

…to be organized.

…to feel unbalanced and disorganized.

…to not make art every day.

…to have chocolate in the afternoons.

…to not like someone.

Whatever shows up for you is part of this experience, right here, right now. It is okay to be who you are, where you are (it’s better than okay–it’s the only thing that’s possible!).

Here’s my only encouragement: don’t get out of the game.

It’s okay to not like someone. Just don’t step out of the game of hoping that you can find ways to have compassion, to find points of commonality.

It’s okay to not make art every day. Just don’t beat yourself up so much that you step out of the game of making art, altogether.

It’s okay to be organized. Just don’t step out of the game of cutting yourself slack when needed, when life calls for randomness and lack of organization.

I like reminding myself of this–remembering that wherever I’m at is fine, and wherever you’re at is fine, too, and we’re going to be fine together as long as neither of us step out of the game of accepting ourselves and each other.

Image from yogalifestyle.com

Some of you may remember that a few months ago, I started a Bikram yoga practice. It has been a really transformative process–everything from just noticing how I sometimes have resistance to setting myself up for success (my resistance most often shows up as wanting to sleep longer, even if I’ve had plenty of sleep) to noticing my judgements about instructors to noticing my fears to noticing my breathing.

The last time I posted about yoga, I noted that Fixed Fern Pose and Camel Pose were the two I was most afraid of. My fear? That my kneecaps will pop off. Or that the tendons will tear. But in essence, that something BAD will happen to my knees.

I’ve been working into that fear, such that now I do Fixed Fern on most days. But Camel? Oh–that one has been rough. I’ve been easing into it by not doing the full backward bend of resting on my heels. Instead, I bed back partially, tightening my butt cheeks until you could bounce a quarter off of ‘em, and leaning my hands on my hips. This is a perfectly okay way to start getting accustomed to the posture, yet I’d notice that I kept feeling engulfed by dizziness.

Then, the dizziness stopped being quite so prominent–there was lots of breathing through, coming out of the post as necessary, and not always doing the second set–and what replaced it was a wave of nausea that would start just if I stood on my knees, before even going into the pose. And I’d breathe through that, too, still not doing the full pose, still just doing the first part of leaning on my hips and tightening those cheekies (things are looking fine on the backside, if you ask me) and staying really present to that edge between what I could do and what I could not do.

And then, today?

I felt nauseous just standing on my knees, waiting for the instructor’s move to start actually doing the backward bend. Normal. I took some deep breaths. As per usual, it was overwhelming to be in that bend so when I got to a place where I felt “done,” I went ahead and eased my body forward, coming out of the backward bend.

And right there in class, this wave of total EMOTION swept over me and I was trying hard–very hard–not to cry.

The anti-Bikram peeps would probably see this as a sign that “the heat is bad! it’s bad yoga! it’s your body telling you something!” However, that wasn’t the experience I had. The emotion felt like a release of sorts that was, while a little uncomfortable to have coming up in a room with all these other people, not bad in any way. I stepped out of the room during the next pose, cried a bit in the hallway, took deep breaths, and headed back in.

What I noticed when I headed back in surprised me at the time, though looking back it does not surprise me at all. I would have thought that I would have had to “push” through the rest of the class. Instead, I felt lighter and completely re-energized, as if I’d just walked in. I finished the class feeling completely motivated and fulfilled.

It has been a journey to learn how to honor my tears. I don’t know what exactly happened in that room today, but something did open up and lift, and I’m incredibly grateful.