Your Courageous Life

Oh, but what a perfect day to write about BEing the journey/being in process.

I am sick.

It’s just a little sinus infection–I get 2 or 3 of these things a year, and they always follow the same pattern. They last about four days. Really, I’m going to live.

But–Ohmigoodness, but I really strongly dislike being sick. And each time I get one of these, I swear to myself that I’m going to get a Neti pot. Then I don’t because they cost $18 and that’s my chai latte budget.

And let me tell you, I had plans for this week. Plans. All sorts of things I was going to do, because my week is going to be truncated by events. Yesterday, Andy and I attended a wedding. And I was sort of feeling icky yesterday, but then it started to go away (apparently, two medium soy chai lattes in one day will do that) so I even rocked out at the wedding and swung my curvaceous (is that really how you spell that? Man, I am out of it. The “ceous” part looks all wrong. I want to use “cious.” Hmmm) and bodacious (no questioning the spelling, there) ass to “Play that Funky Music, Whiteboy.”  This included, at some point, me doing the phantom casting of the fishing lure at the sister of the bride and then reeling her in while she, no doubt exhausted from weeks of wedding planning, flew her arms and legs akimbo and danced like a woman released from prison.

So, you know. I had fun.

Then as we were heading home, the sniffling intensified and I crashed in bed to the peaceful slumber of ear plugs and the humidifier, since my nose was alternately stuffy and then running but my throat felt dried out like I’d been living in the desert for weeks.

Then I proceeded to wake up at 2am, 3am, 4am…and so on. Andy was getting dressed this morning and I was so tired that I completely missed my opportunity to look wasted and consumptive in a ploy for sympathy (more tucking of the covers! NyQuil! Tea! Perhaps a foot massage?), and instead when I heard drawers opening and shutting, I grunted at him. Had I had my wits about me, I would have pleaded for a chai latte.

Now I am sitting on the couch in the living room and reading “Suffering is Optional” by Cheri Huber.

Oh, the irony.

But when it’s not ironic, it is true that I’m reading this book because I would very much please like to not be suffering when it comes to sickness. I used to get sick a lot, and found it somewhat traumatizing because then I started to get paranoid about getting colds. I was in a workshop once and there were sick people there, people who were coughing and sneezing and announcing to the group, “I’m feeling sick today,” and getting sympathetic looks (from everyone but me) while touching things with their germ-infested hands and thinking nothing of it, and I complained about it to this guy and he shrugged and said, “Eh, I just figure a few times a year, it’s inevitable that I’m going to get sick.”

I looked at him and smiled and said, “Oh, that’s true,” while inwardly my mind launched off on another rant about how if people who were sick would just stay in their houses, and not attend workshops with their germy little fingers, the rest of us would not get sick. I did all of this online google research when I got home that night, to find statistics and facts to back up my point. I didn’t plan to present this information to this guy. I just wanted to know that I was right.

It was observed during the course of this workshop that I maybe perhaps kinda sorta had just a few, uh, control issues. You have to love group process work.

I have this idea that I present to Courageous Year participants: BEing your journey, which is really to say, BEing in process. BEing. Sinking fully into it. I present this as Lesson Numero Uno, because focusing on an end result is a recipe for misery–as is trying to control every outcome, to only have the happy thoughts, or to only grow in the ways we feel we should grow.

And, because I’m human, this is one of those lessons that I can use as comfort in lots of areas of my life when I don’t like what is happening, and I have much more difficulty embracing this idea if we’re talking about physical illness, because that’s an area that both is, and feels like, it’s out of my control.

But just as Huber says: Suffering is Optional. (Really, it’s true).

And P.S. I am embracing the fact that I work for myself as this divine opportunity to lay around in my pajamas all day, watching the end of season three of Mad Men (!!!!!!!), reading, and generally being slothlike. Talk about divine self-care!

In what areas of your life do you notice yourself having a hard time BEing your journey, allowing whatever comes into the path to just be there and worked with? Is there any part of BEing your journey that would feel like giving up, or “letting the bad stuff win”?

All of these things are great, but they’re not the be-all-end-all of success, living well, or making your dreams happen. So here are ten things you actually don’t need in order to be successful (with success being defined in whatever way you choose):

1.) An organized desk. “My desk is so disorganized,” someone says, as if that’s what keeps them from any hope of seeing their dreams come true. But I think that the hyper-organized types in our society are few and far between. With those few exceptions, the idea that organization is tantamount to success is something that people use as a delay tactic to get started. And the grief so many of us give ourselves because we aren’t “more organized?” Goodness. Let’s just save that energy for something else.

2.) A specific, step-by-step plan. I believe in specifics, and I even believe in step-by-steps and plans. But if there’s too much rigid attachment to the step-by-step, lovely diversions along the way can be missed. Far better to go by instinct. Learn the art of following your inner YES.

3.) Schedules. I’ve been interviewing people for Across Mediums, and one question I keep putting into these interviews is how they make time for artmaking and creativity. I’ve been asking this because I consider myself to be someone recovering from the land of “if you’re serious about something, you make a schedule.” I have a theory that this emphasis/pressure on scheduling our lives down to the minute as a measure of discipline or aptitude has something to do with school and how we did math at 10:00 followed by reading at 11:00 followed by lunch at noon and…you know, it’s taken me years to stop eating at noon just because it was noon, and start eating when I was actually hungry.

4.) A perfectly clean diet. Good grief, the energy I’ve put into finding the perfect diet, thinking that once I found it I would have boundless energy and no stress. Just recently, I started avoiding refined sugar and I feel so much better, but of course what really brings a quality of calm to my day is how present I am in it, and whether or not I’m making a choice to be passionate about whatever it is that’s right before me.

5.) A private office. I love my office. It’s yellow and beautiful. But I spend a fair amount of time writing at my local library, and if I spend too much time in here, I start to feel nuts. In fact, a home office makes self-care harder–because there’s always that thought, “Oh, I could head in there and get this or that done…”

6.) A meditation practice. Meditation is great, but presence is better. Noticing is better. Watching those judgements and opinions and where they create drama and disconnection in your life–all better. Meditation is a great vehicle for learning how to get good at the noticing and watching, but if you’re not making the time for it each day, far better to funnel the energy of beating yourself up into just noticing, watching, and being conscious about your choices.

7.) To work for yourself. There are so many people out there who have great 9-5 jobs and then they do something more creative in a freelance capacity, or not for any money at all, but just for themselves. Your life is a success because you say it is–because you claim your choices and are behind them. Working for someone else is not tyranny (unless you say so). Your life is not a success because you are the next “I quit my job and followed my dreams” poster child on the internet. (If you are that poster child, that’s great–I totally support you. I just don’t believe that it’s what works for all people, and want to support those who are feeling stuck with the Story that they have to quit their job in order to do what they love).

8.) A lot of money. The quality of our lives depends more on how we claim our lives and our choices than it does on the money. Next time you’re worrying about money, consider asking yourself where in your life you aren’t “behind” your recent financial choices. What financial decisions have you made lately that you have a nagging feeling about? Which ones didn’t feel really great to make? Cut those out of your life, and you cut out a lot of the pressure to come up with a lot of money.

9.) To live an esoteric existence. I don’t like the emphasis people put on material things. I’m all about sustainability. I support people who make choices to have few or no possessions if that’s a match for them. I even agree that saving money in all of those areas means more money available, and that this causes less financial stress. However–every choice we have has its flip side. For instance, Andy and I chose to rent our own, stand-alone house. We’re paying more rent this year than we have in years past, at a time when the economy sucks. Of course–We could save money by living in the places we’ve lived in in the past, with shared walls. But then there was stress in other areas–like when the neighbors blasted their music during the day, or woke us in the middle of the night. I like books, comfy chairs to read them in, and chai. I feel more financial stress making things work with this home, but my home is one that I genuinely enjoy being in, so it’s worth it to me to do what it takes to pull in a bit more rent money. In essence, let’s strike a balance between excess and minimalism.

10.) Constant internal monitoring. The inner critic/Ego/fear-based self, whatever you want to call it, that lurks within? Let’s soften that. Let’s have some gentleness. Let’s sink into the choices we make and get behind them, and then accept that some people will look at those choices and write a blog post on “10 Things You’re Not Doing That You Should Be Doing” and maybe those 10 things will be “Get organized!” and “Make a Plan!” and “Set a Schedule” and “Eat Right!” and all of those things. You get to decide what resonates with you, which of them will be necessary for making your life workable.

What would you add to this list? What’s something that you feel you’ve been oft-told is necessary for success (any kind, whether entreprenuerial or otherwise) and really, it wasn’t absolutely necessary?

Just being yourself is a precious thing.

And in case you didn’t know? Stripy socks are good luck.

You matter.

You are courageous, even when you don’t know it.

All of your mixed-up parts, the parts that are seemingly contradictory, come together to form something beautiful (even when you aren’t aware that that is what is happening).

Your beauty shines through.

And when you least expect it, trust me–you give gifts to others, simply by being yourself.

Have you seen the movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona? God, I love that movie (it is not nearly as dramatic as that trailer makes it out to be). It’s the only Woody Allen movie I like, in fact. The cinematography inspired Andy and I with this hare-brained idea of traveling around Europe for a year, spending a few months in different places. This hare-brained idea is one of those things that we’ve put on a back-burner, for now. For one thing, I now have a small child to take care of. Two of them, in fact. For another, we signed a year lease and spent a small fortune upgrading from broken down IKEA castoffs to Crate & Barrel. My office is yellow. We are finally living somewhere with no shared walls, no kiddos below us watching MTV at top-volume.

But back to that movie. If you haven’t seen it, there are no spoilers in me saying that the two main characters are Vicky and Cristina. One is sensible and pragmatic. The other is bohemian and whimsical. One is a monogamist and the other is ready for a fling with hunky Javier Bardem (and who wouldn’t be? I mean, as long as he’s not wearing that god-awful wig toupee thing from No Country For Old Men…).

Basically, if you put the two halves together, you get–scary thought–MY BRAIN. I am some parts sensible and pragmatic, happy to snuggle in and ground myself each night in the lumbar-supported comfort of  a pillow-topped Simmons Beautyrest mattress (which is a great mattress, by the way). I want spice racks. A good set of kitchen knives. I want to bake bread and try recipes. The most exciting part of any move I’ve ever made is unpacking the boxes of books. Once they are lining the shelves, I truly feel at home. I want houseplants that need watering and a favorite local coffeeshop and regular dates with friends. I want stability. I want regular paychecks. I want a wardrobe full of options.

A whole other side of me wants nothing of that life. A whole other side of me–the wanderlust side, the travel bug side–wants to spend the day walking and then crash on anything horizontal, sleeping deeply from a day well-lived. That side doesn’t want spice racks or kitchen knives or heavy boxes of books or furniture or anything that would tie her down–especially not a lease agreement or houseplants or cats that need feeding. That side of me wants to try a new restaurant each night. That side of me adores my friends but also loves the thrill of sitting on a random park bench in a totally new city and meeting a totally new person who will end up joining me as I meet up with a group of CouchSurfers who have decided to have a meetup in which every single CouchSurfer brings someone they are currently hosting, resulting in a panoply of languages all talking over one another, pantomiming to fill in the gaps (this is, in fact, what happened when I stayed in Milan in 2008). This other side of me has no need for stability, craves something new, is willing to forego regular paychecks in favor of running her own ship, and is happy to pack a suitcase with one black skirt, one black pair of pants, one pair of jeans, and three different tops, all of which can be worn in interchangeable combinations and hand-washed in the sink of a hotel.

It has taken years for me to realize that these two sides are actually quite real, and completely legitimate in and of themselves. They are my yin and yang, my water and my fire. If the Universe asked me, “How would you like to structure your life, Kate?” my answer would be: Be financially abundant enough to have a home-base in the city of my choosing. This would be a place where I’d live with Andy for 8 months of the year. Then 4 months of the year we’d travel. We’d find a house-sitter to chill at our place and watch Poppy and get the same advantages of free rent living that we were gifted with while we were house-sitting. Maybe those 4 months would be divided up into several smaller trips. Or maybe not. We’d either telecomm while traveling or just schedule our lives and save money in such a way that we needn’t work those months.

And yes, this is not just some distant dream. This is something that Andy and I are, in various and sundry ways, paving the way towards having, though all of the pavement has not exactly arrived in shipment just yet. I’m not sure how we’ll make it happen; only that we want to and that sometimes bits and pieces make themselves clearer as to how that might happen.

I share this today because I know that for many years, I felt guilty about these two seemingly disparate sides of myself. I felt like I needed to “be practical” and “get it together.” I didn’t understand what was “wrong with” me, that I kept weaving back and forth between craving fresh green smoothies and salads (it feels so good to be healthy, doesn’t it?) and then good red wine and bread with olive oil (to hell with healthy eating! c’est la vie! buon appetito!). It is a strange thing to be both enamoured with neatly folded laundry washed each Sunday and restocking my drawers, and to simultaneously not care if  that night, I re-wash my socks in a sink and then hang them on a towel rack to dry because it’s not worth it to go to the laundromat until I have a full load of laundry. I want the bookshelves full of books and the comfortable chairs to sink into and my kitty snuggling on my lap while I read; I want as few possessions as possible and am proud of having mastered the art of packing light.

For several years, it seemed wrong somehow that I would be this person, composed of these two pieces. I filtered it through my Zen Buddhist training as: Kate doesn’t want to be in the moment. When she’s here, she wants to be there, and when she’s there, she wants to be here. When will she want to be in this moment, now?

But now I realize that there is a deeper–and more useful–Zen Buddhist training in all of this, and it is being in the now with what is. Being fully aware of both the aspects of me that sincerely desire movement as well as those that desire stillness, and accepting them whole-heartedly. Embracing the two. There is absolutely a part of me that craves stability as much as it enjoys a little disorder. Instead of ping-ponging back and forth between Hell no! Stability is soooo rigid! and I need to get life under control, pull in some order, eat my veggies, meditate regularly, there is this lovely passionate middle ground that I am working on riding. Rather than toe the line that the order/veggies/meditation are really where I’m “supposed to” be, and that the desire to cut loose is all distraction, I like the broader, more all-encompassing idea of putting the two halves together to make a whole.

It is a middle ground that notices, in fact, when I most like stability and when I most like to cut loose. Do you notice this about yourself? For instance, I love stability in the morning. I want order and quiet and routines. But around 5:00 in the evening? I want out of the house. I want to see something new–a new book, a new art exhibit, a new person, a new bit of scenery. Flip it around and give me the “new” stuff in the morning, and I experience this as jarring. Ick! Too much! Ask me to settle down in the evening when I’m craving going out, and I am antsy as all get out.

In finding the middle ground, there’s this opportunity to both BE Kate and LOVE Kate just a little bit bigger. It’s freeing, and sort of a relief. Whew! Instead of trying to “figure out” how I would be cultivate stability without resenting the commitment, or cultivate adventure without missing the groundedness of home, I just get to be me: the girl who is beautifully splintered in these different ways.

How about you? Where would you like to give yourself permission to just BE who you actually are, even if the parts are seemingly contradictory?

IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

* Thanks, Jen Louden!

* Healing All Sides

What’s Your Wisdom? from Kate Swoboda on Vimeo.

(!!!!)

I just really loved the way this project turned out. I see it as seven minutes of sitting back and getting centered, remembering and re-remembering that we are so much more alike than we tend to believe. Getting connected with love. With a big world. With what we know. Such beautiful images and words…

Enjoy!

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?

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?

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

(click the link above to download the e-book)

To round out e-book week, I’m offering a PDF version of the Job Suckage Challenge. Now, the “Stop the Job Suckage Challenge” was something I ran from January 1-10th of this year, offering day-by-day exercises for looking at why our jobs can sometimes suck, and why they might not be the sole cause of blame. Many people don’t like their jobs–my feeling is that in some cases this is actually a thing that can be improved or remedied, in other cases the job isn’t the problem at all (it’s the scapegoat that gets the blame), and in still other cases the job truly isn’t a match and that it’s a powerful practice to get fully in integrity with oneself before attempting to leave any relationship, including a relationship to a job.

If you’re taking this challenge, I strongly suggest that you take it one day at a time, no flipping ahead (no peeeeeking!). There is something about the element of surprise and also giving yourself time to marinate in between exercises that I think will be really  helpful.

On this note of clarifying the often complicated feelings that we have about our jobs–what are some exercises, books, tools, tips, resources, quotes, mindsets that you’ve found helpful around “job stuff”? I’m thinking of perhaps an exercise you might have done in a workshop that really helped you clarify what you wanted, or a book that really resonated with you. Please share–I know that feeling “ick” around jobs is a very common phenomenon and I bet there are people here who would be helped!

Registration for The Courageous Year closes today…Click here to register and reserve your spot. The course includes interviews with amazing people like Christine Mason Miller and Jen Louden and Pixie Campbell, among others, as well as a 100-page e-book, conference calls (optional), and an amazing community.

McCabe and me, in San Francisco.

On Monday, I read about Brene Brown’s worthiness week and jumped right in–sign me UP! I had already prepared a series of blog posts for this week so that the e-books would all be in one place, but then this inspiration to write about worthiness hit and I decided I’d just do more than one post, some days.

And then Monday, it didn’t happen. And Tuesday, it didn’t happen. And Wednesday, it didn’t happen. And while I am extremely busy these days (far busier than I ever was working my “normal” job; keep that in mind if you’re planning to jump ship at some point) I also sensed that deeper down there was something going on, some point of Resistance.

Today, it occurred to me that there is some part of me that still hesitates to claim the places where I don’t feel worthy. Some of that is due to not wanting to make disheveled a credential. I hesitate to talk about things in written form until I feel I can verbalize them in some way, because goodness knows my words are often enough misinterpreted even when I think I’ve got a clean idea of how to verbalize what I’m thinking. But no–this time, it was not “waiting for the words to come clearly,” it was “I don’t want to publicly claim my feelings of unworthiness.”

Especially because–ahem–when I let go of my job a few months ago, a new area of unworthiness popped up for me, and totally unexpectedly, and it didn’t start when I decided to let go of my job while I was still finishing up the last few months–it started right when I was officially working for myself. Basically, here it is–

Sometimes, I feel unworthy of working for myself. Like I’m having too much fun and getting away with something. Like it’s “not fair” that I would be doing XYZ with my life while someone else isn’t liking their job or their life. Then, when the inner critic is done with that, in begin the messages that I’m ridiculous because “there are more important things in life to have drama about–people have cancer. People are losing their house. People’s kids die. GET OVER YOURSELF.”

(P.S. RE-Do, PLEASE!)

Now. Part of the reason I hesitate to claim the feelings of unworthiness in this space (because I have claimed it elsewhere) is because I don’t want to be read as “living there.” Sometimes coaching clients will feel really sad about something and then they tell themselves, “Well, I don’t want to wallow.” My response is that wallowing = “living there,” in the anger, the grief, the resentment, whatever. I won’t support living in that anger/grief/ick feeling, but I do support visiting for the purposes of getting it out of your system. In my view, it’s totally normal to cry when you feel sad, vent when you feel frustrated, and process out anger when you’re pissed. All of those can happen without “living there.” It can sound so BIG to read someone claim their feelings of unworthiness and then, in that 2-dimensional way that we human-beings are prone to, assume that that’s the entire story.

It’s not.

And yet, I recognize the healthiness of verbalizing and claiming my feelings of unworthiness–that sometimes, I really do feel like I am undeserving of something, like I received something and cheated somehow to get it, even though of course, there was no cheating. There was/is a hell of a lot of hard work, setbacks, challenges, re-dos, and feeling my inner little girl rise up and get frustrated because she just wants to “get it, already!”

You know: To GET it. To understand everything, before giving it time for understanding.  To know all the answers–NOW!

I really liked this, from Brene: “Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am worthy of love and belonging. “ 

So, having talked about unworthiness, I would like to talk about worthiness.

I have been thinking about this: “When I give to others what I would most like to receive, my whole world shifts.” This is something that popped into my head last week and it lifted my heart. I believe that the things we most want to receive are things like compassion, second chances, love, belonging, trust that our ideas have merit, opportunities for expression (creative and otherwise). And inclusion–big time with inclusion. I think that we want to feel like a part of something that is even larger than ourselves. A group, a cause, a belief system. 

I was thinking of “When I give to others what I would most like to receive…” and how that thought takes me so easily out of playing small, waiting for something external to me to change. I want to feel worthy in my life–and I want others to feel worthy, too. So how might I invest myself in that? How might I do something for the collective whole by putting something out there that is a direct contradiction to Stories about worth?

I am worthy of inclusion.

I am worthy of inclusion even if I make mistakes.

I am worthy of the time to have my mistakes explained to me and I am worthy of second chances.

I am worthy of time to rest.

I am worthy of a career I love.

I am worthy of supporting myself financially with that career. I am worthy, in fact, of not living hand-to-mouth doing it and even going beyond that. It is okay.

I am worthy of a rest, of taking a break.

I am worthy of deep, true truth-telling and of being able to tell my truth.

I am worthy of my partner’s love (and he loves so big that to be quite honest, sometimes his kindness tooootally triggers my “worthiness spots.”)

I am worthy of all the good in life.

And so are you.

What do you want to declare yourself worthy of receiving–that you would also like to open yourself to giving to others?

(click on the link above to download the e-book)

There are stories and then there are Stories. I equate Stories–the capital S kind–as being about habitual actions and assumptions that we have put into practice for so long that we don’t think about them any longer. We all carry them. Some serve us more than others.

For instance, it’s a Story that I tell that the world is fundamentally good and I believe in people. I like that one! It’s a nice swap for the one I held maybe five years ago–that people were fundamentally selfish and that I wouldn’t believe in anyone until they’d proven themselves to me in some way. (I mean…ouch).

What are some Stories you’ve told about yourself or about the way life works? What would it be like to let go of them?

Freedom, I say. One of my tenderest Stories–one I carried for a long, long time–is that men were just out for sex and that they would violate boundaries at the first chance they had. I had a lot of examples to go along with that experience, so that Story seemed really, really real for me. It was after meeting men who didn’t have those intentions that I was able to shift something within myself and practice a new Story: Men (like women!) come in all shapes and sizes, and some are more trustworthy than others, and I am a competent woman who is clear on what her boundaries are and how to speak up if they are breached.

Another Story–that the only way to have creativity in my life was with a great studio, a thriving Etsy shop, and a series of hung shows. The way that that Story was interrupted was when I saw how unhappy I was with that lifestyle–trying to pull together enough work for a show, constantly comparing myself to other artists and what they were doing and were they better, the physical work of hanging a show, finding storage for pieces in between a show, cleaning up that sassy studio…these days, I far prefer a little table in my office. When I do creative work, it’s a treat. When I don’t, it’s fine. No pressure.

So what Stories do you tell? What would it be like to let go of those?

Speaking of stories (the lowercase kind), here are some that are told about The Courageous Year (registration ends tomorrow!).

“I feel like I am getting a lot of support out of this course. I am the kind of person who dithers a lot about committing to things like this, but I am so glad I trusted my instincts with this one. I would recommend it (and have done!) to whoever asks.  The lessons are so well thought out, communicated clearly and have had an immediate impact on my life for the most part. I also like that it’s kept fun.” — E. S.

“I feel I am getting numerous valuable tools to help me in my life.  It’s really interesting to begin to see how so many of these things are connected–the inner kid, the blame story, forgiveness, being in integrity with myself.  It’s been a chance for me to put a lot of pieces of my life-puzzle together, and in the process begin to either release, re-frame or forgive a great deal of the challenges I have had along the way.  It’s definitely freeing, and I’m so glad to have had the courage to begin the process.” — C. V.

“I have felt some major shifts within myself. I think just being able to recognize my “stories” for what they are, is huge. Having written down my values, and noticing my inner critic, are all of benefit…my friend was asking me if I would be happier to have the money to spend on something else, and all I could think about are the things that are most important to me – my values. And personal growth along with several others of them are a match for me with this course. I want to live BIG, and I know that I am capable, I just need more tools in my toolbox – and I’m getting those here. I also enjoy having a group of women to share the process with.” — D. W.

“I was on this path (of dreaming and achieving bigger and living by my values) anyway and this course is giving me good structure in which to keep on that path which some extra encouragement and tools along the way.  I have been surprised by some of what I have learned and that’s why I am continuing.” — E. H.

My beautiful friend, Diana.

So we were at yoga this morning, chit-chatting about how–oof–5am just comes rolling in like a freight train, and how we’ve both needed to make lifestyle adjustments in order to make it to bed earlier in order to wake up earlier. Suddenly, I found myself able to verbalize something that I had been thinking about for days, weeks, months: being disheveled. For awhile now I’ve felt some feeling that something wasn’t quite right sometimes when I’d read a blog post on the subject , or I’d feel particularly satisfied with some aspect of my life and then some inner critic voice would rise up that I understood yet did not understand, such that I felt almost…guilty. You know, for doing things like getting up really early to go to yoga, or for getting my taxes done on time.

This thing that had been sifting around for awhile gained more clarity when a Courageous Year participant posted last week that she held a particular kind of Story around what it would mean for her to have her life in order, and it hit me that I had been carrying a Story that there is something “stick in the mud-ish” about things like regular bedtime schedules or healthy eating. I’ve picked up on that attitude for some time, especially in my early 20′s, but hadn’t really thought much of it because the “stick in the mud” vibes were coming from people who, you know, had yet to realize that spending all of one’s money on alcohol and dragging your ass home from the umpteenth walk of shame isn’t sexy! sassy! Carrie Bradshaw the redux! or daring! It is, simply, dragging your ass home after drinking. No reinventing the wheel, there. But still getting that vibe even as I get older and we’re all supposed to be adults is something that I confess I find a little unsettling.

Yvonne from Challenge Day relays a story both in Be the Hero as well as at Next Step workshops, and it is this–that there was a point in high school when she was overweight and unpopular, and then she lost the weight and managed to become popular. For awhile things were fine, until then, suddenly, the other girls turned on her. People started spreading rumors that she was stuck-up and conceited. It was at that point, she relates, that she realized: “No one is winning at this game.”

It was this morning that I was finally able to articulate what was bothering me when I was talking to Diana–it bothers me to see people displaying “disheveled” as a credential, as if it is somehow more authentic. I think that there is beauty in all of the rough places of our lives, and I feel under no illusions what.so.ever. that there is anyone–not anyone–who has things all perfectly together, all of the time (and while I don’t get a vibe that anyone thinks I have it all together, it goes without saying that I myself am included in that statement).

Though, with that said, I should clarify. I think that there is something really powerful in declaring where our vulnerabilities and weaknesses are. What I hear people say most often about when others expose their rough patches is that it makes it easier to accept their own–and that’s true for me, too. Where I think the line gets blurred is when it starts to either directly or energetically create divisions, with the “people who have it all together” on one side getting labeled as conceited or arrogant, while the crowd who views themselves as “more real because we don’t have it all together” on the other, using “disheveled” as some kind of credential for authenticity.

No one is winning at that game.

I mean, isn’t it ridiculous! (I’m sort of laughing as I type this, because it is). Who has anything, ever, all totally wrapped up? What if we stopped with the comparisons and relaxed into this simple fact, and instead of beating ourselves up over what someone else is able to create for themselves (especially when we don’t know the whole story by the time it’s filtered through a blog post), what if we were to see our craving of a particular way of being as a gift? Someone else is doing it and you’re not? Fantastic. They are proving that it can be done. What if you joined them in what they are trying to create?

I know that a big booming inner critic voice might pop up that says, “THEY WOULDN’T WANT ME!”

But you know what? If someone is really living an authentic and big vision that is a match for your vision, they will want you. Maybe they won’t have the space in their lives to make you their new best friend, but they will have some kind of interest in what you uniquely have to offer. Speaking for myself, I genuinely treasure every comment to this site, every email, every tweet or post to facebook. I view it as someone participating in my life and what I want to create, and I appreciate that! If someone doesn’t respond with wanting you, avoid the Story of not-enoughness. Skip it entirely (unless you believe it serves you in some way). Step instead over to the one that is about you creating your life, doing the best you can with what you’ve got among a sea of people who are all doing the best they can with the skills that they have. The so-called perfect bloggers, the advice columnists, the woman down the street who looks like a Stepford Wife…we do them a collective disservice when we do not fully “see” them for who they are.

We do ourselves a collective disservice if, in response to the insecurity that arises from all of those comparisons, we decide to play small by taking on “disheveled” as a new identity.

Authentic is living your vision for your life, and that’s what you make it.

I found this meme at a blog and started looking around to figure out who started it, and didn’t find it (everyone was linking to someone else who linked to someone else…) and now I’m not remembering the blog I found it on. Well, then. Sheesh.

I don’t usually get into memes and things, but this one struck me as tender. I am in one of those cycles where I am noticing all of my tender places and feeling them more acutely and wanting them to be less hidden.

I smell: fantastic.

(From last week’s Next Step workshop)

Last weekend, I got very scared about money. I started to cry. Then I started to heave as I was crying, shaking. I was really stuck in a Story about money and that Story went something like, “You’re supposed to have a set income, with a set paycheck, and you know exactly when every single thing is happening.” And then that Story quickly became, “What the hell did you leave behind steady paychecks for? It was so much better when you didn’t have to worry!”

Now here’s the thing: There’s plenty of money in the bank. There was no actual money problem that prompted the crying.

Stories don’t necessarily wait for the good old sh*t to hit the proverbial fan before they run like an endless, infinite loop.

To use another example: Back when Andy and I first started dating (almost five years ago! We have an anniversary coming up!) he was perfectly sweet and kind and wonderful. And I remember he invited me to go to a ball game, impromptu when some tickets became available, and I said yes, and then I learned that one of the people in the group going that evening was someone that he had once had a tiny crush on.

I called up a friend and began bawling. “He’s going to see me next to her, and realize that he really doesn’t want to be with me!” I wailed.

I mean, Andy hadn’t done anything. I was just totally caught up in Story. Money in the bank, awesome new relationship–yet, Story Story Story.

(P.S. It’s Belief & Story time over at The Courageous Year, so the subject of Stories in particular have been swirling about my head).

Sometimes my Stories are so conditioned that they passively influence my behavior, like walking around with an assumption that someone won’t like something, when in fact they could care less. Then I forget that I devoted all of that energy to an assumption until I clue myself in next time or when that moment of clarity hits. Other times my Stories hit me smack in the face–like when I’m suddenly crying or wailing (I’ve always liked Elizabeth Gilbert’s description of that kind of crying: “Double pumpin’ it”) and then it’s like “Throw me the life raft, boys, because it’s sink or swim time.”

Despite the embracing of courage now, the simple truth is that in my life’s trajectory I have had more experience with running Stories and staying stuck, or spending long periods of time in the ick feelings, because I was more invested in a Story that “This all sucks” than I was with Stories that serve me (“I choose if this sucks” or “I bet there’s something about this that doesn’t suck.”) It has only been in the past few years that I’ve pulled all of my mental inventory from the Doldrums Bank and started investing in Possibility IPO.

I realized that I have far more “bad” Stories about leaping, taking risks, than I do “good” ones (with “bad” being the ones that don’t serve me and the “good” ones being the Stories that lift me up, support my life vision, etc.) We live in a world where I think it tends to be kinda easy to get risk-averse!

Earlier this week, I made a decision to let go of something that had been been bothering me for awhile. I’d run about a million and one Stories about why it was not working, and it was exhausting to do. I’d had a great session with my Coach in which I realized that I’d been carrying a lot of Stories about how I had messed it up, had make-up work to do, needed to try harder, etc. And then I realized that I was also carrying a Story that one was not ever supposed to “give up” on other people or difficult situations or anything that caused conflict. Where did I get that idea? Sometimes it’s time to let things go (another Story, but one that serves me better and leaves out that whopping helping of guilt).

I was reminded that we work with what we have in this moment–anything else is judging what happened in the past or going into the future, which I don’t know anything about and can start to catastrophize if I’m in a fear-based place. I’d exercised a lot of options around this decision, including the all-important, “Don’t bother with it for awhile, think about something else, allow some space,” and none of them really seemed to shift things.

The funny thing is that I thought that letting go was going to be hard–this was my Story–and I assumed that I would feel grief, fear, loneliness, scarcity. Instead, what I noticed was an immediate sense of relief. And any time I didn’t go into any Stories, and just stuck with the moment and what I knew to be true on a purely objective level, I was able to stand behind my choice. Things felt expansive, like opening up. Whenever I moved away from that and into some Story about lack or fear I was back in an icky space, and whenever I stepped away from that, I was completely in support of myself as a fumbling, stumbling, mistake-making and all around fantastic, vibrant, courageous human being.

And in a series of moments, something opened up until I could feel myself having embraced fully some new Story around leaping: letting go and leaping opens up new space for something that is more of a match to come in.

What kind of Stories have you noticed yourself running about money, time, friendships, jobs, the economy, your parents, your relationships, your kids, people who eat X kind of food, people who wear X kinds of clothes? And, as Byron Katie says, “Who would you be without your Story?” Now that’s a powerful question!

I have a Marketing Guru.

We met by happenstance in the midst of an e-course. We decided to trade coaching for marketing help. And right away, one thing became very clear: I was the coach, helping someone step into BIG living and being seen in their life. And my Marketing Guru became my coach, helping me to step into BIG marketing and being seen in my profession (which is in alignment with my life and thus often feels very much like “my life”).

And really, they are in so many ways the same thing, with the same processes and stumbling blocks. Little brain goes: “I am going to take a risk and do something new that I have never done before, and I’m almost guaranteed to make mistakes and I’ve been taught by most of the people in my life that mistakes are bad. Now what?”

Confession: I have an inner critic that tells me all the time that I am “doing it wrong.”

However, I can comfortably confess that because I know that I’m not alone in that. (P.S. All of you Etsy shop owners, we’re in this together!)

I’ll daresay that for most people, the question of how to get word out about their new business is the most daunting aspect of the new business. I’ve been coaching for years now. I’m excited about it, always learning something new, etc. And when I first began coaching, I worried that I was “doing it wrong” but luckily I had mentors and people around me helping me, giving me feedback (and I still have those people).

My Marketing Guru got me all set up and ready to go and SEO-optimized and full of ideas. That’s as far as she could take me. Now the rest of the work is my own. And, that is also like life–when I work with a coaching client, we can brainstorm, clarify, and be accountable around practices. But ultimately, the client is the one who puts that into practice in their life. At some point, one must risk being seen for who they are and what they stand for.

My experience of “marketing” (a word I still feel a little ick around) is about 10% updating my site or spreading word, and 90% fear of being seen.

Because, ick–being seen can be so uncomfortable. It can be so misinterpreted. It can so often be confused with selling something. And I don’t want to “sell anything” to anyone. I much prefer the idea that I’m offering something and perhaps they like it. And if they don’t, they’ll pass, and that’s cool, too.

Chris Guillebeau once said: “I try to avoid ‘selling’ in general–even though that’s technically what happens with products. Instead of the selling mentality, though, I think more about offering solutions to problems. If someone has a problem and they like my proposed solution, great. If not, I’m not really interested in pressuring them to change their mind.”

Right. What he said. That’s what I want to do.

Except sometimes, the stretch of being seen feels even like that–how much is too much? How often is too often?

I felt super triggered a few weeks ago when someone made a comment on Facebook about someone who marketed themselves too much and too often. I immediately went to a space of, “Oh, gosh, I bet I do that. I bet I’m wrong.” (I’m not suggesting that the person making the comment was wrong–I’m owning that my reaction to reading it was to be triggered, to step into an old habit around thinking I’m fucking it up).

I was able to recognize when I was triggered that that’s what was going on–I was triggered. That’s my work. My responsibility. Not theirs. Also, I still have hangups around self-promotion. Is it fake? Is it cheesy and schmaltzy? Can people tell that when I’m describing The Courageous Year as a really powerful process, I’m really believing that and not just using some ad-lingo that sounded good?

What helped immensely when I was triggered? Recognizing that this was work around fear of being seen, of being too much, of playing life “too big.” Marianne Williamson and the fear of success and no one is served by our playing small. All of that.

My coach routinely says to myself or my partner (whom he also coaches): “Risk annihilation.” The first time I ever told him that I was afraid of, you know, failing and ending up in a cardboard box and all of that, he smiled and said, “So?”

Which sounds looney.

But the thing is, if I’m seriously living my vision for myself, taking risks, and being willing to embrace everything that comes into the circle of my existence rather than picking and choosing (which really amounts to playing it safe), I’m probably going to “fuck it all up.” Except he would rephrase that as simply “learning from life.”

And part of this big vision I have, which is–when I stop to get perspective, also helpful!–is not such a huge massive dream. To do work that I love and support myself? Nah. I’m not exactly re-inventing the wheel, here. People do this. People have done this. People will continue to do it.

Where are the scariest places in your life for you to “be seen” for who you are? Is there anything that you would like to do, but that you avoid for fear of being seen (i.e., in a business, in relationships)? Any other small business or Etsy shop owners out there who know what I’m talking about with this marketing stuff? And how do you deal with the days when you worry about being seen?

P.S. According to random.org, Caiti is the winner of the PolaPremium giveaway! Congrats!

There was this moment awhile back where my coach/counselor/mentor Matthew looked at me really directly, straight in the eye, and said something like, “You realize that if you embrace this kind of work, you’re stepping into a whole different way of being in the world.”

It was in that moment that I fully got that while a part of me really wanted to live the life of my dreams, and was excited about what I saw as the potential of fully stepping into my power, and wanted to use tools and be in integrity with me and connect with everyone in my life, there was this very real other part of me that totally did not want any part of that. First of all, part of me didn’t want to to bother because I felt I’d hit upon a truth that was unsettling: “bad” things would still happen. Challenges would arise. I would get triggered. Finally, the truth–it’s all a continuum, there is no ending point where feeling good about life is wrapped up in a pretty little bow.

The other point of resistance was simply wanting to stick with what I’d grown comfortable and accustomed to doing. There was this other part of me that really wanted to stick to repetitive complaints, telling people that I “couldn’t,” etc. I just wanted to be the way I had been, negative, yelling, complaining, angry, prone to drama.

It shocked me to realize that there was this very influential piece of me that was quite content to be that way. Then it struck me that many other people are quite content to stick with that, too. None of us are “bad” or “weak.” We’re just human, and at the end of the day, we prefer our routines over something new. It all sounds “wrong” to say that–we are a world of people buying self-help books and seeking gurus and stretching our bodies into awkward postures hoping it will bring enlightenment. We run to e-courses and therapists and we journal furiously and we’re cathartic about our anger–and yet, I really do believe that most people experience, on some level, a very deep resistance to truly changing their own patterns.

This isn’t a judgement–I still have resistance come up! The only difference between before and after is that now I work with it.

The other day on the Courageous Year forums I posted a question for participants. In essence: “Who would you ‘have to’ be in order to step into living the kind of life you want to live?”

Even though I had not intended for this question to stick with me, stick with me it did. I kept thinking about that moment when I realized all that I would be choosing to give up if I really stepped up my game and started letting go of the petty stuff, having compassion in the face of cruelty, not judging when I felt vindicated in doing so, telling my 100% truth and accepting that someone else might not agree. Even though it sounds like it would be great to let go of all of that, there was this odd clinging that I felt–like I didn’t want to let that go! What would I put in its place?

Which brings me to the other point of resistance that I had–who I thought I would “have to” be if I stepped up my game was a.) perfect, b.) chipper, c.) cheerful, d.) having all the answers, e.) someone who would be made fun of. I believed that I would “have to” become a walking posterboard for empowerment and holding space and being nice. I thought that I’d probably have to stop buying things, especially things like clothing.

In particular, this was a point of resistance around letting go of my job as a teacher. I have received very different reactions when I answer the “What do you do question?” now that I’ve switched jobs. The look that comes over a stranger’s face when I tell them what I do is usually one of curiosity (“What is that, exactly?”) or a quick shut down (“Oh. Nice.”) presumably in the hopes that I will not pull out my business card and start trying to sell them on a “Buy four sessions, get one free” deal. There’s a lot of disdain out there for terms like “positive thinking” and “affirmations.” I can’t say that I blame people. The first time I ever picked up a book on the topic, I was excited and convinced it would work for me. The tenth time, it was like, “Nah. This doesn’t work.” Very discouraging. (P.S. I believe that both positive thinking and affirmations are, in fact, helpful–when combined with work that also acknowledges frustration, anger, etc. All of this put together, in the form of something that can be practiced in small increments, is what I attempt to do with The Courageous Year).

I think it’s important to say that whatever path you follow, if it’s truly authentic, it’s going to make room for the parts of you that feel too broken. It’s not going to tell you that any one part of you is bad, or push you to perfection. I still do all of the things that I thought I’d “have to” give up in order to live bigger: buy clothing, and eat the occasional burger at In and Out, and snap at people when I’m frustrated, and get discouraged. The only difference is the part where it’s practice. (Speaking of which, have you seen the latest PDF e-book? It takes 2-3 minutes to download and is ripe for coloring: http://bit.ly/d86pMU )

So I’m curious to know: who would you “have to” be if you were to fully step into living the life of your dreams, a life where you were completely fulfilled, a life where you took full responsibility for your choices, a life where you were living 100% fully alive and with authenticity? What old roles would you be giving up in the pursuit of that, and what new roles would you be adopting? And do you have any hesitance about adopting the newer role, either because of what others think or because it’s unfamiliar or uncomfortable?

P.S. Registration for Across Mediums closes at the end of this week–and starts Feb 15th! Fourteen days of experimental, creative fun that stretches you. And registration for a new group of Courageous Year participants will open on February 15th! Sign up for the mailing list to get first dibs.

Tonight I was chatting with McCabe and she related that in a class she’d taken, a teacher had told the class: “This class is going to bring up all your shit, and it’s going to be the best thing that has ever happened to you.”

Or something like that, loosely paraphrased.

And I wanted to get that printed on t-shirts, because when I’ve got my “shit” coming up, I generally don’t think that it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me. I get really attached to the way I want it to be, and that way is always the easy way. I mean, I can almost hear myself whining as I type this. Why can’t it be eaaaaaassssyyyyy?

But quite frequently life brings up all of our shit, and it’s the best thing that ever happens to any of us.

And then after this I was sitting on the couch eating brown rice and wild rice with steamed green beens (because, if you must know, between reading Fast Food Nation and seeing the movie version and seeing Super Size Me and watching Food, Inc., it just is not sitting right for me to eat processed food anymore, from an environmental, ethical, health and human rights perspective, which is going to be a serious killjoy for me when I want to sit down for my Tuesday night ritual and watch The Biggest Loser while eating a Frosty from Wendy’s, and I don’t have any plan for how I’m going to shift this but green beans and brown rice are a start, and they were quite tasty…) and I was eating dinner and watching How to Cook Your Life, a documentary about Ed Espe Brown, writer of the Tassajara Bread Book and Zen practitioner. I was staying at Green Gulch Zen Center on a retreat a few years ago and had the good fortune of having some of his bread because he happened to be there at the same time.

And oh my god this is good bread.

I still remember this bread.

But I was watching this documentary tonight and there were shots of Green Gulch and I was remembering my time there. And then Ed Brown starts talking about how life brings up all of our shit (only he of course didn’t say “shit”), how cooking can be like a metaphor for life in so many ways. Cooking = timing, patience, our morals and values around affluence, care, tenderness, practice, integrating the body, being present to what is before us. Cooking, as he explains it, brings up all of our desires to enforce our will, to overthink it, to control, to run up against discouragement when things go wrong.

Because things will go “wrong.” And I’m constantly forgetting that and re-remembering. Things will go “wrong.” Life is going to edge up against me all over the place, against all of us, and it’s going to be uncomfortable as hell.

It’s only our stories that tell us that there’s something “wrong” with discomfort that make discomfort so…discomforting.

And I’m the weirdo, I guess, because I like watching documentaries where people chop vegetables and liken that to life.

In this documentary, every story and every sentence was phrased with carefulness, and yet I couldn’t help but think that what Ed Brown says and what McCabe’s teacher once said are basically the same.

So I’ll rephrase it a bit:

“Life is going to bring up all of your shit, and it’s going to be the best thing that has ever happened to you.”

I love it.

From inside of Pizzeria di Michele in Naples, Italy.

I have been on a journey with loving and fully accepting my body. I think that most women are, or have been. The journey has been such a complicated and layered place–full of thinking I was “over it,” beating myself up for not being “over it,” eating disorders in high school, extreme exercising, extreme dieting, not being able to exercise due to injury and watching in frustration how my body changed, noticing the women who judged me for judging my body, wishing my body would be anything else but what it was.

Looking back with the benefits of hindsight, I realize how much I have wanted some kind of “holy grail” of body image therapy–like there would be this one day when I was just done judging my body, if I followed XYZ steps. Instead, each piece has been a piece.

The woman who once told me disgustedly that she didn’t respect any women who were “insecure much past high school”? I get to heal that piece–the piece of me that, in the moment I heard that, accepted the full weight of that shame and wanted to deny that I ever had any issues with my body at all. The piece of me that didn’t want to own that loving my body has been a challenge, a struggle. I get to fully own the fact that I have been, sometimes still am, and probably will again feel insecurities about my body. And I feel powerful in that. I am embracing those insecure feelings as if they are poor, abandoned children that no one wants, and it’s my job to speak kindly to them and let them heal at their own pace, not because someone else is being cruel.

It’s a journey, not a one-stop-shop.

The night I did that naked workshop on body image, and huddled up on the floor because I didn’t want anyone to see me? I got to heal that. I got to come back and re-do that workshop a year later, and this time I did a full on sass and a half naked turn in a room full of other naked people, and it rocked the casbah and I was so proud of that. That night, the re-do night, I owned every piece of myself.

It’s a journey, not a one-stop-shop.

That workshop was also one in which I got really, really clear on how women are oppressed through the media as well as how we as women–even when we “know better”–participate in that oppression. At the end of the day, there are all of these ads thrown at us to convince us of one thing–that something is wrong with us and our bodies, and that we need to buy something to make it all better. We buy it hook line and sinker, despite all of the research on how the media influences how we feel about our bodies. I stopped buying women’s magazines that had anything to do with supposed “fitness” or “health,” as well as the celebrity gossip rags that do things like rate what women are wearing. I stopped watching television shows that feature only stereotypically beautiful, thin women that I am asked to emulate, and I also got in touch with the judgements that I carried about beautiful women. What good does it do me to hate them? What good does it do any of us to hope that they may be beautiful, but that they lead unhappy lives? How have I been trained to think that someone who is beautiful on the outside has it all “together” on the inside, and how does that belief system contribute to separation in the world?

This was all more journey.

Going to Italy in 2008? I got to heal the part of me that was terrified of what might happen to my body if I stopped dieting. (Actually, first I got to get in touch with the fact that I was terrified of no longer dieting–I hadn’t even been aware of how afraid of that I was!). In Italy, I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. When I went to Pizzeria di Michele, I ate an entire pizza myself. And at the end of the day, when I got back to the United States after spending a month in Italy eating, happy as a clam? I weighed myself and had lost five pounds. That’s when I “got it” that the diets don’t matter so much as loving myself and focusing on completely being happy. I can hear the cynics saying that I must have lost weight because I was walking so much in Italy. I doubt that that was it. I had pastries for breakfast, pastas and breads and pizzas–regular meals–at mealtimes, and stopped for gelato twice, sometimes three times a day. One would need to do a lot more walking than I did to make up for all of that!

And still, it’s a journey–not a one-stop-shop.

I decided last year that I wanted to lose 20 pounds–to get myself back to the weight I was at before I had a foot injury that kept me from exercising for nearly two years–and also that I wanted to run Bay to Breakers. I began training in January of this past year. I worked out five days a week many weeks. I lost thirteen pounds. My body started to look like an athlete’s body. I felt really excited that I had figured out what really works when it comes to weight loss–weight lifting and resistance machines all the way, baby–and at the same time that I was getting really ripped, something was not clicking for me and my body would shut down if I tried to run more than four miles. I had to cancel on Bay to Breakers. I also got to do work on the parts of me that were afraid of the judgements of others for making a choice to work out. I learned a critical piece about how the important thing is consciousness and ownership of my decisions. If I decide to lose weight, I make that decision because it’s what I want for myself, for reasons that support myself and my vision for my life…not because some magazine shames me into it.

Journey, journey, journey.

Fast forward to this past summer, when I went back to Italy and again resumed the “I’ll eat whatever I want” diet. I was unable to work out there, even though I tried–the humidity just wasted me–and once again, returned home another five pounds thinner. Then I decided to let go of teaching and as I put more time and effort into coaching and getting things set up for this transition, the workout schedule that I’d maintained so well fell by the wayside. This was a conscious choice. I noticed that I had an inner little girl who was working so hard at two jobs plus moving and every time I thought of going to the gym, she threw a fit. How could I make her go to the gym and workout, on top of everything else? The resistance was so, so strong. So I did something that I had never been willing to do before–I both continued my policy of “not dieting” as well as embraced my inner little kid’s resistance. She didn’t want to go to the gym? We didn’t have to. I had lost 13 pounds since deciding to lose 20 this year, and 3 crept back but the rest were seemingly held at bay.

I decided to see where that would lead. Journey, journey, journey.

My coach, Matthew, has had me doing mirror work for the past two years. It’s only been in the past few months that I have been super consistent about it. I’m grateful. I am a curvy girl. I have hips and breasts. When I first began doing mirror work–standing in front of a mirror and looking myself in the eye, while naked, and then looking at my body, while naked–I couldn’t handle it. There was a touch of the perverse in there–like, was I somehow perverted or wrong for looking at my own body? Was that narcissistic? Crazy?

In addition, I would do this work and all I could see were my flaws. It drove me crazy to spend time being with them. And then, over time, something lifted and I came to understand that none of it was a flaw. It started to seem as ridiculous to think of looking at my thighs and thinking they were wrong as it would to look at my elbow and think it was wrong. There came another part of the journey–how had I been trained to look at certain parts of my body and believe that something was wrong with them? And who chose that belief? And who could choose to opt-out?

Something shifted in these past few months–some combination of seeing that I could release the “diet and exercise grip” without gaining a lot of weight, plus the mirror work. The fear lessened, and I began looking at my body in the mirror with something akin to kindness. I began feeling true gratitude for it, every single day. What a wonderful machine it is! It keeps me upright and has me moving around and twisting and using all kinds of muscles that I never think twice about using. It’s got me typing at some ridiculously fast typing speed right now–all of that processing, that ability to pair muscle movement with thought! And its ability to heal–to get sick and then fight back, to bruise and then send healing cells to that area, to be sore and then repair the muscles. How can we all spend so much time hating something that does such beautiful work for us?

When I really started to think about these things, I was in awe of my body, of the cells that make it up and have so beautifully do their job every single day, despite my history of ABUSE, my HATRED, my DISGUST, my CRITICISMS.

What a wonderful body I have! What wonderful bodies we all have, working for us in the ways they work for us and not working for us in other ways so that we have the gift of learning something from that.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that my inner little kid was starting to come out of resistance with the gym. She wanted to exercise again. She likes all of the energy it gives her. She likes how it reduces stress. She likes being strong. She likes running and being out in nature. She likes how it keeps her from feeling cooped up in the house. So I asked her, “Are you ready?” She said, “Yes.”

My first day back at the gym was Tuesday, and what a fitting experience to have on a first day–two women were working out with a guy friend of theirs who was helping them learn the equipment. The two women were overweight. They were being really great about letting me and others get sets in as they rotated through the equipment (some people are not so respectful…sigh…). One of the women was resting in between sets and she looked me up and down and said, “How often do you work out?”

“Well,” I said, “I used to work out four or five days a week, but then I stopped for a long time. Now I’m getting back into it.”

“But what’s the point?” she said, and she was not saying it unkindly. “I mean, you’re thin. What’s the point?”

All of these words rushed to my lips and were about to spill over, words like–Thin? ME? No. I’m not thin. I’m a size X and I weigh Y, and if I weren’t wearing these sassy gym pants you’d see that, and I wish I could lose blah blah blah–and then I stopped myself. I smiled.

“Well, to have energy–when I work out regularly, if I have a bad night’s sleep I don’t feel tired at all. And to have a healthy baby someday, and to live a longer life,” I said.

Then she said, “Yeah. Yeah, I notice the energy thing, too. When I work out, I have a lot of energy.” Then she ducked her head and laughed. “I also notice that when I’m exercising, I’m really regular.”

Well, okay then–that was another benefit I hadn’t thought of…

Here’s where I’m at on the journey, today. First of all, sometimes I still “feel fat” or fall into criticisms of my body. I embrace that as okay. The sooner I shine light on that and then look at why I’m suddenly feeling insecure and projecting that onto my body, the sooner I feel better and get into a good place again. I no longer take feelings of ick around my body as truth. It’s never my body–the feelings come from something deeper.

Second, I am easing back into working out again–not because I want to be really skinny. The mirror work has done a lot to take that desire off the table. I’m full-on in love with my fantastic body. I’m exercising to keep it strong, to keep myself energized, and because my inner little kid got that time that she apparently needed to just have the Resistance. I’m lifting weights and this feels good–I feel strong.

Third, I use the question “What nourishes me?” to decide what to eat. I eat bread. I eat sweets. I eat gelato. However, I don’t eat anything without consciousness. I think about what I am eating and how I will feel afterwards. If the experience I want is to share a decadent dessert with my partner, I’ll do that. I’ve learned to recognize that no matter how good something tastes, I really really really hate that icky bloated feeling of eating too much, so I choose not to do that. I now believe I’m pretty good at being able to tell when my body wants vegetables or meat or a carbohydrate. It took time with that question about what nourishes me to get conscious about what my body was asking for, when.

All of this is a piece. If you find yourself hating your body right now, terrified of what might happen if you stopped dieting, frustrated by how you can love your body one moment and then hate it in another, start by considering just the question “What nourishes me?” combined with daily mirror work.

Body image is something that I work on with a lot of my clients–I’m really excited to be able to share with them what I’ve learned and guide them through this process. Body image is also something that will be addressed as part of the Courageous Year.

Loving yourself all the way, no matter what–that sounds pretty courageous to me. And don’t forget–apparently, another benefit of exercise is that you’ll get really regular.

Where are you at on your body journey?

If you really knew me, you’d know that birthdays have historically been kind of sensitive for me. It’s my own fault in many ways–at this point in time, I don’t yet clearly see the way of “choosing out” of the belief system that they are a measuring stick of how much people love me. The measuring stick works like this: First of all, will the people I love remember? Second of all, will they come if I have a birthday get-together, or will something else be more important? And if something else is more important to them, what does that say about our relationship?

Awhile back, I had a few birthdays in a row where friends who had conflict with me used my birthday as a way to express that they were upset, in the form of not being available to get together. Years later and in hindsight, I recognize the dynamics that were at work and see how all parties played a part, and I accept responsibility for my part in creating and perpetuating conflict, and in not cleaning it up.

And, nonetheless, each year since that conflict happened, I notice that I feel a little sad about my birthday. I’ve done any amount of work with my coach around cleaning that up, letting go, etc., and yet it still lingers. So, okay, I’m going to give it more time, trusting that there’s still some gold in there (while simultaneously fully admitting the hurt feelings that can come up around that–it’s such a balance for me when I write here, conveying both how I am truly committed to a vision of owning my life fully and not being a victim, while also acknowledging the parts that are sticky, stuck, difficult or painful).

I do notice, however, that this year things are feeling just a bit different–and I owe that in large part to Andy, who has been World’s Sexiest Boyfriend this past week. It’s basically been “birthweek” around here, not “birthday.” The bed is made. The toilet paper rolls are replaced (and more toilet paper is purchased before I have a chance to put it on my to-do list). What would I like for dinner? Oh no, honey, I’ll load the dishes in the dishwasher. This morning he bought me my morning latte. This is all in addition to his usual, everyday availability for snuggling and random displays of affection (he’s really good at those).

Trust me, I’ve been having fun with this, appreciating it, acknowledging him for it and being full o’ gratitude.

But the thing that takes the cake is this–he planned a special weekend getaway for us. And I have no idea where it is or what we’re doing. All I know is that I’m supposed to pack a bag. And I think I’ve sneakily managed to get him to admit that it does not involve planes, but is a short car ride away. But I’m not sure. 

I’m totally thrilled on one hand, and on the other, I can’t help but have this little niggling worry: Uh, wait. What if I don’t like it? Like what if he’s planning to take us to a romantic…couples workshop? Which I would totally be up for, just not on my birthday, you know? The only clue he’s given me is that it’s warm (that’s a good thing). And I’ve made him promise and swear that it’s not expensive.

See, this is where I expose myself fully–the CONTROL synapses are going, “Danger! Danger Will Robinson!” 

You are officially witnessing this life coach’s “edge” with the comfort zone.

If it’s something I wouldn’t be into, how will I control my face from twitching and revealing that after his hard work and planning and the sweetness of the surprise, it’s not something I’m into? How to avoid NOT feeling like “the selfish a-hole” because what I “Should” be caring about is the thought, more than anything else.

CONTROL CONTROL CONTROL, DANGER, WILL ROBINSON–the control freak synapses don’t want me to focus on the gratitude. They want to know what’s going to happen next, at all times. They want to be on the lookout on my birthday to forestall any possibility of a disappointment, so that they can CONTROL CONTROL CONTROL a resurgence or retriggering of the pain of past birthdays. 

Isn’t it amazing what we humans will resort to, to avoid pain? 

He has almost given in to my pestering several times to tell him what he’s up to. And at the end of it all, he pulls back and doesn’t tell. It’s better that way; I know this deep down.

So by the time this entry posts, I’ll be who knows where, and triggered by who knows what (if anything, at all).

AND I’ll also be with my best friend, the person I adore the most, who makes me laugh on a daily basis, who triggers the crap out of me (and I return the favor), who doesn’t give up on me (and I return that favor, too).

He’s the guy who both replaces the toilet paper roll and takes me out for a surprise birthday weekend. When I am able to push aside the CONTROL switch, I could cry with the awareness that I would not want anything more.

At the Marin Headlands

When I began telling people about letting go of teaching, everyone I spoke with was supportive. I was surprised by this. I anticipated hearing more, “But what about…money/time/health insurance/making it?” types of fears. Instead, people congratulated me on making the shift, and what I was left with was my own little room of these fears.

They weren’t anyone else’s–they were my own.

Then, as the weeks went by and I began building the websites and they were starting to take shape, I needed to define for myself what my hopes were. My hopes were simple: that initially, the sites would have resonance–and that ultimately, the e-course and retreats would fill.** 

“I get that the e-course starts in three months, so people aren’t going to sign up right away,” I told Andy before the sites launched. “All I want right now is resonance; I want to see that what I’m wanting to do resonates with people in a positive way. To me, that would look like supportive emails or comments. People saying ‘Like’ when I post the link on Facebook. Sharing the video with others. Stuff like that.”

By Thursday of last week, it was clear that I needed a break from the computer. I’d managed to come down with a cold right after a visit from my sister, my arm was hurting, my carpal tunnel was flared up, etc. Starting Friday, I decided to just…let…go...and take a break from the computer for a few days.

So you could have knocked me over with a feather when I got a call from someone who had registered for the course on Saturday afternoon, while Andy and I were out looking at apartments (it would seem at this point that we are likely letting go of house-sitting because the hurdy-gurdy moving around is wearing on us). And then I get home and try to log in on the computer, now excited to see what else is there–but the internet is down! Nonononono! gah!–and then finally later the internet is back up, and…oh my gosh. People are signing up for the e-course. Three months in advance. And joining the mailing list-serve. And sending me emails. And being so unbelievably wonderful and supportive and kind that I just want to send all of you the good things of life…things like gerber daisies. And buttercream cake. And vanilla lattes.

Holy tamale, Batman!

The personal work that I’ve been doing for years now means so much to me, mostly because it has gotten me out of a really, really stuck space. Being a Life Coach means so much to me. The e-course–something I’ve been thinking of doing for years, to the point where I’ve kept all of these little bits of notes in a file-folder that I’ve dragged around to every house I’ve moved into (and if you’re counting, that’s a lot of moving)–it means so much to me.

The fact that any of you see enough resonance to sign up this early in the game means more than I can say. You are helping me to create my own Courageous Year. I can promise you–this is not going to be some half-hearted, pitch it together at the last minute kind of deal. I’m putting my heart and soul into this course and hoping (trusting!) that when all of us collectively step into that space, something pretty amazing will be created–this group of people who are letting go of whatever doesn’t serve us to step into a vision for something new and more powerful.

** April 2010 retreat dates to be announced soon! Sign up for the mailing list over at http://www.yourcourageouslife.com for the announcement when I have our space confirmed.

“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?