Photo courtesy of pOOfkAt via Flickr Creative Commons License

It’s been two months – two months – since my last post. The weeks have been full. A delicate juggling act that looked something akin to me standing at the edge of a cliff in pointe shoes balancing spinning plates on my nose and twirling a fire hoop in each  hand.

The tele-retreat was amazing. (Thank you to the beautiful souls who participated). I listen more than I talk in my work so hearing my voice fill more than an hour each week pushed me way outside my comfort zone. I can’t wait to do it again. I facilitated a retreat for mamas and their teen daughters. My heart opened wide watching the magic of connection and re-connection, and imagining myself and Ada 10 years down the road.

I fell into tailspins, got sucker-punched by grief on Mother’s Day and enjoyed visits with the Not-Good-Enough Fairy. Life has been kind enough to show me exactly where I have room to grow. It’s also handed me beautiful opportunities to step out of the muck, lean into trust and watch miracles happen. I’ve spent time wishing things were different and loving them exactly as they are (often in the same breath).

There is an energy on the planet that is shaking things up for a lot of us – bringing old demons to the surface so we can let them go, and reminding us our hearts and souls need daily care. We are being challenged and we are being called to step forward, to play big, to shine.

I’m feeling the pull – the desire to serve, to create, to play on a deeper level. Sometimes it comes from so many angles I am paralyzed. Sometimes it’s hard to sleep for the sheer joy of being alive. And so I open my heart, turn to my practices, listen to my intuition and make room for growth.

And you? What’s happening for you right now? I’d love to know.

The recent shifting and sliding of my life suddenly made sense. I feel like I’m growing something big and unknown and beautiful. It’s taking an inordinate amount of energy. I’m not clear on what it is, and I don’t know how long it will take, but sooner or later I’ll give birth again. I’m preparing for it – a challenge without knowing what’s coming. I can feel life giving me exactly what I need. Opportunities, questions, choices. The right people. I’m following a trail of breadcrumbs deeper into my own forest, trusting that after the birds eat them, they’ll show me how to get out.

Life is messy. Birth. Death. Creativity. All messy. Though I know this I want it to be neat, now, today. I want it to fit into a box labeled Perfect. A part of me wants to bypass the journey and see the end result even though I know the journey is where joy lives. I see other people’s boxes and they look solid, polished, well-crafted. Much better than the mess in front of me. I get jealous. That old voice in my head whispers that I’ll never get anywhere, be anyone, unless I can look like that, do things the right way. My mind has stories to tell. Stories about measuring up and failing and being un-loveable.

Deep inside there’s another voice and it’s gotten louder over the years so that I hear it more quickly. I hear it just behind the first one now, when it used to take days for me to recognize the sound. It’s the voice of my heart. The voice that knows everyone has a mess somewhere. The one that trusts I’m exactly where I need to be. When I pause, breathe and listen to that voice, I am able to celebrate others’ successes without worrying about my own. I am able to see what I admire in them without feeling that their strengths make mine invisible. I am able to honor our individual paths without fearing that I’m trailing behind.

I am making friends with the stories that have held me captive for years, keeping me safe and small when I wanted to take a leap into big and brilliant. I thank them for watching over me and inform them (firmly, as they don’t like to listen) that I don’t need them anymore. I’m writing new stories now but even so, I’m working to not get attached. The mind is powerful and wants something to hold on to. But when holding on makes us miserable, it’s time to learn to let go. Birthing a dream. Being human. Messy. The mind can make it more, or less, so.

We’ll be examining our thoughts and our stories in the second week of the Picking Up the Pieces Tele-Retreat, moving toward both accepting them and letting them go. If you’re feeling ready, consider joining us.

The body is the foundation.

If we’re not in our bodies, we’re not in the moment. If we’re not in our bodies, we’re cut off from one of the biggest information centers and conduits of sensation and Love in the capital “L” sense of the word.

We are born knowing this, knowing that our bodies ground us in our lives. As infants we don’t need to think to know if we’re hot, cold, hungry, or needing to be held. Our bodies tell us. As a dancer, my body was my vehicle for expression. As I began working in physical theater I needed to know my body even more intimately as there was no choreographer to move me across the floor – every note that was hit, every word uttered, my body responded to from impulses deep within. My body was my tool and my craft.

Then I quit. I cut it off. Shut it down. Left it behind in favor of my mind. And I was miserable. It’s taken years to recover, finding my way back into myself slowly, searchingly.

The body is the foundation. If we are not present in our bodies, we are not fully alive.

It doesn’t matter what your body can do, what matters is that you live INSIDE of it. Embody your life. Embody your love. Feel life – taste it, touch it, experience it all through your body.

It can be terrifying. Our bodies hold memories we’d prefer to forget. They are scarred and wounded, vulnerable and strong. They are powerful beyond measure. As is our mind. But a mind disconnected from its body tells half-truths.

So many of us ache to escape what we see in the mirror. We judge it, berate it, cut ourselves off from it. We over-feed and under-adore. We struggle to make peace. Many religions and spiritual practices tell us to distance ourselves from our flesh, tell us that heaven is only reached when our body dies, tell us that to connect with the spirit realm we have to go up and out. I say the way to heaven is both in and through the physical. I say in order to be truly awake, we have to be able to live inside ourselves, deeply connected to our own inner wisdom. Our bodies are miracle babies, a union of Nature and the Divine. They speak powerfully. It’s time for us to listen.

What is your body telling you right now?

The body is the first week’s topic in the Picking Up the Pieces Tele-Retreat. If diving deeper into the how of this is something you’re drawn to, consider joining us. 

And I wanted to take it a step further.

I loved – loved – hosting the Picking Up the Pieces Retreat in September of 2011. Those were four of the most incredible, powerful, amazing days of my (almost) 40 years on the planet. I have been awed and humbled by the impact it continues to have on the lives of those who attended.

And I realize a retreat is a huge time and financial commitment.

I’ve been dreaming of a way to do the work I’m passionate about in a format that’s more affordable for people in terms of both money and time. I’ve been dreaming of another way to support us all in finding the gold in our challenges. I’ve been dreaming of an expanding community of people who are able to sit with each other, in person, on the phone or virtually, when life hands us those moments where all we can do is fall apart. This community exists (you might even already be a part of it) and it wants to grow – it needs to grow.

In service of those dreams, I am ridiculously excited to announce the:

Picking Up the Pieces Tele-Retreat: 5 weeks of emotional alchemy for those experiencing sorrow, sadness, stuckness or grief.

Because it’s the first time I’m offering it, and it’s a new format for me to work in, I’ve made it incredibly affordable. And there’s an extra-special time-limited offer as my birthday gift to you.

Find out more here. Share it with a friend. Sign up yourself.

I can’t wait to support you in finding your gold.

Photo by Dennis Skley, via Flickr's Creative Commons License

This past weekend I’d planned to start a “40 Days of Giving” adventure leading up to my 40th birthday on March 15th. Then I realized that even though I loved the idea of it, adding it to my daily life at this point felt terrible. I let it go, with only a twinge of disappointment. At one point I was planning to organize an Empty Bowls event here in Ventura as a way of celebrating my birthday. Again, I loved the idea of it – building community, raising money and awareness about food insecurity, having the opportunity to plan a fun, meaningful event. But when I listened deeply to my body, the thought of it made me physically exhausted. I filed it away for another day and decided to go low-key for my birthday. After all, if I wasn’t going to make some grand gesture of giving, I probably shouldn’t do much at all. I invited three couples that I adore to a small dinner party, which sounded lovely and made me incredibly sad.

I want a party. I want to celebrate. Not only is it my word for the year but I’m excited to be turning 40 and I want to begin this decade in the style I hope will carry me through. Celebration. Abundance. Play. Community. I want a new dress to show off the body that is 60 pounds lighter and feels great. I want to be surrounded by people I love to spend time with, talking and laughing and watching the sun set over the ocean. I want to feel full and happy and like my cup is overflowing.

Right there is the key.

I’d heard the expression Serve from the overflow and could pay it lip service, but I didn’t fully get it. One day when I was pregnant with Ben, during those miraculous two months when I wasn’t bleeding and thought I’d make it through the pregnancy in one piece, I listened to an interview with Lisa Nichols. I could sense her energy vibrating over the phone line and I finally understood, on a visceral level, what was meant. Taking it from a mental concept to something I could feel in my body was a radical move. Then Ben died, life upended and I was adrift. Somehow in my grief process, I allowed myself to fill my cup more than I ever had as an adult, learning slowly and painfully, that to take care of myself was also taking care of others, particularly my family.

Despite my new-found skills, something hasn’t felt quite right recently and I’ve been struggling to figure it out. The other day, in a flash of insight, I understood. I saw an image of a cup and saucer, white with simple curved lines, the liquid inside beginning to drip and splash over the edges. As I looked more closely, I saw that it was splashing unevenly and when I glanced in, there was a yawning white space at the back. My liquid was lopsided.

“But…but…” I sputtered to myself, “I meditate every day and I do yoga and I hike and have wonderful friends and I sit by the ocean when I need to and I’m trying to get to bed earlier…”

“Yes, this is true,” I heard my wise, intuitive voice answer, “but you’ve been wanting to paint, and you haven’t. You’ve been needing a massage and you haven’t scheduled one. Your self-care is out of balance and you still don’t feel totally worthy of receiving what you deserve.”

Worthy of receiving. I wonder how many of us struggle with that?

I made a list of all the ways I can take care of myself, no matter how impractical or expensive or small. It’s long -  more than three pages in my journal. A lot of it I incorporate into my life already but there are a few key areas where I see, very clearly, that I am not honoring my needs. Those areas are the hole in my cup. They are also the places where I still feel shame, where I continue to play small. My friend Christa wrote a beautiful post the other day about the shift in her life and her creativity, about not giving up, about creating space for ourselves. It is then, when we’ve breathed life into our dreams, when we’ve said I am important enough to…, that our cups really fill. It seems to me that it’s when we are able to give ourselves what we need to feel alive, to feel good more often than we are in pain, that we begin to recognize our inherent worthiness.

Every now and then when I’m feeling sad, Ada will do a little song and dance in an attempt to cheer me up. While she never fails to make me smile, I always let her know that it is not her job to take care of me. It’s not her daddy’s job to take care of me. It’s my job and mine alone. My hope is that it won’t take her half a lifetime to learn that lesson. I want to model self-care in such a way that it becomes as natural to her as breathing. I don’t do it perfectly, I don’t always do it gracefully, but I am learning to be the caretaker of my own soul.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a birthday party to plan.

Celebrate

Let joy flow into and through you. Celebrate everything. Pause in the midst of life and breathe in the beauty and the muck. Dig deep and find the gold. Explore celebration. Live celebration. Let your life be a dance with joy.

Full Permission

You have full permission to be your brilliant, messy, gorgeous, imperfect self. All day. Every day. Don’t ask anymore. Take it in both hands and run. Be yourself with wild abandon, even in your quietest moments. Love yourself with your whole heart.

Focus

Find your priorities and focus. Let everything else go. Follow the joy. Follow the passion. Narrower, go deeper. Fill your mind, heart and belly with what sustains you. Learn to say no, with love.

Shine

This is the year of letting your light blaze into the world. Be your own sun, moon and stars. Be the map to your inner night sky. Be the map you live by. Play big. Play with integrity. Dance by the light of your inner fire and SHINE.

Embody Love

This is your life’s work. You are love, now live it. Breathe it in, and out. Fill your cells. Fill the world. Walk, as love, into your life, so that everyone who enters your orbit knows that they too are loved, and are Love.

The museum has a number of raptors that have been wounded and can’t be released back into the wild. They are out in the sun every afternoon for visitors to get close to and ask questions about. We’d seen several of them on prior visits but this time there was a young falcon that caught my eye. She was stunning. The young man taking care of her told us her story – she’d been shot in the wing in Los Angeles, rescued, cared for and then she found a permanent home at the museum. Every few minutes she would spread her wings in an attempt to fly. My heart ached as I watched her. With a deep sadness in his eyes, her keeper said that most of the birds quickly give up and no longer reach for flight, but not her. She kept trying, refusing to accept the loop on her leg as permanent.

I’ve thought often about that beautiful bird with the intelligent eyes in the last week, about her attempts to break free from her situation, about the long years she can live in captivity and if there will ever come a day when she too gives up the dream. I thought of the human spirit. Of how we can be shot, beaten, raped, imprisoned and still, our spirits can soar. I read recently about a group of women in Congo who have lived through incomprehensible horror and are working to create positive change in their country. The world is full of such stories (if you’re not familiar with any, I recommend reading Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn). The world is also full of people who feel broken, beaten down, defeated, people who are so deeply wounded they only know how to wound others, people who have given up. I believe it is still possible for those people to fly. I believe we are all meant to be beacons of light, though perhaps not in this lifetime.

My friend who was hit by the truck essentially died after the accident and was brought back to life. He describes the experience as akin to taking off a lead jacket and soaring. He had young children at the time and wasn’t ready to go, but he says it was so beautiful that he came back with no fear of death. He will often seek out people who’ve lost loved ones in tragic ways and share his experience with them if they are open to hearing it. He, and others with similar experiences offer us the hope that if the brilliance of our spirits cannot prevail here in our physical bodies, it will shine again when we leave.

It seems to me though, that the goal of this life is to be our unique, luminous selves. To be ourselves, with full awareness and acceptance of our quirks and challenges, our imperfections, and at the same time to hold the vision of living as the best version of who we dream we can be. That might mean a resolution to not lose our temper for a year. It might mean embracing our Nerd Thug Swagger while vowing to speak our truth more often. It might mean creating a beautiful space to honor our creative souls or a site that aims to support and empower women entrepreneurs who are finding their way on the web. It might mean simply getting through the day in one piece with a life that has been completely altered by the ravages of cancer. The goal is not comparison (I am here, I should be there), nor is it perfection (impossible). It is to turn our faces in the direction of trust and take baby steps toward the belief that we are where we are meant to be, that we are who we are meant to be and that we are worthy of our own love.

Wondering how to do that? I’ll be exploring that in a subsequent post. A simple question to ask yourself in any moment is, What would Trust (or Love) do in this situation? Even if you find yourself unable to act on the answer, or if no answer comes, the act of asking the question will help take you out of your habitual patterns.

I wasn’t going to choose a word for 2012. Nothing came to mind anytime I tried. It felt forced, something I should do. I’m cutting should and try out of my vocabulary so I let it go. Just before Christmas, as we entered our final deep relaxation, or savasana, in yoga my teacher invited us to either relax as usual, or imagine contacting our higher self to see what she had to say. As I drifted into that lovely space of inner connection that has become familiar over the last year, images flooded my mind and then came the word, celebrate. It hung, crystalline, inside me and my entire being breathed, yes. It encompasses joy, gratitude, lightness and play and in my mind at least, takes them a step beyond. This is the energy I want to take into 2012. This is my word.

We’ve started to get acquainted over the past week and a half, celebrate and I. I’ve realized I don’t know much about it. The first associated thoughts that come to mind are have a party and have a drink, as those have been my celebration go-to’s as an adult. I don’t  drink much alcohol anymore and I’m not about to throw a party every day, so my exploration begins with the following questions:

What does “celebrate” mean to me? (i.e. what counts as a celebration?)

What and how do I want to celebrate?

What is mindful celebration?

What happens when the thought of celebration makes me want to hurl dishes at the wall?

I wondered too, about focusing on celebration here, where my writing as been so much about grief, as well as the fullness and beauty of life. Are they incongruent, celebration and loss? We threw a birthday party for Ada eleven days after Ben died because it was vitally important to me, but is that wise? I was reminded of Brene Brown’s wonderful TEDx talk where she says that the research shows we can’t numb emotions selectively. If we numb grief, we numb joy. If we close ourselves off to vulnerability, we close ourselves off to connection and love. We flat line. The world becomes shades of gray. My willingness to stay present with my grief has allowed me to grow in ways I never could have imagined. My ability to sit in the muck when I needed to has given me a greater capacity for joy, for gratitude, for living with an open heart. It’s also made me even more keenly aware of my brain’s negative bias (a human trait) and my tendency to dismiss my successes as I stay focused on my desires and what’s still to come.

Looking back on 2011, I am amazed at what I accomplished while still being immersed in my own grief process. I made huge dreams come true. I’m done dismissing them. I want to celebrate everything – from the little moments with my daughter that break my heart wide open with an aching joy, to the hard-to-miss moments like my 40th birthday, a long-awaited vacation, and career visions turned reality. In the spirit of spontaneity, I launched “Celebration School” on Facebook and Twitter (hash tag is #celebrationschool). It will start out as a daily post and tweet about celebration and who knows where it will go. I will revisit it periodically here on the blog as I answer the above questions and more. I invite you, no matter what’s happening in your life, to add a little more celebration. If that feels impossible, then I encourage you gently to turn your face in the direction of joy.

May 2012 bring us all ease, healing, light and full permission to be who we are. Shine brightly this year. Celebrate the imperfect, beautiful fullness of all that you are.

After my big declaration in yesterday’s post, I woke up this morning to a deluge of emails and Facebook posts letting me know the TEDxOjaiWomen talks are finally up on the TED site. So for those of you who’ve asked, here it is.

If it resonates at all, please share it. The more we can stay present with grief, the more open our conversation can be around it, the better off we all are.

Check out the other TEDxOjaiWomen speakers: Dyana Valentine, Instigator (I’m Not Sorry), Kira Ryder, Yogini (Slip Into Something More Comfortable), Colleen Wainwright, The Communicatrix (Are You Sure It’s Impossible?) akka b, Poet (Permission to Play), Gloria M. Miele, PhD, Business Consultant (What I’ve Learned Being a Girl Scout), and Alison Ivy, Money DeMystifier (The Gift of Money Know-How).

***

On another note, I’ve been meaning to share Raising Roses with you all too. I’ve written before about my friend Roos in Amsterdam (or Rose, to translate her name). Her husband Kenji has acute lymphoblastic leukemia and is fighting for his life after a double cord blood transplant. Though they are lucky to live in a country with socialized health care, some of his new cocktail of drugs is not covered. Roos will have to return to work soon, but right now she is full-time mama, wife and caregiver. Zen author and teacher Karen Maezen Miller (whose words have also helped me navigate the last 18 months) launched Raising Roses in order to help defray some of their costs. There are hundreds of worthy causes that could use our money, particularly at this time of year. If Roos and Kenji’s journey touches your heart, please consider supporting them as well. You can do so here.

I’ve decided to be okay with all of it.

The last few weeks have brought a resurgence of grief. Perhaps it’s from stepping into the holiday season. Perhaps it was preparing for the TEDx talk that pulled so many memories to the surface. Perhaps it was simply time to peel another layer of scarring away and expose a deeper wound to the sun. My writing right now is about a part of my life that is not ready to be shared. My focus is being pulled inward. Soft voices are urging me to give myself space to do this deep, healing work.

I am choosing to listen.

This space will be quiet for the next two and a half weeks. I am going on a social media fast: no blogging, no tweeting, no Facebook. I’ll check my email twice a day instead of compulsively every time I see a green flashing light on my phone. The hours feel precious and my soul is calling out to be nurtured and fed. I feel trepidation – a wondering about what I will miss – but it is time.

With a heart full of gratitude and love, I wish you deep peace and exquisite joy this holiday season. Take good care of your hearts and in the quiet moments, notice if there is something your soul is calling out for. Perhaps it is time to listen.

I’ll see you in the new year.

My friend Kristin Noelle has released a wonderful e-book called Unspiking the Holiday Punch. It is full of her lovely illustrations and contains seven gentle practices to help you navigate the emotional minefield of the holidays. If you are someone who struggles when spending time with family (as much as you love them), I highly recommend this simple, loving and wise little book.