LoudenMouth

Afraid to Blog

I'm afraid to blog. I know, that's sounds a bit absurd but I have been missing writing in this format for months and although I've told myself, "Wait until your sabbatical is officially over June 1st" and "Wait until the new blog is up at Comfortqueen.com so you don't have to import any more text" I know that's bull hockey. 

I'm afraid to write. I'm afraid to create. I have never been so afraid to create, I don't think, in my life. I've become the queen of busy work and I'm pissed at myself.

What am I afraid of?
Do I really care?  Naming what I'm afraid of feels so boring and so besides the point. Because the point is: I need to create to live and life doesn't feel good when I'm not.  But one night, when I wasn't looking, even in the midst of my retreat (more on that later but not this post or I will never push publish) my old nemesis "BE PRODUCTIVE"  latched on  to me and has been riding me raw ever since. 

Developmental psychology posits that when we are destabilized, we regress to the level of development where we last felt stable. Because all development happens in waves, we surge forward or upward into more complex ways of being (think of learning a musical instrument) and then when life presses on us (in positive and negative ways), we fall back (you suddenly can't remember that chord progression for the life of you). My stress has been overwhelming miraculously positive (I've fallen madly in love) .  I'm feeling so much joy and letting go in my body and heart -- you might think that would translate to wild abandon with pen and paper and ideas and you know what, you be wrong! Feeling so much joy has destabilized me and sent me back to a former, more stable, but much less satisfying way of being creative: be productive, get things done, worry about money, no time to play, etc.

So here I am, writing this to create something. I've also been art journaling and making weird messy paintings.

Off to exercise and then family night - yes, blended family dates are happening, he has a 11 year old, the sweetest coolest boy in the universe.

Ah... Breathe, Jen, it's all going to be okay.

Yi Yi Yi

I'm a Frito Bandito...

                                                        Just had to write that. I'm dating myself!

I needed to write to CONNECT. I miss our conversations and yet I feel our connection, us creative thinking heart women webbed around the world, opening and closing with the tide of life.

I'M STILL ALIVE and I'm actually, well, great. And good. Certainly stronger. More even-keeled. Learning heaps. Playing more! As the sun returns to the misty NorthWest, so does my life force.
Being divorced is becoming part of me, it's truth is being metabolized. For example, when I talked to my neighbor on the ferry Tuesday about my new life without Chris, I felt (mostly) like I was talking about myself and not some alien life force. I'm beginning to feel less like divorce is inconceivable. Oh sure, there are moments when, out of the blue, I wondered who socked me in the solar plexus. I look around but there isn't nobody there, just the realization that my other half is no longer connected to me. But that's not true. Our connection, in some very important ways, is richer and clearer than ever. Sitting on either side of our daughter a few weeks ago at her student conference,, we shared one of those parenting looks that saod, "Oh my god, she's such a miracle, don't you want to eat her up?" and although that look was followed by one of those sad looks, it was not followed by a "I'd be so much happier if you would just..." look. It was not followed by our heart's shutting down. My friend Ann Cheng said this morning on our walk, "What would it be like to live without any expectations?" (which is probably what enlightenment feels like) and that's part of the gift of not being married anymore: we can love each other without expectations. No expectation of connection or being on time or getting the taxes done... It's odd and lonely and freeing. It brings up the question in me, over and over, what do I want or need from another person? Why do I believe a relationship has to look a certain way?

On the creative front, after being dead to even the most remote creative impulse, I can feel the creative heat building in me. It feels exciting and a little scary. All I know right now is that my next creative leg must be:

More collaborative - I want someone(s) to work with in person at least part of the time
More fun - play! Be a voice and conduct for play!
More focused - I want to articulate what self-care is and be an international stand for it; what is the "there there" of my work?
Better supported - asking for and creating systems so I can do all I want to do.

I've been considering performance as part of my future. I know I want to become a better speaker and speak more. I may want to do more weekend workshops. I've fantasied how much fun it would be to do a TV show-- some thing for the new Oprah network!  I'm edging toward my novel. I've made some art again...  Did I mention focus must be part of my new life?   

And I've been struggling with my days getting eaten up with "stuff," like today, Lilly is home from school, it's a holiday and yesterday it was meet a friend for tea. I'm feeling the need to get away for a longer retreat in silence, away from home again.  Not sure when that came happen but feeling the need!

So far my retreat looks like nothing I ever thought it would, certainly it doesn't look particularly special or "sacred," but I keep reminding myself, "What should it look like?" and "Why should it look any different than it does?" In other words, I'm accepting reality, digging into the rich and sticky and lovely dirt of me, and living the sacred line from Rilke:

            

May what I do flow from me like a river,
            no forcing and no holding back

Get Happy

My friend Michael Neill's new book Feel Happy Now! is out in the U.S. and it's a must have. I am friends with Michael, true, but he was a coaching client first and then a friend, and he's a friend because he's kind, incredibly smart, and dedicated to making good information that really helps people available - and being a great Dad and husband and having fun while doing it.

Here's an excerpt:

"One of my favorite quotes, for which I have never satisfactorily
found an author, is: 'Life isn't measured by the number of breaths you take, but by
the moments which take your breath away.'

In the past week I have had my breath taken away by:
*my four-year-old daughter's giggle when I tucked her in for the
night
*hearing my nine-year-old daughter singing along to High School
Musical
*watching my 12-year-old son dancing when he thought I wasn't
looking
*seeing my wife coming down the stairs dressed to the nines for
an evening out
*seeing my dogs cuddled up with one another sound asleep on the
sofa
*the view out over the valley on a midnight hike with a friend
*a scene in a movie about a family who lived in a lighthouse

Each time your breath is taken away by the beauty of nature, love or even a sappy, happy movie, you are born again into that moment - and by taking the time to collect those moments you get to relive them whenever you choose.

While I am not advocating getting all your medical advice from Julie Andrews, you could do worse than make a list of a few of your favorite things - you may find that suddenly, you feel glad.

To put this  into practice, make a list of all the things you can think of that 'make' you happy, from the sound of a cat purring to the taste of your favourite food. Carry the list with you at all times and add to it whenever you can.

Whenever you are feeling a bit down and in need of a pick me up, read through your list until you begin to feel an inner smile. Let that smile flow through your whole body until you are once again feeling good on the inside."

I know that the ideas in Michael's book work because I've been using them since he sent me the U.K. version so do yourself a favorite and get on the Happiness train!

Yoga is Union

Ahhh... A week with Amy did me a world of good. I'm feeling so much more hopeful and awake. It is such an absolute truth that we must clear the space if we are to realize our true nature.

I wish I could explain the mystery of my divorce-- because I would love to understand it. The shock that some of you expressed in your comments has been reverberating inside of me and in our friends and family, too. Love and attraction have always been in abundance between us-- and almost equally present has been a something else, and that something else became too heavy and too hurtful.

It is so liberating and so disorienting to hatch a new identity. Who am I now that I'm not married?  Some moments I'm sure I have no skin on my body anymore and no ground under my feet. I literally feel dizzy. Other moments I'm sure I could soar into the heavens and love everyone and everything.

It would be so comfy if I knew what I was doing!!

Raw Radical UnRuly Dreams - Part 2

I didn't know this but on September 2007 when I declared a nine-month retreat--sabbatical, what I was really declaring was, "Where do I go when now that I've gotten to the end of my dreams?" At the time, my dreams seemed fine, thank you very much, but as I moved into less and less doing, I found my time off was becoming more and more about shedding and letting go: of outmoded dreams, of dreams that are so threadbare, they can't even float on the River Denial anymore, of "should" dreams and good idea dreams and dreams other well-meaning people have for me. It's turned into a dream heaving festival over here. Watch out because when you start such a process, the gods and goddesses love to jump in and help--my husband has shed our marriage, Spring Air shed me as a spokesperson and Body+Soul as a columnist. Oh bloody hell, I want to go back to what was known, to what was safe--help! But the worse thing one can do is stop the process mid-way through. I've done that several times before and where did I end up? Watch a current presidential debate and you'll get a good idea: same old, same old. Boring. Trapped. Nothing raw, radical or unruly to be had.

I write this from my shedding nadir where the only dreams left on my list are: Reawaken the feminine, open my whole heart to Love, and create art with abandon and only for myself. Read those three again—see how beautifully interrelated they are? That astonishes me. And see how clearly tending to these will provide the energy for more specific dreams like rewriting my novel? And guess what? Art is the way in to it all, the way in and the way out. So this is what I'm trying:

• Open my big cheap art journal on my art table
• Put out some random paints, water, couple of brushes, oil pastels, water soluble crayons, alphabet stamps
• Glance slowly with soft eyes at one art book (current favorite Hans Hoffman), read two or three poems (current favorite Pablo Neruda odes), put on some music (Always favorite: Krishna Das).
• Feel into the space around me, behind me, in front of me, above me, below me.
• Ask Spirit to get me out of the way. Ask Spirit to fill me.
• Tell my small self, "It's only for ten minutes. Nothing bad can happen in ten minutes."
• See what emerges. Not for the sake of dreaming new dreams or getting anywhere but for the sake of being open.

We can dream our way through the wardrobe door, down the rabbit hole, out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing into a fresh field of learning and possibilities (to appropriate the Persian mystic poet Rumi) but only if we are willing to ask, "Where am I willing to go when I get to the end of my dreams?"

Footnotes:
* Diagnostic new age guru Louise Hay claims foot problems signify a fear of the future and not wanting to step forward into life. For me, my very sprained big toe came about because I was hurrying and I'll buy I'm afraid to step forward so I see my sore toe as a lovely symbol of needing to rest and let go of everything, including fear.

* Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim posited that grappling with horrible tales (he primarily studied fairy tales) gives children an outlet for natural angst and anxiety which makes me wonder if so many truly horrific horror movies are being consumed by teenagers right now because their anxiety about the future has left the building along with Elvis.

Raw Radical UnRuly Dreams - Part 1

          

“Where do you go when you get to the end of your dreams?”                    Dan Fogelberg

    I was on hold with my local clinic about my big toe – which stubbornly is not healing*—when I realized I was hearing a Dan Fogelberg song from my youth. In fact, the song coming over the phone had been the soundtrack for my 16th summer, a time when I was bursting with hopeful itchy angst, stuck between yearning for newness, for life, to be in life yet completely unsure what I wanted from life. As I listened to Dan croon (what a crush I had on him: the original sensitive man!) it struck me that how I felt my16th summer was very similar to how I felt now, some 29 years later, and that Dan’s question was perfect for me – and maybe for you, too. Where do you go when you get to the end of your dreams?  (I realize now the station was playing Dan because he died Monday of cancer at 56.)

    I’ve run out of dreams. It’s very scary to admit that because in this microcosm culture of personal growth and coaching where I spend a lot of my time, it’s all about possibilities. Declaring, “Hey, I’m tired of growth. I don’t want to live my best life. I just want to curl up and do nothing,” feels so unrealized. It also smacks of the S word-selfish. “Dreams are the food of the soul. In our existence, we often see dreams come undone, yet it is necessary to go on dreaming, otherwise the soul dies and agape does not penetrate it” rhapsodizes novelist Paulo Coelho in his Ode magazine column (January/February 2008). Yes, I say to Paul yes but where does the letting go, cleaning out, dropping-into-nothingness-stage of dreaming fit?  In our love affair with self-improvement and efficiency, have we forgotten this aspect? If you and I don’t attend to not dreaming, do we block the ability to conjure truly new dreams? If I lack the courage to peer at my dreams and ask hard questions like:
“What commitment am I willing to make?
What price am I willing to pay?
What courage is required of me right now?’ (Questions courtesy of The Answer to How is Yes by Peter Block), what is the result? If I lack the stamina to be restfully fallow (say that three times really fast), do my dreams cease being dreams and become should-filled bland heavy nightmares? If I only dream, do my dreams become only delusions?

    I believe many of us have gotten to the end of our dreams—I certainly think our American culture has reached the end of something. Partially this may be because we have relentlessly, brutally pushed ourselves. Faster, faster, grab the golden ring! Keep moving, keep buying, keep trying because if you don’t, you’ll be left behind. Our collective well has more than run dry; we’ve pushed clear through to China and out into empty space. Consider our political landscape, our national depression rate, and the number of horror movies leering from the New Movie wall at the video store* as proof positive. We want to dream radical raw dreams, we want to feel desire, we want to believe in new beginnings but we’re too tired from doing, from pushing, and those optimists among us, from dreaming.

Stay tuned for Part 2

What Sustains You During the Darkness?

Oh this the dark time, the crunchy empty flatness of burning away everything-- and the art of self-care to sustain me.

How do you practice your self-care art?   Do tell, please!

But first..
BOOK SALE
Buy The Life Organizer: A Woman’s Guide to a Mindful Year and get a 
FREE Life Organizer Companion CD!  Save $14.99

Buy Comfort Secrets for Busy Women and get a FREE journal  Save $6.95

Buy The Woman’s Retreat Book and get a FREE Audio Sacred Pause 
Retreat: Listening to the Question (mp3) Save  $12.95

Buy anything else and get 35% off*!! Use the coupon code "holidays".

*Sorry no discount on our Specialty Items.

ART JOURNALING RETREAT
The always inspiring Teesha Moore of ArtFest fame is offering an art journaling retreat called Play January 31-Feb 4, 2008 in Port Townsend, Washington.  I’m hoping to go — and there are only a few spaces left so download the particulars right at the top of this page.
Tell Teesha I sent you!!!

YOGA FOR DEPRESSION RETREAT
January 5th – 12th, 2008
Tucson, Arizona
And this year I'll be offering a mini-workshop one night! So you get a little me with a lot of other excellent, wise, restorative experience and learning. And if you are a yoga teacher or therapist of any kind, this is also a training for teaching LifeForce yoga. My evening presentation will draw on journaling, laughter, small group discussion, and who knows what else to help us conceive of self-care and self-nurturing in the light of being one with the Divine and each other, while creating practices that can sustain the changes in our brains and bodies that allow us to feel whole. It's self-care for depression and anxiety.

I can't say enough good things about this retreat. It nurtured me out of my depression following my Dad's death and I'm turning to Amy's gently transformational work again this year. From early morning yoga practice to an enriching evening program, your day will be filled with gentle yoga ways to dissolve the obstacles that block the flow of your own healing energy. In an environment of love and acceptance, you'll learn breathing practices to meet your mood and constitution and an attainable sequence of postures. You'll return home feeling refreshed, renewed and excited about your practice with new tools to work with your mood. Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy Sessions and massage will be available.

FROM WAVERLY at the SCHOOL OF THE SEASONS
        Full moon, where will you be going from here?
                Into retreat.
        Why do you take a retreat after your fullness?
To make myself an empty cup in order to rise again.
---Inayat Khan

Desire, Mood and Shoulds

I'm wondering and thinking and experimenting with this idea of desire as separate from mood. It continues to excite and free me... and then that niggely nasty word should comes creeping in the door... and confuses me a tad...

I should make this retreat deeper and richer.
I should be meditating more, asking for guidance more (or at all!).
I should be using my time more wisely.

        The language of should can be (mostly is) so automatic that is it the linguistic structure that helps create the mood of not wanting? If so, where does it come from? I 've always loved the idea that it's a way that women have been taught to give up their sovereignty and power--by shoulding on ourselves we put the power to decide our lives out there, with them.  Given that desire and power are intimately interrelated, it doesn't surprise me that when I claim my desire by asking "What do I want?" then the shoulds come sneaking around, eroding the feeling of desire so that it becomes grim or flat.

    I'd love to hear your thoughts on this -- feel free to be inarticulate like me!

~~~~~~~~~~
And now a poem that has sharply reminded me why I'm on retreat and why I need to recommit to my time in the void:

Flowers of a Moment by Ko Un

It is said that nothing can become new,
unless it first turns to ashes.
For a whole decade,
my misfortune was not having turned to ashes.

Burning a mound of dead leaves in late autumn I want to weep.

     Translated from Korean by Brother Anthony of Taise', Young-moo Kim, and Gary Gach

As I wrote a few moments ago in an email to a friend, "My job these days is to burn everything I have been unwilling to  burn in the past — all the times I stepped back from the edge and didn’t let go when I knew I needed to-- let go of work, identity, relationships... I must burn this time and I’ve been hiding from doing that since I began this retreat, at least a bit."

Burn, more burning? ARGH!!!!!

Desire Vs. Mood

I have been chewing on the latest issue of my friend's Michael Neill's ezine - okay, not literally chewing - because it may help you if you've read my last two books and because I'm having such a hard time with this so-called retreat I'm in the midst of.

A bit from Michael's newsletter:
"In 'You Can Have What You Want",' {his very useful and powerful book} I identified three keys to
recognizing that you are living an inspired life:

1. You are doing what you love and want to do

2. You feel guided

3. Things seem to unfold as if by design

I then suggest that in order to get to this point, there are really only two things you need to do - consistently ask yourself "What would I love to do today?" and whenever possible,
do it."   

Which is the major theme of The Life Organizer, my hope is the weekly questions keep bringing you back to desire, true deep desire, and helping you see it and hear it and feel it.

But here is where I have gotten tied in a knot which is confusing desire with mood. My mood these days is low - I'm doing a ton of deep grieving - and that low mood convinces me I don't want anything.  That mood likes to say, "What the point of anything?" So this nine month retreat I'm in the midst of is is being eked away, without renewal happening, because I don't feel like renewing!  (And this lack of deep renewal is also because life and work goes on and I've been subscribing to the swaths of time theory, which is another retreat boondoggle i.e. don't wait for them, those swaths of time are often deadly anyway). Then enter Michael's brilliant distinction which is...

"...the difference between navigating by desire and navigating by
mood.

Navigating by desire means you base your decisions about what to do or not do on the question "Do I want to?".  If the answer is yes', you do your best to move forward; if the answer is 'no', you do your best to stand pat.

Navigating by mood, on the other hand, is when you attempt to base your decisions on the answer to the question "Do I feel like it?".  If you don't feel like doing something, you put it off until later; if you do feel like it, you move forward.

While at first these two ways of making decisions seem similar, they take people in two completely different directions.  Since our moods are often tied up in old habits and patterns of
thinking, following them tends to just create more of the "same old, same old" in our lives.  Somehow, we just don't get around to making those changes we know we'd love to make, and things that seem like they'll take too much effort are put off until the last minute or don't get done at all.

Your wanting, however, is a living, breathing, fluid process. Each time you do what you want (or don't do what you don't want to do), your actions seem  effortless and inspired ideas become
almost commonplace.  Over time, it becomes easier and easier to read and follow your inner compass. Life gets a lot simpler, and the pursuit of success becomes a lot more fun.

Today's experiment is a simple one:

This week, before deciding on any course of action, ask yourself "Do I want to?"  Wherever possible, allow your answer to influence your decision and guide your choices.

Do this irrespective of whether or not you're "in the mood" - if you do, you'll notice that your mood begins to change "all by itself".  "

Desire says, "Let's write" or "Let's paint" or "Let's call a friend and then Mood says, "Why bother?" In that moment between the two impluses, there is choice!

What might happen for you today if you became very curious about the distinction between mood and desire and if you remembered that moods are always malleable, even when we are depressed or have PMS or are otherwise sunk in the mire.

"You are what your deep driving desire is.  As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed.  As your deed is, so is your destiny."  From The Upanishads 

True Calling

I loved this quote from Mark Silver's newsletter this morning. If you don't subscribe, do!

"You don't need to express every last bit of creativity and who you
are in your business. You just have to enjoy it, and be willing to
bring your heart into it."  Mark Silver