Greetings, sisters!

Just returned from leading a wonderful 3 day retreat in Malibu for my favorite organization, The Guild, an astonishing collection of spiritual leaders, tricksters, mystics, artists, and fools from around the world. Many thanks to Sister Georgene, a wise, wild, and woolly Franciscan nun, poet, and visual artist. Sr. Georgene, in an honoring of the spirit of The Feral Nun (www.FeralNun.com), declared the Saturday night talent show an evening of Holy Disorder. May we all sashay through our 60’s with as much grace and flair as she!

And may your wild and precious lives blossom with as much soulful abandon as my wonderful garden!


Kabobble surveys garden from my office window

With love and pleasure,

FEATURE ARTICLE: Poison, Peacocks, and Pleasure

Something was niggling at me just under my radar a few months ago. I didn’t know what it was. Being flat-out committed to full aliveness, love, and pleasure, I invited this thing to show itself.

Well, you know how that goes. Be careful what you invite into your life.

This thing turned its face to me in a dream: childhood sexual abuse. I dealt with this for many years, many years ago. I thought I’d done with it, finis. I was wrong.

Well, sisters, I’m not here to tell you about the pain. You know it. We’ve all got it. It’s part of the package called life: abandonment, illness, betrayal, death, hundreds of flavors of suffering and heartbreak.

What I am here to tell you about is my ongoing learning that our deepest, grittiest pain carries our deepest, most lavish life energy.

The peacock gains the extraordinary colors of its plumage through – get this – eating poison, goes a story from Central Asia. Yup. You heard me right.

Peacocks, they say, eat poison and turn it into life-giving nectar. This poison/nectar creates the vibrant colors of its plumage, and makes the bird plump and prosperous. Poison, fully ingested, is transmuted into beauty and radiant health.

After the first week of wailing and gnashing my teeth (No Fair. I Don’t Deserve This. I’ve Spent My Life Helping Others, And THIS Is How Life Repays Me?), I got curious. What if I could turn toward, and not away from, this poison, and digest it into greater aliveness?

Good news, gals: Here’s where it royally pays off to be over 50. Before the big five-o I hoped that I, and life, were perfectible. Enough money, and therapy, and self-help books would erase all pain and leave me willowy, wealthy, and blissfully happy. Here’s what I now know, to my great relief:

• I know my heart’s meant to be broken. Like shedding a too-tight skin, each time my heart mends to a bigger, freer size. And with that greater size comes more love, and more pleasure.
• Pushing mondo pain away doesn’t work. Period. It dims my lights, big-time. If I’m swimming in that ol’ river, Denial, even chocolate offers no real pleasure.
• Some of the greatest “failures” and traumas of my life have turned into my greatest blessings. Heck, I even wrote a book about it, Silver Linings.
• Life’s too short for bullshit. I want honesty. It may hurt more in the short run, but it sure pays off in the long, if what I’m wanting is to be really, fully, truly, deeply alive.
• I love pleasure. I just adore it. And I don’t have access to real pleasure if I’m stuffing pain.

So, thinks me, why don’t I try something quite radical: eat this poison whole-heartedly, and go for the plumage?

So that’s what I’ve done, sisters. I’ve opened my arms and my heart wide to this anguish. It’s been pretty damn messy sometimes. But there’s been something else, too, even at the worst of it: the grace of knowing that this pain is no longer The Enemy. It’s my life, just as all my deepest pleasures are as well: the smell of David, The Husband; my daughter’s laugh; my garden’s cool, dark loamy earth running through my fingers; a good dinner shared with friends of my heart and soul.

It’s all one piece now. I’ve cancelled my subscription to the surgery model of life (if it hurts, cut it out). I know, after fifty, it’s more about learning to open my arms, and heart, wider and wider and wider to take it all in. It’s life. It’s my life, and I damn well intend to dance with it all before I go.

“When you truly possess all that you have been and done,” once wrote 90 year old psychotherapist Florida Scott Maxwell, “which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.”

I liked that quote in my forties. Now, at 53, I get it. I’m not airbrushing my life any more. What you see, world, is what you get. I’m possessing all I’ve said and done, and all that was done to me as well. It’s mine, and I’m fierce with it.

We can push pain away, or we can move toward it. We can deny it, or name it as our own vital energy. And from this naming, this swallowing of our own poison, we reclaim precious life force that has been locked away.

The bigger the pain, admittedly, the harder to digest.

But—the harsher the pain, the more potent the poison. The greater the vitality and love unlocked once the poison has moved through, whether that moving through takes minutes or months. The more boundless the awakening to who we are meant to be in these precious bodies, in our wild and precious lives. A wild awakeness to the full catastrophe, as Zorba the Greek called it, dancing naked on his beach.

Last week I walked around Green Lake with my friend Carla, holding hands for the goofy love of each other, not giving a fig who thought what about us. My heart hurt. Fish were making love among the lilies, leaping out of the water in their iridescent passion. The radiant sun shone equally on the pain and the pleasure.

Wild and untamed awakeness, you might call it. Drinking the poison. Loving the plumage. Celebrating the pleasure.

COACHING SESSIONS WITH MELISSA
If you would like to:

• Experience deep and authentic pleasure in your life
• Create a life that sings for you, free from struggle and efforting
• Free yourself from damaging cultural myths about growing older that limit your aliveness, creativity, and unique genius
• Making a meaningful difference in this time in your life
• Deepen your spiritual journey in a way that reflects who you are now
• Reclaim curiosity, gratitude, and wonder for your journey

Read more about how you can benefit from private coaching with Melissa: http://www.MelissaGayleWest.com
If you're interested, contact Melissa at Melissa@MelissaGayleWest.com, or 206.427.1325

 ABOUT Pleasure and Soul
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This newsletter and all content within it is Copyright(c) Melissa Gayle West 2007 except where otherwise noted. All rights reserved. I encourage you to share this newsletter or reprint material from it in other electronic or print publications, provided a link to http://www.MelissaGayleWest.com and copyright information are included in the credits. Please send a copy of the publication.

Melissa Gayle West
106 NW 104th St.
Seattle, WA 98177