The Grace of Change

Your Big Yes

NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This aliveness is what’s most important to me, and what I most wish — from the very core of my being — for us all.

I don’t know about you, but I regress to toddlerhood when my life falls apart. Those times when the cherished whatever that defines me and gives my life meaning — healthy body, interesting work, kids at home, relationship with someone I love — falls away, usually wrested from my fist tightly wrapped around said cherished whatever.

Noooooooooooo, I say to life/God: no, you can’t have this, it’s MINE. Nooooooooooo, this CAN’T be my life. My life, my good life, my best life, HAS to have (fill in the blank: health, wealth, primary partnership, your own cherished whatever).

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh lordy. This primal NO sucks the juice right out of me. It obliterates both the “wild” and the “precious” from my wild and precious life.

Enter the Big Yes: the no-holds-barred Yes to your own life, with or without your cherished whatevers.

Your Big Yes doesn’t depend on your health, your bank account, or your age.

Big Questions to play with

I just remembered this handout from years ago. I used to give this to participants in transitions retreats I used to lead. I'd hand this out and ask the women to breathe into all of these questions for a few minutes and notice which question most spoke to them. We'd then go around a circle and each woman would ask her favorite question into the Mystery living at the center of our circle, and the center of our lives.

One of the gifts of life transtions is that we get to be like adolescents again.

(Yeah, I know that doesn't feel like much of a gift ;-) ). Remember those all night dishes in high school and college where you talked with your girlfriends about The Meaning of Life? Being in big transition invites us to ask questions of ourselves and our lives we haven't had the time and inclination to ask in a loooong time.

In transition, it's NOT about knowing the answers to the questions.

We can't. The answers will come in their own time. What's important is to simply be with the questions in a soft and curious way.

Kindness First

I remember the first time anyone suggested that I could be kind to myself, no matter what.

Say what?

I was slumped over in my therapist's office decades ago, too depressed to have brushed my hair that morning. It was an abysmal nadir: physically and emotionally worn out, ill with a serious chronic illness that was sapping my soul, grieving multiple deep losses.

I was a mess.

Life Is A Garden, Not A Road

So here's something to chew on:

What if life is a garden, as this poem says, and not a road? What does that say about the directionality we all assume about our lives? I, for one, sure behave differently in a garden than on a road. Makes me realize how imbedded that Western notion of "going somewhere" is in this heart and mind.

I'm planning to play with this for the next while - anyone care to join me?

life is a garden,

not a road

 

we enter and exit

through the same gate

 

wandering,

where we go matters less

than what we notice

 

~ Bokonon ~

 (The Lost Book)

Just Because

There I was, knitting happily away on a freeform piece I was going to felt into a bowl, both cats curled in my lap. Life was luscious until the Usefulness Tyrant in my head stomped into my awareness and demanded: What the hell are you doing with this lumpy pile of yarn? And why are you doing this?

I look down at the teal yarn and my happiness deflated like a pricked balloon. Ssssssssssssssssssss.

Taking up the Usefulness Tyrant’s line of interrogation, I echoed, Yeah, why? This isn’t earning me any money. It’s not useful. It probably won’t be pretty (my first felted bowl was a tad misshapen. Friends kindly suggested I could use it for a hat “or something.”)

I lamely argued back that perhaps my felted bowls are Spiritual or Healing or at least Transformative. I convinced no one. The truth is I love to make them just because I love to make them.

I'm Giving Up Polyamory

I know polyamory is in, sisters, but I'm out. Polyamorist no more.

OK, so maybe I'm embellishing a little. I'm not really a polyamorist, at least not in the "biblical sense."

But I sure am with my attention. And it's plumb wearing me out, not exactly a place from which I experience pleasure or joy.

I've realized that whatever is in front of me to do, in some sense, is my lover. And my attention is the way I make love with the weeding, the bill paying, the knitting, the person I'm talking with.

Looking For Trouble

When I took ice skating lessons in my thirties, I met an older woman who was having a ripsnorting time falling on the ice.

Intrigued, I asked Karin why she was having so much fun looking like a fool.

She grinned and replied, simple: as a rank beginner she felt more alive than she had in years.

Say what? There I was busting my gut proving to the world and myself that I was competent and powerful. Why in tarnation would anyone be happy to be so visibly ignorant?

When I took ice skating lessons in my thirties, I met an older woman who was having a ripsnorting time falling on the ice.

Intrigued, I asked Karin why she was having so much fun looking like a fool.

She grinned and replied, simple: as a rank beginner she felt more alive than she had in years.

Say what? There I was busting my gut proving to the world and myself that I was competent and powerful. Why in tarnation would anyone be happy to be so visibly ignorant?

First, The Bad News

First, the Bad News: Pleasure won't protect us from pain, death, loss, or illness. Pleasure cannot inoculate us from our own pain or the pain of the world. Pleasure isn't a magical amulet we wear over our hearts to prevent them from breaking.

Opening our hearts and souls to pleasure guarantees that our hearts and souls will be open to pain, too.

But wait, all is not lost.

First, the Bad News: Pleasure won't protect us from pain, death, loss, or illness. Pleasure cannot inoculate us from our own pain or the pain of the world. Pleasure isn't a magical amulet we wear over our hearts to prevent them from breaking.

Opening our hearts and souls to pleasure guarantees that our hearts and souls will be open to pain, too.

But wait, all is not lost.

Fifty is NOT The New Forty

And, while we're at it, Sixty is not the New Fifty.

I had a fabulous time last weekend leading a retreat for 20 wonderful women (and one fantastic man!). At one point, I looked around the circle of middle-aged faces, radiant with love, experience, and full living, and thought: These are the gorgeous faces of 50 and 60 year old women...

So what's this craziness about Fifty being the New Forty? What cultural mishigas is it that the finest compliment we get is that our aliveness makes us seem 10 years younger? Why is growing older conflated with loss of beauty and draining away of power and delight?

Know what it makes me think of, ladies? A chocolate covered slug. Rich chocolate covering-that's right-a juicy northwest slug. Yuck.

Honoring Your Own Sabbath

I've been experimenting, and I love what I'm discovering.

Remember the Sabbath? Growing up that meant Sunday School (boring), lunch at my grandmother's (a little less boring), and then sitting around all afternoon (how boring can you get?). Sabbath meant, well, arrgghhhhhhhhhh.........

Fast forward almost a half-century (can that really be so?). Take one boomer woman, frazzled from decades of doing, doing, doing... Marry her off to a guy who actually loves  taking naps (me, I'm an abject failure at it-I actually bought a CD that promised me ultimate 20 minute naps, but I fidgeted my way through it several times and donated it to Goodwill).

Have her realize, one Sunday afternoon when husband is napping and she's washing windows, that she's spent an ungodly amount of her life worshipping at the altar of her to-do list. Even gardening and meditating had become about Getting Stuff Done; plant the bamboo, check. Morning meditation finished, check. Unremitting busyness cramped my spirit and made me cranky.