When the Story Becomes Hollow

August 16, 2017Leave a comment

We use stories to make sense of our experiences. These stories shift and change over the course of our relationship with them. The way we speak of an experience that just happened is different than the way we speak of that same experience a few weeks, months or many years later.

Our relationship with our stories defines and shapes us to greater and lesser degrees. Sometimes we become very attached to the story we tell, to the version of ourselves we have lived out over time.

Some of these stories are truly defining moments of our lives. Some of them offer moments of journey we visit over and over again, looking for lessons learned, looking for healing, looking for moving on. When I wrote Embracing the Stranger in Me: A Journey to Openheartedness I described it as a process of peeling back the layers of the onion, only the onion seems to grow new layers even as we are shedding the outer ones. It can be annoying, frustrating and downright disheartening when we discover the story we thought we had outgrown still has life within us.

onion-276586_960_720 These story themes are rooted deep within us. Depending on your beliefs, some of these patterns may have been carried into this life time from past lives (or future lives perhaps) and some of them may be within us as a result of being passed from one generation to another. We might not know or discover the root of the patterns we live out in life, relationship or typical conflicts we may find ourselves in.

So, when do you know the story is healed – finally, perhaps forever? I am sure there are many possible barometers but one of them (newly discovered in my awareness) is when the story begins to feel hollow. It has no substance, no catch, no grab, no hijack anymore. Like a quantum resonance you can see or sense it just within your field of awareness – like a ghost image asking to be let go. You could possibly put it on and wear it again, but like that comfortable old coat you use to wear seemingly forever, it no longer fits, no longer offers the protection or service it once did. It no longer defines you or your look – since your physical body often also changes noticeably when new levels of healing take shape.

I’m not sure it is something we achieve. I think it is something that graces our awareness in the moment it is revealed. Then we can acknowledge the journey, thank the story for all it has offered us over the time we have carried it and turn our awareness to the future and to the new story that is already emerging within the fabric of the old one that no longer defines us.

The Voice of Your Inner Judge

September 18, 2015December 7, 20205 Comments

There is no more powerful limiting mechanism in our lives than the voice of the judge. I don’t mean that other person – parent, spouse, child, teacher, boss, friend, co-worker, random stranger on the street or in the shopping mall. It’s the internal voice of judgment or internal critic that often runs rampant inside of us that we barely notice, if at all, because it is so clever and really good at disguising itself – for self preservation really.

I first became intimately acquainted with my inner judge in 2008-09 during coaching work with Sarita Chawla. She recommended I read Soul Without Shame by Byron Brown in addition to the work we were doing together. I will forever recognize this as a pivotal point in the shifting shape of my openhearted journey. I wrote about the voice of the judge back then in an article. I am reviving that article here now in an updated version . When I first wrote this post, my inner critic was activated – obvious to me because of how I felt – and I am reminding myself of strategies I already know that help to deactivate it and release its grip on me.

When I first became aware of the force of the internal judge, I had been working with the concepts of self-leadership and hosting oneself for almost as long as I could remember – still do, of course. I worked with coaches, read books, did courses, took part in and led deep group work. I am generally a positive, optimistic person holding deep appreciation and gratitude for much of what transpires in my life and who shows up. I have transformed the negative self talk of my “itty-bitty-shitty committee” into more appreciative forms of self talk and into periods of quiet in my mind. I meditate and practice other forms of reflection and mindfulness.

So, imagine my surprise when I discovered a voice of self judgment and self criticism that was booming loud and clear in my unconsciousness, stronger than any external voice of judgment or criticism could possibly be. This voice constantly set the bar for my performance at the best that I had ever achieved. The bar moved if I did better. When I didn’t match my most excellent performance, even when I did extremely good work, this voice told me that I had failed, that I did not measure up and that I never would on a consistent basis. Strong performance was interpreted as mediocre. Criticisms from others, whether justified or not, was reinforced by this inner critic.

When I felt most down on myself or just down in general, this voice played a significant role – and still can in moments I feel most overwhelmed or vulnerable – until I expose it. I didn’t actually hear it as a voice until I began to listen for it but I felt it strongly in many forms: sadness, unhappiness, melancholy, anger, listlessness, lack of motivation and many other emotional manifestations.

While I had been aware of this voice (or at least the emotions it manifested in) to some extent, I also prided myself on my journey of self-transformation and change. Been there, got that medal, surely I must be done now, can I just get on with my life and success? I realize now it was the voice of self judgment that said, “You’ve been doing this long enough, how come you’re not done?”

Part of the reason I had been pretty oblivious to this voice was because, in my quest to be calm and serene and professional, I skirted over my own emotional reactions. I barely recognized I had them except in the odd instances where they overtook me. Oh, was that an emotion that wasn’t calm and serene? Oops. Nope. Couldn’t have been. It must have been something else.

Then, a friend told me I deal with my emotions intellectually. So, I thought about that. And I thought my friend just might be right. Emotions don’t reside in our intellect. They reside in our bodies. We feel them and sense them. We use metaphors to describe them. We say things like, “That packed a punch!” If we stop to notice, we will notice where it feels like we got punched. And if we stay with that, we will begin to notice the impact. And if we stay with it longer, we will notice the uncomfortableness and want to move onto something else. This is where I am learning to stop. I have learned to stay with it longer, until I can begin to discern the wisdom that is held there and that can only emerge when we give it an escape hatch to surface to the light.

It is in these moments that my voice of self judgment has come booming out at me in all of its voraciousness. With all good intentions, all it wants to do is protect me – from failure, from being unlovable. But its methods only serve to reinforce for me my failures, even to the extent of turning successes into failures, thus creating in my mind my own unlovability and unwantability.

I learned to journal in this voice. I am astounded by the punch it does pack. Periodically I sit and check inside of me to sense into what I’m experiencing and feeling and what the impact is. I journal what I am sensing until I feel done. Then I check in again to see what I am experiencing, sensing and feeling, and then journal again. And then again, if that seems required. I am committed to going the next layer deep and the next until I feel the light flood back into my soul and I feel a lightness of spirit and of body. This is what I want to amplify in my life now.

Exposing my voice of self-judgment transmutes it into a gift of understanding and insight after which joy can once again arise and take more of the space that is its, and my own, rightful due. Now, instead of seeing my journey as one that should be concluded and being hard on myself because it is not, I see my journey and myself with a gentleness I could not access before as it was hidden underneath the protective layer of the voice of judgment. I have always known, intellectually, that learning and growth is a life long journey. Now I know it and accept it with a graciousness that only comes from the light.

(This post was first published at Shape Shift Strategies on December 20, 2011)

Human Tragedy Story Often Obscures Soul Journey Perspective

August 24, 20156 Comments

For a long time, I have believed we are soul journeyers having a human experience. The beauty and challenge of life is that our assumptions and beliefs get tested along the way. In 2012, for me, one way has been through my mother’s journey.

Painting by Adimir Kush

When the symptoms of my mother’s dementia were becoming more obvious in the years before she went into long term care, I knew it as a soul journey and experienced it as a human tragedy story. This became more pronounced when she went into long term care. Instead of being the only person in a household living out a bizarre new set of behaviours, losing her capacity to communicate and do simple things like change the channel on the TV, she became one of many old and dying people no longer able to care for themselves, most living in their own little diminishing physical worlds.

The human tragedy story is amplified in these circumstances and places. It is hard to see past the story of tragedy when it stares you in the face as you walk down hallways that evoke very visceral reactions in what you see, smell, hear or otherwise encounter – even in a place as loving and caring as the place my mother experienced as home in the last four years of her life.

How many people came up to me, my brother or my father after mom’s funeral to share amazing stories about her that captured the essence of who she was and then proceeded to talk about how they just couldn’t visit her at Harbourview Haven. How hard it was if she didn’t seem to recognize them. How hard it is to be in that building when, as a culture, we have become disconnected from the death chapter of the life cycle. We no longer experience it as part of the natural flow of life but as something to be feared. Walking in a place where death is imminent generates fear and discomfort for many of us. It did for me when I first began visiting my mother but, through my mother, the shape of my experience shifted.

For the few who were able to manage a visit or two, they expressed how amazing it was when there was a flicker of recognition in something she said. I learned how many people besides me she called “little one” (really mom?!) and that was a point of reference for them.

There are others who saw enough through the human tragedy story to visit often. My mother had a few of those regular visitors although we often didn’t even know it since she couldn’t remember who visited or when they did. Deeply grateful for those dear friends.

The length of mom’s journey with dementia and her stay in long term care, invited me more deeply into this paradox of understanding the human tragedy dressing of soul journey. The phrase “oh, that poor soul” makes me chuckle now. We use that phrase to describe the human tragedy perspective. It is the physical experience that appears poor, not the soul journey perspective if you believe, like I do, that we make some choices before we manifest into physical form about what it is we want to experience for our soul journey this time around.

As my mother become more disembodied, I embodied the soul journey perspective from a deeper, more encompassing place of understanding. Towards the end, her human tragedy story didn’t register for me anymore, only the soul journey perspective. This gave me a high degree of peace during her long transition process, allowing me to live my life fully even while being present to my mother’s journey and our family care around it.

For the gifted people who work at Harbour View Haven, it seems to me they also see past the human tragedy perspective, treating each individual with full dignity and respect. Treating them as if they are, what we consider, fully functioning, fully present human beings. It was a gift to observe this most keenly in my mother’s final hours. It made me wonder what would happen if we all treated others all the time with this kind of dignity and respect – whether we thought they deserved it, whether we thought they were fully human or not.

Living simultaneously with my mother’s journey, my journey and the rest of life, I’ve been thinking about how to express this all so it does not fuel the human tragedy story. I now speak about “the many streams of life”. We are all in many streams of life all at the same time. Stuff happens. Stuff comes up. There is a life giving invitation to be well in all of it, although a more typical response is to be stressed by all the things that come our way that we have to take care.

I’m leaning into this invitation to flow with the many streams of life as though that is what they are, rather than challenges. Greater spaciousness beautifully shows up.

And then there are the lessons of embodiment that have been present for me in a big way already in and since 2012. As I embody my experiences and my learning I understand more deeply my life’s events, my relationships and my soul’s calling.

I’m not saying the human tragedy story isn’t real. But the soul journey perspective is also just as real although harder for many to see, obscured by the human tragedy story. The soul journey perspective allows me to live into joy and delight and allows me to fall in loveover and over again in a way living into the human tragedy story does not.

For my mother, I continue to experience a dance of joy, delight and lightness as her spirit soars free from the human tragedy unfolding of her physical body. She continues to be my teacher and my friend and very, very real in my human experience.

(Originally published at Shape Shift Strategies Inc. on March 1, 2012)

Extending Love – A Powerful Game Changer

July 10, 2015July 10, 201515 Comments

A long time ago now, I was studying A Course In Miracles. The most striking thing I learned, that has stayed with me for more than a decade, is that everything is either an extension of love or a request for love.

I reflect on it often. It seemed improbable when I first heard it, but in my own journey to openheartedness, embracing all that shows up on my path, the meaning of it has seeped into my being. The implications are profound. It is top of mind for me as I see posts on social media reminding us that “hurt people hurt people”, an adaptation of Thich Naht Hahn’s quote, and as I see quotes about forgiveness.

When someone issues a request for love it does not come in a question. It comes in behaviour that looks like anything but a request for love. Actually asking for what we need puts us in a place of vulnerability and for many of us this is a fate almost worse than death.

A request for love often looks and feels like an attack. The default is to respond with your own request for love. Attack meets attack. Defence meets defence. And the game is on. Not only is it on, it is hard to break the pattern. It is a vortex we get sucked into. Until we don’t. Until we become conscious of the pattern, our own contribution to it and set an intention to step out of the pattern, dance a new dance.

An extension of love does not come at the sacrifice of you and who you are. It cannot truly come at the subjugation of yourself because then you are still acting from the place of requesting love. You can only extend love to another once you have extended it to yourself. The more you extend love to yourself, the more capacity you have to extend it to another person, the more likely you are to break the patterns.

A beautiful side benefit is that you fuel your own boundaries. It is much harder for someone to “request love” through an attack when your boundaries are clear – first to yourself, then to others.

When you understand that when someone is behaving inappropriately, it is a reflection of their own internal state of being – it really is more about them than you – it can change how you respond. When you change the way you respond, you can change the nature of the relationship. If it is an intimate relationship where you are at risk, it does not mean you stay. But you exit differently. When you extend love to yourself, you will not put yourself at risk or stay in a situation of risk.

When you can forgive someone for their behaviours or actions, it does not condone or excuse their behaviour but it releases their grasp on you. As long as you hold onto the pain, they continue to have power over you – essentially you give your power away. Forgiveness is a means of reclaiming your power. Refusing to forgive is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

It is easier to forgive if you can see past the behaviours of the other person, to the child within, see their soul essence, see the request for love as what it is – an expression of their own pain, their own desire for connection – with an inability to articulate it, possibly even to themselves. It becomes easier to extend love to the person and bring the whole situation to a higher vibration. This does not mean you do not act in ways that are appropriate to the situation, but the range of options you can draw on expand, sometimes exponentially, when you are in the place of extending love to the person or situation.

Reclaim your power. Step into it fully. Extend love every chance you get.

Love at First Sight

June 21, 2015June 21, 201511 Comments

My dad, Hector Jourdain, and me during a toast at a mine celebration of my parents’ 50th Wedding Anniversary.

On January 11, 2008, the day of my parents’ 50th Wedding Anniversary, I turned to my father to ask him to tell me the truth. “I’ve received emails this week from two women who seem to think I might be their sister.” I was 46 years old and never suspected I might be adopted.

I already knew the answer before I posed the query. And I could see it in his face before I finished talking. There was, what seemed like, a long pause and finally he said to me, “Well, that’s another long story.”

A long story, yes. And it began with a very simple and clear declaration I might not have heard otherwise, “It was love at first sight!” he told me. Love at first sight. I always knew that my father and I had a special connection. And I always knew that he loved me/loves me as unconditionally as it is possible to love a child, although it hasn’t always been an easy path or relationship, but showing up most significantly, most unconditionally, in the times I have been most challenged – in job loss and divorces.

In the early moments following that conversation about what had been a family secret, dad was worried that my knowing would change our relationship. But, as I told him, we had a lot of history together so I didn’t see any reason it would change. And, I knew both my parents loved me and only wanted the best for me. The journey was undertaken in the spirit of openheartedness.

Dad is now 82 years old. Much to my surprise, not only did he outlive my mother, he became her personal care giver before she went into long term care with dementia – the same year as their 50th wedding anniversary. She died in 2012. Dad still lives home, alone, in the house they shared for many years.

Mom and dad in 2007 for his birthday with a 4 year old Shasta helping out.

He has had, over the years, a myriad of health issues that makes it a miracle he is still alive. He had his first open heart by-pass surgery when he was 45 years old. His second one about 30 years later and it took him almost 2 weeks to wake up from that surgery, partly because, in the end, it was emergency surgery and partly because he was exhausted from taking care of my mother. Then there was the time he became delirious with dehydration during the final week of radiation therapy for prostate cancer and it was the synchronicity of a call to him by my brother that resulted in contacting family friends who immediately took him to the ER, just short of having his organs shut down because of the dehydration. In the hospital so long, his legs weakened and he was in a wheelchair. Even his family physician thought he wouldn’t walk again. That was a few years ago now. Then, he was diagnosed with lung disease and told he would be on oxygen for the rest of his days. A few months later the oxygen was taken out of his home because he was doing fine. (And that’s just a snapshot of his health issues over the years.)

Quality workmanship – one of dad’s projects.

This past winter, a hard one here in Nova Scotia, he was out with his snowblower clearing his driveway. Over the last couple of years he renovated his upstairs bathroom to put in a shower. And he built a row boat in his basement. He still has marine engines in his garage that he works on from time to time and he has a long list of projects to tend to. He complains that it takes him longer to do anything, but he has time and he has motivation. And he’s taken a few road trips to Quebec – his home province – to visit with my cousin (who graciously hosts him in her home) in the last couple of years. These things – things to look forward to, to get out of bed for – they keep him not just alive, but living. And just recently, he bought his first tablet and got internet at his home (thanks to some persuasion from my cousin Jacqueline) and this Father’s Day I will try to help him sort it all out. Wish us luck.

In Rimouski, Quebec – dad, me, my cousins Julie and Jacqueline (who we stayed with) and Julie’s husband. 2013 Road Trip

I’m proud of my dad. I’ve learned, am learning, a lot from him. About quality workmanship. About independence. About sheer will power. About love. About just keeping on keeping on. And, I’m glad it was love at first sight or who knows where I would be today.

Dad, Shasta and Spencer, watching me cook. April 2015

Expanded Consciousness – It’s So Simple Really

June 13, 2015June 13, 20157 Comments

What are you waiting for?

From a very young age, I have always believed in the super-natural – things “attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature” or beyond our own limited “understanding” as human beings – limits, by the way, we have placed on ourselves.

When I was growing up and even as a young adult, I used to think it was something only very special or very gifted people could access and I was in awe of them. Now I think of it as “expanded consciousness” and I know that every single one of us has the capacity and ability to access it. Not just in special places or special states of being, but anywhere and everywhere, when we choose to. But we doubt ourselves and our experiences. We invalidate our experiences, saying “it wasn’t real, it was my imagination, I’m making it up.” It is part of the stranger within that goes unacknowledged, un-embraced. For many of us, this was what we heard growing up. Our connection to expanded consciousness, to source, was “beaten” out of us and replaced with the kinds of messages we now hear in our own minds when we encounter our own expansiveness.

We learned how to fit in with our families, friends and institutions (school, church) – our Worldview influences. Yet, for some of us, there was a niggling sense that something was missing, not explained or not quite aligned. Questions you couldn’t ask, observations you couldn’t make, and the door to expanded consciousness slowly – or abruptly – slammed shut.

This niggling sense does not go away though. Maybe it is just easier at first to imagine that only really gifted people have access to expanded consciousness. That way we can live vicariously through someone else’s experience rather than venture into a place we have been told doesn’t exist, that we have learned to shut off for ourselves.

My first encounter with spirit guides was when someone else told me about one of mine. When I was told I could develop my own “intuitive” capacity, I couldn’t. I got nothing. No information. No connection. No visions. And I certainly didn’t trust any information that might have come, certain I was making it up – with that certainty shutting down access to information.

Slowly, slowly, over years, I began to learn to trust my own experience, my own “visions”. There were periods of awakening, periods of “practice” of being in touch with my own expanded consciousness – which meant periods of regular connection to non-physical entities like spirit guides (mine and others) and there were/are greater periods of non-practice equivalent to shutting down connection, access to information and flow.

Yet, it is so simple. It is a matter, for me, of shifting awareness, asking the question, opening to my heart and my knowing, inviting the experience and the connection. So very simple.

So I ask myself this question, “What am I waiting for?” I don’t know the answer at the moment but these days, I am living the question, “What AM I waiting for?” Living the question will reveal the myriad of – or the one – response, which is true for me. Are you also waiting? What are you waiting for?

My youngest son and I making drums in 2009 – part of the compelling journey.

Dementia and Death Illuminates Choice to Tell Stories Through Soul Journey Lens

April 12, 2015April 14, 20158 Comments

My mother with the beauty of youth.

My mother with her mother in 1990 (the year my first son was born)

We make meaning of our lives through the stories we tell. We can tell those stories through the lens of human tragedy or the lens of soul journey. I learned what this means through my mother’s journey with dementia and in long term care. I share a bit about that in this 2014 interview with Terry Choyce:

Shame: Releasing Its Hold

October 25, 201413 Comments

I have been reflecting on shame for a couple of months now, how it sneaks up on you, robs you of your vitality, robs you of your voice. How it feels almost impossible to reveal but liberating even just when you can begin to understand that it is at work.

Most of us, if not all of us, have experienced shame at some point in our lives. The work of shame is so powerful that it can shut you down, deplete you of your energy, make you want to hide. It works in partnership with the voice of your internal judge so the whole experience is amplified. Sometimes it feels as though there is an antennae on your head, sending out signals that you are a person who has failed, that here is someone who wasn’t smart enough to figure out something, someone who misjudged a situation, someone who totally bombed. It is particularly bad when the situation you misjudged, misinterpreted, misread, mismanaged is something you generally do quite well and may, in fact, earn your living by it.

This happened to me awhile ago now, in a public way with a client. That’s when I drafted this post and it has taken me this long to finish it and post it. It was the client’s end of the year employee appreciation day and dinner. They wanted to build on some of the past work and amazing speakers they have brought in. After a few conversations and meetings with the leadership team, that were full of promise, we decided to do something different for them – an appreciative inquiry to engage their large group in conversation with each other and in discovery of what they already do well to apply in other ways.

Aside from the wireless mic dropping on the floor and breaking open, it all seemed to be going well. People seemed engaged and in conversation with each other. We did a rapid fire harvest. I ended with a lovely poem and added in Rule 6a and 6b – don’t take yourself so fucking seriously, don’t take other people so fucking seriously. The CEO was speechless at the end but, in the moment, I didn’t understand why.

A bit later, someone else on the leadership team shared with me how severely the organization looks down on the use of profanity, even though it was meant in a lighthearted way, and I immediately felt bad. And not just bad. The voice of my internal judge was activated and it gave me a very hard time – I should have known better, this is what I do – hold space for other people, sense into the dynamics of a group – how could I possibly have so misjudged the client dynamic – a new client that had started off with such a high degree of possibility.

Although I apologized to the client instantly, I became aware I could not find it within myself to talk about what happened – to anyone, not even my closest friends, not even my partner who is incredibly supportive of me in work and life. That’s when I realized I was ashamed. Deeply ashamed. Shame shut me down and made me miserable – for days, weeks, even months. It was reinforced and amplified when I got the feedback from the group, forewarned it was a “mixed bag”. While that was true, it was easily the harshest feedback I have ever received from a group in all the years I have been in this work. So, it was doubly, triply hard because I really should have known better.

All the little and larger things in my awareness that have not gone right or have not flowed over the last months and maybe even years were activated and then compounded upon themselves. Until I finally, finally found the words to share my experience, my shame, my personal self-disappointment, first with my partner, who just listened, who supported me, who did not try to downplay my own responses (whether they were out of proportion or not), did not try to make it better or to dismiss it and did not judge me; and then with other friends who are also colleagues in my business field.

It still feels bad when I think of that moment, when I cannot understand how I so clearly misjudged the moment, but the shame of it is no longer defining me, shutting me down or playing itself out larger than life, compounded by building on any other unresolved incidences of shame that might exist in my history – known and unknown, aware and unaware. The most important thing is that it illuminated the power of shame to close me off and I know I am not alone – which is why I chose to write about shame.

I realize this shame is minor compared to the shame some other people assume or carry, unwarranted shame where they blame themselves for someone else’s actions like in cases of abuse, sexual assault, abandonment or other issues. Shame that keeps people in relationships that are not healthy, do not function well; shame that keeps people from reaching out for help because they are ashamed at finding themselves in the situation to begin with, because they blame themselves so completely they shut out sources of support. Shame that buries our stories until they become deep dark secrets instead of stories that naturally shape our lives and help us know who we are.

Brene Brown offers some powerful research on shame, its origins and its impact, sharing her own personal stories of shame and vulnerability, paving the way for so many others of us to share our own stories of shame and vulnerability so we can embrace all aspects of the stranger within, for each of us in our journey to openheartedness.

Who do you know who you might be willing to share a shame story with, or where might you seek professional support to do so, to release the hold of secrets and shame and shift the shape of how you show up in the world, to claim greater resiliency, your power and your path?

You Are Not Your Story

September 1, 201427 Comments

It is deeply heart-opening when people who read Embracing the Stranger in Me: A Journey to Openheartedness share how the stories in the book resonate for them in their own journey. And then they thank me for being so courageous to share those stories as they feel they have glimpsed into my own vulnerability. All true. And it has generated a curiosity for me about what my relationship with this book is – because it doesn’t feel quite so courageous from my perspective. This book has its own life, energy and flow – thankfully and interestingly.

How are your stories working for you?

And I get to remember, again, what I already knew and now know more deeply. I am not my stories. I am not my book. I am not the stories other people tell (or think) about me. And, you are not your stories. They do not define you – unless you choose to let them. Of course, they shape you. And, you have choices as to how they shape you – looking at life through the human tragedy or drama perspective or from the soul journey perspective – that which we are seeking to learn or experience at the soul level.

There are moments in my life that are seared into my memory as pivotal moments. One such memory, complete with date, is March 1998. I was halfway through a severance period, having been royally fired from my job, in the middle of a divorce and having bought a home, for me and my two young boys, predicated on a salary I no longer had with no idea what I was going to do next to support myself. I was in the highest anxiety of my life – to that point. I could only focus on what was right in front of me – the next moment, maybe the next day, but certainly not weeks, months or years down the road – because otherwise the stress was overwhelming to the point of being debilitating.

I was sitting in my kitchen, making a choice of which book to pick up and read – the practical What Colour is Your Parachute or the transformative The Dragon Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I didn’t know it would be transformative when I picked it up, but it was. I was transported to another world. Mesmerized. It moved me to tears and to laughter. And I understood maybe for the first time: I am not my stories. I am not my failure. I am not my divorce. I am not my job loss. These are things that have happened in my life. I have a choice as to how I view them. The Dragon Doesn’t Live Here Anymore offered me a different, expansive option for how to view these things that happened to me. The author, Alan Cohen, offered that I had attracted these things into my life. If I had the “power” to attract those life altering “negative” things, I had the equal and opposite capacity or power to also attract more life affirming circumstances into my life.

What I understood is that I had been increasingly drifting away from the things I hold true in my life, the things I valued – or said I valued. My actions did not always support my beliefs and what I thought I valued. I was in increasing dissonance and did not know how to live a fractured existence anymore. At the time I felt like I was looking out a picture window at my life as it unfolded, I was so dissociated from my experience and my existence. And I did not have the skills to know how to navigate it – or relationships – in a healthy way. It made me believe the human tragedy/drama perspective – that I must be a bad person, maybe even evil. Otherwise, why would these things have happened to me?

In this one day, I was liberated. I was invited into choice. I wish I could say it was only a generative upward vortex from then on but of course it wasn’t. It was, and still is, a human journey, fraught with the rollercoaster of emotions and experiences. It took me another decade to surrender into the journey with a greater degree of fullness and I’m still learning about surrendering.

The book was and is intended as an offering of stories for others – for you even – in your own journey. An invitation to journey on, journey deeper, journey more lightly. An invitation to view your stories in a different way from different perspectives, ones that generate more expansiveness, spaciousness and choice. An invitation to trust what you doubt, to know someone has navigated similar waters with varying degrees of success, sometimes at peace and sometimes in turmoil – because this is life and this is how we grow. To understand that life is more than just the physical experience and to trust the non-physical as you experience it, as you surely do. To treat yourself with compassion, love and forgiveness and to invite that into your relationships – all of them, even the ones where you would prefer to hold onto a bit of resentment.

When you live your stories as if they are you, you disempower yourself. When you understand your story shapes your journey but is not you, you show up more fully in your strength and your power and it is a thing of beauty to behold.

All Things Are Here – In My Life and Experience – By My Invitation

August 20, 201419 Comments

When my youngest son was a toddler and a preschooler, he could throw a temper tantrum like I had never experienced before or maybe even believed possible. He could throw them in private at home and he could also throw them in public places, equally well. I once did my whole grocery shopping with him in a fit because my options were limited. When he was in a tantrum, which could be set off by seemingly inane things, he was beside himself, working himself up into more of a tempest with each minute that passed. Yelling. Screaming. Throwing himself around. He was truly inconsolable and, believe me, we tried many different ways to soothe him. Nothing worked. Anything tried only made him worse, as well meaning friends and strangers sometimes found out. He needed to exhaust himself from whatever swirl of emotions was in him. When he was done, he was done. He was ready for apple juice and a snuggle, to let go of where he had been and to move forward – almost as if nothing had happened.

I have no idea how many temper tantrums he threw. Enough to observe a wide range of reactions and responses in myself. Learning, as difficult as it was, he needed to be left alone, to be in his own journey of discovery of how to self regulate. It was challenging to bear witness to and challenging as a mother to seem to have no strategies of success to help him feel better. So many things activated in me – disappointment, frustration, my own rage, sadness, despair, feelings of failure – as a mother and a person. Also fear when that moment became projected into the future and images of this child as a temper tantrum throwing adult made me fear he would not find his way in the world, find his way to maturity. Learning not to personalize his behaviour, not to make it about me instead of about his experience. Learning patience, to move at the pace of guidance – one of the seven whispers in Christina Baldwin’s book of the same name.

Maybe the most significant learning was in letting go. After what could sometimes be an hour or more of a temper tantrum, my son was ready to let it go. An awareness and curiosity arose in me as I pondered what seems like typical adult reactions – the desire to make it about the relationship, to see it as personal attack, to want the other person to suffer as much as we perceive that we have suffered at their hands, as a result of their behaviour. “Just because you’re done, doesn’t mean it’s over. Now you need to bear the consequences of what you just did – to me.” We want to stay grumpy even when the other person has moved beyond it. Why do we do that? He was not angry at me. He was not deliberately trying to ruin my day. He was caught up in his own experience.

Staying grumpy, staying mad, seeking retribution, sometimes seeking apology, wanting the other person to admit they are wrong, are ways of externalizing our power – giving it away to someone else. A toddler in a temper tantrum. A person we care about in their own disruption or projection. We want them to make it better. We want them to pay. And who does it serve to be that way? No one. Especially not us. Not the relationship either.

“In my life, I have told many stories that externalize or give away my power. Learning to own my own experience and my own power has been and continues to be a significant part of my journey.” Embracing the Stranger in Me: A Journey to Openheartedness (Chapter 1)

All of this has me reflecting on relationships – the ebb and flow, beauty and challenge that show up, sometimes in equal measure although sometimes it just seems that way, because of where we focus our attention. When we have an argument with someone dear to us, sometimes that argument and the energetic imprint of it takes precedence and becomes the defining energy of the relationship. If we focus on it, focus on how wronged we feel, that is what we grow. But we have a choice. We could choose to focus on the beauty, the joy, the qualities of the other person that we admire, adore and love. They are there in equal measure and often more. These could be the defining qualities of the relationship.

To know we have choice invites us into self reflection and self hosting – to discern what is our own to take care of and what needs to be taken care of in relationship, so it does not become the shadow underbelly given life by trying to repress it. This is a discernment and we may not always get it right. But what if we could be in relationship in an attitude of appreciation, love and forgiveness? How would that change the dynamic, flow and connection in relationship in contrast to when we focus on the moments of hurt, pain, disappointment?

I often need to remind myself that “all things are here by my invitation or attraction of them in one way or another. If I were not attracting these experiences, the insights that arise from them could not be in my experience. This includes people, events, situations, timing and flow.” Embracing the Stranger in Me: A Journey to Openheartedness Chapter 1. This is the invitation to hosting myself, to be self reflective. If I can find clarity in this, then I can know how to show up in relationship, what I can heal within myself and what I need to bring to the relationship, not through righteousness or justification but through generosity and curiosity to understand how to deepen relationship, to create the invitational space to show up in the fullness of who we both are as human beings – in our strength and our vulnerability, to not feel the need to hide or the need to defend.

“With great intentionality, I have been shifting my focus to tell more and more of the stories of appreciation, gratitude and love. I am telling more of the stories of the way I want my life to be rather than of how I don’t want it to be.” Embracing the Stranger in Me: A Journey to Openheartedness Chapter 1. And this is an ongoing, often daily practice. It would be so much easier to live a cocooned life but people are always going to show up in one way or another no matter how hard we might try to shut them out. Easier isn’t necessarily better. The opportunity for growth shows up in those moments, invited whether we think they are or not.

A beautiful example is my son. Not a toddler anymore. A young person who has been learning how to self regulate his emotional experience who no longer throws temper tantrums. Now it is a beautiful journey to witness. He is such an old soul teacher for me in this journey to openheartedness, embracing all that shows up on the path.