Love over Fear

A common theme this week has been Love over Fear. How do we do the next right thing with love and trust, rather than panic and fear and desperation? How do we attract more of a good thing?

It's so easy to get caught in the fear and uncertainty as the economy as we've known it seems to be dissolving. What new form is coming? Is this too little too late to save our society? What can I do? You may be feeling triggered just reading these words. Stop. Exhale completely and let your breath naturally fill you up. Do it again. Again. Again.

Place your hands on your heart. Yes, right now, as you are supposed to be preparing for a business meeting. It only takes a minute. Connect to all the positive change that is happening right now in your body as it renews itself. Your heart pumping, slowing from anxious pitter patter to a deeper sure rhythm. Slowing down enough to remember the wholeness that underlies all discomforts.

Compassionate self-touch is love your cells understand. While you're at it, think of someone you love, someone who loves you. Yes, even let that smile come to your face. Love over fear can happen in a few breaths. You get to choose. The fear may still be there, but it may not have you by the throat.

Place your hands on your belly. Let your breath drop below the diaphragm and calm you down immediately. The belly expands with fresh energy on the inhale, and releases unhelpful thoughts and fears and toxins from the body on the exhale.

Nothing new. Essential to remember. As we practice being in loving presence with ourselves and others, we make more space around the fear and infuse that space with a whole lot of love. And as we know, so much can happen in that more open-hearted space, where we are connected with ourselves and each other.

Making Space for Change

After not collaging or writing much in late fall, I wondered where my creativity was going. I actually asked myself this while spackling and painting my new healing space. I somehow forgot I was pouring my art and soul into an 11' x 11' x 11' room.

Need is the mother of invention. Months ago I left a rented office situation and didn't want yet another office that didn't feel like me. It finally dawned on me to transform the junky guest room into my new healing space. A tarot reader who knew nothing about my work expressed great urgency about home improvements, work environment, and finances. Doh!

My creative process over time went like this:

dissatisfaction, desire, visioning

incubating

research, investing, gathering materials

deconstruction, recycling

prep, painting, installation, decoration

test-driving, feedback, aesthetic fine-tuning.

Most of this is in collaboration with my husband, who has the can-do to complement my vision. It's contagious. I'm ridiculously proud that I installed the dimmer switch all by myself without burning the house down. I tell all my clients. I'm still in fine-tuning - I am a dimmer switch! Yet in a relatively short time - VOILA - I am sitting in a beautiful new space, ready to receive and happy to serve an abundant flow of clients.

The feng shui people are onto something. My new healing space is in the life path/career part of my house. How could we have let it get all junky?!? What's sad is that this is the very last room in our flat that we've upgraded to be all nice and beautiful. I'd been putting my livelihood last, a refugee without a proper home. For my work and my husband's the more beauty, grounding, comfort, quiet, warmth, the better. I'm grateful we know how to make an inviting beautiful space and that my healing work with clients finally, finally, finally has a room of its own.

*I'm leading collage workshops starting 1/31. Check out www.wildimagination.org/calendar.htm

X is for X Marks the Spot

X marks the spot. We hold a picture up at eye level on the wall, then adjust it higher or lower. We then move it laterally, until we instinctively know That's it! So we mark it, nail it, hang it. We step back and savor where and how it wanted to be all along. 

We can do right placement with objects, and we can practice it with ourselves. I moved to San Francisco somehow knowing it was the right environment for who I am and who I'm becoming. We are beings existing in space AND time, so right timing is just as important. I wrote about that some weeks back, that timing is often beyond our control. But we can try. I suspect right placement comes first, having some physical place to show up and say I am here. When we place ourselves well in space and time, with intention, life just opens up.

A friend and I are both redecorating rooms in our respective homes. Getting current by recreating our external places to match our insides. Her touchstone is that the parts and the whole should make her heart sing. This phrase and its accompanying emotions and sensations allow her to check in: Does this material's texture do it? What about that color? This style of furniture? This heart singing is an essential quality to creating a home that feels like it's really hers.  

I'm seeking to create and experience a grounded and uplifted feeling in my new healing space. That means putting in a chair rail, with a darker color below and above it all warm light and possibility. Something soft under foot, no clutter, a gauzy curtain to block out the ugly light well. The room's palette comes together, all with the sense of that grounding and uplifting.  

When placing ourselves well, we take time to check in with ourselves to find what is just right. Like Goldilocks, we assess:  too this, too that, just right. We muddle our way through by trial and error.

But how do we know we've gotten to YES?  More on that next week... 

  

R is for Receptivity

I was sharing with a friend a short story I'd written. She wondered how I'd come up with one particularly striking image. The truth is stranger than fiction. I pretty much wrote down exactly what I'd seen. This specificity helped ground the scene in a way, which I might never have been able to imagine. Creative people know, and we are all creative people, that a large part of our work is to live with eyes and ears open. Our receptivity and the open space we hold are essential to our capacity to synthesize and create.

When we are too full of distraction, there's nowhere for new energy to come in and stay. We become like an overflowing closet. That's when we need spring cleaning, to clear out the clutter in our minds and our internal creative space to allow the energy to flow again. This could mean literally cleaning up our writing space or art studio, sweeping the dance floor.

Or it could mean properly storing our odd thoughts, idea seeds, scraps of dialogue, or stray images. I use my laptop or my journal. Raymond Carver apparently kept his scraps in his bathrobe pocket. Jotting things down, doing sketches, playing with movement and gesture are ways to give things raw form and reassure them they can have your attention at the right time. It gives you something solid to return to.

Once those are given initial form, there's a clear arena for what wants to emerge. Again, it's listening, watching, being curious about what is going to show up. Why is it that I can trust something will come in my creating life, when the same uncertainty in other aspects of my life just makes me anxious? I think it has to do with practice. Some people, especially meditators, know about the comings and goings of ideas and energy and have a broader perspective of nonattachment.

So notice where you are receptive and where you need to clear out some space for new energy to come in.

B is for Being With What Is

The core of many spiritual practices is learning to BE WITH WHAT IS. Some call it acceptance or surrender or letting go of our attachment to how we want things to be. When life's big challenges loom large, it takes courage to show up and stay present with whatever vexes us.

As a big fan of Focusing, I am learning to sit with It. Stepping into Presence allows me to be with anything that comes up and wants my attention. By maintaining the compassionate, open, and curious stance of my most loving and wise Self, I can really hear Its concerns and extend empathy. Often just being heard allows this something to relax or shift.


The story goes that Tibetan saint Milarepa invited the demons of anger, greed, fear to come into his meditation cave and have tea. The point is to make space for what's here anyway, to invite it to be here in a more compassionate space. By being with what is, we get to stop fighting ourselves. And that is one way to see and bring beauty into the world.


For more info, see www.FocusingResources.com