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.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Being Love
LATE FRAGMENT
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
- Raymond Carver
Magic happens when we are busy being love. I don't mean being 'in' love, as if it were a substance we swim in. But being love, the walking talking ocean itself. Touching everyone and everything with our gentle wave, bringing love to everything we do.
A friend described her life of late: providing great service to people at work, realizing some visionary projects and handing some off to others, paying off debt and saving for the next big thing, tending the relationship in a new way with her life partner. She is happy, excited about life, and at peace.
Part of me is pure envy listening to all this wonderfulness. And still I am awake enough to recognize that she is Being Love. She's crossed into new territory. And she is making a difference. I am Present enough to be happy for her.
I try to remember moments of being love. Setting out for a hike, anticipating adventure. Making my husband laugh. That still, crackling point when a counseling session opens up and my client and I are deeply moved by discovery. Making art when I let it make me. Allowing myself to be all broken in front of other people. Letting their compassion mosaic me back together. Noticing that my cat has hypnotized me once again into giving him a belly rub.
How do I get back to this being love when it feels so far away? The envious part of me desperately needs to know. Does the self-care routine come first? My friend has fine-tuned her nutrition, rest, and yogic spiritual practice. She actively loves herself with the basics every day.
Or is it an internal action? A surrender to love, a YES to life, a declaration of I am here. It probably doesn't matter where it starts, as acts of self-love or reaffirming belief in love and the goodness of life. Just that it starts. In deep winter, with our much needed rains seeping into thirsty earth, seeds of being love are being fed.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
- Raymond Carver
Magic happens when we are busy being love. I don't mean being 'in' love, as if it were a substance we swim in. But being love, the walking talking ocean itself. Touching everyone and everything with our gentle wave, bringing love to everything we do.
A friend described her life of late: providing great service to people at work, realizing some visionary projects and handing some off to others, paying off debt and saving for the next big thing, tending the relationship in a new way with her life partner. She is happy, excited about life, and at peace.
Part of me is pure envy listening to all this wonderfulness. And still I am awake enough to recognize that she is Being Love. She's crossed into new territory. And she is making a difference. I am Present enough to be happy for her.
I try to remember moments of being love. Setting out for a hike, anticipating adventure. Making my husband laugh. That still, crackling point when a counseling session opens up and my client and I are deeply moved by discovery. Making art when I let it make me. Allowing myself to be all broken in front of other people. Letting their compassion mosaic me back together. Noticing that my cat has hypnotized me once again into giving him a belly rub.
How do I get back to this being love when it feels so far away? The envious part of me desperately needs to know. Does the self-care routine come first? My friend has fine-tuned her nutrition, rest, and yogic spiritual practice. She actively loves herself with the basics every day.
Or is it an internal action? A surrender to love, a YES to life, a declaration of I am here. It probably doesn't matter where it starts, as acts of self-love or reaffirming belief in love and the goodness of life. Just that it starts. In deep winter, with our much needed rains seeping into thirsty earth, seeds of being love are being fed.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Creativity in Business Relationships
I asked my husband the furniture designer* where he sees creativity in business. He says it's all in the relationships. There's the client, vendors, collaborators, assistants. Say a client wants you to make X. You say YES, even though you've never done it before. You seek out someone who knows more about X. You envision how you could work best together, meet them, present your ideas and remain open to theirs. Others have the right materials or technology or know-how for these aspects, so you bring them in too.
You nurture all these relationships to be mutually beneficial, staying focused on creating X together in the best way. There's lateral thinking, flexibility, and intuition required to go where the relationships and the project are really taking you.
And ultimately, it might not be about X at all.
Rick Jarow, a favorite spiritual teacher on abundance and right livelihood, says our work is just an excuse to heal relationships and mend our karma. Tell that to corporate America. As we've seen too often recently, people do horrible things to others and the environment, then wave it off: Oh, it's just business! It may be business as usual, but it's usually not just.
Beautiful furniture, or whatever the offering, may be merely a benefit of developing a network of trusted collaborators. Tending relationships with creativity in mind goes a long way toward healing the wound of extreme self-reliance. Abundance for one, abundance for all.
*Check out www.gobuildstudio.com to see simple, elegant, modern furniture.
You nurture all these relationships to be mutually beneficial, staying focused on creating X together in the best way. There's lateral thinking, flexibility, and intuition required to go where the relationships and the project are really taking you.
And ultimately, it might not be about X at all.
Rick Jarow, a favorite spiritual teacher on abundance and right livelihood, says our work is just an excuse to heal relationships and mend our karma. Tell that to corporate America. As we've seen too often recently, people do horrible things to others and the environment, then wave it off: Oh, it's just business! It may be business as usual, but it's usually not just.
Beautiful furniture, or whatever the offering, may be merely a benefit of developing a network of trusted collaborators. Tending relationships with creativity in mind goes a long way toward healing the wound of extreme self-reliance. Abundance for one, abundance for all.
*Check out www.gobuildstudio.com to see simple, elegant, modern furniture.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Recipe, No Recipe
Sometimes it goes like this: Open fridge. Stare. Close door. Spiral light bulb flickers on above your head. Check cupboard, spy tin of sardines. Forage for leafy things, peppery things, orange things, more green crunchy things. No bread, but a few crackers. Go back for salad dressing, a bit of goat cheese. Pumpkin seeds?
Wash, chop, toss, add, arrange, serve. Lunch! Enjoy.
Other times it's like this: Pull out the disintegrating page torn from the old Moosewood cookbook. Gather measuring spoons to follow the recipe for cornbread you've made 523 times. This ritual needs no improvements. Every time it comes out perfectly; you are astounded again.
With creativity, recipes are only a starting point. The choreographer, dancer, children's book illustrator and author Remy Charlip created a series of Airmail Dances. He made spare line drawings of dancers in a series of simple poses. Mailing them off to trusted choreographers, he encouraged them to fill in the rest. A different dance for every choreographer, ten thousand ways to connect the dots. Remy gave space for others to create in the present moment in their own dance language, inspired by these simple landmarks.
Consider how you cook, garden, be with your children, do presentations, lead meetings, make love. There's room for creativity and experimentation in all these things. Where would we be without Jimi Hendrix's version of The Star Spangled Banner? What if Luke Skywalker had not used the Force?
There's also times when we need the comfort of the consistently astounding. We just need to awaken in the present and remember to be astounded, even if it's for the 523rd time. One client was running on automatic, producing without a sense of fulfillment, "missing all the good things." Recipe or no recipe, that is our task, to not miss this being alive.
Wash, chop, toss, add, arrange, serve. Lunch! Enjoy.
Other times it's like this: Pull out the disintegrating page torn from the old Moosewood cookbook. Gather measuring spoons to follow the recipe for cornbread you've made 523 times. This ritual needs no improvements. Every time it comes out perfectly; you are astounded again.
With creativity, recipes are only a starting point. The choreographer, dancer, children's book illustrator and author Remy Charlip created a series of Airmail Dances. He made spare line drawings of dancers in a series of simple poses. Mailing them off to trusted choreographers, he encouraged them to fill in the rest. A different dance for every choreographer, ten thousand ways to connect the dots. Remy gave space for others to create in the present moment in their own dance language, inspired by these simple landmarks.
Consider how you cook, garden, be with your children, do presentations, lead meetings, make love. There's room for creativity and experimentation in all these things. Where would we be without Jimi Hendrix's version of The Star Spangled Banner? What if Luke Skywalker had not used the Force?
There's also times when we need the comfort of the consistently astounding. We just need to awaken in the present and remember to be astounded, even if it's for the 523rd time. One client was running on automatic, producing without a sense of fulfillment, "missing all the good things." Recipe or no recipe, that is our task, to not miss this being alive.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Freeing the Hostage
An old friend emailed me something about being "held hostage" by creativity and failure. If I may translate, he was expressing a desire to engage his creativity in some tangible way and felt the preemptive fear of failure. He was identifying with some part of him that was kidnapped by another. The violent image speaks to the very real urgency of freeing what is held captive.
Let me reassure him and all of us. Our creativity is natural and essential to each of us. It cannot be taken away. But it can be undiscovered, unclaimed, neglected, forgotten, disowned, banished, rejected. Our creativity is our inherent human ability to imagine and manifest what is needed next. It is letting our hands be hands, connected to our hearts and extending out into the world.
My friend lives in a society with a long history of world-shattering art and architecture. He is also a product of US culture, which revolves around producing, advertising, buying, and consuming. No matter, there's always a place for the handmade life. Our soul life depends on it.
Many of us in the US distance ourselves from or neglect to claim our everyday creativity. We are told it's only for artists, special people. We take the creative process out of cooking, parenting, intimate partnership, friendship, housekeeping, fitness, finances, work and turn it into obligation and put it at the bottom of the list of things to do.
To free the hostage, I would ask what part of us is holding it hostage? What does this part want and not want? What is it worried will happen if the creativity is allowed to run free? Is there some participation it wants? Or does it just want its point of view to be heard?
In situations like this, if there's a lot of broken trust, it may take time for the 'kidnapper' to release what's being held. It's vital that we give compassionate awareness to it and really listen. Reflecting back how it feels, what it's saying, will often magically allow it to relax and see it doesn't need to hold any other part of us captive.
We need to bring our mindfulness and kindness to parts of us that feel mistreated and driven to desperate acts. We can bring everyone home safely and return to our creativity all together.
Let me reassure him and all of us. Our creativity is natural and essential to each of us. It cannot be taken away. But it can be undiscovered, unclaimed, neglected, forgotten, disowned, banished, rejected. Our creativity is our inherent human ability to imagine and manifest what is needed next. It is letting our hands be hands, connected to our hearts and extending out into the world.
My friend lives in a society with a long history of world-shattering art and architecture. He is also a product of US culture, which revolves around producing, advertising, buying, and consuming. No matter, there's always a place for the handmade life. Our soul life depends on it.
Many of us in the US distance ourselves from or neglect to claim our everyday creativity. We are told it's only for artists, special people. We take the creative process out of cooking, parenting, intimate partnership, friendship, housekeeping, fitness, finances, work and turn it into obligation and put it at the bottom of the list of things to do.
To free the hostage, I would ask what part of us is holding it hostage? What does this part want and not want? What is it worried will happen if the creativity is allowed to run free? Is there some participation it wants? Or does it just want its point of view to be heard?
In situations like this, if there's a lot of broken trust, it may take time for the 'kidnapper' to release what's being held. It's vital that we give compassionate awareness to it and really listen. Reflecting back how it feels, what it's saying, will often magically allow it to relax and see it doesn't need to hold any other part of us captive.
We need to bring our mindfulness and kindness to parts of us that feel mistreated and driven to desperate acts. We can bring everyone home safely and return to our creativity all together.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Something Always Blooming
Like everyone and their cousin, I am trying to take better care of my body. I don't like the 'e' word that sounds like demon banishing, so I say 'body in motion' or 'joyful movement'. Motivation can be tricky, for the part of me that would rather stay cozy in the blankets doing sleeping yoga is very strong. So I must lure myself out to the cardio hills and stairs with promises of beauty and the wildly disciplined drumming of Babatunde Olatunji.The endorphins are a bonus.
The plants conspire with their endless creativity. Amidst the running up stairs or purposefully striding uphill, I pause and notice what's around me. One foggy morning I met potato vine flower flashing a yellow eye at the center of deep purple, a no-nonsense kind of beauty. Bare cherry tree sprouting tender red baby branchlets a few millimeters long. Reddish purple cyclamen pushing up out of the cold, moist earth. What bravery!
On another morning, clear and cold in another microclimate, I found a tiny barrelly cactus with green torso, its head and little arms a fiesta orange and yellow. Try being grumpy now. A perfectly fragrant pink rose, just at my nose level, reminds me of the one in The Little Prince. Birds of Paradise, here? You've got to be kidding. And it goes on.
What's so easy to observe in the green relatives is sometimes harder to see in me. Where am I sprouting, emerging, braving the fog and cold? What beauty and joy am I sharing with others?
Like this new habit of joyfully moving with the hills and stairs, it takes practice to be honest with myself. The part of me doubting by own growth, beauty, creativity and impact on others may always be here. But the more I connect daily with the wild and cultivated nature around me, the more I get in my bones that I am just like the green relatives. There's always something blooming in some corner of my wild inner garden. If I look for beauty and signs of life, I will find them. Somewhere in me, fertile ground is producing and supporting life.
So walk out, expect to meet signs of life wherever you are. Be met with beauty and be amazed.
The plants conspire with their endless creativity. Amidst the running up stairs or purposefully striding uphill, I pause and notice what's around me. One foggy morning I met potato vine flower flashing a yellow eye at the center of deep purple, a no-nonsense kind of beauty. Bare cherry tree sprouting tender red baby branchlets a few millimeters long. Reddish purple cyclamen pushing up out of the cold, moist earth. What bravery!
On another morning, clear and cold in another microclimate, I found a tiny barrelly cactus with green torso, its head and little arms a fiesta orange and yellow. Try being grumpy now. A perfectly fragrant pink rose, just at my nose level, reminds me of the one in The Little Prince. Birds of Paradise, here? You've got to be kidding. And it goes on.
What's so easy to observe in the green relatives is sometimes harder to see in me. Where am I sprouting, emerging, braving the fog and cold? What beauty and joy am I sharing with others?
Like this new habit of joyfully moving with the hills and stairs, it takes practice to be honest with myself. The part of me doubting by own growth, beauty, creativity and impact on others may always be here. But the more I connect daily with the wild and cultivated nature around me, the more I get in my bones that I am just like the green relatives. There's always something blooming in some corner of my wild inner garden. If I look for beauty and signs of life, I will find them. Somewhere in me, fertile ground is producing and supporting life.
So walk out, expect to meet signs of life wherever you are. Be met with beauty and be amazed.
Monday, January 12, 2009
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
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
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