Have you experienced the past few months as intense, chaotic, and full of uncertainty?
Yes?
You’re not alone.
Some days feel like a tough slog. Like we’re moving through dense resistance. Which is all the more reason to embrace your spiritual practice and deepen into it.
Many seers have spoken of this time we are in as an amplification, when everything is speeding up and gaining power. This is exactly why you have to choose your own sanity, clarity and peace.
Not only because the chaos is ever growing, but because the benefit of you doing your inner work is amplified during this time. In other words, you can use this time to fast track your liberation.
Recently, we explored the big idea in which I asked you what myth are you living. If you’re still ruminating on this, here’s another tool that might help you drill into it: archetypes.
The concept of archetype is something Carl Jung spent a tremendous amount of time exploring and is so rich! Caroline Myss has built on Jung’s work and expounded on how we can access and utilize archetypal energy to better understand ourselves and the world.
A powerful way to help understand where you are on your life path, is to recognize what story or stories are playing out in your life. This is a question/idea that comes from Carl Jung. He famously said:
I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “What is the myth you are living?”
I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud
of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust.
Happy New Year!
Are you ready for 2025?
It still feels pretty new, which is why it’s helpful to employ some anchoring exercises to support you as you get clear about how you want this year to be for you.
I always start my year by choosing a word or phrase, something to focus on, dive into, and act as a theme or inquiry for the upcoming 365 days.
Some of the ones I’ve chosen in past years include: receive, relax, joy, shine, communion… you get the idea. Once you hit on your word (or phrase), the invitation is to spend the next 12 months deepening into how you can experience it in your life.
I love sharing spiritual tools with you with this blog.
Sometimes it's a poem, mantra, prayer, breath exercise, or affirmation. But each technique is one I’ve tried and tested over the decades and is now part of my box of go-tos. The ones I rely on when I need additional support, assistance or help reconnecting to the truth of myself, which is love.
Today I felt called to share one that I return to again and again. It's a breath I was taught by my guru over twenty years ago called the Chittakash, which is the heart space over the head.
In the last 40+ years I’ve asked myself this question, "Who Am I?" countless times. Sometimes when I hear it I see the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, smoking his hookah and looking sagely down at Alice. He pointedly and stiltedly inquires, “whoooo are youuuuu?”
Sometimes I hear Roger Daltrey’s voice belting it out “tell me who, who, who are you...”
As many of you know, I’ve been working on a memoir about my life and my sister, Melissa’s life for a while now. In fact, I’m coming up on the 1-year anniversary of my computer crash and losing a huge chunk of that manuscript. An error which cost me a few months of time spent re-writing what I’d been too remiss to save. I was determined last fall though to complete an initial manuscript and move on to the next phase, whatever that was.
Sometimes life can feel like an endless To Do List. This weekend, while I contemplated relaxing, got eaten up instead with household chores, entertaining and childcare.
Suddenly it's Monday again! The have-tos start as soon as the alarm goes off and the week can easily be absorbed with task fulfillment and checked boxes.
I walk, run, sprint but am on this endless go round. That’s when a little thought enters my mind and suggests it might be time to stop and do... nothing.
After spending the first 8 months of 2011 grieving and trying to get my life back together after losing both my sister and father in 3 months, I realized it was time for me to focus on me. Having been a pleaser and caretaker most of my life, this task felt daunting and I didn’t even know where to begin.
But as most things go, the Universe helped me out. A friend lent me a book about happiness by Dr. Robert Holden and immediately I knew I wanted to learn not only more about his ideas BUT also how to facilitate this work. Next thing, I was signing up to attend his happiness coaching certification in New York. I was ready finally to learn precisely how to be happy.
Turns out that there are different kinds of happiness (who knew?)
As most of you know, I’m teaching a happiness workshop this fall. In fact, it started last night and we'll be meeting together, exploring what happiness means to us for the next 8 weeks. I am thrilled to be on this adventure!
For the past couple of months leading up to last night I spent a lot of time reading and researching to see what the “experts” can tell us about happiness. One of the books I came upon is called, The Happiness Project written by Gretchen Rubin. In it she describes how she spent a year doing a research project in her life, planning various activities and behavior shifts each month to increase her level of happiness.
A few weeks ago I watched Annie Hall, the Woody Allen movie starring Diane Keaton and Woody Allen. I hadn't seen it in over 30 years and probably laughed harder and appreciated it more this time around.
The movie essentially is a study in Alvy Singer's (played by Woody Allen) rejection of the women in his life because he can't possibly fathom why they would want to be with him let alone love him.
In the film, we watch as Alvy systematically sabotages his relationships only to then regret it after they're over.
But then something weird happened. I actually started to see this same pattern playing out with people I knew in my everyday life. Twice I witnessed one partner goading the other, speaking harshly almost like the desire was to reject, push away, or create cause for a break up.
Last week I encountered two people saying virtually the same comment to me, a variation of "I'm not smart."
In their unique ways, they were announcing that they didn't feel intelligent or school wise. After each of these confessions, I found myself chafing against their words.
Why?
Both of these people are incredibly intelligent in a variety of ways. They have lead successful lives, run businesses, raised children, have life partners just to name a few accomplishments.
Lately I've been hearing people talking about their anxiety. One man I know can't stop thinking about his health. He recently had a check up and was told he has high blood pressure. Now he can't stop thinking about the blood pumping through his body. His thoughts make him fearful and anxious, that he's going to have a heart attack or stroke at any moment. Then a pregnant woman mentioned almost the same thing. Even though this isn't her first child, she's finding herself fixated on the future pain and all of the awful complications that could happen despite the fact that she's already had near perfect birthing experiences.
So what is this?
As I thought about what to write this week I found myself feeling that, even though I just wrote about Melissa, I needed to write about her again. Contemplating what to share, here’s what came:
If any of you have ever been with a person in the last days of life, you know it’s largely unpredictable. At the time even though I knew Mel was going to leave her body soon, I certainly didn’t think it was my last night with her. I knew she could go any time but anytime felt like the future not right now.
This past weekend I returned my sister's ashes to the sacred earth.
Melissa died 4 years ago of metastasized breast cancer. She'd donated her body to the Georgetown Medical School so we didn't receive her cremains for two years. When they arrived at my house around April, 2012, I started contemplating what to do with them.
I knew Melissa was gone. She'd left her physical body on June 30, 2010. The ashes weren't really "her" anymore.
I used to hate exercising. To me it was punishment. I exercised because I had to. I'd eaten too much and had to run or bike to counteract my inability to manage what I was eating.
When I released myself from my eating disorder I decided I had a free pass. I was now thin so I NEVER had to exercise again! I pretty much stopped for years, maybe even a decade. But because I didn't exercise, I had some physical side effects. The most notable one was head aches. One day my husband suggested that perhaps my neck muscles needed strengthening to hold my head up better.
What? Exercise?
My friend Heidi posted a link to a Huffington Post article, My “Naked” Truth yesterday. It's Robin Korth’s account of dating a man who enjoyed her “head and heart” but not her body.
After reading the piece, I found that I couldn't stop thinking about it.
I don’t know about you but when I have a question or am unclear about something, I always want it resolved immediately. Yup, you can call me impatient. I want to know, to be clear, sure, certain.
Part of why I’m like this is because I’m an action oriented person and can only act once I know what to do. When I don’t know it’s like being on an airplane circling the airport in a holding pattern. I don’t like that feeling on in-action, confusion, or lack of clarity. It is uncomfortable.
When I was in my early 20s, I was walking down the street one day when an interesting idea came to me. I’d been contemplating self evolution (as usual) and had the realization that each of us has 3 components to our beings:
Of these three aspects of self, we all have an affinity toward one as the area in which we feel most comfortable. So, for example, an athlete who works out daily and relishes in his routine is clearly most at ease in the physical realm.
It’s so easy to look at other people and feel like they’re way more motivated than I am. Other people seem to get so much done while I can often feel like it takes me ages. Ever feel like that?
Over the years, my self-motivation has definitely ebbed and flowed. There’ve been times when I’ve been really unmotivated. Mostly during those times I was an avoider- checking out and not wanting to deal with my life- with the stress and with pushing through.
