Are you, you?

“We realize–often quite suddenly–that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn’t define us, it has no center.”
― Adyashanti

I’ve gone through a fairly thorough scrubbing and cleansing of my mind over the past few years. The result has been a profound alteration in the way I see the world; politics, religion, love, hate, humility, suffering, pain, spirituality, money, food, vanity, creativity. All of them have been under the microscope of my own introspective inner eyeballs.

When you do this and begin to alter your beliefs and more importantly your reactions, it throws other people off considerably. At least once a week, someone has said something along the lines of “I thought you and I agreed on politics/religion/values/etc”. The under-current being, of course, “you’re not who I thought you were.”

Oh, well. I’m not who I thought I was, either. So, there. We can agree on that, right?

Based on my many conversations in person, online and in various groups that I belong to, this questioning is building into what could be described as a spiritual epidemic. We are questioning conventional wisdom and our long-held personal beliefs en masse.

This has brought us to a place of great discomfort for many. To let go of what you thought was ‘true’ and ‘right’ and comfortable, is to feel the earth rumble under your feet. It’s like a case of psychic vertigo, where you can’t quite find a foothold or a handle; you feel like a kid who spent a little too much time on the playground merry-go-round. Buzzy and confused.

But, as kids, didn’t we kinda love that feeling? That out of control, dizziness where you felt as if you weren’t solidly on the planet? You sort of thought if you spun around long enough, you might levitate right up into the sky.

As adults, we tend like firm footing. We know what we think and we have strong opinions based on….um, well…something.

We are tribal. I’ve written this so many times and we like it when we find people who we think are of our tribe. That translates into people who agree with us. People who ‘share our values’, whatever that means.

When you begin to evolve and for lack of a better word, awaken and begin to question your ‘truths’, your tribe won’t like it. Not one little bit. Because suddenly, they may begin to question and that is not a comfy place to be, is it?

But, we’re all grown ups here and if we look around the U.S. and the world, we can see that challenging the status quo and the monied interests and conventional wisdom is rampant. It’s causing fear, chaos, imbalance. Those who have been in power for a very long time, certainly don’t like this uppity attitude from the ‘peasants’. They feel the ground shifting as well.

I think this is part of a much larger transformation of humanity; humans 2.0, if you like. The metaphysical world believes that this began around December of 2012, with a shift in energy. In astrological terms, we are nearing the end of a cycle where Pluto transits from Capricorn (patriarchy, authority, plutocracy, status, wealth, power) into Aquarius (divine feminine, nurturing, thinking, sharing, problem solving) over the next decade or so.

Many of you will poo poo this airy-fairy stuff, but admit it: you can feel it. You can feel a shift that is happening in our nation and you feel it in yourself. You’re questioning your life, your choices, the very essence of WHO YOU ARE.

Are you fulfilling what your soul craves? Are you where you want to be, doing what you want to do, with the people you want to be with? You’re questioning your job, what you eat, how you eat, how you treat others, how you treat the planet, what you really want out of your leaders and your government.

It’s a sea change. We are on the crest of a huge wave of transition and change and yes, possibly enlightenment.

So, the next time you find out that someone isn’t exactly who you thought they were or if someone throws that down on you, stop for a minute. Question your own truths. Do they REALLY serve you or do they serve your tribal leaders thatneed you to follow along? If you have changed, just smile and tell them that you are much more comfortable being who you really are.

Be you. Be brave. Ride the wave. You’ve no other choice, really.

Re-assembling My Soul

Looking back on your life can be a surreal exercise. I believe that even though we retain the same name and biography, we are not the same person from day to day, let alone decade to decade.

The ‘me’ of 20 years ago is not the same ‘me’ of today. Biologically, not one cell in my body is the same; they’ve all been replaced many times over. My day to day and minute to minute experiences have altered my outlook, behavior and reactions. My friends and co-workers and geography have changed. The things that interest me or take up my time are radically different and so how are we the same person throughout our lifetime?

My husband and I argue about this all the time. He looks at life as more of a long progression or a movie, whereas I see it as a bunch of snapshots or more of a photo album. When I look back, I see it as chunks of time that I often no longer relate to. Even if that chunk was in the recent past.

I’ve been struggling with our move from Colorado to Michigan over the past year and a half. I was drawn back to my home state for reasons that I could not explain at the time. Something compelled me to move back to a state  I hadn’t lived in for over 30 years. I didn’t question it, I just did it.

All was well for the most part, until a few devastating things happened, including the death of my dog and then, the sudden death of my 93 year-old father. Those two incidents made the already difficult transition of moving across the country, much more challenging. I longed for our life in Colorado, where Chili was still alive and my sweet daddy was a phone call away. I found myself pulling that ‘photo album’ off my mind’s shelf all of the time.

It didn’t help that my job was still in Colorado, so I was constantly reminded of what I was missing. I spoke to Denver every day on the radio and flew back for work fairly frequently. It was hard straddling two lives, while I was grieving so much. That’s one of the reasons I chose not to renew my contract when it expired last year. I had to live in one place and accept that my life was now on a beautiful 10-acre farm in northern Michigan.

So, I talked my husband into a ski trip to our former neighborhood. As we drove up Berthoud Pass into Fraser, Colorado, it felt as if I had never left. My exact quote was: “I feel like the last year and a half has been a dream and now I’m waking up to reality”. That’s how much I loved that segment of my life.

I’ve kept in contact with the folks who bought our house and we were able to pop in and spend some time visiting with them and my beloved house. She has offered to let us stay there when we visit, but I just wasn’t sure that I could handle that. Too hard. But, visiting with her and ‘my’ house was the most important part of the trip. That house is loved and cared for and I felt a huge wave of peace as we left.  All is as it should be.

We skied in beautiful conditions; there is no place on earth that makes me happier than a ski mountain and so this trip was therapeutic in ways that I never imagined. We snowshoed through the beautiful meadow behind our former home and I was able to soak in the images and energy of the mountains that I love. My happy place. The place where I left part of my soul.

So, that leads me to my next theory. All of those ‘photo albums’ that I mentioned earlier contain bits of our soul. We leave pieces of it as we travel our path and I guess our goal is to somehow call them all back at some point; to reassemble our souls as best we can by letting go of regrets and anger and bitterness. By being grateful for the people, places and experiences that have either chipped at our soul or filled it. We are a constant work in progress and we morph and grow and shrink and evolve, depending on the state of our soul.

I am so grateful for my time in Colorado because I know that for me, it’s a magical place, even though it took leaving to make me fully aware of how much I love it. I’m grateful that I can come back and visit and feel its familiarity. I also know that there were some very difficult times while I lived there and I must honor those challenges as well. It wasn’t perfect; no place or time in our lives is.

But, my soul is fuller after this trip. That part of my life is past and I’ve accepted it and embraced it. So, my message to you is to find your happy places and go there. Often. Whether in your mind’s eye or physically. You’ll find little pieces of your soul there.  Call them all back; it’s what makes us whole again.

Teetering or Tottering?

Our lives are a series of tipping points. Some are subtle shifts in our awareness or behavior or circumstance; some are like a teeter totter falling when your partner jumps off and you crash to earth. But, they happen.

Sometimes these tipping points are forced on us by events that are out of our control, but sometimes they are the result of making a decision; usually a decision that we KNOW we have to make. In my experience, these are decisions that our intuition has already made, but our brains override.

I have been mentally balanced on the fulcrum of a tipping point for over a year now, weighing both sides of that teeter-totter. My heart and intuition on one side and my brain and logic on the other. The balance has shifted from one day to the next, but as I began to feel more than think, the balance shifted and I made the decision.  The tipping point arrived.

One of my goals for 2014 is to tune into my intuition; to stop analyzing and crunching numbers and feel my way forward. I had to finally ask myself, “Jane what do you WANT to do? Not what SHOULD you do.”  That is a freeing moment when you answer yourself honestly; it’s like the first breath when you emerge from underwater.

We have to unravel ourselves from other people’s needs and expectations.  We have to let go of the belief that we are so intertwined with our past and present that we can’t move forward. This happens professionally and personally, despite huge piles of evidence that when people quit a job, quit a relationship or in the worst case, lose someone to death, we all move on. We grieve these losses and we survive.

Nothing is permanent, is it? That’s why tipping points are so important. They remind us that change and evolution have always been and will always be, the drumbeat of our lives.  They remind us that we have choices; that we can either be an active participant in those choices or have them forced upon us by default.

So, listen to your little inner voice. It’s often drowned out by the louder ‘voice of reason’ (in my mind, that is the voice of my mom or dad…for you, it may be James Earl Jones. Whatever). That voice has served me well on many occasions, but when it becomes constrictive and stifling, sit quietly, sometimes for months and allow the quiet, but insistent voice of intuition to have a say.

Here’s a warning. The voice of reason is not just internal; it shows up in your friends and family when you tell them that you’ve made an important shift. “But, why would you do that? You’re in a great situation and jobs like this don’t come along everyday.” “It will be get better. Just work harder.” “Give it another year or two. You can do that, right?” “What if this doesn’t work out the way you think it will?” “You’re being kind of selfish, aren’t you?”

Tipping points are about choices and dreams and knowing what you have to do; they lead us to the next phase, a new outlook, an end, a beginning.  Don’t fear them.

 

 

 

 

 

Hey 2013! You kinda sucked…..

Dear 2013:

I’m glad you’re nearly done.

I wrote a glowing review of 2012, 364 days ago. I was sitting in my kitchen in Colorado, reflecting on a year that brought a sea-change to my life.  That sea-change was internal; I put my life and my beliefs into a salad spinner and formed a new way of seeing things.  I called 2012 “my year of living honestly”.

You were supposed to be my year of “walkin’ the walk”.  The year that I took what I learned about myself in the previous year and instituted the new life.  It went from being internal and spiritual to physical, geographical and real.

You’ve been a bitch, 2013.  And I take partial responsibility.  The strategies that got me to the tipping point of changing my life went out the window once the changes really started physically and emotionally happening.  Meditation fell by the wayside, exercise was put on the back burner, I allowed my control freak tendencies to creep back in and settle into a spare bedroom in my brain.

One step forward, two steps back…or is that two steps forward, one step back.  Maybe I’ll have a clearer picture of that concept as 2014 unfolds.

I’m an optimist.  Really.  I think that things will work out just fine in the end.  I’m also a pragmatist and a planner.  Once I commit to something, I’m pretty much all-in and often that means that I can power through problems and snags and barricades like a tank.  But, that takes a toll.

The last 6 months contained a fair number of hurdles.  Selling a house, moving 1500 miles, realizing that a 10 acre farm requires a lot of maintenance, constant nickel and dime problems with the new house, working remotely and feeling cut off from friends and co-workers, the sudden illness and death of one of our dogs, being the new folks in a small, rural community and finally, living close enough to my parents to witness their age-related decline.

These were not in my plan and it felt like being caught in an avalanche or a monster wave.  I told my husband after the death of our dog, which felt like the final straw, that I had lost my mojo.

That little internal spark that I’d always had that kept me going through challenges; the core belief that everything works out.  That my internal, anti-skid control will right my course very soon.  All of that was gone and I ended up in a deep ditch, spinning my wheels.

It seems that you were my year of cold, hard reality.  Of loss and grief.  But, that’s my glass-half-empty view and I’m a glass-half-full kind of gal.  Right now, I’d look at the glass and say “there’s enough liquid in there to wash down an Advil”.  I’ll take what I can get.

So, 2013, you gave me a beat down, but we all know that growth comes after destruction.  I’m feeling a few little stirrings of my mojo returning.  It’s walking up the driveway, through the snow and will eventually ring the bell and want to come in.

I can speed that mojo up by getting back into my meditation practice, cleaning up my diet, and firing up a more regular exercise routine.  I can embrace the changes that I put in motion, including those that were not included in my master plan.

So, goodbye 2013; I’m grateful for your lessons and your time, but you’ll stick in my craw for a long time.

Now get out.

Jane