Tag: life

Anonymous

It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others’ knowledge of him. That was freedom.

— Ling Ma

Quite a while back I was taken by the idea of paying it forward, inspired to choose random folks and random acts of kindness whenever the mood struck me. Typically this would be expressed out and about where crossing paths again if spotted was less likely. As my personal yoga practice grew and my heart space more embodied, I began bringing the giving in closer to home as well — perhaps dropping off something unexpected here or there but staying anonymous. It was fun, there were no expectations, and no one had a person to tie in to the act of receiving so we were all free in the experience.

At one point I had my kids looped in after we first moved to our current sanctuary and we made quite the summer day of shopping for our neighbors, stuffing bags full of whatever snacks and treats a 7 and 10 year old may choose, and then driving around to the 52 mail boxes to leave the shares anonymously. We would drive a little, park, all jump out with bags and scatter, then repeat until it was complete. One or two folks saw us but what unfolded later on the neighborhood list serve was just as fun; no one who posted actually saw us though they described a vehicle and people not like us and they had a bit of entertainment speculating. It was decided we had neighborhood fairies and they were all quite happy with their bags. Over the years people have still mentioned it and just last week (9 years later) a neighbor told me she thought it was us and that she still has the stickers my kids put in the bag.

I still appreciate a sweet pay it forward moment these days and I’ve come to the place of being able to own my sharing now too, but it wasn’t always easy for me when my name was attached because of the complexities that are possible with giving and receiving.

I spoke with my counselor about these shares back when the kids and I made the best of that summer day and she suggested I do this more personally in a way where I was allowed to be seen. It wasn’t comfortable, but I leaned into who in my community may be able to receive with an open heart and set about sharing baked goods or otherwise in various scenarios. With time, this grew into steady cycles in my life of giving and receiving without strings attached. I can give, receive, stay present, and be seen with ease. In a recent instance, I dropped off a share at one home and within twenty minutes someone else from another household had left a share at my home! I really took a long joyful pause that day with how wonderful it can be to step into the flow of giving without expectation; you may not have the freedom of anonymity but you may gain a sense of rightness with life that comes from being seen by others.

Both are good for different reasons.

Treasure

Written in 2020 —

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.  After a little fun yesterday setting up a treasure hunt with one of my children for anyone who may like a diversion in the neighborhood, I’m thinking one mans treasure is not necessarily valuable to everyone because at least the first person who found it, checked the bag and left it assembled differently.  To me that’s a lovely thing too because whoever that was didn’t value what they found enough to take it along with them and if something doesn’t match up with you, it certainly need not be a part of your journey. Where our values live helps us to connect with others who hold similar views and pass when not.  The little bag makes me think of relationships in another way too: how many times have you met someone, spent some time with them, and found yourself altered after time together?  Maybe after checking each other out something just didn’t line up or maybe it did for a time and then it was done. C’est la vie.

Nearsighted

When looking to understand something or someone, try to hold off on categorizing too soon. Give it time to reveal itself naturally.

We can often be mistaken in our labeling, seeing one thing that is truly something else altogether.

Perhaps that first assumption plays its part well enough but the details have their value in color, form, and saturation. If you take your time with all the information while giving every aspect breathing space and permission to be different than you thought, you may be pleasantly surprised by the freedom from limiting labels.

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We Women

I have been blessed with a lens into the most beautiful support from women in the last few years that allows one to hope for a nurturing future of how we connect to one another in community. Honestly, I have been lucky to have a handful of wonderful friendships from a young age with girls who have become lovely women. I know not every woman is so fortunate, however, the choices for women are evolving. I have been part of a group of women who are absolutely dedicated to supporting each other however they show up for the love of sacred feminine energy re-emerging on this planet. That means all judgements and comparisons are dropped and competition is not entertained as necessary or desirable, and not just because a woman has aged out of being perceived as a threat; acceptance is offered with camaraderie simply because you showed up. Wow, yes to more of this!

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We all have our own paths and learn how to be in the world based on our familial exposures and that cannot escape the over culture that creates our conditioning on a larger scale. I grew up in a household of a working mother and my closest friends in elementary as well as middle school had mothers that stayed at home and maybe who decided to work when they were older, some in traditional systems and one as an artist from her own space. My mother focused on work outside the home and with time became the breadwinner of our family. It was a different dynamic than the other households of my friends. I noticed their mothers were more relaxed and perhaps happier in some regards while I knew my own mother was pleased with what she had been able to create in her life after marrying my father while still in high school. I was proud of my mom and felt she was an excellent example of dedication to making the best of your circumstances.

Years down the line, I was surprised when I found myself desiring to stay at home with my children, and I felt it created an assumed point of disappointment with my mother though now I know differently. Before this — my work as an elementary music teacher had already faced the judgement of females who had chosen careers of more influence and power. I found as I moved in the world as an early twenty something that elementary public education was not so valued by many. Parents of students were unbelievably disrespectful and colleges of my at the time husband who was studying medicine on occasion belittled the work calling it “cute” or “adorable” (never his male colleges by the way, only the females) which when I was still living from an immature ego myself, infuriated me. I felt my work was important but also that because it was with children, knew it was perceived as less valuable. This is nonsense, of course, because music works across both hemispheres of the brain to create better coordination and advanced thinking as well as providing an emotional processing platform for youth among other things. Working with children is an incredibly powerful point of shifting the future reality of humanity as we mold the subconscious and nurture belief systems with more ease at that impressionable period of life. If you want to make a change, do it within yourself and then with your children.

With my spiritual work and diligence to changing patterns within the familial line that I knew were not going to be passed on to my children and enough years staying at home to deeply accept my choice, I now no longer care how I am perceived by a woman who has chosen differently. I knew what I had to do once the children were here and I have the good fortunate of being supported in doing so for which I am eternally grateful. I didn’t want the rearing of my children in the hands of paid providers. There’s nothing like being faced with your ingrained patterns as well as those of the other parent day in and out, and work outside of your home can make the perfect escape so that outdated patterns persist. Can you work and make these changes? Yes, absolutely, if you are self aware with a want to improve, you can. Can you stay at home and ignore needed change? Yes, absolutely. Immersion made the way clear here.

These life experiences have created for me a vantage point of total support for other women in whatever they choose so long as their hearts are happy and they have the support they need in however their paths take direction. However, I sometimes still encounter a woman who carries a sharp edge in her tone for the woman who stays at home, maybe she dismisses her as less important than other woman who work or makes defensive comments for her choice. While I don’t care how I am perceived, I do care for the good of women and the connections women are able to form. If the working woman can see that the work of living everyday for every person has its inherent value regardless of the system or the kind of work — it would release her from judgement. If the woman working feels judged as somehow less of a mother or less of a woman, how far from the truth is that? It’s only as true as we give it belief. If the woman choosing to stay at home can be at peace with the work she is offering as just as valid as whatever current societal stories are pitching, we may all be able to claim our womanhood for however it fits each of us best. We are all Goddesses, as far I am concerned and we are all working, children or not.

If we could drop these judgements, how much better would we all be?

Imagine if we replaced all the judging and comparison with lifting each other up. What if we women united and allowed ourselves to be in the energy of fierce love and devotion to one another simply because we can see that’s where real influence and power can thrive for the good of us all?

Whatever You Call God

Jessica, the lovely soul who began this blog with me back in 2016, reached out yesterday to share a video she found of the actor James Van Der Beek speaking on his experience of cancer and being stripped of the roles that defined his worth.

When we were in high school, Jess and I were extras in the pilot of Dawson’s Creek which became his claim to fame in the roll of a small town boy seeking a career in film making. While neither she or I watched the series in full and there was no direct exchange with this man during those days on set, we both felt a little extra jolt around death in midlife. I’m sure many folks in this age range feel the passing of a well known 40something in a certain kind of way for his familial loss and life not lived.

His vision was towards recovery during this recording and his words from the heart:

View Video HERE

Seek Within

O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again. — Shakespeare

So often we look outside ourselves for something to be satiated internally. We want people to love us so that we feel a certain way or we want a thing that will help us embody a particular energy – maybe confidence or desirability. We want someone else to tell us or show us we are good enough. At the root of it all, we are seeking love and quite possibly we look for our divinity everywhere but inside. If someone else sees us in our best light or appreciates something about us, it must mean we are lovable and that can be addictive. You can find yourself chasing illusory love through achievements, big ticket items, grand experiences, or the presence of another reflecting your divine birthright of love —- or you can give that source energy to yourself and be delighted when someone else offers you the same without a sense of longing.

Longing is not in and of itself bad , (it may ultimately lead you to a spiritual path) but it can leave you feeling pretty out of sorts until you see it for what it is: an invitation to seek within, to hold yourself with what you wish to be reflected back, and to know YOU dearest one are love.

Redirection

“Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being redirected to something better.” — Steve Maraboli

Rejection can be such a difficult emotion to experience. Oftentimes it takes a long while to look back and see how that showed up in life as a redirection to something that was better for you. Maybe that something better is not what mass opinion would note as better -but for you, it’s the better match. Sometimes this rejection can be experienced as coming from another person not wanting to be in relationship with you, a series of events that keeps you from realizing a dream, a situation at work going sour, no call backs from your auditions, or any number of ways you may know this happens that I’ve yet to encounter myself or through conversation with others. We can even feel rejection when it was not intended depending on how our expectations have set us up to interact with others and to respond to ourselves.

Rejection is difficult, however, shifting to the mindset that there’s no such thing as rejection and replacing it with redirection is quite the liberator. The sooner you can get to assuming you’ve been redirected whenever rejection is present, the sooner you’ll feel trust in what’s occurring. It’s worth assuming and in this case assumption won’t wreak any sort of havoc in your life. There are little ways we can nurture ourselves that have big pay offs and this is one of them. If you can start here, today, with replacing any rejection experience you’ve had with redirection, the benefits will start to appear immediately.

Affirmation: I am always directed in ways that are better for me than I could have guessed. Any rejection is actually redirection towards better alignment.

Everything I Wanted

“In the Divine Plan, every righteous desire of the heart is satisfied”. – Florence Scovel Shinn

When I was 17 I had the inspiration to write a list of what I wanted in life. I included details about my ideal partner, my children, how it would feel to be together, and how I would feel with all those things secured. I sealed up the list in an envelope and I tucked it into my favorite book at the time.

Twelve years later, I was packing up to move to another state with that ideal partner and those two kids just in the gender order I had specified, and the forgotten list fell out of the book. I paused for a long while looking over what 17 year old me had very directly listed I wanted to have and I felt everything freeze around me seeing it all received. I HAD EVERYTHING I WANTED. That may look like a lovely blessing and I definitely felt it as such at the time. I was a bit wowed at how I had simply listed it all and easily received it all without toiling over it. I didn’t repeatedly look at the list and wonder about how it would happen. I just clearly stated what I wanted and let it go. So this realization of how life *can work shifted into my conscious awareness and I say it like this because I have no doubt that some unconscious part of me understood already. It also helps that I wasn’t asking for anything outside of the realm of what we consider to be common occurrence. Those things take more trust and imagination to bring about.

As the move continued on, I didn’t think about the list much more but in the year to come, I found myself begin questioning everything I thought I understood about reality. HOW did that happen exactly? I began to feel curious about astrology and venture down pathways to understand different lenses of life as well as to write poetry and some short stories regularly which caused me to seek inspiration points in others. I found observing the qualities in others as well the way people relate to one another to be an excellent past time; it was super informative for how reality appears to be different depending on the participants.

As more time passed, I began to have symptoms of what many refer to as spiritual awakening. I felt different in my reality, with contrast coming up between me and those around me. I saw others differently than I had seen them before because I was changing. I learned to respond differently to the reality to heal the unhealthy patterns that were playing. I devoted myself to creating a healthier physical form after childbirths and within that began a practice of Kundalini yoga which I attribute now to the pattern awareness that occurred. When I first practiced this yoga I felt like I would vomit after every session for many weeks, and yet for some reason I kept doing it with adjustments here and there to help myself through that reaction. More recently, in a training to teach Kundalini, I understood that was a release of toxins in my body. The breath work and the lymphatic cleanse cleared so much energetic density from my body and it was absolutely worth it to do that work and to ultimately feel better. This also meant becoming more sensitive to my body and what my body needed as well as what it did not need.

I became more sensitive to everything around me as well. I could always read people with ease, but their motivations began to become apparent to me and I could feel their feelings too so that a person’s energy would speak to me before they ever said a word. I found this to be overwhelming for a time, wishing I could just process myself and not so much other information at once too. As I learned to anchor into this way of experiencing life, my external reality took on some challenges that didn’t match that original list at all. Everything I wanted was shifting into an external expression that wasn’t at all what I wanted, but now that I’m a decade deep into venturing away from the list, I’ll say I’ve come to view the growth that has occurred as it’s own blessing. Loss is a great teacher. I’ve learned to have gratitude in each day, to let forgiveness be an ever-present practice, to be mindful of what I speak, that saying less and sometimes nothing is more effective than anything I could have uttered, how to give without a thought for what may come back, how to expect the best from others knowing that allows them to show up as such, and how to love others as well as myself unconditionally. I’ve also learned to trust the universe to know best what’s in alignment with my highest good and to welcome what shows up in my reality now under that frequency.

Sometimes our ego and our soul want or need different things. Making sure they’re aligned is imperative. Otherwise, it could be that everything you want is only in service to a particular aspect of you, but not in service to the whole. That moment of thinking “I have everything I wanted” for me was a gateway to one of many spiritual awakenings. Sometimes Spirit creates a little precursor moment to releasing the ego because the soul has other plans.

Waking Up

“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up” — Paul Valéry.

We could look at this quote and marvel at the simplicity of first getting yourself out of bed everyday and consistently moving towards your dreams: one step at the time. To shift yourself from contemplation to actionable reality perhaps was what the French poet intend we derive. However, I can’t help but pull multiple meanings from this every time my eyes scan over the words. Perhaps we’ve been in one way of thinking too long and we must wake up to a pattern. Maybe it’s that we’ve been excusing behavior from others that limits us and we have to wake up to claiming our own right to space and expression. It’s even possible that we’ve settled into relationships that were comfortable for us at one point in time but as we all grow and change, we have to remember to wake up to the present and not the past versions because who we and they were five, ten, twenty years ago isn’t the same as today. Life may cause us to go through something that shifts us in a particular way to prepare us for a new way of being that we have to wake up to. From yet another perspective, perhaps the dominant energy in whatever life dynamics we find ourselves is providing the perfect illusions to keep us small and working in systems that deter our growth or keep us dependent on someone else’s dream or base desires. Within the same thinking, it could also be that our energy feeds the demands of another and we have so little left for our own wants and dreams that we begin to feel deflated. Perhaps we don’t even know what to dream anymore…

There are so many ways we may find ourselves waking up to reclaim and probably redefine our right to dream. Please don’t assume these dreams have to be big to be valuable. The smallest dreaming is quite powerful and affirming. You may find small dreams are the most rewarding all along your path. We certainly all deserve to live nourished and free in our hearts desires – surrounded by those who help us remember our sacred sovereignty.

Hug it In

What happens when you avoid or dismiss something or someone that makes you uncomfortable? Perhaps you bypass it or them because you think it’s not worth your while but yet when it rolls around into your awareness there’s a kind of stickiness there and maybe even a sting.

As we wind down 2025, year of the snake and shedding, what if you let whatever this could be in your life have a bit more airtime? What if you expand to meet it and even include it or them in your field with conscious awareness. Let avoidance be part of your shed, dear one. The sooner you meet whatever / whomever this is with your heart light, the sooner you embody peace and wellbeing with yourself across all aspects of your life.

This is not to say you should sit in difficult feelings for a long time but acknowledgment with the light of the heart helps to transmute these feelings into neutrality, and with more and more practice, you can even shift the feelings into loving acceptance and possibly joy.

May you expand in loving light. 💛🙏🏼✨