Personal ads. They’re … personal! Very.
At the very least, useful noticings about my relationship with wanting. It all counts.
♡
What do I want?
It has to do with letting go.
A letting go of something specific.
I am letting something go. I am in the process of letting go. I am wishing for help in letting go.
What do I want?
I want to rename the thing I am letting go of, because the thing itself is not as important as the letting go.
And because I think that will make it easier, for now, to write about.
For now, let’s call it W.
What do I want?
I honestly cannot imagine a world without W.
I was raised by people who W. I live with people who W.
There is unconscious W happening around me all the time, and even if I stop W, there will still be plenty of W.
That’s because it exists in every part of my life, it seems. In this hugely pervasive way, even more so than I’d realized when I decided it was time to let it go.
I have W that comes from the surrounding culture, lineage W, family W.
So I need to find out what it is like to be a W-less person in a W-full world.
What do I want?
To remember that I can do this.
After all, I already live outside of [broader culture], and it works.
I don’t speak, and living quietly doesn’t hinder me even though I spend my days in a world of talkers.
I stopped consuming sugar — 14 years this February! — and I am able to live in a world where sugar is everywhere.
I can do this.
It is just going to take practice. Practice, patience, permission, legitimacy.
What do I want?
I want to find the ways I already know about Not-W.
What is the opposite of W? Alon asked me that this week, and it blew my mind because I didn’t know. I am so steeped in W that I can’t imagine what it is like to not be in it, surrounded by it, believing in it.
And yet, there has to be a part of me who can not-W. A part of me who has let go of W.
What do I want?
I want to find people who have also chosen to live without W.
Like my wonderful uncle Svevo.
I can’t think of anyone else, so I am going to have to be a pioneer here.
What do I want?
I want to play on multiple levels at the same time, the thing I am always talking about:
Physical IRL changes. Energy. Emotions. Thoughts. Intention.
To give myself time.
To fill up on my thank-you heart…
What do I want?
To be patient with the process of letting go of W.
I have spent thirty seven years breathing W, and so this is new. It is going to take some time, and that’s okay.
I want to remember that noticing W is a win. Even though right now it seems like holy shit do I do anything aside from W?
The more I notice, the better.
Without blame, without judgment, without criticism and without W.
Or if those things show up, to remember that they are part of what is leaving as I learn to let go.
And: to give myself a thousand billion trillion sparklepoints, because this is hard.
What do I want?
To rename the mission so it is about what I want instead of about what I don’t want.
To have fun with this, even though it’s hard.
To find the best costumes.
To skip stones.
Where/how do I want to start?
Putting it here. Writing out my wish and what I know about it always helps.
Using the Floop and a playdate.
Trusting that this is the exact right thing to be taking on in the new year.
Anything else coming up?
There are sources of support for this that I don’t know about yet.
Keep paying attention, Havi Bell.
What are the qualities of my wish?
Calm. Steadiness. Peacefulness. Trust. Composure. Delight. Play. Readiness.
And the superpower of opening up space for what I want, and all the superpowers of fire snakes.
What would help me move forward on this? How am I going to play?
Interviewing slightly-future-me who has already made progress on this.
Asking her for advice.
Listing all the ways W currently shows up in my life, so that I can be extra-aware in those situations/interactions.
This week is Rally (Rally!), so I can find clues and treasure there.
Drawing a crown and a heart on my palm. Thinking: Crown. Heart.
What is my clue?
I am a fish.
Anything else?
The upcoming Rallies are G and H.
What else do I want?
Seeds planted without explanation, a mix of secret agent code and silent retreat dreams. Things I’m working on, or might be, someday…
- May Peacefulness Prevail!
- Announcements.
- Everything is getting easier.
- Miracles everywhere.
- Regular gigs at the ballroom, which is also the Spiegelsaal.
- This doesn’t require my input!
- Ha, it’s so perfect that it turned out like this.
- Past me is a GENIUS.
- I have what I need, and I appreciate it.
- There is money for this.
- Trust and steadiness. I can see why this moment is good.
- Hawaii.
- I am fearless and confident, and I do the brave things and give myself sparklepoints, and it is not even a big deal that I did the brave things but I still get sparklepoints, yay.
This week’s ops?
Finishing the almost-done Last Hat. Operation KNOWINGS.
I’m playing with…
“How is this useful?”
Attenzione! AGENTS.
I am deep in an undercover mission to get better at Gracefully Accepting Thanks. Or: Glowing Receptivity and Being Receptive to Glow.
This mission also resolves a question we get from people a lot, which is “I really, really want to thank you, except I’m not going to buy products and I can’t come to a Rally.” And it is also related to Operation Coming Out Of All The Closets, so I can share some experiences from Then where past-me thought her best survival strategy was not-sharing-how-hard-things-are.
If you would like to support my mission by sharing sweetness and appreciation for any aspect of my work, I would love that. You can do it with the magic of words, through the comments, or add something to Barrington’s Discretionary fund. (Explanation!)
And if the way you are glowing appreciation is quietly in your heart, I like that too. It all counts. ♡
Progress report on past Very Personal Ads.
So. Last week, aka a hat that is a door…
My wish had to do with change, and specifically about change towards [SHARING], [COMMUNITY], and [SUSTENANCE]. I am really really glad I wrote it.
This helped me write the HAT, which is very close to done, and it also helped me get really clear on what I want and what I don’t want.
Given how tremendously stuck this has felt over the past several months, big huge astonishing progress!!
Thank you, writing. Thank you, me who asked.
Keep me company?
Consider this an open invitation to deposit wishes, gwishes, visions, personal ads. Small or large. In any form you like, there’s no one right way. Updates on past experiments are welcome too, as is anything sparked for you.
Commenting culture: This is safe space for creative exploration. We are on permanent vacation from care-taking and advice-giving. We are here to play.
Let’s throw some things in the pot! And, as always, Amnesty. Leave a wish any time you want.
xox
Follow
I kept checking this page, knowing/expecting there wouldn’t be a post until later today, but it is here now! Yay!
I honor your privacy, but if it happens that W stands for Work in the sense of paid employment, and that letting go of W means somehow not being employed, I am there, and have been there, for 4 yrs now. I went through a complete existential meltdown over it in the beginning. But now, I have a whole different identity, and I’m much happier & more creative than I ever was, while working.
Now, socially, it’s tricky. Sometimes I tell people I’m “retired” (even though I’m in my late 40s, and we’re not rich) just because it’s easier than explaining. Other times, saying I’m a blogger & poet suffices.
In any case, Letting Go is what my life is about. So, in that way, you are not alone.
P.S. These days, I call my blog “dreaming fish” – synchronicity!
I was thinking through my whole life last night, and wondering if S is possibly the only language I know. If I have been marinated and gestated in S, raised amidst S, absorbed S by osmosis and actively taught the art of S, grew and mastered S, mastered the art of living despite the amount of S in my life, in my world, moved from S to S, married and lived with an even more masterful practitioner of S for so long without realising this is the language we were speaking, so screened from conscious awareness have I been, so oblivious to the ubiquity of S that the simplicity of the solution (not S! Maybe A! And L! LH! LH!) has felt frustratingly just out of reach, just missing the Rosetta Stone which has been here all along Dorothy (mixed metaphor salad anyone?)
S awareness, S fluency, S resilience, S releasing. My children are young, and I am a fast learner. There is time to make this right, to shift their mother-tongue to something other than S. Even though I have spoken so much S in front of them, to them, around them. Even though right now it seems like oh my god the only thing I do is S, this is okay, this is progress, this is shifting, this is new fluency. I too can release this thing that feels so native to me, I can make space for my even older, stronger, more powerful language instinct to emerge.
Blessings on everything that has been and blessings on everyone who is releasing what needs to be released.
Thank you Havi, thank you thank you.
A wish from me to know what the P is, when and if you are ready. (I’d draw a heart here, but I don’t know how.)
This year, I want to learn to live without Sh. I believe that this may be the key to everything, but especially to having my voice. No more Sh!
I have so much love and gratitude for everyone here. ?
(That was meant to be a heart, not a question mark. )
<3!!! Funny Kat!
What is the opposite of W?
Whistling.
Wheeeeeeeeee!!!!!
Winning
Whipped cream
Wombats (http://zactopia.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/wombat.jpg)
Winking
Wham boom!
Whispering
(being) Wide (open)
Et cetera.
This was so perfectly delightful, Havi. The floodgates are opening, for me, too. I, too, would like to live without W in a culture that is full of it, that almost seems to *run* on it! Here’s to being accidental radicals!
WHISTLING. Genius.
Fwiw, 1 of my favorite W words is Whimsy.
I am letting go of my own W. I have been practicing for a long time, and pieces of it dissolve and reappear and dissolve again. And now, I can clearly see the fine art of W mirrored outside me, and then reflected back to me, in a way that helps my practice sink deeper into my bones.
Sending you an image of a weimaraner napping, which I’m pretty sure is the opposite of almost any W we might want to live without.
Elizabeth! That is the best image ever.
Ahhh, epiphany city!
I just realized that
1. 99% of the time, I live in W.
2. This is hilarious because, as I am in detached observer mode, I realize that W solves exactly nothing, actually makes everything worse by gunkifying my relationship to wanting. One of those epiphanies that are super obvious in retrospect.
3. Based on thought/emotion/energy experiments which are fresh out of the oven, a mind without W has a light, playful and flexible approach to wanting and problem-solving, which is incredibly delightful but foreign to my brain which is so used to perpetual W.
Being without W shows me the fastest route to the superpowers of adaptation (“oh, things are like *this* now! got it”) and curiosity (“hm, I wonder what might happen if…”). Releasing W feels like lifting a fog, which then makes ALL the open highways connecting me to the Objects of Desire super clearly visible. I connect faster to the essence of the OOD. I can improvise better. I can respond instead of react. I can play instead of grind wheels. I can easily maneuver the levels of the video game because I am able to remember that this is a video game. I can see SO much more. It literally feels like a giant fog lifted. I can SEE. All of which brings me much closer to the OOD.
My campmate read me a quote she found: “whenever something goes wrong in life, just yell PLOT TWIST!!!!! and move on” which I found delightful. Living without W is like that. Plot twists! Enemies to bust in video games! Devious strategizing and jumping and responding to clues and cues, just like in dance!
Plot twist!!! I love this.
I enjoyed rereading this post with the following values for W: Waxing, Washing and
Walrus wrestling.
I would support anyone in a campaign to end the brutal sport of walrus wrestling. Not that the walruses (thank god no one ever convinced us to call them wallri) seem to mind. It is the humans who suffer. The ones who can’t stop wrestling walruses. Sometimes I wake up at night and can’t get back to sleep until I’m exhausted from wrestling walruses.
As it goes, I have a friend who doesn’t wrestle walruses. This is an excellent thing because while I could wrestle walruses indefinitely rather than starting a new thing, he doesn’t. I’ve not yet seen him ambushed by a rouge walrus but if if it ever happened, he’d probably say that wrestling with it wouldn’t have helped.
Oh, that picture makes me laugh, PhilH!
Thanks – I needed that 🙂
My H, and all.the.stuff. that lives in it, are looming at me like the rolling boulder in Indiana Jones.
I need a plan. A plan to divest myself of most of the.stuff. + how and where to change H.
When? is isn’t even in question – I have until the first week in March to make it ALL happen. And I’ve known that date was coming for nearly a year, and haven’t made either the Plan, or much progress on all the parts of the Plan-to-be.
Thank you, Havi for the (incidental to your own Wish though it may be) reminder that Slightly-Future-Me *has* made it through this, and that I *can* pick her brain (and heart and gut) for “What’s the next right thing to do?” possibilities…
Remembering my own Bright Blessings, too!
Wish oh wish, I have a wish. I ask for visions of What Could Be if I let go of the backup plan. The safety net that keeps me stuck in safety mode, not risking for what I really want. (This scares me silly, even writing this. Because it sets the intention. Which is why, at this point, I ask for visions rather than pathways. I’m not sure I’m ready to follow the path, if it showed up just now.)
I don’t want to be without safety, but I do want to leap off this hamster wheel and do other things. Brilliant magical things.
As I struggle to let go, I have almost let go of the idea of letting go, since that idea is the easiest to let go of. But perhaps not. Perhaps letting go is something else and I can re-frame letting go so that there is more letting go and less no! no! Release and exhale work in other contexts, maybe here too.
Release. Exhale. Release. Exhale.
I’m going to go play with this for a while. So much love for this community and this space.
After another stressful move across the country and unpleasant, traumatic holidays (and a traumatic life, frankly), I’ve felt compelled to pause and examine nearly every single thought and belief that forms in my head. Why am I thinking that? Where did that thought structure come from? On a fundamental level.
Especially the very old, long-held beliefs. I’ve made so much progress in this area that I didn’t even recognize many more of them as potentially not-really-mine, because they are so, so deeply ingrained, and they feel like my identity. They are the ones in which I was raised, both by society and family, and that have been perpetuated by certain decisions and actions of mine that were based on these beliefs.
In recognizing my profound divergence from the culture in which I was raised, it’s almost like I need to start my identity over from scratch. It’s kinda like waking up from the Matrix, where my consciousness has been hooked into a certain reality so completely, I haven’t been free to perceive the greater space around it that’s available for my existence. Is is possible to free myself completely?
I have an image in my mind of turning up a plot of soil, so that the earth is freshly turned and ready for new things to be planted. So much of my brain is riddled with pervasive species that got planted and rooted there when I was still just forming, before I could possibly know my own mind. The image of the freshly turned soil gives me a sense of relief and peace, which makes me suspect I’m on the right track.
I want to be able to recognize when things that feel like a part of me aren’t really mine. I want to release default beliefs, ownership, and obligation. I want to examine my own mind and figure out how to build a peaceful existence around what’s really in there. And I think that continuing to free myself of the material and situational constructs that contain old thoughts and beliefs is indicated.
Oooh, I want these things for you too and send support and en-courage-ment!!
Occupy Claire! Let’s make it a movement 😉
The upside-up of W (because W is downside-down and has no upside and its opposite should have no downside) is M. Instead of teetering on those two tiny points, it has two strong feet and sometimes the third point in the middle for even more stability.
And I am Not exchanging my night-time bouts with Brain Squirrels for Walrus Wrestling, DangIt!
The rest of my wishes in invisible ink.
What a masterful monogrammatic modification.
Magic!
Three points of contact with the ground and also two diagonal bracing struts.
It’s a typographic engineering marvel.