What's in the gallery?
We dissolve stuck and rewrite patterns. We apply radical playfulness to life (when we feel like it!), embarking on internal adventures (credo of Safety First). We have a fake band called Solved By Cake. We build invisible sanctuaries, invent words and worlds, breathe awe and wonder.
We are not impressed by monsters. Except when we are. We explore the connections between internal territories and surrounding environment to learn what marvelously supportive delicious space feels like, and how to take exquisite care of ourselves. We transform things.* We glow wild.**
* For example: Desire, fear, worry, pain-and-trauma, boundaries, that problematic word which rhymes with flaweductivity.
** Fair warning: Self-fluency has been known to lead to extremely subversive behavior, including treasuring yourself unconditionally, unapologetically taking up space, experiencing outrageously improbable levels of self-acceptance, and general rejoicing in aliveness.
What's in the gallery?
We dissolve stuck and rewrite patterns. We apply radical playfulness to life (when we feel like it!), embarking on internal adventures (credo of Safety First). We have a fake band called Solved By Cake. We build invisible sanctuaries, invent words and worlds, breathe awe and wonder.
We are not impressed by monsters. Except when we are. We explore the connections between internal territories and surrounding environment to learn what marvelously supportive delicious space feels like, and how to take exquisite care of ourselves. We transform things.* We glow wild.**
* For example: Desire, fear, worry, pain-and-trauma, boundaries, that problematic word which rhymes with flaweductivity.
** Fair warning: Self-fluency has been known to lead to extremely subversive behavior, including treasuring yourself unconditionally, unapologetically taking up space, experiencing outrageously improbable levels of self-acceptance, and general rejoicing in aliveness.
Resolutions that actually work
New Year’s resolutions that don’t involve beating yourself up
I love New Year’s. Not the whole party thing of course, which is not at all my cup of tea. My cup of tea is a hot, steaming … well, cup of tea. Preferably with yerba buena leaves floating in it.
I invariably fall asleep well before midnight. And five years as a bartender cured me of ever wanting to imbibe an alcoholic beverage. Or to even leave the house, for that matter.
It’s just that I really enjoy beginnings. Marking time. Looking back. Making plans. The whole process of symbolically closing a circle and opening a new one.
Luckily, there’s no shortage of new year moments in the year. Being Jewish provides me with four different “new year” observances each year, since Judaism is full of wonderful wackiness, and I even go so far as to celebrate three of them (don’t ask).
And then there’s January first. And of course September which just kind of smells like going back to school, but in a good way. Plus there’s my birthday in March when I take the day off and meditate on the year that was.
So the whole year, for me, is filled with many sweet moments of resting, reviewing, examining and preparing. Which is exactly how I like it.
Still there’s something about the two-thousand-and-eight-ness of it all — the official moving of the digit and the having to remember every time you write a check — that makes this official new year more solemn and more scary than the others.
The trick to resolutions that work
You’ve probably noticed that I talk a lot about how self-mastery is a waste of time and self-friendship is the way to go.
Usually what happens when we start making resolutions is that we make them in the “wrongest” way. We start beating ourselves up for what we didn’t accomplish and threatening about what we’d better get right this time. Oh, my dear, it just doesn’t work like that.
“I’m going to finally drop all that weight this year, goshdarnit” is not a useful resolution.
“No more screwing around and procrastinating!” is not a useful resolution.
“I want to start making some money for a change!” is not a useful resolution.
If you find yourself making the same old resolutions this year about what you should be doing or what you wish you were doing, maybe it’s time to approach the whole darn thing differently this time around. Here are the components of coming up with resolutions that actually work:
PRACTICAL
- Is your resolution specific?
- Can if be broken down into baby steps?
- Is it realistic (can it actually be done?)
- Do you have a plan?
- Is it track-able?
“I’m going to come up with a four month plan to fit into my old favorite pants, and I’m going to do that by a. walking for at least fifteen minutes every morning, b. drinking a glass of hot water before each meal, c. journaling around what I eat and when, d. going to yoga twice a week and e. practicing Shiva Nata three times a week for half an hour.”
“I’m going to figure out the five things that scare me most about writing this book / applying for that job / starting that band and I’m going to journal about them every day. I am writing down ten baby steps I can practice taking to begin feeling comfortable with this new thing. To this end, I am creating a new ritual of listening to one of the Emergency Calming Techniques every night before bed for ten minutes.”
“I am ready to have a conscious, intelligent, mature relationship with money. I’ve called my brother-in-law and he’s going to give me a Quicken tutorial this weekend. I’m signing up for a Conscious Bookkeeping course. Plus I’m instituting a five minute ritual before breakfast where I do one of Havi’s calming techniques and look at my numbers. I put my laptop on the kitchen table before bed so I won’t forget.”
ACCOUNTABLE
- Are you committed to your resolution?
- Do you have back-up in the form of a partner, friend, coach or mentor who will gently, kindly and firmly hold you to your decisions?
- Do you have a support network and how is it going to work?
“Two girlfriends are taking turns walking with me in the morning and I got my friend who’s doing a yoga teacher training to promise to drag me to class on Tuesdays.”
“I’m on a forum where a bunch of people are dealing with all of the same procrastination issues that I’m going through. I’m committing to post there every day.”
“I’m checking in with my brother each week and we’re comparing notes on our financial goals. I’m also packing lunch at night and putting aside what I normally spend on eating out into my ‘hire a business mentor for three months’ fund.”
COMPASSIONATE
- Are your resolutions “love-oriented” (do they come from your desire to have more “good” in your life or are they a way of punishing yourself for not being perfect?).
- How compassionate do your resolutions feel?
- Are you considering and interacting with your feelings when you make these resolutions?
- How are you motivating yourself with encouragement and support, rather than blame and criticism?
- And, if this whole compassion thing still seems impossible for you, how are you working with this information consciously so that you can get better at practicing kindness with yourself?)
“I’m ready to work on having a conscious relationship with my body where I can work on being able to say nice things to myself no matter where I’m at. It’s important to me to be strong and healthy. Even though I don’t always feel very confident or positive in my body, I’m committed to this process of learning to eventually like myself anyway.”
“I know inside that the thing I’m so scared to do is really kind of a gift to the world. I’m ready to work through my fear around being seen and noticed so that I can do this giving. Even though I’m pretty terrified, this process is important to me and I know I can grow from this if I take it slow and ease off the pressure.”
“I am aware of the anxiety I have around facing my money issues. I’m actually kind of proud of myself for just being willing to work on this so directly. I know I’m headed in the right direction and even if it takes time, at least I’m trying to invest in myself and take care of my future.”
Got the difference?
Ask yourself again: What would it your resolutions look or sound like if they were compassion-oriented rather than goal-oriented? If it were actually possible for you to motivate yourself through encouragement rather than blame and self-criticism … what would your life be like then?
What steps would be needed in order for you to even want to interact with yourself in this kind, conscious way? And what parts of these steps are terrifying and depressing?
Are these thoughts exciting? Terrifying? Liberating? Panic-inducing? Drop me a line and let me know — we’ll talk about moving through this process together in our next teleclass. And good luck!
This has been the best year ever for me, so many thanks to you for being part of it and for participating in the “virtual community” that makes my job such a pleasure. I know the upcoming year will be even better than the last one and am absolutely looking forward to sharing it with you.
Self mastery is a big ol’ waste of time
News flash: self-mastery is a big ol’ waste of time
As the new year approaches and resolutions start piling up, it’s easy and tempting to slide into “self-mastery mode”. You’re determined to do it right this time and beat your bad habits to a pulp — and that’s where all the problems start. The thing is, self-mastery is just not the smart way to do things.
In self-mastery mode, you have to constantly struggle to maintain your position as the strongest, the fastest and the smartest. You’re always fighting, and worse, your enemy is you. You’re beating on your brain and/or your body.
As long as self-mastery is your goal, you’ll never escape the power dynamic and never stop fighting with yourself.
The smart way to work on your stuff
If there’s a smart way to do it differently, it’s clearly going to have to be less violent and less exhausting. The truth is, you’re always going to have “stuff” because that’s just part of being alive. The smart way is to stop fighting with your stuff and instead let your stuff be your teacher.
First of all, notice when your stuff is coming up — in your practice, in your relationships, in line at the supermarket, etc. Notice how you interact with your stuff — if you ignore it, fight it or let it drag you down. Look and listen for patterns.
Paying attention to your patterns helps you figure out what your stuff is trying to tell you, without being impressed by it. Remind yourself that your patterns don’t define you and don’t say anything bad about who you are. They’re just the messenger.
Do it differently
When you drop the self-mastery paradigm, you let go of the never-ending power struggle. You can’t inadvertently commit violence against yourself. You interact with your stuff instead of trying to demolish it.
You learn from your fears and anxieties instead of fighting them. You release them instead of stomping on them. You forgo fighting for a life-long process of learning about who you are, how you work and how you interact with yourself and the world around you. You abandon the self-abuse mentality of “mastery” to work on self-knowledge, self-acceptance and, who knows, maybe even self-love.
You know that proverb you see on inspirational calendars about how the mind makes a terrible master and a wonderful servant? Well, it turns out that those aren’t your only options. The mind can also be a friend and partner who encourages and supports you in everything you do. Your self-work practice can help you make friends with your mind, if you commit to the idea of putting your energy towards releasing your patterns rather than conquering them.
It’s not about self-mastery, it’s about self-friendship.
When you’re befriending your mind instead of trying to whip it into shape, everything changes. In our next teleclass we’ll be talking more in detail about how to be in this process and make it work. For now I’m wondering …
What would your New Year’s resolutions look or sound like if they were compassion-oriented rather than goal-oriented?
If it were actually possible for you to motivate yourself through encouragement rather than blame and self-criticism … what would your life be like then?
And are these thoughts exciting? Terrifying? Liberating? Panic-inducing? Scary stuff, being nice to yourself. I know. Take it in baby steps.
6 tips for dealing with uncomfortable situations
Dealing successfully with uncomfortable, high-stress (holiday) situations
There is no stress like the stress of having to be nice to people you don’t actually feel like being nice to. Welcome to the holiday season.
Here in America we are bombarded with Christmas music in every shop, the usual avalanche of decorations and advertisements, and furrow our brows with irritation at the sense of duty and obligation that sometimes seem to just come with the season.
Big family get-togethers can bring out the worst in everyone as old family patterns come to the surface. You’re dealing with your stuff. Other people are dealing with their stuff. Their stuff sets off your stuff, your stuff sets off their stuff and pretty soon you’re all yelling at the top of your lungs — or pursing your lips and pretending nothing happened, depending on your family’s history, patterns, ethnic/cultural make-up …
Patterns are everywhere: you have your personal emotional and mental patterns, your family has its group behavioral patterns, and under duress it’s easy to default to your absolute worst patterns.
Your patterns show up and are reflected in everything you do; relationships, work, the way you treat your body, the way you interact with strangers and everything else that happens to you in any given moment. So if you add stress + patterns + family + “having to” be nice, it’s going to descend into a big messy, uncomfortable Kerfuffle, if you will. Yes, my people say kerfuffle.
The way out of the stress and into the self-learning process is through compassionate interaction with yourself. The better you get at being kind to yourself, the easier it becomes for this pattern to be reflected into your interactions with others. It’s a process, and to say that it isn’t always easy is an understatement.
6 quick tips for surviving high-stress family and/or group situations
1: There is no such thing as feeling insulted
If you sense that you’re being “insulted”, remember what a wise teacher of mine once said to me: being insulted means you suspect a kernel of truth in the accusation. If your brother-in-law tells you your “hot pink wings make you look like a wanton buffoon”, you probably won’t be offended (assuming that you don’t actually have wings).
If he says, “Nice love handles”, then it hurts, because you suspect he might be right. When the hurt comes up, remember that this is your stuff. Find out why you think this remark feels true, and why it hurts. Give yourself a hug.
2: There is also no such thing as feeling betrayed, rejected or attacked
I know it seems like there has to be, since we think we feel these things all the time. The distinction is that these are all judgments, not feelings. “Angry”, “sad” and “irritated” are feelings. “Betrayed”, “rejected” and “attacked” are plot summaries from the narrator’s point of view.
3: Try to describe the feeling
Go for what you are feeling instead of summarizing what you think is happening. For example, “I am noticing that I’m feeling really annoyed when Uncle Leopold doesn’t speak to me, because I need to be acknowledged and encouraged.” Once you have worked through the feelings, then you’ll have some more clarity around what’s actually going on. You don’t have to speak these out loud; it’s often enough just to get clear in your own head.
4: You are entitled to feel what you feel — be it angry, sad or any other FEELING
As you practice using feeling words rather than judgment words, remind yourself that whatever you are feeling is okay. Whatever you are feeling is what you are feeling. Notice when you are loading up your feelings with extra layers of guilt and obligation (“What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just stop being annoyed about this?”). If you’re feeling annoyed, let yourself feel annoyed. It doesn’t define you. It’s a temporary moment and you’re allowed to be in it.
5: Practice Miller’s Law
If your Aunt Hildy says something that sounds crazy or mean, try assuming that what she said makes sense somehow and work backwards, asking the following question: “If I assume that what she just said is true, what is it true of?” (Or: “how is it true?”)
Use the moment to learn something about yourself (how you think, how you react) and/or something about Aunt Hildy (what she needs). Don’t operate according to your assumptions of subtext or hidden meanings based on the past. Instead, try assuming that things make sense and then figure out what part of the pattern you’re not seeing or hearing.
6: The art of “taking a moment”
Give yourself time out whenever you need it. If it’s possible, try saying, “Excuse me, I need a moment to myself”. If that’s not going to work, retreat to the bathroom for a few minutes or go read a book to one of the kids. Taking a moment to regroup, reconnect to your intention and check in with yourself is a huge help. Give yourself plenty of moments to practice being kind to yourself.
The worst thing about Thanksgiving (and a game!)
The worst thing about Thanksgiving
The worst thing about Thanksgiving is the flood of email, newsletters and essays trying to shove another dose of gratitude down your throat.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m seriously pro-gratitude. Done right, it hooks you up with powerful happy drugs easing their warm soothing glow through your veins.
As far as goofy natural highs go, gratitude is second only to being in love.
But when you’re told you should be feeling grateful, it drains out 99% of the fun. Force-fed gratitude is the worst.
Worse than having to warn your lovely hosts that you are sugar-free and vegetarian (Note to self: bake a loaf of juice-based bread to bring, and plan to wax poetic about the salad).
Guilt, guilt, guilt.
“I should be more grateful, things aren’t that bad, I don’t deserve to be dissatisfied … what’s wrong with me?”
Worse, this pressure to be in a state of gratitude (and the guilt over not being there yet) is only exacerbated by the slew of well-meaning coaches and experts telling you to Think Positive, Delete Negative Words from your Vocabulary, and offering various other annoyingly know-it-all bits of advice.
The good kind of gratitude is the kind that shows up on its own. Out of nowhere you are struck by a glorious sense of remembering.
You suddenly remember how cool it is to be alive, how fortunate you are to be living this life of yours, how beautiful it is to be on your crazy, unique, surprising path. Maybe you even recall that you actually can’t stand the word “path” (as one of my clients says, “ewwwwwww”), and yet here you are using it anyway.
How do you do the whole gratitude thing without annoyance?
When gratitude shows up it feels great. You want more! And like someone in love, you want to share it with the whole world — forgetting in your happiness how irritating that can be to someone who wants to be there too, but doesn’t know how to get there.
Sure, you can build a gratitude habit from scratch, and the way to do it is with gentle compassion, patience and an understanding of how you actually function. Which means that if a healthy dose of cynicism is what you need to make it work for you, bring it on!
The trick to helping these moments appear is to constantly shift your focus to the question: “What can I be doing right now, in this moment, to be developing a conscious relationship with myself?”
Keeping it conscious:
Noticing what’s going on for you in the present moment is part of building a conscious relationship with yourself.
And that is way more important than gratitude. It is the key to gratitude, to self-love, to success and to all sorts of other great things. Keeping it conscious solves half your problems right off the bat.
You see, the “win” is actually not the feeling of gratitude. That’s just the bonus. The real win is noticing what you are feeling and experiencing, and using that knowledge to respond to your pain and needs with understanding and compassion.
Developing this conscious relationship with yourself is the best thing you can do for yourself. Best of all, it doesn’t require gratitude. It yields gratitude. The only thing you need is the honest intention to pay attention — so that every minute can be one in which you learn something about who you are and how you interact with the world around you.
Keeping it honest:
Describe the situation instead of forcing it. DON’T make yourself say, “Oh, I am soooo grateful to the universe for the glory of the present moment!”.
Pay attention because maybe what you really mean is this:
“I am noticing that it’s hard for me right now to feel grateful. I am noticing that I’m feeling hurt because I need my pain and frustration to be acknowledged. I am noticing that I would like to be able to take some more time to work through these feelings before I can access that place of gratitude.”
The funny thing is, when you allow yourself be in this honest place of “not grateful yet” you’re creating an conscious relationship with yourself, a relationship which is going to automatically open up a lot of room for appreciation of yourself and the world around you.
Keeping it kind:
If you notice that you’re beating on yourself again and your response is “Cut that out! No more negative talk and I mean it!”, you’re doing it again.
Berating yourself is not the goal. The goal is to ask, “What is the kindest thing I can bear to hear right now?”.
Instead of tough love, give yourself the kind of love that actually feels good to receive. If you can’t be kind, try acknowledging that and just letting yourself be where you are for now.
Play one of my favorite “Un-Gratitude Games”
Not to be confused with ingratitude games (we’re not total ingrates, we’re just not feeling grateful yet), it’s fun for the whole family, as they say, — or something you can play on your own or with a partner.
Here are some basic guidelines: you don’t have to be grateful for anything, you’re allowed to roll your eyes whenever you feel like it and you can adapt the rules and words to fit your mood and/or personality
The “77 things that don’t absolutely suck” Game
Here’s what you need: two small cups and 77 lentils. If that feels like too many, choose your age (or your grandkid’s age if that wasn’t helpful).
Fill one cup with the lentils. When it’s your turn (and if you play by yourself it’s ALWAYS your turn), you pick up one lentil from the first cup and you say, “The first thing that doesn’t absolutely suck about my life is _____________”. And then you fill in the blank.
It can be anything.
Maybe the fact that you don’t have fur growing on your elbows. Hooray for small miracles. Or that you don’t have a pet elephant who throws up on the floor.
That your eyes work. That you’re still breathing.
The second thing that doesn’t absolutely suck follows the first thing, and you keep going until you reach 77 or whatever number you decided on.
You’ll probably be surprised (I always am) at how many things you think of as well as how coming up with a bunch of them kind of evens out your internal gratitude mechanism.
Then you play this straight through to dreydel season. Or not. You’ll see how it goes.
Reality only occasionally bites
Exactly just how nutty would you have to be to try and define reality in a few paragraphs of a newsletter? Would the most full-blown smart-aleck know-it-all alive dare to even attempt it? Ordinarily I’d label it a futile endeavor — doomed by necessity to oversimplification. At best, you’d get only a small piece of truth; at worst a cheesy, embarrassing and/or possibly dangerous cliche.
However, I’ve realized that one of the things my coaching clients want from me most when they are freaking out (aside from Emergency Calming Techniques) is a reality check.
A reality check is a moment in which you stop analyzing, criticizing and nitpicking the problem situation to death. Instead, you let someone (okay, that would be me) point out the distinction between WEAR and TEAR.
WEAR = What Everyone Agrees is Reality
TEAR = The Ego’s Arbitrary Reality
But wait: we need an example!
Boy meets girl (you don’t get much more of a classic example than that)
Okay. Here is what happens:
Boy meets girl.
Boy and girl share long, involved, personal conversation.
Boy asks for girl’s phone number.
Boy says, “I’ll call you.”
Girl sits by phone and waits. And waits. And waits.
What is the reality of this situation? That the girl did not receive a phone call. That’s the WEAR. What Everyone Agrees is Reality.
(Of course, when I say “everyone agrees”, I’m assuming that we can skip over the urge to get completely lost in deep existential, metaphysical hemming and hawing. “Everyone” means “everyone who doesn’t happen to be a first-year philosophy student”.)
What you’re trying to do here is to zero in on the least subjective part of the equation. You want to avoid any temptation to explain why things are a certain way, and instead focus on what you can observe. As long as we are agreeing that the boy and girl do in fact exist, we can say that the girl waited and has not yet received a call.
However, when it comes to the TEAR — The Ego’s Arbitrary Reality — things are a little different. This is the individual, highly personal, clouded vision of reality, based on a lifetime of experiences and assumptions. The girl’s personal reality might be something like:
— “It’s because I’m so fat. Of course he didn’t call.”
— “I screwed it up by letting myself get my hopes up. That was clearly a mistake.”
— “All boys are nasty, mean, lying jerks.”
The wallet-eating wild boars of Borneo: it could happen
Reality-reality could be any number of things. Maybe the boy was attacked by wild wallet-eating boars who devoured her phone number. Maybe he had fears of rejection and talked himself out of it. Maybe she’s right and he is a jerk. Maybe maybe maybe.
There are so many possibilities in any given situation. So many factors. Reality is a funny thing. You can only see or hear tiny parts of it from which you vainly attempt to get a sense of an enormous whole. And on top of that, in any given moment you are interacting not only with the information you’re receiving, but with all of your STUFF. Your issues, your history and your patterns are coming to the surface and informing your grasp of this current reality.
And here’s the danger: It’s so easy to jump to a conclusion without even noticing the jump. The evidence that things are the way you think they are is damning. The thing that’s happening in your life “again” is matching up with your patterns and your cumulative experience of the world. The thing is, even though you think there just aren’t any more options, there might be at least a couple you haven’t thought of yet.
It’s just kinda hard to remember that.
Some useful questions
You are under no obligation to Figure Out Reality. That’s not the point. The idea is that you always want to keep your stuff in mind. Remind yourself that your reality in any given moment is being colored by what was already present in your history — your stuff.
That is exactly where the learning takes place: meeting yourself where you are — with your stuff — so you can tweak the pattern. Playing with the pattern alters the results. Crazy, but true. And the best way to shake up a pattern is to start asking useful questions.
- What can I learn about myself from this moment/situation/feeling?
- What can I learn in this moment about how I interact with myself and the world around me?
- Is it possible that I’ve made an assumption about reality without considering that this is only one of many possible things that could have happened?
- Is it possible for me to separate from “my” reality long enough to recognize that it is reflecting a pattern that I can learn from?
- What can I do right now to acknowledge my STUFF so that I can get better at letting it go?
Exercise
Take a situation that’s challenging you right now in your work, your business or a relationship, and write it out as if you’re telling a story. Then see if you can let an omniscient, compassionate narrator step in and do some editing. Have your compassionate narrator help you practice separating your reality from the bigger picture, turning the TEAR into WEAR.
For example, you might want to play with the sentence, “My boss is ignoring my ideas as usual”.
Can you know this to be absolutely true? Would everyone in the world agree that this is the only possible version of reality? Or is there some pain from past experiences hiding out there that would like some love and attention? Once you rewrite the sentence to reflect a more general depiction of reality in this very moment, it will get easier to recognize who needs a hug (probably you).
In this example, one way to reword the pain-sentence could be, “Even though I have no way of knowing if my boss has even read my last email yet, I am feeling hurt and frustrated because I need to have my input acknowledged.”
Aha! There’s the need. There’s the hurt. There’s the “stuff”. Now meet yourself where you are. Recognize your need. Let yourself be a real live human being with needs and hurt and “stuff”. You might notice that some of that pain will dissolve almost as soon as it gets some attention. You might notice that the story begins to change when it’s written by someone capable of recognizing alternate endings. You might find that it becomes easier to communicate your need for acknowledgment in words and actions so that other people actually pick up on it.
Hey, look! We’re back to my favorite theme of infinite possibility, which is of course what any decent reality should offer. And there you have it: a small piece of truth. And some food for thought.
P.S. Thanks so much for reading. I consider myself very lucky to have so many bright and capable people interacting with my thoughts and ideas. Plus you let me make up acronyms. Yay!