In my youth, I tried to control the chaos that I engaged.  At first this was like pushing the tides and I got smashed against the shoreline on a regular basis.  Then I tried to surf the chaotic tides only to discover that this is a recipe for excitement with the occasional wipeout.  It was very dramatic and more than a little scary.

I prefer these days to bob up and down in the waves and let the currents take me where they will.  And, when the time is right and the waves just so, I scoop myself out of the chaos, taking a bit of that primordial ooze with me to form into my next adventure.  Just a small piece, mind you, for to take more is to invite disaster.  But a small amount is enough to move shorelines. And that is sufficient if you go diving often enough.

In my thirties, I came to understand that there are some things that cannot be fixed, cannot be undone, cannot be ameliorated.  I began to accept that some things just were and that grieving was the process of coming to terms with and accepting that fact.  When I understood this, then I began to understand that there was nothing I could do to help the person who was grieving except to provide them with whatever they needed to get to this place of acceptance.  I realized that it wasn’t about me – it was about them.  And sometimes there was nothing to be done except to be present and to witness the pain.

Now, at the opening of my forties, I am experiencing real grief for the first time in my life.  I thought I had felt it in my divorce, but with it being my choice to leave the relationship, I didn’t get the full force of it.  Now, upon the sudden death of my mother, I begin to grok the fullest extent of the feeling.  And what I realize is this: no one can help me.  This is a road that I walk alone.  I must walk through the pain and the loss on my own – no one can walk the road for me.  As much as others can be there to provide support and love and some small measure of comfort, there is no one who can truly lessen the load.  But the witnessing and the touches and the statements of support provide pinpoints of light along the path.  It’s amazing how much a simple comment from someone that says that, even a month after my mother has passed, they are still thinking of me and sending me love helps.

Because experiencing the death of a loved one isn’t an event – it’s a voyage.  It’s a journey through pain, wistfulness, nostalgia, need, neediness, desolation, depression, anger, betrayal, sweetness, joy, poignancy, life, rebirth, questioning, reevaluation, hopelessness, confusion, tears, determination, edurance and more.  The full spectrum of life’s emotions ebb and flow through my experience.  I am more aware of my life and the need to make more of it.  I am keenly conscious of my own mortality and questioning of my choices of what I do with my time between now and then. This grieving is as much a blessing as a curse and I am grateful to have the human and monetary resources to explore it fully.

And so I offer a thought to those who are as I was – fearful and feeling completely inadequate to the task of supporting those in grief.  Here is what you can do:  be present.  The gift of your awareness of my pain is sufficient.  It is enough.  Do not ask for a response because it is likely that you will not get one.  I cannot take care of you and of myself at the same time.  But your comments are heard and felt and apprecitated.  They matter – even if I don’t say so.  Put me on your calendar to reach out to or drop me a note on my Facebook or in email to say you’ve been thinking about me.  Offer help even though there is nothing you can think of to do.  The offer alone is enough to make me feel seen and heard in my pain (or joy or loneliness or wherever I am today).  I may take you up on it – I may not.  But you are helping.

I spent much of my early life being the warrior – defending myself and others from would-be abusers.  Whether it was the person who cut in line or the person who was threatening a friend with physical harm, I was there.  Defending those who could not defend themselves.

I didn’t know as a child, that the warrior path was so much more than this.  As I developed my sense of self and my personal beliefs, I stepped onto a different part of the warrior’s path.  It was the spiritual warrior.  The person who delves deeply into themselves to see clearly and unvarnished the truth of who they are.  This is a painful and often shaming experience.  It is not pleasant.  There is no one who has walked this path who will tell you that it is.  You cannot hide from yourself on this path.  That is a guarantee of self-destruction.  You have to go headlong into your crap.  You have to own your actions, deal with your upset, and decide to become responsible for your life.  It’s a difficult decision to make and you are often challenged to walk away from it.  But if you stay on the path, it can be more rewarding than anyone can ever explain to you before you step on it.

The thing that no one ever told me though was that the path could also be pleasurable.  I’ve been walking this path hard-core for a little over 10 years now.  And I’ve seen some really ugly things about myself.  I’ve faced some harsh realities about who I am vs. who I wanted to see myself as.  And I’ve made a lot of changes along the way as a result.  I told people that you couldn’t walk this path unless you were a spiritual masochist like I am.  And in the beginning, that is true.

But what I have discovered, 10 years and a lot of hard work into the process, is that there is an upside that is better than becoming a better person or being more balanced and peaceful.  And that is this:  I have learned to receive love.  I have learned to receive it from others and from myself.  I couldn’t allow myself this gift until I had done my penance by doing all the hard work first.  But when I broke through that barrier, I found that all the love I had ever been given in my life, all of the love I had never been able to receive, was sitting there waiting for me to pick it up.  I received love from people I hadn’t seen in years, it was still hanging out in my energy field, patiently waiting for the door to open so it could flood in. It was so overwhelming, my heart physically hurt for months.  It ached with the fullness of it all.

Now I am working on the next level in my development.  I’m working on letting go f the victim.  Living in my victim in various fashions has allowed me to continue the cycle of masochism and I’m OK with letting that go now.  I don’t have to struggle so hard.  I don’t have to feel put upon or put down or unimportant. I am important – in my own life and in the lives of others.  I matter.  There’s nothing wrong with me.  I have all the skills, resources and friends I need to get anything I want in life.  I can take my victim off-duty – she’s taught me what I needed to know.  And for that I am grateful.

There is nothing more condescending or irritating to me than having someone (usually a man) ask me “so you’re turning 29 again huh?”  No.  I am not.  I’m 40.  And I’m happy to be 40.  Just as my boyfriend is happy to be 40 and every person I have been to their party recently has been happy to be 44 or 42 or whatever age they are.  It is only the other attendees who bring it up, inherently apologizing for the other person getting older.

There is no shame in aging.  I would not go back to 29.  There are too many things I know now that I didn’t know then.  I’m a better person today than I was back then.  I am happier today than I was then.  I am fabulous just as I am and so are all my friends.

So I invite you to reconsider the next time you try to play down someone’s age.  Denying their years also denies a part of them.  Tell me that I look fabulous (because you know I do), tell me that I’m amazing and how did I get so amazing in such a short time, but don’t tell me that I’m still only 29. I’ve earned these grey hairs and wrinkles and I (and many of my friends who I discussed this with) don’t appreciate you refusing to see them.

I’m old and I’m proud.  And I’m dating (by his own declaration) a lecherous old man.  Ain’t life grand!

There’s an old sales saying that you can’t be a good salesperson unless you have the “fire in the belly” to motivate you to get out there and sell.  To me, passion is like that – but it’s a fire in the heart.  It’s a motivating force that drives you forward because you’re in love with the idea of what could be.  It has the intensity of anger, but it isn’t the same thing as anger.

Passion lives in the heart, whereas anger lives in the belly (with the sales motivation not the same thing there either, but the belly holds the energy of the will and therefore both of those items live there).  The heart holds the energy of love and connection.

Passion is another form of love – it’s the masculine side of love.  The feminine side is the feeling of loving another person and receiving love in return.  It’s a soft, receptive, open sort of energy.  Passion is the energy of being so in love with something that you grab it and drag it back by the hair.  You simply MUST have it and are willing to brave whatever it takes in order to get it.  That’s the masculine side of the same energy as love.  Passion untempered by feminine love becomes obsession (and stalking in the case of interpersonal passion).

If you haven’t clicked over to Steven’s blog yet, you should.  He’s got great stuff there.  I know I’ll be using it to inspire my writings in the future too.

What if your clothes held a certain type of energy? What if you got to put that energy on in the morning and wear it all day? What if your clothes could support your intentions for the day, the week, or even your life in general? It would be like putting on a layer of support that would go with you all day.

What if, instead of choosing a color, you chose an emotion to wear? This way, every time you noticed your clothes during the day, you could be reminded about the emotion you’re wearing and let it in. What would it be like if you could wrap yourself in love or acceptance or forgiveness or energy or excitement or sex appeal every day? How would it impact the way you live your life?

Our clothes are more than body coverings, they are a reflection of our insides. What if we turned that reflection around and made the outside reflect into the inside?

Interesting thought isn’t it?

Control
Most of us start off in the masculine control arena.  We want to control how things go and force the universe to bend to our will.  We want to be able to control each aspect of the work that we do, the way others behave/react, and the results that are achieved.

Surrender
Eventually, we try to control so completely that we have some form of catastrophic meltdown that occurs.  This forces us into the feminine end of the spectrum – surrender.  We let go and find that things work out so much better than expected that we are tempted to just stop trying to DO anything and instead we wait for the universe to give us signs about where to go next.

Balance
The problem with that approach is that the universe doesn’t really have plans for us.  It has its own flow and we can get caught up in that for a while, but eventually, if we hope to arrive somewhere that we want to be, we need to decide on what we want.  The challenge at this point becomes being able to step back into a self-directed life without stepping back into controlling.   This is a major challenge.  Even more of one than we realize because it has an undercurrent of victimization that we often don’t see and therefore fail to address.

The Victim in Controlling Behavior and Unconscious Surrender
Think about it for a minute.  If you are trying to control the outcome of something, it’s because you are certain that any other outcome would be detrimental to you – i.e. it would victimize you to get anything other than exactly what you planned.  The other side of the coin is to surrender to everything and become a victim of the currents of life that buffet you around.  Where is the middle ground?

Defining The Victim
It’s actually not on the same spectrum at all.  You see in order to find the balance between a self-directed life and being in the flow, you have to get out of the victim mentality.  But most people have no idea how to accomplish this task.  The problem is that victimhood is insidious.  It invades and pervades many aspects of life without your event realizing it. Ultimately though, victim has two primary pieces that have to be unhooked before real progress can be made.

Victim – The Masculine Form
The masculine form of the victim is in the controlling and the seeking power over.  As in all things masculine, to transcend this issue, you have to let go of it.  You must release the desire for power and abandon all hope of being in control.

Victim – The Feminine Form
The other side of the coin is the feminine.  As with all things feminine, the key to salvation is to accept.  Accept that sometimes things don’t go your way.  Accept that pain and sorrow are a part of a full and healthy life.  Accept that bad things sometimes happen to good people for no reason at all.

When you can step into both of these places simultaneously, then you have the chance of stepping out of victim enough to make a real difference in your life.

Pressure Creates Diamonds
It can seem like the pressure is too much, but this is not true.  We are never given more than we can handle.  It may take some time or the support of friends or family, but ultimately we can weather any storm.  It is in these moments of pressure and pain, of fear and fret when we get the chance to best learn about ourselves.  It is during these times when we have the opportunity to pace being who it is that we are choosing to be.

Look Fear in the Face
I discovered something about fear today.  Fear is a funny thing.  If you don’t want to look at it, then it runs your life by making you run away from it.  You can find yourself frantically seeking for distraction or for solutions.  At least this is what you think you’re seeking.  What’s actually happening is that you’re desperately seeking a path away from your fear.  On the other hand, if you dive directly into your fear, it can overwhelm your senses, making you anxious and panicked.  It can cause shortness of breath and shut down all ability to think as the fear seeps into your bones and paralyzes you.  And so we can sometimes feel that there is no solution to fear.  But there is a third path.

Beating Fear
There is the path of stepping into the fear without engaging in it.  How do you do this?  It’s about stepping into the energy you’ve been running away from without engaging the thoughts that the fear is creating.  The thoughts are what can trap you in a cycle of panic, but the energy is what keeps you running desperately grasping at straws so that you can stop feeling the need to run.  It is in acknowledging and stepping into the need to run that we gain control of our fears.  We can face that urgency to flee that is instinctive in our bodies and be able to allow our bodies to acknowledge that there is no physical danger from which we must run.  When we can step out of that place of fight-or-flight panic, we can begin to step into a place of rational response.

Become More Conscious
It is also during this time that we can learn about ourselves and how we process situations.  When we are under stress, when the world is not working according to our plan, we are forced into situations that bring out aspects of ourselves we didn’t know existed.  We get the chance to explore our shadow selves.  We see what the dark sides of our own psyches have to tell us.  It shows us our blind spots and highlights the buttons that still need to be removed.  So pay attention to your thoughts and actions more closely than ever when the stress levels get turned up.  It’s incredible what you can learn.

Don’t Give Up – Keep Moving
But most importantly, don’t stop moving forward.  It’s easy to get depressed and think that it’s safer to stay in bed than it is to go out in the world, but if it is meant to be, the universe will send you a tornado to rip you out of bed anyway.  Safety is a myth.  So don’t let your life be ruled by the pursuit of it.  In the words of Helen Keller “life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”  So instead of lamenting your woes, see the opportunity in them.  Instead of worrying about what you’ve lost go looking for what is coming in to fill the space that was left behind by that loss.  Instead of looking behind you to see what’s coming next to kick you in the pants, look ahead of you to decide what you choose to bring into your life to make it soar.  Life happens.  What will you do with the surprises you’re offered?

What If We’re In Physical Space to Learn How Creation Works?
If you are an all-powerful being whose every thought is made manifest immediately, wouldn’t you need to place some limitations on your abilities in order to see how they really play out – to slow them down so that you can understand the component parts that go into making up the whole?  If you truly wanted to understand your ultimate creative ability, what better place to do that than in physical space where, by definition, there is distance between thought and form?

Limited Remembering
But if you were to step into physical form, you would also need to forget – forget that you are all powerful.  Because stepping into physical form doesn’t mean stepping out of being part of God.  This has been proven over and over again by Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Muhammed and countless other spiritual teachers.  They have shown that when we remember who we are in this physical form that we are just as powerfully creative as we have ever been.  So it is in the forgetting that we have the experiement.  It is in the forgetting that we can see the process.

Unconscious vs. Conscious Thought
And what has the human race learned over the millenia?  Well, we’ve learned that without conscious intention, that the unconscious and subconscious beliefs that we hold will rule us.  They will be made manifest in fashions that reinforce the original beliefs because those beliefs created them.  We have learned that when we buy into the limited thinking of the physical world, we get limited results.

The Law of Attraction
I believe that we are entering a new phase of the experiment – the conscious phase.  As more and more people are learning about the Law of Attraction through media like The Secret, we are bringing ourselves more into awareness, waking up a little as a people.  We are still ruled by our beliefs and assumptions.  We are still manifesting that which we most fear because we haven’t yet learned to stop fearing that which cannot truly hurt us.  But we are learning, just a little, to create more consciously.  We are remembering the power of our intentions.  We are getting an inkling of what we are capable of.

Choice Is Upon Us
And so, because of this fact, a choice is upon us.  What do we want to create our world to be?  Do we want commerce to be the center of our collective church as it is today?  Or perhaps, we want to choose differently.  I invite you today to think about what you would design the world to be.  Really think about it.  Below is the pyramid for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  How will each of these needs be fulfilled in your vision?  Really step out of the box.  I’ll start you on the path.  Assume that money doesn’t exist.  Assume that there is no class system – that no one is better than anyone else.  Assume that our leaders are stewards of the good of the people rather than holders of power.  Then assume something else entirely.  This is your creation – I’m only whetting your whistle for the process. What will you choose for your reality?

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Why do I tell you this?  Because I just realized today that I’ve been thinking about ways to fill the rest of my time.  I’ve been feeling like what I’m doing isn’t enough.  Not because what we’re planning isn’t good enough because it certainly is – it’s awesome in fact.  But because I won’t be filling all of my time.  Odd that I should say that when one of my goals has been to have lots of free time to spend with people I enjoy.  But I realized that this is exactly what I’ve been fretting about.

And so I resolve now to accept that what I am planning is enough.  I don’t have to do anything else if I don’t want to.  Everything else after that is gravy – something I do for fun.  And I’m cool with that.  Because I know that no matter what:  I do enough, I have enough and I am enough.

I wanted to share this with you in case anyone else out there was stressing out because you felt that you weren’t doing enough.  It’s been a rough year.  There’s been a ton of emotional upheaval, financial upheaval, and personal upheaval going around.  No one I know has gone untouched by it.  So give yourself a break.  And when you feel like you’re not meeting your mark, swing by a mirror and look yourself in the eye and say “You Do Enough, You Have Enough, You Are Enough”.  I promise it will make you feel better.