When I decided to do the Virtual Retreat: Finding Calm, Confidence and Contentment No Matter What, I knew I wanted it to happen soon for two reasons:

Because so many of us are in need of help dealing with uncertainty, fear, worry, even terror like:

• Yesterday a friend announces, “Either we’re moving across the country or he loses his job. We find out this week.”

• An Israeli woman comments on this blog yesterday about feeling guilty for seeking inner calm when Hamas are using children for human shields less than 10 miles away.

• A client waits for a diagnosis.

• My boyfriend wonders if his job of ten years for a global non-profit is disappearing—and with it, his irreplaceable environmental work.

And

Because we humans, we don’t always love change.

You may hate it, at least some aspects of it. You may want to scream, “Give me my comfort zone back!” (And some good chocolate and a blanket to hide under while you’re at it, thank you very much.)

But you also know that–and this one may wake you up at 3 am–that never before in the history of humanity have we needed to work together to save ourselves–and our children, and our common futures, like we do now.

You want, you may need, to be part of the goodness and possibility sweeping our world. Even in the midst of such turmoil, war, and suffering. It’s here.

No matter your politics, you want to be part of the hope that is building.

We can feel it, hope and purpose and decency returning, wanting us to work with its tide of wholeness, to let it carry us and to help carry it.

Michele Obama knows we want to be part of the change — how brilliant is it that the day before the Inauguration she’s asking us to be of service? See her invite here.

And often, we must prepare ourselves to be the change we wish to see.

We don’t stop doing service (wouldn’t it be cool if you offered a gift of service to someone and made doing that part of your Virtual Retreat!?!) or reaching out to others; we do this at the same time we till our souls, we listen to the fears that may be stopping us, we give ourselves gentle attention and rest, we attend to our deepest needs.

At the same time.

I adore this comment left a few days ago in response to my post How to Take Action when Fear is Paralyzing You by writer Joely Black because it speaks to how important tilling the soil is so we can get out of our way.

For the last two years or so, I’ve been completely stuck by a fear I can’t even feel. I know I’ve got blocks and limiting beliefs, so for two years, I just worked on the limiting beliefs I had around getting an agent and being a published author.

No matter what technique I used, the beliefs always came back. It was the fear underneath that kept re-instating them, so I wouldn’t actually look at the fear itself. That’s how scared I was – and still am.

This Christmas I went into a bookstore to get Yet Another Book On Dealing With Issues and stopped myself. “But I’m OK,” is what I kept thinking.

Since then, I’ve noticed the beliefs dropping away, and at last I can actually feel and deal with the fear I’ve been hiding from. I’ve started doing the work with somebody’s help to really get Amnar out there. It’s amazing how we get blocked in ways we can’t even see.

Let us join together to bring down the obstacles to wholeness and justice, outside and inside.

Let  us be of service in ways that show each we are not alone, never have been, never will be.

Let us gather our beauty together and shine it out into the world, shot through with courage and pockmarked with imperfection.

Let’s us.

So whether you intend to join us at the Virtual Retreat, what will you do, externally and internally, to prepare the way for change? To be the change you want to see? (and if you need to start under the covers, that is so perfectly fine – I may meet you there!)

Last Sunday I bought an I-Phone

It was a VERY big deal for me because I had been talking about it forever and also waffling on if the monthly fee would be too much and wondering if I was too much of a Luddite to master the thing.

Buying an I-Phone is a very good thing

The GPS direction app alone  (I feel geeky cool writing “app” instead of “application” or “thing-a-ma-jig”) has already saved me two melt-downs due to being lost. And I have an I-pod again which means I can listen to Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me in my car– which I did driving back and forth to the U.S. Canadian border on Sunday. I helped out with Global Mala at the Border – which was so sweetly glorious. Eion and Melissa lead the 108 Sun Salutations, then Michal did a fantastic yoga nidra and then Steve Goldman lead us in one of my all time favorites chants, So Much Magnificence. I couldn’t practice because my back is still tweaked but I chanted 108 Gayatri mantras and meditated while everybody else did their prayerful sweating. This was also very sweetly glorious.

What does any of this have to do with your address book?

I’ve kept a digital one since 1999. And due to the wonder of modern Apple technology, that digital address book is now on my I-Phone and (here comes the whole point) the names are displayed in a big long list instead of as individual entries.

A big long list of people.

People I’ve had crushes on, people I met on long wilderness treks, people who I lived next door and watched her light come on 4 am so she could study before her kids woke up, people who I watched Thirty Something and LA Law every Thursday night, people who taught me how to write, people  who held me when I cried, people I met with in a women’s group every week for six years, people I worked with at my first job in LA at Creative Artist Agency, people who were my therapists and massaged my aching body and cut my hair and listened to how much I wanted to be someone else, people who I went to fourth grade with and was best friends with until she met her husband in 6th grade who she is still married to, people who I’ve lead workshops with, people who I smoked pot and drank beer with.  People I’ve been married to (okay, the latter is just one person).  People I’m jealous of. People who I don’t even remember.

People I would die for.

People who are dead.

I studied that list with big eyes, flabbergasted at these fragments of my personal history. I felt such tenderness for the woman who had lived this life, who is living this life. In the past, I might have beaten myself up for losing touch with some of these souls and beaten myself for knowing some of them in the first place. I  might have wished I had more names, more friends, more connections.

But not now. Now I was, and am, tenderized by love.

And then she pruned

The very practical OCD can’t-stand-clutter part of me just HAD to prune that list, first deleting the people who I couldn’t remember, then the people I had lost touch with and wouldn’t speak to again, then the people who wouldn’t remember me. Oh, and maybe a few people I never really liked but just pretended to.

But when it came to the names of those people who have, as my mom says, gone on, I could not delete those names.  I love seeing their names. They are little nudges to remember. Eric. Edna. Louise. Frank. Yvonne and Jack. Dad.

I love you.

When’s the last time you cleaned out your address book?

Not as a chore but as a celebration of the ever amazing web of your connections and vastly sublime history?

I get a lot of strokes for being so honest in my writing and my retreats. It’s healing to see I don’t have it all together. I feel the same way – it makes me feel less alone when someone I admire for their writing or ideas or artwork reveals their own messy process. But sometimes, being honest crosses over into leading with my hips.

I digress to explain.

Melissa, who attended the Writer’s Spa (next year’s will be entitled The Luscious, Nurturing Get Your Writing Done while Laughing Your Butt Off and Maybe Crying a little Too Writer’s Retreat; registration will open soon) and who is also in my writing coaching group, just published a funny and very well written essay at Divine Caroline. It’s about how she handles a day that’s getting out of hand and that’s threatening to drag her self-worth with it with help from a colleague who told her:

“‘Don’t lead with your hips today…’  She went on to explain that one of her friends seemed to have this amazing life—everything we think of—a supportive husband, great kids, fulfilling career, but seemingly big hips. (She really didn’t!) She complained about them all the time. She would weave her hips into every conversation, making sure everyone knew how unhappy she was with them—so whenever people think of this woman, they don’t think of all the great things about her and her life, but about these made up big hips she brought up in every conversation. So, Lynn, in all her wisdom, said, don’t let your hips lead the session today. ‘Don’t focus on all that has gone wrong because if you do, more WILL go wrong.’”

Melissa’s writing helped me see that the way I lead with my hips is to confuse being honest/being myself with calling attention to my mistakes and foibles. Why in the world would I do this? Why does anybody? Nervousness, disbelief I just did X (as in “Did you see that?”), and this weird tick I have of getting in my own way. It’s almost as if I afraid to be really good at something. Almost as if I’m afraid of my own power. As if by deprecating myself, I can stay connected to others. Hmmm… That feels very close to home.

How to be powerful and rooted in my own flesh, “Here I am” and to be nurturing and open hearted and connected? Why would I think these states can’t intimately co-exist?

Where, when, how do you lead with your hips? Or how did you learn not to?

I believe we can get to a place where we can let go of anger, fear and other negative emotions, where we are more like the Tibetan monk Matthieu Ricard writes about in Happiness then say, OJ. Simpson. The monk spent twenty-five years in Chinese labor camps where he was brought to the brink of death many times. Now free, he visited the Dalai Lama who was deeply moved by his serenity. He asked if the monk had ever been afraid during his long imprisonment and the monk answered, “I was often afraid of hating my torturer, for in doing so I would have destroyed myself.”

Gulp.

When I think about where I am far too often and where that monk is, I feel pretty friggin humble. What I do is whine too much. “Why is this happening to me?” flits through my mind far too often. I think it’s only me who has gas before her first improv class, a mouse who apparently climbed inside her fridge motor and did not live to tell the tale (oh the puns are coming now) and who wonders five times an hour what she’s doing with her life. This trait of mine is getting some love and relief by using this phrase from Radiant Mind by Peter Fenner: “I suffer, yes, but this doesn’t mean that anything is fundamentally wrong.”

When we think we are the only ones or that we are being picked on or why me, oh my gosh, we make it so much worse.

I’ll fart my way through improv tonight and maybe make a joke out of it.

More self-love resources I love:

This post from Havi from which I’m going to devise an exercise for my upcoming class in

Portland that is going to be really freeing and moving and useful, too.

For self-employed gals and guys I love Molly’s work.

And David’s is for everybody everywhere forever.

My sweetheart Bob who is so good at smiling at me when I rant and saying nothing.
Smart man.

by Simon Pais-Thomas'

I read the most beautiful poem in LIFE IS A VERB by Patti Digh last night. I love this book – Patti has taken what could be a hackneyed subject–how would you live if you had 37 days left? – and made it sing through her deep heart and generously wonderful writing. The poem that moved me so is at the beginning of the first chapter and my favorite lines are:

“Being lost only has meaning

When contrasted with

Knowing where you are

A presumption that slipped out of my life

As quietly as smoke up a chimney

For now I live in a less anchored place

Where being lost is irrelevant”

I found the poem strangely comforting as if being lost was not such a bad thing once you got used to it and what is lost and what is found anyway? Then Patti reveals that the poem was written by a man in the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease. Hmmm… still, I felt comforted. So many people tell me they feel lost and bewildered; does that make bewildered the new black and does it look good on everybody? I mean, if so many of us are feeling lost, at least in some parts of our lives, could it mean we are looking for a new found, a new territory that we can’t even imagine but we certainly can’t find the way we found our way the last time?

I’m getting lost writing this post.

Which leads me to all that I know today for sure about being lost and found which is: we have to accept being lost before we even think about being found and we have to accept that being found may never feel or look the way it did before we got lost this time. We have to let go of the story that being found or “knowing what we are doing” is better than where we are right now.

What does lost and found mean to you these days?