Choose Your Life Monday is an invitation to name what pattern you will lovingly notice this week and to do so in community. Of course, you can do it any day you want- you don’t have to start on Monday. Join in when and whenever suits you.

You know how, just when you are getting truly utterly sick of a pattern, something shifts?

A tiny window of grace opens and you feel some peace?

Maybe even a new way of being.

You get a little relief from your own stuff, your relentlessly present shit?

Well, that didn’t happen to me this week

Nope.

Instead, I moved deeper into my signature preoccupation of snarldom and impatience. My pattern of making things harder than they need to be.

But you know what? It actually felt good.

Not good as in a hot rock massage, not good as in a date with my sweetheart for sushi and kirtan, not good as in snuggling with my daughter and the doddle dogs.

More like good when you start to get back into shape after being ill and you feel the first bit of strength returning even though most of you still feels like rubber that’s been left out to rot.

I actually welcomed this week’s intensity.

Mostly.

What I Did

I said hi to the restless feeling.

I  noticed the relationship between my impatience and making things more difficult as it happened without trying to change it. As in,

Oh, I see that hurrying and restlessness and my hunger to create are entwined with making things more difficult. And my whole body is really tense. I’m telling myself I can’t even stop to adjust my back or get a glass of water. I’m telling myself I have to do everything right now. Hmmm…”

I honored my intention for the month – it is Systems (creating more in my work and home one step at a time) by noticing how the voice of faster wants me to forget about systems (“That takes too long!”). I said hi to that voice and I also stopped and created systems like creating a file for the posts I make on the forums at the Comfort Cafe so I can find something I wrote later.

I did lots of witnessing of myself, abiding in the part of me that never changes.

I did lots of watching where the hurry up shows up in my body. In my jaw, my face, my upper back, my butt.

I even noticed how I could make doing all of this hard.

And I tuned into desire.

Tuning into Desire

I’ve written about desire, talked about it most recently on the Virtual Retreat, and it’s going to be one of our upcoming themes at the Comfort Cafe. It’s one of my life themes, one of those ideas I never feel I completely understand (like comfort) or grow tired of and that’s because…

It’s the perfect antidote to my impatient make-it-difficult self

What do I mean by desire? Wild sex? Law of Attraction? Tight abs?

Um, no.

Except maybe the wild sex part.

Here’s how I defined desire in the Life Organizer:

Desire is the flow of life we yearn to swim in, the urge to be one with Spirit, and the way to stay in touch with this flow is through knowing what we want without insisting that we get it. It is staying with the feeling of desire, following it with curiosity, that leads us ever closer to what we most want. All desire, at its heart, is about a longing to be one with All That Is, to be known by and to know you are divine. Even the most mundane desires or worse, ones that have calcified into unhealthy obsessions, have at their root this desire to be known and loved.

To desire a gorgeous garden, a soul mate, deep inner peace, the ability to play Chopin, for your loved ones to live a long, happy life is to feel life rising in you like sap, exhilarating, rushing, impossibly sweet, and unstoppable. The calcifying of the desire into a must-have, an accomplishment – whether it be a custom-built house or a safari or a sculpture you made that brings others to tears – is very different and is the reason desire has gotten a bad rap. That kind of desire becomes fuel for greed and grasping. But when desire and the light of awareness meet, we can experience desire as energy, fuel, and Spirit speaking to us, and then it plays a very different role.

Yes, it can be scary as all-get-out to feel desire, because:

• It’s life working through you – it’s so much bigger than you and thus a clear reminder that you aren’t in control (say it’s not so!)
• It can be a huge turn-on – now what I am supposed to do with this energy?
• But I’ll be disappointed because I won’t get what I want (which is never the point but the mind wants to get what it wants)
• You feel more of everything – more joy, more sorrow, more energy and that’s a lot!

And I was reminded this week, as my making-a-snarl tendencies and my impatience jerked me to and fro, that letting myself want what I want is a very, very lovely way out.

Out into life

Each time I even remember the idea that wanting what I really want is okay, I step a teeny bit away from impatience and making things overly difficult, and toward being in the flow of life.

An Example of What I Mean

Yesterday afternoon, I sat in my living room and decided not to move until a real honest desire arose in me.

I sat in my orange leather chair with the doodle dogs on the back of the sofa and hail falling outside and I kept relaxing and asking myself,

What do I really want?”

and letting it be okay that I didn’t know because my impatience was so freaked out about not doing anything.

The eventual answer was a compromise between my doer, who got to walk the dogs, and my desire, which read a novel on the couch and then napped.

Compromise is delicious!

This Week

I’m sticking with it, gals and guys, I’m sticking with this long deep twisty-turny thread of watching my impatience, saying hi to it, watching myself making a simple post like this one into a big long ding-dang-do, and loving that part of myself, and asking myself, “What do I really want to do?” even when I have no idea.

Or to put it more simply:

This week I will lovingly notice when I make snarls, when I rush, when I’m restless and open my heart to those feelings, those parts of me

This week I will ask myself what do I really want? when I feel this snarling, rushing, restlessness

Not all the time because I will forget and I also don’t want to get into a battle with these parts of myself

Love it!

Jen Pat’s Herself on the Back

Declaring a monthly intention as part of the community at the Comfort Cafe, writing my weekly responses to the Life Organizer questions and sharing them there, then printing them out and looking at them (or not) a couple of times a week, and writing all about it here each week – I am very, very proud of myself for doing this.

I am also very proud of the light flexible system for choosing with love that the Cafe is and in awe that I wrote the Life Organizer.

I heart myself.

I heart awareness.

You can get your own copy of just the Life Organizer questions for free here. If you want to get an idea what I’m talking about.

What will you pay attention to this week? What pattern are you hanging your attention on this week? Maybe you want to revisit what you and others wrote last week and then comment. I’d love to hear!