Committed to helping you create a life of miraculous self-compassion and divine creativity, enabling you to connect your unique gifts with the world's great need.

Dear Spider Women,

Watch for a freshening of this newsletter next issue--I'm ready for a change in format and content and I want more community. As artists, wordsmiths, and expressive souls, your brilliance will spark our new look--so send any suggestions you have my way--what do you want to see in this newsletter and community of women creating lives they love? How can I serve you better? I envision your voice strengthening the web of comfort that holds us all, using this newsletter and my podcast to spark conversations on my blog and then through my new website (launching December 1st) http://www.lifeorganizerbook.com.

Come to think of it, webs are everywhere during fall...cobwebs appear overnight outside my kitchen window, spiders creep inside, leaves fall from the trees and the web of branches show their previously hidden beauty. Based on pure tensile strength, spider webs are truly a wonder and yet they're so translucent and fleeting. I see connections between those spider webs and our own lives, composed of strands that feed us in so many precious ways and yet can be ripped away. Nature provides so many metaphorical (and literal) lessons--change is the only constant and we are all connected are the ones I recognize today. We are all change agents who persist in spite of our often great and more often mundane challenges. I am always grateful and honored to encourage, embolden, and embrace you in any way I can.

Radically spinning a web,

Self-Care Minder
What does consciousness mean to you? Obviously, on the most basic, medical level it means you are alert and responsive, in a non-vegative state (except, perhaps, when watching American Idol). But in spiritual practices, it means a state where you are going through life more aware. Consciousness, to me, also means the ability to detach from reactions, from personal history, from preconceived ideas, and from the story about how things should or shouldn't be.

When we live frenetically or believe we must live this way, we limit our ability to be conscious. We tune out a ton of information and feelings because we don't have the time or the "band width." We can easily become attached to comfort as a haven from the world rather than a place to stretch and grow from. We start to frame our experience of reality in a way that maintains what is familiar or comfortable. But at what cost? How do our reflexive responses affect our futures?

That's a fine següe to a reflective moment. What signs do you get that something is real for you? Have you had experiences where something seemed so real, so true, so important, so valuable--only to have it later revealed as fool's gold? Did that make you question your perceptions, your conclusions, and your ability to navigate your world in a safe way? Have you made decisions based on what others deemed "right" only to find it wasn't right for you--and beaten yourself up for forgetting to listen to your own wisdom? How do you assess reality? Do you think we've lost the ability to do so as a country (whatever country you live in)? As a public? Please comment at the blog.

Peace often seems to arrive in the space where we take the input we have received and craft a meaningful, well-grounded interpretation that can then inform our choices--until it's time to reframe everything yet again, given our new life experiences. An example: someone raised in a militaristic, orderly home may later rebel and say that all order is about domination, control, and limiting behavior...they choose to live like a gypsy for a while, but may eventually come to their own conscious relationship with order. They find that order when done mindfully can produce clarity, calm, and ease. They come to that belief on their own time and terms. Then this same person's mother becomes ill and in taking care of her, chaos prevails more often than not, and she finds a way to be with and work with that state. See how the same phenomena becomes a very different reality when we own our experience and learn to feel our way into a fit versus doing it from pleasing others, fear, or stale habit?

John Snelling shares the following in Elements of Buddhism: "We are forever trying to break the dynamic world-dance, which is a unity, into separate 'things,' which we then freeze in the ice of thought. But the world-dance doggedly refuses to remain fragmented and frozen. It swirls on, changing from moment to moment, laughing at all our pitiful attempts to organize and control it. In order to live skillfully, in harmony with the dynamic Universe, it is essential to accept the reality of change and impermanence."

Peace is not another achievement or attainment. It is a received experience of life that you can have every moment--certainly at the grocery store, in a traffic jam or cleaning up dog poop.

As we move into fall, I'll be finding new ways to co-create my visions with you around this mission: Comfort is the foundation for creativity and creativity is the flower that gives off the fragrance of service. Your generosity with ideas and blessings connects you to me and I could never manage to say where I begin and you all end.

Comfort Wishes
Mind melts in surrender
not to chocolate but to the breeze, the scent of lavender
released when I brush by
a hedge of the holy stuff.
My half-jog (late for lunch duty) slows to a saunter and my
greatest idea of who I am shatters because
I’m wondering:
is it possible to achieve greatness this way — through slowness and savoring and loving myself so much, I must
I must
allow myself to be and
to blossom
ever more fragrantly?

Self-care is narrow and selfish only when we use it to prop up our private realities
But when we use it to see and be All That Is, we also see that reality is vast enough,
fluid enough,
raw enough to handle
our gerbil minds and
then suddenly,
that bath you’re taking becomes a
holy communion.

All together now, sigh ahhhh
and then ahhhhh
again.