The experiment is off to a grand soul tonifying start…I was so enthralled and felt so with each of you as your comments came in… Thank you!

I’m (yet again) amazed by the power of awareness. Awareness rocks!

What I learned (warning: I learned a lot)

By lovingly being aware of my pattern which was (is):

… jumping into action without asking myself what I want or what feels good,

(otherwise known as speediness)

and by knowing that you were being aware of your pattern and we would come back here and check-in about how our paying attention shifted or didn’t shift things, I learned so much, it pretty much bowls me over.

As you know, I’m working on a slew of stuff around Comfort During Uncertain Times, around fear and change and uncertainty . But last Sunday, I got the wild hair to do this very simple, very quick project… (go ahead, chuckle knowingly) which was to compile and edit the short audios I’ve been doing over the years (I call them Mood Changers), and maybe just create a couple of new ones and record maybe a few of my Comfort Wishes and get these all on to a CD and package with my books for holiday gifts…

I was sure doing this would only take a day, two at the most.

It took all week.

And as the week progressed, I was aware of how my hurry-up-and-get-it-done-pattern is helping to perpetuate the key issues I’m struggling with in my business. But you may say, so what? You still did it. To which I say and I learned so much — which is the main reason, besides loving, we are alive and by the by, the only way we change– so there!

I learned:

• That I don’t allow enough time for projects.
• That asking myself, “Are you sure you want to do this project?” made me do a little due diligence to make sure the project made sense which is good business.
• To accept that doing this project would take longer than I thought and that was okay.
• The link between wanting to be special and original in all I create and hurrying up is huge and important and I will be paying more attention to that link going forward.
• How I have a story that doing a lot fast and working long hours is exciting and interesting and makes my life more meaningful but as soon I’m actually doing a lot and working long hours, I want to be hiking in the woods with the doodle dogs and going to yoga class and talking on the phone with my best friend Barbra. In other words, I actually like balance.

• BIG NOTICE: Speediness contributes to me being all over the map and getting sucked into the lottery syndrome and thus not building the systems that will allow me to be creatively, steadily productive.

… Pause while I breath and pat myself on the back as I really want to turn away from this learning and check email or otherwise distract myself but I’m going to sit still and breath….

…Because I’ve seen this pattern before and that’s why being willing to look at our patterns means we are terrifically brave. I first wrote about this speedy all over the map tendency of mine in February 2006 and again in April 2007.

A lull in writing while Jen appreciates this fact.

Another lull while Jen ponders how awareness of our patterns and accepting those patterns without immediately running to change them are so intimately linked to loving ourselves.

Another lull while Jen wonders about her friend Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s powerful question, “What if the question is not why am I so infrequently the person I really want to be, but why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?” and what that has to do with loving our patterns.

Whew! That was a whole heck of a lot of understanding going on there… loving myself for staying with it…loving myself for seeing it yet again… hoping you are loving yourself, too.

Because Choosing Your Life Mondays is not never ever an invitation to beat yourself up!

And now, drum roll, the Choose Your Life Monday focus for this week:

This week I will lovingly notice my pattern of wanting to do everything yesterday (aka speediness) and let myself stop and feel the creative urges behind that speediness

(That may sound a little vague and I’m sensing that my speediness and my love of life are intimately entwined and that stopping to feel that link, while scary as all get out, will be very revealing.)

I won’t try to change what I’m doing, I’ll simply stop and feel.

Want to join me? Name your pattern in the comment section. You can name the same pattern from last week, if you played last week. Or you may want to tweak yours a tad. Try to keep it simple. Which I have not really modeled.

And if you wish, join me in sharing your reflections on what you noticed about your pattern this past week. Or not! Certainly I will not be processing this long every week! Trust me on that.

A fantastically helpful email from a lionhearted spirit leads me to learn many things

R. wrote me after the tele-comfort experience to say some groovy things that made me so happy for her, like…

There was also something about how you talked about the need to address the feelings behind the fear… it felt less impossible, less intolerable. I was amazed during the exercise what I was able to write down and that I was able to stay with the feeling of safety and comfort that we created. I’m not usually able to stay in that safe place once I get scared, I sort of fall out of it.”

She stayed with feeling safe long enough to talk to her fear

I am jumping around the room and doing a silly dance for this brave amazing woman (which I’m grateful nobody can see me doing – the dance that is).  Because this is what I’m trying to articulate / create/ offer with the Comfort During Fearful Times digital hope fest (more info coming soon, any minute now, swear) because without safety and solace and some inkling of feeling you are on your own side, it’s really really difficult (really) to get anywhere near fear, anxiety or shame.

Without the safety-solace-comfort grounding, fear can feel like a writhing foggy eat-you-up-panicky darkness with no end, no toehold, no sense to it, solid yet wriggly, every where yet nowhere. I felt that  feeling this morning and then I did 5 minutes of frustrating but strangely comforting Dance of Shiva and felt that bridge to myself open back up again, and I remembered (thank you wise self) that I am safe in this moment, that the way back to peace and sanity and creativity is not pushing myself relentlessly to get over the fear, is not pushing myself to change and be someone else smarter, faster, more creative, is not telling myself to hurry up, there is no time to journal, meditate, or lovingly stretch the scared parts of me.

But wait, she said more brilliant things!

Because this brave soul has, like most of us, been dealing with her pain and stuff for awhile and in the process of doing her very noble inner work, she has come to associate comfort and safety with remembering things she doesn’t want to remember and feeling emotions she doesn’t want to feel. Safety and comfort have become linked to coming face-to-face with fearful things from her past. Which leads me to exclaim:

Give yourself lots and lots of comfort that has nothing to do with big deep possible scary inner work

The last thing I want is for you (or me!) to think is that comfort must be linked to something that’s has a purpose or is good for you or you only get to be nice to yourself so you can feel safe enough to talk to your fear or shame or whatever.

Talk about a set up for brandishing the “do more = you are worthwhile” cudgel not to mention draconian-esque self cruelty.

Which IS NOT what audacious R. is doing at all– and she pointed out to me that there is this possibility of turning comfort into only self-improvement / a prelude to doing big possibly scary inner work and that is not what I want to advocate. Because that would just feed the fear! Because comfort for the sake of doing something or getting somewhere could feed the idea you aren’t okay, you aren’t safe, and you aren’t lovable.

And that is a big fat lie.

You are okay! You are lovable! You are so fabulously safe in this moment… (check in with yourself: are you safe right now?) and this moment… and this moment…

Tomorrow: the importance of giving your mind a bone. Or why acknowledging ain’t the same as wallowing but boy, I can get confused there, too.

I can faintly hear a man singing The Star Spangled Banner. It’s coming from the middle school across the street. I find myself crying. I’ve been doing that a lot these last few days. I’m torn and suffused by the truth that absolutely nothing stays the same, pierced by the truth that everything is constantly changing and that nothing is fixed. There are days when this truth gives me comfort and helps me see that being lost is just an illusion too, but today is not one of them. The fall air tickles the hair on my arms and I wonder how my daughter is doing on her first day of high school. I want summer back, and the first vacation Bob and I took together. I want to be dropping Lilly off at kindergarten at the Waldorf school in Santa Barbara again. I want to do my life over, not because I want to do it differently (although, okay, there might be one or two things I tweak but just a tad) but because I want to savor it more.

At the Writer’s Spa this year, one of the participants, Annelle, had just lost her best friend. Annelle’s intention for the spa was “Savor.” It’s my life lesson. To savor. Even the sadness, even being lost. Actually, especially being lost, especially being sad.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Out of the corner of my eye

I catch

The red blush of my neighbor’s Japanese maple

I want to turn away from it’s dying beauty

Dig my heels in, demand that summer stay put, that the kids don’t grow up, that my father’s voice greets me when I walk in the door of the house they don’t live in anymore

I want to act petulant that fall has arrived, as if it’s so unexpected, such a surprise.

But isn’t that the trick of life, the wonder and the ache: that the expected arrives and leaves us gaping

Have you ever come home from a trip — or several trips back to back– and you’re in the midst of a ginormous life change which caused you to break into heaving sobs in the middle of your new love’s family reunion (although not in front of the actual family) and you are in must-hold-hands-or-otherwise-always-be-touching love and you keep pinching yourself because you can’t believe you found this relationship and you’re navigating about a million new creative ideas and you’ve started coaching again and holding these wonderful souls tenderly is so thrilling and it’s huge too and your arms are flapping every time you move them because you’ve barely exercised in three weeks and let’s not forget all that pie-chocolate-wine that has made you plump overnight where before you were svelte (or sveltish) and you’re really really tired and you walk in the door after the last of these adventures and there are two dead mice in the traps you set and the smell is shall we say rather strong? And you miss your 14-year-old daughter who didn’t go on the last trip at the last minute but you are also dreading seeing her because her father has not said no to her about getting a third dog (yes, that would be the number 3) even though he cannot have pets at his apartment and he travels a lot and you can feel your arms flapping as you clean up the dead mice but then the love of your life comes in and says, “I’ll do that” and you feel so grateful and tired and then you think what a good chapter for a new comfort book this would make, returning from trips and retreats and adventures and family reunions and feeling really, really OVERWHELMED and like someone put you in a blender on high and.. What could you do at times like these?

Go outside and breathe.

Feel your feet on the floor and your connection to the ground; feel connected to something that is not your own spinning to-do list.

Do a brain dump on Omnifocus or on a big sheet of paper everything you think you have to do.

Do the one thing that is lurking behind you that you don’t want to even admit you need to deal with – for me, right now, it’s the flapping arms.

Color in your art journal for a minute or two; keep it quick and simple.

Start and finish one small task as in sweep the mudroom or empty the dishwasher.

Drink a big glass of water and say to yourself as you do, “I have come home before from trips/vacations/retreats/family reunions and survived and I can choose to push myself relentlessly right now and get myself and everybody around me into a dither and a lather or I can proceed at the pace of loving kindness and put one foot gently in front of the other. It is my choice.”

Call a very helpful friend to talk you down.

Put on uplifting music (I’m a big Krishna Das fan) and declare you will unpack, clean, answer email, etc. until one song is over (or no more than two) and then take a break and do something brief and fun like call a helpful friend to talk you down.

Avoid multi-tasking like you would avoid the guy in the Portland airport who stopped me to tell me how much I looked like LAURA BUSH. Aside from politics, do I really look that old? Did someone dress me in a pant suit when I wasn’t looking?

I’m now going to go do some of the things on this nice list and talk myself back into my life. It’s wild to ride the waves of so much emotion and change, just wild, and I’m glad to be back at this blog, settling into a fruitful loving conversation with each of you – I so treasure your comments. I feel so much hope and anticipation for a creative, stable, and love filled fall.

What do you do to comfort yourself, especially when faced with dead mice?

Photo by Sookie via Flickr

Welcome to my long OVERDUE new website. The original Comfortqueen.com launched in May 2000 and although we made changes along the way, for the last three years, it was dated, riddled with broken links, and no longer reflected me. People would report broken links and ask where the e-cards went or that they missed the Daily Dollop and I’d say, “Soon. Soon I’ll know what to do.”

I kept telling myself it wasn’t the right time to do a redesign because I didn’t know what was next for me and I didn’t know what look I wanted for my “brand” and I didn’t know my target audience or my USP.

Then, one day, I realized I would never know if all I kept doing was thinking and mulling. I realized the only way I would ever know what I was doing next was to do something. To be in motion.

There are times when we get stuck because we have forgotten how to create. We believe we have to know exactly what we are doing before we can do anything — we have to know our brand mission, our ideal customer, have a snazzy logo; We have to know our big life vision, our soul purpose, have a cute tag line; We especially have to know where we will end up before we can begin.

When we notice that we are talking to ourselves in sentences that begin with “First I have to…” or “When the kids are…” or “When I know what I want to say then I will” before we sign up for the class or go for the interview or start the book, we’ve gone beyond listening and fruitful waiting and discernment and we’re stuck in a dead end story that is all about safety and fear and wanting guarantees in a life that never gives them.

The antidote? Action. Motion. Creation.

But not big long-term commitment kind of action. Not launching a company with fifty employees, not starting a book, not signing a year’s contract. Instead, start with something finite, easy, and yes, fun. Start with something that lights your heart up (or at least makes you faintly smile) and that has a clear beginning and ending. If you take a job after being home with the kids for ten years, take a job that you can leave easily but that interests you, challenges you or at least gets you into action. If you want to write, start an article or a blog post, not an historical epic. If you need to redo your website but you have no idea where your business is going next year, do something simple, with as few pages as possible and Word Press based so you can change it easily.

(Note: if you are somebody who gets into action easily but quits often, this advice is all wrong for you. You may need a big long hairy epic commitment. Or not. What do I know?)

Be in motion, build in change, and let it be easy.

Or think about it this way:

When the Shoe Fits
by Chuang Tzu
Translated by Thomas Merton
( a longish poem from: Roger Housden’s collection Risking Everything that ends:)

Easy is right. Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.

The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.

Welcome to my ever-changing motion-filled ease-inspired new website.