You know, one of those days in which you wonder, “What is it I do?” And you bemoan not becoming a nuclear physicist because at least they know how to split atoms.

One of those days in which all your plans, which just a moment ago were so shiny and promising, suddenly resemble false fronts on a movie set.

One of those days when you calculate how little money you can live on.

Otherwise known as a farm-fantasy day. Or move-to-the-ashram day. Or find-a-cozy-cave-in-Greece day.

You are going to give it all up for the simple life.

Give up the struggle, the effort, the bustle, the doing, whatever it is that feels so hard right now.

Yurts are always part of this fantasy. As well as spaciousness and time to do what you want. Shelling peas also shows up for me, not sure why.

There is a desire for wholeness and rest in the farm fantasy – you want to heed that.

There is also a desire to be rescued, to not have to be a grown up anymore – you don’t want to heed that.

Hold the desire for spaciousness, living a hand-crafted life, retreats and renewal in one hand and

in the other,

hold the exhilarating, humbling truth that choosing your life is damn hard work, putting yourself out there takes a huge amount of courage (whether selling your paintings or putting up a profile on Match.com), not to mention brain glucose, and being conscious,in general, is rewarding, sure, but also very, very taxing.

Farm fantasies are fun as long as you don’t confuse them with finally being safe. Finally being enough.

Watch a BBC period drama, read a historical novel, churn some butter and get back to putting one foot in front of the other. You aren’t doing anything wrong – it’s hard, it’s scary, and you are so not alone.

P.S. Non-farm fantasy retreat this weekend at Kripalu with me. You get to give up the struggle while staying awake. That’s good stuff.

P.P.S. Links: Living a hand-crafted life, retreats and renewal, enough.

Related posts:

1. Choose Your Life Mondays- The Hand-Crafted Edition
2. Desire Vs. Mood
3. Drumming

I thought I might share some of what we’re learning with you, my most fabulous blog readers who, for some silly reason, are not all members of the Cafe. (You are fabulous. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

My favorite way to frame how you live in a story is to see yourself wearing a pair of glasses at all times.

These glasses are made up of your genes, your life experiences, your biochemistry, your wounds, your gender, education, travels, hopes, prejudices, cultural upbringing, the language you speak, and what you ate for breakfast. Plus a whole bunch of other stuff.

Almost all the time, your glasses are invisible to you. You forget you have them on.

Therefore, without knowing it, you forget that you are seeing life through glasses and believe that you are seeing the truth. You believe your interpretation of the facts seen through your glasses to be THE TRUTH.

Another better way to say this:

• Event happens
• You make up a story (not just in language, also inyour body and your mood but that’s another blog post.)
• You hold that story to be THE TRUTH
• You promptly forget you made up THE TRUTH.
• In the forgetting, there can be a whole lot of suffering.

Your life goal? To remember you are wearing glasses!

Important! Note! I did not say get rid of your glasses – that is impossible. Literally. Stories are how our brains work. We must make up stories to organize the information coming to us – there is simply too much information coming in for us to process. We drop most of it and then organize the rest into a linear story.

Here’s the truth: you and I are incapable of accurately perceiving reality.  So maybe there isn’t a truth? Holy Batman!

And who wants to live without stories? My dear friend and Master coach Ann Cheng said on our fantastic Comfort Cafe call on Saturday, “I was talking to my daughter about letting go of stories and she said, ‘But mom, that would be horrible.’ What she meant is our stories is how we make meaning.”

We treasure our stories because they organize reality and make meaning. YES! They make us human.

So my point is simply – simple but so very far from easy – to be aware you are making meaning.

What meaning do you want to make?

And every time you think you can’t choose what meaning to make?  That, my friend, is a story!

P.S. I’m doing links at the end of posts because it has always bugged me as a reader to feel like I’m missing something if I don’t click on the link so I do and then my reading experience gets all nattery and scattered goes my thinking.  Tell if you you like this or hate it, I’m curious.

Comfort Cafe, Ann Cheng (no link, she’s a closely guarded treasure who does not have a web site and she’s the kind of wise person I bring to the Cafe each month for rollicking learning conversation) and my favorite book on story making is The Trance of Scarcity.

Related posts:

1. A Romantic Story is Busted
2. Off for a Week
3. LoudenClear ComfortCast – The Power of Story

Photo by Benimoto

First, a Finding the Good Wish

Wishing you

strength to love the curl of the question mark

around your heart

patience to wait for the stirring of your confusion to reveal

your next leap and

most of all,

the humility to listen to what wants to be heard.

And Now a Thought about Question Marks

We waited two decades for it. Clarrisa Pinkolas Estes, the esteemed author of the ground-breaking “Women Who Run with the Wolves,” is releasing her new work through a series of live classes offered by the amazing Sounds True.

Yes, it took almost twenty years for her next great work. And here is what she said about the gestation period:

What you’ve heard over the years about my having disappeared and gone underground to work and write is true,” says Dr. Estés. “When people ask where the heck I’ve been and why I so seldom come out when called by the “clattering world,” I often respond by saying that one can’t fulfill one’s calling by being called away. Rather one fulfills one’s calling by filling up… by studying, thinking, listening, looking at, living in the layers of life beyond the collective ones. Then . . . one can pour outwardly again.”

When I read Dr. Estes’ words, I started to wonder:

How do you discern between what Seth Godin calls “shipping” – getting the work out the door – and priceless diving-underground-time, away from the clattering world?

The need to fill up is built into the creative life, yet filling up time can so easily slip into not creating because you aren’t “ready.”

On the other hand, not taking time to fill up can leave you creatively bankrupt.

But how can you take time off? People around you are “shipping” everyday. They are creating so many cool partnerships and products and making millions.

And anyway, you need to post on your blog, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

So where would the time and space to fill up come from? You’ll be left behind!

So, is it time to ship or time to fill up? And how do you know?

What I do: If there is question mark curled around  my heart, I ask it if it wants to ship or go underground.

I turn to a community of honest peeps to help me see if I am hiding rather than filling up underground.

What about you? How do you know whether it’s time to retreat and rest, or if it’s time to ship? Please comment as this is dear to my question marked heart and I would really like your input, questions, and ideas.

Related posts:

1. About Ordering
2. Being Alive: Such Tender Weirdness
3. Kindly Finding Yourself

There is an emptiness that comes to me when I am finished leading a retreat.

A scrubbed out-ness. Hollowed out. Pumpkin after scraping before carving.

It’s an odd feeling, not bad at all, but if I don’t ground myself, and have a lot of awareness, I start pounding chocolate.

I wish I could sum up the magic of the Virtual Retreat

But I’m not good at summing things. Humming yes, summing not so much.

I throw myself into the moment of teaching and then I wonder, ‘What can I say about what I just did?”

Last year, when Havi Brooks was my guest at the Writer’s Retreat (she is again this year and there are few spots open and early bird price was supposed to go away yesterday so hurry and that might be a run on sentence).

So anyway, not good at summing up.

I could quote from some of the hundreds of blog posts on the Virtual Retreat blog but what would that tell you?

That people had a wonderful experience.

That people faced into their fears.

That people touched their essential goodness.

Is that enough of a summary?

In my hollowed out-ness, I started to despair at writing a blog post and then Jenzie posted this at the Comfort Cafe (yeah for the Cafe and Jenzie!) and I thought, “Virtual Retreat Essential Distilled Beautifully Summed up Wisdom! Just what I need to choose my life this week.”

So here is Jenzie’s wonderful summary:

How can I put the pieces of my life together into an abundant yet peaceful whole?

What do I yearn for, what do I truly desire, right now?

I am not all things … yet I am enough.

I tend to my peaceful perspective, as I would tend a garden or a child.

I pay attention to life’s transitions, small as well as large.

Gently bringing myself back: sweetheart, we’re doing just one thing at a time now.

Find and use a compass that leads me back to my true self.

The first time something extraordinary happens, we call it a miracle. Yet if it continues, we begin to regard it as ordinary! Reclaim the miraculous in the bowl of cheerios…

I am not broken, and I do not need to be fixed.

I am open to the voice of the sacred, in everyday life as well as in transcendence.

When do I feel most myself?

What would I love my life to be like?

I instinctively know what I need to thrive.

I am.

Who is it who notices my body, my thoughts, and yet is not contained by them?

Live more. Forgive yourself. Begin again.

Just shift direction by one degree… and in six months, I’ll be somewhere entirely different than I would have been otherwise.

Listen for the inner voice of self love.

Be the little girl who can do anything.

Grow wild and wooly before you prune.

Focus on what’s really essential and true.

Stop thinking about time, instead think about energy and flow.

Be fully committed to and fully present with whatever you’re doing, right now.

Get underneath the joy … and the fear … from there comes inspired, grounded action.

Act as if what I truly want is already here.

That which I avoid is an energy drain … and the longer I avoid, the stronger the drain.

What is the simplest action?

Learn to distinguish the practical-sounding voice of fear from my true loving voice.

I am more than my history, more than my degrees, more than my checkbook, more than my stories.

I am not all things … yet I am enough.

What one bit will you use to light your way this week?

Thanks to Deb, Meredith, and the amazing teachers and hundreds of people who retreated this weekend. More kudos coming must go shower and get on a plane.

Related posts:

1. Choose Your Life Mondays – the Wednesday Virtual Retreat Version
2. Choose Your Life Mondays – The Charlie Gilkey Edition
3. Choose Your Life Mondays #29

Fankle 1# – Tribal Authors

I’ve had a crush on Jonathan Fields ever since I bought his yoga video oh probably 10 years ago. I love a guy in a bandanna who is gently telling me what to do with my body. (coy blush)

Fast forward a year or so ago and we connected via Twitter over his first book, Career Renegade.  He didn’t contact me so I could help him — he wanted to see if he could help me! Major mensch.

Watching Jonathan develop his kickassiness via his blog this year has been so enlightening but you know what made me fall in love even more with him?  When a client o’ mine signed up for his Tribal Author Camp and then had a family emergency and instead of him saying, “Shine it on baby,” he gave her the recordings for the entire weekend. As we say around my house, “Good form! Good form!”

Jonathan interviewed me via video Skype last week on my Tribal Author Book Biz Plan – watch me admit that I don’t have one and talk about what I’m doing to keep reinventing myself.

Thanks bandanna man, I love learning from you.

Fankle 2# – She Does it Again

How does Cairene MacDonald keep doing it?  I want to be her when I grow up!  She takes ideas that could be so surface and pat and she digs into them and makes you see new ways of being.

Lots of my peeps at the Comfort Cafe are big fans. She was one of our Wise Persons last year (we have a call every month with someone, um wise, who teaches us something wise – get the theme?).

Picture this: I’m hanging out with my Lillian (she’s 15) and we’re talking about how she can’t decide whether to date this boy and how making decisions is hard for her in general (I’m talking even ordering in a resturant) I’m trying to explain to her “good enough is good enough” and how you have to leave the not quite right and be in the unknown so the right stuff can find you (can you imagine how annoying it is to have me as a mother?) and then

THIS POST ARRIVES IN MY IN-BOX.

Oh. How. Perfect.

(and no, not because she talks about me.)

Fankle #3

I’m all et-up (as my grandmom used to say) with retreats these days.  The Virtual Retreat and my live mini-retreats. I’m on fire with new material to help people end the dreaded deadly cycle of depletion.

Then I read Andrea Lee‘s last newsletter in which she says, “If you’re stuck in any way, or even if you’re not stuck but you want to amp up your flow of energy, ask yourself:

In what way could I be applying the things I sell, teach or stand for, to myself?”

I remembered I have canceled not one, but two, retreats this month.

I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

But I have so much to do!

I have to keep pushing through!

Oh my god, I will not believe that lie again!

So here is the word: Starting Friday at noon, 24 hours of total retreat time.

I will not be a liar who sells one thing and does another.

P.S. Next two live retreats are soon:

Wisconsin, near Madison.

Texas, near Dallas. Early bird price for Texas goes up February 27th. I’ve added local beloved yoga teacher Brandie Werner to our day – easy restorative yoga, yes ma’am!

Fankle #4 – Another Mensch!

Charlie Gilkey has been my coach and he is certainly my friend.

I love him because he is so smart and yet he still wants to talk to me.

I love him because he is so smart but gives away too much stuff (like me) and refuses to do sleazy marketing stuff (hopefully like me).

Let me admit right now: I am a planner whore — and I created a few myself back in the days when The Life Organizer was a date book.

Isn’t there something so Garden of Eden about hoping you will find the perfect planner?

Charlie thinks so too (or he’s a planner whore, too,  you’ll have to ask him) so he keeps creating these cool planners for creative types.

It’s all about chunking it down to the smallest action.

Action, people, action. Which might make some planner whores uneasy because you would actually not just be planning but creating.

Please check out Charlie’s hip and helpful planners for creative people.

Related posts:

1. Wednesday Wiry Fankle #10
2. Wednesday Wiry Fankle #9
3. Wednesday Wiry Fankle #5