Comfort Queen » divorce

Choose Your Life Mondays #29

Jennifer — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:01:15 +0000

Choose Your Life Monday is an invitation to name what pattern you will lovingly notice this week and to do so in community. Join in when and however suits you.

Here’s a pattern I notice when sitting down to write these blogs posts: the pattern of feeling scrambled.

As in who the hell am I?

This is a good pattern but somewhat crazy making.

It’s a pattern created by learning.

By being willing to constantly test who I think I am.

By being so hungry and curious about life.

I love this about myself!

This week’s scrambling is because I spent the weekend listening to the venerable Ane Pema Chodron. There was so much about this weekend to be grateful for, not the least of which is simply being able to partake of such teachings.

How lucky am I to get to explore how to work with my mind?

How lucky are you and I to be able to learn such wise ways to stop feeling unhappy and icky and to be joyful?

(Note to self: remember you are grateful for this when it’s two in the morning and you’re so painfully aware of your mean thoughts about your ex.)

Another wonder of Pema

is how comforting she is. She keeps saying, “It is possible to be free of your neurosis and endless stories. It really is.”

She then says, “I may not be the best role model but really, it is possible.”

And we all laugh and feel comforted.

Because how often do we believe we can never be free? We will always be screwed up.

Always be depressed or wounded or lost or less than or not fit in.

Nope.

Not true.

Of course

Listening to Pema made my whole snarl of around significance and safety and wanting to just get things done so transparent.

Before the retreat, I was thinking how deep and original my pattern was.

How very difficult to unwind.

How significant.

Um, no.

These are all moves I make to avoid stepping into the groundlessness of being, otherwise known as being completely and utterly vulnerable, tenderhearted and without a story.

Being here, without your story to shield you from life.

Being naked like this is true freedom.

As free as my dogs in the car, heads out the window, eyeballs vibrating, ears flying.

Even freer that that.

Tasting that freedom, that nakedness, this weekend, after quite a long time of not tasting it, of being lost in busyness and anxiety, was such a precious reminder of why I do inner work.

Of why I do my work in the world.

Which brings me to this week (in a long winded round about way)

I so want to nurture this experience of freedom – at the same time I’d really rather go pour a big glass of wine and numb out – but I want freedom more – so this week

I will lovingly notice

When I get lost in my fear and anxiety,

I will inhale deeply and exhale long and slow and then look gently and steadily at my fear, and keep dropping my story, whatever that story is in the moment.

This is my committment for this week.

I’d love to hear your comments and what patterns you are working with this week or this month or this lifetime.

Coming Home Comfort

Jennifer — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:22:26 +0000

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?

Yi Yi Yi

Jennifer — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:35:36 +0000

I’m a Frito Bandito…

Just had to write that. I’m dating myself!

I needed to write to CONNECT. I miss our conversations and yet I feel our connection, us creative thinking heart women webbed around the world, opening and closing with the tide of life.

I’M STILL ALIVE and I’m actually, well, great. And good. Certainly stronger. More even-keeled. Learning heaps. Playing more! As the sun returns to the misty NorthWest, so does my life force.
Being divorced is becoming part of me, it’s truth is being metabolized. For example, when I talked to my neighbor on the ferry Tuesday about my new life without Chris, I felt (mostly) like I was talking about myself and not some alien life force. I’m beginning to feel less like divorce is inconceivable. Oh sure, there are moments when, out of the blue, I wondered who socked me in the solar plexus. I look around but there isn’t nobody there, just the realization that my other half is no longer connected to me. But that’s not true. Our connection, in some very important ways, is richer and clearer than ever. Sitting on either side of our daughter a few weeks ago at her student conference,, we shared one of those parenting looks that said, “Oh my god, she’s such a miracle, don’t you want to eat her up?” and although that look was followed by one of those sad looks, it was not followed by a “I’d be so much happier if you would just…” look. It was not followed by our heart’s shutting down. My friend Ann Cheng said this morning on our walk, “What would it be like to live without any expectations?” (which is probably what enlightenment feels like) and that’s part of the gift of not being married anymore: we can love each other without expectations. No expectation of connection or being on time or getting the taxes done… It’s odd and lonely and freeing. It brings up the question in me, over and over, what do I want or need from another person? Why do I believe a relationship has to look a certain way?

On the creative front, after being dead to even the most remote creative impulse, I can feel the creative heat building in me. It feels exciting and a little scary. All I know right now is that my next creative leg must be:

More collaborative – I want someone(s) to work with in person at least part of the time
More fun – play! Be a voice and conduct for play!
More focused – I want to articulate what self-care is and be an international stand for it; what is the “there there” of my work?
Better supported – asking for and creating systems so I can do all I want to do.

I’ve been considering performance as part of my future. I know I want to become a better speaker and speak more. I may want to do more weekend workshops. I’ve fantasied how much fun it would be to do a TV show– some thing for the new Oprah network! I’m edging toward my novel. I’ve made some art again… Did I mention focus must be part of my new life?

And I’ve been struggling with my days getting eaten up with “stuff,” like today, Lilly is home from school, it’s a holiday and yesterday it was meet a friend for tea. I’m feeling the need to get away for a longer retreat in silence, away from home again. Not sure when that came happen but feeling the need!

So far my retreat looks like nothing I ever thought it would, certainly it doesn’t look particularly special or “sacred,” but I keep reminding myself, “What should it look like?” and “Why should it look any different than it does?” In other words, I’m accepting reality, digging into the rich and sticky and lovely dirt of me, and living the sacred line from Rilke:

May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back

Raw Radical UnRuly Dreams – Part 2

Jennifer — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 02:52:17 +0000

I didn’t know this but on September 2007 when I declared a nine-month retreat–sabbatical, what I was really declaring was, “Where do I go when now that I’ve gotten to the end of my dreams?” At the time, my dreams seemed fine, thank you very much, but as I moved into less and less doing, I found my time off was becoming more and more about shedding and letting go: of outmoded dreams, of dreams that are so threadbare, they can’t even float on the River Denial anymore, of “should” dreams and good idea dreams and dreams other well-meaning people have for me. It’s turned into a dream heaving festival over here. Watch out because when you start such a process, the gods and goddesses love to jump in and help–my husband has shed our marriage, Spring Air shed me as a spokesperson and Body+Soul as a columnist. Oh bloody hell, I want to go back to what was known, to what was safe–help! But the worse thing one can do is stop the process mid-way through. I’ve done that several times before and where did I end up? Watch a current presidential debate and you’ll get a good idea: same old, same old. Boring. Trapped. Nothing raw, radical or unruly to be had.

I write this from my shedding nadir where the only dreams left on my list are: Reawaken the feminine, open my whole heart to Love, and create art with abandon and only for myself. Read those three again—see how beautifully interrelated they are? That astonishes me. And see how clearly tending to these will provide the energy for more specific dreams like rewriting my novel? And guess what? Art is the way in to it all, the way in and the way out. So this is what I’m trying:

Open my big cheap art journal on my art table
Put out some random paints, water, couple of brushes, oil pastels, water soluble crayons, alphabet stamps
Glance slowly with soft eyes at one art book (current favorite Hans Hoffman), read two or three poems (current favorite Pablo Neruda odes), put on some music (Always favorite: Krishna Das).
Feel into the space around me, behind me, in front of me, above me, below me.
Ask Spirit to get me out of the way. Ask Spirit to fill me.
Tell my small self, “It’s only for ten minutes. Nothing bad can happen in ten minutes.”
See what emerges. Not for the sake of dreaming new dreams or getting anywhere but for the sake of being open.

We can dream our way through the wardrobe door, down the rabbit hole, out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing into a fresh field of learning and possibilities (to appropriate the Persian mystic poet Rumi) but only if we are willing to ask, “Where am I willing to go when I get to the end of my dreams?”

Footnotes:
* Diagnostic new age guru Louise Hay claims foot problems signify a fear of the future and not wanting to step forward into life. For me, my very sprained big toe came about because I was hurrying and I’ll buy I’m afraid to step forward so I see my sore toe as a lovely symbol of needing to rest and let go of everything, including fear.

* Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim posited that grappling with horrible tales (he primarily studied fairy tales) gives children an outlet for natural angst and anxiety which makes me wonder if so many truly horrific horror movies are being consumed by teenagers right now because their anxiety about the future has left the building along with Elvis.

Raw Radical UnRuly Dreams – Part 1

Jennifer — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 01:20:37 +0000

“Where do you go when you get to the end of your dreams?” Dan Fogelberg

I was on hold with my local clinic about my big toe – which stubbornly is not healing*—when I realized I was hearing a Dan Fogelberg song from my youth. In fact, the song coming over the phone had been the soundtrack for my 16th summer, a time when I was bursting with hopeful itchy angst, stuck between yearning for newness, for life, to be in life yet completely unsure what I wanted from life. As I listened to Dan croon (what a crush I had on him: the original sensitive man!) it struck me that how I felt my Pu16th summer was very similar to how I felt now, some 29 years later, and that Dan’s question was perfect for me – and maybe for you, too. Where do you go when you get to the end of your dreams? (I realize now the station was playing Dan because he died Monday of cancer at 56.)

I’ve run out of dreams. It’s very scary to admit that because in this microcosm culture of personal growth and coaching where I spend a lot of my time, it’s all about possibilities. Declaring, “Hey, I’m tired of growth. I don’t want to live my best life. I just want to curl up and do nothing,” feels so unrealized. It also smacks of the S word-selfish. “Dreams are the food of the soul. In our existence, we often see dreams come undone, yet it is necessary to go on dreaming, otherwise the soul dies and agape does not penetrate it” rhapsodizes novelist Paulo Coelho in his Ode magazine column (January/February 2008). Yes, I say to Paul yes but where does the letting go, cleaning out, dropping-into-nothingness-stage of dreaming fit? In our love affair with self-improvement and efficiency, have we forgotten this aspect? If you and I don’t attend to not dreaming, do we block the ability to conjure truly new dreams? If I lack the courage to peer at my dreams and ask hard questions like:

What commitment am I willing to make?
What price am I willing to pay?
What courage is required of me right now?

(Questions courtesy of The Answer to How is Yes by Peter Block)

What is the result? If I lack the stamina to be restfully fallow (say that three times really fast), do my dreams cease being dreams and become should-filled bland heavy nightmares? If I only dream, do my dreams become only delusions?

I believe many of us have gotten to the end of our dreams—I certainly think our American culture has reached the end of something. Partially this may be because we have relentlessly, brutally pushed ourselves. Faster, faster, grab the golden ring! Keep moving, keep buying, keep trying because if you don’t, you’ll be left behind. Our collective well has more than run dry; we’ve pushed clear through to China and out into empty space. Consider our political landscape, our national depression rate, and the number of horror movies leering from the New Movie wall at the video store* as proof positive. We want to dream radical raw dreams, we want to feel desire, we want to believe in new beginnings but we’re too tired from doing, from pushing, and those optimists among us, from dreaming.

Stay tuned for Part 2…