As a child, I remember many a summer evening, lounging on the floor of my uncle Walter’s house in Bedford, Indiana, listening to my dad and Walter and Uncle Pryce talk business.

No. Not talk, pontificate. Extol. Preach.

The theme was always the same: be in business for yourself. Business was god. With a small g.

But still, god. (Yes, we went to church, too.)

When I got my first job out of film school, as an assistant to a literary agent in LA, my dad said, “Why did you get a job? I thought you wanted to be a writer?“

Oh no, Dad was not a patron of the arts. He believed that I would make more money working for myself than working for the Man.

My Dad did not have in his possession the statistics that most writers earn poop.

This week I feel like I returned to my family roots by writing about being self-employed.

It may be a new direction for me, working with self-employed women (and maybe men, I like men, I live with two of them and they are very lovely) around the inner work of being self-employed.

I’m feeling such a nice tickling about this idea.

In the meantime, in case you missed them, here are some great things to know about – not just for the self-employed.

Swooning

I’ve only been reading Danielle LaPorte for a few months. Oh the grief over all the juicy good I have missed. She’s sexy, truthful and loving. Good stuff.

Swigging Tequila

I sometimes paint myself into a corner with my writing, feeling I have to be serious or comforting or… Why do I tell myself that? That’s a topic for another post.

I love reading the very naughty Naomi Dunford’s very very very popular blog.

(I wrote a guest post this week. I don’t really swig tequila. It’s a metaphor. Or a joke. Or both. )

Admitting Mistakes

I’m putting on the Big Virtual Retreat next week. I made some marketing mistakes promoting it. I feel bad about them. Here is where I talk with the uber smart and very grounded Dave Navarro about what I learned doing this project.

Do I really make these faces?

You know Molly Gordon’s brilliance, right? If not, you are missing out big time.  I made a video blog post for her and you have to got to see the very odd expression the video froze on.  I laughed out loud when I clicked over.

Everybody loves Christine!

Christine Kane and I met when we did an event together a few years back. I fell in love with her immediately, everybody does. But what has made me sit up and take notice is how she has gone from struggling artist to paying off her mortgage!  Read my post about depletion, and learn more about the amazing Ms. Kane!

Hungry Ghosts, Part 2

Where the sexy sharp ass Jennifer Howard tells you how everything is really going to be alright. This woman has a brain and half. Plus she’s intuitive! Plus she’s really really cool.

I hope all these goodies help you remember that life is a wondrous game for playing and failure is just another label.

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These wise folks said things like “You help women be effective in the world” and “Comfort is a quality of the Divine, it’s the foundation” and “If it’s killing me, then it’s killing the world.”

Wow. Okay. YES!

And then this one:

Women get into a cycle of depletion and they’re afraid to step out of it, because then they would be freed up to actually take action on what they really want. They are positive they won’t be able to create their heart’s desire. So they stay busy or scattered or overcommitted so they never have to try.”

This one landed like a slap across my face.

I do this!

I hate to admit it but I do.

See I have an ancient, crusty legacy of shame around my creative work.

I have an old stinky story of being a failure.

A public failure.

The stinky shame dates from when I did an Edith Ann impression (a Lily Tomlin character for those of you too young to remember) on stage in front of my whole school and you could see my breasts through my white shirt and I got heckled.

I think high beams were mentioned.

I was in 5th grade.

Did I mention it was in front of the whole school?

I’ve got a lot of stories like that – stories of wildly creative out-going kind-of-loud Jen launching herself at the world and things not. Always. Going. So. Well.

What creative person doesn’t have these stories, right?

I’m 47 now and I’ve done a ton of healing around this and even let my desire to murder my 7th grade English teacher go (that’s another story).

Only I didn’t see until now that

when my creative shame  gets triggered, I kick off a depletion cycle to end all depletion cycles.

It’s like I want to prove I’m a untalented goof and so I exhaust myself by launching too many projects, hiring the wrong folk, miring myself in endless details that do need to get done (thank you very much) but I suck at details so that makes me feel more ashamed plus there is no time for real creative work which would restore my sanity.

But I’m afraid to stop the cycle because then I’ll have the time to replenish and do creative work but what if it sucks again?  Better to stay busy!

Stunningly diabolical!

Michele said, “Women are ashamed to need comfort and support and love to be able to thrive.”

I would add, “We have to build the trust and heal the shame that tells us that if we get comfort and rest and ease, we’d better by damn prove we were worth it.”

So this week I’ll be loving watching my story that depletion is the punishment for being a failure, and must be maintained to keep future failure at bay.

What about you? Is depletion the story of your life these days? If so, maybe it’s just because life is crazy busy and soon you will get some time to rest, maybe a retreat?

Or are you caught in a washing machine of depletion and you feel like you can never get out?

If so, tell me more! Me thinks this could be juicy conversation.

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Oh be still my beating heart.

Won’t You Join us Energetically?

So many of you wanted to be here but could not so I thought “What if we retreated together in spirit? What if the women who are here supported the women who are not, and vice-versa?”

You send your energy, prayers, and intentions to the women who are here, this weekend and next week, and I will ask women to send the energy of the retreats to you.

And

What if you took a mini-retreat between tonight and next Friday at noon and let the energy of my Kripalu retreats hold you and inspire you?

You could use the Virtual Retreat sessions (The Retreat is available again with a Refresher Day on April 25th) as one way to structure your time, like my sessions do for the women here.

Won’t you take even a half an hour in the next week to rest in the abiding peace that is your true nature, to calm your well-meaning but often rather busy mind, and to comfort yourself in ways that bring you toward life, rather than away?

If you do retreat, please share your intention and experiences here. Let us feel the ripples of retreats around the world!

Sending you the peace of true comfort and the power of women slowing down, listening, and remembering.

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Last week I declared I would

lovingly be a student of my snarl.

Um, that wasn’t so fun.

As in I’m here again?  Heart sinks. I’m making things harder than they need to be again?

I’m struggling with structure and support again?

And… it was truly enlightening. As in bringing light to my being.

My friend Molly Gordon calls the things we do that get in our way signature preoccupations.

Signature preoccupation = a pattern we do again and again

A blind spot

Something that trips us up and we say heart sinking, “Not you again!”

One of mine is making things more complicated than they need to be and thus not serving the people who come to me as fully as I could.

And tiring myself out in the not-serving-so-well process.

One of the gifts of being with the same group of people for years -

most recently that’s been my brain trust (Molly Gordon, Eric Klein, Mark Silver and Michael Bungay Stainer) and before that my women’s group in Santa Barbara -

is getting to see their signature preoccupations, up close and in furious action over time.

“Oh he’s doing that again! Wow. Can’t he see he’s doing that?”

The answer to that would be no.We can’t see.  We need outside eyes and helpful, kind ways to see.

That’s why we need learning adventures and coaches and therapists and brain trusts and women’s groups and processes.

What’s also been a gift – although many days it feels more like a kick in the gut -

is having my signature preoccupations witnessed over time.

Now you could, and you would if you were me, might be tempted to get all victim-y right about now, to put your wrist to your forehead and swooningly moan, “But change is so hard!”

True.

It is not for the weak of heart, this inner-change paying-attention business. It is not for the rigid, the unable to laugh at themselves, or the unable to look in the mirror and smile ruefully at what they see.

And here is what I know – not believe – know:

When you are willing to pay attention to things over time, they do change.

Yes, over time may well mean your life time.

So? You’re going to live anyway. Do you want to live conscious and aware or do you want to live afraid and ignorant?

Do you want to hug yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep engaging with your patterns or do you want to swoon and be a victim?

No, don’t pick up a cudgel when you pick up your pattern.

Pick up your pattern, your “Oh my gosh, I’m doing that again?” with the same tenderness you would a baby who was wailing and needing some love.

As you would a friend who keeps doing the same thing that makes her miserable and you see what she does but she can’t, not yet.

You don’t love her any less.

Actually, you love her more.

I want to say that how you engage with your stuff is something I am very, very passionate about and is a reason I created the Comfort Cafe because how you engage can be productive and life changing or frustrating and then more frustrating. Whatever you do to see and change your patterns, do it with as much love for yourself as you can. Even a wink of self-love, a passing angel wing blessing of tenderness, a shrug instead of a face slap, helps enormously.

As you have probably already guessed, I’m sticking to my signature preoccupation:

This week I will lovingly be a student of my snarl.

My heaviness, my making things difficult-ness.

I may also be a student of my impatience, which is an intimate friend of my snarl. They may even be colluding. And even if they are, they are part of me and I will lovingly notice their antics this week.

I did notice last week how much my hormone surges and changes increase my snarled-ness.

I noticed I’m getting much better at stepping away from things and letting them settle instead of wringing my hands and making a big “this will always be this way and I am screwed” story.

And I’m super-extra-duper proud  of myself for changing this month’s theme at the Comfort Cafe from Discerning What Matters to Discovering What Nurtures You and then when I explored that, chunking it down even further to Resourcing.

Resourcing is drawing on something larger than  yourself. Often.

I made it more simple and understandable instead of more complex.

YES!

A good example of how lovingly paying attention to our patterns yields small miracles.

What will you pay attention to this week? What will you lovingly miracle-ize? I’d love to hear!

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Uncertain times can bring fear, worry, anxiety and overwhelm with them. They seem to walk hand-in-hand. Not knowing what’s going to happen stirs a prehistoric fear in most of us and has since the beginning of humanity.

On the many occasions when I felt paralyzed by uncertainty and fear and worry, I remember saying to myself,

I’ve got to get moving, got to get writing, but first I have to stop feeling afraid. I can’t do anything while I’m afraid.”

So I folded a lot of laundry, checked a lot of email, posted to Twitter, walked the dogs, checked email again, whined to wise friends, started projects that fizzled because they “didn’t feel right,” (which really meant I was too afraid to keep going), ate a lot of chocolate, and felt more and more frantic and paralyzed.

When you are fearful (or anxious, overwhelmed, worried, fretful), even if you don’t know you are, it’s pretty automatic to interpret your body’s natural fear response as a call to action – a directive to “Get busy! Do something to save us.”

But random action doesn’t take care of your real needs

The problem with trying to “busy” your way out of paralysis is that you don’t really know what’s the right thing to do because you haven’t addressed the real issue yet-you haven’t sat down with your fear so that you can learn what you really need.

You may not even know you’re afraid! I didn’t.

It wasn’t until my boyfriend Bob gently pointed out I was afraid that I began to see the role fear was playing in my stuckness. In fact, my paralysis was a direct result of my fear. I’ve since talked with wise people about this – especially the Comfort Conversations I had with Molly Gordon and Pam Slim (by the way, five of these fear-breaking Comfort Conversations are part of my upcoming Virtual Retreat)- and these talks explored  how avoiding feeling our fear is often the real reason we stay stuck – not whatever it is we’re afraid of but our running away from the scary feelings.

Who can blame us?

And sometimes, we get stuck because we think we shouldn’t be afraid as in, “I have a roof over my head, enough to eat, a toilet that flushes, others are so much worse off, what do I have to be afraid of? It’s just silly I can’t get going on marketing my business or meeting someone new or getting in shape, it’s just silly.” When we don’t allow ourselves to feel what we are feeling, the feeling grows, like a tired two-year-old who wants some attention.

Don’t overlook the biology of fear

When you feel the fear response in your body- the cascade of stress hormones, popularly called fight or flight — you automatically want to do something – anything. It doesn’t matter if it’s moving you toward your dreams or moving you sideways or even backwards. The key is to keep moving. Moving at least discharges some of your anxious energy and you feel like you are doing “something.”

The only problem is that this running can become habitual, creating a sort of anxiety fog that makes it very difficult to identify your next true step, so you become lost in a haze of inconsequential yet obviously very important actions. In other words – in a haze of procrastination, self-blame and general guilty “shoulding on yourself” (yuck).

My client Amy, a coach working with nurses in upper management, described her haze this way:

When my business was still pretty new, I fell into a good year of procrastination. It started when I had two major clients quit in one week. This was the first time I had been fired – I was mortified and certain I would have to go back to my previous job as a hospital administrator, which felt like dying to me. I began avoiding actual marketing in the most creative ways.

I got very busy drafting intricate plans. I signed up for a million how-to-market-yourself classes. I attended networking conferences. I even learned how to build my own website.  Then there were the causes I volunteered for – I don’t think I said no once that year.  It wasn’t until I saw the connection between my fear of being a failure and my lack of action that I was able to see how fast I was running away from my self and my business.

When I was able to start to taking care of the fearful part of me, able to sit down with the fear, rather than all my stories about the future, I was, slowly, able to move into action and save my business.  When I look back, there was this underlying feeling of not being okay and trying to get away from that feeling as fast I could that I kept trying to distract myself from. It seems so simple and obvious now.”

What Amy discovered is that often the only way to dissolve fear (and fear’s toxic hand-maidens, shame, guilt and self-loathing) is to be with it, to see it, to sit with it, even to talk to it to discover what emotional needs are hiding within it, instead of trying to outrun it.

Acknowledge your fear.  Like you, it wants to be listened to.

The first step is to acknowledge fear’s presence and give yourself time and space to be with fear. The Sufi mystic poet Rumi said it best,

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.”

Treating fear as, if not a welcome guest, a guest who is, without question, here, shifts you out of running and into the present. Allowing fear to come in temporarily does not mean you must give it the run of your house or that it gets to run your life. The exact opposite is true: when you can see your fear and put your focus on the fear itself rather than your story (how badly you screwed up or unlovable you are or that you can’t get a job that pays as much as your old job, etc), fear, like pain, moves and shifts and even dissolves.

Fear will always visit and it can teach you but it does not ever get to rule you

Several of the Virtual Retreat sessions deal with exactly this topic, as it is so central to dealing with uncertainty, especially Emergency Calming Techniques and Dissolving Procrastination with Havi Brooks and Emotional Freedom with Judith Orloff and Healthy Comfort and Heart Felt Permission with me.

In the meantime, join me in a short guided imagery to help you feel grounded.

A little audio love with Jen (click to listen, right-click to download)

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post: What to Do when you Feel Alone and Scared.

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