Last week I wrote about being a Christmas kitchen idiot and how burning the walnuts triggered a big story of “I can’t do anything right, why am I such a loser?”  I’m happy I was so scathingly honest because:

It helped you to be more lovingly expansive with yourself or as Julie said “PS – Scathingly honestItidbits ROCK!”

and

Because I received this email from Rebecca which made me laugh so loud I spit my tea across the room.

I was reading your latest about burning the nuts and feeling inadequate… and all I can think is: you have done so much for so many, you have changed their lives…and you are upset about burnt nuts? [this is where I blushed at my own scathing honesty]

Heck, I am planning to toast walnuts completely smoking black in your honor! I’ll call it the annual “Jen Louden Holiday Kitchen Fire.”  [this is where the tea spitting occurred]

You were meant to do something else in this life. And it seems to me you are doing that which you are meant to. I’m sorry the nuts tweeked your sense of self, but in the grand scheme…? [this is where I took a big swallow of tea and felt both sheepish and blessed]

I say this because of how much you have helped me with your book, The Life Organizer – it has given me a new way to see myself, new language to think thoughts in. It is a source of inspiration, strength, comfort…and joy. [this is where I did a little dance around the room and sang one of my off tune nonsense  happy songs in joy for my book helping] [this is also where I said, yes outloud, 'Damn, that is a good book.]

On your tombstone, it will not say, “She couldn’t toast walnuts.” It will say something to the effect, “Beloved Jennifer was loved far and wide by many whom she never met…but they are her friends and love her as if she were family.”  [this is where I got tears in my eyes and wondered at the power of words to connect us all]

Sincerely, One Grateful Reader

I hesitated to share this email because I thought it might seem a little self-congratulatory as in  “Does Jen think her poop doesn’t stink?” or somebody might think, “Well, isn’t it good for her that she has her purpose all figured out, that only makes me feel worse because I don’t” (none of you are petty enough to have these thoughts so I’ll have them for you)  but I decided to because…

I felt so busted and in such a good way

To my ears, Rebecca is saying, to me and you,

Hey, stop focusng in what you don’t do well and start paying attention to what you can’t help but do, your natural genuis.  What the  heck do you care about X when you can do Y and Z and plenty of A, F, and L?”

To my ears, Rebecca is the voice of God saying,

I only want you to be you. If you spent more time being you, you sure would have more fun. Either way, I love you.”

So, I propose, in Rebecca’s honor, that we each perform our own verison of the Jen Louden Holiday Kitchen Fire.

• What are you ready to acknowledge is not your thing, not your gift, not your bailiwick, not your talent, not your forte, not your genius, at least in this life time?
• What are you ready to stop trying or maybe you stopped trying a long time ago but you still wish you could?
• What would, if you let go of it, let you have more brain space and greater heart energy for your natural can’t-help-but-do-it genuis?
• What will be in your kitchen fire?

My “I will not be this in this life time” list is:

I will not be cook – and I will have lots of kitchen fires

I will not be a good speller - and this blog will have lots of typos

I will not do much of anything neatly – and I will continue to make art and wrap presents

I will not be a linear thinker – and I will still get my point across

I will not have a clean car, a tidy garden, or stain free clothes- and my sister will

I will not love parties where I don’t know people – and I won’t go if I don’t want to

I will not be calm, cool and quiet – and it will get worse as I get more deaf!

Wow, this feels so good, you’ve got to try it. I could go on and on, and I don’t want to write too much because I want to be sure I’m really ready to not want these things anymore, that I’m really ready to say, “Not this time around.”

So this week, I am proposing that you lovingly explore the idea of making an “I will never” list.

Forget putting down things you are already over – who cares about those?

Instead, list the things that you keep wishing you could do or ways you could be even though you know it’s not you.

Write down what you still itch about, even though you know, if Rebecca wrote you an email, she’d say,

Oh come on. Look over here. Here is your genius, here is where you want to focus. Stop with that stuff, leave it alone and get  on with ______!!!”

I can’t wait to read yours!

Join me! Name what you will put in your kitchen fire in the comment section. I can’t wait to read what you will burn. Burn baby burn, it’s the not no more inferno.

The holiday family bonanza is winding down. Tonight is our last family dinner for eleven. And may I say, we have all done a great job of meeting and greeting and being patient. And I have done a very fine job of not getting into caught in my story that nobody loves me? Yeah!

In case you missed last week, my intention last week was:

will lovingly notice when I’m feeling like a victim or abandoned. I will simply notice my thoughts and what my body is doing and if I chose, I might speak to myself kindly, I might look for a need of mine I could better meet, I might go outside and watch the wind in the trees

or I might just notice.

That was a good one. By setting it, and by talking to Bob about it, I avoided my whole poor pitiful me story.

What I did not avoid, however, was my “I’m a big incompetent boob” story — it premiered on Christmas day but not to raving reviews.

You see, I’m about as genetically far removed from the Martha Stewart’s and Julia Child’s of the world as Pol Pot was from Mother Teresa.

I can’t cook, can’t bake, can’t wrap presents in clever yet environmentally correct ways. I’m not much better at creating meaningful holiday rituals nor creating wonderful ice-breakers to foster deep connection between suddenly united yet complete strangers aka newly blended family (although I do that really well when I teach retreats).

So on Christmas Day

when I attempted to help Bob with dinner by making Laura’s Brussels sprout recipe and he wanted to pan toast the walnuts but I wanted to toast them in the toaster oven but then I forget about them and they burnt, I watched myself melt into the “I can’t do anything right, why am I such a loser?” story.

Oh, it didn’t last long and nobody in the family was around so they didn’t have to politely look away while I picked at my inadequacies but still, it was not fun. It felt so old and yucky and yet so very real.

It’s me at my victim best as in “If I can’t be perfect, why be at all?”

I share this scathingly honest tidbit so

a) if you experienced a moment of self-loathing or cooking incompetency over the holidays, you will feel less alone

and

b)if you can wrap presents in clever yet environmentally correct ways, you can (privately) entertain a moment of high fiving yourself

and

c) because even though we can set wise intentions and be aware and take naps and read Mary Oliver’s new poetry book and not over-do it, we can still get side-swiped, especially when we are tired or around our families or under stress. Especially then.

So a big hug to my stupid boob story and then on to this week…

I’ll be creating the final touches for my luscious big Virtual Retreat (January 16-19th) and I am so damn proud of it and of my Comfort Cafe and Life Spa (when you sign up for the retreat, you get the option of a free month’s membership site but only until December 31st) so get on it now.

I’ve noticed that as proud and excited as I am, I’m also stressing. Wondering if I can do it all, do it right, get the word out enough, etc.

So this week (cue angels and a Greek chorus and drums and why not a harp… and bongos, I love bongos)

I will lovingly notice when I am telling myself I can’t. I will simply notice the “I can’ts” and what thoughts go with “I can’t”, what reactions I feel in my body, what choices I feel I can and can’t make.

I might also ask “Is it true I can’t do ____?” or I might just notice.

‘Cause one thing I’m loving loving loving about Choose Your Life Mondays it is showing me through experience that changing my patterns doesn’t always have to always be hard work. That the ease of simply being aware can sustain me without me having to do anything.

What are you noticing?

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. Or comment on the process.  Love reading your intentions!

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.

And that’s okay.

Choosing Your Life Monday is an invitation to name what pattern you will lovingly notice this week.

As you may know from this post I recently set a BFHG and it’s going very well although I did hit a snag on Friday which is good as it requires me to lovingly notice my-hurry-up-you-should-have-been-done-a-year-ago pattern.

Although, of course, I hate (stamping my foot now) slowing down.

Anyway… my BFHG is about offering you lots of ways to be comfortable and  uncertain times and it’s about creating a place where we can hang out and support each other in never giving up on ourselves. A sort of comfort cafe. Virtual. With live events a few times a year.

But For Now, Back to Patterns

Patterns are something I’m always learning about (aren’t we all?) especially from my Writer’s Retreat guest Havi Brooks. In the shower today I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could write your own owner’s manual?”

How cool would it be to have a way to record your wisdom, and have it replayed to you just when you need it as in when you are about to repeat a pattern you always repeat? (Note to self: invent software for this).

Then I remembered: I had created a guide to writing your personal owner’s manual: the Life Organizer! (Got a lovely note yesterday from Rachael, “Last night I had trouble sleeping and came across your book The Life Organizer at just the right time to reconnect & recommit to trying it out. Then I came across the book’s website and now, your invitation to join you on Facebook. Thank you!”)

(Hi Rachael, hope the book helped!)

I started wondering: what Life Organizer ideas would be good to practice together?

I decided on insight, which I define in the book this way,

You’ve got the gray hairs to show for them, so why not find a way to benefit from your life insights? Remembering and applying them is perhaps one of the reasons you were put on the planet, and even if it isn’t, using these insights can save you from wasting time (years!), money, energy, and love. Yet most of us were never taught to track, record, and refer to what we learn in life, or to hone these insights as they change and grow with us.
Life insights are gifted to you through therapy, coaching, reading, studying, meditation, prayer, spiritual practices, and listening to something larger than yourself. They tend to become clear on retreats, during long walks or runs, while rowing or folding laundry, during conversations with perceptive friends and sometime enigmatic strangers, and when we are writing or creating art. Sometimes we spot them in our journal, on our canvases, and in our complaints. We learn them through living, and often in a painful way, especially the third or tenth or thirtieth time around.

Here’s a really simple way of saying what I want to do with Choose Your Life Mondays: what pattern do you choose to pay attention to this week?

We choose our lives through awareness.

We change our lives is by becoming aware of our patterns and then changing our habitual reactions when those patterns are triggered (well, that’s one way we change).

But we cannot change our reactions until we lovingly become aware of our patterns and we cannot lovingly become aware of anything until we are paying attention and one way of paying attention is to name in community what we will pay attention to.

Another is to chunk down what we are lovingly paying attention to one thing at a time.

So Choosing Your Life Monday is an invitation to name what pattern you will lovingly notice this week.

I’ll start – heck, I may the only one doing this although I really hope you will join me -

This week I will lovingly notice my pattern of jumping into action without asking myself what I want or what feels good.

I won’t try to change what I’m doing, I’ll simply notice.

Want to join me? Name your pattern in the comment section.

Then next week when you name another pattern or the same one, you can reflect on what you noticed this week. Or not!