In this week’s newsletter, I posed the questions:

• Darling, sweetie, honey baby, what one habit would feel really delightful this week?
• What one habit or practice or choice would feel as supportive as a personal chef, assistant, and massage therapist all rolled into one?
• What do I want to do to support myself?

Now what in the heck are my answers? Hmmm… taking a moment to check in with my self……………..

Here’s what feels right: Every time I feel a surge of anxiety, instead of taking it as a sign I’m utterly lost and headed for creative dead end and that I have completely forgotten how to create anything at all, I will gently replace that ugly noise with the remembrance, learned from my great friend Micheal, that what I choose to do is both overwhelmingly meaningful and overwhelmingly
insignificant or to put it another way, I will get over my hand wringing little self via a dose of lightness.

I’ll also cultivate the habit of watching Saturday Night Live reruns and maybe even a few Monty Python oldies to help this lightness bubble along.

I want to commit to more new supportive habits but that’s a fantastic way to pull the self-flagellating knot even tighter so I’ll stop right here. Stopping now.

How about you? Love to hear what you’ll be choosing to do.

Related posts:

1. At Kripalu
2. Two Comments and an Idea
3. Grieving the Lottery

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…

Related posts:

1. Summer Righteous Girl Power and Italian Dreams
2. Grieving the Lottery
3. More on Truth

I should make this retreat deeper and richer.
I should be meditating more, asking for guidance more (or at all!).
I should be using my time more wisely.

The language of should can be (mostly is) so automatic that is it the linguistic structure that helps create the mood of not wanting? If so, where does it come from? I ‘ve always loved the idea that it’s a way that women have been taught to give up their sovereignty and power–by shoulding on ourselves we put the power to decide our lives out there, with them. Given that desire and power are intimately interrelated, it doesn’t surprise me that when I claim my desire by asking “What do I want?” then the shoulds come sneaking around, eroding the feeling of desire so that it becomes grim or flat.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this — feel free to be inarticulate like me!

~~~~~~~~~~
And now a poem that has sharply reminded me why I’m on retreat and why I need to recommit to my time in the void:

Flowers of a Moment by Ko Un

It is said that nothing can become new,
unless it first turns to ashes.
For a whole decade,
my misfortune was not having turned to ashes.

Burning a mound of dead leaves in late autumn I want to weep.

Translated from Korean by Brother Anthony of Taise’, Young-moo Kim, and Gary Gach

As I wrote a few moments ago in an email to a friend, “My job these days is to burn everything I have been unwilling to burn in the past — all the times I stepped back from the edge and didn’t let go when I knew I needed to– let go of work, identity, relationships… I must burn this time and I’ve been hiding from doing that since I began this retreat, at least a bit.”

Burn, more burning? ARGH!!!!!

Related posts:

1. Desire Vs. Mood
2. Busted the Shoulds
3. Deepest Desire

What is my suffering comes only when I push myself to know? When I strain. When I concretize, stuff in a box, try to write a tag line for my future?

You know what? I don’t know!

Related posts:

1. How Do I Want to Be?
2. Life Purpose