Last week I declared I would

lovingly pay attention to when I am second guessing, over working or otherwise prevaricating

and

I will lovingly look for the thought – which comes in many shapes and flavors – that what I’m doing isn’t important enough.

I’ve been a significance spotter all week.

I became terrifyingly, achingly aware of how strong this pattern of significance is and how it’s tied to this other pattern of “I’m so utterly freaked out about not being able to make this presentation the greatest ever experienced in the history of presentations, I just want to get it done so I don’t have to feel anxious about it anymore.”

This pattern sometimes means I end up doing not so great a job. I lose my creativity and my own voice in the pursuit of just getting it done.

The result of not doing such a great job fuels my story I’m a stupid loser and that starts another cycle of “If I could just be like X (whomever I’ve deemed smart and talented that day) then I would be finally significant and I would feel safe.”

Ah.

I get it now!

Significance = safety in my mind.

Now that is wild. How the hell did I come up with that one?

Because what the labyrinth of significance actually = is anxiety. Crazy making comparisons. Losing touch with my heart. Moving away from trusting myself into the never ending void of not enough.

Significance = anything but safety.

I’m attending a retreat with Pema Chodron this coming weekend in Seattle and I’m sure being steeped in her teachings, plus spending time with wise friends who are coming from out of town, will give me new ways to lean into this pattern, as Ani Pema often says.

And what will I lovingly pay attention to this week?

My thought pattern that I need to just get it done, that I will feel more peaceful and safe when it’s done.

Instead, I will pause and resource (shorthand for drawing on, being fed, by into something larger than me, myself, and I) and I will repeat my new mantra “I am resourceful and it’s not all up to me.”

Resource and be resourced.

Ah… I know it’s going to be challenging. I can feel the story trying to morph into some new version that can resnare me. I won’t get caught there because I’m not trying to change myself; simply loving watch my story.

What will you notice?

My brilliant friend and Writer’s Retreat guest star Havi Brooks loving advises that the first step in taking care of yourself is to meet yourself where you are.Yeah for Havi!

For me, that usually looks like saying something like, “I so don’t want to be afraid and I so don’t want to stop and feel anything and I so want to eat donuts right now, and this being with myself never really helps anyway and why can’t I just get to doing something to make myself better right now.”

We want action!

We want to be super charged action heros. Let’s change things now.

That doesn’t work.

Why? Because when we try to move right to change, there is a fundamental rejection of ourselves, a subtle (or not so subtle) belief that what we are feeling is not okay and therefore we are not okay which means we are not lovable which means we are not safe.

Cue donuts.

A Bob Kegan aside

Bob Kegan writes about this in How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work. How when we discover we believe something about the world or ourselves, a master assessment or big damn story, something like if we talk to our fear we will be annihilated or if we stand up for ourselves at work we will be fired on the spot, end up alone, broke and without even a pet to hug, we need to stay with that assessment and watch how it plays itself out in our daily lives before we do anything differently.

So here you are

And it’s might be scary and uncomfortable and itchy and twitchy and you certainly may hate the idea of being here and that’s where you start. Acknowledge the itch, the deadness, the fear of fear. Acknowledge that you might not want to slow down and check in – in fact, you’d rather eat nails or give money to McCain. Acknowledge that comfort in form of donuts or checking email or reading more blogs sounds way more more satisfying right now.

In other words, notice the resistance, the wall, the “I don’t want to whine.” You don’t have to like it!!! You just have to stop and say hey. Oh yeah. You.

Kind of subtle and so very strangely liberating.

Tell me if you do it and what happens!

Photo by Sookie via Flickr

Welcome to my long OVERDUE new website. The original Comfortqueen.com launched in May 2000 and although we made changes along the way, for the last three years, it was dated, riddled with broken links, and no longer reflected me. People would report broken links and ask where the e-cards went or that they missed the Daily Dollop and I’d say, “Soon. Soon I’ll know what to do.”

I kept telling myself it wasn’t the right time to do a redesign because I didn’t know what was next for me and I didn’t know what look I wanted for my “brand” and I didn’t know my target audience or my USP.

Then, one day, I realized I would never know if all I kept doing was thinking and mulling. I realized the only way I would ever know what I was doing next was to do something. To be in motion.

There are times when we get stuck because we have forgotten how to create. We believe we have to know exactly what we are doing before we can do anything — we have to know our brand mission, our ideal customer, have a snazzy logo; We have to know our big life vision, our soul purpose, have a cute tag line; We especially have to know where we will end up before we can begin.

When we notice that we are talking to ourselves in sentences that begin with “First I have to…” or “When the kids are…” or “When I know what I want to say then I will” before we sign up for the class or go for the interview or start the book, we’ve gone beyond listening and fruitful waiting and discernment and we’re stuck in a dead end story that is all about safety and fear and wanting guarantees in a life that never gives them.

The antidote? Action. Motion. Creation.

But not big long-term commitment kind of action. Not launching a company with fifty employees, not starting a book, not signing a year’s contract. Instead, start with something finite, easy, and yes, fun. Start with something that lights your heart up (or at least makes you faintly smile) and that has a clear beginning and ending. If you take a job after being home with the kids for ten years, take a job that you can leave easily but that interests you, challenges you or at least gets you into action. If you want to write, start an article or a blog post, not an historical epic. If you need to redo your website but you have no idea where your business is going next year, do something simple, with as few pages as possible and Word Press based so you can change it easily.

(Note: if you are somebody who gets into action easily but quits often, this advice is all wrong for you. You may need a big long hairy epic commitment. Or not. What do I know?)

Be in motion, build in change, and let it be easy.

Or think about it this way:

When the Shoe Fits
by Chuang Tzu
Translated by Thomas Merton
( a longish poem from: Roger Housden’s collection Risking Everything that ends:)

Easy is right. Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.

The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.

Welcome to my ever-changing motion-filled ease-inspired new website.

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

A bit from Michael’s newsletter:
“In ‘You Can Have What You Want”,‘ {his very useful and powerful book} I identified three keys to
recognizing that you are living an inspired life:

1. You are doing what you love and want to do

2. You feel guided

3. Things seem to unfold as if by design

I then suggest that in order to get to this point, there are really only two things you need to do – consistently ask yourself “What would I love to do today?” and whenever possible,
do it.”

Which is the major theme of The Life Organizer, my hope is the weekly questions keep bringing you back to desire, true deep desire, and helping you see it and hear it and feel it.

But here is where I have gotten tied in a knot which is confusing desire with mood. My mood these days is low – I’m doing a ton of deep grieving – and that low mood convinces me I don’t want anything. That mood likes to say, “What the point of anything?” So this nine month retreat I’m in the midst of is is being eked away, without renewal happening, because I don’t feel like renewing! (And this lack of deep renewal is also because life and work goes on and I’ve been subscribing to the swaths of time theory, which is another retreat boondoggle i.e. don’t wait for them, those swaths of time are often deadly anyway). Then enter Michael’s brilliant distinction which is…

“…the difference between navigating by desire and navigating by
mood.

Navigating by desire means you base your decisions about what to do or not do on the question “Do I want to?”. If the answer is yes’, you do your best to move forward; if the answer is ‘no’, you do your best to stand pat.

Navigating by mood, on the other hand, is when you attempt to base your decisions on the answer to the question “Do I feel like it?”. If you don’t feel like doing something, you put it off until later; if you do feel like it, you move forward.

While at first these two ways of making decisions seem similar, they take people in two completely different directions. Since our moods are often tied up in old habits and patterns of
thinking, following them tends to just create more of the “same old, same old” in our lives. Somehow, we just don’t get around to making those changes we know we’d love to make, and things that seem like they’ll take too much effort are put off until the last minute or don’t get done at all.

Your wanting, however, is a living, breathing, fluid process. Each time you do what you want (or don’t do what you don’t want to do), your actions seem effortless and inspired ideas become
almost commonplace. Over time, it becomes easier and easier to read and follow your inner compass. Life gets a lot simpler, and the pursuit of success becomes a lot more fun.

Today’s experiment is a simple one:

This week, before deciding on any course of action, ask yourself “Do I want to?” Wherever possible, allow your answer to influence your decision and guide your choices.

Do this irrespective of whether or not you’re “in the mood” – if you do, you’ll notice that your mood begins to change “all by itself”. ”

Desire says, “Let’s write” or “Let’s paint” or “Let’s call a friend and then Mood says, “Why bother?” In that moment between the two impluses, there is choice!

What might happen for you today if you became very curious about the distinction between mood and desire and if you remembered that moods are always malleable, even when we are depressed or have PMS or are otherwise sunk in the mire.

“You are what your deep driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.” From The Upanishads