Changing directions

“One day the hero

sits down,

afraid to take

another step,

and the old interior angel

limps slowly in

with her no-nonsense

compassion

and her old secret

and goes ahead.

‘Namaste’

you say

and follow.”

- from “The Old Interior Angel”, by David Whyte

Today I had one of those days that felt like deja vu, or a relapse to a time I thought I’d outgrown. But I suppose it’s like that point in every hero’s story where the hero sits down, feeling a little doubtful, wondering if he is really cut out for this work. Then he is reminded that this is his destiny. There is no other journey like this one, and there is no turning back.

Maybe it was all the inversions I’ve been doing the last two days in yoga. Standing on your head – repeatedly – will do things to your thought processes. Bringing fresh blood supply to the brain and reversing the flow in the lower part of the body…I’d love to see a PET scan of someone in headstand.

One of the things I realized today is that when you change, and stop playing the roles that people have come to expect of you, you might run out of things to talk about. It happened to me today with my hair stylist, who is such a fabulous woman and always good for a great conversation while effortlessly crafting my hair into something sleek with “somethin’ goin’ on”. The switch flipped when I tilted my head back in the shampoo bowl and announced, “No more school!”. She gasped loudly, “No more SCHOOL?? What are you going to DO??” I didn’t expect that response, given the fact that I had spent the better part of the last two years sitting in her chair telling her horror stories – at her request – of some of the clients I was dealing with. It seemed like every six weeks there was a new story. There were some favorites that she still remembers – like the time when I had a parents forum and one of the “lessons” shared by a family was “motivating” their three-year-old to practice by threatening to throw her Barbie dolls out the window if she refused. After that, I had the wisdom not to hold open forums for “sharing wisdom” among the group. Some parenting strategies are best left as “best kept secrets”. It was easier for me to sleep at night not knowing what happened in some of these homes.

But I was done complaining today.

What makes you come alive?

Civil rights activist Howard Thurman said: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Do you know what it feels like for you to come alive?

Or are you taking someone else’s word for it?

Start now…go into the silence of your own heart, and start listening for what makes you come alive.

A case of the “should”s

I caught myself with a major case of the “should”s today. Last night I was notified that I was accepted to speak at Ignite Bay Area on March 2, 2010, in San Francisco. (Yes, it’s open to the public and you can get tickets here.)

I was so excited! I felt it was the universe telling me, “This is YOUR time!” Of course I always love a stage and an audience, so that got my juices flowing too.

Then I got up this morning and the “should”s started flowing.

“I should make a plan for the month of February to market this.”

“I should blast this across my network so everyone I know will come.”

“I should write a blog post on my main website to convince more people to come to my Music Improvisation class.”

What a way to kill the creative flow. Falling back on old thinking, I kept my butt planted on my chair in front of my computer, trying to prove to myself that I was “working”, typing away at a draft of some lame blog article based on a “Top Ten Reasons…” format that just wasn’t working. It took me all day to finally ask, “Why am I forcing things with ’should’ thinking? What happened to my clarity today?”

I realized that today’s case of the “should”s was wrapped up in a sense of some constant need to produce something that makes me look good. It’s what I’ve been taught to do. We are all taught this lesson starting from an early age. We are taught systematically to please everyone from parents and teachers to older siblings and the popular crowd at school. And those of us who were handsomely rewarded for our accomplishments – whether it be gold stars, good grades, leadership roles, or high-paying jobs – tend to stick to those well-worn strategies. It feels so safe and familiar to fall back on the same praise that brought you from the cradle to this point, wherever that may be. And as we grow older, it gets scarier to think of letting go of everything we thought we once knew to be true.

Celebrating fullness

I’ve been doing a lot of synthesis lately. Creating a new business, dreaming a new dream, reflecting on what to take forward from the past will do that to you.

I realize that I’ve done enough (perhaps too much) explaining of the reasons why I had to let go. But I haven’t done enough celebrating of the fullness and richness of my life that enables me to be where I am right now. I’ve been acting like I have to apologize for five and a half years of offering everything in my being in service to something bigger than myself. I’ve been acting like I have regrets or things left undone. Where these thoughts came from is a subject for my own inquiry.

But as I reflect on the lessons I’ll take forward for the next chapter of my life, I am finding there is an abundant overflow of learning. I am literally foaming at the mouth with the lists of things I know now that I didn’t know five years ago, the things I will do differently now that I know more than I did five years ago, and the ways I will engage in life now that I did not know were possible five years ago.

And there’s a lot to celebrate in that learning!

Love – quote from Rumi

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”  – Rumi

Grins and giggles for the day…

Listening with your whole body

Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie gives an engaging TED talk and performance, encouraging us to open our entire bodies to the experience of sound and music: “My aim really is to teach the world to listen. That’s my only real aim in life.”

Another take on grief

So I admit, I’ve been feeling  a little bit guilty these past two weeks as I’ve been saying goodbye to students, responding to questions like, “How are YOU doing?” (in that concerned tone one uses with the bereaved at a funeral), with a big smile on my face. Happy. I feel happy. I feel light and happy to be letting go of something that was done in my mind and is now done in the physical world. I celebrate so many things right now, like my freedom, my creativity, my health, my energy, my desire to enjoy my own life. And I also celebrate setting people free to find their own truth, to go more deeply into the world to find what else is there for them.

And yet it is interesting to watch how tightly they hold on, grasping for anything that will give some illusion of continuity for the story they wished would never end.

I read this today, from my favorite book of Zen stories, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?, by Ajahn Brahm:

“Grief is what we add on to loss. It is a learned response, specific to some cultures only. It is not universal and it is not unavoidable….there is an alternative to grief. Not that grief is wrong, only that there is another possibility.

“Grief is seeing only what has been taken away from you. The celebration of a life is recognizing all that we were blessed with, and feeling so very grateful.”

Comfort in her own skin

I went to Wendy Nelson Tokunaga’s book reading tonight at Kepler’s Bookstore in Menlo Park. Her second novel, Love in Translation, is about an American woman who travels to Japan and falls in love. Not sure why I was drawn to this reading at first. I saw her announcement on the She Writes site. The reading was structured as two brief excerpts – read quite theatrically by the author – followed by her singing a Japanese song from the book, music arranged and performed by her husband.

When she picked up the microphone and started singing, I knew why I had been called to attend that reading. With her surfer-dude Japanese ex-pat husband manning the sake and rice cracker snack table, his music playing on a portable boom box, and the author – a middle-aged white woman wearing a slightly funky black blazer, colorful glass jeweled multi-strand necklace, and wild greyish blond hair – crooning Japanese lyrics into a microphone, I realized I was seeing someone who had become comfortable in her own skin. She was calm, unself-conscious, and very matter-of-fact in her presence. Her singing was filled with the joyful tongue-in-cheek quality of Asian karaoke love songs. Corny by design yet also filled with hope for true romantic, star-crossed love, these songs (which I love to sing in Chinese) allow us to express our childlike yearnings in an adult format.

There were just a handful of us in the audience for the reading – the subject matter of Love in Translation was probably too fun and frivolous for the serious, ambitious, upwardly mobile Atherton crowds who normally flood Kepler’s. Hint: the #1 bestseller in the store this week is Daniel Pink’s book Drive, on the psychology of motivation. Wendy’s reading was honest, straightforward, fun, and from the heart. Her singing was just as unabashedly from her own unique heart.

Rare to see someone unafraid to be a little corny, a little wacky, a little funny, and hard to categorize. I just liked it, and I don’t know why.

Waiting for the storm

The night before last, I watched the evening news for the first time in several years. I rarely watch TV anymore, because if I’m that bored I’ll find a full episode of one of my favorite shows to watch online with minimal commercials, or I’ll spend some time in a yoga pose to enliven my mind.

The night before last, though, I had gotten home from yoga class at 9 o’clock, then started making the dinner I had been craving, which took me until 10 o’clock to finish eating and cleaning up. So I felt like “vegging” out a little before going to bed. I plopped myself down on the couch for some non-computer-related catatonia. Stripped down to the 12 or 14 basic channels, there isn’t that much channel surfing to do, but it’s still amazing how long even those limited choices kept me going.

At one point, it was time for the 11 o’clock local news, and all three channels were talking about the “storm of the century” (or at least of the season) that was forecasted to arrive the next day. Images of a small, bright yellow blob surrounded by a bigger, darker green blob located off the cartoon coast of a map of the Bay Area flashed on the screen. These were followed by stock footage of ocean waves crashing in a misty, foreboding dusk lighting; rock walls being pummeled by said waves, as oceanside shanties, perched precariously on wooden stilts as sandy sheerfaced cliffs dropped off beneath them, stood naively against the tumultuous wind and rain. Cut to an image of sheets of rain, being blown horizontally across a glistening blacktop parking lot.

The voices of the newscasters warned of a “dangerous morning commute” and “gale force winds by lunchtime” followed by a “treacherous rush hour ride home” the next day (which was yesterday). As if to add to the scientific accuracy and credence we were to lend to these predictions, the meteorologist clicked on the Doppler radar graphic (the one with the green and yellow blob) and measured the distance from the yellow blob to the edge of land, confirming the prediction that the storm would arrive well before daybreak in San Francisco, make its way down the Peninsula just in time to “wreak havoc on the morning commute”.