I was inspired by my 6-year-old niece’s poem above, to write this:

And yet
all things – every thing – must die.
Each “now” moment, like a courageous snowflake falling,
dies in the warmth of the glistening sun to become river,
lake,
food for trees,
nectar of all life,
cool oasis for the weary traveler.

Dies to become cloud,
to harden again
and then let go,
falling through icy layers,
cold rush of wind,
carried on wings of surrender,
landing on mountain canopies
softly, silently,
not knowing,
not even asking to know,
where flight and flow and melt
and vapor and drink and rush
and burbling over rocky creeks
and plummeting over walls of granite
impossibly high
and cascades of foam and mist,
will take it.

Each snowflake dies,
finally reaching a gathering place,
a pool so still, so clear, so precise in its reflection.
We go closer, wanting to touch it.
The water rests, breathes.
Once we contact it, the image dissolves,
Becomes something else -
something we are now part of.
We are in it. No longer looking at,
but being in.
Now we feel
the cool tingling against our skin,
the bumps of the round stones under our feet,
the movement of the water, accommodating
every shape without hesitation.
We hear the sound of the stillness.
We reach in, perhaps wanting to taste it.
Realize we are not so different,
not so separate from this pool,
which traveled from heights we cannot now see
or maybe even imagine,
from a cloud,
a mountaintop,
a snowflake,
to be here right now.

You can choose from about fifty preset words in the image library, or create your own.

I went with a total stream of consciousness, picking out words that appealed to me for no apparent reason, or just came to me. Then I went about the process of rearranging them into lines of poetry.

Don’t think too hard about it. Just enjoy!

Image by Skrewtape via Flickr

In May, I spent three entire weeks – seven days a week, 6 to 8 hours a day – sorting through all of my material belongings, downsizing by about 80%, and moving. I learned practical things (like how to give away items to actual people who gladly come and pick them up from your house), I learned mental things (like the years of stories stored in boxes, never seen or touched in decades), and I learned spiritual things (like the power of generosity and letting go, and the unfolding meaning of abundance in my life).

As the end of the month approached, poetry started coming to me. I did not write a single original blog post during May or most of June. But these haiku poems (which I posted on my Facebook profile) did come out of me. I share them now as a collection of impressions on movement, growth, and becoming intimate with the hidden parts of ourselves. Enjoy!

(May 30):

Haiku for Growth (came to me in the middle of the night):
“With folded wet wings,
Butterfly works to be free,
Keeping dreams alive.”

Haiku for Clearing Clutter (came to me while on my way to Goodwill with a full SUV):
“The weight of worry,
Stored in boxes, bags, closets,
Today I break free.”

(May 31):

Haiku of Moving (came to me while following Two Men and a Truck, with 6 pieces of furniture I chose to take with me):
“We want to move on,
The past screams, pleading, warning.
We breathe out, and move.”

Haiku on storage bins (came to me after another full SUV drop-off at Goodwill):
“Containers won’t store
Worthiness, Peace, Joy, Freedom.
Fill your self with love.”

(6/10):

Haiku for awakening:
“Grief silences me.
Years of pent-up rage numb me.
Breathing, I see me.”

(6/27):

Haiku on numbness:
“So much shame, silence
keeps the heart a little dull
clouded by secrets.”

This is a story of a yogi who lived through this cycle of pain and emerged with a new internal compass for his practice – one that may not photograph as well but feels gentler and kinder to his own body.

It prompts me to ask, “What will it take for each of us to let go of our need to achieve an image of perfection, and turn toward accepting ourselves as we are?”

Here’s the story of James MacAdam’s wake-up call.

In my early yoga days studying Anusara Yoga with John Friend, he once told me (through my girlfriend) that I could be a great yogi like my friend Darren Rhodes.  To me, this meant that I too would be able to contort my body into incredible formations, and demonstrate my world-class athletic prowess through the art of Hatha Yoga.   … Read More

via James MacAdam

Image by buxtonwolf via Flickr

Hello, readers. It’s been awhile, and I thought I’d let you know about a new blog I’ve started, called Bad Asian Daughter: http://badasiandaughter.com.

Here’s a magazine-length piece that I’m really happy to share with you here. Enjoy!

Dime a Dozen: How My Journey As A Bad Asian Daughter Started

By Lisa Chu, M.D.

I suppose it all started with being the only minority in my childhood hometown of Libertyville, Illinois. My introduction to first grade was being called “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, if you please!”. There was actually full choreography involved, which my classmates performed in front of me: “Chinese” – pull the outer corners of the eyes up, “Japanese” – pull the outer corners of the eyes down, “Dirty knees” – put your hands on your knees, “If you please!” – put your hands together in prayer position, and bow your head forward.

I didn’t get it. Did Japanese eyes really slant down? Were my Chinese eyes really slanted up like they were showing me? Did we really put our hands together like that? I had to go home and ask my parents what these classmates of mine might be referring to.

My mom went in for a parent-teacher conference with my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Brown, and calmly explained how we were very proud of who we are, and that her children were entitled to a public school education like every other law-abiding taxpayer.

I’m sure this didn’t help with my popularity on the playground.

I wasn’t bullied. I revved up my “nice” factor, following the explicit instructions that my mom had recited to me every morning since I can remember, as I rode in the backseat of our brown Ford Gran Torino to my mom’s work at Saint Therese Hospital, where I attended onsite daycare at Melody House. For 1975, the Catholic nuns were quite progressive by providing high quality onsite childcare to employees, and my mom was very grateful not to have to patch together a makeshift network of semi-unreliable and quasi-abusive babysitters like she had done with my brother seven years earlier, while getting her PhD. I started at Melody House at just a few months of age, while she still nursed me. I graduated from there at age 5, as soon as I was ready to go to kindergarten at Copeland Manor School.

Every day from the front seat of the car she would say, “Xiào xiào jiang jiang,” Chinese for “Smile and talk nicely”. And, “Bié rén bù yào tao yùn ni,” Chinese for, “So that you won’t trouble anyone else,” or, “You don’t want to be annoying to anyone else.” It was her way of teaching me to play along with the rules, be nice, and not get in anyone’s way. “Just try to blend in,” I heard her saying in my mind, “so that you won’t get singled out and picked on.”

Other mothers might have told their children to “fight back” or “stand up for yourself”. But in her mind, “Xiào xiào jiang jiang” was the safest way to get by, at least as long as I was a helpless child. It would save me, and her, a lot of heartache, if I just smiled and talked nicely, like I was asked.

So I learned to play along with all the white people who surrounded me for those first years of my life. I didn’t think of myself as any different, because no one ever pointed it out until I got to first grade. I wondered why they thought it was funny, or even noteworthy, to tell me that I was “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, if you please.”

This only made me focus more intensely on pleasing in any way that I could. School was frankly very easy for me. The first challenge I had was writing my own book in Mrs. Kublank’s second grade class. Other kids, like Jane Oakley, read many more books than I did, and my parents used the opportunity to point out that if only I would read more, it would be easier for me to write. I started to resent Jane. Why was it that she could read so fast, and know all the Ramona Quimby and Judy Blume books by heart? I didn’t have time to read. Never mind that I was practicing violin and piano every day after school and spending every other Saturday, all day, at my music school, in repertoire class or watching my brother’s chamber orchestra rehearsal.

I ended up writing a book about a hole. Yes, that’s right, the main character in my little book was an anthropomorphized hole in the ground. I don’t remember what the plot was, but it was all I could come up with at the time. I, and my parents, tried to act proud of it, but we knew it was far inferior to what some other kids were able to come up with. Oh, how I wished I could have written a better book than that.

But we brushed it aside, and took comfort in the fact that I excelled in every other subject in school. Well, except for counting money. I remember the handwritten note on my second grade report card from Mrs. Kublank, which read, “Please help Lisa with learning to count money.” I remembered the page full of punch-out paper nickels, dimes, pennies, and quarters, in one of our math workbooks. I suppose they were there for practice. I told my parents that I couldn’t always tell the difference between nickels and dimes – they looked so similar! Both silver colored, both with the profile of a pony-tailed man on one side, both nearly the same size, and in two dimensions, no way to tell the difference in thickness.

It was around that time that my dad started sitting me down at the dining table in our house, with a pad of white lined paper, showing me “word problems” in math. He pointed out that in Taiwan, by the time he was my age (six), he was cranking through these kinds of problems and honing his “arithmetic reasoning” skills, something he saw to be sorely lacking in the American math education system.

He was my dad, so I sat there, trying to focus on what he was saying. “Two trains leave their stations, located 50 miles apart, headed towards each other at 3 o’clock. One is travelling at x miles per hour, the other at y miles per hour. At what time do the fronts of the trains pass by each other?”

Or, “A barn contains a mixture of chickens, horses, and cows. There are a total of 46 feet in the barn, and the number of horses is equal to the number of cows. How many chickens are in the barn?”

Or, “There is a bathtub that holds a total of 100 gallons of water. The hot water faucet fills the tank at a rate of 5 gallons per hour, the cold water faucet fills the tank at a rate of 7 gallons per hour, and the drain, left open, empties the tank at a rate of 3 gallons per hour. If both faucets are left on, and the drain is left open, how long will it take to fill the tub?”

I never got these answers right, or even demonstrated any clue as to how to approach these problems. This always disappointed my dad, which he always took as an opportunity to comment on the amazingly poor quality of math education in America. He never criticized me for my lack of ability. He did sigh when he’d see that I was both bored and showing very little curiosity or interest in improving my arithmetic reasoning skills. His response to this was to create pages and pages of handwritten problems for me to solve, all written on that same white lined paper.

Most of the time I never did them. I just didn’t care that much about math.

That was the way my dad loved me, though.

He loved to tell me stories of how the merchants in Taiwan’s open-air markets had such quick arithmetic skills, using no calculators (abacuses) and writing nothing down. They could keep track of an entire day’s worth of sales completely by memory.

This was the image he painted in my mind of what “mad math skills” looked like. It wasn’t about winning math competitions, it was about having very practical life skills that would help me survive.

At some point in our childhoods, the focus shifted from learning life skills to “making it” in life. It shifted from growing and experiencing to establishing and fulfilling expectations.

I’m not sure exactly when that happened.

All I remember is that one day, in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I found myself, at age 18, in the office of Eugene Sun, M.D., Ph.D. He was a “Venture Head” at Abbott Laboratories, a big pharmaceutical company that had employed my dad for over twenty years at that time. I was a summer intern, working in a lab that was supposedly doing research on new drug targets for the immune system. My dad had asked for this meeting because he was proud of me for being enrolled at Harvard, and because he wanted to show me someone he thought I could look up to, someone “like me”. He wanted me to see that in America, I had opportunities that he himself could never imagine. I had chances, because of my command of the language and knowledge of the culture and access to the best education, that he could never hope for, not because of any intellectual disadvantage, but because he was slow at writing reports in English and could never schmooze effectively in the corporate political game.

He wanted to show me a real person who had grown up Asian-American and “made it” to “the top”, or at least, to levels higher than my dad had been able to achieve. He wanted to show me what this sacrifice was all about.

As I sat in the spacious office, with my dad seated in a chair to my left, and with both of us facing Eugene Sun, M.D., Ph.D., across from his large desk, with the windows behind him (you know you’ve made it in a corporation when you actually have an office with windows), I wondered what I was supposed to say.

He started off by saying, “So tell me about yourself, Lisa,” as he leaned back slightly in his chair, seemingly ready to listen. He looked at me without a smile, and just waited with his hands folded together, scanning me with his eyes.

“Well,” I began. “I just finished my freshman year at Harvard. And I’m working in an Immunoscience Venture lab here as an intern this summer.”

“No wait,” he stopped me, already bored. “Don’t tell me. You’re a Biochemical Sciences major, you want to go to medical school, and you played violin and piano growing up. Right?”

“Um…well, yes, that’s true, but–” I tried to interject.

“You’re a dime a dozen. That’s really not going to be enough to make it very far. You’re going to have to find something that’s really unique about you, something that sets you apart.” He went on to say something about how he did something at UCSF, got an infectious disease fellowship at someplace, and blah blah blah blah, the rest plays back in my mind like the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher in one of the Peanuts television specials.

I didn’t get to say much more during that meeting. I suppose that the part of me that was trained from such a young age to “ Xiào xiào jiang jiang,” along with the part of me that was an innocent 18-year-old, just starting off on the exploration of my individuality and adult life, joined forces and I simply sat there and smiled. Took it all in. Listened.

A dime a dozen? I didn’t feel like that about myself. But here was a person “like me” who had “made it” and he was telling me this. What was I supposed to believe?

In fact, I knew somewhere very deep inside me that how he had summed up my life – the few bullet points that might appear on a resume or even someday on a match.com profile – did not at all define me as a person. I didn’t have the words for it at that time. I just knew two things without a shadow of a doubt from that moment on: someday I was going to be a better mentor than he was, and I would not get there by playing “Xiào xiào jiang jiang” to people like him.

Thus began my journey as a Bad Asian Daughter.

——

Eugene Sun, M.D., Ph.D., has continued to rise in the ranks of senior corporate management at Abbott Labs (NYSE: ABT), and currently is Vice President of Global Pharmaceutical Development. I am proud to be me, the Bad Asian Daughter who chose to disbelieve his label and create a life that is anything but dime a dozen. Read more about me on badasiandaughter.com, on Facebook, on YouTube, or on Twitter. My dad retired from Abbott after twenty-five years of service, having funded college and medical school educations for both of his children, and still lives with my mom in Libertyville, Illinois.

Cover of Departures

Maybe I’m one of the last people to find out about the 2008 Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film, Departures. But I finally saw it last night. I’m not sure what drew me to the film as I was speeding through the aisles at Blockbuster. (I’m probably one of the last people who still physically drives to the video store to rent videos, then drives back to return them.)

As I was watching it, and the end of the film was approaching, I tried to predict what would happen to Daigo, the main character. “Maybe he goes and becomes a cellist, fulfilling his lifelong dream!” I thought. “No, that would be American. This is an Asian movie, so it’s got to be about honoring the family.”

Well, it turns out both answers were right. I think the message in the film was about accepting the unexpected nature of life, embracing what is not known, and seeing that our dreams are unfolding exactly as they should be. The ending of the film, as I saw it, was the fulfillment of a dream – a dream he didn’t even know he had. Since I tend to see themes in movies and extend them to be “universal human themes”, I’ll do the same here. Daigo believes that his lifelong dream was to be a cellist. However, he never even acknowledges, until the last scene of the film, that his deepest dreams were to be seen (by his father, by his wife, by those who love him), to be loved, to be appreciated for his way of doing something, and to openly love something with his whole heart.

As I saw the contrast between the two opening scenes of the movie – a small family bereavement ceremony, solemn and silent, and a symphony orchestra concert performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, as big and showy as it gets – I appreciated the lessons that Daigo learns in confronting the deaths of so many clients. He goes from sitting on a stage, one of many, performing at a distance from an audience who largely doesn’t care (his orchestra dissolves based on low audience attendance), to performing for small, intimate audiences of intensely interested bereaved family members, doing work that touches them so deeply they can barely express their gratitude in words. He goes from having a glamorous job that everyone envies – a cellist in the big city – to a job he never even finds the courage to tell his closest friends, out of shame.

But it’s through his new job – literally coming into contact with dead bodies on a daily basis – that he learns about the many ways to live. He learns that the very small things, done with respect and care, done peacefully and beautifully, can be of great comfort to people. Daigo’s work allows loved ones to see their dead family members one last time, to honor them for how they were seen during their lives. This was sometimes the only chance they got to express their deepest feelings to the ones they loved.

This is beautifully captured in the final scene, where wordlessness spoke volumes, healing both a son and a father, and a father-to-be.

If what I’m writing sounds cryptic, go and see this movie. It’s about death and life. It is elegant, it is simple, it is real. It is universal.

Image by cambiodefractal via Flickr

It hit me all at once just as I was about to leave my office and head to yoga class. I heard a coach say on a group call that the best thing she did to cure the part of her who was depression-prone, and perfectionist was to keep surviving failures. She realized that the only way to heal the part of herself that was so fearful of failure was to actually “fail” and survive it. Over and over again.

What I heard in these words was a whole new way to look at the word “failure”. I’ve always had a hard time answering the question, “What is your biggest failure?” As I look back at my life, I’ve been awash in so many brightly lit success stories – the kinds that bring attention from other people’s parents, and disdain from the other kids in school whose parents wished they could be “just like me”. It was enough bright light and attention to overshadow any of the areas in which I might have been failing, and it took up enough of my time that I never had a chance to try the things I might have actually failed at.

In short, my life was set up so that I had no option to fail.

I stayed very busy and worked very hard on a few things that my parents had decided were the most important for me. And I followed the rules. I did my work. I did not fail.

This might sound like every ambitious parent’s dream for their child. But from the perspective of an adult who developed from this kind of environment and “succeeded” at fulfilling that dream, I’m seeing that there is a lot more to life beyond “living the dream”, especially when it’s not your own.

What I never learned was to trust myself to survive failure.

What I developed was an overly inflated fear of what failure MEANS. As I dug through a list of fears that had been holding me back during the past several years, I realized it included things like, “If I’m not married by a certain age…” “If I don’t have kids by a certain age…” “If I don’t own a home by a certain age…” “If I don’t have a job title that makes sense and matches neatly with the education and experience I’ve accumulated…” “If I change my mind about a decision…” “If I disappoint other people by my choices…”

ALL of these things equated in my mind with being a failure. A noun. An identity. A Failure, with a capital F. And F’s were not an option in my world. So I avoided them with all the skills developed in a lifetime of pointing myself squarely in the direction OPPOSITE any and all chance of failure.

The result? Perhaps to the outside observer an impressive list of “accomplishments”. But on the inside? The part of the self that FEELS the sense of accomplishment, and GROWS in trust every time that feeling arrives, was withering, getting weaker, smaller, and feeling more insignificant with each year of disuse. It was like an atrophied muscle. Ignored in favor of the more socially acceptable muscle that seeks and gloms onto approval like a strung-out junkie to their next hit.

It struck me that in my first business, I had managed to build a stream of income, a following, a set of systems, a community, and a brand all from a core mindset driven by avoidance of failure. I imitated, I leveraged, I did everything that I knew would impress, but I stopped short of being totally authentic to my vision.

And the irony? Other people LOVED what I was doing, even though that sickening feeling of dying inside (that withering part of myself that needed to feel a sense of accomplishment in order to grow and thrive) plagued me. I couldn’t explain this internal feeling to anyone, because the part of me that would have had to speak those words was exactly that part of me that was dying. It was too weak. It found a small voice in my journal pages, or in private conversations with family or friends, but soon they got tired of hearing the same old story.

“Why can’t you just be HAPPY with what you have?” they would say to me, as if it were just that simple. I felt bad about feeling bad, so I put on a happy face. Got busier. Did more.

Maybe they were right, I thought at the time. Everyone in my life seemed to be saying the same thing. How could they be wrong if the message was so consistent?

I didn’t know then that my failure avoidance had ATTRACTED all of those relationships into my life and created a field of energy around me that was consistent with a failure avoidance mentality. I so wanted to be an entrepreneur – one who took risks and created things from ideas and made visions into reality. However I was behaving as if I were a corporate employee trying not to lose my job, fearfully clinging to each new milestone I achieved, afraid to let go.

I didn’t want to be on the ladder that I was climbing. I dreamed of following my real dream, creating something that I could not fully describe at the time. So I ended up with something defined by other people, and it was just easier to say what elicited nods of recognition and approval from other people.

I got tired, and I didn’t know why at the time.

Now I know it’s because I didn’t have the conditioning of the right muscles. I did not have the kind of practice I needed to take the actions I needed to take. Luckily, I knew how to practice. I knew the principles and power of doing something daily, consistently, no matter how small, over a period of time.

The problem was, my goals were always determined by the underlying mindset of avoiding failure. I was pointed in a direction of lowest risk. My goals were ones that appeared to outside observers to be excellent and compelling. However,they were not the ones that meant anything to me personally. They were cheap imitations of other people’s dreams.

I realized that my brain literally had no pathway to orient me toward the kinds of visions that would lead to the success I desired. I had to unwind and untangle a lot of circuitry along the way, identifying all the layers of fears that held me in a pattern of stagnation and inactivity (all while running a six-figure business on my own). I had to let go of more than I ever dreamed I would have let go of. Ideas, beliefs, values, a wardrobe, too many shoes, relationships, and lots of stuff.

Only when I really started letting go of LOTS of stuff did I start to experience glimpses of the kinds of vision and clarity and energy that started to bring me some unexplainable, “spontaneous” results. I believe it’s because I got to the point where I was peaceful and joyful enough to let go. I was playing music, getting recognized, meeting new people. My energy was flowing from that place that needs to feel its own sense of accomplishment in order to grow. None of what I was doing would be considered “impressive” by any of the voices in my head that were programmed in childhood. But I had already been down the path of being impressive, achieving what other people considered success, and just ended up tired.

Until now.

I have something that is my own, my own adventure into the unknown, my own conquering of my own particular fears of my own particular definition of failure. I no longer wear high-heeled shoes. I show up to concerts and play onstage wearing JEANS. Most of the time I play simply long tones, nothing fast or “impressive” technically on my violin. But I feel whole, and peaceful, and increasingly unattached to what anyone else might say about me.

And guess what? A whole new group of people are there to be impressed with me. The old dragons of failure avoidance come back, but this time I’m a little stronger, from all my practice of taking risks and surviving my failures. I’m a little more aware, from all my practice of defining what I’m making it mean to “fail”.

Now I equate failure with freedom. I equate each move toward possible failure as a step in the direction of conquering my fear, and getting stronger with the muscles I want to build. I’m a little bolder. I’m a little more joyful without needing a reason to be joyful, and a little more trusting of myself each day.

So why must you celebrate your failures? You might be the only one who does, and it might be your only path to a life you’ll be happy to call your very own.

by John C. Parkin

The spiritual freedom of the “F” word…

Have you watched a young child playing? Or can you remember what was going on inside your head as a child? I’ve done both. I do the first regularly because I have young children. And the second because when I really relax I remember what it was like to be a child.

If I lie down and look up into a blue sky and listen to the sound of a distant airplane, it invariably brings up a memory from my childhood. Why? Because as we grow up we stop being fascinated by ordinary things. So when I do occasionally take pleasure simply in what’s around me, it reminds me of the last time I did that: when I was a child. This is what children do. They live in the miracle of existence. Everything is new and fascinating. They can enjoy the wrapping as much as the present . . . a leaky faucet as much as a beautiful lake . . . the smell of rain falling on dry concrete as much as the smell of baking bread.

There are no rules about what’s good or bad, what’s better than something else, or what’s worth it. There’s little discernment: there are just things coming in . . . and most of them are fascinating.

As we grow up we learn how to discern, discriminate and filter out. And we tend to filter out the ordinary things in favor of the extraordinary and the unusual. In fact, much of the time we’re so lost in thoughts of the past or worries about the future that we don’t have much time for any kind of appreciation. But when we do “appreciate,” it tends to be of the things that adults think are worth appreciating: tasty things, beautiful things, interesting things and expensive things.

At some point the feeling of wooden boards under our feet, the sound of a toilet flushing in a room upstairs, the feeling of wind against your face . . . these all disappear off the list of things that we should appreciate. Instead we spend lots of money to go on vacation, or go to the movies, or go out for a meal in order to flex our appreciation muscles.

When we say F**k It to anything, then the meanings start to crumble. As the things that matter lose their meaning, then suddenly the world opens up again. Without the discrimination and discernment we learned as we were growing up, every single thing has the potential to be appreciated. Everything is beautiful.

If this happens all of a sudden it can be mind-blowing (almost literally). And this is what happens to a lot of people who have apparently “awakened.” When you start seeing the beauty in absurd things, you know you are starting to lose your mind. Or at least the mind that has learned to see meaning in only a limited range of things.

See each moment as having infinite potential for beauty. We tend to drag all our judgments, conditioning, and boundaries from the past into the present. And it squashes that moment into something very limited. If you leave some of those judgments behind and just see things as a young child might see them, you start to get a beautiful feeling.

It’s a feeling of relief but mixed with some kind of longing, too. The longing rises up from a very deep part of you that remembers what it was like to see things like this all the time.

When we say F**k It we turn the clock back. We unlearn meaning and smash the things that we have come to think matter.

Even the most enlightened people have a weak moment from time to time. And Hay House author John C. Parkin is one of them. He believes that saying the big expletive is good for the soul! He calls it the ultimate spiritual way and he even named his amusing and lighthearted new book after it. John (the son of Anglican preachers and noted spiritual teacher of Eastern wisdom) feels that saying F**k It to some of the things that really bug you on your life journey will ultimately set you free from the attachment to such meaningless things—so much so that you’ll actually find more meaning in your life. And John practices what he preaches. He said F**k It to a very lucrative job in London and now lives in Italy where he teaches regular F**k It classes at his new retreat center The Hill That Breathes. John’s new book F**k It is now available. For more about John’s lighthearted approach to life, click here.

from Hay House, Inc.’s Present Moments, September 2010 http://hayhouse.com

There is a part of my soul

That is like a child

Learning to walk again

For the first time

Again and again.

Those are my words.

Imagine living your entire life in fear, only you don’t realize you’re living in fear, because your brain is so fast at learning that it has figured out exactly the behaviors you need to do in each moment to keep yourself safe. It’s not that good at protecting you from physical danger, but luckily you are also surrounded by other people who do everything in their power to keep you from doing anything that might involve physical movement.

Since fear is constant, and your brain is desperately seeking ways to keep you out of danger, the proxy for safety is people liking you, people praising you, people having nice things to say about you. It’s the next best thing your brain has latched onto because there is so little kindness, so little softness, so little trust in your environment that you have to go foraging for scraps of these things wherever you can find them. You’re like a bottom feeder in the fish tank of love.

Luckily you have a lot going for you in many ways. You have a nice smile, a body that found ways to move in non-dangerous physical ways, and a brain so skilled at adapting that you can become almost anything you need to be in order to please the people around you. This has made you appear “successful” in many systems of your society – school, in particular.

The thing you realize one day when you’re nearly 35 years old is that there is a part of yourself that is in its infancy. It’s the part of you that trusts yourself. It’s the part of yourself that knows you are loved in every moment, without fear of anything happening to you. It’s the part of you that will never die, even after your physical body leaves this form.

The other thing you realize is that in nurturing the self-trust and self-love parts of yourself, you’ve been weaning the addicted part of your brain slowly, gradually, off its tight grip on the need to please each and every g*dd%mn person in the environment. This has been incredibly painful for the approval-addicted part of your brain. Every time you “let someone down” it’s like dangling a needle in front of a strung-out junkie and saying, “You can’t have any!”.

You’ve made incredible progress, and you haven’t done it alone. You’ve let go of toxic relationships without blinking an eye, and you’ve welcomed in tons of empty space where there were once piles of junk. You’ve faced your own fears, heard the voices telling you that you were worthless and devaluing yourself and never doing enough, and you moved ahead into uncharted territory. In that field beyond right and wrong (the one where Rumi will be meeting you), you’ve discovered something for the first time that feels like the birthright you’ve always had. You’ve experienced pure joy, pure freedom, pure love OF YOURSELF without any voices, without any judgments, without any need to be right or good or praised or successful.

At times it felt “wrong”, but you have been gaining wisdom and realizing that the “wrong” label comes from that addicted part of your brain that wants another hit of approval from the old sources.

Then one day those old sources come flying back in your face. They show up in your email inbox, on the phone, even in physical form in your own house. They resonate at the old familiar frequencies. Yet this time, they don’t hit you in the same way. They don’t feel “good” in the way they used to when your addicted brain was running the show. However, they trigger that part of your addicted brain in a huge way. They remind that part of your brain of the fact that you have been withholding and depriving it of approval all this time. It’s like a wild animal that was sedated, captured, and then slowly wakes up from its stupor, only to find itself in a cage.

The rage is intense. You can’t listen in the same way. You want to flush yourself of the frequencies that are being blasted in your ears, resonating through your body, at a constant, rapid-fire pace. You want to flood yourself with something that is good.

Luckily you have your own practices that bring you joy. Luckily you have cultivated a reliable internal compass that you TRUST and brings you back to your center. Luckily you have a community of people who are more than excited to see you as you are, in your joy and in your freedom, and whose voices you don’t hear in your head afterward.

You see that you’ve been living in someone else’s dream for a very long time. You feel anger, mostly directed at yourself for not knowing better earlier, not being stronger sooner. And then, after you breathe a little, give yourself a little space (OK, a lot), you see that you were given your particular life path for a reason that is unknowable. You are grateful. Or you try to be, with each breath.

You see that everyone is human, no one holds the absolute truth for anyone else, and that the spiritual journey is unique for everyone. You recognize that your greatest lesson is to learn to trust yourself. Your greatest challenge and gift will be to learn to love yourself fully. You have been practicing, working, following your path in life, in order to come to the greatest possible level of self-trust and self-love that you can in this lifetime.

Imagine.

“If you think you’re enlightened, go spend four days with your family of origin.” – Ram Dass

Lately I’ve been feeling pulled in many different directions. Before I blame this feeling on the imminent arrival of my parents to stay with me and observe my current life, I’m finally sitting down to write about (and perhaps discover with more clarity) why.

After a totally blissful July of following the music that was flowing from me – bringing with it new people, new places, new experiences, and new ways of being seen – I entered August with a renewed sense of awareness that I needed to be “working” on something. “My newfound sense of freedom and joy could not possibly be the truth of my life experience”, said an ancient part of my brain. “Life just can’t be that easy for you!”

I recognized those thoughts as ones I could choose to believe or not. I saw myself as an observer. I talked it out with my coaching buddy. She reminded me of how far I have indeed come on my path toward the Core of Peace I now know is my birthright and within me at all times.

And still, as I drive from one place to the next – from home to studio to the next place on my agenda – I can’t help but feel scattered. Like my energy is more diffuse than I would like it to be. I notice that my business card has four identities – musician, life coach, writer, and speaker. I now notice that this is symbolic of the fact that in my life I have never felt that it was enough for me to be just one thing – namely, me. I had compartments where I kept my identities and developed them diligently, but rarely did the boundaries of these containers spill into one another.

Or at least I thought.

Today was Day One of my second program with Christine Kane, the brilliant life coach for women and creative entrepreneurs. She herself is a singer/songwriter and speaks so clearly and eloquently about her early years of depression, bulimia, poverty, and struggle, before she turned her life around and created a mid-six-figure coaching business along with a successful recording career.

She seems to be “doing it all”. But maybe that’s not the message I need to be hearing from her story. Maybe the message is that she finally got her priorities straight. She finally decided what was important to her. She finally stopped running after other people’s dreams and expectations, and away from fear and scarcity. She finally got grounded and centered and focused on the only energy she can possibly contain – her own.

I’m feeling ready for this next step in upleveling my life and my business. I am ready for my business to serve my soul, for my gifts to reach the right people who will benefit from them, for my daily life to invigorate me and provide me with a personal context and purpose for my work in the world.

I am not yet quite ready to decide which of these balls I’m juggling will have to be let go, or delegated, or modified in order to create space for what needs to be born.

If there’s one thing I keep seeing and learning about creativity, it’s that it requires space. The ingredient missing from most people’s lives is not some special talent (we all have something), not some secret passion (we all have one, no matter how deeply buried), not some burning desire (we all have this too). It’s SPACE.

The greatest discipline I practice each day is being conscious about NOT being on the internet, NOT clicking around mindlessly in Facebook, NOT cleaning out my email inbox for the better part of half a day, NOT launching into tasks before I reflect on where I want my mindset to be focused first.

In other words, it takes more conscious effort to eliminate unnecessary things from my “To Do” list than to “get stuff done”. Our world is now designed to fill up our time by default and fill it up without limits. It takes a new kind of engagement and internal connectedness to be truly creative in this environment. The upside of all this connectivity is that the opportunities for spreading your work – your energy, your gifts – around the planet quickly and cheaply are multiplying by the moment.

As I think about how I want to engage and with whom, I want to get to know this feeling of being pulled apart. My hunch is I’m not the only one experiencing this, and that the road to wholeness is a path we would love to travel together.