This is my life, and it’s sometimes good

windy hillLet’s see… what have I done this week? Well, I taught my regular writing class at university, I welcomed a professional storyteller into my class to do a short workshop (and took her to lunch because she fascinates me), I made arrangements for an upcoming retreat I’m hosting, I visited the retreat centre where the retreat will be held (photo above), I wrote a lesson for Lead with your Wild Heart, I did a coaching session with a new client and accepted her invitation to do a workshop with the staff of her yoga studio,  I promoted my upcoming Creative Writing for Self Discovery class, and tomorrow I’m heading out of town for a couple of days with my daughters.

Wow. When I break it down like that, I suddenly realize that this… THIS is the life I dreamed of two and a half years ago when I started self-employment.

I suppose you could say I manifested my dreams.

But there’s another part to this story that I refuse to ignore.

On the way to my dreams… I had a LOT of moments when I worried whether I’d have enough money at the end of the month to pay the bills, I went through a really rocky period in my marriage, my father-in-law died, my mom was diagnosed with cancer,  she went through the horrors of chemo, and then I watched her die, I had some significant business failures, and my husband had a heart attack. (There’s more, but I don’t want to overwhelm you with the details.)

Would you say that I manifested that too?

The truth is, life is full of the yin and yang of happiness and sadness, darkness and light, dreams coming true and dreams crashing at our feet, love and betrayal, life and death, success and failure, grief and joy. It’s all part of the package and it all matters. You don’t get to choose one or the other – the yin or the yang.

No matter how hard you pray or meditate or think happy thoughts, you won’t be spared the heartache that is part of the package of your life. You don’t get the happiness without the sadness. And it you try to push past the sadness in favour of the happiness, you’ll miss one of the best teachers of your life.

I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t dream because it might not come true – not at all! I’m a BIG dreamer and I’ll keep dreaming until the day I die! I’m just saying that there are no guarantees, and sometimes your dreams will shift with your evolving life. It’s all part of the journey, and you need to develop your flexibility and resilience skills along with your dreaming skills.

The best you can do is to learn to ride the waves and be present in the journey rather than focusing only on the destination. Hold your seat lightly, reach for the tools that keep you from crashing too hard on the rocks, trust the other people in your boat, relax when the water is calm, prepare yourself for when the water is rough, and be present in the flow. And when you find yourself capsizing, poke your head above the water and swim for your life.

Whether you’re in the rapids or the calm waters, remember this – everything that comes your way is meant to be your teacher. If you forget that, and try to live only in the calm waters, your growth will be stunted and you won’t get anywhere. Just like the water needs to flow in order to stay fresh, you need to move through the rapids in order to thrive.

This week was good, but last week was hard. I don’t know what I’ll get next week, but I’m here, present, trusting that I have the courage and resilience to handle it. Through the ups and the downs, many of the things I’ve longed for are coming to me, but many of them have also been discarded along the journey.  The best I can do is to keep my paddle in the water and keep rowing.

What if I have courage?

occupy love 4

Three social scientists once conducted a series of experiments to determine which was more effective, “declarative” self-talk (I will fix it!) or “interrogative” self-talk (Can I fix it?). They began by presenting a group of participants with some anagrams to solve (for example, rearranging the letters in “sauce” to spell “cause”.) Before the participants tackled the problem, though, the researchers asked half of them to take a minute to ask themselves whether they would complete the task. The other half of the group was instructed to tell themselves that they would complete the task.

In the end, the self-questioning group solved significantly more anagrams than the self-affirming group.

The researchers – Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois, along with Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi – then enlisted a new group to try a variation with a twist of trickery: “We told participants that we were interested in people’s handwriting practices. With this pretense, participants were given a sheet of paper to write down 20 times one of the following word pairs: Will I, I will, I, or Will. Then they were asked to work on a series of 10 anagrams in the same way participants in Experiment One did.”

This experiment resulted in the same outcome as the first. People primed with “Will I” solved nearly twice as many anagrams as people in the other three groups. In follow-up experiments, the same pattern continued to hold. Those who approach a task with questioning self-talk did better than those who began with affirming self-talk.

I’ve been intrigued with this research ever since I heard about it a couple of years ago. Because of it, I often invite my coaching clients to create question mandalas rather than setting goals or developing strategic plans. Questions tend to release possibilities in us in ways that goals and declarations do not.

Lately I’ve been playing with this idea again in the area of courage. There are some areas in my life in which I know that I am still letting fear keep me small. I am conflict-averse, and so I shrink back and avoid challenging people when I know that it will make me feel uncomfortable. This has been cropping up in my teaching lately, where I’ve had to challenge some students for plagiarism and other unacceptable behaviours. I cringe any time I have to deal with these situations, and yet I know that I am not doing my students any favours by simply avoiding the tough conversations.

I also still deal with some fear around creating controversy in my work, or teaching things that people don’t like to hear or just don’t receive well. There’s a scared little child inside me who just wants to be liked, and I’m trying to coax her out of her hiding place into a bigger life.

In my effort to build my courage, I decided to use the question technique. Instead of telling myself “I WILL BE COURAGEOUS” each time something fearful shows up, I simply ask myself “Can I be courageous?” Usually the answer to that is “yes”.  I carry enough courage stories with me that I can remind myself of times in the past when I’ve been courageous, so I know it can be done. Then, before I take any action, I sit with it a bit more and ask “what will happen if I am courageous?” and I play the scenario out in my mind. I play with the best that might happen and I play with the worst. Usually I realize that the worst is not as scary as I think it will be. If it still seems pretty scary though, I ask myself “can I live with the consequences of this action?” And again, usually the answer is “yes” because my story basket is full of reminders of the tough things that I have lived through in the past.

Almost every time I’ve done this little run-through in my mind, I’ve been able to step into the courageous act more boldly than I expected. In the past week, I’ve been in several of those uncomfortable situations, and each time, I’ve had more courage than I usually do.

And you know what? When I’ve had courage, shored up not by my resolve but by the stories in my story basket, people have almost always responded positively instead of defensively. The question approach not only gives me more courage, it gives me more grace in that courage. Resolve makes me more forceful, questions make me more open. People respond well to openness.

If you want to try the question approach to courage, here’s how to get started:

1. Fill your story basket with stories of courage. Take some quiet time with your journal and write down the stories that come to you when you ask yourself the question, “when have I had courage in the past?”

2. Fill your story basket with stories of resilience. Again in your journal, ask yourself, “when have I lived through difficult situations and survived and thrived?

3. The next time fear shows up, pause for a moment and ask yourself “Can I be courageous”? Reach back into your story basket and pull out the stories that remind you that you CAN.

4. Ask yourself the next question, “What will happen if I am courageous?” Run through the story each way – the best that can happen and the worst. (If you have the time, you may want to journal about this, but you can also run the scenarios in your head.)

5. When you’re sitting with the worst that can happen, ask yourself, “Can I live with the consequences of my actions?” Reach back into your story basket and find the stories of resilience that tell you that YES you can survive the worst.

6. Bonus question… Ask yourself, “Will I be happier if I am courageous or if I shrink from this in fear?” I think you already know the answer to this.

You do not have to be good

Rache & banjo

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.

I keep coming back to this elegant little slice of Mary Oliver’s poem, Wild Geese.

You do not have to be good. You can be beautifully imperfect. You can mess up. You can fall flat on your face. You can embarrass yourself in front of your friends. You can let down someone you love.

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles. You can let go of all of the “shoulds”, the “have-tos”, the obligations. You can lower your expectations. You don’t have to be responsible for the outcome. You can pour yourself a drink and sit down even if the sink is full of dishes.

It’s been a tough week – an emotional roller-coaster kind of week. I have beat myself up a thousand times. I have failed to meet my own expectations. I’ve been convinced that I should give up this work and go pour coffee at Starbucks. I’ve let the tape recorder run in my head that says “You’re foolish. Your ideas are stupid. People just don’t get what you’re trying to teach, so why bother?”

A week ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop in rural Manitoba after realizing that the facility I’d booked for an upcoming retreat just wasn’t going to cut it, and that little failure was letting my brain re-run all of the other failures in my life. The students in my class that weren’t engaging with what I was teaching, the failures to grow my business as much as I’d hoped, the crazy amount of work I’m doing right now for not enough pay, etc., etc. You know the tape – you’ve been there too.

In that moment, with my journal in front of me, I had a sudden awareness. “You are going to have to walk through the shadow before you can step back into the light. There is more for you to learn in the darkness, and you can’t get to that learning without another trip through.”

Sure enough, the shadow showed up big time this week, and I knew it was there for a reason. I knew it was there to teach me. I wallowed in self-doubt and self-pity, and everything that fell apart was surely my fault. By Saturday night, when my daughter Maddy’s birthday party threatened to be a flop because the pool at the hotel we were staying at was closed, I had gone so far into that deep dark place that I was sure THAT was my fault too. And when people didn’t seem to get what I was teaching at a workshop and in my regular class, I took that on as well. “Surely I am failing,” the shadow whispered to me.

It was all good, though, and important. It was all the things I needed to learn in a deeper way. It was teaching me that I can fail, I can let things fall apart, and that doesn’t mean that I am a failure. It was re-teaching me that I need to return to my spiritual practices – my touchstones – to help me stay grounded in times of darkness. It was reminding me that, no matter how far I go in this journey, I still have to be willing to risk and fail, willing to surrender to the God of my understanding, and willing to let go of the outcome.

Last night, I was reading The Three Marriages by David Whyte, where he shares a story of leading a trek in Bhutan. On the way out of the mountains, everything was falling apart. He was in conflict with their arrogant and incompetent guide, and they’d lost one of the women on the trail. He spent all night looking for the woman, in the dark, in the rain, on a mountain trail. All the while, he was beating himself up for his failings and for not having more courage to confront the incompetent guide.

Suddenly he had a moment of profound peace and he knew that the woman would show up at the camp the next morning.

Sure enough, the woman appeared just as he’d envisioned. She’d spent a remarkable, though frightening, night in an empty cabin on the trail, and the same sense of peace had come over her. A few weeks later, when she went to Cambodia to pick up the baby she’d been planning to adopt, she found that the baby that was meant for her was born on that very night she was alone on the trail. She realized that she was meant to be alone that night, walking through the darkness and the fear to a place of calm, to be part of her baby’s birthing process.

David came home from that journey with a renewed sense of understanding of how even his failings can be used for a bigger plan.

You don’t have to be good. You can screw up big time. Your failings may open a door for someone else into a place where they need to be.

You are part of a bigger plan, and you don’t have to get everything right to be part of it. You just have to show up, do your best, and TRUST.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Aaaahhhh…. what a relief!

There is good work to do

I sat in a small room at the hospital, between my friend Terence and a social worker and across from two police officers. I had just been raped by a man high on glue who’d climbed in my bedroom window. Terence had brought me to the hospital.

“You need to think seriously before you lay charges,” said the social worker. “It’s not just about bringing someone to justice, it’s about whether or not you feel you can handle the trial. If this goes to trial, it probably won’t happen for at least a year, and then you’ll have to drag up all of your memories of this horrible night again. Not only that, but lawyers will pry into your personal life and the choices that you made – things that might have brought this on or made it easy for the rapist to get into your room. It will feel like you’re being raped all over again.”

I was shocked. I hadn’t realized that the decision about whether or not the police would go after the man who raped me and whether or not he would be punished rested on my shoulders.

Despite what the social worker said, it seemed like a no-brainer to me. Of COURSE I wanted the man to be caught and punished, especially if it might stop him from climbing through the window of some other young woman and raping her too.

They never caught him, though I did have to visit the police station to view mug shots once or twice (much harder than they make it seem in the police dramas on TV) and I had to write down all of the details I could remember, in case he was found a few years later.

I never had to face trial and, fortunately, I had a strong support system that helped me heal from the trauma (though I still show the emotional scars now and then). Although I heard a few questions about why I’d left the window open on a stifling hot night and why I hadn’t just kicked him in the groin (the answer: because he was holding a blade over my head and tried to choke me to death when I angered him), nobody went so far as to blame me for my own rape.

Unfortunately, the same can not be said for the young woman who was raped by a couple of football players in Steubenville last August. According to the media, her community, and the people at the party who stood by and did nothing, she was raped because she was a slut, because she was drunk, because she deserved it, etc., etc.

To make matters worse, she’s now had death threats because she dared to accuse the football-playing favoured sons of the community. And she has to be subjected to the media who shows blatant bias toward the unfortunate rapists whose lives have been ruined by this.

I can hardly tell you what this story does to me. It’s bringing up anger, empathy, sadness, despair, and countless other emotions. I am shocked by the way that the media has treated this story. I am angered by the young people at the party who knew what was going on and didn’t stop it. I am outraged by a coach who apparently knew about it and laughed it off.

Mostly, I am disappointed that so little has changed since I was raped. Back then – nearly 25 years ago – I made a conscious decision that I would do what I could to bring the man to justice, even if it meant I wouldn’t be treated well by the court system. I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I chose not to press charges, and six months later I heard that he’d done the same thing to another girl.

I can’t say that I’ve done everything I could to work for change for rape victims, but I have certainly given a fair bit of energy toward trying to change the flawed cultural paradigms that let rapists get away with it and let victims carry the blame. In those 25 years, I have continued to carry hope that we can change our views and our justice system so that victims aren’t raped again when they enter the court system.

I must admit, though, when I listened to the CNN reporters lament the way these boys lives have been ruined by this verdict, all the while ignoring how dramatically this young woman’s life has been altered, I was filled with both rage and despair. Has my hope in the last 25 years been all for naught? Has nothing changed? In fact, I wonder if it has actually gotten worse, considering we now have a term for “rape culture” and we have politicians who speak openly about how the women can sometimes be blamed and the woman’s body can shut down and avoid pregnancy from a rape.

Yesterday, I let myself dip into despair and a sense of utter futility. What’s the use in working for change when things only get worse? What’s the use in fighting when it feels like a losing battle?

At the same time as this news was coming out, we received another huge dump of snow on our city and the cold weather has returned, even though it’s the middle of March and it should be starting to feel like Spring. My despair over the weather mirrored my despair over the state of the world. As I shoveled the snow in our driveway, I wondered if Spring would ever come again. “What’s the point in shoveling all this snow if we’re just going to get another dump again next week?”

Even as I shoveled, though, I knew that Spring will come again. I have lived through forty-seven winters, and that’s enough experience to know that winter never lasts forever – Spring always arrives, whether it’s in March or May.

I also knew I had a choice to make – get stuck in the snow the next time I try to pull my van out of the driveway, or keep shoveling it out of the way each time it falls. Similarly, I could get lost in despair over the Steubenville rape and give up my belief that change is possible, or strengthen my resolve and keep sharing my stories and keep working for change.

I chose the latter. A life without some hope and some desire to move forward into a better future is not a real life at all.

I am reminded of a song that my friend Steve Bell wrote, inspired by a woman who wrote a piece after her cousin committed suicide. Despite her despair, there is laundry to be done and she knows she must carry on.

We’re not alone
laundry awash in the mid-morning sun
you can see angels dance as they try blouses on
there is good work to do

We’re not alone
casting long shadows as the day wears on
Billy had troubles, now Billy is gone
there is good work to do

kissing eyelids closed like caskets
breaking bread and filling baskets
pressing dress and swabbing soiled floors

fast remains of feast and fanion
evidence of ghost companions
greeting some and showing some the door

we’re not alone
wordlessly stung by a sliver blue moon
closed casket wake in a cold living room
there is good work to do

Listen here: [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/78760610″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Yes, there is good work to do, and I will keep doing it. I may not be able to single-handedly wipe out rape culture, but I can teach my daughters that they are beautiful and that their bodies are their own and nobody has a right to violate them. And I can encourage my nephews and the young men around me who are living with integrity and respect for women.

I did some of that good work yesterday. I played the CNN clip for my Public Relations students and we talked about media bias and what we as concerned citizens can do to challenge our media to report with integrity and compassion. And then I welcomed Barbara Judt, the CEO of Osborne House, the local women’s shelter, into the classroom to talk about the work that they do to protect women who’ve been abused and to help them heal from the violence. My students are in the midst of creating a campaign in support of Osborne House as their class project, and in the process, they’re learning about violence against women and are having lots of conversations about what we can do to contribute to making their lives better.

Yes, there are bad things happening in the world, but if I live in a world in which a classroom full of students can get passionate about doing something for women who are victims of violence, then I can continue to live with hope.

Indeed, there is good work to do.

Honouring women of courage on International Women’s Day

women in circle

From my Facebook feed…

I wanted to write a “real” blog post for International Women’s Day, but a head cold has made my brain all fuzzy and every time I tried, the words got jumbled up on the way to my keyboard. So instead of a blog post, I raise my glass to the incredible women of courage and resilience in my life…
– Here’s to my beautiful mother, who raised four gifted children and gave us so much love that we knew we wereinfinitely better off than those families who had far more money than we ever had.
– Here’s to my soul sister who gave her heart to a tiny baby, raised that baby as her own, and then watched helplessly as the powers-that-be returned the nearly-two-year-old to her parents.
– Here’s to the courageous young teacher I met in India, who gave up all of her comfort to teach school children on a remote, poverty-stricken, flood-prone island.
– Here’s to the friend, deep in grief after her 21 year old son decided he had nothing left to live for, and the other friend, deep in grief after her 18 year old son died suddenly of an apparent heart attack.
– Here’s to the young woman who left the city for the Ethiopian desert and dared to lead a water diversion project to great success, despite the fact that the locals told her “if it’s run by a woman, it will never work.”
– Here’s to the Ugandan woman, who had the courage to forgive and then befriend the mother of the man who kidnapped her daughter, forced her to serve as a child soldier, and fathered two of her children
– Here’s to my three beautiful daughters, who brave the pitfalls of pre-teen and teen life and dare to let their personalities shine despite the pressures to conform.
– Here’s to the beautiful circle of women who are part of my Lead with your Wild Heart program, who are stepping forward with courage onto the rocky, glorious, and sometimes treacherous paths that leads to their most authentic hearts.
– Here’s to you, my friend. May you have the courage to speak your truth, live with bold love, challenge the oppressors, and let your gifts shine for all the world to see.

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