by Heather Plett | Oct 4, 2012 | Beauty, beginnings, Community, Creativity, fearless, hope, journey, Leadership
I have seen too many wounded women.
I have watched them lose the light in their eyes when the shadows overcame them.
I have heard a thousand reasons why they no longer give themselves permission to live truthfully.
I have seen too many wild hearts tamed.
I have witnessed the loss of courage when it’s just too hard to keep being an edgewalker in a world that values conformists.
I’ve recognized the fear as they take tiny brave steps, hoping and praying the direction is right.
“I feel guilty whenever I indulge in my passions. It feels selfish and irresponsible.”
“My husband doesn’t like it when I talk about feminine wisdom, so I keep it to myself.”
“If I write the things that are burning in my heart, it will freak people out. So I remain silent.”
“I used to love wandering in the woods, but I never have time for it anymore.”
“I just want to have a real conversation for a change. I want to feel safe to speak my heart.”
“My job makes me feel dead inside, but I don’t know what else I can do.”
“People expect me to be strong and hide my feelings now that I’m in leadership. I feel like I have too much bottled up inside that I can’t share with anyone.”
“Sometimes I think there must be something wrong with me. I just don’t fit in.”
“There is so much longing in the world. I get lost in that longing and don’t know how to sit with it.”
“I wanted to be a painter, but I needed a real career. I haven’t painted in years.”
“People think I’m strange when I share my ideas, so I’ve learned to keep them to myself.”
“I can’t go to church anymore. I don’t feel understood there. But I haven’t found another place where I can find community, so I often feel lonely.”
“There’s a restless energy inside me that wants to be free. I long to be free.”
So much woundedness has been laid tenderly on the ground at my feet.
So many women want their stories validated. Their fears held gently. Their tiny bits of courage honoured.
I hear them whisper “please hear me” through clenched teeth.
I see the tears threaten to overflow out of stoic eyes.
I recognize the longing.
I know the brokenness.
I feel the ache of silenced dreams.
They come to me because they know I have been broken too.
They trust me with their whispers because I am acquainted with fear.
They look to me for courage and understanding because they witness my own long and painful journey back to my wild heart.
I see you.
I know you.
I honour you.
I love you.
You are beautiful.
You are courageous.
You are okay.
You can be wild again.
You can trust your heart. She will not lie to you.
You can live more fully in your body. She will welcome you back.
You can go home to that part of you that feels like it’s been lost.
You can find a circle of people who will understand you.
You can step back into courage.
You have permission to be an edgewalker.
You have permission to speak the things that you’re longing to say.
You have permission to be truly yourself.
You have permission to step away from your responsibilities for awhile.
You have permission to wander in the woods.
You also have permission to be afraid.
And to wait for the right time.
And to sit quietly while you build up your courage.
You don’t need to do this all alone.
And you don’t need to do it all at once.
You don’t need to shout before you’re ready to whisper.
You don’t need to dance before you’ve tried simply swaying to the music.
You can give your woundedness time to heal.
Take a small step back into your self.
Move a little closer to your wild heart.
Pause and touch the wounded places in you.
Just breathe… slowly and deeply.
And when you’re ready, we can do this together.
If this post resonates, please consider the following:
1. Join me as I host a circle of amazing women at A Day Retreat for Women of Courage in Winnipeg on October 20th. Pay what you can.
2. I’m creating a new online program called Lead with Your Wild Heart (related to the themes in this post) that feels like a coming together of a thousand ideas that have filled my head in recent years. Add your name to my email list (top right) to be the first to hear about it and to receive a discount.
by Heather Plett | Oct 1, 2012 | Uncategorized
“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.” – David Orr
The above quote could not have appeared at a better time in my Facebook stream. I’ve been in desperate need of a success reboot.
Today marks the second anniversary of my self-employment. Unfortunately, leading up to this date, my brain was playing the “I am a dismal failure as an entrepreneur” tape on perma-loop.
If you measure my last two years by any success-meter that the corporate world would value, here’s what it looks like:
- Last year, I made only a third of what I was making in the non-profit management position I walked away from to become self-employed.
- This year is shaping up to be only slightly better financially.
- Most of the major consulting contracts I’ve negotiated have either fallen apart altogether or been cut in half part way through the project.
- Several of the classes I’ve offered online or in person have had only 5 or so people sign up.
- I had to cancel one of my classes when only one person registered.
- I have burned through a lot more of my retirement savings than I’d intended to.
- I still can’t afford the reno project we’ve been dreaming of for half a dozen years.
- I’m giving up one of the courses I teach regularly at the university because it’s become painfully clear that my skills don’t suit the expectations for this class.
- I have very little work lined up for the next few months.
- My writing submissions have been rejected more often than accepted.
- I’ve been scouring the want ads lately for jobs that might take less of my energy than this relentless self-promotion requires.
It’s not hard to see where the discouragement comes from. This self-employment thing is all kinds of HARD and I haven’t figured out how to make it lucrative. It’s tempting to accompany that loop tape with other failure stories like “I’m not cut out for this”, and “all those other people who make this look easy are smarter than me.”
HOWEVER… the story doesn’t end there. When I work with clients, I use a narrative coaching style in which we work on replacing old worn-out stories with new ones. When I change the definition of success, for example, the picture looks a whole lot different.
- I have developed an incredible network of people from all over the world. I’ve had (and continue to have) meaningful conversations with many of them.
- I’ve done one-on-one coaching with more than 2 dozen people and I’ve had the pleasure of watching almost every one of them have an a-ha moment when they re-wrote the stories that were holding them back.
- Even when only 5 people completed my last Creative Discovery class, every one of them reported that the experience changed them.
- I’ve received hundreds (maybe even thousands) of emails and comments from people who’ve been deeply impacted by my writing.
- In each of the eleven university classes I’ve taught, there have been at least a few students who have connected with me in a deep way. I still get lovely emails from some of them, including one today that said “you continue to inspire me”.
- One of my coaching clients was so transformed by our work together that she gifted me with registration and lodging at my favourite annual authentic leadership gathering.
- I’ve had the opportunity to teach workshops and classes in all of the subject areas that I dreamed of teaching when I started this journey – leadership, creativity, community, storytelling, and writing.
- I co-hosted an international women’s gathering and have had the pleasure of hosting several other women’s circles.
- I’ve written a book that gets better with each edit and I’m committed to publishing it some day.
- I’ve created multiple offerings that have reached people who said they were exactly what they needed at that time.
- Together with my beloved, I’ve done some deep and soulful work on my marriage and managed to save it from the brink of disaster.
- I have been more present for my children than I was when I was employed full time.
- I have been able to spend extra time with my mom these past few weeks.
- I have done some deep personal exploration and grown in ways I never anticipated.
No, I’m not financially successful and there’s a good chance I never will be, but, on this, my second anniversary of self-employment, I can hold my head high and call myself a “peacemaker, healer, restorer, storyteller, and lover.” That’s worth a whole lot more than a few dollars in my bank account, or even the shiny new kitchen I dream of having some day.
How do you define success?
by Heather Plett | Sep 27, 2012 | Uncategorized
Some days
when all it takes to make you cry
is a heap of dirty laundry and an empty bottle of laundry soap,
and you can’t stop viewing the future
through the lens of your self pity,
then the best that you can do
is find a place to sit where nature holds your wild heart
in her tender hands
and kisses it where it’s broken.
by Heather Plett | Sep 24, 2012 | journey, practice
Yesterday, Ronna Detrick and I (and the women who’d gathered in circle with us) had a heart-opening conversation about pilgrimage, community, story-telling, and feminine spirituality. (You can listen to the recording here.) I love having conversations like this because, even if I’m the one doing the teaching, I always end up walking away with more clarity than I had before.
At the end of the call, after I’d shared several stories of the “hardships, darkness, and peril” along my own pilgrimage, Ronna asked me to talk about how I hang onto hope in the middle of the dark times.
It’s a timely question for me, and it’s been on my mind since our conversation. As much for myself as for you, the following are some reminders of how to reach for hope when life knocks us off our feet.
1.) Find community. I can’t stress this strongly enough. You NEED community. You need a circle of people who will support you and who won’t judge you when you’re falling apart. You need to let yourself be held when you’re not feeling strong enough to walk on your own. There is no weakness in admitting that you need other people.
2.) Find wild spaces to wander in. When I’m falling apart and hardly know how to articulate the depths of the pain, I head to the woods or the riverbank. I find the Goddess there, in the most unexpected ways – in the wind, in the waves on the river, in the twinkling light reflected off the water, in the eyes of the deer who stands and stares at me. I think the Goddess is especially comfortable showing up in wild spaces because she has a wild heart herself. I feel comforted and more alive when I step out of the woods and return to my hope.
3.) Rest. It’s always important to rest, but when you’re going through especially difficult times, you need to find even more rest than usual. Deep, soulful rest that replenishes your strength. Take naps and hot baths, curl up with a good book, let people do some of your chores for you – just rest.
4.) Give yourself permission to cry. A social worker once told me that tears are the window-washers of the soul. It might sound a little corny, but it’s true. The tears help clean us and they help improve our vision. Let those deep sobs erupt from your belly and don’t try to keep them inside. Tears held in for too long will drown you.
5.) Find spiritual practices that sustain you. I’ve said this many times and I’ll say it again – spiritual practices are especially necessary when your pilgrimage gets difficult. Your spiritual practice can be as unique as you are – dancing, singing, walking, painting, praying, meditating, yoga, or photography. These practices shift us out of our left-brain thought processes that want to fix our problems or find logic in them or rush through them to the next easy place on the journey. Inside the practice, we rest in the unknowing space, where the problems serve as our teachers rather than our adversaries.
by Heather Plett | Sep 22, 2012 | journey, Labyrinth
This story has no clear beginning and no clear ending. It’s a pilgrimage story, and without going all the way back to the beginning of my life (and even the lives that were lived before mine that thread through mine), or waiting until I’m ready to die, I can only tell you about a small portion of that pilgrimage.
This week I’ve been revisiting my memoir, hoping to bring it to completion and eventually get it published. I set it aside months ago, thinking it was almost finished, but feeling like I might still be missing a piece of the puzzle.
I think I’ve found that puzzle piece. It started with adding the above words to the beginning. The story is now a pilgrimage story, with no clear beginning and no clear ending.
It used to be simpler. The very first time I tried to write it, it was about the three week period in the hospital waiting for Matthew to be born, and how that impacted me in a deeply spiritual way. The second time I wrote it, it was about a ten year transformation in my life, starting with the arrival of Matthew in my life. I was comparing myself to a caterpillar, going into a cocoon for ten years and eventually emerging as a butterfly. Or Theseus, heading into the labyrinth holding the thread, slaying the minotaur, and emerging victorious. And they all lived happily ever after. The end.
But now, after months of contemplation, I know that it’s not that straight-forward. Transformation is not a clean and simple thing that we can put into time frames or boxes. I’m still transforming. I’m still being stretched. I’m still not a butterfly. I’m heading back into that labyrinth again and again.
And so I am more satisfied calling my journey a pilgrimage. My son’s death was one of a long series of initiations, each one taking me deeper and deeper into my own heart. Each one teaching me how little I actually know. Each one revealing something new about God.
Now I am at a new place in the journey. In past initiations on this pilgrimage, I have lost my innocence, lost a son, lost a father, nearly lost a husband more than once, lost a father-in-law, and lost all of my grandparents. (Incidentally, nearly all of those things happened around this time of year.) I have fought the minotaur many times and returned from the labyrinth scarred and yet stronger. I expect my next initiation will be to learn what it’s like to lose a mother.
My responsibility as a pilgrim is simply to put one foot in front of the other and keep following the path. When the labyrinths appear along the path, I need to trust that a sword and a thread will be provided to help me survive.
If you’re interested in being part of a conversation about life as pilgrimage, join me tomorrow morning as I talk to my friend Ronna Detrick on her virtual Sunday Service at 10 am PST.
Most of us arrive at a sense of self and vocation only after a long journey through alien lands. But this journey bears no resemblance to the trouble-free ‘travel packages’ sold by the tourism industry. It is more akin to the ancient tradition of pilgrimage – ‘a transformative journey to a sacred center’ full of hardships, darkness, and peril. – Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak
I have seen too many wounded women.
