Trusting Yourself

Sometimes things happen that we don't know how to handle. This is a part of life. You handle it the best you can in the moment, you ponder what else could be done later, and you move forward with the lessons you've learned. Nobody knows how to handle life at all times. Nobody has all the information they need at all times. We all have connection to the source of the best information we could have, but it can sometimes be hard to tune in at the precise moment you need it. With practice, it gets easier.

Trust that every action that comes from your best self is enough. Trust that any help you offer is enough. Trust that you are enough. Trust that you being you in this world is the best thing for all of us. 

You Are Worth All The Soup

A teacher gave me an assignment a few months ago and I would tattoo it on my forehead if needles didn’t make me squawk like an indignant chicken:

“Your only job now is to raise your vibration.”

For those who don’t speak hippie, raising your vibration basically means turning up the dial on your joy and happiness. Even turning it up one notch above awful fulfills the assignment. Feeling whatever you’re suppressing because you’re scared or don’t have time or just don’t wanna fulfills the assignment. Stepping away from something frustrating to refill the tank fulfills the assignment.

This metaphor also works with apples. 

As I focus on my new project for writers, I'm realizing just how crucial this kind of self-care is. How crucial every kind of self-care is. I'm getting really noisy about it, actually.

I'm even getting mad. Mad at myself for being so resistant to the idea for so long. Mad at the world for telling us we aren't worth this kind of care, that everyone else deserves it before we do, that taking deep and loving care of ourselves means we're being selfish and self-indulgent. I'm not quite sure how this crossed over from "good idea" to "thing that makes me want to yell and hit things because so few people believe this is true," but here we are. (I haven't hit anything yet, but I reserve the right.)

It just makes me want to curl up and cry. When did we collectively decide we weren't worth taking care of ourselves? When did we decide that our worth was contingent on what we put out, rather than who we are and how we feel? When did we forget that everything we send out into the world is rooted deep within us and if we send things into the world from a place of need and lack and disconnection, our world will absorb that message until it's passed on unconsciously to our friends and our children and everyone else who comes after us?

NOPE. STOP. NO MORE. Because you are worth all the gentleness, all the love, all the hikes, all the naps, all the massages, all the yoga, all the emotional tending, all the however-you-choose-to-define-it self-care you can muster up. You are worth all the soup.

Soup?

Yes, soup. It's one of my favorite parables explaining the idea of growth and self-care. There's a table. You and all your friends and family are sitting around this table. You're all starving. From the ceiling descends a bowl of soup. It lands right in front of you. You are the only one who's allowed to dip your spoon into the soup. No one else can have any soup.

Here's the big question: Do you eat the soup?

Yes. You eat the soup.

Many of us fight this concept, especially if we're accustomed to believing that others are more important than we are or that belonging is more important than our own wellbeing. In some ways, it stems from a good place. We care for others. We want to be with them, we want to understand them, we want to feel connected to them. We all have a deep-seated desire to belong. Historically, we know we need to be part of the herd to survive. Stragglers get eaten by peckish mountain lions, after it chases you around for awhile to get you nice and salty.

You starving to death doesn't help your friends and family. Not even a little bit. Your pain doesn't remove their pain. You being in pain only adds to the pain of the room.

Yes, there's some guilt associated with taking deep and tender care of yourself. Because suddenly you're feeling better than people around you. But the guilt isn't because you aren't taking care of those people - you can't take care of them. They can only take care of themselves. The guilt stems from taking care of yourself when those around you aren't.

Just as your pain would only add to the pain of the room, your happiness also adds to the room. If you're in a happy space, that lightness will lift those around you, even if they don't recognize it. If you're taking care of your body and your emotions, it will show others that they're allowed to do the same. Your joy will show others that joy is possible.

Eat the damn soup. Feel better. Because feeling better is the magic bullet and I will never shut up about it.

Self-Care for Humans

Self-care is not optional. It is necessary. You do not move forward without self-care. You do not establish yourself in your true worth and your true potential without self-care. There is nothing that is more important than caring for yourself physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Anything you do that raises your vibration is self-care. Anything you do that makes you feel joyful is self-care. But be careful here. Sometimes we can fool ourselves into thinking that the joy of a donut is self-care. Sometimes it is. Sometimes that perfectly frosted confection is precisely what you need. But sometimes it's also a way to pretend to comfort yourself when you don't understand what true comfort looks like, or don't feel you deserve to have it. Sometimes it's a way to numb yourself. Sometimes it's a way to fit in with those around you.

As you learn what true self-care looks like, you will discover full awareness around what is true self-care and what is false comfort. When you notice the patterns and behaviors of false self-comfort, don't berate yourself for them. You were doing the best you could with the information you had at the time. Instead, gently reassure yourself that you have better tools now and it's time to play with using them.

Self-care should feel like play. It should feel fun. Sure, sometimes heaving yourself out of bed to go for a run doesn't match your precise definition of "fun", but if that's the case, look at where you could adjust your routines so that the activity you know raises your endorphins and smoothes out the wrinkles and puts the gremlins to sleep becomes a joy, rather than a burden.

Self-care looks like being gentle with yourself. It looks like accepting yourself fully. It looks like investigating where you don't accept yourself and bringing the old voices and the old patterns and the old decisions into the light. Often, when we shine a light on our darkest places, what we feared simply evaporates. Sometimes what we fear comes out to waltz with us for awhile. This is when the deepest self-care is necessary. It's when we need to trust that we are dancing with our demons so that our demons will leave us in peace.

When you're tired, sleep. When you're hungry, sit down for tasty nutrition. When your brain has stopped functioning, allow it to rest. When you sense that your life or habits or routines need an upgrade, ask yourself how you can create something that serves you better. When your emotions are calling for attention, give them some love. When your back hurts, take yourself to someone who knows how to handle painful lumbar regions.

Allow others to support you in your self-care. Many dedicate their life's work to helping others feel better, helping others heal, helping others find what they need to do their own life's work. As you step into nourishing yourself and releasing the self-judgment around this kind of work - for self-care is work - you will find the perfect people to help you find your way.

You are valuable. You are worthy of being cared for. You are allowed and encouraged to care for yourself. Caring for yourself is one of the most necessary and defiant acts of service. Defy the voices that whisper otherwise, defy cultural assumptions that tell you how to be in the world, defy what informs you that you aren't worth this kind of space and care and love. Those voices are only speaking from their own pain, from their own sense of lack. 

Fill yourself to the brim, so that you do not feel that lack. If you begin to feel lack again, know that it's time to refill the well. Fill it as best you can. As with anything else, the more you practice caring for yourself, the better you'll get and the easier it will be. Self-care is the easiest and happiest road to the life you desire, and the one you were meant to live.

Our Stories

His story is not your story. Her story is not your story. Your story is yours alone. Yes, you share your story with others, others play a role in your story as you play a role in the stories of others, but you are ultimately responsible for your own life and how you view your life. You have power over your story. Yes, you can be hurt. Yes, you can be sad and afraid and worried. That can be a part of your story. Once you have allowed your feelings, heard them, asked for what they have to share with you, your story is allowed to change. You are allowed to change. You are allowed to feel what's sad, feel what's painful, feel what's hard, you're allowed to rage against the universe, and then see what that release brings you. Once you send your pain and your fear out into the air, into the space that is meant to take those feelings and transform them for you, your story will change.

Listening to another's story without judgement, without equating it to your own story, is one of the best services to humanity we can provide. We all want to feel heard. To know that our story matters. To know that our story matters every bit as much as another's story. To know that your story does not negate my story, even if we have different experiences.

This does not mean we are required to forgive the unforgivable or sacrifice our own wellbeing on the altar of another. It simply means that we release that which does not serve us so that we can focus on the sweetness of life, the tart lemon of experience, and the heady joy of swirling it all together.

Every person's story matters. Every voice is crucial. Every life is a light and when we can accept our own light and the light of our fellow humans, that light will power the universe.

The Power of Five Minutes

When you're flying apart - not in a dire way, not in the life-has-just-crumbled-around-me way - but when you feel like you have too many things to do without sufficient clock-time to do them. This is when you sit quietly for five minutes.

Yes, it feels like the absolute very last thing you should be doing. But this is when it's most important. When the world is tugging insistently at your hem, you need to sit down and listen to you. What truly needs doing now? What's your best next step? How can you care for yourself when so many things are happening? These are the questions to ask and, if you listen, the answers will become clear. Allow yourself the space to expand your ribs with quiet air and the time to allow your brain to draw in all its thoughts, pull them to the center of your head, and drop them into your heart space. In that moment, you can allow your heart to lead you into what needs to be next.

It may be the next thing on your to-do list, it may be something entirely unexpected. That quiet voice inside you may say, Now is the time to work. Or it may say, Now is the time to rest. You may even get lucky and hear, Nothing you do today will turn out well until you take the time to walk on the sand or shift your feet in the cool grass.

If that voice tells you to do something, life will be smoother and kinder if you do it.

If you're worried about listening to the wrong voice, use your feeling center as guidance. Does the advice bring you peace? Or does it make you agitated? If you feel agitated, you're probably listening to fear or one of a hundred voices in your head and your life that have their own agenda. If it makes you feel peace, then it is most likely your intuition. If you still aren't sure, ask for confirmation.

If it still feels haywire and awry and you're not sure what to listen to or what to pay attention to, that's okay. Intuition is a muscle - the more we use it, the stronger it gets. Five minutes every day will take you far.

And it may take a mere five minutes to realize that your to-do list isn't the hell-frazzle you suspected. Maybe it's now full of ease, even joy.

Where Money and Emotion Tango

So many of our human issues are tied up in money. Both on a global scale and on a deeply personal one. Money in and of itself is a neutral force. But money easily absorbs whatever emotions we want to plaster on top of it. Money represents so much to us - love, power, success, freedom. Any one of us can have any one of these things without money, but we throw money up as a barrier to what we want. I know I sure do.

My tendency to under earn throughout my adult life has affected my self-esteem and my belief in my talent and my success. At times, to an unreasonable degree. Lots of people slam face first into this particular brick wall - especially artists.

When tying my self-worth up in my belief that lack of money equals lack of talent, I also had to admit that I never really invested in myself or in the kind of writing I truly want to do. Sure, you don't necessarily need money to do this, but you do need energy. To be fair, much of my work over the past five years was to get me to the point where I felt like I could invest in myself this way. I've been blogging for almost ten years. I wrote stories I cared about. I used words to preserve pieces of myself and my history. I did my best to adjust my lifestyle so that my energy was solid and my sensitivities managed. When I hit rock bottom, I did what I could to lurch upward. When I hit rock bottom again, I flailed and then I found help in the upward lurch. Some writers need writing to find themselves, some writers need to find themselves before they can truly write. I needed both. Not that we are ever found, of course, that's kind of a dumb phrase. We're always here, but maybe we're buried. Or we've slipped away from ourselves, our intuition, our deep knowing of who we are and what we're here to do.

I spent a lot of my thirties hunting for myself, digging through the layers until I found my center. Then I lost my center, found it,  lost it, then I found it again. So it goes with center-finding. Balance is never rock solid, it's always at the mercy of the wind. Until you realize that the wind can't blow you any farther than you choose to go.

But one of the things I still struggle with is money. Lucky for me, now I can struggle with money while actually having some. When my dad died, he left $40,000 buried in the woods (true story) and a piece of property that we decided to sell. Buried treasure doesn't last long when you have hospital bills and mortuaries to pay, but the property sale helped me get to the place where I always believed I should be at this age. Namely, solvent.

Some of me felt guilty that it took a parent dying to get me there. Sometimes it felt like blood money, but most of me didn't feel that bad about that. I was perfectly willing to look at it as a paycheck for dealing with the pain, anguish, stress, grief, and crazy details of death more or less gracefully. (Mostly less.) What I felt guilty about was that the money made so much of a difference to me. Shouldn't I have gotten there on my own? Shouldn't I have figured out money by my mid-30s? Shouldn't I have been more frugal? A parent's death shouldn't be a get-out-of-debt-free card. Maybe yes, maybe no. But spiritual counter-arguments of the "we all have our own paths and timelines" persuasion fall on deaf ears when you're eager to feel terrible about yourself.

Money guilt, even though I'm not in the same dire $257-away-from-being-flat-broke straits as I once was, still rears its goblin head to stick out its tongue at me. Especially when I choose not to earn it.

A few months ago, I did a scary thing. When my last two big freelance contracts ended at almost precisely the same time, rather than engage in my usual six stages of coping - panic, worry, panic again, get over it, write things that excite me for awhile, hunt for a new client, find a new client - I opted to skip the panic part.

Instead, I decided to buy myself two months to write what I wanted to write, to work on projects that fed me rather than drained me, to both invest deeply in work I want to do and take the adult's version of summer vacation. Three days after I made the decision, I finished my book of animal stories. Vindication! My choice was the right one! Tainted by only the smallest amount of guilt. Yes, part of the deal of buying myself two months of writing was that I wasn't allowed to feel bad about it, but the gremlins devour good intentions like candy corn. Then a few weeks later, my channeled blog was born. Now I'm creating some stuff for writers who want to learn how to use their intuition to make the whole process of writing easier and more fun and hopefully more likely to wow the world with their mad genius. (Do you know any writers who'd be into this? Send 'em my way! Are you a writer who'd be into this?) It's fun and I love it and now I get to love rather than dread sitting down to work.

But now I'm at the end of my two months. I deeply want to keep investing in my own work and I do have the means to do it, but the Real Adults Make Money (Preferably Lots of Money) belief is tough to elude. So are the gremlins of "this is self-indulgent" and "who are you to think you can make money doing what you actually want to do?" and the "lucky you, you certainly couldn't do this if you had a family to take care of!" All I can do is confront them head on and decide what's truly important to me. While doing my best to untangle my own issues around money and trust in myself and my abilities.

My issues with money are mostly just my issues with myself - where I don't trust myself, where I don't trust my work, where I don't trust the world. But trust is a muscle. All you can do is lean on it and hope it grows stronger.

What To Do When You're Cranky

Be cranky. Don't desperately try to snatch at some feeling you think you should have instead. Allow yourself to be cranky. Maybe you need an hour of being cranky. Maybe you need to kvetch to a friend for twenty minutes. Maybe you need a whole day. Whatever you need, take it. Don't try to wrench yourself into some state of being that you think is better or more appropriate or not so inconvenient. Be inconvenient. This is not to say that you should wallow. You know if you're prone to wallowing or if you're more inclined to soldier through. If you're a soldier, ready for action at a moment's notice and never offbeat: give yourself some space. Take an hour off from your life to feel, to take care of yourself, to do something that brings you joy. If you're a wallower, take some action: write an angry letter and rip it up, stomp around for awhile, take a walk. Search for the feeling below the cranky. Your crankiness is probably hiding something deeper. Maybe anger, maybe jealousy, maybe sadness. Allow that emotion to float to the surface and just feel it for awhile. If your emotions take you to a real place, take care of yourself once they're done whipping you around. Take a bath, take a walk, go see a movie. Do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself. Feelings can be hard work, but they're some of the best work you can ever do.

What to do when you're cranky? Be cranky. Until you aren't cranky any more. But recognize that crankiness is no greater or lesser state of being than any other. It simply is. When you can simply be with the cranky, you may find that it dissipates that much faster.

Because Money Freak Outs Happen

What is money? How does it come to you? Money is just like everything else - a flow. We've assigned it great importance because in this world we've made money mean security. Money to most of us means a roof over our head, food in the fridge, and a sure future. But money is no different than anything else. Money begins in your mind. Money shows you the truth about yourself, about what you've made the flow of your life mean, where you are and aren't allowing yourself to receive.

Love flows to you when you let yourself feel love for what's around you. Peace flows to you when you decide it's okay to feel peace. Money flows to you when you've decided that you can allow yourself to have what you need, what you want, what you truly desire. Money heightens these lessons because we've attached so much importance and so much of our wellbeing on the amount of money we have. We choose the amount that makes us feel safe. Some feel safe with ten dollars, some feel safe with ten thousand or ten million dollars. It is arbitrary. Money is arbitrary.

Money is not our security or our savior. Money is only a means, a means to know ourselves better, a means to get what we want. But money is not the gatekeeper to love or security or freedom. We can have these things with or without money.

Money works best when we share something we value - our art, our time, our knowledge - and receive in return. Money is simply an idea, an idea that works best when it feels fun, when it feels like simply another way to accept in the flow. You send out, you accept back, in an infinitely looping figure eight.

Care for it, love it, share it, send it back into the world for things you love and value - that's when money can truly do its job. Money doesn't need to be a receptacle for our shame and our fear and our disappointment. It can be, if that's what you require to learn what you've decided to learn. But money can simply be another tool that allows you to play in the world.

No moral value or judgment is attached to money. Receiving what feels like a large amount of money for value you put into the world does not carry the weight of "good" or "bad" - it's simply the product of a decision you've made. But the decision can't simply be made on the surface. The decision of what you're worth must be made within your deepest, darkest depths. By accepting and loving those deep, dark depths you can integrate them into the wholeness of your life, your soul, and your experience. When you do not judge yourself or others, you will not judge money. When you do not judge money, you have removed enormous blocks to allowing yourself to have it.

Money is like love - it comes to you when you allow it, when you welcome it, when you prepare yourself for it. Preparing yourself for it does not need to take time, it does not need to be another barrier. Preparation is simply something you have previously assigned yourself.

If you don't have the money you think you need or want, rejoice. You have just been accepted into the PhD program of your choice and you are about to learn how to conquer the world. As you go through the process of learning how to accept and have the money you would like, trust that you won't be abandoned, you won't be left, you won't be assigned to suffer. Allow yourself to have what you need without money and trust that as you step forward, one step after another, you will learn all you need about money - that it was never about money and it was always about yourself. 

There's No Need To Hide

Hi. Hello. I see you in there. Whether you're fully in the world or a moss-lined hermit, there may be some aspect of yourself that you're hiding. Because you're afraid, because you feel it should be different, because you're ashamed of it. Maybe it's your financial situation, maybe it's your relationship, maybe it's that you aren't doing what you truly feel called to be doing with your life. Maybe you haven't found a calling, maybe you have more money than you need but you spend it in ways that don't feel peaceful.

Come out of hiding. When you do you will see that there are so many others who are hiding that precise thing that you've tucked away and guarded so closely. Maybe you can help each other. Maybe you can begin to see yourself as whole, even though you aren't perfect, even though you aren't who you thought you should be, even though your life isn't where you thought it would be by this moment in time.

Emerge from the bushes, shine a flashlight into the shadow, talk about the thing that you're most afraid of. When you open your vulnerability up to the world, you will be surprised by the love and support and acceptance that flood back to you. For we are all afraid, we are all hiding some part of ourselves. We all have something that we wish would just die off already and leave us in peace. But peace is found in fully accepting that piece of ourselves. Building a relationship with it. Allowing it to provide us with more connection, rather than less.

If each of us pull out the monster hiding in our rib cage or our solar plexus or the back of our skull, we will lift each other up and the world will shift in indefinable but measurably great ways.

Show us your monster. We will love it, and we will love you. For you are one of the greats, monsters and all. 

When Bad Days Strike

When bad days hit, it's easy to wish them away. To wish them into oblivion, into the nearest deep cave, to any place but the one you're currently occupying. But bad days are part of the wholeness of life. When we're in the wholeness of life, we experience everything fully - the good, the bad, the indifferent, the annoying.

Bad days can show us where we judge. Where we judge one situation as better than another, that person as better than this one, this aspect of ourselves as better than another - judgments that rarely serve us.

Days are sometimes seen as bad because we need to process something painful to move forward. Maybe we need clarity around a certain situation, maybe we need a blow up to clear the air. Maybe we need a bad day to show us where we aren't taking care of ourselves. Maybe a bad day is precisely what we need, even if we can't yet see it.

When a bad day shows up out of the blue, ask it what it needs. Ask yourself what you need. Ask those in your life what they need. Taking care of needs - first your needs, then the needs of others - is one of the best ways to realign with what you truly want. If that feels too daunting, ask what the house needs. Sometimes doing the dishes or tidying clutter will bring the answers to you.

Don't worry about the bad days. Don't let your cunning little brain use it as proof that you're doing things wrong. You're doing nothing wrong. Don't let yourself veer into the dark and tangled weeds. Or if you do, sit in the weeds for awhile. Revel in it. Roll around. Wonder about it. Ask yourself why you're in the weeds, ask yourself what you need to get out of them, ask yourself why you like it there and why you're staying.

Curiosity is the first step. Finding the joy in the situation is the second.

Maybe if you're in the weeds for awhile, you can get some time to yourself. Maybe if you stay in the weeds when your brain is telling you that you need to fix this toilet and finish that work spreadsheet, you'll emerge from those weeds with better ways of solving and doing and being.

Trust yourself in the bad days. Trust yourself to keep putting one foot in front of the other, trust yourself to keep moving forward. Or trust yourself to sit quietly, let the bad day flow around you, and stop labeling it as better or worse than any other day. Sometimes the worst days are what is needed to get us where we want to go. Sometimes the worst days draw us closer together. Sometimes the worst days point you toward what you've been longing for.

Sometimes a bad day is just a bad day. And that's okay.

What To Do With Worry

Some days, worries creep in to tug at you. Some days, worries bop you insistently over the head from the moment you awake. Some days, worries feel easy to blow up and send away.

If today is the former, remember that you always have the power to offer up your worries and let them be taken from you. You always have the option to expand those worries out like a great bubble so that the still exist but they aren’t knocking around inside your skull. (Sometimes, letting go of worries completely doesn’t feel like a good idea so you resist it. But you can always push out the boundaries so that they don’t impede the joy of your day.)

Worry is something we feel we need to cling to for protection. We all know that worries do nothing but ruin an otherwise lovely rainy morning, but our hearts and our soft animal innards are not so easily convinced. So play with worry. Approach it like a friend. A friend who sometimes annoys you, but only has your best interests at heart. (But, like most friends, worry doesn’t know you the way you know yourself. So its version of your best interest may be understandably skewed.)

Play with worry. Collect all your worries into a ball and hurl them into the atmosphere. Approach each worry separately and light it up like a firework and let it surprise you with the great exploding dragons and balls of colorful flame in the sky. Imagine a great church, thousands of years old, where you can walk through the vestry under that high arching ceiling and lay your worries down on the altar, knowing that when you walk back out the door, your worries will be cared for and won’t follow you.

Worry is simply a protective mechanism designed to keep us safe and then left running in the background long after our software has been upgraded and what was designed in the past is no longer necessary. Now it’s just eating up space and memory.

Delete the program, play with it in new ways, allow it space and give it love. Worry can be another way to know yourself in a deeper and more intuitive way, if you approach it like something that can be loved rather than a dark monster intent on ruining your day.

Goats on Hills & Other Dreams

One day, I want to be the eccentric woman on the hill with a menagerie. I've already scouted out the hill - there's a perfect one right near my hobbit cottage, marked by a sign urging dog owners to keep hold of their pets so they don't terrify the goats. I want a hill with goats and giraffes maybe a water park for a baby porpoise and a few adventurous hippos. I almost started my menagerie on Sunday morning when we were walking through the town square for coffee. A man had four puppies on a leash and he was parked in a spot where people would stop to play with the dogs, which we promptly did. I know myself well enough to give puppies a wide berth but the manfriend was playing with them before I could coax him to a safer spot, one far away from puppies who need homes. Inevitably, one of the puppies crawled over to me and started to lick my hand until I was about thirty seconds from breaking my lease and smuggling a dog into my house. I might have even done it, if housing wasn't so desperately hard to find in the Bay Area.

We hadn't made it out of the town square before I started crying because I wanted a puppy. Not just a puppy, that puppy. We had to spend the rest of the day comforting me with discussion about how puppies pee on favorite rugs and chew on hot pink ballet flats.

Yesterday, I started crying in a diner when I saw an empty baby carrier sitting on the ground.

One could chalk this up to hormones - and I usually do - but it feels like a symptom of something bigger.

My life is very quiet. I have a lot of time and space alone. I know that friends with pets and kids and jobs would kill for the life I lead, or at least they would for a week or so, before they started missing their children and pets. But at some point, a few years in, the quiet begins to echo. It's not emptiness precisely, but it is solitary. And I don't believe we're meant to be solitary creatures.

I've had people tell me not to wait too long before having children - but it's not a question of waiting. It's a question of timing. I've been knocking myself out, believing that I have complete control over what happens in my life and when. But the more I abandon the idea of control and just allow things to happen as they will, the easier everything gets.

But I will continue to dream of a time when there are kids and animals tumbling over hills. Even if the giraffe remains a bit of a stretch.

Confessions of a Sugar Beast

I'm a hormonal, sugar-fueled mess this week. I find these labels empowering. Because they give me reasons and solutions for the way I feel. You're cranky, hungry, tired, and head-achey because being a female is terrible sometimes. To feel better, wait.

You're cranky, hungry, tired and head-achey because you've been eating a lot of things that you know are bad for you. To feel better, stop eating sugar.

Unfortunately, the blithe "stop eating sugar" mandate is tough sell right now.

Sugar is my achilles heel. My mouth loves it, my body hates it. If I eat sugar, I feel tired and cranky and my brain goes foggy and my skin breaks out and I have cravings for a week.

In the past, simply acknowledging the cycle and recognizing how much worse my life is when I'm eating sugar has been enough to pop me out of the dreaded cycle.

Making good food choices is an experiential process. Quitting certain foods to lose weight or because it's healthier isn't enough of an incentive for me, because the concepts are too vague. Vague does not hold up well when confronted with butterscotch pudding on a sunny patio. But experimenting with alterations - over the past five years, I've experimented with raw, vegan, and no sugar - for long enough to learn how I feel and how my life shifts without those things provides amazing incentives. Like, stop eating that thing and life gets 100% better and you know this to be a fact. Now, that's an incentive.

When I'm off sugar, I don't have food cravings, I sleep well, my energy is high, creative work feels easy, my moods are cheerful, my skin is clear and my jeans fit.

But sugar is in everything. It’s in your curry chicken when you go out for Indian food, it’s in bread you buy at the grocery store, it’s in basically any food that comes in a box or from a restaurant. It also craftily hides under innocuously healthy sounding names, like honey and brown rice syrup. Alcohol reacts in your body the same way sugar does. So do potatoes.

Sugar is also in pancakes and oh my stars, how I love pancakes. Green juice is so terribly uninspiring when what you really want is a stack of buttery blueberry pancakes.

But pancakes make me feel terrible and green juice makes me feel like I’m flying through the sky on a friendly dragon.

I’ve been dabbling in sugar again, because I've been going out to eat a lot more often than in past years and I'm in a relationship now so my exercise routine is all thrown off and also the demon of over-confidence started to whisper in my ear about how "sugar doesn't affect you that much!" and "you're fine!" and "mmm, buttercream-frosted cupcakes!" 

I’ve given up sugar four or five times now. Sometimes it lasts for a year, sometimes it lasts for six months, last week it lasted for about three days. Usually, I have to hit some point of pain - like watching the sugar cycle of crankiness and depression roller coaster me up and down for awhile until I decide it’s absolutely 100% not worth it. Then everything clicks in and abandoning sugar feels easy for green juice feels easy. But I just haven't hit that point yet. And I'm a little mad at myself because I need that point.

Willpower isn't really a thing for me. I have no interest in torturing myself, even for the sake of health or feeling better. Self-control and discipline have never made me jump for joy. So I wait until eating sugar is actually a more painful prospect than not eating sugar and everything gets easy.

Why Crying Is The Best Thing Ever and We Should All Do More of It

Who's been crying a lot lately? ME TOO.

After years of desperately wishing I had been born with an instruction manual because I really don't understand how I operate and am prone to pulling the wrong levers, I'm finally noticing how deeply my emotions can help or inhibit me.

If I observe and express them - usually by sobbing like my heart's about to shatter like glass on concrete - they help me.

If I ignore them or decide I don't have time for them right now because I have to watch TV or because whatever's on my to-do list is infinitely more pressing, they inhibit me.

When I let myself carry around unexpressed emotion, it totally blocks me up. To the point where I can't function. Getting client work done is like pushing a two-story house up a cliff using only my thumbs and writing anything creative is impossible. My brain spends all its energy coughing up all the reasons my relationships don't work and why everything is terrible and why that won't ever change.

But when I let myself cry - sob, really, in the most dramatic fashion possible - in an hour or so, everything feels better.

My therapist told me I needed to cry more and I thought that was silly. "I cry the perfect amount," I thought. But then I'd go for a week or two without giving much attention to my emotional state and everything would begin to pile on top of me like layers of fog and dust and rubbish until my entire life felt like a toxic waste site. Crying is like washing away the acres of sludge with a convenient tsunami that leaves everything clear and ready for whatever's next.

I feel like someone just handed me that instruction manual. 437 pages on How Amber Works, complete with diagrams. Now every time I feel incapable of getting anything done, it's not because I'm lazy or unmotivated or undisciplined or in the wrong career or a complete waste of space. It just means that I need to go outside and stick my bare feet in the grass and cry for awhile. Or go make a list of everything I'm feeling sad and angry about. The signs have been pointing me in this direction for a long time, I was just too caught up in telling myself I was a bad human to see what was really going on.

Crying is incredibly freeing. It releases whatever has piled up on top of you and wipes your outlook on life clean. Crying makes you happier, smarter, more productive, and less prone to guilt trips. Crying takes the mess your three-year-old inner self has made on the etch-a-sketch of your life and shakes it clear.

I think we should all spend some time crying today. Maybe even every day.

On Fear and Its Uncanny Effect on Your Solar Plexus

Fear is the emotional equivalent of termites. Find a tiny sliver of fear stashed away somewhere and suddenly your house is full of it. When I talk to people who fear things I used to fear - spiders, economic collapse, glitter eyeshadow - I start to get worried. Fear breeds quickly and discussions of Terrible Things That Should Make Any Sensible Person Very Scared kick up my dread of being sucked back into that sticky black mire. Like being sent back to stormy Kansas after tromping through the Emerald City. I'd prefer to avoid tornadoes, thank you.

Fear itself doesn't scare me much - it's mostly visceral. It feels like a blow to the solar plexus that shortens the breath. So if you just remember to breathe, it will pass.

Oddly enough, that's also what excitement feels like.

Maybe it's possible that fear is really excitement. Maybe it's possible to rewrite fear as opportunity. I have to look at what I fear and what that fear is calling me toward. More action? Less action? Rather than just breathing through the fear, rather than just surviving it, transform it. What wonderful things are waiting beyond the sticky black mire?

When I look at today's episode of fear, I realize that I fear not following my own self-knowledge. I fear letting other people's beliefs sway me. I fear that the world will prove to be as grim as all the news outlets are yelling it is. But if I allow myself to trust my response and my knowledge and my choices, then I can start to see the opportunities. Opportunities to let go of old stories that came from a father who would rather bury his money in the woods than trust it to a bank. Opportunities to allow myself the space to do what's right for me, opportunities to recognize that there is no right or wrong, there's only what feels right in the moment. Opportunities to follow what makes me feel good and inspired, because feeling good and inspired is the only way I can hope to affect the world for the better.

When I do this, the weight in my solar plexus starts to resemble a bird - a bird with strong wings that can pull me up out of the tornado.

Making Myself a Wizard Hat Out of Felt and Rhetorical Questions

Crushing, soul-grinding doubt seems to be the legacy of humanity. We doubt our worth, our contribution, our ability to meet the standards that society or we ourselves have set. I spend a reasonable chunk of every day convinced that I’m not doing enough, feeling enough, living enough, earning enough, being enough. Why on earth would I do that? Why on earth would I pour so much of my finite energy into a sticky black pit of doubt?

Why isn’t it enough to be breathing every day? Why isn’t it enough to wake up, put your feet on the ground and think, “How can I help today?” Or wake up, put your feet on the ground and think, “How can I have fun today?” Why do most of our early morning thoughts begin with, “How can I survive today?”

My tiny-fist-shaken-at-the-sky rhetorical questions crop up whenever I find myself in the unconscious loop of work and budgets and doing all the things I don't particularly want to do in hopes of one day being able to do what I really want to do. I have a bad habit of feeling like a victim of my own life rather than its creator. But work and budgets and doing things you don't particularly want to do right this very minute aren't bad. Sometimes work and budgets and things you don't want to do right this very minute really are a good idea. It's not so important what you do, as long as you're being conscious

I don't believe we're here to eke out whatever small life we can manage. I prefer to think of us as wizards of our environment, whisking what we most want out of the ether the way Dumbledore presents hundreds of thirsty adolescents with jugs of pumpkin juice. We're here to make what we want to make and do what brings us joy and spend as much time as we can in the midst of things that light us up - whether that's music or writing or knitting or running through dewy grass or eating that expensive granola that you feel bad for buying. (STOP FEELING BAD FOR BUYING THE GRANOLA YOU ACTUALLY ENJOY.)

Creation beats sacrifice. Joy beats doubt. Picking up a stick on your morning walk to wave like a found magic wand while pretending to be Dumbledore and yelling, "I shall conjure up time for more writing and plane trips to visit friends and also better breakfast cereal!" beats just about everything.

Dream + Real World = Trust

In my perfect world, the world I'd like to create for myself because I am an almighty god person who can mold her environment to her every whim, I get to spend all my work hours writing about things that mean something to me. And "all my work hours" cap out at about three or four hours a day.  All the hours that come after that get to be spent picking cherries in a sunlit orchard or something. My time is mostly spent having adventures with my favorite people and taking care of my family, including one or two moderately well-behaved children. Living life, then turning around and writing about it.

What trips me up is what I think I need to get this life. As I dive into the How To Make Amber's Dream a Real World Thing, I enter an uncomfortable space. To get a book published you need x, where x = brilliant idea or ready-made audience of a hundred thousand or some unspecified brand of magic. To get an essay published somewhere people have heard of, you need to have a book published. To make money at any of this you have to be a wizard of many disciplines, and my brain has mastered only whimsy and baby animals. I build up insurmountable roadblocks in my head until I wind up going in aimless circles.

I don't have a clear roadmap and that makes me uncomfortable. Even with roadmaps, I tend to get lost. Even the omniscient voice of the GPS deity can't account for every variable and all it takes is one off-kilter message to send me twenty minutes out of my way on a ten minute trip.

What I want to do comes from a good place - writing brings me joy and helps me learn more about myself in the world. I want my writing to help me feel more love - for myself, my people, and the world; and I hope it does so for others as well.  I want to transcribe my soul so that maybe people can learn to see theirs in a new way. It's a little grandiose, but hey, if you don't hand yourself a purpose, who will?

I don't like posting this. I don't feel comfortable saying, "I want to be published. I want to write books that sell to a lot of people. No, more people than that. Just go ahead and double the most outrageous number you can think of. That's what I want. So I can write a few hours a day and spend the rest of my time with my family." Because to this day - despite my belief that if you really want something, you have the capacity to get it, despite what I would say to anyone else who approached me with this problem - I still think, "Who am I to want that? Who am I to think about getting that, when so many other people want that too?"

When I think about Publishing and Audience Building and All The Things You Need To Make That Life Happen, I just want to open my closet door, arrange my shoes and sweaters into a nest, and curl up in the dark for a week or two. I stop writing and start focusing on what I think I need to do in order to write. Which doesn't make any sense.

So I have to trust. Trust that my work will find its people and its place. Trust that I can live the way I want to live and spend my time doing what I want to do. When I twist it up in my head because I don't know how to make it happen and spend my time worrying and not doing, I learn what trust is. Trusting that the path leads where I want it to go even though I don't know what that path looks like.

What I want is actually contained in a very simple process - create and share. Create and share. Write, finish, ship, repeat. No matter what the fear in my head sounds like, the answer remains the same. Meaning, the more I write and the less I tangle myself up in what it feels like I have to do, the happier I am. Because writing is all I ever wanted to do in the first place.

A New Frequency

Most of my writing is heavily influenced by my brain. It's for me. It goes up on a public domain, but it's for me to process my stories, my life, my sometimes incomprehensible emotional space. I write to discover how I feel. To discover what I need. To discover what pieces of my psyche require attention. To find out who feels the way I do, especially when the feelings make me wonder if I'm all alone out here. That's what writing is for me - healing, comfort, connection.

But this new kind of writing works differently. Writing this way is like tuning my brain to another station, another frequency. Instead of mining my thoughts and history for patterns and clever ways to share them, I have to abandon my brain altogether. Blank it out and listen to something else, something bigger, something brighter. Channeled writing requires listening to you.

If you've found your way here, you're probably extraordinarily sensitive in some way - to yourself, to other people and all their moods, energy, emotions. You may walk into a room and feel bowled over by the power of all the other humans in your immediate vicinity. I spent a lot of years doing my damnedest to block all that out so I could function in the world. But now I'm learning to relate to it in a different way. I want to be open to it, rather than walled off. I want to be able to access that energy, that power of feeling, in a new way. By treating this connection to everyone around me as a gift rather than a burden, my life feels happier, lighter, and I'm able to tap into my own feelings in a new way, a way that guides me rather than hinders me.

We all know what to do. We all know what we need. Every one of us carries all the love, perspective and wisdom to have the experience we want to have. But the world is big and scary and exhausting and many of us don't know that part of us even exists, let alone where to find it and what to do with it when we get there. Our world doesn't often value instinct and intuition. The part that nudges you to bring an umbrella in the morning - ignore that nudge and you get wet. The part that nudges you to leave a relationship - ignore that nudge and life gets progressively harder until something cracks and your life shatters.

The more I open up to my intuition, the more I can open up to yours too. When I turn my attention to myself, I can find what I need. Now, when I turn my attention toward you, I can also open up to what you need. Because what I need and what you need all comes from the same place - somewhere everyone can access. I'm learning to use that piece of me that I wanted to ignore for decades, the piece of me that I thought was making life harder, but may just make life infinitely easier. Because feeling what others feel, even when it's draining, can be a great gift.  It reminds me that none of us are alone. Different stories, same experience. 

Emotions are our most profound guidance system - they will unerringly point us toward what we need. We just need to learn how to interpret the message. It's like learning another language. After spending years being buffeted around by my emotions before getting heartily sick of it and learning to interpret them, I've chiseled my own Rosetta Stone of feelings.

Now that my emotional space is clearer than it's ever been, I can find that different frequency. The interpretation is simple, as long as I keep my brain out of the way. I think of this new writing as transcribing what your soul wants you to know, in this moment.

I think of it as a love letter from your soul. 

---

If you asked for one of these way back in March and haven't received it yet, I promise I haven't forgotten you. This particular learning curve has been a roller coaster and I'm still working my way through the list. If you didn't and you'd like to be my guinea pig as I practice with this, leave me a comment or send an email. 

An Ode To The Broken Hearted

Let it hurt. Because the more you feel it now, the less you'll feel it later. Keep breathing. Keep air cycling through your lungs and let that breath reaffirm your life when you feel like you want to die. Care for yourself physically when your emotions are battered and exhausted. Drink water, nap, exercise out the pain and the anger. Keep breathing. Keep feeling. Care for yourself the way you would care for a wounded pet or a beloved child. Know that the shattering of something you wanted is clearing the way for something more, something better. Not a better person but a better fit, a better match.  Know that you are loved, even if it doesn't feel that way. Yes, your heart has been tossed onto the funeral pyre to go up in flames, but the old heart must disintegrate before a new heart can be born.

If you feel like your heart is a blackened, charred cinder of nothing in your chest - congratulations. You tried. You opened up. You exposed your tender bits and even though it feels like a tiger just ripped out your jugular - you won. Because you were brave. Because the only people who find victory are the ones who are also open to taking a beating. Letting someone near your tender, easily bruised heart is the ultimate act of courage.

So lick your wounds and keep letting those emotions rise to the surface because the power of that hurt, that anger, will keep walls from forming, will keep the arteries to your heart from hardening. That means that when the time is right and the person is right, you will get what you always wanted. 

Trust that whatever happens is leading you toward something better, something more suited, something more beautiful. The old and broken must dissolve before the new can sidle in. If you feel that you are the one who's old and broken, allow that to disintegrate too. Because you are as whole and perfect now as you were on the day you were born.

Yes, you loved that person, for their beauty, their foibles, their unique humanness. Of course you did. But they were not the source of that love you felt, they were only its mirror. That love came from you, when you decided to focus it on them and their beauty, their foibles, their unique humanness. Once you've grieved and felt all the painful things we'd prefer not to feel, once you've realized that feeling those feelings makes the feelings dissipate, even if it takes longer than you'd like - that's when you can open up again to the next gorgeous, foible-filled human who catches the strings of your heart.

Love is not limited to one person, one life, one source. Begin to feel love in everything that surrounds you - a home you love, a pet you adore, books that make you happy, the movement of the leaves in the trees. It's everywhere and the more you see it, the more it will find you. Because you were born to be loved and that love surrounds you, even now.

X = Me

Solving for x is astonishingly easy, as it happens. If I am the x factor, then the x factor is me.

Simple, right? Almost brutally so.

What's particularly brutal is that I've known this for years. My brain understood. People told me, books told me, my reasoning skills parsed it out. But just because you understand something doesn't mean you know it. Just because you know something is true doesn't mean your heart or your emotions have any idea what that big gray lump in your skull is prattling on about.

I am the x factor. Not because I'm the reason dating hasn't worked, but because I need to focus my attention on me.

If I am the x factor, that means I get to put all of my time and attention into things that make me happy, instead of going out on first date after first date in a time-consuming attempt to play the numbers and manipulate the system into giving me what I want. I get to put my energy into what feeds me on a deep level, rather than spending my time trying to create some safe, loving space for someone else because I thought that if I make them feel loved, they'll make me feel loved.

Pro tip: That doesn't work.

Trying to force people to feel something - even if it's something we all want to give and experience - is a really bad bet. Good intentions, poor execution. People can feel it when you're coming from a place of need, rather than a place of "here, I have so much that I would like to share it with you." I can't name that place because I haven't found it on the map yet. I'm still looking.

In my efforts to find me in this new map, I have claimed this month. All of it. All of it is mine, henceforth to be known as Be Nice To Amber month. You don't have to be nice to me, but I have to be nice to me. Being nice to me means no dating. No online suitors, no constant checking of the apps, no wondering when he's going to respond. Unless some epic romantic comedy kismet slams into me at the grocery store, I will go on not one single date. Instead, I will focus on what makes me happy, rather than on what someone else is thinking or feeling. A month of fixing up the hobbit hole and going to yoga and reading Harry Potter in the fairy garden that was recently discovered near my house. A month of less caffeine and no self-recrimination. A month of things I rarely allow myself, like manicures and chocolate bars* and afternoons at the beach.

* Lies. I always allow myself chocolate bars.

My month began on June 11 and will end on July 11, my 36th birthday. Everything feels better already. Lighter, clearer, like I'm more me than I have been in a long time.

Maybe the best way to date is not to date at all.