Shifting Shadows

Everything feels like it’s zinging ahead at warp speed. It also feels like it's moving as slow as blackstrap molasses. Life so enjoys its contradictions. 

Sign of the times, I suppose - and these are very interesting times. You’re feeling it too, I’m sure. Like everything you thought about your life has suddenly flipped inside out and situations that were idling in the garage are suddenly launching forward, sometimes straight through the still-closed garage door. While other situations have unexpectedly come to a slamming halt or changed tracks entirely.

Astrologically speaking, things haven’t been this interesting since the ‘60s and, as we all know, the ‘60s were a decade of massive change.

Spiritually speaking, we’re receiving great influxes of light. Like we’re being downloaded with what we need to shift the planet away from destructive patterns that humanity has found itself entrenched in. While this involves flux and the break-down of certain systems, I believe the possibilities are far greater than we can currently conceive.

I believe my job - and yours as well, if you’re reading this - is to hold that expanded sense of light and love and possibility. To send that love to the places in the world that are being deeply challenged. To send our brightest rays of light into places that are feeling the shadow.

In a session I had last week with one of my writers, I said that we don’t feel the shadow unless we're being touched by the light. 

When those shadows crop up in my life, when I feel the deeper spirals of areas of challenge that I’ve been working on for so long, I try to remember that we only feel the shadow when the sun is moving over us.  

I believe it’s our job to dream bigger than we ever have, both in our own lives and in what’s possible for this spinning blue orb on which we live.  

Some are diving bravely into the light and the shadow, some are resisting with all their very powerful might. As I develop my fledgling business I’m seeing both - in others and in myself.

My shadows show up in my frustration with others, always places where I’m deeply frustrated with myself in a way I don’t fully see yet, so it has to be shown to me in the guise of someone in my life. My resistance shows up in money - another spot of historic shadow. (Oh, money.) Intellectually, I’m beginning to understand that money is simply another channel of energy as well as another way to see the reflection of where we still want growth. But emotionally, I still sometimes get sucked into the morass. (Oh, the deep sucking morass of suck.) 

Money collects so much shame and so many shoulds. I should have more than I do, I should have worked harder, I should have worked better. I should be working on my writing but I’m working on money, I should be working on my writing but I’m working on money. I should be saving more, I should be spending more.

See how it’s all work? Hard and contradictory and there’s just no winning. Locking myself in with the brain gremlins and letting them yell at me is the surest way to stay in the swirl.

My task now is to breathe through each moment. When in doubt, make sure I’m inhaling oxygen - in and out, in and out. My job is to look for what feels fun, what feels like play. To inhabit my body and life fully. To write my story without judging my story or how I tell it. To see myself in others and ask myself to take any frustration I feel and look for that source of frustration in myself rather than spackling it all over the person who’s reflecting it back to me. To take things seriously while holding them lightly.

We all have a deeply important job, and it's more important than ever. My question is - and I would genuinely love to hear your answer - what feels like your task now? What feels like the best way you can be you? Which is, in the end, is the very best way you can contribute to the experience we're all sharing here on this earth. 

We are all bigger and brighter than we know.

We are all built for more than we can currently envision. We are all reaching for the place where what we can't yet imagine has popped like magic into our lived reality. 

We're all just looking for magic. For love. For truth. For peace. For what we feel - down to our bones, down to our souls - we're truly meant for. The irony, of course, is that magic exists inside of us, fully formed, just waiting for us to dig deep enough to see it. We already have more access to more love than any human can hold. We have access to truth and peace in every moment.

I believe this more than I've ever believed anything. 

But I am also just a person in my own body and my own experience and my own brain and sometimes what I know to be true gets clouded in a haze of humanity. We're all in a haze of humanity. Those who blast through the haze create genius. Those who peel away the wispy layers of fog reveal brilliance. Those who make it their sole mission to know who they are realize that they're already everything they ever hoped or dreamed. 

So here's a toast. To blasting, to peeling, to lurching and soaring our way through this human experience. To becoming so fully human that we feel the divine and lifting so high into the divine that we realize how deeply lucky we are to be human. 

Whatever's holding you back, blast through it. Whatever's asking for your courage, show up as the mighty being you are. Whatever wants to be expressed so strongly that it burns you up if you don't let it out, commit yourself completely and fully to that creation. Commit yourself, know yourself, be yourself. For you are mighty and brilliant and strong and a blazing star through this human plane. 

 

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. 

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.

Ask For a Sign and You'll Get One

Turns out, I'm not going to live forever. It also happens that if I want children, my childless days will be coming to a rapid halt in the very near future. I'll be 37 in July, guys. Which gives me a rather short span of time to do everything I want to do ever before kids muck it all up. So in the next year or two, I need to have many amazing adventures, spend a month in Bali and France, learn how to earn a lot of money while also having plenty of time to hang out with babies, and, I dunno, buy a house or something. It's a hefty to-do list. What does a person do when they suddenly realize they don't have forever to do all the things they want in life? If you're me, you decide to devote yourself wholeheartedly to writing animal stories, and pretending you have answers on youtube. Because animal stories are obviously the way to get to Bali and also have plenty of money to pay for babies. Cough.

I'm forging a path that doesn't necessarily make good, common sense. Do I believe it's possible to have what I truly want in life? Absolutely. Do I have any idea how to do it? Nope. But to build the life you want, one that doesn't necessarily look like everyone else's, you have to listen to yourself. You have to get really clear on what you truly want to do, what you truly have to offer, and offer it up in the best way you can in that moment. 

I have anywhere from one to three years to make a lot of things happen for myself before it's baby go-time. It feels more possible than ever, but only if I follow my intuition. Because that's the only thing that can tell me how to get where I really want to go. 

I literally wrote the book on freelance writing (fine, one of the many books on freelance writing), but I've started to realize that freelance writing isn't actually what I want to do. I don't want to write for other publications, I don't want to hustle, I don't want to pitch. It exhausts and drains me and it's taken me fifteen years to admit that. In Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield talks about shadow careers, about career paths that resemble what you want to do but are really just a form of resistance. I've been resisting what I actually want to do for a decade and a half now. In many ways, I do love freelance writing. I love talking to people about their jobs and their passions and their businesses and I love writing about burlesque dancers and chefs and mountain climbers and canny CEOS. And I will happily continue to do it until what I actually want to do begins to make sense in the real world.

Here's the paradox: In order for writing animal stories to make sense as a career choice in the real world, I have to abandon the real world. I have to allow myself to dream in a way that felt foreign even just a few months ago. Because I want to be an artist - yes, a writer, but not a writer in any of its more professional, practical forms. I want to write ridiculous stories about talking raccoons who wear cravats and go on adventures. I want to channel for people, something that I still have trouble saying out loud because what?

Owning what you really want isn't always easy, especially when what you really want wouldn't make sense to most people you pass on the street. But that just makes it even more essential that you do it. We need the strange and unconventional and creative in this world now more than ever. Because if we keep doing it the way we've always done, we'll keep getting what we've always gotten.

Last week, we drove along the coast of California until we hit Esalen in Big Sur. When we pulled up to the gate, they handed us a key that sent us here:

photo-6
photo-6

Sometimes the universe sends you a literal and unmissable sign, and that sign says, "Go right ahead and be an artist, you irrepressible hippie, you." And so I shall.