Fist Bump To Anyone Else Who Struggles With Boundaries

While I don’t want to jinx myself or otherwise tempt fate by putting this in writing… I think I might be on the other side of the Great Crash of 2019. I opted out of calling it the First Great Crash of 2019 because I am optimistically envisioning a henceforth crash-free year for myself, a year where I don’t get taken out for weeks at a time because I over-extended myself.

Culprit of this particular crash was my refusal to rest over the holidays when I was encouraged to and also my boundaries.

I can state without exaggeration that I have - in the past, let’s call it the past - had truly terrible boundaries.

Having good boundaries is like having a nice sturdy bucket. When you have a bucket you can catch things. If you don’t want the thing you’ve caught, you can take it out of your bucket. You can keep filling your bucket until it overflows and then you can offer what’s overflowing to other people.

Having not-so-good boundaries is like having holes in your bucket. You pour water in but it will leak right back out again.

For most of my life, I had less of a bucket and more of a fishing net. Nothing could stay - not friends, not money, not relationships, not energy. It all leaked out until I was standing there holding an empty soggy net and wondering what happened.

Since I’ve been working on my boundaries like a fiend, my fishing net has been tightened into a sieve. Better than a net that a crafty lobster can escape but money, love, energy continue to leak out.

This is exhausting and flat-out unsustainable.

Because work is one of my greatest teachers - at least until I have kids, which will be a whole new level of Dear God Help Me - I recently burned out hard.

After spending a few days in a tunnel of despair and also bed, I finally recognized that I had been giving away way too much for free or charging way too little in certain areas of my business.

Free energy healing and channeling for people is just a bad idea. I would sometimes think, why don’t I see anyone else doing this on youtube? Why am I the only one?

OH THAT’S WHY.

Boundaries, man. Boundaries.

The way the universe gets my attention is to cut off my money. It’s a last resort, used only after all the usual avenues of nudging me, poking me, sending messages via other people, and taking me out for two weeks with a cold had been exhausted.

Finally, the universe got sick of waiting. And it whisked everything away. Clients, programs I’d run for years, money I’d been counting on, the person I was dating - POOF!

Up in a swirl of phoenix ash.

In all the years of running this particular business, that had never happened.

So I was left in a puddle of pitiful, thinking forlornly “I can’t be doing all this for people and be in a constant state of terror around money.”

A sigh of relief was breathed by the universe, and my guides and angels patiently waited.

After watching a lot of Netflix, I finally connected the dots.

I was draining myself for others because I thought I had to. I thought that was how I was supposed to help. Because I do believe that everyone should have access to this kind of energetic help and information, whether they can pay for it or not. But there’s a way to do it that doesn’t involve me destroying myself. Because that doesn’t help anyone.

So I’m reorganizing everything - how I work, what I offer, how it’s priced, how I share it. Complete foundational restructuring. So everything feels good and feels supportive, to me and those I work with.

BOUNDARIES.

Patching up the leaks in my bucket, tightening my sieve. Establishing healthy boundaries can be a challenging process, but so worth it. Mostly because who doesn’t want money and love? Who doesn’t want to give it a safe space to land and know it’s going to stick around once it does?

NO ONE, THAT’S WHO.

BOUNDARIES.

Sorry I keep yelling at you. I’m really yelling at myself. Maybe I should stop yelling. My system doesn’t like yelling - and allowing my nervous system to soften and feel supported is a big part of this process.

</yelling>

Part of me is now wondering if I should even post this because hi, lots of boring talk about boundaries. But if you’re still with me, it means this was in some way useful. Hooray! Thanks for hanging out with me, friend! Fist bump to all of us who are devoting ourselves to being healthy in the world. (BOUNDARIES.)

As a thank you for reading many paragraphs about boundaries, here’s a preview of my 2019 Christmas card. I’ve been threatening to do this for years, because the idea of sending out a photo of me with my stuffed animals to all my friends who always send beautifully shot portraits of their adorable children makes me laugh.

The Adrian family, as it currently stands. Sally would like you to know that you can best demonstrate your love by sending sardines.

Zooming Out

I have decided to accept that I am a big wooden bucket of messy dysfunction. I’ve also decided that being a big wooden bucket of messy dysfunction is 100% okay. Maybe because the wooden bucket is artisanal. Crafted by a bearded gentleman in Vermont who hand-planes wood harvested from local trees with an axe that he inherited from his great-grandfather or purchased from a different artisanal workshop. It doesn’t matter.

Or maybe because it’s okay to be messy and maladjusted and chock full of undiagnosed mental abnormalities. I’m not going to call them illnesses. I don’t even want to call them abnormalities.* Because I don’t think any of this is abnormal.

(* Let’s call them curiosities. Undiagnosed mental curiosities. That’s much better. It invites exploration and wonder, rather than strife and shame.)

So we get anxious walking out into the world. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. Maybe the world is an anxious, angry place sometimes. It’s also full of wild oceans and butterflies and kind people doing their very best in a world that’s not always that kind. Maybe the next time you walk out into the world you’ll figure out something about how to be less anxious in the midst of it and you’ll tell me about it and I’ll say, “Hey, that’s a great idea” and suddenly we are less anxious and more able to notice the butterflies floating above the fray.

Maybe not. That’s okay too. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with hiding in your house for awhile.

We’re all just trying to accept and love ourselves as the messy, dysfunctional, divine beings that we are.

Divine and human, kind and unkind, total jerks and purely loving.

In a phrase, absolutely perfect.  

I’m starting to get mad at labels. Because they’re divisive. But they can also help us categorize our experiences and accept them and learn from them. Oh hey, look! Once again, there are two things seemingly at odds with one another occupying the same space.

Maybe we just need to zoom out. Like putting your fingers on the map screen and moving them together so you see California snuggled against the Pacific Ocean instead of the sushi restaurant on the corner.

Maybe if we give everything more room - our anger and our joy, our messiness and our maladjustment - we’ll start to see the absolute perfection in all of it.

Maybe.

I keep saying maybe because I have no idea. I throw out wild theories like half-done spaghetti in the hopes that something sticks to the wall.

But every time I zoom out on my own life, moving up into the air above it to peer down through the eyes of my higher self rather than my annoyed, anxious self, everything looks very different. Beautiful. Perfect. Fun. A way to expand instead of a mistake. An experience in loving instead of a heartbreak. An opportunity to try something new instead of failure.

Sometimes it’s hard to hold that height for long and I drop ignominiously back down into my cranky human self, but that’s allowed. That’s part of it. The challenge is blending the two - the divine and the cranky - into something resembling fully embodied divinity. Grounded height. Higher self and human self into one gleaming, sweating, star-laden meat suit. I don’t know. I’m struggling with the language because I can’t quite parse this experience. Maybe because I’m still drifting between the two, zooming up and down, in and out.

Trees and butterflies are what I think of as a solution to the zooming quandary. Nature and animals help us bridge the divine-essence-in-a-human-experience gap. Zooming in on a daisy growing through a crack in the concrete or the moss on redwood bark is its own kind of perspective and doesn’t inspire acrophobia.

So when in doubt, go find some trees. Hey, at least it’s getting out of the house. Pick big trees so that if any anxious humans wander your way, you can hide behind a handy trunk.

Oceans are also helpful, though harder to hide behind.

Star Seed Problems

If you've ever found yourself in the bathroom sobbing "I just want to go home" when you are, in fact, at home - you might be a star seed.

I've been ignoring this for a long time because I'm here, I'm human, may as well get on with it and enjoy the benefits of earth (which are chocolate donuts if you were wondering) (most bread products and baked goods, really). But then I found myself crying like a child lost in a shopping mall because I had this bone deep feeling of being alone and far from home and not sure how to fix it - and I realized it's time to dig into this a bit more.

I can feel my work about to deepen again, because looking back on it, most of the people I work with - if not all of them - are star seeds. We have trouble grounding, we have trouble with 3D things like relationships and money, we tend to feel lonely and like we don't belong. Some forget to eat (that's never been my problem) (DONUTS!).

But I'm going to have trouble helping them if I don't have a lock on this myself.

So. Guess it's time to dive into that whole being an alien thing.

P.S. And I thought it got weird with the whole Jesus revelation. NOPE. THERE’S MORE WEIRD WHERE THAT CAME FROM!

P.P.S. As I feel into it, I think I came in with Jesus, decided to stick around to make sure that whole love-and-support-for-all-humanity thing got carried out, and hahaha whoops, no wonder I feel like a failure all the time.

P.P.P.S. (is that a thing?) NOW I NEED A DONUT.

Transformation

Transformation can feel like: 

• Every bad choice you’ve ever made rising up to throttle you. 

• Spending the morning in bed. 

• Anger blooming up out of nowhere. 

• Old wounds doing a rain dance on your liver. 

• Crying in the middle of an outdoor mall.

• Wondering if you’re too damaged to get any of the things you want.

• Events you thought you'd made peace with mooning you on the freeway. 

I may or may not have experienced every one of these symptoms in the past seven hours. 

It’s been a fun Thursday. 

I know I’m going through a transformation, but it’s easy to forget that and just feel like I’m failing at life.

Failing at life A LOT. 

Like everything I thought I knew is in question and all of the divine timing messages I get are complete bullshit.

Because obviously I have failed. A LOT.

But failure is a judgment and self-judgment never shows up more powerfully than when you’re about to burst into something new. 

So if you’re in the midst of a WTF-is-going-on-and-when-will-this-end? phase, you’re probably transforming. 

It’s not super fun. It’s rarely easy. But it’s worth it.

Transformation is how we do what we’ve never done before, how we step into our next evolution.

Transformation takes a lot out of you. Sometimes laziness is called for, as your entire system re-boots and your brain re-patterns. You’re doing quite a lot, even if it feels like you’re mostly just watching Netflix and eating half-off Halloween candy. 

But the more chrysalis processes from which you emerge, the faster the transformation goes.

The first few cocoons I crawled into were long, drawn out, painstaking, and painful. Now I can move through something relatively quickly - in a few days or even a few hours. It’s still painful, but I can usually see my way through it or beyond it.

So even though I spent a few minutes worrying that I was going to need years of therapy to work yet another uncovered trauma (good lord, do they never end), I got that nudge that said, “No, you don’t. Just keep moving through the feelings and being gentle with yourself in the process and this will quickly pass.”

It’s easy to make multiple “I Have Failed” arguments when most of your work is in the 5th and 7th dimensions and most of life happens in the 3rd. But if you’re arguing with yourself, it means your brain is far too involved in the process, and the brain mostly just operates as a 3D recording device.

Brains are certainly useful, but not so much in deep processes of transformation for which your brain has zero reference.

Hush, brain hamsters.

In the midst of a transformation, the best you can do is take care of yourself. Lots of gentleness, lots of care for your body and nervous system, lots of nature and water, lots of rest. Zero judgment of your path, your process, or your results. Just let yourself transform.

Times of transformation are not times to expect a lot from yourself externally, because you’re switching worlds and moving internal mountains and getting ready to emerge anew.

Caterpillars halfway to becoming butterflies aren’t getting much done, I guarantee it.

Halfway to butterfly. Hence, totally fine that I have a sink full of dirty dishes.

Season of Surrender

Surrender one big thing and life gets all greedy and wants you to surrender more.

Fine. (Goddamn it.)

I was all proud of myself for releasing the life-will-align-with-my-husband-and-babies-plan again, when life went, “Great! Good job! We’re just getting started!” as it rubbed its hands together like a miser in a Dickens novel faced with a large stack of gold coins.

Really? We’re just getting started, life? I thought we were DONE.

“Nope! Not even a little!”

Life, the universe, and everything can be a brutal task mistress, I tell you what.

Because suddenly I went into expansion panic, into an emotional free-for-all around my intuitive work and money.

Sometimes I just want the earth to stop shifting below my feet. Sometimes I want to stop having to yank all my stability from somewhere deep inside, because my insides are tired.

But the universe thinks my insides are doing just fine, and tells me to keep going.

So much of our ego and safety and self-worth is tangled up with our work and creativity and bank accounts. Unspooling those threads feels destabilizing, even as it allows for stronger foundations to form.

Here’s what I’ve learned as I feel into what’s next for me on this ride of fulfilling my earthly purpose:

Get comfortable being uncomfortable. You’re fine.

Lift your hands off the steering wheel. You’re trying to steer a matchbook car and we’re trying to chauffeur you around in a Bentley.

Stop trying to stuff yourself into a box. There is no box and never was.

Surrender. Everything is so much easier and so much more fun this way, please do it already.

Note to self: Surrender isn’t giving up.

Surrender is trusting that there are other forces at work.

Surrender is sinking into the idea that you don’t need to have all the answers. Or any of them.

If things don’t look the way you want or expect, it’s because room is being made for something better.

Since I don’t know what this moment requires, in terms of my work or my money or my writing or any of the life purpose things up for review right now, I have to soften in and trust myself, trust what I’m shown, trust my guides, and know that there is no such thing as failure.

Know that I am protected and loved and supported, just as we all are.

Whenever I check in lately, I get “write more.” Because my plan was always to spend half my time on my writing and the other half on my intuitive work (energy healings, readings, channeling the guides, etc). Maybe that’s the emotional rumbling I’m feeling. My higher self is shaking me down to remind me of what I was always here to do, and what I’ve forgotten or resisted or found hard lately.

So here’s to room for something better, for all of us. Here’s to surrendering into the arms of peace and joy and love and whatever the fuck is in it for us when we finally let the universe wrest control from our hot little hands.

And to writing more, in whatever form that takes.