Soften

My internal message this morning was “soften.”

I am such a tense little pigeon. I clench and tighten and stop breathing without even noticing that I’m cutting off my flow of air. Trust me, when you clench off your flow of air, you’re cutting off all your flow - the flow of love, the flow of money, the flow of inspiration, the flow of healing, the flow of divinity trying to make it into this human body of mine.

In the midst of living my life, I’m doing my best to catch myself when I tense and tighten up. Soften into this life. Feel safe in this body, in this place. Feel safe in all the circumstances and events and thoughts and feelings of my Amber existence.

Softening actually makes for a pretty good day. When I soften, I become more aware of the air around me - the bright sky above, the trees flashing past the window of my car, how lucky I am to have money for a sandwich I can eat in the sun and a coffee I can drink in my favorite writing spot.

Softening allows gratitude to show up easily - something that I tend to struggle with. Softening allows my thoughts to quiet. Softening allows my lungs to take in more than ten percent of their capacity. Softening helps me feel like every step I take is worth something, rather than spinning my wheels fruitlessly.

The first part of this year has really been about devoting myself to the small daily habits that support my health, evolution, and work. Alternating walking and yoga-ing so my body doesn’t petrify on the couch. Turning on the writing faucet every day so that if anything wants to come through me, it has a chance. Channeling for myself every morning, because I’m great at channeling for everyone else and not so good at channeling for myself. But spending five minutes each morning receiving messages for myself has skipped that evolution forward massively.

I’m rebuilding my foundations, after a year of shifting and redrawing boundaries and wondering what on god’s green earth I was doing with my life. I still don’t know what I’m doing with my life, to be clear. But I do know that I can get up every morning and take a walk and write some words and check in with my guides and share what I’m led to share and heal for anyone who wants it - and maybe that’s all I need to know about my life right now.

On Being Happy In a Human Body

Inhabiting my body and my life and my relationships is one of the hardest things for me. It doesn’t feel safe. Though of course, being fully in the body is the safest place for us. But try telling that to my gun-shy soul.

I joke that I was lured back down into the world and a human body with the promise of sex and donuts.

Now that I’m here and know that sugar makes me crazy (meaning donuts = bad idea) (let’s not even get into the marathon of terrible that sex was through most of my twenties) , I realize that I should’ve read the fine print.

Last night I was at an acupuncture appointment with one of my favorite healers. She was asking me about my relationship - and she completely lost my pulse as I answered. It was like I just dropped straight out of my body. Like the rug was pulled out from under me - which is how I feel in most of my relationships, romantic or not.

Being fully in my relationship is - apparently - a really rich place of exploration for me. It also feels like boarding a ship to sail for the horizon when everyone still believed the world was flat.

In a miracle of eastern medicine, she stuck needles into me in the places that would help my body feel like a safe place for my soul to land. Which is quite a good trick, considering that my soul was not even a little bit interested in another human life and life’s few redeeming aspects have proved problematic.

Even though I don’t want to be here most of the time, I love this world and I love the people in it. And when I can rise enough out of my own nonsense, I love my own life. My life has sunshine and beaches and cats and coffee and writing words and a boyfriend who’s an excellent cook.

So my other place of exploration/trying-not-to-fall-off-the-edge is being so at home in myself and my body and my energy that I can embody that love rather than all the fear. (So much fear, my god.)

It becomes a daily practice of doing everything I know to do to stay in my own center rather than being buffeted around by the world and the people and all the feelings. This is why I harp on about light all the time. Using my imagination to sling light through my life is one of the best ways to help myself feel better.

Honestly, I don’t really know what it looks like to fully inhabit my body and relationships and life. I just have to trust myself and my guidance and keep moving in the direction that feels good. That’s all we can ever do.

Bread is the Answer

Last night I baked bread for the first time.

It was garlic rosemary pull-apart bread, and I’m quite smug about the way it turned out.

I kneaded the dough like I’ve watched every single episode of The Great British Bake-Off (which I have) and knew exactly what I was doing (which I don’t).

Bread baking is something I’ve been wanting to try for a long time but since I haven’t had an oven in five years, opportunities have been thin on the ground. After moving into a house equipped with more than a dorm fridge and a hot plate (garden cottages are magical but not if you want to engage in cooking anything more complex than soup), it took me precisely 25 days to get my first batch of bread in the oven.

Yes, I am terribly proud of myself. Doing things just because they’re fun, just because I want to, is something I’ve gotten noticeably bad at recently. Baking some bread turned out to be a solid way to shift that particular tide.

Bonus: kneading dough is quite satisfying.

Creative people are happiest when they’re making things, and I’m a big fan of having hobbies that you don’t have to be good at, that you can play with just because you want to, just because it’s fun. It alleviates the stress of being a wild perfectionist of doing a creative thing that you’re being paid for or building a business around. I really want to type “ugh” or “stupid bills” here, but I’m spending a reasonable portion of my time re-wiring myself around money and that seems like a step in the wrong direction.

If money is reading this, I love you! Let’s hang out! I have a very nice bank account for you to stay in.

My usual methods for cultivating the child-like wonder that soothes my soul are brightly colored converse, a weird obsession with giraffes, and a willingness to utilize empty swing sets to the best of my ability. But I have plenty of giraffes and hot pink shoes, and there aren’t any public playgrounds nearby.

(However, the new house could definitely support both a foster giraffe and a swing set. There are already plans for a goat train and a cat-copter so the kitties can better chase hummingbirds.) (Maybe lack of childlike shenanigans aren’t my problem.)

So, bread baking. Next on my list is singing lessons. Not because I’m good at singing, but because I want to sing. I want to take my Not Great Singing and make it Better Singing. I want to see what progress I can make, when I’m not already good at something. Like most people, I tend to gravitate toward the things I have some talent at, because the ego enjoys nothing better than being good at things.

But I know that creative endeavors fuel more creative endeavors (please note my first blog post in six weeks!) and so I am stating this here and now so I don’t forget again:

Making things is fun. You are happiest when you are making things. Make more things. If you can’t make the thing you were planning to make, make another thing, until the first thing shakes loose.

When all else fails, bake yourself garlic rosemary bread in a place where you can walk out into the garden and pluck rosemary straight from a bush in the ground, which is apparently where rosemary comes from.

Your Soul Cheers As Your Human Self Wonders WTF

Nothing about the last ten years has gone according to plan.

Maybe plans are just my brain's way of helping me feel safe. Maybe goals are just my ego's way of keeping itself satisfied.

Not that there's anything wrong with plans or goals, I just seem to rebel against any and all prescriptions, even if they're my own.

Don't tell me what to do, goal.

Something about dancing on the edge of the unknown appeals to me. Which is good, because a lot of unknowns are looming right now.

I'm moving at the end of the month. Leaving my Mill Valley cottage, my haven for the past five years, to move in with someone. I haven't lived with a man person in over a decade, and it didn't go well when I did. I honestly didn't realize the depth of that particular trauma until I started losing my ever-loving shit at the the thought of trying it again.

I've had the worst financial year of my life. In the past, I would have a bad month or a bad few months - the perils of working for yourself when money is one of your big life lessons - but I would always turn it around before missing being late on a bill or having to skimp on groceries.

I didn't pay the minimum on my credit card last month and my bank account is overdrawn. None of these things have ever happened to me before. Straight up, the only reason I ate a few weeks ago was because a friend sent me some money out of the clear blue sky.

While this isn’t precisely the situation I wanted or expected at this phase of my life, it's showing me that worrying about money serves no purpose. It's showing me that people are deeply kind. It's showing me how to have deep and tremendous faith in myself and my work, even as everything in my current reality is telling me to have zero faith in either of those things. It's showing me that I'm getting ready to expand big time.

I'm getting better at diving into the scary, here-be-monsters depths. I'm getting better at not judging myself. I'm getting better at plunging into joy whenever possible.

Maybe that's enough. Maybe my soul is cheering, even as my human self wonders what the fuck is going on.

You Can't Fail At Being Spiritual. Because You Are Spirit.

I went to see a guru a few weeks ago, because he was appearing across the road from my boyfriend's house and when a guru appears on your virtual doorstep, you might as well say hello. So we crossed the street to watch an Indian spiritual leader in action.

We sat with hundreds of followers under a gigantic tent and listened as people asked him questions for two hours.

One woman got up, crying, because she felt she was failing spiritually because she always fell asleep in meditation.

The guru was very kind and had the same reaction I did which was, Let yourself fall asleep! Don't worry about it!

But what broke my heart was how harshly we judge ourselves around being "spiritual." And how many hoops we make ourselves jump through before we consider ourselves enough in the eyes of god.

Heart. Breaking.

We are always, always, always enough in the eyes of god. Or spirit. Or the universe. Or the flying spaghetti monster. Whatever.

The phrase "practical spirituality" keeps running through my head. Not every human is cut out for a daily hour of meditation. But anyone can use stop lights as their moment to pause. Any one can make doing the dishes a meditative practice. We can live our lives as a meditation.

I do this approximately 15% of the time and I teach this stuff, so I'm not saying it's easy.

But the point isn't to be perfect, because we ain't none of us perfect.

The point is to continue grounding into a practice, whatever that practice is. Your practice can be dancing, walking, meditating at stop lights, petting your dog, pulling weeds in your garden. Whatever returns you to you.

Devote ourselves to ourselves, and allow that to be enough.