My Heart Feels Like Charlie Brown Trying to Kick a Football

Plowing forward, filled with hope, leaving the ground with the high of the kick as you look up to the sky ...and then the nausea-inducing spinal trauma of crashing flat into the ground. Yup, my romantic life most accurately resembles Charlie Brown trying to kick a football.

This is mostly my fault. If I try to date out of fear that I'll miss out, or because I'm bored, or because I want the quick hit of validation, or because I think I should, or before I'm completely out of the grieving cycle, that's when I get stood up four times in two weeks by four separate people or end up unraveling a tangled mass of karma. 

So I vow to be more careful a dozen times a week, to guard my heart better. But that’s not really what I want, and I know it. Even when I’m carefully instructing myself to just go ahead and be a different human this time. 

Being in a relationship with me means you occupy a portion of my heart’s real estate and you get to live there for the rest of your life, whether you want to or not. Luckily, my heart is growing bigger every day, so I don't begrudge the space. Construction is ongoing.

So far, three people have annexed a corner of my heart. As much as it hurts in the healing stage, if I love someone enough to assign them a lifelong corner of my left ventricle, how could I pass up that love for as long as it lasts? I can't, and I wouldn't want to, no matter what I tell myself in the getting-over-it process. 

Minor heart fractures do fade. Karmic entanglements do drift right back out again. Melt like ice cream on a hot sidewalk, leaving only a sticky residue to eventually wash away in the rain, the cement no worse off - and maybe even retaining a hint of that invisible sweetness.

But the big cracks, the breakages, those don’t recede as easily.

Two major heartbreaks in one calendar year strike me as more than plenty - and explains all this hard-felt keening and flopping in my ribcage over the past few months. 

(This is what keening and heart flopping looks like.) 

I was wrangling last year's heartbreak around this time in Hawaii. Hey, if you have to get over something, you might as well do it on a tropical island. The big energy of those islands had me rolling through vision after vision of my not-on-this-plane-but-still-very-persistent daughter. 

As these visions drove saltwater into the cracks to unapologetically bust me wide open, I saw my heart being knit back together with gold light.

Heart breaks open, you put it back together again. With Elmer's glue, if you have to. 

A friend once called me a dating warrior. “You just keep throwing yourself back out there to get trampled.” I'm an enthusiastic warrior, but apparently not a very good one. 

But every time I hurl myself into the ring, my heart does grow bigger. It has to. 

Feeling big clears out big space. Space for unconditional love to flood in naturally, replacing the sadness and the anger and the “here are seven reasons we both royally fucked up” judgment parade marching through my brain in an alarmingly predictable loop.

When the unconditional love starts sweeping everything clean again, the space that lets everyone have their own experience and knows that the love doesn’t go away even if the people do, that’s when I start having more trust in the process.

Trust in myself - that I haven’t profoundly fucked up this time, even when my brain is pretty certain I have. Trust that the right relationship will work out at the right time for everyone involved - and that I don’t have to hurl myself warrior-style into the coliseum to be gnawed on by a tiger for the privilege.

I do want to be kinder to my heart. I'm learning what that looks like, slowly but surely. It means not proceeding out of fear or need for validation. It means giving myself plenty of space and room to nurture me and my relationship with myself. For now, I'm just thrilled that my heart is finally feeling less raw. Joy is starting to feel more natural, and all the I'm-in-a-grieving-period bad decisions and massive karmic tangles have finally stopped. It kind of feels like a hot shower and big meal after running a marathon - routine experiences that suddenly feel like Christmas morning, simply because you put yourself through the wringer first. 

It's like the universe is asking for my faith, asking me to just surrender. Because the more I try to control, the harder everything gets. But if I just trust what comes my way, and trust myself to handle it, everything simplifies. 

Meeting My Daughter

My daughter first stood in front of me on a summer day three years ago.

I was sitting in the Super Duper Burger near my house, eating a hamburger under a sunny window and minding my own business, when she showed up out of nowhere - eight years old with long blonde hair and wise eyes.

I’ve had visions before, especially when I was younger, flashes of downloaded information about how we all connect as souls and how the universe works. But this was my first holy-shit-I-can-see-her-standing-in-front-of-me vision.

She was my daughter. In my future, but already so present. Her name jumped right into my head as we looked at each other and I started sobbing into my lunch.

It shifted and rearranged me on a cellular level. Not having children was no longer an option, because I had seen her and felt her and knew her as mine. I loved this vision that, even a year or two before, I might have chalked up to biology-driven yearning or low blood sugar. Which is probably why she waited to visit.

When I accidentally got pregnant a few months later and my new boyfriend was panicking, my rib cage released a few terrifying questions: Is this my daughter? Will I have to do this alone if he bails? Will I have to make a choice that will break my heart? In a channeled session with my teacher, my daughter told me that this wasn't the only chance, she could always come in another time, another way. 

I ended up miscarrying, and coped by developing a rather intense attachment to a stuffed sea otter. 

So many relationship decisions have been drastically affected by that summer lunch I spent crying into my french fries. Can’t commit to children? Bye. Not ready to even have the discussion? Bye.

Sometimes I wonder if I should give those relationships more of a chance, if maybe the flesh-and-blood human in front of me should win out over the etheric vision. But she was so powerful - as an energetic being, as a part of my future - that if this man wasn’t ready for her, I couldn’t stay. Because I wouldn't be sacrificing my dream child, I would be sacrificing some essential piece of myself.

She looks like me, but lankier, with light-filled eyes she'll get from her dad. 

She left for a few years, as I struggled through that relationship and breakup, but when I was in Hawaii last April, my daughter started showing up again.

Wearing goggles and bumblebee wings and racing around a grassy farm fueled by a delirious hybrid of pure joy and epic sugar high.

A toddler, handing me a lollipop because she sensed I was sad.

In the last vision, she tugged on my hand, dragging me through the zoo as I ask, “Where’s your daddy?”

I cried a lot in Hawaii, is what I’m saying.

She’s been quiet for the last year or so. But I’m sure she’ll show up again. It would be super convenient for me if she really would point out her daddy. But I don’t think children are that biddable, especially spirit-realm-children you can’t threaten with loss of television privileges.

I turn 39 in July, which is terrifying on one level, but on a deeper, more peaceful level, I know I have time. I’m healthy, pretty damn fertile, and still working on healing my own wounds and releasing ancestral patterns so they aren’t passed on to her.

She’ll be like me, and probably even more so, a ninth generation sensitive with superpowers that will likely be both a gift and a terror. The more work I do before she’s born, the more I’ll be able to help her when she lands on this planet in the haze of forgetfulness that we souls sign up for.

Or maybe she’ll be born fully realized, knowing exactly who she is and how she’s here to contribute, and just needs me to feed her and clothe her, and drive her places. I don’t know. But I’m really excited to find out, and finally hold her in my arms.

Living in the Crucible

I am so, so, so ready for a change. 

When you feel stuck, it’s often because something energetic, emotional, physical or spiritual needs to be unraveled before you can move forward.

But unhooking the threads of karma that bind you is no small task. It’s like picking apart a tapestry and re-weaving shadowy demons into white dragons. You can’t leave any loose threads or they’ll form a pathway to let the shadows to walk back in.

We’re entering a six month cycle of great change and, in order to be ready for this change, I’ve been deep in releasing mode. I’ve been burning things, tossing things into the ocean, doing rituals, and throwing a few hissy fits in the general direction of god. (Or in the general direction of my bed pillows, but if god is everywhere, it’s basically the same thing.)

People have been telling me for years that I have self-worth issues. I mean, yeah. I get it. But unearthing your self-worth from the landslide that buried it often means digging without a map - it can be hard to know where to aim your shovel. You have to rewrite the stories you’ve absorbed from others, untangle the knots of normalized abuse, peer at the karmic baggage you may have grabbed - and empaths are so much more likely to carry other people’s bags as well as their own. For the first three decades of my life, I was basically a martyred hotel porter.

When I look at the Facebook highlights of the past ten years, it looks like a litany of loss. Death, miscarriage, getting fired, trying-and-failing-trying-and-failing, getting fired again, breakup after breakup after breakup. My ego has been thoroughly thrashed.

When I scan through the loss litany, relatively unbroken by brag-about-able triumph, my life starts feeling like a crucible whose only purpose is to burn me down to the bone. 

Where I go when the crucible feels extra searing. 

But the up side to all that fire is that I've gotten really good at transmuting dark into light. 

Diving into the depths of the bubbling muck of your soul and swimming around even when you’re afraid you might suffocate and hitting the same problem over and over again from every angle will show you what you're made of - and I'm made of pure tensile strength, baby. I am whittled down. Sometimes I feel like I'm two taps away from breaking, but I haven't broken yet. I've bent, I've danced, I've sobbed like a broken doll, I've set fire to the branches, and I'm still standing. 

I’ve gone from unconscious empath to understanding that if I’m angry for no reason, it’s not because I’m slowly and methodically going insane, it’s because I just sucked up that anger from someone else. I’ve gone from hating myself for being too sensitive to recognizing that sensitivity is my primary superpower. From words that were funny but flagellating to being able to write my story from a place of deeper, if less amusing, compassion. From trapped in the hell of my own head to relatively accessible joy.  

If it took that litany of loss to get me to a place where I’m mostly free of the hell my brain spent most of every day re-building, it was worth it.

But I'm not here to swim in my own stuff forever. I'm not here to heal everybody else. I’m here to feel joy. I’m here to share what hits me in the solar plexus and expands from my rib cage. I’m here to be a gift to the planet, just as you are.

So I’m re-weaving the patterns of my life, unraveling the threads of the images that don’t serve me and tying off all the loose ends. It’s not easy to keep track of all those dangling knots. And just when you think you've tidied everything up, you find a whole new room full of yarn. 

But we can’t be that gift until we see ourselves as that gift. So that’s where my effort is going now. Into the day-to-day process of keeping my energy and gratitude and joy high. Not to heal myself or anyone else, but to know that ascension from the hell of your own head is possible. Because it is. And it’s required.

And sometimes that means spending the evening watching TV and eating ice cream straight from the carton so you can get up in the morning, light the match, and ask what the crucible has for you today. 

Your Feelings Are Changing The World

I turn 38 in a few days and I’m feeling entirely lackluster about the whole situation.

Newsflash: Woman in her late 30s not super thrilled about late 30s getting later.

I guess I feel like more should have happened by now - besides the death of a parent, a miscarriage, and a rather startling collection of breakups. But you really can’t measure your life in Facebook events. Because that is a soul-withering road.

We all want the highlight reel, the one we’ve decided will make us happy. The partner, the baby, the job, the shiny accomplishment that looks oh-so-slick in a snappy bio.

But does all this really make us happy? Oh yes, absolutely. In moments. I imagine some of the very best moments in life are holding your baby for the first time or feeling so deeply grateful for what helped land your goal or marrying your person in a haze of mutual adoration. But these highlights, these moments, don’t necessarily equal a lifetime of bliss.

Any moment can bring joy. Even the painful ones, the ones that crack you open. Because eventually you’ll learn how to mend the pieces. How to put yourself back together like Humpty-Dumpty did after the king’s men wandered off and the story ended. Or you’ll realize that the scars have healed themselves, as wounds often do. The lightness that follows pain is its own joy.

My highlight reel feels a little sparse - and, yes, I do care about that perceived paucity - but my soul hasn’t withered. I’ve tended to it, often relentlessly. Just as I’ve tended to my heart. Both have been filled with light, and the cracks filled with gold.

One thing I have learned: Those of us who are deeply sensitive, who feel a lot, who process a lot, who sometimes think we are doing nothing with our lives but feeling and processing - we aren’t just feeling and processing for ourselves. We’re feeling and processing for everyone.

It may feel like you’re just sitting in your bedroom crying - but you are feeling for the entire world. You are healing thousands of people, maybe even millions.

When you process that heartbreak, you are making the heartbreak of others easier to bear. When you feel that grief, you are easing the pain for others on the planet. For those who may not have the luxury of time or access to the tools that we have.

It won’t win us any awards or commendations, no one can even prove we’re doing it (yet) - but I would argue that this is some of the most important work a human person can do.

Lately, whenever I work with a client and they ask why it feels so hard, why the world feels so heavy right now, I always receive the same answer: Because you aren’t just feeling for yourself, you’re feeling for the world. Because you aren’t just healing for yourself, you’re healing for the world.

It’s so easy to forget that this applies to me too. To get down on myself for not having done more, having been more. But shame has no place in light, and it doesn't get to take any more of mine. 

You’ve probably heard the term lightworker, and if you’re reading this right now, chances are good that you are one. Because you’re infusing this planet with much-needed light and desperately-sought love. Even when you don’t know you’re doing it.

Next time you’re feeling sad or lost or unsure, pull light into the experience. Imagine light filling your dented heart. Pour light over a tricky situation. Ask for light to be applied to any moment, any event, any hurt. You don’t even have to do it yourself, you just have to request that it be done - and it will be.

Light. You have it. I have it. No matter what our Facebook feeds look like.

(That said, I really hope 38 is the year my highlight reel gets dusted off and starts rolling again.)

The Relentless Roar of the Ego

There is a fierce and relentless section of my ego that roars in fury whenever I see someone else doing what I want to do. Shame is triggered when my heart sinks because an essay I wish I had written, or did write to a far quieter reception, is splashed all over the internet. The piece of me that feels that this reaction is bad or immature or not spiritually enlightened (whatever that means) is reflected in the reactions of others when I share that I feel jealous over the words of others or the number of people who see what they do.

But maybe in some twisted way, this ego serves me. Because it only quiets down when I’m doing my work - writing or sending out that writing or even resting when I know that it isn’t the time to write because I need to rejuvenate before I can create. When I am consistently in the space of creating and sharing what I create (or consciously resting in preparation to create), my ego is quieter, calmer, more centered in a space that can appreciate what others do without feeling a deep and shameful lack in myself.

Writing this made me feel better, and isn't that what writing is supposed to do? Purge us, calm us, and help us realize that the monsters we feel lurking deep in our stomach aren't the terrors we imagine them to be.