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.

Magic Hair

Sometimes the thing we judge the hardest is the thing we want the most.

(Obviously, not everything we judge is some deep desire. As hard as I've worked on my own judgey tendencies, I hardcore judge mean people. Hard. Core. If you are mean, I will judge you, end of story. Or at least end of story until I float away on some ascended cloud which I estimate will happen approximately never.)

Here's what I'm talking about:

When I was in my early 20s, I lived in the Presidio of San Francisco. It's a national park near the Golden Gate Bridge and people could live in it and I did and it's still one of the best choices I've ever made. One of the nearest neighborhoods was the Marina, a land of women who look like golden Thoroughbreds in pricey yoga pants.

One of my favorite past-times was to sit outside in the Marina and try to guess how much each woman spent on grooming per month - whatever I estimated it took to get skin that glowing, hair that shiny, and nails that perfect. I would cast my predictions in an admittedly judgmental tone of voice.

I hope none of them ever heard me because, wow, rude.

It took me something in the range of two decades (two actual decades) to realize that I wanted to feel safe looking that polished and pretty. That I wanted to be able to spend that kind of money on myself.

My highest standard of self-care was to spend twenty minutes getting ready for senior prom, wearing a dress I bought in a Venice Beach stall. Being Not High Maintenance was a point of pride. Spending the smallest amount of money possible on my appearance was an ingrained frugality, experienced by many of us who were raised by parents who were raised by parents who lived through the Great Depression.

But then, some nineteen years later, I learned the magic of the blowout. I learned that getting manicures elevated my mood - and, weirdly, my productivity - by a startling percentage. I learned that facials are awesome and massages are even better.

I want to be one of those people who does that kind of thing regularly. I want to be one of those shiny Thoroughbred women. I was kind of ashamed of that for awhile. I'm still a little uncomfortable writing about it. For all the reasons that may or may not be running through your head as you read this.

Taking good care of myself still feels downright revolutionary. It still feels like a splurge I'm still not quite worthy of. And that is straight nonsense.

If I want it, I want to have it.

If you want it, I want you to have it.

If we judge it, but secretly want it, I want us to have it - even if it takes decades to get there.

We are worth it. And we are goddamn allowed to have it.

So here's a picture of my first official blow-out. My afternoon post-blow-out was like a movie montage. I'm convinced my hair was magic that day, and has been every other day since that I've had it professionally wrangled or done my best with the mousse and curling iron.

Hooray for magic hair and significantly less judgment!

Back to the World

I've been in a very galactic headspace for the past four years.

Talking to unicorns and dragons, archangels and ascended masters, playing in all sorts of dimensions - and then coming hope and napping a lot. I'd take people on dragon rides and ask Mother Mary for advice on their behalf. Chakras, crystals, sage, mystic otherworldly adventures - you name the California neo-hippie cliche and I was all over it.

Whether you want to call it channeling or divine guidance or just Amber Was All Up In Her Crazy Imagination and Holy Whoa Look What Came Out, it was a lot of fun.

But I'm finding myself returning to earth now. Wanting to ground all those divine downloads into my real ass life. Wanting to be a part of the world again, even as I observe what the world appears to be doing these days.

But it's like having inter-dimensional jet lag. I don't always know how to reconcile where I've been with where I am with where I'm going.

So I have to go back to all that stuff I downloaded from the ether and integrate it into practice - in a way I was always too exhausted to do when I was making a daily trip up the dimensions. I want to make the channeled wisdom more concrete, blend my human self in my divine self, and help others do the same.

I don't know what that looks like, but it seems I have to start with all the things I already know how to do and trust that to lead me where I want to go. Which means I guess I have to start a goddamn meditation practice? Which likely involves reframing discipline so it doesn't sound like a dirty word-slash-terrible idea and rather That Thing That Will Help Me Pull Possibilities Out Of The Ether And Into Reality.

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.

Sweating Out the Inner Mean Girl

I joined a gym last week. For the first time in nine years.

It’s one of those gyms where you go to a class and sweat in tandem with a whole bunch of other people while hooked up to a monitor so you can obsessively watch your heart rate ascend and descend.

Watching my heart rate move into the orange zone and then not give up when I normally would in order to keep it there is one of my better addictions.

One of the unintended consequences of draining myself dry was that I had no energy to do the things that would’ve given me more energy - namely, working out, eating well, and not being mean to myself.

I’m nailing the working out portion of the equation. Yes, that was a bit smug but I have enough gross gym clothes in my laundry basket to merit a wee bit of smug and I take my wins where I can get them.

I ate two whole vegetables yesterday so that nutrition thing is creeping into reality.

But the Not Being Mean To Myself plan remains elusive.

Being mean to myself is a fall-back reaction, a trigger tactic so ingrained that it takes me hours to realize I’m even doing it. It’s the bastard step-child of shame, anger turned inward, and is absolutely no bueno.

Weirdly, I feel like I HAVE to do it. Like, if I’m kind to myself I’ll get lazy. Or if I’m loving to myself, the entire world will implode. Wounding? Trauma? The human condition? Who knows. All I know is that I’d like my inner mean girl to chill the F out.

If I could solve one thing in the world it would be Humans Being Mean to Themselves.

(I’m pretty sure that if we solved Humans Being Mean to Themselves that would also solve Humans Being Mean to Others, and that seems an efficient use of time.)

My current solution is, when I notice that I’m being mean to myself, to stop whatever I’m doing and try to focus on my breath, focus on dropping all my thoughts into my heart. If I feel better and that catches the spin cycle of internal mean girl, I am free to continue on with my day.

If it doesn’t work, then I stop whatever I’m doing and do something soothing. Take a nap or a shower or go for a drive. I’ll tap into my wiser self - the quiet bit below my own private Regina George - and ask for help. Then I do whatever that voice says.

This actually works fairly well, but will kill an afternoon, after I’ve done all that resting and driving and meditating. Which is why I work for myself, so that I can halt the Being Mean To Myself Spin Cycle without getting fired.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is catch that mean voice in the act, because we’re so used to it being mean inside our heads that we just accept it as normal or as fact.

One of the best ways to catch that voice in the act is to simply pay attention to how you feel in those thoughts. Am I feeling better? That’s probably my wise self voice. Am I feeling worse? That’s Cady Haron after she learned to use lip gloss.

I’m old enough to have gone through a number of I Exercise and then I Don’t and then I Start Exercising Again cycles. So I know that when I start clearing my body out, whether it’s with kale or lots o’ sweating, old feelings and thoughts will rise to the surface. Saying hello before they melt into the atmosphere.

So I like to think that I’m sweating out my inner mean girl, that she’s rising to the top of my consciousness as I watch my heart rate climb to frankly dangerous levels while my feet frantically try to keep up with the moving belt below me. Like, if I give my inner mean girl a hockey stick she can leave her aggression on the field instead of dressing it in pink.