Archive for 2009

the goddess of grief: getting to the other side. and there is always another side.

This article has been a long time coming. You may want to put the kettle on.

"Grief can make a liar out of you because there is a disconnect between how you feel, and how you think you're supposed to behave." This was Maria Shriver's intro to her heart-gripping talk at the 2009 Women's Conference. I stumbled across the live telecast. The topic: Grief, Healing & Resilience. Interesting topic for a conference. That's kind of pushing it, I thought.

Then Marissa tweeted about grief catching her off guard. Ronna wrote about the barn burning down, and Emma started thinking about death - a lot. Kelly riffed about endings because she was inspired by Lianne philosophizing about "something dying to be born." Guess the death thing is up for the sistahs this season, I thought.

And then I went to a Transformational Speaking workshop with Gail Larsen - which is really group therapy disguised as enlightened toastmasters (and one of the best learning experiences I've had.) Gail spread out a large quilt on the floor with the cycles of life stitched in a big circle. She calls it the Journey Well Wheel. "Stand or pull your chair to where you think you are at this time of your life," she instructed. Easy, I thought, I'm here, at the Seek Support-Experiment-Emerge stages. Just before which is Grief and Letting Go. But no matter how I tried to stay in my place, my chair mysteriously kept eeking toward the grief zone. Like a ghost was pushing me - away from the lie, toward the white hot truth. Black as it was.

LAST YEAR, I DIED
I handed over the keys to the studio/office I'd help to fill with staff, laptops and artwork - to the company that had my name on the door, on the parking stall, on the book, the domain name, the shareholder certificates. Passwords were changed. Computers stripped. Lawyers retained. The CEO I was so wise to hire was given the go ahead to change the business model - and the new strategy didn't include very much of me. I was out.

A few months after my, uh, departure, I was scrolling through Craigslist looking to buy a new desk and came across a desk that I loved - no wonder, it was my desk - my former desk. And that is how I found out that the company was having a going out of business sale. The company was divided up and auctioned off - the book, the intellectual property, the website. Sold to the highest bidders. It was over, except for major bank debt, for which I was partly personally liable.

I'm feline by nature - a gold medalist in Landing On My Feet. This year: I launched WhiteHotTruth to a great reception (a thousand thank yous to each of you for being here.) I did Fire Starter groups in about sixteen cities. I've worked with nearly one hundred Fire Starter clients. Shot a demo reel for a new TV show that I could star in. Spoke on some very big stages. Scored a gig as commentator of a national prime-time TV show. Gave dozens of interviews. Wrote a book proposal. Outlined two more books, and have strategized a content and collaboration roll out for 2010 that has me ablaze with more artistic joy than I have ever experienced. Creative sovereignty rocks. Hard.

Those are the facts. Facts can disguise grief...only for so long.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler's legendary Five Stages of Grief applies just as much to the death of dreams and identity as it does to people: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. It's brilliant, compassionate, and whole, like a Goddess.

Grief is one of the most powerful Goddesses. She swallows your agony and lets it tear her apart. Beautiful birds fly from her belly - each one an insight into life and your power. Grief brings the whole flock to your window and she waits and waits to reveal universal truths to you. She goes to the depths with you. She rises with you.

Grief won't rest until you swallow the medicine she made especially for you, and tell her your story of death...and life.

HOW TO ABSORB THE MEDICINE OF GRIEF

1. Grief messes with your focus. When she's tap-tap-tapping on the door of your consciousness, it becomes difficult to concentrate. You're not sure what the priorities are, not sure where to put your attention, and when you do put it somewhere, it slips off easily. Time does not feel fresh, it feels a bit stale. Launching new things feels awkward, subtly inappropriate.

Give your self space to meander, aimlessly. Aim less. Under achieve. Be confused. As Nietzsche said, "You must have confusion in your heart to give birth to stars." You are giving birth to a new reality. It takes tremendous resources. Healing hurts before it feels right.

2. Grief is patient. Grief may operate on a time-release capsule system. She'll let you be busy and distracted for a long period of time before she descends. She respects survival mechanisms and the necessities.

So go ahead and throw yourself into work or hobbies. Just know that...

3. Denying grief her power squelches your vitality. You can dream and laugh and march on, but until you swallow the bitter tea that Grief has brewed, things won't be as vibrant or grounded as they could be. And that's half dead.

Recognize where you are numb. Notice the memories that ouch the most. This is the beginning of response-ability.

4. Grief crystallizes in your body. The medicine will get stuck in your muscle memory and joints. It needs to circulate and be digested.

You have to dance grief to the surface. Stomp. Rock. Stretch. Move without your intellect getting in the way. Keep moving.

5. Grief thinks scars make for great tattoos.

Accept that you'll never be the same. Trauma marks you. Embrace how much more dimensional you've become.

6. Like Bindu just reminded me, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." (Maya Angelou). Grief needs to hear your story told.

Speak it out to a sacred listener. Be witnessed. And then...

7. Tell a new story, one that includes the description of how you healed. The Goddess of Grief's favourite word is Goodbye. You can smile when you say that.

 

what’s the best change you made to the place you live?

I'm habitual Purger of Stuff. Can't stand clutter. Nic nacs give me hives. Someone once critically described my living room as "austere" and I glowed with pride. So happy change for me usually comes from getting crap out the door. Dropping a bag of clothes off at Value Village, giving a chair away to a new university student, piling piles into the recycling bin = euphoria!

The best changes I made this year to my place:

• downloaded 400+ CDs onto MAC/iPod, bought small docking speakers, and sold/gave away said CDs and mammoth old stereo system - including fake wood speakers that always made me feel like a cheap 70's house wife.
• sold plushy couch and got my dream sofa: a danish day bed with a trundle. Had it recovered in a mocha with blue fleck cotton/velvet.
• put some twinkly lights in the bedroom.
• found my favorite new incense from Ten Thousand Villages, which smells like ancient India.
• bought a new white desk unit.
• stopped burning candles with paraffin in them (cough cough, hack hack.)
• hung two of my favorite pieces from text artist, Cheryl Sorg.

 

the upside of procrastination

Click here to view my Connect with Mark Kelly segment for this week on time management and why we should leave space to meander.

 

best moment of peace for 2009

An hour or a day or a week of solitude. What was the quality of your breath? The state of your mind? How did you get there?

The monastery was peaceful. Those five days when the Man and the Boy went camping, now THAT was peaceful (read: get to have long baths with magazines, write at 3am, eat breakfast at noon, watch documentaries in the day time.)

But this week, this week has a quality of Love Boat peace to it - exciting and new. And I've come aboard. I made way for the peace by declaring December the Universal Month of Tying Up Loose Ends. And I've given myself the space to meander. Time management systems have their place, but not for the immediate now. I'm clearing my in box. I'm having lunch with my Man, tea with the girls. I'm following the rabbit hole of new blogs and spiritual texts and iTunes. Hell, I may even put my kid's baby photos in an album - the ones that have been sitting in a shoe box for five years. I may...bake something. But probably not.

Nothing's changed on the outside. I still have tons of email. There are new projects that I'm so excited to ignite, that I can barely sit still when the promise of it all runs 'round my heart. There's laundry in the living room right now, and my TV producer is waiting for me to deliver my next segment. But peace is my call to make. 1-800-Life-is-good-cause-I-say-so. I'm letting the GO! GO! GO! of 2009 unwind from my spine. Flexi plexi meander. Peace in. Peace out.

 

mothering.com: new column for modern mamas

I've got a new column on Mothering.com, called: Very Big Love: For Seekers, Mamas, and Mavens

This week's article: Mindful Speech and Supreme Kid-Respect

It's such an honour to be involved in anything that Peggy O'Mara does - she an icon of conscious birth and natural families. And get this - Mothering.com has the #1 community forum on the entire world wide web. That's alotta mamas.

 

burning questions with jay schryer: a man who digs the goddess..and the prince

“Porsidan” means “to question” in Persian. I know that because Jay Schryer is a questioner par excellence. He writes about in search for meaning and rock 'n roll on his blog, Porsidan.com. Jay is one of the reasons I adore the global brain we call the internet. You get to climb inside of stories. You argue in the spirit of seeking - like when Jay took me to task on my No Pity For A Strong Soul article. You learn that the most excellent people can fall on very hard times and that love finds a way. You learn about life and near death.

You make friends and you find new questions inside their story.

What question(s) in your life have been the most empowering (either mind-blowing or gently pervasive) for you?

When I was 19 years old, I was in a nearly-fatal car accident. In fact, I was dead for about a minute or so. In that time, I had a near-death experience where I met the Goddess and talked with her. At the end of our time together, she gave me a choice. I could either stay with Her, or go back to Earth. I chose to come back. Since that time, I have often asked myself why. Why was I given a second choice? Why was I allowed to come back, when so many other people never get that chance? Why did the Goddess handpick me to come back to the physical world? Why am I here? Why are any of us here? And last but not least, what can I do to make sure that I'm not wasting this opportunity, wasting my life? What can I do to make the world a better place simply by being here?

My entire life revolves around those questions, and finding new answers all the time.

If you had an altar, what symbols of devotion would you put on it?

Actually, I do have an altar. On it, I have: A statue of the Goddess, to remind me of Divinity, spirituality, and to always do the right thing. A deck of tarot cards to remind me of the power of symbols, hidden imagery, and mystical, magical powers. I don't believe in divination; I believe that the future is constantly in motion, and that every choice we make changes it and affects it. (more...)

 

kissing ass, quantum leaps, and the power of being unqualified

(Disclaimer: this vocational approach does not apply to heart surgeons, shrinks, or pharmacists. Or the guys who engineer bridges.)

I took a survey last week looking for "unqualified successes," trolling for crackerjack people who bypassed the diploma, the pecking order, or the security guard to get to the top of their game. Here's what we surfaced:

The Top 30 College Drop Outs Who Made It Big In Business list, which includes: billionaires Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Steve Jobs - who, by the way, took a Calligraphy class in college...and then dropped out.

Jimi Hendrix couldn't read music. Rachel Ray never went to cooking school.

Colleen in Calgary sent me this great list: John Fluevog went from working in a shoe store to his own shoe empire. Vera Wang was a fashion writer, and of course there was Coco Chanel, who had no formal training. And this was my favourite client story from Tanya in New York, she "traded risk management software to Investment Banks and on Wall Street...with only a fashion design diploma from South Africa." Yah.

Me? I'm The Poster Chick for Unqualified. I never went to college - except when I was in diapers. My mother, being eighteen when she had me, took me to school with her so she could complete her degree. I doodled in psych text books and played with my dollies in the back of the class. You could say I got my B.A. by osmosis. Maybe on a cellular level, I drew on my toddler days at St. Claire College when I formed my own communications company (representing a few Nobel Laureates and some old pop stars,) and managed a fancy think tank in Washington DC (stacked with PhDs). To be clear: I juuust made it the Right Side of the Tracks, and then ran like hell.

One of the best inadvertent decisions I made was to not go to university. I never had a box to get out of. And yah, yah, higher education partially makes the world go round, but I did what was best for me personally. I just couldn't see the necessity of school. I wanted to be in the world - asap.

6 1/2 WAYS TO BUCK THE SYSTEM, WALK THROUGH WALLS, AND EARN QUALIFICATIONS ON YOUR OWN TERMS

1. Kiss some ass. Yep, you can bypass The System, but there are no short cuts to initiation. You are going to have to smile, make coffee, drive that package to the airport with no gas in your car to get it on the FedEx airplane on time, and then race back to clean up after the party.

1 1/2. Kiss some more ass. Offer to work unpaid for two weeks. Give your ideas away for free - chances are you'll be asked to execute those ideas. If your ideas get hijacked, it will push you to learn that you've got more where that came from. If you're hungry enough, you will innovate.

2. Learn through obsession bordering on crazy-stalker. Immerse yourself in the culture of your choice. Swim in the industry. Eat information whole. Subscribe to every newsletter, read every book, attend every conference.

3. Take people for lunch, ask questions ceaselessly. Risk being annoying - it usually comes off as charmingly eager. Ask: what they're reading, what they'd do if they were you, where they see things going, the best advice they ever received. Keep in touch.

4. Get in over your head. Can you deliver within fours weeks? Just say yes, immediately. It doesn't matter that you don't have a staff, let alone a business card. Accept the mission and then figure out how to make it possible. Where there's a yes, there's a doorway.

5. Present yourself as…You. You can fake qualified here 'n there, but you cannot fake passion, essence or originality - and those are the exact qualities that fuel quantum leaps and barrier-obliteration.

6. Look super fine. If you don't think style matters, then you should probably go get a diploma and play by the rules.

EXTRA-CISE: Consider your dreams (the job, the gig, the love of your life). Write out:
: 5 reasons why your dream is ­unreasonable or the odds are stacked against you;
: 10 passions or beliefs;
: 5 persuasive, potentially outrageous actions that will create forward traction.

Then kiss mediocrity goodbye and prepare to move to the front of the line. Muwah!

 

best of 2009: meet ups, workshops, and blog pow

Best night out: September 30. Tweetup at the Thom Bar, SOHO NYC. Hot, high-minded women in NYC, lounging and laughing. I mean, really. In the red tent that night was, Bindu, power Kate, Rochelle the inspired dancer, the When I Grow Up Coach, a Bronx Beauty, an insecure Ivy Leaguer, a lawyer come entrepreneur, a pole dancing techie, Step Up's Selena, and other new and familiar femmes. The highlight had to do a very animated conversation about clits and literature. Not in that order.

Best workshop or conference: Gail Larsen. Transformational Speaking. Two weeks ago. Runner up: Patty Digh and David Robinson's tele-seminar, Playing With Blocks.

Best blog find of the year: Cleavage, from Kelly Diels.

 

best book of 2009: the unfolding now

What book - fiction or non - touched you? Where were you when you read it? Have you bought and given away multiple copies?

The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature Through the Practice of Presence
by A.H. Almaas

A.H. Almaas is the creator of The Diamond Approach work, which Ken Wilber calls "a superb combination of some of the best of modern Western psychology with ancient (and spiritual) wisdom...probably the most balanced of the widely available spiritual psychologies/therapies."

The Unfolding Now book is like chamomile tea for the soul, made with purified water, with honey from sacred bees, served in a hand made Zen bowl. So simple and nourishing. It is a book of rare transmission that sparks one's deeply innate desire to be real.

We want to learn how we can be here in as real a way as possible: How can I be completely here and completely myself, or as completely as possible? How can my atoms, which are scattered, vibrating, and oscillating in some kind of frenzy, slow down, collect, and settle here as what I am?
- A.H. Almaas

The most delicious mix of questions I drank in all year.

 

best article of 2009?

My pick: Bindu Wiles' Unexpected Broken Heart. A Buddhist in Brooklyn on opening your heart and minding your manners.

 

READ MORE