“As you begin to take action toward the fulfillment of your goals and dreams, you must realize that not every action will be perfect. Not every action will produce the desired result. Not every action will work. Making mistakes, getting it almost right, and experimenting to see what happens are all part of the process of eventually getting it right.”
– Jack Canfield
Oh God, here I go again…experimenting, making mistakes, almost getting it right…Crap!
As Monday approaches, which is the day my online business class starts,
I’m getting a stomach ache. Maybe a headache too. Yeah, definitely head ache.
Why you ask? Because of my expectations!
They started off strong, which is par for the course for me.
I devoured all the pre-class curriculum, watched the videos…twice; then I got to the parts I just didn’t understand, and I got frustrated.
” Go big, or go home!” has often been my battle cry. But that was in the ventures where I knew my shit.
Now, I’m WAYYYYYYYYY out of my league, and I want to go to bed.
That all got me to thinking about expectations.
I’m expecting everything to be over my head.
I’m expecting that I will not understand analytics, web design, content blah blah, and all that jazz.
I’m expecting to be asked to build a rocket ship from popsicle sticks, some gum and a flashlight.
I don’t understand how televisions work and planes fly. I know it’s something about capturing pixels and aerodynamics, but it’s all just a miracle to me.
So is the internet.
And I’m about to go behind the curtain and see how it all functions.
Then, I’m going to learn how to finagle and manipulate it.
Then I’m going to rule the world! Mwaaaahaaahaa!
Expectations too high?
See? My expectations have run amok. I vacillate between knowing I’m gonna suck, to thinking I’m the next Mark Zuckerberg.
Damn you expectations!
Do you do that too?
I have until Monday to stop being so expectation-ally schizophrenic and get a more realistic grip on them.
Then I need to just be okay being a student.
I can’t be good at all this stuff, because it’s all NEW to me. Some things I’m going to grasp right away, and love them because they make me feel smart.
I expect a great majority of the material will read like Greek to me, and I’m gonna suck.
I’m expecting a lot of tears…Because that’s what I do when I get frustrated.
So stay tuned. This should get interesting, funny and soggy.
This blog will soon become part of a website. I expect it to be…great.
You will all get to witness this transformation in the coming months, and I know you’ll weigh in 🙂
There will be two, maybe three books available. They’ll be compiled from the over 400 blog posts I’ve written so far.
Hey! Email me your preference for the first book, will ya? Atikhome@me.com
1) The poignant posts with a message and the poems.
Or…
2) The more humorous posts.
I know you’ll be honest with me, because…
I expect nothing less.
XoxJanet
in·tu·i·tion
noun
1.
the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
“we shall allow our intuition to guide us”
synonyms: gut feeling (I added that) instinct, intuitiveness
“Can you use that word in a sentence please?”
Isn’t that one of the questions spelling bee participants ask?
I love the sentence Dictionary.com came up with: We shall allow our intuition to guide us.”
Wouldn’t it be great if we all REALLY did that?
I’d like to live in THAT world!
When’s the last time you said: I shouldn’t have trusted my intuition?
Probably never.
Here’s why: Intuition is your internal GPS. She hold the maps, she has all the directions.
Your intuition has access to all your wisdom, all your talents, all your hopes and dreams.
Even the ones that are buried so deep you don’t acknowledge them or show them to the world.
Then, she has access to wisdom and talents that YOU didn’t even know you possessed.
The thing with intuition is: she’s got your back.
You have to really know that in order to trust her guidance,
because when you can quiet the bullshit, she will be your North Star.
She will guide you to exactly where you should be.
Where you need to be.
You just need to listen.
Intuition is that voice that keeps repeating.
It is calm but insistent.
You’ll try to talk yourself out of it, there doesn’t seem to be reason to its request.
Sometimes it doesn’t make sense.
OFTEN it doesn’t seem rational.
That’s the thing, it isn’t reasonable, it isn’t rational, it’s intuition.
Mothers have it IN SPADES!
“Check the baby”.
Calm, but insistent.
“Check the baby”.
There is no mother on earth that ignores that voice.
They go check the baby, damn it!
Intuition has conviction, it has that knowing.
I’m going to add that to the definition: having a knowing…just KNOWING something.
There’s never a question mark at the end of the request.
If the thought starts with “should I “? Or “What if”. That’s not intuition.
It says without a shadow of a doubt “Don’t marry that man”.
End of discussion.
Shit! We know that voice is telling the truth, we just don’t want to hear it the night before the wedding.
There are some people that risk looking foolish to obey their intuition.
People get off planes that then crash.
There are the stories of people that didn’t go to work, didn’t go back in the building or were “late” on 911.
“Get that mole checked”
That’s intuition. It’s not asking you, it’s telling you.
Whether it’s telling you to get off a plane, see a doctor or leave the ass hole at the altar. It’s trying to guide you and possibly save your life.
My husband and I follow intuition’s instructions every time we get on the motorcycle. We’ve gotten really good at it; because we want to live to see another day.
On our long distance trips we schedule a stretch break every two hours so our butts don’t permanently fall asleep.
Several times, just because one of us has gotten that “hit”, we have pulled off a road to check a map or get a coffee way ahead of time, and it has saved us.
I can remember two times in France. Once we missed a ten car pile up by about a minute. Another morning we left early, just before a sniper opened fire from a bell tower, on the plaza where we were staying in Tours. If we had stuck to our original time, we would have been having coffee…in that plaza…at that time. Guaranteed.
I’m not kidding, we are probably alive because we deviated from our plan, we both had a gut feeling to leave early.
In March of 2010 on Oahu, my friend was teasing me because I was convinced there was going to be a tsunami. I was drinking umbrella drinks and obsessing, so he Googled the frequency of tsunamis in the Hawaiian islands.
Rare.
Didn’t matter.
I heard the voice that kept saying very calmly, but insistently: there’s going to be a tsunami. If Oahu had been an airplane, I would have grabbed my carry-on and gotten off.
Well, it never occurred, we left the next day and I forgot about it.
The next year my husband and I were invited to Maui to stay with friends.
On the drive from the airport to the condo, there’s that voice again.
“There’s going to be a tsunami”.
So I blurt it out over the bad music on the radio.
We then had a spirited debate on which was more likely to happen, a tsunami or a giant volcanic eruption? We both end up on Team Volcano, because THAT makes sense.
It’s reasonable and rational, unlike a tsunami…and we forget about it.
I do have to say, I did pay attention to the fact that we were six floors up. I know I wouldn’t have stayed beachfront. No way.
So you can imagine my husband’s face when 10 days later CNN breaks in with coverage of the huge Tsunami in Japan, and a few minutes later all the Islands are put on Tsunami Watch!
Intuition had my back. She had OUR back.
She just had her dates wrong the first time, she was ahead of herself by one year.
Or was she?
XoxJanet
When I forget this, I get scared.
Another one I like is from Esther Hicks/Abraham: Things are always working out for me.
Doesn’t that just make your shoulders come down off your ears?! Deep breath…
Things are working out, everything will be ok.
Carry on.
XoxJanet
You all know the feeling. It starts in your stomach, maybe as butterflies.
Travels up to your heart, which then accelerates to Mach 1 pace.
Your face may start to get hot, your hands probably tremble, my lips buzz!
Is that excitement…or fear?
You gotta be clear!
Almost plowing into the back of the car in front of you on the freeway, and waiting to find out what’s behind door number one, FEEL the same.
Speaking in front of a thousand people, and walking to the electric chair do too!
Your brains got to inform your body, because your body doesn’t know the difference on its own.
Crazy, but true.
Since the beginning of time, all the same hormones flood your body, trying to get you to run back to the cave.
A good friend’s five year old used to tell her he felt “scared” on the way to Disneyland or a birthday party. He associated all his physical symptoms with the big, loudly barking dog next door. He was terrified of that dog, and so on the ride in the car, to the “happiest place on earth”, he was feeling anything but, labeling his excitement as fear.
Some of us still confuse the two as adults. We probably didn’t verbalize our fear when we were kids, I know I didn’t, it was the 60’s, children were “seen and not heard”….”Martini anyone?”
If your brain lets your body know: Hey, this is a good thing. I choose to be here.
You will save yourself a ton of grief.
I have another friend who hates any kind of surprise. She hates the way that rush of adrenalin feels at the reveal. She’d just as soon be shot out of a cannon, than to endure a surprise party. We had her first and last party at 21. When the lights went on, and we all yelled surprise, she peed her pants, cried hysterically for 15 minutes and then got absolutely shit faced drunk, just to stop the shaking.
Good times!
Excitement or fear?
Here’s the deal, both excitement and fear contain the element of anticipation.
It is the adrenalin trifecta!
But, YOU have the choice of what label to put on a situation.
So, you can anticipate the worst, a horrible death in a fiery crash or anticipate a wonderful tropical vacation.
Same plane flight.
You can tell yourself you’re the luckiest person in the world to be winging your way to Hawaii for ten days. You can be so appreciative of air travel and the fact that you can get across the ocean inside of a day, instead of two weeks at sea. You can start to anticipate your first Mai Thai instead of sizing up the people in the exit rows and trying to gauge who in the flight crew will deploy the rafts.
Give your feeling the appropriate name.
Use the anticipation to your benefit.
Let it help your body navigate the rush.
When you’re watching the movie Halloween Part 25, and your heart is ready to jump out of your chest; in order to live through it, you just tell yourself:
This situation isn’t real.
I’m in no danger.
I choose to be here.
That’s the agreement we all make when we walk into a theatre.
I’m embarking on several new things in my life this month.
At times I’m the five year old in the car, on my way to the party, feeling afraid.
Then I remind myself; that feeling’s not fear, its called excitement.
There’s no danger here.
I chose these adventures, this anticipation is a good thing.
This planes not going down, and I’m definitely NOT running back to the cave.
Whew!
XoxJanet
This savage heart is wild and un bridled,
wanting things that can’t be named.
This savage heart behaves like a child,
running barefoot and untamed.
This savage heart won’t choose the road,
that the other hearts have tread.
This savage heart won’t make it easy,
it won’t let itself be lead.
This savage heart is filled with passion,
that drives it forward hard and fast.
This savage heart will daily command me,
inside this life which I’ve been cast.
This savage heart will go on beating,
until all desire is a thing of the past.
ELEGANT
el·e·gant
ˈeləgənt/
adjective: elegant
1.pleasingly graceful and stylish in appearance or manner.
“she will look elegant in black” (a reason why I always wear black, ha!)
synonyms: stylish, graceful, tasteful, sophisticated, classic, chic, smart.
antonyms: messy, unwieldy (hot mess)!
Oh yeah, I’ve talked about this. I cautioned you in the previous post.
We can aspire to it, aim for it, even pray for it, but enlightenment, spiritual awakening, whatever you want to name it, is rarely elegant.
And by rarely…I mean never.
There is a mine field of inelegance that surrounds becoming conscious.
You can side step the big stuff, like disaster and dis-ease, but you’ll still get your shoes dirty.
It’s kinda the name of the game.
If it was pretty; clean and easy, everyone would do it.
Take meditation for instance.
I can’t tell you how many friends have said this to me: When I started meditation, all hell broke loose.
It starts out all zen and blissful, with the breath and the inner peace. You will have that in your back pocket for life; but ask anyone who’s seriously meditated for a while.
Shit can hit the fan!
If you meditate every day, you literally change your brain…and your body.
You put the monkey mind in its place, and make your connection with source.
But source likes a clean link. It doesn’t like an old plugged up infrastructure, so it cleans and clears things out. When that happens, all your bad habits, your sabotaging self talk, your anger, hate, rage, lack of forgiveness, selfishness, greed, and jealousy, to name a few, are chased out of the shadows and into the light.
Get the fan.
This will set you free, but these guys won’t be graceful, chic or elegant.
They will give you the middle finger on their way out.
Meditation shook their cage, and they’re pissed.
Yoga is right up there too. A great practice, amazing for the mind and body, but it’s not just exercise, there is a spiritual aspect to Yoga that you can’t get around.
Yoga in Sanskrit means “the Divine Union”. Using the physical postures to bring the mind under control and join with the Higher Self or Source.
Uh oh.
Get the fan.
A regular Yoga practice will unleash all the usual suspects.
Anger will be released from your hip joints, sadness from your shoulders.
There will be heart openings, epic realizations, even tears.
It will free YOU as well…it just won’t be elegant.
Choosing the path less traveled.
Operating outside your comfort zone.
Mindful living.
Being of Service.
All call for making the tough choices, lots of “no’s” = Fast track to a more enlightened life.
Elegance…not so much.
Enlightenment is the loftier, more desirable pursuit of the two, but it has been my experience that you can’t have both.
Choose wisely.
XoxJanet
“Someday you are going to realize there is a tremendous difference in knowing the path, and walking the path”
Morpheus to Neo ~The Matrix
I hate to do this, but if you want to be caught up, you’re going to have to go back and read Parts I-III.
I’ll wait.
Ok, so now you have some of the back story.
This installment starts in late November 1993 and I’m going for my second session of “energy work” with that little Tasmanian devil, T.
I’ve wised up enough to realize this work has absolutely nothing to do with alleviating tension and sore muscles.
It is a “soul massage”. It is releasing very old and “stuck” cellular memory, in order to give my soul a cleaner slate. I didn’t have a full grasp of why that was a good idea, but like most things that were happening to me at that time, I was just “goin’ with the flow”.
T incorporated acupuncture needles this time. TONS of them. I had them all over my body. My face was covered, down my spine and the bottoms of my feet, which freaked me out. What if there was an Earthquake and I had to make a run for it?
When he was working on my spine, I started to feel very anxious, like an anxiety attack—so I told him to stop. With one wave of his hand, I felt better.
Shit, Where was this guy when I was getting my divorce?
After my previous session, which was my first, I became quite ill.
This time, I lost my mind.
Well, just a little at first, but I’m someone who REALLY likes feeling normal, and as I left normal far behind me in the rearview mirror, I shut down.
But first I got weird and kinda desperate.
I had read that putting pennies (copper) in your shoes could help ground a person, so imagine if you will, me at work with pennies taped inside my Jimmy Choo’s and Manolo Blahnik’s. It didn’t help. I was out of clever options. Could a tin-foil hat be far behind?
Work…yeah, that was interesting. Thank God I ran the place, so I was there alone 90% of the time. I literally would be “out” of my body all day, every day. To the point that I would forget how to answer a telephone. Not what to say… I didn’t know how it worked! It would ring, and I’d stare at it, like someone from the dark ages seeing modern technology for the first time. Same thing with the fax. I also had trouble reading English.
While I was “out” I was freezing cold, but each day for I’d say a half-hour total, I’d pop back “in” for a visit. I could feel it start at the base of my spine with a warmth that would radiate to the top of my head. Once it got there, Me, the 20th century Janet, would be back!
That’s when I made sure I would listen and return the phone messages, and read whatever needed my attention. Oddly enough I have no memory of a single customer interaction. I know that can’t be true, this madness lasted for over three months, but apparently, I was able to fake sanity convincingly.
I was so afraid of getting fired or driving a car when I was “out” but my team, yes, I had a little team around me now, with T acting as the leader, and he assured me that the state I was in (Samadhi) was so sacred, that no harm would befall me.
Sacred Shmakred. But it never did.
When I wasn’t an emotionless zombie, I was suffering epic, massive anxiety. Fear was my constant companion.
I know, hot mess…enlightenment isn’t elegant. (More on that later)
I had one foot in this world, and another foot…somewhere else. Somewhere far, far, away, where I was assured I was needed.
My opinion was, hey, I have this perfectly good body right here, right now, I want to be present! So I fought the process. Tooth and nail. No flow going for me! I struggled every second of every day, and THAT was causing all my suffering.
You don’t fight Samadhi, you embrace it, or so I was told.
Nights were hard. I lived alone, for which I was partially grateful. On one hand, I didn’t have to make excuses for my behavior, but I felt extremely isolated.
God, nights are sinister.
I’d never really noticed that before. They are excruciatingly looooong and so damn black, so damn all the time in the winter!
T did his energy work on me, sometimes several times a day if I was particularly uncomfortable.
With him came that same bone dry bedside manner.
I remember, one day, laying on the bed, saying all I could see was black, and screaming that I couldn’t breathe.
Me:(gasping dramatically) I’m gonna die!
T: (calmly, almost bored, while thumbing through a People magazine) You are in Bardo, every cell in your body can breathe, not just your lungs, ask your whole body to breathe for you. How about if you quit fighting it? Surrender.
Me: I’m dying!
T: Then die.
Looking back I realize his calm nonchalance saved me. I can’t imagine how scared I would have been if he had been freaking out also. I’m convinced that that’s the best way to be in these situations. Calm and reassuring, not at all emotionally invested.
If I had smelled ANY fear on his part, I would have lost it…more than I already had.
The team was concerned that if I didn’t lighten up and “throw up my hands like I’m on a roller coaster” that the energy would fry my circuits. Everyone agreed, fighting it was not serving me.
“This is your new normal,” they’d insist. “There’s no going back, you can’t un-know something, once you know it”
Shut up! And what does that even mean??
I swear, some of the people that look homeless and crazy on the streets, I’m convinced have never learned to ride the roller coaster. I feel for them, I really do.
I bet they have pennies in their shoes.
My friend at work, Sally, was the only person I confided in. She didn’t judge, even though it looked to her like her friend had flipped her lid.
When I felt particularly bad, I’d walk by her booth and we’d make eye contact.
Then we’d both throw our arms in the air and go “weeeee” and I’d feel a little more human and understood. She rode the coaster with me.
I’m making it sound like it was all hell.
It was mostly hell, but Samadhi brings with it some interesting party favors.
I think that happens to keep you engaged because every fiber of my being was checked out.
I did have some mystical, magical, miracles happen during that time.
Those will be next.
(To be continued)
XoxJanet
Both feet have to leave the ground to leap.
Shit!
….and therein lies the rub.
We seldom feel like we’re ready….it just isn’t the right time…not yet.
What the hell are we waiting for?
An illness?
Divorce?
The empty nest?
More diplomas?
Losing a job?
More zeros in our bank account (Ahhh, now I’m getting warmer) but how many are enough?
How about PERMISSION?
Word from God-on-high that all systems are go, and you’re ready for launch.
That’s what I want.
That’s what we all want.
But you know what you guys? We’ve got that. We have our internal guidance, our intuition, our gut, to let us know when we’re getting close.
We’ve all been there. You get that restless feeling.
You start asking life WAY too many questions.
You feel as if you can’t do that thing you’ve been doing for one-more-minute.
That to me, signals one foot off the ground.
Then I have to suck up every ounce of courage to trust those signals, and
Lift. The. Other. Foot.
Permission is Grace’s secret weapon.
If you give enough value to the signs, the synchronicity, that jumpy little feeling in your belly, and you turn away from the fear and doubt and really show up for yourself; you grant Permission.
Permission’s bodyguards, Faith and Courage, then clear the path for Grace to enter.
Then you know what Grace does?
She lends you her hand and helps you balance…
so you can lift your other foot to leap.
Xox
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