self improvement

“The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety.” 
– Goethe 

I hope you’re old enough to remember having an Etch a Sketch.
If not, get off my blog!
Because none of my ancient references will make any sense to you
unless you’re an anthropologist studying the 20th century.
I remember when telephones were attached by wires to the wall,
TV was in black and white,
and there was no Internet! Gasp!

Anyway…an Etch a Sketch is a prehistoric toy, about the size of an iPad.
You turn two knobs at the bottom to “draw” with black lines
and you shake it to erase the screen in order to start over.

I found it profoundly frustrating because it only draws in straight lines and right angles.
At least for me.
I have seen that some people were able to draw the Mona Lisa.
I’m still sure somehow, they cheated.

The analogy I’m trying to make here, is that after many years of turning the knobs
and through a series of straight lines and right angles, I got my little black and white picture just so. Then…

Someone Shook The Etch a Sketch!!!
And my masterpiece is gone, for good!

Actually, it seems someone has shaken the global, maybe even cosmic
Etch a Sketch, and we all get a “do over”!

Now, that feels better to some than others.
We all get really invested in all the time and energy our black and white
masterpieces required of us!
We were able to overcome the frustration at only using straight lines,
and right angles.
We lowered our expectations a bit.
Maybe WE were not the ones that could draw the Mona Lisa, and that was…okay.

But after the shock of the shake ;-). Heehee
I think everyone, myself included, has started to embrace the empty slate.

I for one, am going to take my time.
I’m going to read the instructions for once,
and learn to draw circles, and loopty loops, and set the thing on COLOR!

I doubt I’ll be able to draw a Mona Lisa, but that’s alright,
I want my masterpiece to wear glitter and false eyelashes,
And a real smile!

How about you? What are you going to draw now that you get a “do over”?
XoxJanet

Instead of a problem that needs a solution,
I’m changing my approach.

I now want to summon the Universe to help with 
A question that seeks an answer or
A desire to be fulfilled.
That is how I choose to steer my life!

Because really, doesn’t the Universe just need a break from all the heavy lifting?
It must get SO old always being called at the eleventh hour to put out my fires!
And don’t sit there in your smug and insinuate that I’m the only one!
Ha! You rapscallions!

You must agree that it is long past time to graduate from the status of 
Universal troublemakers, creating problems that propel us to move from point A to point B.

Instead, I’m leaning more toward Universal creator, 
Someone who comes up with a series of juicy “what if’s”? for the Universe to ponder.
The brushstrokes are broader,
There’s still forward movement,
Life’s much more interesting, 
Nixing the drama,
There’s a lot less crash and burn.

The ultimate will be Universal dreamer.
I’ll dial up a desire, and BAM!
Like a genie from the bottle,
The Universe appears!
My wish is their command!

As the process is refining itself, 
So am I.
Fewer nights of worry and woe,
Many more days of yeah!! and whoa!!

I’m beginning to realize that all these posts on forgiveness are going to come in handy for the upcoming holidays and their familial entanglements.
Thanksgiving in the US can be brutal because of all the Norman Rockwellian
expectations.
Unfortunately, what we imagine as warm and fuzzy, can quickly turn cold and prickly.

Even though everyone at the table is somehow related, dinner etiquette can morph
into a kind of blood sport. 
Back handed compliments and thinly veiled sarcasm abound, and it’s just not Thanksgiving, if somebody doesn’t cry.

Put tons of carbohydrates, lots of judgement, a dash of shame, with a pumpkin pie chaser and voila! 
Hilarity ensues!
NOT!

When you put together people that only sit in the same room once a year, there isn’t enough alcohol on the planet to keep you in “that loving place”.

It can turn into a real numb-fest.
The carbs numb you down,
The booze,
The sugar,
The football,
The sour cream onion dip,
Yes, you heard me!
It all numbs you down, so you can smile and remain polite,
making sure that everyone lives to see another holiday.

But let’s all remember that everyone has the highest of intentions
when they pull up the driveway.
And each year can be a fresh start.
When you make forgiveness the first course, 
knowing that everyone is just doing the best they can, 
it makes the rest of the day play out differently.

My family is loving, relatively sane, and really quite civil now.
I think that’s because we’re all so damn old!
The last time we served crazy for Thanksgiving was during the Reagan
administration.
Gone are the comments that are meant to be funny…but aren’t,
followed by that uncomfortable silence.

Still…let’s all practice forgiveness,
try to operate from the heart, remembering the true intention of this day.
Take a deep breath,
And listen with love as our well intentioned aunt tells us how much she dislikes our new haircut.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Xox Janet

I like the word appreciation over gratitude.
It’s cleaner,
It’s clearer,
It feels better to me.

Gratitude can still have the energy of overcoming something attached to it.
“God! I’m so grateful THAT is over”!

Thankfulness can carry a similar energy to gratitude.
“I’m so thankful to be done with THAT”!

Don’t get me wrong, reaching for gratitude and thankfulness,
can pull you up and out of the sticky tar of hate, fear and anxiety.
But I have found that through the years, as my gratitude journals
evolved, I could read back and feel in those words of gratitude, 
the wounds that had not healed, 
the fear that I was trying to banish.

It felt like gratitude and thankfulness were part of the healing
process, part of the energy working to sooth me.

Appreciation feels like the finish line.
It feels like the wind is at my back, the past is far behind me, and
I am reaching that line, having stopped to heal along the way with:
1) forgiveness
2 gratitude
3 thankfulness.

So…currently the clean air of appreciation stands waiting for me at the finish 
line, with a towel and some Gatorade.

Try it and see if you can feel the difference.
XoxJanet

Your ability to lead a healthy and happy life depends more on your perception of the events that unfold around you than it does upon the actual events themselves.
– Christiane Northrup

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”
~Gilda Radner~

I LOVE that!! What a contradiction! Right?!!

In AA they call it letting go,
And letting God.

AMBIGUITY (noun)

the quality or state of having a veiled or uncertain meaning 
Synonyms ambiguity: ambiguousness, darkness, equivocalness, equivocation, inscrutability, inscrutableness, murkiness, mysteriousness, nebulosity, nebulousness, obliqueness, obliquity, opacity, opaqueness

Sounds scary, right?
But then you add the word…the perception of
Delicious

I saw this quote a couple of weeks ago and it’s been rolling around in my head.
What did she mean?

The lack of clarity about a situation does not necessarily mean it cannot be desirable.

Delicious Ambiguity means to Revel in the Unknown. What appears
ambiguious has many delicious things for life. Keep your eyes open,
Your MIND open, and things will reveal themselves.

Then I found this on the Web just the other day and it all started to make sense.
It’s a prayer of sorts that feels to me like it can help put us in a place of 
Delicious Ambiguity. 

I’m saying it every morning.
It goes like this:

Dear God, 
Put me in the right place even though I don’t know where it is. 
Dear God, when you do it, make it comfortable for me and help me to see the sense of it. 
Make it easy and bring me the right situations and synchronicities to put me in this place I don’t know about.

XoxJanet

“If I have harmed anyone in any way either knowingly or unknowingly through my own confusions, I ask their forgiveness. If anyone has harmed me in any way either knowingly or unknowingly through their own confusions, I forgive them. And if there is a situation I am not yet ready to forgive, I forgive myself for that. For all the ways that I harm myself, negate, doubt, belittle myself, judge or be unkind to myself through my own confusions, I forgive myself.”
~ A Buddhist Prayer of Forgiveness

My darling Diana used this prayer in a meditation the other day
in honor of the current full moon energy.
We get together once a month to pay homage to the energy surrounding each full moon, in hopes it will kick our ass that much less.

We were talking about the inflammatory nature of the word 
Forgiveness

People will get furious and fight for their right to NOT forgive.
I would love to hear the argument for this and how it serves them in their lives.
How is staying mad and resentful working in their favor?

NOTHING is unforgivable
No Thing.
There is always a choice
The choice to stay right..and miserable,
Or the choice to be happy..and free.

Some things FEEL unforgivable, they are so horrible.
Forgiveness does not mean forgetting, nor does it mean condoning or excusing offenses. 
It is accepting and moving on.

“Holding onto Anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die”
~Buddha~

I have a story that demonstrated this to me so perfectly.
I was once walking with my husband through one of those beautiful,
outdoor malls, when suddenly, I saw someone who had visited torment,
in the form of horrible verbal abuse and hugely expensive, unjustified
legal action on me.
He acts like a MEAN guy.

Immediately my blood ran cold.
I darted around him like an idiot, trying not be be seen, or breath the same air.
He on the other hand, was walking and smiling and having a perfectly lovely time with his wife.
He was fine.
I was miserable.
In my anger, resentment, and ultimately my inability to forgive him or move on,
I was hooked up to an intravenous feed of poison, that was only hurting…
ME. 

I work hard literally EVERY day to forgive this man.
And to forgive myself for attracting someone like that into my life.
The moment I met him I should have turned and run!
And I knew that! 
My bad.

Forgiveness is the scent the violet leaves on the heel that crushes it
– Mark Twain

Think about that statement. That feels so sacred to me.

I’d love to open a discussion on forgiveness.
Forgiving others, and forgiving ourselves.
Let me know your thoughts.

XoxJanet 

“A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain. ” 

– Mildred W. Struven

I need a show of hands, who thinks time is messing with us??
I mean really!
I feel as if I’ve lived about five lifetimes INSIDE this one ragged, crazy life!!
Clay that has been molded, then flattened out, then re molded,
over, and over, and over again.

A thousands suns have fired me into porcelain.
I’ve been broken, then glued.
I’ve been chipped…repeatedly.
I’m too fragile for everyday sometimes,
Too fancy.
But porcelain is shiny and it’s pretty.
And remarkably durable.
And I’ve lasted.

People used to be dead by 50!
These days we’re just hitting our stride by then.

In Kabbalah, that wonderful form of Jewish mysticism,
You don’t even get possession of life’s secrets until after 40.
What a gype, you were allowed all the answers,
then you died?

I don’t know about you, but the past me’s
bear little resemblance to the current me.
I can follow their trajectory to see how I got here,
but honestly, it could have gone any number of other ways!

Sometimes I’m right back in the 19 year old me’s skin,
looking thru her eyes, and she feels familiar, I can relate to her thoughts.
Other times, I can look at a picture of me at 26, 35, 47 and a complete
stranger stares back.

What I know for sure, is I’ve been, we’ve all been,
given the opportunity to take our time to evolve this time.
We’ve all lived several lives inside just this one.
And I for one, was not trusted with life’s secrets until after 50.
I didn’t have the gravitas, I couldn’t be trusted.

Not until the clay was molded into porcelain yet once again,
this time using all the broken pieces.

I’m having that Christmas morning feeling lately.
Even if you don’t celebrate Chistmas, I’m sure you know what
I’m taking about.
It’s that delicious feeling of anticipation, butterflies and all, that you get
in the lead up, and almost unbearably the night before, 
but by early Christmas morning you’ve almost lost your mind, from excitement.
too much sugar, and lack of sleep.

I’m ridiculous, I know, but I still get that feeling every year despite my best intentions.
A cold and cynical Grinch I will never be.

It must just be in the air, because there’s really no excuse!
The actual day is almost 6 weeks away.
The real lead up is….well it did start the day after Halloween,
but I have yet to hear a carol, so it hasn’t started yet in my world.

This feeling is like the excitement I associate with Christmas, but I know this 
time it’s unrelated.
I’m filled with optimism of something wonderful about to happen.
Not sure of the logistics.
Just sure of the miracle.
Kinda like flying reindeer and a fat man squeezing down a chimney.

The Universe, or Source, or God, is up to something.
Doesn’t matter if we’ve been naughty or nice.
Whew!!!

She’s hanging white twinkle lights and making everything feel special.
The future is wrapped up sweetly with a big bow.
Miracles are afoot
All bets are off
The jig is up.

Are you feeling it??