"These are the days of miracle and wonder..." Paul Simon

When I left my homestead of 25 years and moved 6 blocks south to my dream cottage home, a 1928 craftsman bungalow,I envisioned an ache in my heart that would never really leave.  I mean my babies grew up here.  They only home they ever knew.  And we had to say goodbye to it and those memories.  A lump in my throat accompanied me as I went through getting the home ready for sale and then packing up to move.  I NEVER envisioned, being back at said homestead on retreat while the men who own it now, vacation elsewhere.    I thought I would have to say goodbye forever.But today I sit next to a newly re-plastered perfect pool, in a new remodeled home that still structurally holds the best of my "old" homestead.  And I am amazed at how wrong I was about what I thought the future with my children's and my home would hold for me/them.  AND more importantly I so created unnecessary suffering by getting out ahead into a future that ...never happened!  Instead I got to leave a home that was too much for me and move into a new chapter in my life.  AND I got visiting privileges.  How great is that?!"These are indeed the days of miracle and wonder..."  The miracle of shifting your mind and the wonder of opening your heart abound.  Had I trusted the future and trusted myself to meet it, I could have saved myself some unnecessary pain and heartache.

1. Where do you need to open your heart and trust yourself to meet the future?  
2. Where are you out ahead of today with a story that diminishes you in large or small ways?
3. Where can you make a miracle just by looking at something differently?

The ideal and the real...

Mom's pin-curled hair, now loose and blowing in the March Wisconsin winds as she applies the clothes pins to the wet laundry on the clothes lines strung through the backyard by my father.  Four children, I the oldest at 8 years, followed by three more all two years apart.  Her life.  Her busy and full life.  Many fighting for her lap and her attention.  "Mama",  "Mom", "Mary" ...my mother and many mothers' lives in the 1950s.  It was a different time.  Another time.   Or is it?I watch my young friends, juggle work schedules and a variety of enrichment classes for multiple children.  They are having their children closer together, like my parents generation did.  And they are having larger families.  As I sit on the large patio of the local city golf course looking out ...and back in time...I am struck with the cycles of life.When I was in that jam-packed family and house-holding phase of my own life, I missed time to read, time for me, time for museums, brunches and gallery walks.  Now I have much time for all of these things.  And I miss the sound of "mom" "momma".  I miss being sought after and adored.  I miss the fullness.  The busyness of it all.  Truth be told each phase of life has its exquisite beauties AND the places it falls short.  I advise a young client who currently has no romantic love in her life to enjoy this time because when love finds her again her life and time, will no longer be primarily about just her and her own preferences.  But do I heed my own advice?Not so much...Do I wake up excited about being the sole person I get to please and care for today?  Somedays.  Today, this day, I glance back and wish that I understood 20 years ago that to everything there is indeed a season.  Such a life-long challenge for this visionary, this midwife of change and possibility, to fully embrace whatever cycle I am in, rather than lean into the next "ideal" vision, I glimpse.  For too often that "ideal" arose out of an anxiety or sense of lack.  Years back, when covered over in motherhood, I wondered if there would ever be time for me again.  Would there be enough?  Was I enough?  And when I thought that thought I was leaning away from the reality of my life without deeply embracing it for its particular beauties and flaws.  So often the inner dialogue then was "I better..."  "I need to..." "and I have to..."So now when I hear myself say "I better______"  and note an anxiety that time is running out, or that something negative will happen if I don't act now, I breathe and question that thought.  Same thing with "I need to______".  or "I have to_________."   And often I discover that these thoughts have fear-scarcity-lack or some sort of anxiety lurking at their base.For example, today I could say to myself  "Nancy you need to appreciate your current state of being single."  And if I respond to that inner command it is ultimately a lack-based response.  Ditto, if I say "Nancy, while you are still single you better enjoy and make the most of it."  But, what happens, if I say to myself,  "Nancy, lucky lady, you get the privilege of a low maintenance life with enough time to focus on those things that you set aside during the years you were raising your children"?Shift is what happens.  Shift inside of me.  Shift to a deep gratitude and a wholehearted embrace of the life I have been given.

Strength AND vulnerability...

I feel like the oak tree on the north side of the caddy shack at the city golf course I walk each morning.Fragile...beautiful...broken and bare branched in places, yet graceful and lovely on the whole.My mind like the leaves rustled by any breeze, yet my core, my trunk and roots are sturdy and strong.Strength and vulnerability, my existance.Strength and vulnerability our world.Strength and vulnerability, my home.At last.

Psyche (aka your unconscious): Holds all the trump!

More and more neuroscience is demonstrating the limits of the logical and the rational.  Thus proving C.G. Jung, (Jungian Psychology) to have been a prophet.  The power of the unconscious, the mysterious and unfathomable, within each and everyone of us is truly breathtaking.  AND it is efficient!  How does it get better than that?!I write about this because there are tools that one can use (many of which I have practiced for almost 2 decades) that help us actually hear the voice of our own psyche.  AND why that matters is because it turns out ..that it is not "Father who knows best" but Psyche.  (Yes, I am that old!)Our own sweet souls are what will make the best and happiest decisions on any and all matter of preference for each of us.  Whether it be the next car we buy, the person we live with or career path we take...or which pair of shoes to buy and where to go for dinner.    Psyche (soul) always speaks to us in the language of feelings, energy, moods and dreams.  She is always letting us know what will make us happy in the long run.So why aren't we happier?  Because our Strategic Mind generally overrules her and so quickly we often don't hear her at all.    She says, "I want light and space."  Strategic mind jumps in with "We can't move, we don't have time and where will we find....blah, blah, blah."  Conversation over...except it isn't because Psyche will now start to disturb our peace with ennui or discontent or weird dreams.  AND she won't stop.Our distrust of her is part and parcel of our inherent distrust of joy and happiness.  (See my post:  Trusting Joy).  Most of us trust suffering and struggle more than we do joy and happiness.  That is why we mostly change through the school of hardknocks.   What would happen is when Psyche whispered "I want light and space." we would respond with curiosity with "Tell me more"?Maybe we allow Strategic Mind (SM) to register it's concerns immediately...but in the spirit of a brainstorm, instead of control.SM:  "Look, the easy way would be to change our exisiting space if that is possible, but why is it you want light and space and are there other ways we could achieve that, because moving is a a big chunk of time and money?"And then the ideas surface.  The brainstorm is on.  Strategic mind doesn't have to and should not just say "yes" to Psyche, it is meant to be a true conversation between the rational and irrational within us.  We can learn how to stay in the tension of the conflicting needs within our own minds, knowing that one day something greater than either "move or stay here and ignore the need for light and space" will emerge.  Einstein said, "you can't solve a problem with the level of thinking that created it."  I say, ask yourself where you are stuck.  AND put those two opposites together and ask "how can I have both X and Y?"  Then settle in and wait, trusting that an answer will come.  Stay open.  Wait for what is fresh, new and alive to arrive.  

For those Difficult Conversations during the Holidays:

This was written by Daniel Goleman and The Emotional Intelligience Guru.  I have reposted it because I think it is spot on and well written.  Before I tell myself a story about how a sister or brother, or mother or father-in-law, or whomever just doesn't get it.  Or "Always" judges me or "never" listens to me, I might want to take Goleman's advice. "We’ve all had difficult conversations, often with difficult people. How do you improve the process and outcome of challenging discussions? I recently spoke with Erica Ariel Fox, lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, and member of the internationally acclaimed Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON), about how to manage a difficult conversation. Her research on negotiation showed her that improving your interactions with others starts with managing how you interact with yourself.Here’s her take on how she came to discover the effectiveness of emotionally intelligent negotiation:"Every difficult conversation is really three conversations. There's the conversation about what happened: the substance, the facts. Each of us has a story about what happened. There's also what they call the feeling conversation, the emotional level. And there's also the identity conversation, which asks “what does this say about me?” Is something in my self-image implicated in what's going on here? What's making the conversation difficult for me? Expanding your view of the conversation in this way lets you understand that just battling back and forth to prove that you're right and the other side is wrong is not likely to get you from a breakdown to a breakthrough. I've spent a lot of time working with executives, teaching, working in companies, and working in some government situations, and I noticed that people had this difficulty trying to deal with the three conversations - they got the concept, but in real time they found it very difficult to use this concept. Even if they practiced it in a workshop and got the words to come out of their mouth, their real-time experience was that they weren't doing the best practices that they cognitively knew they should do.I became extremely interested in this gap, what I later called the Performance Gap, between people's potential to negotiate effectively, which might be very high, and their ability to practice it. In looking at this gap and trying to figure out how you help people in real time bring forward their skillful means and higher nature, I simply asked the question: What if I'm the problem? What do I need to do to be more effective to get better results, or develop stronger relationships, or reap the deeper rewards of life in general? I can stop looking out there. I can stop wishing my boss would change. I can stop blaming or judging my family members. I can look inside and ask how am I contributing, how is my relationship with my self leading me to get in my own way? Asking yourself if I’m the problem isn’t the same as self-blame. If you think about your levers of change, where you can influence - it’s not easy to change other people, particularly when you're talking about long-standing habits and mindsets. But you actually do have a quality of autonomy that enables you to grow as a human being. You set that intention, you learn skills, and you shift your mindset. It’s extremely empowering to notice that one of the ways to improve your interactions with other people is to get better at how you interact with yourself."  Daniel Goleman