The Unconditional Loving Heart

Have the unconditional loving heart of an infant,
Have the curious mind of a toddler, and
You will never be old.

Michael de Hart

When did you stop dancing?

 

“In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions:

“When did you stop dancing?

When did you stop singing?

When did you stop being enchanted by stories?

When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?”

– Gabrielle Roth

I would add one more.

When did you stop laughing?

 

Reflections on Living and Dying

Michael and I have spent the past five days sitting with his mom as she slowly makes the final journey of her life.  We have had the support of her family, friends, and hospice along the way.  So many people who love her, who have shown up to sit and care.

When Judie was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December, we all agreed to see how we could help her stay with us, in our home.  Thankfully we have been able to have her at home for the past ten months and she is dying in her own room with all the important people in her family surrounding and supporting her.  And I didn’t know what a gift the experience would be for me.

This road is filled with lessons.  I’m learning that important lessons about living come from the experience of sitting with dying.  Learning about critical values like love, human frailty, compassion, courage, forgiveness, and about the value of time.  These are all things I know about, but I am experiencing them in new ways as I sit here in the presence of the completing circle.  I sit in awe and I feel how blessed I am to be allowed to help care for the end of another person’s life.  At the end, I am working to be focused on being fully present, in this moment, and this moment, and then in the next.

There is something that can happen, if you allow it, when you care for another person as they die.  You can fall in love with them in new ways, and you can fall in love with life.

I have a unique opportunity to foreshadow my own life, see my own end and look at the places I am wasting time or energy on things that don’t serve me or those around me. Places where I might be focused on the small stuff, the unimportant, the meaningless, holding onto resentments, or judgments, or bitterness toward myself or others.  I cannot keep love and judgment in the same space in my mind or heart and continue to stay present.

Knowing that you cannot give what you do not have.  You cannot be what you are not willing to become.  You have to become love to give love.

Sitting quietly in the presence of an ending life offers us a look at places that are scary, but these are places we will all be looking at eventually.   Developing peace through this experience requires us to look at ourselves and reflect, looking at the thoughts or beliefs that are helping or challenging the ones that are hurting. Death asks us to explore where our attachments to stories, beliefs, and ideas might be leading us onto a fearful lonely path.  Dying allows us to become courageous in the face our fears.

Life goals are wonderful, they give us direction.  But, life is far more mysterious and deeply meaningful than solely completing a series of goals.  Life is about experiencing both the ups and the downs.  Finding joy in the moments.  We have the opportunity to recognizing the connection between us all, as we spin along on this shared spaceship, being born, having a life and then passing on into the next experience.  We share this reality with every other living thing on this planet, to include the planet.  Learning to rejoice in life’s mystery.  We can miss our purpose if we are focused only on things like making money, or  all the stuff we want, or sitting in judgment of others.  In the end, the only things that bring joy are the meaningful relationships you create, the people you love and the people who love you back.  The ones who will help to feed you, feed your soul, rub your back, wash you, and help you comfortably move through the rough places that come into each of our lives.

Sometimes we sit waiting for our lives to begin.  But life is not a dress rehearsal. Life is happening even if you’re waiting, life is happening all around you.

My biggest challenge is in recognizing the illusion of “control” that I still want to have in my life.  Challenging this illusion and allowing myself to be  fully present, in the moment.  Trusting that I will get what I need to be a better human being.  Being in touch with my own soul, and working on the lightness. My biggest insight is that life is an adventure towards surrendering.  In every moment letting go of expectations, of anger, and remembering that each of us are all on the learning journey together.  And, that insight has been huge for me.  Surrendering.  Breathing.  Surrendering again.  I see how difficult the surrendering has been in Judie’s ending life.  For her, for us, letting go and letting love.  In these last moments, none of us can take care of ourselves alone.  At the end, we need others, we require care, and we all must let go.

I am sitting with my own internal struggle as the train continues forward and there are no more stops or choices along the way.  No more doors to open, save one.  And our family has talked about how surreal it is when you come to the end of life.  For me this blessing has been important: reminding me to be aware of love, making choices that matter and mean something in my life, because I too will come to the end of my own journey and I want to be able to embrace it as my next adventure instead of my last.

Dream as if you will live forever

Dream as if you’ll live forever live as if you’ll die tomorrow.

Living and dying are issues that are coming up in my home very distinctly.  I haven’t shared with many people my personal life situation.  But, when my husband and I moved from New Mexico to Washington State in 2013, we brought my mom with us.  She was no longer able to manage her affairs, she had lost most of her vision due to a Pituitary Tumor and the related surgeries, and she just basically needed more help.  So, the option was to find her a place to live, or move her in with us.  I have a complex, complicated, and in the past it has been an often painful relationship, and she and I both saw this as an opportunity to work towards healing our relationship and ourselves. It’s a work in progress in my life, learning to let go of resentments, hurts, and StoryJack my experience day to day.

We had been living in Washington State for about a year when my mother in law was suddenly homeless.  It was a no brainer, we had just purchased a home that had a daylight basement with a living room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom, so we moved my mother-in-law into our home.  And, soon after moving in with us in October 2014, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with end stage Pancreatic Cancer.  Since that time, we have begun the process of living and dying in our home.  Death is a hard thing to watch and participate with, but death comes with many gifts.  It creates the space to look at how you want to live your life and how you want to die.  My mother and my mother-in-law could probably not be more different.  My mom is a developing Buddhist and my mother-in-law is conservative Baptist.  I fall somewhere in between.  Sometime about 15 years ago my mother-in-law was telling me about how terrible Pagans were when I asked what a Pagan was, she said, “Someone who loves nature and sees God in nature.” I apparently, in a fit of being contrary, told my mother-in-law that I was a Pagan.  That stuck poorly with my mother-in-law.  I was not being compassionate at that dinner years ago.  And while I don’t consider myself a Pagan, I do still love nature and I do see God in every leaf, flower, and living thing.  My past contrariness has forced me to look at the fact that we are, all four of us, very different.  And, there are many gifts that come from learning to let go of judgment, learning to be accepting, and the willingness to work through differences with those we love, it has been deeply powerful.

Dying is, at its heart, the act of letting go.  Letting go of the stories we have told ourselves that in the end don’t matter.  Letting go of the illusion of control.  Letting go of the ideas of what life should be like.  Breathing through pain.  And, ultimately letting people in, letting them help, letting go of how you think you’re supposed to get love, get help, and learning to accept the love that is around you.  God shows up in the people who are there for you in these difficult times.  Learning to let go is much harder to do than to say.

As I sit and comfort and watch my mother-in-law struggle with the letting go process of dying it is also a letting go process for me.  Not one of us can walk another person’s journey.  I can’t make her better, I can’t make the emotional pain go away, and I can’t make her better.  She is allowing me to show her love, help her where I can, dispensing morphine, rubbing her back or hair, and just being a loving presence in the space that lets her know she is not alone.

 

image from bigstockphoto.com

 

StoryJacking Relationships

In thinking about my own StoryJacking, it’s come to me that I have had dozens if not hundreds of StoryJacks in my life.

In an effort not to overwhelm, I think what I am going to do is just start with one at a time.

As things come up I will add a personal StoryJack to the podcast series, that seems important or relevant to whatever is going on, or that I am trying to explore.  You can listen to an expanded version of this blog on my podcast, “How StoryJacking Helped me Love.”

One insight that I have had is that the more that we look at our lives as transformative StoryJacks, the more likely we are to learn from the experiences versus being dragged down by them.

I have an ordinary story in some very universal ways. My parents divorced when I was 9, and while their marriage wasn’t great, the fighting was disturbing emotionally, the divorce more importantly disrupted my sense of security. This might be a terrible thing for some people, but for me it was my first wake up call.

Then life added the loss of my favorite grandfather, and a sister/friend who died from cancer when she was 19 and I was 12, all adding to my journey. I don’t know if it is about my personality, or my need to feel some sort of control, instead of seeing these losses as tragedy alone, I also began to see that death had a very real presence in life and that I didn’t want to take people or life for granted. These early StoryJacks set me up to continue the process through each adventure and tragedy that has rolled through my life.

The StoryJack that I want to share today is about finding love and growing relationships.

Through my journey of questioning I realized that I had no clue what a healthy relationship might even look like, I wasn’t paying attention to good relationships, I was only looking at the dysfunctional ones that were everything I didn’t want. So, I shifted focus, I looked to my grandparents who had a 50+ year relationship and were in love until the day each of them passed on;

What had worked for them?

• They valued their relationship more than they valued being right.
• They maintained their friendship their entire relationship, they never forgot they liked each other.
• They laughed and shared a sense of humor, sure they groused at each other, but they found ways to turn that into laughter.
• They shared some really important values about life, and they talked about those values, they discussed what the value meant to them, what the value looked like, how they felt when they were demonstrating the value, and they knew that they were in agreement, not just about a word, but about the meaning of the word.
  • And this is crucial if I say I have a value of “honesty,” and you say, I do too! and we go on and only find out later that my value of honesty and your value of honesty were a 100 miles apart. On the surface of the planet a 100 miles isn’t much, but in the intimacy of a close relationship it might as well be the moon, we are worlds apart.
• The areas that each struggled with shyness, or being bossy, the other one either accepted or helped to balance out. They complimented each other in their personalities and human frailties. These were not personality quirks were deal breakers for them; in fact they had no deal breakers in their relationship at all.
• They both really wanted to be in a relationship with each other.  My grandparents were ‘all in’ versus one foot out the door. A lot can be muddled through if both people are invested in the relationship working. We tend to be kinder in our approach if we care about the other person and want to keep them around.
• They both took responsibility with each other and worked really hard not to hurt each other’s feelings. When it happened, they apologized and took ownership, and tried not to press the repeat button too often.
• And, when I asked my mother about my grandparents relationship, she said they didn’t hold grudges with each other, there were no resentments and no hidden agendas. They were fully and honestly present with each other.

The more I thought about what relationships could look like, the more I was willing to risk to grow into the person that could bring these qualities to a relationship of my own. I wasn’t going to settle, I was going to soar. I also decided that I wanted to find a partner, not a savior or a project. That was huge for me, because I had to give up these ideas of Prince Charming or Prince Project.

There was no one coming to take me away from the tough things happening in my life. If I was going to get out of debt, or finish school, or find love, or create a meaningful life for myself, I was going to have to quit waiting around for it to find me and go out and create it.

I also had to give up on the idea that if only ‘someone’ would see my value and my worth, and chose me, I could help him have an amazing life. I realized I needed to save myself, and work to find an equal. If this resonates for you at all, I wrote an article on my blog called, “Sleeping Beauty Must Die! Why you need to kill her to grow up.” I talk a lot more in depth about this issue.

I made another pivotal StoryJack as I dated, 180 dates over two years, where I went from worrying “do you liked me?” to assessing if I liked you. This was huge! It meant, I not only had to stop wrapping myself up in the idea that someone could define my value for me, I had to stop twisting myself into a pretzel to make myself into someone I wasn’t in order for someone I wasn’t even sure I liked to love me. Simply put, I had to learn to love myself.

All of what I was learning meant I would have to be honest about who I am, learn to love myself, get comfortable just being myself, and trust that I was enough.  If I worked at being someone I would like, then the people who like people like me, would find me.  And maybe I would meet the one who was strong enough to handle a real relationship himself. Mr. Lucky 181.

Through this journey of revising and transforming my ideas about myself, what I was capable of, what love authentically looked like for me, and what a real ‘all in’ relationship required, I did meet someone who fell in love with the “me” I had become along the way.

For the past 17 years, he has shown up and loved me and I have shown up and loved him back. When we are being silly, or annoying, insightful, my bossiness, his being wrong, (being silly here) and we have discussed and agreed, and agreed to disagree, on our share of important ideas and values.  We have learned to understand each other and agree that we know what we mean when we discuss these values, and we have learned to laugh at ourselves and at each other… but that will have to wait because that is another story, my friends.

Quick link to the expanded podcast version of this blog.

 

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images from http://www.bigstockphoto.com

 

Sleeping Beauty must die! Why you need to kill her to grow up…

One of the prevalent stories of our lives is the one of Prince Charming and the Perfect Princess.  We all know it, because it’s a story we have been told since we were born, we’ve watched the story play out in books, in movies, in songs, and yet, we rarely see it work in life.  Yet, we’ve all bought into the fairytale, because at different times in our lives we have tried to save someone or wished with all our might that someone would come along on a white steed and save us.  I know I am guilty.  In my 20’s I was ambitiously looking for Mr. Right, to come and save me from… whatever I needed saving from.  I wanted to be Sleeping Beauty.

The fantasy of Prince Charming is a little like thinking about what you will do when you win the Lottery. Which is a great tool to distract us and is perfect if we’re avoiding our life.  I might even make the argument that the Lotto fantasy is the same story with the character of Cash instead of Charming.  These are hard stories to live with because we either sit around waiting to be a hero in someone else’s story or we sit around as a victim, waiting to be swept away from all our own troubles.  Unfortunately, when we are sitting around we aren’t actually doing anything to change our life in any of the meaningful ways we might if we were taking action.

And, that last bit is key to why you have to kill the Sleeping Beauty/Prince Charming myth in order to grow.

• Why do you think that being asleep through your life makes you worth saving?
• What do you learn about taking care of yourself if you are waiting for some magical solution to show up?
• Have you ever met anyone who could perfectly take care of you, past the point they started to bug you?
• At what point are you taking care of your own baggage if your focus in on fixing someone else’s?
• How do you grow up if you choose to hold onto a fairytale?

Let me be clear, I like fairy tales, I love to read them and watch them at the movies.  I just don’t want to pretend that I am waiting for the fairytale to show up and save me from my life.  I don’t want to wait for Prince Charming, the Lottery, the perfect Mentor, the perfect body, the perfect job, I want to go out and find what makes me happy and grow if from the inside.  It’s  time to wake up.

I’ve always wondered at the end of the fairy tale, “and, they all lived happily ever after…” Not only is there no such thing as “happily ever after” it is an ending to a story that continues on the next page, it’s also an untruth that gets us into some serious trouble.

What if my life is filled with the normal ups and downs? What does that mean about my value, my abilities, and me? If I never meet Prince Charming am I lost? Or, I didn’t get the happily ever after just because I met Prince Charming, what then?

And, maybe I did find my Prince Charming, but he has a few bad habits, he doesn’t always listen to me the way I want him to, he doesn’t always clean up after himself, he disagrees with some of my genius ideas, he needs me to take care of him sometimes, sometimes he just needs me to be quiet, and happily ever after actually has taken an epic amount of work and willingness to find a middle path.  In fact finding the right partner for my life, took a lot of courage and an astronomical amount of self-realization, self-improvement and some deeply honest and painful conversations with myself.  I won’t even go into the painful conversations with my partner about my “not so Princess like” qualities that I have had to take a good look in the mirror about, so I could address them.  I am happy; in fact, I may have found what amounts to a real happily ever after.  But I am not happy because I sat around waiting for someone to come and save me from my past, my problems, or myself.  I am happy with my life because it didn’t just magically show up, I have worked on my thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, my actions, and learned to take real ownership of my crap. These tools will stay with me and grow through the rest of my life and add to my happily ever after in real and tangible ways.

Learning to take care of yourself means you have to take your own leaps, you get to run with your equals, that you learn to trust yourself, and learn that you don’t require someone to help you feel powerful in your life.  You don’t actually need to be saved.  Your care is not dependent on someone else, it can’t just be taken away from you, and so you get make choices, make mistakes, learn, grow and kick ass for the rest of your life.  And, magically, you find friends and partners to share all this with, and when you continue to ‘own yourself,’ you get to keep these brilliant gems of people the rest of your life because you’re not wearing them out with your need to save them or be saved by them.

My happiness is a direct result of my willingness to grow myself into a person who I would actually like to be in a relationship with.  I want to be a person who owns her good qualities and her ‘in need of improvement’ qualities, a person who listens even when she disagrees, and I want to kill the fairytale so I can choose wake up and get on with my life; finding my happiness along the way.

images from bigstockphoto.com

Caroline Myss Quote of the Day

Exposure to truth changes your life, period – whether that truth is a revelation about personal honesty and integrity or a divine revelation that reorganizes your place in the universe. This is why most people run from the truth rather than toward it.  Caroline Myss

Are you a StoryJacker?

What the heck is StoryJacking?  This is a question that I have been fielding a lot recently.  Part of the reason is that I invented the StoryJack mashup, so this is a new concept.  If you don’t know what it is, you are not alone.

We all live in stories: the ones we tell ourselves, the ones others tell us, the ones we believe, the stories that scare us, and the ones that we use to drive ourselves forward.  Stories are our narrative, describing life as we see and feel it.  Every bit of information that we take into our mind comes to us in the form of a story, the news, movies, reality tv, books, gossip, education.  And, if you think about the things that capture your attention, it’s probably a juicy story.

Narrative psychology is a viewpoint or a stance within psychology concerned with the “storied nature of human conduct” or in other words, how human beings deal with experience by constructing stories and listening to the stories of others. (Wikipedia)

As you’re looking, you will see stories everywhere.  Our lives are so intertwined with stories that we are often unconscious to the mystery and magic that are embodied in the stories that we connect with, and how those stories impact us.

As children we play in the fields of make believe, enjoying the stories we create from the mist of our imaginations.

Today, science is showing us that our memories, the very things that generate our life stories, are mostly made up.  Yet, we are constantly creating narratives to explain ourselves, or situations, and these stories are filled with tragedy as well as triumph.  Stories can capture us within powerful emotions.  There is always a story that we are telling ourselves in every situation.  Whether we feel empowered or disempowered, there is a story we are telling.  These powerful stories engage us and form a glue that binds us to people, places, ideas, and ultimately to our sense of self.

Stories help us to describe and align with our tribe; the people we will love, the people who will challenge us, the work we are passionate about, the lives that we will create, what we could never do, what we must absolutely do, and each intention is a story.

It can feel overwhelming, but we have the unlimited ability to change stories that don’t work for us, and as they change, they have the power to transform how we interact with the world around us.

StoryJack / stohree jak / verb

Definition:
Story a narrative, either true or fictitious, designed to instruct the hearer or reader; a narration of the events in the life of a person or the existence of a thing, or such events as a subject for narration: example the story of his life or the story we tell ourselves about what we are capable of, in Business it might be the story of our organization or how our team is functioning.

Jack to increase, develop, raise, or accelerate. (Typically followed by something: in this case, awareness, understanding, or insights) To boost the morale of; encourage.

Related terms: StoryJacking, StoryJacked, StoryJacks

Noun: StoryJacker ex. I am a StoryJacker, helping people recognize the stories that will transform their lives, careers, teams, and businesses.

So, what’s your story?  Are you a StoryJacker too?

I am developing a podcast series, StoryJacker, if you think you have an interesting and transformational story, I would be very interested in connecting and having a conversation about having you on the show.  Thank you for reading. 

photo: from bigstockphoto.com