pay attention

It began in the summer while leading a canoe trip with a dear friend. She had been embarking on a great personal healing journey and as we paddled and portaged, she kept finding the most beautiful feathers. I was a bit jealous to be quite honest. A few weeks later as summer turned its face toward fall, I also started finding feathers. One after another. Some days I would find three perfectly intact, beautiful feathers on the ground right in front of me. It wasn't that I was suddenly standing under bird nests; I was suddenly realizing important things about starting the next phase of my life.
Shortly after that, my boss, friend and mentor suggested I do a workshop on group leadership. The evening I got on the plane to travel from one coast to the other, I found a feather on the sidewalk, and another right when I arrived. I carried a deep sense of being in exactly the right place doing the right thing for the duration of the workshop.
That was two weeks ago. As I have been settling in to my new life post workshop, the feathers have declined. This doesn't mean that I'm no longer on the right path; I take the decline of feathers as a sign that I am better able to understand and trust my own sense of things and I don't need so many outward confirmations.
I feel better in my ability to read people and situations, I feel more compassionate, and all around me people are being generous and loving. This is why we need not take ourselves so seriously: if we follow the things that intuitively feel right, regardless of the judgement of others, we will find ourselves easily flowing into what we are meant to be doing.

Nobody said it was easy to get in touch with intuition, I'm just saying it is important to pay attention. Look, listen, breathe. What do you feel? What is your body trying to tell you? How do you know you've made a good decision? When things are going well, pay attention to your body and the people around you. When things are challenging and scary, pay attention. Your body already knows things your brain alone can't interpret.

When opportunity arises will you be able to follow your heart?

Forgiveness

If you can forgive yourself and recognize that imperfection is the perfect condition of being human, just do.
To stop and listen: just stop, just listen.
It is so simple:
the earth sings with love. YOU sing with love.

Listen to it, love moves through it. Act. Do. Be. You are not alone, you are loved.
Forgive yourself for wanting things, forgive others for wanting things. 

Forgiveness lives in our bones, it is deeper than language.

Do not deny yourself such healing. 

Power in Gratitude

First: update on the 'Say it Out Loud' challenge: it's going really well! I have managed to tell someone every day since I began, and I feel great about it. I called my sister just to say "I love you" and she said it made her day just to hear it. That small act of reaching out reflected back and felt great. It's been much the same with everyone I've shown my love to. So, if you didn't take up the challenge last time, I recommend taking it now. I think I'm going to expand it into a daily practice.

Ok, now that's been done, on to my new topic, the power of gratitude. There's a reason that giving thanks is a part of every major religion, and there's a reason it makes your life better: it changes your attitude. It's all there in the word itself: gratitude. When you feel grateful for something, you think about it differently, cherish it, respect it, use it appropriately, and you behave differently towards it. Giving thanks, genuine, sincere thanks, brings loving reverent energy into your life. If there's one thing that can give you an instant attitude adjustment and mood boost, it's realizing how many wonderful things you have going for you and being grateful. And if you haven't figured it out by now, the nicest, most important thing you can do for yourself, is to stop the negative thought loops in your existence and replace them with positive ones.

This isn't about lying to yourself or "making lemonade" it's about choosing to focus on what's going right more than you focus of what's going wrong; it's about taking responsibility for your life and your feelings and either accepting things that are out of your control, or taking action to change them. Practicing gratitude is an excellent way to re-frame negativity. Don't like your roommate? Thank them for challenging your patience. Don't like your body? Thank it for all the things it CAN do: read this blog, let you enjoy the world through your senses, give you a home base for all your brainy endeavors, whatever.

Letting go of conflict with your world is in your power. It isn't about throwing up your hand in defeat, it's about engaging with the world AS IT IS, and making things better MOMENT BY MOMENT. There is a place for conflict, but it shouldn't be the focus of your whole life. Gratitude is one step you can take to change both your world and yourself for the better.

Try this: close your eyes, and picture something that makes you really happy, maybe a person, a place, a pet, a memory. Think about it really hard. Feel all the good things that come up. Send it gratitude. Now, think of someone you know who you aren't so close with, and send them gratitude, love, good wishes for health, etc. Then, think of someone or something that is causing you pain, frustration, someone you don't get along with. Try sending them love, thank them for the challenges they represent for you, thank them for giving you a place to grow.

If you do this with intention, it just might change how you see that person, that conflict, and that negativity. Giving thanks for your challenges is just as important as giving thanks for the things that bring you joy.

Thank you, reader. You're enriching my life!

Say it out loud!

My resolution for the new year was to "love more deeply and freely myself and others" and I've been thinking this past week, as we creep up on Valentine's Day, about how to make measurable progress on this particular goal. Supposedly tomorrow is the day when people declare their love for each other and somehow rainbows and magic springs forth forever. But what if we always told the people in our lives how much we love and appreciate them? What if instead of 'love' being a word heavily associated with romance and sex it was actually a word expressing meaningful connection between people. Totally revolutionary, right? It might mean that you've been saying it to people you don't really know well enough to love, which might be a painful realization, but it's also likely that there are people you love who don't know it because you've never said it.

Anyway, I think sometimes we forget the healing power of love and of expressing love to the world around you. It feels really good to love someone/something, and it feels even better to let those people know they are loved. So this post is a challenge to you and to me: tell someone you love them, tell at least one person you love that you haven't told yet, and tell someone you love them every day for the rest of the month, and see if that doesn't make your life just a little bit richer!

Do Something Nice For Someone Else

Yes, yes, a cheap play on the title of the blog. But seriously, everyone knows it feels good to be nice to people, do nice things, go a little out of your way for someone else. It doesn't have to be big, even letting someone ahead of you in line, or sending a short email to a friend you have been meaning to catch up with can make your day. A friend of mine recently moved and I knew this person was moving on the first of the month, so I sent them a text wishing them a happy first day in their new place, and you know what? Even that seven-word text made me feel good. Well, maybe it was also the bike ride and the coffee, but still. . . .

Criteria for measuring your nice-to-others doings:

1. Do you enjoy doing it?

2. Is is fun, kind, interesting, or helpful to the other person?

If you answered yes to both these questions, you're a master of do-gooding. Stop reading lest you be bored. If you answered no to one or both of them, consider doing something else, and please read on.

It's common knowledge that it feels good to make other people feel good. That's the nature of being social creatures : people need to interact positively with other people (even independent introverts like myself). One of my favorite ways of getting out of the downward spiral funk is to immerse myself in doing something nice for someone else. Maybe I make a phone call, maybe I write a letter, maybe I bake cookies and surprise someone, it doesn't really matter as long as I actually get off my ass and do it. Works like a charm, too!

Being nice to people does have its pitfalls though, like:

Expecting others to notice and praise you for your consideration. Just don't do this, it makes you seem like an ass. If you can't give joyfully and without expectation, you should probably try to feel good some other way, like, for instance, masturbating. You want a pat on the butt, join a sports team.

Giving too much. This can be hard to avoid if you're naturally a people-pleaser. Set reasonable expectations about your own time and obligations, and DON'T COMMIT to more than you can handle stress-free. The point is to do somehting nice for someone, not to make yourself into a martyr or make the person feel guilty about being a burden to you.

Believing that being nice to people can lead to being a pushover. FALSE: doing nice things for people doesn't mean trampling over your own needs, quite the contrary. It is absolutely essential that you be assertive and clear about what your boundaries are, and only do things that affirm your own self-love. It's absolutely ok to say no. If someone tries to guilt you into a favor, it's not freely given or joyful for you, which is the point here. Plus, that person is behaving in icky manipulative ways.

Story time: Once I was dating a person who had boundary issues. This person thought that because I was independent and liked to cuddle with people outside our relationship I was going to cheat and/or disappear. In trying to be 'nice' to this partner, I made an effort to keep them informed about my whereabouts and company and I agreed to stop cuddling with other people. The result was that I traded my own personal needs for a very temporary relief of jealousy, which returned shortly when I tried to spend more time alone. Honestly, I should have taken the whole thing as a red flag and dumped that human, but I was trying to be nice. If it weren't for the sex I probably would have. Moral of the story: being nice means doing things you really want to do for people, not doing things people guilt you into.

WARNING:

Doing nice stuff for people might become a habit. If this happens, don't panic, it probably means you've found something that makes you feel really good about yourself. This is a sure sign you should keep doing whatever it is as long as it remains sustainable for you to do so.

Media is like Alcohol

Here's another thing that makes you feel shitty that is pretty easy to eliminate (and thus make you feel better right NOW): Media. Like the title implies I think media consumption is a bit like drinking: a little is ok, and maybe the occasional binge, but for people of certain ages, and when it becomes a constant habit, it's totally inappropriate and self-destructive. Don't get me wrong here, when I say media I'm talking about corporate-sponsored (owned) mainstream media, I'm not talking about the fabulously creative independent media produced by real artists, and I'm (mostly) not talking about books. Yes yes, we could have a fight over what constitutes a "real" artist, but for my purposes let me just say this: if there was a focus group involved in its production, and it advertises specific products, and has a brand attached to it, it's on the chopping block here.

Media is the collective story of our society, or rather, it is the product our society puts out to explain who we want to be perceived to be. Yeah, it's kinda complicated and confusing, but the basic idea is that corporate media creates a picture (fantasy) of what our lives are supposed to be like, or how to get what we are told we need to be successful and happy and then we consume whatever it is so that we can be a part of that fantasy. And don't get me started on how the news is just one giant fear-mongering machine that activates our reptilian brains between commercials making us more likely to buy stuff. Ever looked at a mainstream magazine and noticed how all the images are more clean and perfect than anything you've ever seen in real life and yet somehow they are the ideal? Let me tell you something: every single thing in every single image in mainstream media is precisely choreographed to make you think and feel certain ways. It is brilliant manipulation. My sister works in advertising, and my goodness, the things she does to make food look sell-able are... well, let's just say it's no wonder your casserole didn't turn out like the picture!

Have you noticed how much we are surrounded by screens, plugged in to some giant information machine, or placed captive to billboards in traffic jams? Have you noticed that children are brilliantly creative in their games until they start to get the hang of super hero cartoons and food advertising? Have you ever turned off the radio to find that your own thoughts were way more interesting and important that the song of the week you heard 8 times today?
My point here (and this applies to movies, music, news, corporate internet stuff, you name it) is that there is a lot of stuff out there that is designed to make you feel less than perfect, less than wonderful, less than ideal- it's a bunch of lies. They're really clever lies, they're pretty convincing, but the reality is that nothing real is as perfect as that fantasy, and while it is important to have goals and to strive to have good beautiful things in your life, you are the one who should be deciding what those things are. You, by yourself, without corporate media loudly or quietly commanding you, without some weirdly hairless model or some too-clean kitchen or some messed up slogan about how beer makes you cool. You are the one who decides what is important, beautiful, attainable, challenging, and if you tune out media on a regular basis, or only tune in occasionally, you can be a lot surer your decisions are based on your own wonderful self than on corporate manipulation. And knowing you are making your decisions based on things you actually intrinsically care about feels really fucking great!

walk, write, eat

To the lonely and faint of heart:

walk.

Don’t be afraid – let miles pass

hours

days.

There is nothing to fear.

Walk near water, train tracks, moss

walk lost.

Somedays it takes getting lost to get found.

Walk in the rain, the cold

walk home.

Be in the home of your body

feel what walking feels like in your hips

your pinky toes, your armpits

feel your clothes brush your skin – don’t let judgment in.

Walk until you find something you’ve never seen

it won’t take long.

Walk until you have no idea where you are:

keep going.

Walk until you want to give up:

keep going.

See how long it takes to find stillness of thought:

keep going.

Walk until happiness is the squelching sound of your left shoe

walk until despair doesn’t exist.

Walk until all you can think is littlefeetlittlefeetlittlefeet

and littlefeetlittlefeetlittlefeet and

love.

Feel the vibrations of the ground beneath you

no excuses, nobody has listened in years.

See a magical sand dollar seashell collection

let rain soak you, littlefeet wet, socks felt in shoe

I promise you

won’t melt

Wandering Lost

"We're lost, aren't we?" he said.

"Well, I have no idea where we are, but I'm sure we'll find out where we are when we get where we're going."

Destination? Why do we always have to be going somewhere and knowing everything about it? Where the hell are we? Here. I am where I am, in this chair, in this house, in this body. For goodness' sake! Not knowing stuff all the time is ok. For a smarty-pants, teacher's pet, know-it-all like me, this is a lesson that can be hard to swallow. You don't have to be right all the time. You don't even have to know enough to have an opinion. Give yourself a break. Let yourself not know what the fuck is happening for once. Let go of judging yourself based on what incomplete information you happen to have at the time. You are always going to make decisions based on incomplete information. You're human.

It's ok to take things as they come. Planning is overrated. You can be prepared for something that never happens and then something completely knocks you out of your element and all you can do is get up, dust yourself off, and deal with whatever comes. Letting go of the pressure to constantly become something other than you are is liberating. Just be. Just be for one little bit of time every day.

Get Dirty

Some people go whole years without touching dirt, without running their fingers through the moss or walking barefoot on the grass. Some people go whole lives without stopping to love the earthworms and the beetles and the lowly things that busily make life happen all around us. This is the root of sadness. We are made to love. We are made to love things that hold us. We are made to hold things we love. Touch is essential. Babies wither and die who are not touched. Adults who do not love things become hard and cruel.

Touch the earth. It will hold your grief and your worry and your pain. Don’t be afraid, the earth has always held you, has always opened willingly, given you all that you need. Touch her rich soils, her barrenness, touch the earth, bury your hands in the dirt until you touch the worms, bury your face in the grass until you inhale life. Smear mud on your skin, put your nose in the dark richness, close your eyes, this is the smell of life. Even the decay, the rotting, molding masses, even the fungi that tear living things into death, make way for seedlings.

Some conifers produce seeds that must be cracked open by fire. It does not take intellect to know that life needs death. When you are lost, hungry, yearning to hold something dear, to be held in the embrace of all that came before. When you are hard and calloused by the harsh weather of your life. When you have curled, perhaps slowly without realizing, into a tight mass that is barely breathing. Touch the earth. Let it crack you open like the cone of a Douglas fir, let it break you into tiny shards so that the seeds of hope can spill forth from what is left of the past. You must dig beneath the surface to lay those seeds; touch potential, ever-present.

Who are you really?

I was walking my mother's dog (an animal I'm not particularly fond of with the personality of a fearful cardboard box) and I started to slip into that icky 'what if' thought pattern where I comb through recent events that didn't go how I wanted them to and wonder about minutiae. It was getting to the point of utter ridiculousness (what if I had decided to wear my black high-heeled boots instead of my slouchy leather ones, would we have had sex?) when I just -- stopped. I thought, wow, this doesn't matter at all. If I met me at a party and had this conversation I would be bored out of my mind. Honestly, who is that vapid? Of course, I am, and I really believe that most of us, on some level or at some moments annoy the shit out of ourselves. So I started thinking about things I like about myself, things that are awesome, things I appreciate. You know, stuff like: I'm a really loyal friend, I trust easily, I ask for what I want, people seem to think I'm cool. And as I was thinking this stuff I realized how much of it was based on other people and circumstances I have no control over. I started to think about what's left when everything else is gone. Because, really, that's the only thing that you get to keep no matter what. So I asked myself: who are you, really?

It was a very fruitful question. I challenge you to ask it of yourself.

In a way, you have to fight to experience life. It is easy to sit back and sleep through it. In order to really live, to grasp the nature of being a living entity that is connected to all other living beings, you have to dig into the soil of the earth, you have to sweat and labor out of love, you have to plant seeds of love inside yourself and you have to tend them. Happiness is growth. This is what it means to be passionate. You are a connected, interdependent being outside of societal structures and within them. You are more than any one part of your life, and you are more than the sum of all the parts of your life. Feeling lost is about forgetting you are connected to things. So, who are you, really?

Bodies Don't Lie

I have been thinking about my previous post where I stated that the only concrete thing I could come up with to make you feel better involved not doing certain things, and well, I was being painfully incomplete and framing self-love as the absence of self-destruction. There is so much more to it than that! You also have to be proactive, which brings me to the other thing that is really, really, SUPER important for feeling good right now.

It's really simple: listen to your body and do what it's telling you.

Bodies don't lie, they tell you what they need. Hungry? Thirsty? Stressed? Horny? Tired? Restless? Your body will tell you. How does your body feel when you're happy? pissed off? nervous? Bodies don't lie when it comes to feelings; if you've got some internal conflict, it's probably because your mind is trying to silence your body. Love your body enough to listen. Treat it like someone you respect and pay attention!

Your body is not just a vehicle or a means to an end. And hey, I get it, maybe you have a hard time figuring out what your body is telling you, maybe you've spent so much time figuring out ways to ignore and silence your body you've forgotten how to understand it. I know it's not always easy, particularly when your mind or your ego or all that pain accumulates and you just want to feel in control of something. Maybe you have a hard time listening to your body because you carry a lot of shame about it. That's ok, our (American) culture promotes a lot of fucked up shit about bodies particularly around gender. Letting your body talk again is an important step to getting rid of all that shame and bullshit that wasn't really yours to begin with. Here's some stuff that works for me, that might be worth a shot if you're at a loss about how to listen to your body.

1. Stillness. Let yourself be still and quiet, take some deep breaths, feel what it feels like to be in your own body. Be present. Find those spots where you hold tension and let them go if you can. Try to be still both in your body and in your mind. Try not to judge yourself or anything else. You're not perfect and you never will be, and neither will anyone else. Think of your body as a gift and think about all the things it can do.

2. Movement. Get up and move! Do something you enjoy or used to enjoy before you stopped listening to your body and started judging it. Lace up your shoes and walk, or bike, or dance (bonus for one-person dance parties). Do things that feel good! Climb a fucking tree, dig in the dirt, swim, rent a paddle-boat, do anything you like, just move your body. Every day. Things get better when you move your body joyfully.

3. Nourishment. I am not going to talk about dieting. Food is the fuel for your brain, your body, your soul. Eat food that honors all of those parts of you. Eat food you like, try new foods, find as many vegetables and fruits you've never tried and try them. Learn how to cook something raw and vegan. Learn how to cook something with a lot of fiber. Don't starve or stuff yourself. Get nutrients that you can only get from green things, red things, yellow things. Eat as many natural colors at each meal that you can. Indulge yourself in empty calories once in a while. Food is not a weapon, punishment, or reward. Also: drink water. All-day, every day. Cheaper than soda, better than coffee, being hydrated feels really good. Try it and you'll see what I mean.

4. Rest. Get plenty of sleep. Take a nap if you can/must. Try to keep a consistent sleep schedule every day. It feels good and your body will thank you. Also, your loved ones will thank you for being more fun to be around.

Recap: Listen to your body, love it every way you can. Loving yourself feels good, and it draws good people and good things into your life. Be still, move, nourish, and rest. The more you love yourself the more you will love other people and the more they will love you (and if they don't love you more for loving yourself, you probably don't need 'em around)!

Open Letter to lonely, slutty, depressive, types

Being happy is a full-time job.

The most concrete advice I can come up with to improve your emotional quality of life: stop having sex just to feel close to somebody, anybody. Stop having sex with people you don’t care about, and definitely stop having sex with people who don’t care about you. Stop having “casual” relationships when this is not actually what you want. Stop accommo-dating. It sucks. You can probably fuck yourself better than most of the people you’ve slept with in the past 10 months, and there are always more things to try. You can pour your heart into yourself, or your schoolwork or your writing. You can cuddle with a just-friends friend, or a pillow, or hold your own damn self until a good person with good intentions and compatible desires comes along. You can be patient. You must be patient.

You must learn to be happy right now and always. Let yourself cry. Cry as you write -- it’s ok. Let it flow out in words and drawings and sculptures and tears, scrub it off in the shower, beat it out with a belt, fuck it out with yourself. Fill your room with all the shittiness you feel and then buy some garbage bags and rent a dumpster and fill them with the shit until it’s cleared away. It’s ok to feel like crap, but not for more than a week. Really, not for more than an hour. But we’ll stick with a week to be safe. It will pass, and it will be ok. Sometimes this stuff takes time.

Let go of those projections. They are full of pain. Grab on to the moment, the thrill of typing fast as thoughts form and flow out moment by moment – it’s exhilarating! Actually, it’s almost like an orgasm only ongoing and you can return to it in many more places without causing a scene. Let the act of writing acknowledge your feelings and help you sweep them away. It’s a process. It will always be a process. There is no such place as “happy” so don’t treat “sad” like a destination. Emotions are clouds. They move. Even in the Pacific Northwest where it’s possible that the same cloud will stay overhead for 6 months, even those clouds move. Really, you do see the sun here at least once a week even in the dead of grey-sky season. And really, your life is like that too, no matter how much you let yourself forget it.

So live like you’re seeing the sun or about to see the sun or just saw the sun because you are, you will, you have. Because if you live like it’s always cloudy in Portland you will cheat yourself out of appreciating all the sunshine you do get. Obviously there’s sun here or it couldn’t be so damn green, right? Think of yourself as a plant, as resilient, as timeless. Think of yourself like a seed about to burst, bursting, putting down roots, bearing fruit. You are, you are, you ARE. And don’t you dare cheat yourself out of it!

Do Something Nice For Yourself

Ok, so I woudln't describe myself as the bloggy, make-everyone-I-know-read-my-half-baked-internet-post person, but today I had an experience worth sharing. So I made a blog.

I was feeling pretty crappy, you know, winter, cold, unsexy, bored, lonely, blah blah blah when I thought "hey, if I'm not quite enlightened

enough to transcend to bliss yet, why not act on a little masochism?" So I took a very hot shower, scrubbed off most of my skin, and smeared moisturizer all over. I got so into the act of scraping off and then rubbing on every inch of myself that I forgot to feel crappy. In fact I forgot almost everything except what it felt like as the washcloth moved over my skin, and my own gentle firm touch with the lotion. All those shitty feelings about being lonely? Gone. Replaced by a sense of well-being and love. Somewhere between literally scraping myself raw and gently soothing myself I lost emotion and became present with my body.

Of course, then that presence became a really great orgasm, (hey, self-love is important!) and that was the real moment of clarity: I am the only person who can really make myself feel sexy any time I want. So I did. I looked myself in the eye, put on sexy lingerie and danced for myself. I got all dressed up for myself, and did a strippy, grindy, feel-myself up dance, and made the most of being alone. So, reader(s?) do something nice for yourself. Love yourself in every way you know how and then learn more ways. Seriously. Be present in your body,it feels good and it's one of the most important things you can do to feel better right now!