Fear. You can make it BIG or you can make it small. You can wrap yourself in it letting it suffocate you or plant flowers in the holes of each letter making it the fertilizer for your dreams. You can bury it hoping it will never rise again (oh and, this rarely works by the way. It’s sort of like one of those monsters in a scary movie that never, ever, ever dies. Ever.) or you can turn, look at it square in the eye and mess up its hair. You can dance with it or let it run your life, allow it to close you down or open you up so wide that the very Milky Way feels miniscule inside. You can use it as a signpost marking the important decisions in your life; always pointing you in the right direction. You can make it a trusted confidant calling it in close to you so that you can harness its energy. Know this: Fear is there for you. It is there for you. Decide how to use it … but one thing you can count on, Fear is a certain part of the mix. So you might as well get to know it. You might as well choose the kind of relationship you want to have with it. If you don’t … it will. And most of the time, it will choose the most obvious one; the one that shuts you down, that closes every door inside of you; the one that makes you feel small and frozen and incapable. That’s Fear’s nature at least when it goes unattended and unchecked. That’s not necessarily what it is intended for but like an unruly child, when Fear is left to its own devices, it tends to go a little bonkers.

 The one thing Fear does well is get your attention.

 Let it.

 Then you decide…

What to do next.

Ah, change, change, change. We’re all after change.  We want to change our hair or change our clothes.  Change our spouse or change our house. We gotta change the way we drink or change what we think. Decrease how much we eat and increase the time on our feet. We wanna change the way we pray and for God’s sake … change what we say. Change the time we go to bed or change our name from Bernardo to Fred. Change our job, change our face, change our beliefs, can I change my race? Stop this, start that, more of this and less of that. Change, change, change. And then just when we grow tired of changing ourselves our gaze does a soft slide to the left and then an ever slow slither to the right. Looking through the scope, we set our cross hairs on some unsuspecting fool next to us, press the restart button and begin the whole process over again.

We all buy into the need for change. Our culture is built on it. It’s like somewhere along the way each of us signed a contract to never (ever)be satisfied with ourselves, our lives or each other. We’re not enough or we’re too much. I should be more like you or even better, “can’t you just be like me?” Either way, we come out the looser. 

Here’s the deal, the way most of us come at change carries the imbedded implication that something (and most of the time it’s us) is wrong or broken; a nagging, ever present sense that something needs to be fixed (“I’m not sure what it is, but give me a minute and I’m certain I can figure it out.”).  And with that implication comes judgment, a nice dose of shame or guilt (you get to pick) and a sweet slow dance with self denigration (who invited her anyway?). When our core belief is we’re wrong or broken, then when we reach for change, we reach out of fear or disgust or worse, just plain ‘ol unconscious habit. Read more…

Of the many astonishing, mind blowing, soul expanding gifts that love, romantic love, provides, these days I am reveling in love’s ability to show me the deepest parts of myself, the parts that were forgotten or ignored – the parts that didn’t really learn how to love, to receive love or to give love … convinced they wouldn’t ever really get love. Oh sure, these are not the pretty parts of myself and true, in the wake of love, I’d rather bask in the glory of my amazing smooth-sailing self (ha!), but in this moment, I am also understanding that unless I tend to these shadowy-er, less developed aspects of my emotional self, then my experience of love will forever be relegated to the fringes of my life, the shallow wading pools of experience and I won’t be able to truly stand in the beauty of what my heart so deeply longs for. And so after my most recent brush with love, I drummed up a little bleary-eyed courage and a whole lot of desire and I faced myself as if for the first time. I did this because I wanted to understand. I did this because I wanted to finally know who I was so that I could become who I am. I did this because I want to know love in the way that I dreamed was possible.

We are all familiar with the joys of love. It’s what has us reach for it time after time. The need for love is in our DNA. We require it to live. Love provides deep connection. It holds promise. We put a lot on love. We fill it up with all sorts of hope and possibility. We do this because the returns can be so wonderful. We do this because we are called back to the table to sit with love until we get it right and we answer that call because we intuitively know that there is something powerful waiting for us. But what are we to do with the pain love seems to sometimes deliver? What are we to make of the devastation we feel when love “goes away?” Recently this happened to me. It was stunning. Literally. Read more…

Dare to set your relationship bar high.  The benefit of doing this is really twofold.   First it calls you to become the person who can be a partner in as well as nurture and flourish in that level of relationship.  Here’s how it works: as you reach for your partner and that relationship, you reach for yourself.  As you grow towards that relationship, you grow into yourself.  It’s almost as if that desire, the desire for love is a cleverly designed strategy for you to become your most glorious self.  Secondly, you get what you envision.  So if you’re going to envision a relationship, why envision something half-ass?  Why not imagine the most outrageously fulfilling relationship you can picture?  The worst thing is you’ll actually become this amazingly delicious and balanced version of yourself.  And who the hell doesn’t want that?                                                                                              

When envisioning the ideal relationship, I like to imagine it in its parts and as a whole.  First imagine who he or she is.  Get as detailed as possible.  Honor and respect all of your preferences.  As important, include who your partner is emotionally; how he is with you, strangers, problems, old people, children, pets, change, uncertainty, disappointment – the whole shebang.  Now pause and remember that what you long to discover in another is also what you long to embody in yourself.  Hmm…  see the power of a bar set high?  Next imagine you; how and who you are in this partnership.  Raise the bar on yourself.  What surprises you about who you’ve become?  Explore all of you as you explored all of him.  Thirdly, explore the two of you.  Who are you as you two move through the world?  Who are you in bed?  How do people respond when they are around you?  How do you handle problems, disagreements, successes, confusion?  Read more…

This morning I awoke grappling with fear.  Ugh.  I could feel it in my chest and in my head.  I wasn’t conscious of it as much as I was simply in it.  In this early morning state of mind; I was all wrapped up in my fear.  It was me, I was it.  My chest was tight, my head occupied with fear’s narrative.  And though this fear was attached to a specific situation in my life, it was functioning as a lens through which I was now seeing the entirety of my day. It weighed me down and made everything seem scary and a bit unhinged.   

Then in a flash, I understood something I’d never understood before.  This fear, the one telling me “Be careful. Don’t get too invested. You’re  gunna get hurt.” was actually trying to protect me.  In an instant upon this recognition, the grip fear had on my morning loosened a smidge.  It’s as if there was the tiniest opening that hadn’t been there only a moment before.  In that moment, as I was making the coffee, some impulse had me listen beyond the suffocating narrative I was caught in and I understood for the first time, that my fear had assigned itself to be my protector.  I think I actually smiled.  I became conscious of my fear; listened, got its intended message and it relaxed a bit.  I was no longer my fear.  My fear was no longer me.  Read more…

What is it about the mind that has us continually going back to it for validation, approval, and diagnosis?  Is it really the resident expert on how I am doing on a daily basis?   Is it the best resource on the progression towards my goals?  And most importantly to me, does my mind really understand the deepest longings of my heart and the beauty of the path that I am on?  Can it truly grasp the arc of my growth and comprehend the depth of my transformation?

The process of transformation is layered, dimensional and mysterious.  It is not fixed.  There are leaps forward and setbacks.  There are intense growth spurts followed by periods of stillness or stagnation.  And all of it is vital to the process.   Transformation can happen in an instant and it happens over a lifetime.  It is a force at work.  It is like a river carving its way through hard rock.  To the casual observer (the mind), it might appear that nothing is happening but take a look at the fossil record and quickly you see that the force that is that river has most definitely transformed that rock. Read more…

The world needs all of you.  All-of-you.  Not just the pretty, polished, just-right parts of you but also, the darker, in the shadows, rougher, gutsier, raw and messier parts of you.  You know why?  Because life is about color.  And in those parts of you is where the color is, where the energy hides out, where the rubber hits the road.  It’s when we exclude parts of ourselves that we get into trouble.  When we push out, reject, shame or otherwise banish them from our lives, they get louder, uglier and destructive.  At the very least they turn into a low-level hum of discomfort or anxiety.  So when they present themselves, bring them into the light.  Greet them with a friendly “hello” and integrate them.  Our job as our friend Rumi suggests, is to be a host to all that arrives (see his poem “The Guest House”).  When this is the place from which we come, when we endeavor to make all parts of ourselves feel welcome and heard, they soften becoming allies instead of villains, they reveal their hidden messages and power to us, they begin to show us where they came from and how they are meant to help, not hinder. Read more…

Questions are powerful.  Our brains are hard wired to find their answers.  Ask yourself a question and your brain begins searching for the answer.  Let’s do a quick experiment … ask yourself the following question: “Where are my keys?”  Now watch as your brain gets you the answer.  It works with any question.  Notice what it feels like when you ask this kind of question: “Why do I always do this?”  If you’re like me, maybe your anxiety level goes up a bit – perhaps your breath shortens.  That’s because that kind of question really does not have an answer.  It’s a trick question.  Its very structure keeps us locked into a certain place or stuck in an unwanted behavior.  The thing is, your brain does not realize that.  It does as it was asked – it goes in search of the nonexistent answer.  It goes, and goes, and goes in circles.  And with the increased frustration produced by this endless loop, we ask the same question setting up the same dead end cycle which leaves us stuck in the same pattern that brought us to ask the question in the first place.  And we wonder:  Why don’t we move ahead or break out of that pattern that is so clearly wrong for us?  It’s because we’re asking the wrong question. Read more…

We do not live out our lives in a vacuum.  In the arc of each lifetime there is a line between everything; a thread that connects each of the paths we’ve taken, the choices we’ve made, the jobs we’ve had, the friendships won and lost.  When you follow this thread back to its source you discover that it connects us to who we are, what we want for ourselves, to what lights us up.  Everything expressed within a lifetime is manifested from the individual, the self, the soul.  I believe our choices are born from our values; the very things that we desire and live to express.  Each choice has at its base a connection to something meaningful to us.  The art is to follow the connections, to see the relationships between our choices, to discover what they reflect about us and then to see where they’ve been pointing us. Read more…