“Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.” | |||||
 Thich Nhat Hanh
To my mom who is the most beautiful and giving person I know. You are the kindest and most giving person I know and I am touched by it and inspired by you every day. I hope to be the love and gentleness you show the world.
Shopping for flowers, you putting up with my craziness....black thunderclouds and I decide to take my Jeep and a dog. It's never boring with me anyway.....thank you for laughing and loving it, it will forever be one of my favorite days!!!
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Monday, May 28, 2012
Blog: Your Smile
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Monday, May 21, 2012
Face Your Barracuda
I spend a lot of time talking about fear, other people’s fear, mostly. It comes with my occupation and it is often our greatest motivator and our greatest barrier.
If you ask people why they feel fear in the absence of actual danger, their answers are usually related to past experiences, rejection, failure, judgement, and a whole list of negative emotions and thoughts. I call these the easy answers, they are used so often they have almost become cliches. I was recently in a professional setting and another therapist commented on how a client was not growing because of fear of change. The tone of the therapist was just shy of condecending which angered me as much as his comment. No kidding the client is afraid of change, welcome to the human race. Anyone who says they are not is either not being fully honest, or numb. Good or bad, change provokes fear. However we live in a therapy culture where statements like this have become cliched and when they are spoken, people nod their head knowingly. I think our fear is more than the tired statements which are easy to accept.
When I feel fear, after I am done reacting with the full intensity of my personality, I try to figure out what it is that I am afraid of. It sounds like a healthy trait and it is, however if I am being completely honest, I despise something else having control over me. Which is the basic truth behind my tendency to tackle fear head on. I can also be guilty of coming up with the easy answers at times, but when I challenge myself to dig through the deeper and real layers, the common demoninator is almost always about me. I find myself innately worried and afraid that that I am not good enough, or perhaps I don't belong anywhere or somehow someone will see who I really am and that part of me will be exposed. Keep in mind this is not a rational process, it has the emotional intensity of a tropical storm although this is not visible from the outside.
The center stage for my fear these days has
Friday, May 18, 2012
Being Real
"Real isn't how you are made", said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.""Does it hurt?""Sometimes," said the Skin Horse for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
The Velveteen Rabbit
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Grace
On a daily basis my job is to listen to people ask painful questions
about their value, their worth, their purpose. I am no different, I ask myself
the same questions. I wonder sometimes
how vulnerable and authentic I really have the ability to be. On stage teaching a fitness class, in front
of a room of students with my curriculum ready, or in a therapy session connecting with someone, I can choose my vulnerability
carefully, selecting it with caution.
As someone who spends her life and if fact makes it part of
my mission statement to connect with others and help them reach beyond their safe
zone, how vulnerable can I be?
I am a complicated person and my life has few linear lines. My life is messy and chaotic, split in too
many directions, none of which I could imagine giving up. For those who know me, I am sure the
revelation that I wanted to be at least ten different things comes as no
surprise. An avid reader from early
childhood, I explored amazing worlds through books which sparked my interest
and curiosity.
Early in life I knew what I wanted to be, I just couldn’t
decide because the list was too long. I
wanted to ride horses, and be a cowgirl dancer.
I wanted to work in the rodeo but maybe work for the FBI. I would be an archaeologist and a lawyer, but then
again I really dreamed of being a writer or maybe an artist. I wanted to travel the world, be beautiful
and graceful and when I was really old, at least 30, I would get married and
maybe have children.
The world of books and my naturally creative mind gave me
dreams, but the world of reality gave me something much different. In fact if I am to tell the complete truth,
by the age of 6 some of those dreams had already been shattered. I lived in a world in which a college
education was a farfetched dream and to finish high school was a big deal. My
world didn’t have time for nurturing dreams and creativity, it was one of
survival, chaos, and violence. Even as
I write these words I start to squirm because this feels somehow a bit too
authentic and vulnerable. I have an avid
aversion to ever sounding like anything from a daytime talk show and when others
share their stories in a public way, I find myself fighting the contempt of judgment.
So I have always hugged the other end of the continuum, not talking about it at all.
I was thankfully blessed
with stubbornness and grit which has helped and hurt me in life. In a fairy tale world, these traits would
have given me a happy ending and I would have beaten the odds and lived happily
ever. I didn’t get the fairy tale, my story
was a different kind of book .
By the age of 15 I
decided if I were to survive I needed to move out of my home. What followed was an initial attempt to stay
in high school and pay rent. Finally needing to decide between dropping out of
school or working as a way to stay on my own, I sealed my fate for the next few
years. I had always been an above
average student and although already in an alternative school by that time, I
continued to get straight A’s and loved to learn. Because of this walking out of school with my
withdrawal papers was a painful and shameful experience.
It becomes difficult when you are anchored with shame to
live a purposeful life or to live a life
of value. Within a year I had made
choices that would alter the course of my entire life. At 17 I had moved to a foreign country, was
engaged to a man 9 years older than I and had no direction or purpose of my
own. Fear of my future with him allowed
me to briefly call off the engagement, but it lasted only as long as a persuasive
phone call from him. We were married one
month later, I was less than a month over 18.
The clichés’ could not be more painful when I describe my wedding night. I watched him get drunk with his friends from
the base and tell me that I hadn’t looked as fat as
normal. I was 1500 miles away from any
family or friends, it was before cell
phones and accessible internet or email, and I was horrifyingly stuck. I find myself wanting to back away from the vulnerability
I feel when I describe the utter despair I felt. For months with no phone, no car, no job and
no high school diploma watching him leave for work every day I wondered what I would do to get through the
day and what my future was. I am not
proud of the way I escaped, lying to an elderly man to get Greyhound bus fare,
telling him my mom was sick. Promising
to pay it back knowing I would never see him or step foot in that bayou again,
I added to my list of shame. Many events
followed including a near terminal illness, a hospital stay which meant my then
husband found where I was living and many other events that come with living a
life of hopelessness. Through it all I found myself returning to
the little dreams that would be my big dreams.
A GED, a divorce, a place of my
own where I wasn’t afraid, a home that I could call my own.
When people ask about my marathons and races, the questions
that seem to be the most common are how
and where does it come from. People are genuinely curious about the desire
to push to limits. They seem to hope for a simple answer that will give them the formula to replicate some aspect of it. I don’t ever have a good answer for the question
often wishing myself for the answer. I can only guess and those answers are likely to change by tomorrow. My best guess is this. I know that my mistakes in life have shown me exactly who I do not want to be. I know that when I allow myself to be totally and completely, vulnerable, authentic, connected and genuine I somehow feel better despite my urge to cover my emotional nakedness.
I know that the stubbornness, defiance, resilience and determination
I have are not things I get to claim. I
have them by grace and my moments of defining decisions in life have fine-tuned
them. I have at times hurt myself and
others with them.
There are times when I experience flashes of clarity and
joy. I have learned to celebrate and
cherish these moments and know that when they come there is a message I need to
listen to. I had a moment yesterday
when I pulled in to my driveway after
too many hours of work especially for a Saturday.
Chronically tired these days and overwhelmed with a list which grows
bigger every day I felt drained. But as I pulled in I felt a tug from the
past. That scared, hopeless and homeless kid, the one without a diploma,
stuck in a no win world, tapped my shoulder and reminded me that as tired as I
am , I am a long way from my roots. She
reminded me that I am tired from a long day of working at my own damn agency. She reminded me that I have been this tired
before. The fighting that got me here is the reason that I am the first person
in my family to go to college, that I was the first to even get a GED. She reminded me that the house I was pulling
into with its beautiful country view, wide open space and three amazing dogs
waiting for me, was better than the homelessness of my early years. She reminded me that with bad odds I have
raced through China and Africa and half the United States. I am so much more than my early years
promised and so much more that 15 year old walking out of high school for the
last time filled with shame.
I sat in my driveway with tears running down my face and
wondered how the hell I had made it here and why ? I thought of the woman I met with earlier in
the week who talked about the other women who have it all together and how she
feels so inadequate.
My headfirst dive into vulnerability in writing this is to
be as real and authentic as I can be and to honor the process I encourage
others to take every day. The people
around you don’t have it together , sometimes they just have a better
cover. I will forever be that homeless
vagabond kid, fighting the shame of being a dropout and a life of poor choices.
I hear the voice so many others hear asking “who do you think you are?”
challenging my dream of being loved, being accepted and being good enough.
I hear this voice when I dream of what I want. I want someone to cherish me and to be loved fiercely
and passionately. I want that one
certain person to fall head over heels for me, just the way I am. I want to feel the certainty of knowing I am good enough when my dogs come running and are
overjoyed to see me. I want to connect with others and share moments and feel the peace of
acceptance. I want to exist with grace
and to live each day judgment. I want to be daring enough to show the real me,
with my scars and my shame. In my risk
to be fully authentic I want to find
love and peace and connection. And I
want to know that I didn’t put on a shiny cover, and that in that act I allowed
someone else to find the peace that comes with being as authentic as you can
be.
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