Be Impeccable with Your Word

On Monday I left the house, disgruntled, because I believed I had communicated that I was

Mirror reflecting infinite possibilities

going to be away using a sewing machine that day and Chris believed he had communicated that he needed the car at midday.  I approached the machine with this energy and we were not able to create together despite 2 hours of effort.

Frustrated and feeling stuck, I texted my business partner and friend with complaining words.  We got on the phone and moved to a more prayerful and productive place, but in that conversation disturbed our third partner partner who felt like work was happening around here but not including her.

Wow, that is a lot of contracted energy I spread around.  I see at least half a dozen different places where I could have come into greater integrity and awareness around my word, deed and emotion.

Last night, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Deepak Chopra.  He spoke of some research by Gallup if you have a happy friend, then you’re happiness goes up by 15 percent.  If your happy friend has a happy friend that you don’t know, it goes up another 10 percent. And if the happy friend has a happy friend who has a happy friend who you don’t know, it keeps going up.

In other words, the energy we create has a greater impact on more people than we can imagine.  Chopra also conveyed that when we find ourselves in a place of constricted awareness, problems arise to expand our awareness.  So, releasing any self judgement about what I could have done, I see that this situation arose to bring me into greater awareness of my capacity to affect the web around me.

Dear Divine,

Thank you for the beautiful mirrors that have come into my life.  Thank you for all of the opportunities this week has provided to illuminate the importance of clear communication, honesty, and clarity.  I was questioning my purpose and my power. I see that I am powerful beyond measure.  I see what happens around me when I forget my role in anchoring the vision and gathering the tools of organization.

Help me to be impeccable with my word.  Before I speak and as emotions arise, let me remember to ask, Is this aligned with my purpose? Is this the energy I seek to expand?

Exercise

Today you have the opportunity to expand love and happiness or contraction and fear. Find three ways to expand love.

Difficulty at the Beginning

From the Wilhelm-Baynes translation of “The I Ching or Book of Changes

Times of growth are beset with difficulties. They resemble a

Difficulty in the Beginning from The Tao Oracle

first birth. But these difficulties arise from the very profusion of all that is struggling to attain form. Everything is in motion; therefore if one perseveres there is a prospect of great success, in spite of the existing danger. When it is a man’s fate to undertake such new beginnings, everything is still unformed, dark. Hence he must hold back, because any premature move might bring disaster. Likewise, it is very important not to remain alone; in order to overcome the chaos he needs helpers. This is not to say, however, that he himself should look on passively at what is happening. he must lend his hand and participate with inspiration and guidance.

Launching a new business, changing careers,  the birth of your first born, these are moments when we feel dark, awkward, and vulnerable.  The struggle comes, because it is at these moments, when we also experience the most possibility, creativity, vision and promise.

My life has been at this place for a bit.  The moment before  blossoming. I often feel at the bottom of a mountain and each new piece of information only reveals how little I know about the path to the top.

Weeks go by when I am happily working through my tasks and diligently moving forward. Then something comes in, sometimes just a small detail,  and I am set back.  I find myself once again reconsidering the entire system.  In these moments, its easy to feel like Sisyphus, knocked back to the beginning.  Its important to remember that though I may be reviewing the whole plan from the beginning it is with so much new information and so many new friends.

For those of you familiar with my Life Pulse Planning work, I believe these moments are more likely to surface on a Thursday.  It is the energy of Jupiter which helps us to see the whole system, the good and the bad, and our role in creating our own reality.  Sometimes what Jupiter reveals is the areas where we need to do more work, more learning, and more conscious examination of our own actions.

Dear Divine

Help me to receive all information as good and useful.  Give me the patience of the tree, content in the effort required to fill delicate petals with enough hydrolic pressure to break open woody sepals.  I am content in all phases of development. When I face the uncertainly and vulnerability of beginnings, let me also see the possibility and creativity contained therein. 

Exercise

Are there areas of your life where you are ready to break out of your shell?  What does the shell look like and what would it feel like to be free of it.

If you are already in a new beginning, what support do you need to blossom?

You get a line, I’ll get a pole

What do you need to do your job?

Need is a tough word for people.  I transformed my relationship with the word just last year at Burning Man. We associate need, with being needy.  There is a difference between failing to support yourself, seeking to have your needs filled in an inappropriate place, and having needs. we have needs. For most of us, if we want to make our car go, we need gasoline. That’s a need.  We become needy when we fail to plan for having gasoline or when we seek it at the laundry mat.

In order to do our jobs we need

• Raw materials
• Tools (skills)
• Partners (those we work with),
• Friends (those we share experiences with and through that learn to do our job)
• Playmates (those we can practise with, without expectation of outcome)

If we are missing anyone of these things we may be ineffective or just plain stuck. A carpenter can’t build without wood and a designer with no inspiration is boring.

I was at the Wisdom 2.0 conference last week.  I had the honour of facilitating a World Cafe. In one round, I asked people the question above.  Here was a group of people coming together to talk about mindfulness and technology. They were all doing incredible work and I truly wanted them all to be fully supported. So I asked them to talk to each other and then call out to the group, what they needed to be supported in doing their job.

I was surprised by how few people took advantage of being in a group of the 150 most connected both in terms of awareness and media enabled networks, I have ever seen, to call out their clear needs.   Whatever you could possible need, this group was no more than 2 degrees away from it.  Anything.  And they were all open hearted and ready to help.

I realized how infrequently we ask each other and ourselves, What do you need?  I have made it a practice to ask people and I am learning to ask myself.

Yesterday my body filled with fear.  Today, still working from a place of lack and block, I asked, “Tirza, what are you missing, what do you need?”  If there is block, who do you need to help you create strategies for getting around the block. Tirza, what do you need?

I got back clear answers about the help I need. I need someone to help me with a bio and personal branding.  I need that person to love me enough to ask me the tough questions and not just put a gold star on the first eloquent sentence to come out of my mouth and I need an incubator or business advisor for Be Embodied. Having stated what I need clearly, my whole body relaxed.

Dear Divine,

Help me to listen to myself and hear my needs. Give me a clear voice to call out my needs clearly to my community and eyes that see where and how to meet those needs, appropriately.

Questions

• What do you need to be supported?
•  What do you need to feel like your batteries are charged?
• What do you need to do you job?

Exercise

Standing with the arms relaxed at your side.  Reach both arms out and bring the hand  to the sternum. Then with the palms out and fingers pointing to the sky push the arms forward.  The words that go with this motion, “I reach out. I bring in. I hold onto what is mine and I graduate the rest”

He Who Shines Brightly

“Look for the people who glow, “

Evonne, Be Embodied’s CCO and master netweaver, was teaching me her core technique for finding people she resonates with.

I realized that in the past, I have actually shied away from those people who glowed for me.  Fearing my brilliance would never match theirs or that they wouldn’t see me, I would stay away from those who lit me up.

At the Wisdom 2.0 conference, I took a different approach and it worked. By following the glow, I came home with more friends than ever from a conference.  More importantly, I learned to trust that I am enough.

Coming with a beginners mind, I just allowed those who could see me to be the ones who would see me.  It wasn’t everyone, but it was a entire cross section of professions and ages.

I stopped apologizing for my unique dress, for my constant stretching and unchained dancing. I stopped apologizing for the day a week I spend with my teacher. I stopped apologizing for my experiences.

What I learned was, there are those I can light up. A twitter message from a sweet new friend, reflecting on a moment where I coached him through an experience.

dunno what u did to me that night: wide-open, feeling so spacious, noticed my voice dropped a coupla octaves too, so grateful for u. Love u

Dear Divine,

Help me see my friends, playmates and partners. I will meet their glow with my own light, seeing we are equals each with unique and valuable experiences. Help me to have grace and ease as those who have come for other purposes, go on their journeys. With gratitude I turn my attention to those with whom I have connection.

Exercise

Who lights you up?  List as many as you can in just a few minutes. Now see if you can put each person into one or more categories.

• A friend is someone with whom you share experiences.
• A playmate is someone with whom you use your tools but with no expectation of outcome.  Play can be visioning, sport, board game, even window shopping.
• A partner is someone who you work with.  You expect to produce an outcome.

Are there people who you would like to call in?  Maybe you seek more friends or more work partners.  Describe those people and then keep a look out for the glow.

Joyous Completion

I am a starter.  I love new ideas, new projects, visioning, and discovery.  Closure, completion, and creating order requires my conscious diligence and in the past, some amount of suffering. Completion, putting away all of the dishes and things from breakfast, is what creates the open canvas upon which lunch can be created. Completion is honouring my work and collecting accomplishment,  enough to put my name on the paper and turn it in for grading.  Neither of those were things I looked forward to.

I have become aware that in the past I placed barriers in front of completion because I feared collecting accomplishment and judgement. I feared both success and correction. Seeing the incredible talent around me, I worried my work wouldn’t be good enough and so was paralysed.  I was admiring the skills of  amazing woman last week and wished I too possessed those talents, my dear friend and mirror said, “Tirza, for everyone there are  aspects of our lives where we are at PhD level and others where we are in Kindergarten.”

In Kindergarten, there is joy in turning in work and it putting away the paints. So now,  I think of myself as being in Kindergarten. With the joy of the Kindergartener, I do my work, with pride of workmanship, share it with the adults around me and I anticipate their useful encouragement and correction.

Dear Divine,

Open my eyes to the joy of completion.  With gratitude, I  value my resources. I ensure that my work product is deployed, my remaining stock and scraps are stored appropriately, and my tools are cleaned and put away.

Help me to receive fully and with gratitude, the encouragement, critique, and praise that comes with completing and sharing my best work. And let me remember, whenever I am offering a review of another’s work, that before me is a Kindergartener who deserves to have their spirit nourished and their talent encouraged. 

Exercise:

Reflect on projects in three different areas of your life: your primary occupation, the kitchen, and a hobby or creative pursuit.  Write down 10 steps for completion in each of the projects.  It will likely be easy to think about 4-6 but keep going and think about more steps.  Which are easy and which feel hard.  Ask yourself why the steps that are hard are challenging.  Ask again, why that is.  Ask again, until you begin to reveal something new.

Are there common themes that emerge?

How Sweet is a Half a Candy Cane?

“But its not how much I want!”

So clear, as he pushes my offering back at me and demands an entire candy cane.

Alon, my 4 year old son, and I had many conversations these past few weeks about the size of my offerings.  The cocoa cup wasn’t full enough, the candy cane not complete enough, the pears slices were too few.  For me, these conversations are deeply frustrating, sometimes I only have the amount being offered and other times I am offering an appropriate amount. I have begun to ask before offering a treat if he is prepared to receive it as it is, with gratitude.  Setting the tone has helped.

Last Friday, I set out to clear my mantle and discovered that a desk which crowded and dominated the room contained two, counter height cabinets of exceptional quality.  (Thanks for the eyes that see!) My kitchen, in contrast, had no cabinets. It came that way. Chris and I started moving things around and by the end of the weekend the 8×8 custom cedar wood desk was installed in my kitchen. The tiny bookcase that had served as my only “cabinet” now an appropriately sized island.  We thought we would complete the upgrade and install the dishwasher that had been purchased during a tax holiday 15 months ago and languishing in the garage ever since.

Chris levels the hutch

The new dishwasher has a stainless steel interior and is a quiet beauty; my old dishwasher had a stained plastic interior and was so loud we couldn’t have a conversation over the din.  I was waiting to install it till we could “redo” the kitchen.  Instead of receiving the half of the candy cane, I was waiting till I could have the whole candy cane. Now I contemplate, where else am I denying the gift because it fails to meet some expectation my mind has conjured up.

My kitchen is now infinity more functional and beautiful than last week and we spent a total of $10 on plumbing parts.  Now we can think about replacing the floors and creating the few cabinets we are missing, while deploying the resources we already have.  Creating for myself a path of reuse and a story of a desk that has been in every room of my house and was made by young man with his master furniture making father.  This is more beautiful than I could have imagined.

Dear Divine,

I am filled with gratitude. I am joyously receiving the support and gifts of my friends and the universe, with eyes open to beauty and utility. Please, give me eyes that see things for what they are, rather than compare them to an idealized fantasy of what they could be. I rest assured, that whatever I can imagine, you have already imagined it infinity more beautiful.

Exercise

This week, take notice of the times when you are given a seat, a gift, a cup of tea, and your young voice pipes up, “this is not what I wanted”.  Notice, if there are times when it goes the other way, when you offer a gift and you can feel the receiver’s small voice begins to compare the gift to their own idealized picture.

Scan your belongings, can you find things which you are waiting to fully receive until you get the whole candy cane?  Candle sticks you are waiting to use until you have the perfect tablecloth.  A shelf not installed until you can remodel the bathroom. A shirt unworn till you get a new suit.  What would it feel like to receive and deploy the gift now.

The First Step is a Doozy

Dear Divine,

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”

Khalil Gibran

Aquarius opens up for us the possibility of quantum leaps – a sudden stepping into a new year and a new way of being.  Full moons always offer the opportunity for graduation and completion.  This past full moon was immense for me.  Myself and many of my friends took great strides into new roles and new realities.

With this full moon I experienced a full shift in my internal conversation about my needs.  In the past I have had conversations that dismiss, undervalue, or deflect my needs. The words I chose and my own mindset invited others into the same pattern.  This month, I did deep neural linguistic reprogramming around needs and value. Yes, Divine, you saw me.

I  was  clearly ready to graduate to the next lesson, because on the full moon, I lashed out.  I heard my partner denying my needs (again) and I reacted to that with fierceness and a message of  “this goes no further”.

In that moment I was, however,  blaming the him for denying my needs, rather than taking ownership for my own conversation.  I recognized this and apologized.  He was not denying me anything, the words I was choosing suggested my experience and my needs were universal.  This is the ego centric world of the very young child. I left him no choice but to show me that his needs were different.

Later that day, I was confronted with the fierceness of another who is changing her own internal conversation.

Sometimes the stepping into a new conversation comes with a percussive break with the old.  Sometimes we have to take a deep breath to cross the ravine between the old and the new and sometimes we scream.

Give me support so I am kind and patient as I step into new conversations and ways of being. Make my eyes gentle so I view my own stumbling attempts with the same endearment I would view a child learning to walk. Let me offer sweet words of encouragement to others and to myself, even when we innocently knock over the flowerpot.  That first step is a doozy.

Exercise

Try to do these things with your non-dominant hand:  brush your teeth, eat a meal, button a shirt. While you are doing these activities notice how much you have to think about it.  Notice how much effort goes into motor planning activities you do everyday without having to instruct your hand how to work.

Are there habits of mind or action you would like to change?

• Write down three creative strategies for learning the new way of thinking or action.
• How will you gently and patiently correct yourself when you revert to an old pattern?
• What teachers or allies can you enlist in stepping into a new way?
• What is the reward of making the change?