Normally, I shrug off the question with the typical advice I give the interns who work for me now.  Stuff like:

1.  If you want to impress people, pick the toughest task, the one no one wants, and then make it shine.  Or,

2.  Be careful whom you piss off in your career.  You never know when you’ll burn a bridge with a snotty colleague or even someone you’ve trained…and find out that’s your new boss a little farther up the mountain.

All that advice works just fine, and it would have been good advice for me when I was 19, but I needed something much more basic back then to make my future an easier one.  Now that my younger daughter is about the same age I was then, I see Young Lorna differently.    I needed to understand something fundamental about myself that I really didn’t realize until now was with me all along, and it’s that ability to swim upstream. 

The sweetest man in my world tells me that I am fearless in a way he can never hope to be, but I’m not sure if it’s lack of fear.  The fear is definitely there and at times in my life, I’ve let it paralyze me and keep me in a prison of my own making.  I’m not sure if, at 19, I was fearless or just that naive about the way the world works and simply flinging myself out there to make something happen.

You know how you bury memories?  You can go years, even decades, without resurrecting them?  I was sitting in a meeting where someone else’s opinion was questioned but then deemed unquestionable because he was “Mensa-smart.”  Though several people disagreed, they kept pointing out that the guy was “really smart,” so they didn’t feel they could question his interpretation.  It just annoyed the hell out of me.

Flashback to 19-year-old Lorna sitting in a suit on a floral sofa in a waiting room in Birmingham, Alabama, in some building that was a part of Birmingham-Southern College. I can still see my pantyhose-clad ankles crossed, feet tense inside my low-heeled pumps…still see the rings on my fingers and feel how easily they twirled on my damply nervous hands…still hear the boy on the sofa next to me as we waited to be called in for the tribunal-type interview for the Rhodes Scholarship.  I was early for my interview, of course.  I was always early in those days and no one ever had to wait on me because I was the one waiting for life to come to me.  So I was early.  And scared to death.  And awkward.  In the past 24 hours, I’d been left feeling utterly betrayed by everyone except my mom and I was questioning whether I belonged there.  At this point, I was quite sure that I didn’t.  And the boy beside me on the sofa was the last straw.

He was in his early 20’s, a product of a prestigious university and a resident of Alabama.  He was well-dressed and was quite obnoxious in his insistence that I should have been at the interviews in my home state of Georgia rather than in my university’s state–we had a choice but he felt I was cheating because surely I thought the competition in Alabama would be easier for me.  In truth, the location was related to the logistics of travel, not competition strategy.  Of course, this boy was sure he was right because he was “Mensa-smart.” Hmmm, even though his Mensa-smart IQ was lower than mine…but I didn’t tell him that.   He also had a GPA similar to mine (he asked), but as he pointed out, he attended a prestigious university and I did not, so my GPA wasn’t really on par with his.  He did kindly point out to me, as I was called into my interview, that the little gray purse I carried was a cheap knock-off as he’d never seen any uniformly gray alligators.  By the time I walked into the interview, I was already defeated and ready to crawl back home.

I don’t recall how the whole ordeal started but somewhere months before, I had seen a small advertisement at my college for applying for the infamous Rhodes Scholarship, which was only recently open to women.  The announcement had been posted on the bulletin board outside my favorite professor’s office, and she was the university’s liasion for the scholarship.  I sought her advice…my primary professor…my idol.  I wanted to follow in her footsteps.   I also needed, due to her position in the university, her written recommendation and stamp of approval on my application package.  Looking back, I see that she really didn’t have the time of day for me, but I thought she was brilliant.  She knew nothing of me outside of her classes, where I was consistently one of her top students.   She was frank with me–I didn’t stand a chance.

That didn’t deter me.  I had to write an essay for my application and she insisted I submit an essay of mine she’d seen in a recent class.  That didn’t feel right.  Really, what scholarship application wants an Aristotelian analysis of a poem as the student’s explanation of  her goals?   It didn’t seem to be what  the application wanted but my very logical professor was certain.  I stewed over it and the night before the application was due, I wrote an entirely different essay that answered the application requirements.  It was raw and honest, and talked about how words have been a unifying theme in my life.  I found that essay not long ago and sat and cried over it as I read it because it was then and still is utterly true to who I am.  My professor never knew I substituted an essay against her advice, but I followed my instincts.  Pretty gutsy of me then, considering the power and knowledge she seemed to have back then.

As I began getting my application together, I felt more and more out there all alone on a limb.  I’d started dating someone but if he ever believed I’d actually get the scholarship and leave the US–and him–for a degree in the UK, I don’t remember it.  Yeah, I later married him…so?   My mom was supportive but worried about me going to England for an extended period.  Daddy hit the roof.  But then, he was sure I wouldn’t make the cut and be invited for an interview either.  Really, my mom was the only emotionally supportive person in my life when it came to this dream.

Mama made me a suit, excellent seamstress that she was, and a cocktail dress for the party the night before the interview.  Those were drought years on my parents’  farm when they worked all year for nothing and lived off savings, and even with scholarships to my college and a part-time job, I was on a tight budget.  I couldn’t afford to get my hair cut, so I did it myself…something I still cringe over when I look at my official photo that was part of the package.   I couldn’t afford professional photos, so I had my university’s printing department do it for me on the cheap.  But if I got the scholarship, the payoff was worth it. I’d be off to England for two years and a second degree in English Literature.

Part of the reason for my gutsy move of writing the essay that felt right to me was that I accidentally discovered that I was not the only candidate from my university.  In fact, there were two others who’d gone to my professor.  One of us was my university’s official recommendation, and it wasn’t me.  At that point, I really didn’t feel I had anything to lose by following my instincts.  I just wanted to make the cut to the next level and be invited to interview in the State competition.

To my surprise, I was.  The other students from my university, including the preferred candidate, did not make the cut.

But the surprises didn’t end there.  My mom accompanied me to Birmingham, driving me and keeping me company.  We defied Daddy, who made it quite clear to his wife and 19-year-old daughter that if we left for the interview, we need not come back.  I guess in some respects, my dad did believe in me after all if he thought I might actually win and go live overseas for a couple of years.

At the cocktail party, I was painfully out of place.  It was one of those wine and cheese deals where the competition sizes up the competition while meeting the jury.  I’ve never been good in that kind of social situation, and the small talk with the nicer candidates revealed that they had been prepped for the interview from Day One.  My university and my professor had never given me a word of advice on the panel interview, let alone set up mock interviews or helped me prepare.   The panic, at the point, began to set in.

The competition was tough, and I didn’t know how I could ever stand against students with equally impressive GPA’s from prestigious universities and summers interning with an infamous Congressman or studying in Europe.  They all seemed to know how to act, what to say, how to dress.  All well-groomed for the interviews, and I was a stray cat that had wandered in.

After the boy on the sofa had destroyed the last speck of my confidence, I walked into the interview and sat in front of a long panel of…well, let’s just say I understand what the Inquisition must have been like.  Actually, though the questions were probing and extremely difficult, the faces were kind and friendly.  One of the men, near the end, told me the panel had been very impressed with my answers for their honesty and with my package for two things: 1.  I’d self-published an insightful and unusual book at 19, and 2. my essay had blown them away.  My essay was what got me to the State competition.  I knew when I walked out that I hadn’t made the cut to Nationals.  I knew it when the panel laughed several times at my honesty during the interview–I wasn’t giving the answers they expected or necessarily wanted, but it must have been refreshing to hear the opinions of someone who hadn’t been groomed for it.

I look back now at that 19-year-old kid who was pushing so hard without any help from anyone who knew how to make things happen and it amazes me now.  I was only a few months older than my younger daughter is now, and I wonder how I dared push so hard, to swim upstream, to not give up until I finally got the point in the interview where I was too intimidated to believe it was worth it to keep going.  I left saying to myself that I still had another five years that I could try again for the Rhodes, but I never did.    Not long after the interviews were over and I knew I wasn’t going to be competing at the National level,  I received a thick package in the mail at my parents’ house.  I sometimes wonder if they intended to include everything in the package because my professor’s letter of recommendation was in the envelope with  my essay.  My favorite professor’s recommendation was…withering.  Surely, she didn’t think I would ever see it.  She’d made a lot of assumptions based on how quiet and studious I was in her classes, but none of her assumptions accounted for determination or vision.  I sat at my mom’s kitchen table and read and re-read the letter my professor had sent on my behalf, her words assuring that I would never make the first cut. 

 But I did.  And I made it not only without her help but in spite of her “help.”    I felt betrayed.  I finished my advanced courses under her with straight A’s, graduated, and never looked back.

There’s a part of me now, Older Lorna, who wants to swoop in and beat the crap (figuratively, at least) out of that professor on behalf of my younger, wounded self.   There’s a part of me that is broken-hearted and indigant still for the unprepared girl who followed her instincts and kept pushing, kept swimming against the current even when she got the message loud and clear that she was alone in this venture and she’d better stay in her lane and be quiet.  The Rhodes experience, while an expansive one overall, was still painful enough that I made decisions in the next years of my life that echoed that feeling of being out of place and unworthy of reaching my dreams.  It was not painful enough, however, to keep me from pushing for them.

So if I could go back in time to talk to my 19-year-old self, here’s what I’d tell her:

1.  Stop trying so freaking hard to fit in–it’s your differences that will truly contribute to a better world and a happier life.

2.  Don’t let anyone make you feel worthless or inferior. Their ridicule isn’t about you but rather, it’s about their own insecurities. If they can put your face on their own fears, they feel stronger because you’re an easier monster to fight than the one in their own closets they dare not open.

3. Don’t let anyone crush your dreams.  Again, it’s about their own insecurities and need for power, and sometimes it comes from people who love you very much but fear your dreams will lead you far away from them, so they’re willing to have an unhappy version of you rather than none at all.

4. Roads won’t always be paved for you and sometimes you’ll find you’re the only racer whose path isn’t paved…or even discernable.  That’s when, to make things happen, you’ll have to pull out a machete you’ve crafted and sharpened yourself and hack your own path to get to where you’re going.  And after you have, others will follow.

5.  Follow your own instincts.  Logic be damned.  If doing the “logical thing” just feels…wrong…then do what feels right.  Always, always, always trust your instincts and don’t let yourself be intimidated into doing the logical thing when you know it’s not the right thing.

6.  And most of all, if I could tell my 19-year-old self just one thing, particularly at that moment when she walked out of the tribunal feeling stupid and not good enough because of all the advantages she didn’t have in that competition, it would be to say, “Hey, look how far you got on your own without any outside help.  Kiddo, you rock!”

After a LONG day at the office–often 12 or so hours–I go home to work out, let go of the stress, form a boundary between work and home, and…NOT think for a little while.  So the last thing I want to do is kick my brain back into gear to analyze every little thing.  I need to be on auto-pilot and just let go.

One of the ways I do that is by creating playlists.  Seems like a simple thing, but I’ve taken this to the level of no-brainer.  And that’s good!

I’m currently trying out (with nice success!) the diet/exercise regimen recommended by the brilliant folks at Metabolic Effect Fitness (check out their book and/or like their Facebook page for regular tips).  Their methods are similar to what I’ve found through experimentation to work for me.

Every day of the week, I go for  walk for 30  minutes or 60 minutes.  Generally, I use jog.fm on my iPhone, which pulls songs from my music library to match my initial gait.  It reminds me a bit of walking a labyrinth to the beat of a drum circle at the Florida Pagan Gathering  because my mind can freely wander and solve the world’s problems (or replay every little titilating conversion with that special someone) without me losing a beat or slowing down.  I don’t have the think…it’s very meditative for me.

The rest of  my regimen, I use playlists based on a little help from jog.fm.  Three days a week, I do a 20-minute rest-based workout with weights, with a 5-minute warm up and a 5-minute cooldown.  Spme of the hybrid exercises are from the Metabolic Effect book and others are from my P90X program.  So that I can concentrate on the exercises and not worry about the time, I simply follow one of several 30-minute playlists and when I hear the last song, I start my cool-down.  No clock-watching for me–that’s for the work world!

Another 2- 3 days a week, I do 20 minutes of sprints for varying lengths of time.  I use jog.fm to create 20-minute playlists at different speeds, say 5mph or 8 mph. 

The biggest difference in this exercise regimen and ones I’ve tried before is that it’s more time-based for me.  It’s short and effective, but the very specifically timed playlists keep me on track and my focus where it should be.

Just for grins, here’s one of my rest-based high-intensity weight session playlists:

1.  Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold” (warm-up)

2. AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long”

3.  Pink’s “U + Ur Hand”

4.  Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance”

5.  Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf”

6.  Ke$ha’s “Blow”

7. Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” (just the push I need to keep me on track and let me know I’m nearly done)

8.  Pink’s “F**king Perfect”  (cool down and congratulate myself on a fast and effective use of my time!)

Continued from Losing 20 Pounds in 30 Days: Part 4 — Going It Alone or With Support

When we look back at where we came from and where our weight problems originated, are our parents to blame for our weight gain later in life?  Are we to blame for our children’s weight gain in years to come?

Does it really matter?  Every generation does the best it can with what it knows, with it’s prevailing sciences and its radicals fighting for a different way. 

My grandparents cooked their food in lard.  I remember hearing health-minded relatives speak of it when I was a child.  Appalling!

Of course, when I was a child, things were different.  My parents didn’t cook my food in (gasp) lard.  Nope, my mama made me the most incredible breakfast during most of my growing years.  Sugar toast.  Yes, white bread cut into triangles and smothered in butter and about, oh, what?  an inch?  of sugar.  OMG, soooooo good.  Don’t laugh–just because it contained 3 of the most dangerous ingredients to my health.  Back in those days, if it tasted all right, it was safe.  If it tasted rancid or sour, it wasn’t, and that was that.

Oh, not that I ate only sugar toast as a growing girl.  There were other breakfasts, too…like Froot Loops, my second favorite.  You know, the sugary, fruity, little hoops of cereal?  Dissolving and going limp and crunchless in bowls of milk before any milk was ever reduced-fat or lactaid-free?  Obviously not sweet enough–that’s why it was important for me to add a whole teaspoonful of sugar from the canister, so I could spoon up the remaining milk and sugar and slurp up the last drops of sugary goodness.  This is when I wasn’t eating sugar straight from the canister.  Like most kids I knew.

By the time my own kids  were, well, kids….   Ideas about diet were changing.   I still recall teaching a writer’s workshop in Jacksonville, Florida, one weekend and talking to a nutritionist or dietician maybe for a hospital.  She was talking about the sudden boom of fat-free products on the market and the equally sudden boom in new diabetics she saw in her job.  It was the first I’d heard of it.  According to her, way back then, yes, foods were fat-free–something we assumed was a good thing–but more loaded than ever with sugar and carbs.  That conversation has stuck with me.  Most of us as parents tried to improve our household diets, and that included what we were being told was a good thing:  fat-free and low-fat foods, which unfortunately were high in other things that weren’t such a good thing.  

In the mid-90’s, when my girls were barely out of diapers, I was driving with a rocket scientist colleague to a conference at the University of Florida when we first heard about bovine growth hormone.  I was alarmed at the time because it was the same milk I was feeding to my toddlers and I’d never noticed anything on the ingredient list (ingredient lists were skimpier then but it doesn’t matter in this case) about growth hormones in the milk.  Technically, they were in the cow, according to the news report.  I came home raving about it to my family and was told 1. I’d obviously misunderstood and 2. Stop being a drama queen.

Now that my kids are (mostly) grown, their generation is faced with different but even worse food dangers than the previous generations.  We have all sorts of things hidden in our foods, whether they’re prepared in a restaurant or bought in our favorite grocery stores.  Even foods from the farmer’s market may be biologically altered or genetically engineered.  All sorts of fillers and potentially toxic allergens are in even the least suspected foods.

There’s no need to blame the previous generation.  My parents did the best they could with what they knew at the time.  I did the best I knew for my kids with what I knew then.  The best I can do is tell the girls what I’ve discovered in my own health improvements–all the while sounding a bit like a radical and probably getting on their nerves. 

But maybe I made a little headway in helping my next generation to understand my concern.  Tonight in the grocery store, I chose new (for me) products like coconut oil and almond flour and my 18-year-old returned to my cart with several items and pointed out that high fructose corn syrup wasn’t on the list of ingredients and that there was no added sugar. 

Small victories in awareness.  Blame and looking back at the past isn’t the place to start.  Making your own changes right now is.

And speaking of awareness, in the next part of this series on my detox diet, I’ll explain why I fired my family doctor.

Continued from Losing 20 Pounds in 30 Days:  Part 2 — Earliest Indicators of Weight Gain to Come:  Intense Hunger

In the previous article, I talked about how I went through episodes of intense hunger, a side effect of a drop in my blood sugar that sent me into a  food-focused ravenous mindset where getting to eat again became more important than the subject of the meetings I sat through.  This article focuses on the second clue I had that something wasn’t quite right.

2. WTF?  Diets and exercise have the opposite effect?

The second big clue that something was amiss came from unexpected results of a doctor-approved diet and frequent exercise.  The unexpected result?  Weight GAIN.  

I’ll be honest–I haven’t always eaten “right” or “well.”  I have been eating far healthier in my 40’s than I ever did in my 20’s, for example, and definitely healthier than I ate as a child. I’ve not always been athletic either, but since my late 20’s, I’ve been a regular exerciser and at times a real gym rat.  I was in the best shape of my life in my early 30’s (see pic).  I had two little girls, a high-stress career, and a regular workout schedule, 3 times a week, weights for 30 minutes. I was 113 pounds and rrrrrrrripped.  That was a couple of years before I had a back injury that sidelined my gym work for years and before I headed off to an assignment where I sat in 9-hour meetings without food breaks. 

My then-husband never hit the gym and ate whatever he wanted while I, like many women of my age, struggled to be the perfect Superwoman.  I got little to no support for my diet or exercise regimen because it just wasn’t something that mattered to  him at the time.  And frankly, I think he preferred I be a little overweight to keep the guys from paying me too much attention…even though I was far too busy in those days to notice other men’s attentions.  I would forgo a dessert with dinner or a glass of wine and he would take it personally that I didnt’ want to enjoy those things with him, not understanding that I was concerned if I gained 5 pounds.  Like a lot of husbands tend to do to their wives, he often seemed to sabotage my attempts with too many sugary temptations.

Then, in my late 30’s, everything changed.  I still remember going home from work early to plant herbs in my garden and sitting there praying that my husband would be more supportive of my attempts to eat healthy foods and maybe even go to the gym or take up fencing with me.  Then a miracle happened:  he came home from a doctor’s appointment and joined me in the back yard where he announced that he was turning over a new leaf–a new diet from his doctor and regular forays into team sports. 

His metabolism was very different from mine, and so were–looking back–his food needs.  The diet his doctor put him on became the diet for the entire family:  low protein, low to no fat, and high carb.  That was also the prevailing “healthy” diet of that time.  Low-fat and no-fat products were all over the grocery stores…except that they were extremely high in carbs.  For the next year, he changed his diet and exercise routines and lost 30 pounds. For that year, I changed only my diet to match his–and I gained 30 pounds.  For him, the fats were a huge issue.  For me, it was the carbs.

Working a little harder at the gym didn’t budge the weight, either.  One night, my husband and I went for our usual 1-hour powerwalk (powerwalk for me, a breeze for a tall guy!) and I complained to him that for the first time in my life, I couldn’t manage my weight.  It had been a year and all I could do was continue to gain so I needed to change what I was eating.  His response was identical to what my doctor had said as well as other people who really didn’t know what I did in my daily life:  “You just need to exercise more!”  I was exasperated.  More?  I was taking a 1-hour powerwalk every evening and spending 1.5 hours in the gym 3-5 days a week.  More? 

When I defied him and my doctor to try a different diet, I started dropping weight, immediately.  Initially, I had to defend my food choices almost every day, but within a few months, it was obvious that a low-carb diet was producing results.  I stuck to it for almost a year before my diet became a casualty of my divorce.  Big mistake on my part.

Since then, I’ve kept a steady exercise regimen and eaten mostly clean, with a few cheat days, and eaten around 1500 calories a day.  But not a lot has changed.  When I started P90X, I became a very strong, durable machine over the next 3 months, but not a lean machine.  I gained lots of muscle, flexibility, endurance, stamina–which had been my goals…but I lost only a few pounds.  Even the current man in my life, who is a very supportive friend and health nut, believed that more exercise was the simplest answer to my quest.  When I doubled up, adding an hour of cardio 6 days a week to an already strenuous P90X of 1 to 1.5 hours a day, 6 days a week,  I actually gained weight.  Fat, not muscle.  Okay, big clue that something wasn’t right.

So using the WTF-am-I-gaining-weight-while-exercising-like-a-mad-woman-and-eating-clean indicator, I decided to visit my current family doctor and ask him to run a few tests. 

It took less than 5 minutes for me to decide to fire that doctor.

Continued….

 
The view from the dining room, 2 December 2010.  The 20-degree weather is coming in a few days, but for now–and again next year–it’s beautiful….and life keeps moving forward.  Photo copyright by Lorna Tedder.

I used to kick myself all the time because I could never get caught up.  No matter how many hundreds of things I scratched off my to-do list on any given weekend, I would fall into bed on Sunday night feeling like a failure because there was always so much more to do.  My last words as I fell asleep every Sunday night were usually, “But I didn’t get hardly anything done!”
 
My mom, at 81, will often tell me that something needs maintenance and she can never get it all finished before it needs maintenance again.  It’s a chore that never seems to cease.  She despairs about it, but I’ve come to realize that it’s a good thing. 
 
I stand before the mirror and frown at the cut on my lip.  There’s one on my finger, too, and a particularly bad burn on my hand, but it’s the one on my lip that annoys me more.  It’s the one that keeps me from giving or accepting a kiss, and I’d like to be giving lots of kisses at the moment.    It’s been there for about 5 days and every day, it gets better and better.
 
The repair process—the old cells replaced by new cells—continues, the process moving forward, and I’m glad the processes of life are never done.  My lip gets better every day, the cut smaller, better healed. 
 
Life keeps moving forward, propelled by the processes of regeneration, even the small and annoying tasks that claim the most mundane moments of our days.  It’s never done because I am not finished with life.

Photo copyright by Lorna Tedder

What they don’t tell you about the Empty Nest Syndrome is that there are generally two ways it plays out.  

Most often, I see the kids trying to leave home and start new lives for themselves while their parents become very controlling.  By the time the kids leave, the kids can’t wait to get away and have a  little freedom.  Mom and Dad want to account for every moment of the last year at home and parent-child relationships become very prickly.  For the parents, it’s an unwelcome change and they are trying to freeze their babies in time rather than recognize them as individuals getting that first shot at inventing who they’ll be as adults, mistakes and all.  I saw this all the time when my older daughter left home a few years ago and I’m seeing it now in my younger daughter’s senior year of high school.  Their friends’ parents drive me crazy, so certainly they drive their kids crazy.

What I’ve seen less often–and mostly in cases of single moms who’ve been the rock of their teens’ existence–is something of the reverse.  The children want to venture out into the world and create themselves as adults with ideas, careers, homes, and mates of their own…but they want that security and stability of their parents, frozen in time as they were.  Just as the parents in the first scenario have trouble seeing their children as men and women, the kids in the second case have trouble seeing their parents as men and women separate from being Dad or Mom. 

This is where I’m feeling caught now with my own Empty Nest Syndrome, even though I had little to no issue at all in August 2008 when Shannon, my eldest, left home.  It’s caught me completely off-guard–for reasons I never expected–and I am having a really difficult time with it.  Not for what the  future holds for my kids or that they’re leaving to go out in the world.  No, that’s something I’ve prepared for and  hope I’ve given them as much support as possible to go forth and prosper.    No, this is more about my own personal struggle and feeling caught between staying the same for them and reinventing myself when Aislinn leaves in about 6 months.  The gates of opportunity are wide open for me suddenly–the first time since I married in 1986–because come next summer, the legalities of my custody agreement relent and I will be free to leave Okaloosa County and go anywhere in the world I want, for any job I want, with any lover I want.  I’ve spent the last 6 years held hostage to my divorce agreements or else lose custody of my children.  I’ve declined interviews for promotions and better jobs in other cities and I’ve watched men I loved move away without me, but I’ve never had to consider longer than 30 seconds that my girls came first and regardless of any personal sacrifice, I was staying for them. 

Now, all that is about to change in a few months, and I’m facing uncertainty I have not faced since I left college to seek my career  and later when I divorced and had to figure out if I could afford to eat. Those were the two major life decisions, really, for me:  that mid-20’s start-a-career-and-marry-and-where-will-I-land decision and that mid-40’s get-divorced-and-can-I-support-myself-and-my-kids-without-failing decision.  Now it’s suddenly all about me and what I want?  Wow.  That’s never really been a choice before.  It’s always been under the influence of others and what was best for others, whether that was my husband or children.

I’ve had a few female friends rejoice in the Empty Nest Syndrome, telling me that it was finally “me-time” for them.  It’s interesting that most of them also tried to maintain a very tight control over the children and, though it was “me-time,” they didn’t actually pursue a new life, new hobbies, anything different.  Those who did reinvent themselves were truly inspiring to me.  I have loved watching old friends take up international travel in their 50’s, hiking the Camino or traipsing through jungles.  I’ve seen others sell everything and move to a new city with a new career, finally going after what they’ve put off for 20-plus years.  They seem to have some of the healthiest mother-child relationships I’ve observed.  That’s not to say that parents who don’t make major lifestyle changes are bad, but I think that the kids going off to college don’t realize that it’s a brave new world not just for them but for the “old folks” left behind.

It must be as hard on the kids to see Mom reinvent herself as it is to see the young ones fledge.  A former boyfriend of mine used to complain that he left home to see the world and when he returned, his parents had moved a couple of states away and his home, his roots, his security was gone.  He spoke of it often, and it was clearly disconcerting to him. 

A friend of mine raised her family through seemingly insurmountable odds, sacrificed all her dreams to keep them safe and happy.  As soon as she got the youngest off to college and was all alone in a big rambling house, she moved to a new home, kicked her career into high gear, and found a brand new love like she’d never had…and her children shunned her for at last going after her dreams.  They wanted to spread their own wings, but wanted her to remain the same.  It was years of estrangement before they accepted their mother as more than just their mom and began to support what she’d put on hold for them. 

That’s not really the case at this point with my own daughters, but I’m feeling it all the same.  International travel is something that I’ve only had a taste of and have longed for, but I had to put it aside to be home and available for my kids.  It’s funny that they both are actively planning overseas trips as soon as possible, and that I’m still planning the possibility of a trip around their schedules.  Can I do the Camino in June?  Will Aislinn be living at home still?  Will Shannon be home for the summer?  Could I afford to take the girls with…drat, no.  I’m still thinking of the family instead of thinking of me and my new life.

I’m caught in the in-between right now.  I feel the resistance, even at a subtle level, when I talk about the opportunities that are now starting to show up for my future. It feels like a time will come when they’re both gone–and they do plan to go far from the home they grew up in and leave me alone here–that I’ll be able to fashion a boldly different life for myself if I choose.  The problem for me is this time of uncertainty, of feeling discouraged from making decisions about big changes that will mean I’m no longer the rock that they can count on to be the same.  I have a bazillion choices right now, and some are looking very tasty but I dare not make those yet and I’m quite sure my kids will disapprove if I make them now.  Everything’s uncertain right now, a mix of excitement for the future and scariness over the future.  It’s far harder to make those big changes the second time in 25 years than the first.  More inertia to hold me in place, and especially how such new changes for me will affect my grown-up kids–a mindset that’s been in place their whole lives and isn’t easy to change overnight.

I think after the nest is empty and there’s no longer a physical place for them to come back to, I’ll be just fine in whatever my new path turns out to be, wherever I go, whoever travels my path with me.  But for now…well, let’s just say that transitions suck.

For 9 years and 11 months, I looked forward to this high school reunion.  On the last night to turn in my paperwork, I decided not to go.

It was a surprise, mostly to me. 

There are lots of tales of people who go back to high school reunions to put ghosts to rest.  I’m not one of those.  I put those ghosts to rest at my first high school reunion.  They haven’t bothered me since.

People go back to reunions because they feel they have something to prove.   I’m not one of those either.  I don’t have to prove my successes or show that I’m worthy or make anyone notice me.

A lot of people go back to reunions to find out what happened to people from “back then” and see how life and time have treated them, often compare notes because they need some kind of baseline.   I’m not one of those.  Anyone I’ve wanted to find out about, I’ve done so online–and renewed some very nice friendships.

Some people actually go back to high school reunions because they had such a great time in high school and can’t wait to catch up with old friends and relive their fantastic teen years.  Sadly, I’m not one of those either.

Some people are assuming that something dreadful is wrong because I didn’t attend.  No, nothing’s wrong.  Everything is plenty all right!  I’m happy, serene, prosperous.  If I take a quick self-assessment, I am very close to where I’ve always wanted to be.  Health is very good and ever improving with some hardcore P90x.  A beautiful home with frequent social gatherings and a garden I love.  Frequent travel to regional fun places with a big exotic trip planned.  Feeling productive in my career and passionate about my writing.  Enjoying the company of sexy, loving, adoring men half my age.   Mixing both new and old friendships.  Two amazing daughters who are successful in their own efforts as well as compassionate, intelligent, creative.  Constantly expanding my mind with new courses, workshops,  and audiobooks.  Income appearing from unexpected streams while  maintaining minimum to no debt.  Just…having fun.  No, there is nothing wrong at all.  I can’t think of any area of my life that is dismal or unfulfilling in some way.  Life is good.

So why not show up at a reunion to show that off or celebrate it as I’ve been urged to do?

A couple of days before the decision deadline, I was in the kitchen, preparing a meal for the night’s dinner party, enjoying incense and candles, and listening to an mp4 download of an Abraham-Hicks workshop.  I don’t even remember which one, but it was one of the ones from the late Spring/early Summer of 2010.  If you’ve read my blog for a while, you know that I find the Teachings of Abraham to be very inspirational in my spiritual work, and they’ve helped me ease into a life of serenity.  All I remember is that the subject morphed into a discussion of family reunions and other types of reunions.  I perked up at the sound of this because I had a reunion with writer friends coming up in the next couple of weeks and I just couldn’t wait to see these friends again, even though we keep track of each other online daily.  I also had a high schol reunion coming up less than a month later, but my excitement factor wasn’t anywhere near as high for some reason.

Abraham talked about how family reunions throw us out of our “vortex”– our happy place where we have no trouble bringing wonderful things to us–because no matter how great things are going now, a reunion takes us back to where we once were, to other people’s old expectations of us,  to a place we’re no longer aligned with, and the results can be upsetting.  We go back to how we felt with that group or during that time because that’s where the focus is.

That’s when it hit me that even though I was excited about seeing my writer friends in July, I had no desire to attend my high school reunion in August.  You see, high school wasn’t any fun for me.  It was a time of high misery.  Back then, I didn’t fit in and felt as if I were a visitor from another planet.  My way of thinking was different and unappreciated–including by teachers I admired but shouldn’t have–and I spent most of my teen years in despair, being told to be myself but the “myself” that others wanted me to be.  I was actually a really good kid but misunderstood by just about everyone who knew or knew of me.    You know the BREAKFAST CLUB movie from the 80’s?  I always identified with Ally Sheedy’s character.  It wasn’t until college that I met others (a few) who thought like I did.  Now the Internet connects me with plenty of like-minded people, but back then, I was quite alone.  Maybe that’s why I so appreciate people who are different and “unique” and why I’m so accepting of diversity in my friends.

I also find it amusing that I was so sincere about my Christian religion in high school and an outcast among students who weren’t Christian.  Now they’ve joined the ranks of the churched and become Christians whereas I’ve converted to Wicca….so I’m still an outcast among them.

My high school years were so different from my life now.  I’m still that same person inside, still with the brain wired differently, still the visionary–though 20-somethings don’t seem to have any problem understanding my way of thinking and hence, that’s where I find the most date-able men.  In spite of all the body-switch movies where middle-aged moms swap with their teen daughters, I would not want the same.  I’m so much happier in my life now when it is “half over” than when it was just beginning.  I decided I didn’t want to relive memories of an unhappy time and to align myself now with where I was then.    Reunions are about going back to that place where we last left off…and I have no desire to go back there. 

I may not be 18 anymore, but there’s really no place better in my life to be than I am right now…unless it’s where I’ll be tomorrow.

For more articles on health, diet, and exercise, join us at The X in SeXy.

If the body is a temple, then we need to be aware of  when we’ve let it fall into disrepair.  Nothing makes its normal upkeep more difficult than lack of sleep.

For the past three years or more, I’ve had chronic insomnia.  Rarely has there been a night when I’ve slept all the way through, and if I could get 4 to 6 hours straight on a workday’s night, then that was sheer heaven.  Often, I’d have trouble falling asleep and then I’d wake every few hours.  It became part of my natural sleep cycle…to not sleep.  My energy would flag at the office, and then I’d come home every single day and crash on the sofa for an hour or so.  No matter how tired I’d be at bedtime, even after a nap, I couldn’t sleep.

People gave me lots of advice.  Quit caffeine.  Yep, I did.  Exercise daily. Did that, too.  No difference, even when I was doing cardio and weights 5 to 7 times a week for over an hour each day. 

My favorite?  “You just need to learn to quiet the mind.”  Duh.  I learned to meditate years ago.  That was, at times, of some help in falling asleep but not in keeping myself asleep.  In most cases, it wasn’t a matter of quieting my mind at all or destressing before bedtime. I learned a long time ago not to read email immediately before bedtime or talk to anyone with a history of saying upsetting things to me.

Plenty of people, including doctors, shrugged it off as being perimenopausal and something I should just accept.  Well, I sure didn’t like that answer.  When I had a hot live-in boyfriend, I could overlook the insomnia somewhat and remind myself that he was going to keep me awake anyhow…but in the mornings, boy, was I dragging to work!

But for the past month, I have slept SOUNDLY, every single night but one…and that was a night with a relative who insisted on telling me a horrific and visually disturbing story right before bedtime.  Other than that, I have suddenly begun to sleep at least 6 hours a night (my normal need) without waking even once, and I fall asleep easily, too.  I’ve also stopped coming home every day and crashing on the sofa or feeling zonked after a workout. 

The one specific change I made was to add a protein supplement to my diet.

I’ve read recently that some whey protein powders actually cause insomnia, or at least certain brands do.  I don’t know about that, but I do know that the one change to increase my protein has made a big difference in how I sleep and therefore how I feel.  It’s been as stark as an on-off light switch. 

While chatting with a fitness coach, I realized that my protein intake has been too low.  I’ve been focusing on veggies more and eating healthy meals but I simply haven’t been eating enough protein.  Too often, I’m too busy to eat a full meal, get interrupted at work while grabbing lunch at my desk, or don’t get a chance to leave a meeting and eat until 3 or 4 in the afternoon.  Work can be crazy like that sometimes, especially if I’m in all-day meetings that don’t break for lunch and I look around and see everyone sneaking candy bars out of the vending machines and downing Coke after Coke all day.  I’ve resorted to a piece of fruit or crackers or something somewhat healthier but it’s still not enough fuel for my…temple.  By the end of the work day, the utilities are pretty dim!

After this conversation, I started keeping better logs of my meals so I could think more about nutritional values and my protein ratio.  I immediately began starting my days with a small glass of fat-free milk with whey protein powder and following up any workouts with the same.  I didn’t replace meals with protein shakes but simply added protein powder as a supplement to my normal meals, especially the skimpy ones where I couldn’t break free of work for a fresh, hot lunch.

The effect is that I now have an early morning boost of energy and stay boosted throughout the day.  I don’t feel as if I’ll fall asleep at mid-morning or mid-afternoon, and I don’t go home and nap.  I have the energy to go home and workout, and when I go to bed at night, the sheets feel yummy and I just fall right asleep.  If I sound like I’m gushing, well, sleep has eluded me for a long, long time!

I’ve used egg white protein in blender shakes before but it was recommended that I try whey protein powder. I  stopped by the most convenient grocery store I could find and bought a big tub of chocolate whey powder (Pure Protein) that has 25 grams of protein, 2 grams of sugar, and 140 calories.  I like chocolate so it seemed an easy answer.   I decided to go ahead and get something in vanilla, too, but my choices were limited.  I finally picked Designer Whey’s Biggest Loser Vanilla Bean Protein Powder, mainly because the grocery store had a special $3 off sale.  I was really turned off by the special branding of the product with TV’s Biggest Loser promotion.  I tend to dislike celebrity promotions of that sort, I don’t watch TV much at all, and I wasn’t using protein to lose weight.  It also had a lot less protein than the first tub of whey– 6 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber (different), 1 gram of fat, and 50 calories.  However, I wanted to experiment a little.

As it turns out, I wasn’t that thrilled with the chocolate protein powder.  I liked the taste but I really dislike clumps of undissolved powder on top of my drink, and it takes a hand-blender to get Pure Protein as smooth as I like.  For that reason, I don’t use it as often and usually only after a really intense workout.  That said, my young college student often finds that she misses meals or doesn’t have time for a full meal between classes and she absolutely loves the chocolate protein shake when she’s on the run.

The Designer Whey vanilla bean was much better than I expected.  In fact, I think it’s delicious and I’m really picky about the taste of vitamins and supplements.  Most of the time, I complain that supplements taste like either cardboard (which this does in water) or swamp water.  I was extremely pleased with the taste in skim milk. 

Though I know whey protein is the cause of insomnia for some people,  it gives me the added fuel I need to run my temple on, and at night the lights are all on in the halls, it’s quiet and tranquil, and there’s nothing stirring but the rhythmic sound of deep sleep.

But the yoga teacher had another tip that goes beyond stress incontinence for new moms, menopausal women, and bedwetting children.  She recommended making that First Chakra connection during a squat, preferably alone and naked.  She recommended de-stressing ourselves by completely relaxing the bottom of the pelvis, almost to the point of urinating, while in a squatting position by squeezing  in a single Kegel and then letting it relax all the way.  We hold so much of our survival instinct and the stress of it at the base of our spine and in our pelvic floor that it can be tremendously relaxing to let go to that point. 

We don’t have to hold on so tightly to Life, she said, but instead, just let ourselves go.  What better place to relax and let go of stress than in the First Chakra?

Next time you’re in a health food store, ask the clerk to tell you his or her five favorite items.  Not what sells the best or what might help you with a particular problem—though you may ask about those as well—but which items have they tried that exceeded all expectations.  I did this several months ago and found several new items that  have resolved problems I didn’t even realize had become problems.

Here are my new favs that I recommend to you, either at your favorite local health food store or discount store or ordered online.

1. Elations liquid and powder supplements for healthier joints, containing 1500mg of Glucosamine and 1200mg of Chondroitin  (product review)

Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have bought this had I seen any commercials or advertising for it.  When I mentioned my find to my favorite college student, she made a face and said, “But that’s for old people, isn’t it?”  The commercials and website certainly do seem to market it to people 10 to 20 years my senior, so I guess it’s a good thing it was recommended to me without consideration for the primary market. I wish I’d had this in my early 20’s!

I’ve had several joint injuries in my life, the first when I was 18 and fell on my right wrist, damaging it too badly to play piano at a recital later that day.  It pained me throughout my college years and was excruciating when I was 28 and trying to haul my baby around and had no choice but to rely on my right wrist.  My doctor diagnosed the pain as osteo-arthritis, thanks to tripping over a block of cement that was buried not quite below the surface of the college cafeteria’s lawn.

“But don’t worry,” Dr. Terry Payne promised, “because by the time you’re, say, 45 and it’s really bothering you, they’ll have found a cure for arthritis.”

A few years later, I took up foil fencing and managed to injure my knees enough that I eventually had to undergo physical therapy.  I’m now on an exercise regimen that keeps my legs super-strong and in good shape, but my knees do occasionally bother me, especially if I don’t stay on top of the exercise due to my work schedule.  I stay very active but that doesn’t mean I’m staying active with the correct leg exercises if something blows up at work and I have to forgo gym time. At the time of my diagnosis, my then-physician, Dr. Matthew Dorman, was open-minded enough to recommend glucosamine, based on studies he’d read.

The health food store employee told me that I should feel the effects of one package of 30-calorie bottles in a week’s time, and to my surprise, she was right.  I’ve tried glucosamine “horse pills” and chewables over the years, but felt only minor improvement after a couple of months of steady use.  Elations—perhaps because the liquid is more absorbable—was a drastic improvement that I noticed within a week.

I normally drink one of the 8-ounce bottles a day, every day.  It tastes to me like very strong Hawaiian punch, even thought the several flavors of Elations vary somewhat. It’s definitely better for me than drinking a soft drink, at least a hundred calories less, and costs about the same.

I’ve also tried the powder version where you mix a packet of Elations powder with a 20-ounce bottle of water, but to me, it tastes a little less appealing.

On a recommendation from the older man who does house repairs for me, I’ve also tried their competitor, Joint Juice, but was less impressed with the results.

2. The Fiber35 Diet Sprinkle Fiber by Renew Life  (product review)

When I was 25, one of my best friends taught me the value of fiber, particularly for weight management.  Not that I paid much attention.  Most of the stuff she recommended was hideous.  No matter how good for me something might be, if it tastes like a cereal box, I’m probably not going to eat it.

When the health food store’s employee pulled a tall, narrow canister of Sprinkle Fiber off the shelf, I turned up my nose at it.  That’s when she explained what she liked about it.  She not only got her daily quota of fiber from it, but she got it easily, with no mess and no taste.  I took her recommendation and now this canister stays on my kitchen table, right beside the salt and pepper.  It mixes with any soft food, dissolving completely without any taste or grit.

3. Organic Essential Detox by Renew Life (product review)

My health food store was obviously a fan of the Renew Life product line and initially suggested several detoxes like their Heavy Metal Cleanse.  Their employee raved about the product but since it’s only in pill form and I have trouble swallowing pills, she recommended her favorite liquid cleanse, the Organic Essential Detox.

Though many of my fitness-minded friends do cleanses, or detoxes, several times a year, I’d always rejected the idea.  Frankly, I was afraid I would have to excuse myself too frequently from too many meetings to run to the bathroom—and that’s the main reason I refused to try them.

This one is supposed to be extremely gentle, and after a lengthy discussion with the employee, I decided to give it a try.  I measured out an amount just less than a capful and made a brew of green tea at least twice a day, sometimes three times.  Initially, I thought the tea tasted god-awful but I got used to it after about a week.  I drank the tea about 30 minutes before my meals and made sure to drink plenty of water throughout the day.

Problems?  None.  None of the gastric fears.

The perks?  Well, me. I got downright perky.  In a few days’ time, I began to feel sooooo much more energetic.   This was the only dietary change I made during this time, so I can safely attribute the perks to the product.  My thinking became clearer, my body less fatiqued, and I had a surge of energy.  Instead of coming home from a grueling day of work and wanting to nap for a couple of hours, I wanted to hop on the treadmill or jump into home repair projects.  The bottle lasted approximately 2 weeks, and the difference in energy was substantial.

4. Source of Life Liquid Vitamins by Nature’s Plus.

My favorite of these is the Mixed Berry “Red” version. Vitamins have always been a problem for me because they’ve generally come in pill form, which are hard for me to swallow.  Even as a child, I would ask the doctor if I could take a shot instead of having to swallow a pill or liquid with the consistency and taste of swamp water. Most chewable vitamins lack everything I need, so when the health food store employee recommended liquid vitamins, I was intrigued.  I decided I liked the ingredients and flavor of the Red version of the product better.

I’m still not crazy about the taste. Yes, it’s a 2-tablespoon dose (roughly one shot) but to cut the taste, I generally mix it with a glass of grape or pomegranate juice.  I’m getting used to it, but initially it was not the best tasting liquid.  However, it does really work for me.  Again, maybe it’s because the liquid has a better absorption rate, but I did get a huge surge of energy soon after my first dose, as the product promises.

5. DanActive Probiotic Dairy Drink by Dannon.

If you have frequent yeast/bacterial infections, here-to-forth referred to as “girl problems,” acidophilus pills and a daily helping of yogurt are well-known prevention strategies.  My problem is, I hate most of the yogurts that come in the plastic tubs. I don’t mind the taste, but I can’t abide the gloopy texture.

DanActive is basically a yogurt drink, and I personally find it quite tasty.  The bottles are tiny—not enough for a meal but perfect for either a dessert or to take other vitamins or medicines with.  Vanilla’s my fav, followed by strawberry.  One a day for me keeps girl-problems away!

One of my co-workers swears by DanActive but for different reasons.  Her digestive system is at its best on a daily bottle of DanActive, and she claims it’s the only thing that keeps her from feeling bloated.

So there you have it.  Five new products to give a whirl!

My point is, it seems so freaking silly that a girl the age of my younger daughter would fear a birthday.  And yet, how many grown women (and occasionally men) do I know who hide their birthdays, insist they won’t have any more, as if a birthday is something to fear or dread?  They insist on ignoring their birthdays, insist on no parties or acknowledgment.  The very idea of a birthday seems to give them stomach ulcers.  Shoot, pick whatever age you want to be and call the number a number and move on, but don’t not celebrate!

Birthdays are a time of assessment and celebration.  This year, it’s my best birthday ever and it’s going to be an even better year that last year or the year before.  Sure, I’d prefer to have the body I had when I was 32–svelte and sculpted– but honestly, I wasn’t as comfortable with my body, my sexuality, or myself then.  I was also on the fast track in my Federal career, had two small children, a blossoming writing career,  a husband, and all the things that were considered the American dream–but I was also stressed to the point of frequent chest pains.  Where I am now is comfortable, happy, healthy, and more in the moment than I have ever been in my life.  I don’t necessarily have all the things that some people think are indicators of happiness but that’s what other people need to be happy, not me.  Or feel they need.  Life is good.  Really good.  Not without occasional problems, but really good still.

I’ve never been one to be so much “in the moment” as I am now, but I am at peace with the past, enjoying the present, and looking forward to the future.  With this birthday, I am completely confident in who I am and what I want.  There is no ache to this year’s birthday because of what I’ve lost or whom I haven’t brought forward into the present with me.  This year, I celebrate myself for who I am and for being happy with myself and the life I’ve built, and I appreciate myself.

So I’m not hiding from my birthday this year (I never have).  Instead, I am enjoying it–just as I intend to enjoy every day of this coming year.

Besides, I’m already immortal.

Photo credit by satosphere; creative commons license.  Article originally published in Third Degree Tilt.

In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to my self in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.—Dante

I came across this quote today. I’d forgotten it.

Dante would have been about 35 at the time, so I guess maybe that was what he considered the middle of his life, but I think the quote applies to far more than impending middle age. We all have times when things are dark and we have no choice but to face Self and decide whether to acknowledge what we see or to run and hide.

Anyway, it reminded me very much of the difficult times that people I adore have been having, and I wanted to say that I’m with you, all of you, in heart and in Spirit.

What was it you just said?  “I’m getting old”?  Or maybe, “I must be getting old and decrepit”?  Rest assured, with that kind of self-talk, you’ll be feeling older than you are, faster than you can imagine.
How can I wake you up from giving yourself the polar opposite of affirmations so that you don’t fulfill your own prophecy long before your body, mind, and spirit are ready to decay and fade?  Oh, I know:

Thwap!

You’ve been slapped by the cold, wet salmon of self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, you just attributed an inconvenience, twinge, or annoyance with becoming old and decrepit.

Am I saying that the human body doesn’t age, weaken, and wear down with time?  No, but I do believe that mindset can contribute to an early frailty and stagnation that, for some elderly folks I’ve known who have been upbeat and vibrant, didn’t happen until the very, very end of their long lives.  I’ve known too many people to go from being healthy and productive to fragile and apathetic, and the transition has been a steady stream of self-deprecating remarks on their age and the expectations they have of it.

When I was a teen, my middle-aged mom used to tell me that “Age is a state of mind.”  It is, but it’s more than that.  Age is a mindset, and if that mindset is tainted with constant, powerful phrases—incantations!—of how old and weak and damned we are becoming by the minute, then the negative mindset will shape our physical reality.

I’ve become very aware of men and women between 35 and 55 who tell themselves and others at least 5 or 6 times a day (that I know of) that “I’m getting old.”  Older, yes, but old? Many of the times, they tie the phrase to some minor health issue that isn’t necessarily a sign of aging.  For example….

-          A colleague of mine is having trouble thinking.  Every time I am in her presence, she makes a remark about getting old and that she can’t seem to focus.  I’ve known this woman for 20+ years and when she was 30,  I recall that she was under a lot of stress and complained to me frequently that she couldn’t seem to focus.  Every time in her career that the stress has been overwhelming, she’s become fragmented and unfocused because she’s been pulled in so many directions.  The difference now is that ever since she turned 50, she gives her age as the reason.  Over and  over and over.  Never mind the pressure, the stress, the fact that she needs to be cloned several times to do her job.

-          A guy friend of mine is in his early 40’s.  Every so often in his life, he does something stupid like go join a gym and kill himself working out the first day.  The next day, he can barely move because he’s so sore and stiff.  When he was in his 20’s, he complained that he’d overdone it at the gym—a valid point!–and then snoozed in his apartment for the next week while he recovered.  Now, it’s because he’s getting old, he says.  Not because he didn’t work up gradually to a tough routine.  It does take his body longer to recover, yes, but his entire focus is on his age as an excuse, not on taking care of himself properly.

-          A female friend of mine makes fun of me—as well as anyone else who has problems occasionally with their glasses prescriptions.  As the human eye ages, it loses its ability to accommodate near and far vision without help (readers, multi-focal contacts, laser eye surgery, etc).   I refuse to say, oh, I need glasses because I’m getting old.  I needed glasses when I was 13, and I’ve had a long history of all sorts of contacts and glasses and tweaked prescriptions.  I need glasses but I need them for slightly different reasons, and those reasons have changed many times over the years.  So what?  But this particular friend hates her glasses—which she’s always had, by the way—so she makes a huge point to ranting whenever anyone pulls out reading glasses or uses a  non-microscopic font.  “You must be getting old,” she says.  “Hell, I know I am!”

I’m afraid she’s going to be one of those old folks who spends all her time comparing notes and competing with other old folks to see who has the worst medical symptoms.  Sheesh!  Bring it to yourself as fast as possible, will you?  This is prime Law of Attraction stuff where a person can certainly fast-forward into that reality.   The elderly people who are the most vibrant don’t seem to be the ones talking incessantly about this little ache or that little pain—they focus on other stuff.  You look at them and see the deep wrinkles but still think of them as “young at heart.”  They are still lots of fun to be around.

If you remember the Carol Burnett skit that later became “Mama’s Family,” Vicki Lawrence played a woman decades older.  It always amused me how she could just become “Mama” so quickly, enough so that it was a little disturbing whenever she played her younger character, who was closer to her own age.  Good actors can easily morph into other realities of themselves–the characters they play–if they’re in the right mindset.  Most people don’t claim to be actors but too much time in that mindset of I’m old, I’m fat, I’m bald, I’m…whatever…when they are not physically those things yet will put them on the fastrack to making it reality.

Instead of hurting yourself with endless negative self-talk, try something new.  Wipe that cold, wet salmon off your face and the next time you have a scatterbrain moment, say, “Wow, I forgot what I was going to say.  Good thing I bounce back quickly!”  If your knee hurts, say something like, “My knee hurts.  It’s a good thing I’m healthy and my super-duper vitamins make me feel better every day!”  And hey, if you’re having a hot flash, just remember that not so long ago, most women didn’t survive to see menopause and that you are one lucky woman to be so vibrant and sexy and alive!

Photo Credit by the PhotoPhreak; creative commons license

As I write this, it is a Sunday afternoon  and I have a few friends coming over for dinner and an in-depth spiritual discussion.  Did I say a few?  I meant fifteen.  Or maybe ten because several just called and said they might not make it because of transportation problems.  Or maybe twenty because several just called to say they might bring a couple of friends. I had planned to make chicken cordon bleu but do I double the recipe?  What about glasses?   I don’t know why this particular gathering is so wavering in projected attendance but it is, and I could be a ball of nerves over everything being perfect, but I’m doing only a teensy bit of stress.

I finally understand what a cancer patient told me over a decade ago.

I met her only once, and I took an instant liking to her.  I was drawn to her in a way I can’t explain.  She seemed to radiate something I wanted, needed.  I know now that that something was serenity.

She had come to see me, actually, at a workshop or speech or some such I was giving in another town even though she lived about two miles from me.  She asked wonderfully contemplative questions during my gig, and afterward, the two of us and a few more women sat and talked for an hour or so.  That’s when I learned that this vibrant woman in her 40’s was a cancer patient in remission.  I didn’t know when I’d ever met someone who seemed so alive.  She had an amazing story to tell of how her illness had changed her life, though she really didn’t dwell on the past.  She talked mostly about a technique she’d developed that helped her to de-stress and promised to show the five of us gathered around her.  She invited us all to dinner at her house the following Sunday evening and told us to wear comfy clothes so she could teach us.

I went home excited.  Not  only was I going to learn a new stress reduction technique that might actually work, but I was going to spend two or three hours with this astonishing woman who was such an inspiration to the people she met.  My then-husband was markedly less excited.  He accepted that I might give lectures here and there but to him, this sounded more like a social occasion that wouldn’t include him.  It meant he would have to feed our children that night but I would still be home in time to tuck them in. I was going, regardless, but he’d let me know he wasn’t happy about it, and I knew I’d pay for it with a silent treatment.

About two hours before the get-together, I got a voice mail from the woman.  I don’t even remember what it was that had happened but something had popped up in our hostess’ life that made it far too stressful to have guests over.  Something had delayed her and she suggested we makes plans for another time. She said something else, too, but I was feeling sorry for myself and slightly betrayed at the time. I’d gone to a lot of trouble to make the get-together. Part of me felt that she was letting us down by choosing not to go ahead with the meeting.  I was mentally putting myself in her place and knowing that I’d be having a get-together regardless of what else had come up during the day.  And I was judging her by my own over-stressed expectations of how I would do it.

The thing she said that has stuck with me all these years is that she really made no apologies for canceling our event at the proverbial last minute.  I would have been on the phone begging forgiveness, but this serene woman was very matter-of-fact.  She said she knew we’d all understand that the little things in life weren’t worth adding unnecessary stress to our lives and that we could get together another time that wouldn’t be a burden on her.  True, but to me, I’d made a much bigger deal of our getting together and what she could teach me while, for her, it was simply having fun people over to talk and learn and eat.

That was lesson she taught me.  Not some intricate yoga-like technique but a mindset.  Don’t stress over what doesn’t matter.  She never said “Life is short” or anything self-defeating like that.  She said that life is important and deserving of being enjoyed rather than filled up with stress that didn’t need to be there.

So I’m having people over for dinner tonight and then afterward we’ll sprawl out for hours on the living room floor and discuss Life, Death, and the Universe.  I won’t stress over having enough matching glasses and fine china or whether we’ll have chicken cordon bleu.  It’ll either be mis-matched or we’ll have paper plates and plastic cups.  And instead of chicken cordon bleu, we’ll have a big chicken lasagna and sweet tea and soft drinks.  And it’ll be a relaxed, un-stressed evening full of laughter and good conversation.

I discovered multi-focus contact lenses by accident but began wearing them with great purpose. You’d think that as a professional in my 40’s, I’d be a good demographic for Bausch and Lomb advertising but I’m not, which is why it’s amazing to me that I found them, and found something that really works for me…after a little tweaking. So here’s the good and the bad of what I discovered for myself and how I traded in my reading glasses for a new vision of Me.

I don’t watch TV because I like to avoid all the fear-mongering of the news, so if there are TV commercials about multi-focus contact lenses, I’ve missed it. If there are radio ads, I’ve missed those, too, because I’m usually listening to an audiobook on quantum physics—not beauty tips or how to fight aging un-gracefully. I don’t read women’s magazines either, mainly because they’re filled with the type of marketing that ruins self-esteem. I had no idea that multi-focus contact lenses existed so that I could search the Internet far and wide for reviews on the contacts or even personal stories (like this one) of what made the process work and where I hit some bumps in the road. But multi-focus contact lenses found me, anyway…exactly 2 years after I finally gave in and started wearing reading glasses.

Why I wanted multi-focus contact lenses:

I’ve worn glasses and contacts since I was 13. I’m not afraid of either but I’ve always preferred the convenience factors of contacts. And then suddenly I was having to wear both my contacts and glasses for my up-close work. I was lucky, I suppose, that I didn’t have to have reading glasses until most of my peers had had them for several years.

Not that I didn’t make the best of reading glasses (aka the oh-so-youthfully nicknamed “readers”) when I started wearing them right after my 45th birthday. I bought funky animal prints, geometrically-skewed kaleidoscope prints, and rhinestone and pink Elton-John-ish “dating” glasses. At that time, I was dating men between 35 and 47, and they’d invariably laugh about my reading glasses when I pulled them out to scour a menu at a nice restaurant. Most of my dates had to try them on and look silly but cute in public…and use them just long enough to read the menu for themselves! Then at 46, I began dating a man half my age and have continued to date sexy, fantastic men in their 20’s ever since. The last thing I wanted to do was let the boy take me out to dinner and then find myself fumbling in my purse for my reading glasses while a dippy Ruby Tuesday’s waitress flirted with my “son.” The only thing worse was pulling out reading glasses to check the small print on my birth control—argh!

But hating my reading glasses was never about vanity. I mean, I can pull off the sexy librarian look just fine, thank you, but do I want to? All the time? Who cares if the guys like it—it’s annoying when it’s 24/7/365.

It took at least a year for me to learn to cope with my hatred of the sheer inconvenience of reading glasses. I eventually had a pair in every room of the house, in my car, in my purse, on my desk at work, and wherever else I might suddenly need to read .2 font on the back of a medicine bottle or on the bottom of a contract.

Reading became so inconvenient that I gave up printed books in favor of audio books and stopped reading newspapers altogether. The constant put-them-on-pull-them-off was annoying, and every day I had a dozen conversations with my boss where I pulled off my readers to look up from my computer and talk to my boss who handed me some kind of small print so that I had to put them back on to read it and then pull them off to talk to him again. Ugh.

After confirming that I was not and would never be a candidate for laser surgery, I had almost resigned myself to a lifetime of contact lenses with reading glasses playing a significant part of everyday life when I put the desire out (Law of Attraction, you know?) for some sort of better solution to come to me that would allow me to read whenever and whatever I wanted without the shackles of reading glasses (or the constant clink of them in my purse). At a visit to my dentist’s office, I was told NO CELL PHONES ALLOWED due to the landlines’ picking up the static of my Internet connection, even when my phone was on silent. I put my phone away, heaved a big sigh, and actually opened a magazine. I landed on a page that featured multi-focus contact lenses and how you can see both near and far with them (and in-between) and never put on another pair of reading glasses again. Wow. I was hooked. Multi-focus contact lenses — just what I’d been looking for!

Getting multi-focus contact lenses:

When I asked if my beloved optometrist prescribed multi-focus contact lenses, the receptionist looked at me as though I were crazy and said, “Of course! We sell lots of them!” Actually, I wanted to scream, “Then why haven’t I heard of multi-focus contact lenses in the past two years and four visits here?” But she was way too sweet and upbeat and I was simply happy to know that I might have found my answer.

My eye doctor had to perform an exam for a new prescription, which my usually mediocre vision insurance (Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Florida–Federal employees) covered because it was a new prescription, to my surprise. It was time for my annual exam anyway and to renew my old lenses—a 30-day brand that I admit I wore day and night for 30 days at a time, against my optometrist’s advice. The doc put in the new multi-focus contact lenses and told me to come back in a week.

In a week, he tweaked the power in the left one to make it a little stronger without losing the distance vision. He told me I’d tolerated the multi-focus contact lenses very well and that each person is different in how we respond to the lenses, the multiple powers in them, and the light around us. Because the eye may dilate past the up-close or distance powers (for lack of a more clinical description), sometimes the power we need for either up-close or distance vision might not be where we need it, resulting in problems such as not being able to see signage on highways at night or read books at the beach. Some people, I was told, have to turn their face just so, in order to change the position of the power in certain light.

For me, I didn’t notice any particular differences in the first week except having to look “down” through my multi-focus contact lenses in certain light—and that the compact fluorescent lights at my mom’s house made reading a book nearly impossible. The same went for the dimmed lights in the Olive Garden in Destin, Florida. Impossible to read the ecru-colored menu and tiny print. (“Er, could I have a flashlight with that menu, please?”)

At the beginning of week three, my doc tweaked the power in the other eye and asked me to test it for a week. By the fourth visit, I was happy with my new contacts and ready to order several months’ supply—and take advantage of a special rebate deal that Bausch and Lomb was offering. These multi-focus contact lenses, even without the rebate, were cheaper than my usual brand.

So what’s the good and the bad of my new multi-focus contact lenses after a month? It’s specific to my eyes, of course, but here’s my personal review of what works for me and what doesn’t:

The Bad (or at least, the I’m-not-that-fond-of this):

I cannot sleep in the lenses longer than a couple of hours (for a nap, perhaps). I certainly can’t sleep in them all night or wear them for a straight 30 days. These are a lot thicker than the 30-day lenses, which had the density of Saran Wrap. This was probably the most difficult for me to deal with. I like being able to see when I wake up in the middle of the night–an old habit from when my children were very young.

I had a mild headache with nausea for about 3 to 5 days when I was getting used to the stronger up-close power with the same distance vision as before. This was similar to the kind of headache you get when changing to a new glasses prescription. I almost gave up on this until I was told I’d get used to it, and I was mostly there by the next day.

I didn’t notice it until I did a lot of night driving about 3 weeks into the trial process, but my distance vision at night is blurry in the far distance. Very far distance. Maybe 20 cars ahead, the traffic lights will be…double vision. Six green lights instead of three. Closer than that is just fine, but a lot of night driving makes my eyes feel tired and I have a slight nausea-headache effect.

You know how when you have your eyes dilated for a glaucoma test and all the lamps look strangely bright? That’s been a noticeable difference at night, beginning about an hour before twilight when the light starts to shift. Headlights and traffic lights, as well as neon and digital signs, have an odd halogen-light shine to them. To me, at least. The vision is still perfect, but it makes my eyes a little tired.

Compact fluorescent and dim bulbs make my eyes feel tired, too. This is most often in certain businesses, like the Okaloosa County Tax Collector’s office in Niceville, Florida. However, I’m also one of those people who see flickering in fluorescent bulbs, even the expensive ones.

The Good

Most importantly, I can see out there and I can see up here! That’s simply put but the magnitude of difference for me is H*U*G*E.

I can’t wear the lenses overnight or for 30 days, but the extra thickness (comparatively) makes it easy for me to take them out and put them in without them “taco-ing” on my fingertips.

In summary

So far, so good. They do take some tweaking and getting used to, but thus far, I prefer the minor inconveniences to the major inconvenience of reading glasses. That’s just me, of course, but maybe something in my own experience will help you either decide if they’re right for you or to adjust to your new contacts.

Update: Seven months later!  I am still loving these lenses.  I have just now started to notice some changes so that I need to update my prescription, so I’m glad I didn’t buy a year’s worth, even for some of the nice discounts that were offered at the time.   I usually wear a pair for two weeks, never overnight, before changing to a new pair.  Driving in traffic at night is a chore after more than 30 minutes because it tires my eyes and I get a slight double-vision effect at a distance, still.  I can still see well enough to maneuver my way home, but the effect is similar to being in a 3-d movie without the special glasses.  I also still see a strange glare on lights at night, mainly headlights, tail lights, and neon signs that flash–and I still want to shoot out every halogen headlight within five miles.  That minor vision deficiency is a trade-off I’m willing to make because I can still easily drive to the grocery store two miles away or a nearby boyfriend’s house after dark, and if I plan any long-distance trips for a departure time early enough in the day that I arrive before sunset.  I knew when I started this that these lenses wouldn’t be a 100% solution for me, but they have been and still are the best solution for me.

He’s 23 and has the physique of a demi-god, but that’s not what attracted me to him.  It’s more the fact that he’s a firefighter with a wicked sense of humor.  I love it when a man can keep me laughing…in a good way.

Our first date is very casual–a cup of chai tea at a local establishment–to see if anything clicks between us.  Like most first dates, there’s a degree of sizing each other up and, like most guys, he tries to impress me with tales of his heroics or hard times he’s overcome.  I smile as I recognize the mating ritual in full play, and he’s made it quite clear that he’s interested.

Sitting across the narrow table from me, he confesses that he’s always adored older women but he can’t pin down the reason why.  He promises that whatever I might be interested in with him, he will not disappoint me.  That makes me laugh, even though he didn’t mean for it to be funny.  He’s trying very hard to be worthy of my attention, and I think it’s sweet.

He wonders aloud if older women are more interesting because we’re grateful, and oh, but that really makes me laugh.  And costs him a few points, too.  It’s an oft-stated assumption that’s, well, just plain wrong in the context of his question.

Ben Franklin wasn’t entirely accurate in his famous letter, known as the Old Mistress’ Apologue, in 1745:

But if you will not take this Counsel, and persist in thinking a Commerce with the Sex inevitable, then I repeat my former Advice, that in all your Amours you should prefer old Women to young ones. You call this a Paradox, and demand my Reasons. They are these:

1. Because as they have more Knowledge of the World and their Minds are better stored with Observations, their Conversation is more improving and more lastingly agreeable.

2. Because when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility. They learn to do Services small and great and are the most tender and useful of all Friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman.

3. Because there is no hazard of Children, which irregularly produced may be attended with much Inconvenience.

4. Because through more Experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is they are safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclined to excuse an old Woman who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.

5. Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.

6. Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and may lead to a Life unhappy.

7. Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend the making an old Woman happy.

8 Eighthly and Lastly, They are so grateful!!

The reason Ben’s advice sounds so off to me–besides being 265 years old–is that it’s from the point of view of a man already at middle age.  Maybe cougars 265 years ago were grateful,  but it just doesn’t fit so well in 2010.

I much prefer Frank Kaiser’s “In Praise of Older Women,” a column that is mistakenly attributed to Andy Rooney.  Even though it’s aimed at women a generation older than I am, I have appreciated the column since I first heard of it almost a decade ago.    My favorite parts?

Older women are sublime.  They seldom contemplate having a shouting match with you at the opera or in the middle of an expensive dinner.  Of course, if you deserve it, they won’t hesitate to shoot you if they think they can get away with it.

Yes, women with a little bit of maturity aren’t as likely to be drama queens.  So right about that.  I hear this from my younger friends more than any other reason for appreciating an older woman.

And then there’s this gem that says it all:

An older woman has been around long enough to know who she is, what she wants, and from whom.

Time now to understand the word grateful in its proper context.   I’m not grateful because I’m desperate for a man, any man.  Too damned picky for that.  But when it comes to gratitude, yes, it’s there.

I am grateful for the sexy younger men in my life because I recognize that those full heads of hair and six-pack abs are fleeting, that that fiery passion and enthusiasm for life is often tamped down by the burdens  of paying the mortgage and feeding a family, that the rambunctious innocence of a young man can become jaded after a few drudge jobs and a divorce or two.  I appreciate that part of a man’s life and love to breathe it in with him before–as happens too often–he becomes tainted by the mundane.

Young men are still grateful themselves–a man in his 40’s will criticize an older woman’s weight, clothes, hair, ideas, and ideals whereas a man in his 20’s dismisses all those restrictions and shouts, “Woo-hoo, a naked woman!” without insisting she be registered to vote for the same party.

I’m filled with appreciation for such sweet men to be in my life and I’m grateful  because…well, because that’s what I like and what I get.  And if the Law of Attraction is working in its tip-top form, then my gratitude will serve me by bringing more younger men into my life of such outstanding caliber.

Life is wide open and full of options.  And I don’t really know where to go from here.  I don’t recall ever having so many options open for me at 18 or 25 or 30.

Back then, I felt–and was often told–that I have so terribly many alternatives for my future but that I would narrow my path through my field of study…and my first job…and my subsequent jobs…and then with marriage and family and the PTA and certain expectations of fitting myself into the shoebox of societal norms.  Back then, I saw a whirlwind of possibilities being funneled down to just one or two and being on a path that would be impossible to jump from, unless there was a bridge involved.  The high kind with water and rocks below.

Life has not proved that way.  Not for me, at least.  I think of the ending of the second Terminator movie, where Sarah Connor suddenly does not know the future.  I know my future is full of possibilities and that the future is very fluid.  Yes, indeed: no fate except what we make.

I confessed on a walk with my daughter while visiting her college campus that I have so many options opening up for the future that I really am a little baffled by the direction I might choose.  This, after all my life knowing the next logical step in my life phases.   That narrow path is opening onto a wide vista and I’m about to run barefoot into the grass and sunshine, tumbling and spinning and dancing.  With my younger daughter leaving home in another year, who knows what I’ll do?

Maybe I’ll follow one of these sweet young sergeants to England for a year or maybe backpack through Europe for a summer.  Maybe I’ll take my buddy Shawn’s advice and teach acquisition courses for the Defense Acquisition University and spend a few years on the road.  Maybe I’ll switch to the Army or NASA and see what I can learn that’s new in my current career field or maybe I’ll just write books about dominance and submission from the psychological viewpoint or maybe I’ll teach English at a University somewhere.  Maybe I’ll produce audio books or go back into life coaching full-time.  Maybe I’ll go back to playing pipe organ in a local church or open a writer’s retreat or go back to teaching safety workshops so farm workers don’t lose fingers.  Maybe I’ll spend a year in Costa Rica with my laptap and a good Internet connection.    So many choices, and all of them quite possible.

My older daughter reminded me then, on our pleasant tour of the neighborhood, that my menu of futures is unusual for most people.  For most, she suggested, they become stuck on one path and don’t see any options at all.  Once their path is set, they’re committed to it…eternally.  No more choices.   Once an accountant, always an accountant.  Once set in a house in a certain city, always there.  There is a mindset at mid-life that it is too late to make such drastic changes, even if such changes would present an exciting, happy future.  We too often get caught up in the inertia of where we’ve worked so hard to get to and forget that we have another half of our lives to explore and enjoy new things if we’re not absolutely thrilled with where we are now.

So where do I go from here?  Doesn’t really matter as long as I keep moving forward and enjoying myself.

Though I’m feeling very confident right now about my medical tests on Tuesday, I’ve been bothered by a few things and I think it’s absolutely imperative I work these out in my head, not just for Tuesday’s tests but for  many areas of my life right now and in the future, medical and not.    I spent quite a bit of time today talking to some of the best Law of Attraction practitioners I know, and did ultimately get to the shift I was wanting.

What’s bothering me is that my doctor will likely want to see me more often, and as doctors do, she’ll be looking for what’s wrong. If she doesn’t find anything, she’ll look harder and more often.  Until she does.  I don’t like the idea of seeing a doctor for the routine purpose of looking for cancer or what might become cancer one day.  If you go looking for something on a regular basis, eventually you’ll find it.  And if you don’t find it, then you have exhaustive tests that will “hopefully” find something wrong?  Or does focusing on it make it so?

Our family used to be involved with the local Relay for Life events–now about 4 big events in this area, in different small towns within 20 miles of here.  We’ve lost some beloved coworkers to cancer in the past few years, with rumors that 30-something people who used to work in one particular physical area have died.  (I miscarried while I worked there briefly, as did several other women though none of us knew at the time–and there were frequent environmental checks done on the building.)  Because some of our favorite co-workers have passed in the last year and others fight every day, my organization is very focused on supporting Relay for Life and various cancer experiments.  One of the things you realize very quickly when you’re involved in Relay for Life is how many people you know who have cancer or have a loved one who has it.  They make you stand up if you do, and if you’ve lost a parent or child or a spouse,  and then if you’ve lost a sibling, and then if you’ve lost another relative, and finally if you just know someone who died from cancer.  It’s sobering, in a staggering way, to attend such a rally or event.  The stand-up test was given in detail at our last mandatory office function…which was a week before the tests that had my doctor looking extra hard.  At my job, it’s definitely cancer season …or rally season…which means lots of focus on fear.

One of the things at this last mandatory meeting and rally that bugged me was the attempt to get everyone to sign up for a cancer experiment.  They wanted us to take a few basic tests and agree to continuing the tests year after year to see how many of us get cancer over the next 20 years or so.  My answer was not  no, but hell no.  There was such a deep level of resistance to it for me.  Though they were calling it cancer prevention, it was all about how long and under what circumstances each of us would get cancer.    It had the feeling of bringing cancer to participants in what surely seemed like a  worthy experiment.

It’s important to me to have a doctor who’s onboard with the way I think and who’ll focus on finding good news instead of exhaustive searches for bad stuff.  I think I have that in my current doctor.  I know that many doctors have a certain perspective that, if they find themselves ill, destroys them.  I certainly saw this when I was dating The Treat.  He was a wonderful physician with a great sense of humor, but he once confessed to me that he looked first and foremost for the worst case when a patient arrived with particular symptoms.   Even though he seemed light in his personality, in his outlook, he was very heavy and expected the worst.  He also complained to me that he didn’t like treating people with simple colds or anxiety disorders–he wanted to find and cure the really bad stuff and relished it.  I can see now his mindset contributed to his own self-destruction.

When I was dating the Ten of Pents, another urgent care physician, he had a somber but kind bedside manner but was very light in his outlook.  He loved treating people with minor problems and giving them quick solutions.  Whereas The Treat used to tell me about taking off from work to attend his patients’ funerals, the Ten of Pents couldn’t dine out without interruption.  While out for an evening, we had both other diners and cell phone calls to tell him how he’d saved their lives and they were now X-free and happy.  Both were excellent doctors but with very different public personas and very different private outlooks.

My current doc is positive and upbeat and I love it when she asks at my annual checkups, “Did you have a good year?”  and her face lights up when I say, “Yes, I had a great year!”    I’ll spend a little time Tuesday telling her how I want her to work with me, and that as she’s conducting this particular test/exam, I want her to tell me what she sees that’s right, that’s excellent, that’s improved since my last visit.

That, I think, will be my way of balancing carefree routine visits without the constant gnawing focus on what dreaded thing might be wrong. I will be thankful for such thorough tests that can prove how well I’m doing and that I just get better and better.

Every time I’ve been pregnant, I’ve been completely exhausted for the first few months, or at least until the pregnancy ended– whichever came first.  It’s an incredible  tired-ness.  I remember that when I was pregnant with Shannon and feeling guilty for my fatigue, someone in the medical field pointed out to me that even though I felt that I was doing NOTHING physically, my body was very active on the inside and the exertion level was the equivalent of climbing mountains, so don’t feel guilty for needing to rest and regain my energy

That’s a little of how I feel now as I try to overcome the taxation of different medical procedures and tests.  I need to re-focus and re-calibrate to keep my energy for myself.  To that end, I’ve started a list of where I “leak” energy (aka, be selfless, be a fixer, take on other people’s problems, or be over-protective) and have decided a few things I will no longer do.   For starters….

- – I will no longer stress over my day job. Most of the stress introduced into my daily environment is ridiculous and petty and the result of typical reactive rather than pro-active measures. It’s almost never life-and-death for the soldiers. Someone else’s lack of planning tends to become my emergency.  Though I can handle much of this with ease, it sucks the life out of me.  I’m turning it back to the people who invented the stress instead of trying to transmute it into something shiny.  I’ve been pretty good at this for the past few months but every now and then, something major pops up that’s harder to ignore.

- – I will also no longer argue with people at work.  If my boss doesn’t want to let me work from home (telecommuting for compensation) while I’m out on sick leave, no problem.  The work will simply not be done.  If I explain to my customer that she’s pursuing an acquisition strategy that’s absolutely not going to get approved and she does it anyway, then I’m going to bust her at Clearance and she can start from scratch.

- – I will no longer deny myself pleasure.  My lovers are the hottest men I’ve ever known and I’m having the best OMG sex of my life—and so are they.  So there.  I waited a long time for this and I deserve it.

- – I will no longer hound my younger daughter about her grades, homework, schedule, etc.  She’s making her own decisions  and she can live with the consequences.  She’s made good choices thus far about various potential vices but it’s the non-lethal things that stress me with her (in the absence of worse).  She’ll make her own choices regardless of how much I stress over her so I can recognize that and be here if she needs me but let her scrape her knees where necessary.  She’s almost an adult and needs to grow into some smart decisions—and that includes recognizing cause and effect.

- – I will no longer answer the call of anyone seeking help who isn’t willing to give something in exchange for my energy.  That means no more freebies.  Compensation doesn’t have to be monetary (not at all) but it does have to be balanced.

- – I will no longer expend energy protecting Justin.   There was a time when I was in a really great place and he was the one who needed emotional support and near-constant attention—and I had high energy levels to nurture him.  Right now, I have to nurture myself and I don’t have the energy to prop someone else up.   He’s a big boy, and having the courage to take responsibility and walk in truth is a spiritual growth experience that he has to accomplish for himself, no matter the cost.  Instead of me protecting him from harsh situations he’s fallen/jumped into, he has to learn to protect himself, quit sabotaging himself, and not put himself in situations that create pain and sacrifice.  We have way too much in common in that last regard.

- – I will no longer bother with “students” and circle-mates who aren’t serious and don’t put forth an adequate effort, no matter how much I like them personally.  Most of my students, both initiated and not, are making great strides on their spiritual journeys, even though they may not always realize it.  The ones who just want to play at it?  Not interested.  They can waste their own time, but not mine.

- – I will no longer get pulled into OPD (Other People’s Drama).  Yeah, this one’s hard because I’ve tended to be too caring and want to help when I see people in trouble. For most of the past year and longer, I’ve been trying not to get involved and insisting that other people handle their own issues without involving me.  That works pretty well until I start being harassed or cornered, or drama queens mess with the people I love who are too stressed or weak to defend themselves.  (That’s my downfall.) Not anymore.  My patience is at an end.  I no longer have any compunction about legal recourse—or , if need be, black magick.  If I have to use energy to deal with OPD, it’ll be to slap someone down.

- – I will no longer worry over my mom and the decisions she makes.  If she wants to spend too much money on a shoddy painter or accept sub-par work from an electrician, it’s her money.   If she dismisses or takes a particular doctor’s advice, it’s her health.  She is mentally very capable and it’s her decision to make.  But if she asks my opinion, I’ll gladly give it.  Until then, I’ll remember that she’s an adult and able to choose for herself—and it’s okay if I disagree with her decisions just as it’s okay if she disagrees with mine.

Photo by Jean Goff; creative commons license   

I’m a big fan of looking over your shoulder every now and then to know how far you’ve come.  I can point to three different events in recent months that have been solid proof to me that I have my self-confidence back, and really, maybe even to a point that I have never before had in my life.  These are really in ascending order of importance and probably won’t mean anything to anyone else but me, but they are definitely flags for me to notice on my journey and to celebrate for what they represent.

If you can say, for certain, that you believe in yourself, then you probably have moments like this, too.  And if you don’t?  Start looking for them because just being aware will help to make them happen.

1.   This used to happen ALL THE FREAKING TIME and I spent so many nights questioning myself–I suppose because I’d been raised to believe that everyone else’s opinion was worthier than mine, whether they were friends, family, or other experts on how I should live: 

An “expert” who doesn’t know me or anything about me walked into the room at the tail-end of a conversation, heard my description of something that’s working very well in my life, and interrupted to tell me, “You need to grow up and get a life or you’ve got a hard road ahead of you, little girl!” 

There was a time when I would have  worried over his opinions (whether he’d caught my comments in context or not) and would have doubted my path, even when it’s working wonderfully for me.  This time, I just frowned and burst into laughter…because I am grown up, I do have a life, and it’s easier now than it’s ever been because I absolutely believe in myself.

2.  Because my ideas are so plentiful and I’m extremely good at brainstorming new ideas for others, I’ve never placed a value on that talent.  In the economics of my own brain, ideas were plentiful and therefore cheap, so I gave them away.  That’s changed now, and I have to remind myself sometimes, “What am I getting out of this–other than just feeling good by helping someone else?”  That helped me place a value on both my talents and my time.  The difference came when I heard from a man I used to have long, long phone conversations with.  In fact, I burned up my prime time minutes in many such conversations with him.

The defining moment came when I demanded the exchange between us give something back to me.  I already knew the things I was helping him with, but I wasn’t seeing any return on my investment in time.  We’d spent many months in long conversations, had taken a break in our friendship, and were about to go right back to many more longer conversations that were becoming more and more one-sided.  I was spending all my time, honestly, coaching him on a situation.   And what was I getting back anymore?  So I demanded I get something out of our friendship as well.  It took him all of one day to decide that he didn’t want to reciprocate, so I ended the relationship.

One of my coaching clients recently asked if I could help him with the same issues that I’d coached my friend on so successfully.  So I do…at a rate of $125 per hour.  If I’d charged my “friend” for all the time I’d spent coaching him, I would have invoiced him for about $10,000.  This is why I’m happy to give my personal opinion/advice but I never offer my professional advice to friends or acquaintances any more.  My time and energy must receive a fair exchange.  I owe myself that because I value myself.

3.  This one’s rather personal, but it probably represents the greatest change in my mindset.  Women over 40 will definitely understand what I mean, and probably a lot of younger women, too:

My very talented and passionate lover had been entertaining me for about three hours (yes, truly) when we suddenly switched gears and found ourselves in a very intense conversation about metaphysics for about ten minutes.   I reached for my drink and we both realized at that moment that my lover had lost his erection.

Like many women, I’ve always had doubts about my sexuality, my body, my attractiveness.  I’ve had my idea of womanhood squashed a few times over  the years, and by the end of my marriage and then early in the dating process, I felt completely unappealing around middle-aged men who had waaaaaaay too many issues of their own.  I think it’s too difficult for men  to accept their own aging process and that occasional impotence is something that just happens, and it’s far too easy to blame it on their partners or for their partners to blame themselves.  A few years ago, I would have been devastated and probably contemplating elective surgeries (oh, wait….I did contemplate that a few years ago).  This time was differerent though.  This time, I didn’t even THINK in those terms but rather that I probably shouldn’t initiate stimulating intellectual discussions  that would shift our focus away from play. 

My very hot young lover, however,  WAS startled by his sudden lack of, um, ardor.  I saw his gaze lock on mine and saw the horror in his eyes of how I might take this indelicate moment.  He was sweetly embarrassed, not blaming, but he sat up quickly, apologizing again and again.  “It’s not you,” he swore.  “What you were saying was just so interesting and–it’s….it’s not YOU.”

And me, I just smiled like a woman who’s never been hurt before and shrugged and said, “Oh, I know.”

I love this portait of a serene old woman and the way her life shines through her eyes.  Taken by Ron Aldaman and provided under a creative commons license.

Since I’ve been reconnecting with people from my past via social networking–as in, from my childhood, teen, and college years–I’ve been astonished to see what’s become of other people within a year of my age.  A few have gone the plastic surgery route–some look good as a result and some look like their faces froze while pulling a few G’s in some kind of prototype for a new military aircraft. I won’t say that I won’t try cosmetic surgery one day, but I’m not quite ready yet.  (My doctor actually advised, “If you ever decide to have work done, you should always go for bigger boobs because men won’t really notice a little crease on your face for more than 5 seconds.”)

There are others whom I’ve mistaken for their mothers.  Not their mothers when we were kids but their mothers NOW.    As in, they look like their 65-year-old parents.

And it is entirely in the way they dress and in their attitudes.  This is not aging gracefully–it’s more a sense of giving up on opportunities, on life. And yes, these are the same people who say everyday, “I must be getting old” or “I’m not young anymore.”  They focus so heavily on getting older, specifically on the negatives of it rather than the positives–and there are many, many positives.

Part of it has to do with where they live and the expectations of their environment.   They’ve certainly succumbed to it.  I first noticed this when I was 23 and living in my hometown temporarily.  I ran into a former schoolmate and was shocked at her appearance.  She’d just married and, true to hometown expectations, had taken to wearing dowdy dresses and a matronly hairstyle.  Why? Because “I’m old and married and settled now.”  Her face was still young, but I remember thinking at the time that she looked 42, not 22.  Her posture had changed, her facial expressions, the way she carried herself, the constant sigh in her voice.  It was as if she’d just resigned herself to a death sentence and decided to stop living, stop trying, stop enjoying.

I don’t ever want to be like that.  I insist on being age-inappropriate.  I dress how I want.  I go barefoot whether I’m in my own house or taking a walk through the neighborhood.  I fly kites and car-dance and go braless.  I sit on the floor in the family room rather than in a comfy chair.  I might make out with my lover in a semi-public place.

I picture myself in my 90’s as one of those old women with long white hair, wearing purple and red, going barefoot in the grass still at every opportunity, and  probably dating men half my age.  Whatever I’m doing then, I don’t want to have given up on life or given in to anyone else’s expectations of what I should be doing, or how I should be dressing and acting.  I want to take advantage of every opportunity when it presents itself, at any age.

Photo by  Northeast Photography; creative commons license

There’s an edginess that’s been in the air for the past couple of hours.  It’s the kind of feeling you get after a fight with a lover or when a dream just got deferred. I can’t pin it down but it’s been intense.  Weighty.  It’s nothing new…but I wasn’t expecting to have it interrupt my pleasant evening.  Someone else’s feelings, that is.

This makes me wonder how many people suffer from depression because they’re so highly sensitive to the emotions of others.  This isn’t like that horrid feeling when Shannon, Brian, and I walked past the meat market, er, I mean bar, in the restaurant a week ago and Brian and I both went, “Ewwwww, what’s that feeling?” at the same time.  It’s always gratifying to be in the company of other empaths who pick up emotions at the same instant I do.  It’s a blessing to have others like that around, really.  They totally get it when you say, “Hey, who just had an emo moment?”

Tonight’s wash of emotions happened fairly suddenly, and I don’t feel thye’re  ”mine.”  I’m going through my usual checklist, and hey, good health habits make it easier to isolate!  It’s even better when the feeling goes away, often rather suddenly and inexplicably.  Except for not knowing WTF just happened.

Here’s my empath’s checklist, applied to this particular instance:

1.  Why am I feeling this way?  Did this wave of emotion come on out of the blue, almost like turning on a lightswitch?
I have no clue why I’m feeling such sadness and upset.  It came on suddenly in the middle of a pleasant evening.  I didn’t just have a fight with anyone or receive bad news, yet I certainly feel the effects as if I had.

2. Did something happen to trigger this wave of upsetting emotion?
No.  I’ve been on an even keel all day at work, even with people having meltdowns all around me.  I’d had plans to do some decorating projects tonight, and I was looking forward to that after watching a movie.   I’ve also had time to watch a movie I’d been dying to see and liked a lot.  There were no incidents that happened right before  the emotional wave.

3.  Am I well-rested?
Yes.  Sometimes lack of sleep will have an emotional impact, but I slept well last night and spent half an hour in meditation tonight.  The latter might be a clue, though, because  during my meditation, I felt very connected to a friend of mine who’s having family problems.

4.  Is my blood sugar out of whack?
No.  Sometimes, fluctuations in my blood sugar will make me either antsy or down but I can usually associate that with particular eating habits and know what to expect.  So far this year, my diet has been very healthy and I’m giving my body what it needs.  Also, the timing isn’t right for any type of “sugar crash,” even if I’d been less mindful of my diet.

5.  Are my hormones out of whack?
Hmmm, well, I am feeling the need for some male company, but no, no raging hormones.  I’m on a new prescription after an abominable time with the last two consecutive prescriptions but I’ve been on it enough days that I’m rather sure I’m not suffering a sudden new side effect. (Being a human antennae for emotions isn’t on the packaging!)

6.  Is there something in my environment that I’m hearing, smelling, seeing that has triggered these feelings?
No.  That includes any annoying noises or flickering lights.

7.  Is there something going on in my immediate environment that’s emotional turmoil for someone else?
No.  In fact, this started before my daughter came home from work cheerful and continued afterward.   I was home alone in a pleasant atmosphere.  There was no tension in the house and no upset with my daughter.

8.  What was my day like overall–before the wave of emotions?
Overall, good.  Pleasant interactions with everyone around me.  Good news on many fronts.  Some financial relief in one area.  A great workout.  Some interesting new things I learned.  A very solid, though busy, day.

9.  Are my stars out of whack?
Whether you believe in astrology or not, I sometimes find that personal astrology chart is facing some harsher transits.  In this case,  I’m actually supposed to be under some very, very pleasant influences this week with lots of good and positive emotions.

10.  Is this the usual pattern for my mood changes?
No. I can get into a mood and stay there for two or three days, whether it’s blissful, sad, anxious, or whatever. My moods don’t swing every 15 minutes–if they do, I know for certain that I’m being influenced by someone else’s emotions, usually someone who’s ADHD, bless ‘em.  In this case, the emotional wave lasted about two hours and crested, then faded as if someone had fallen asleep or escaped into some mindless pastime.

11.  Do I have loved ones who are having obvious–or not obvious–difficulties that might be related to this wave of emotions?
Yes.  I do.  At this point, I’m usually either calling them or checking in on them when I can.  Some aren’t always available.  And some will lie to me that everything’s just hunky-dory so they don’t worry me, but I’ll find out later how upset they were.

12.  Are there certain words or phrases that come to mind with these feelings but seem unusual for me?
When I first realized I was empathic, I had been talking for hours to a suicidal acquaintance.  When my emotions crashed that night and over the next couple of days, I found myself thinking thoughts that were phrased in a particular way that wasn’t anything like me, at all.  When I figured out where I’d heard those phrases before, I figured out that I’d taken my work home with me, in the worst way possible.  IN this case tonight, I am getting certain words, glimpses almost, that give me clues to the identity of my troubled loved one.

13.  Am I overreacting?
This is where it helps to have a good friend who understands I’m an empath.  She knows that if I don’t seem like myself that she should call my attention to it.   I’ve been through a lot of loss in my life, including relationships I didn’t want to see go, but back in October, she saw me fall to my knees sobbing at a professional conference of 200 of my esteemed colleagues and got me out of there.  To me, I couldn’t separate my sense of loss from breathing and lost all perspective.  She got me out of there and started quizzing me, then it became obvious to me that I was going through not only my own mourning for a loss but feeling the raw emotions of the other people involved in the situation.    Though I’d been through much worse in my life, the double and triple wallop of emotions was more than I could take.

After running quickly through my checklist, I can usually figure out that these emotions aren’t mine but ones I’ve picked up from someone I care deeply about. Often, I’ll be on the phone, running through my list of loved ones and calling them just to see if they’re all right.  Almost always, if I can reach everyone I think it might be, I find the culprit.  Once I realize not only that the empathic wave isn’t mine and especially if I know whose emotions I’m picking up, then I can usually release it and get back to my pleasant life already in progress.

Photo by theflooz; creative commons license

I am losing one of my super powers, and I’m deeply disturbed by this.  It’s been gone for a little over a year, so it’s unlikely I’ll get it back.   

It has to do with the way my brain is wired, and it’s almost always been that anyone who knows about this secret power of mine will not understand and will unleash some weird combination of anger, envy, and annoyance at me, which can be a super power all on its own.  I’ve known very, very few people with the same internal wiring.  The last one kept rolling his eyes at me and reminding me, “I know–you told me.”  And I was surprised every time–not that I’d told him some information between minutia and life-threatening, but that he remembered that I’d told him.  With most of this planet’s inhabitants, I’ve had to repeat myself multiple times, particularly when it comes to ex-husbands.

But that’s what this super power is all about:  my very odd memory.  I’d thought it was just my surreal memory of calendar dates and events.  (Guy:  “Lorna!  I haven’t seen you in months!”  Me:  “Yes, it was the fourth day of September, about 10:30 that night….”  Guy:  “Huh? Geez, are you a stalker or something?  That’s creepy!”) But I’ve now come to realize just how different my memory has been all these years, now that I’ve lost certain aspects of it.

I know exactly when this superpower started to fade.  I was crouched in my office, on the floor, hoping someone would return soon and take me to the emergency room.  I was having heart palpitations and trouble breathing.  My brain went foggy for a  while.  The cardiologist who ran a bazillion tests later diagnosed me as completely healthy–as long as I stayed off the caffeine mega-doses. (Caffeine equals kryptonite.)  I bid my sweet teas and sodas farewell, and felt wonderful, but the super-sharp memory was gone. I didn’t realize how different my memory was from the norm until I confessed it to various friends and family members, who looked at me strangely and told me that my defective (in my opinion) memory is most like everyone else’s normal memory and not defective at all.

These conversations came after I’d walked through a new hippie shop in Destin.  As my gaze wandered over a certain type of incense that is burned over charcoal, I suddenly remembered a beautifully passionate moment I’d thought I would never forget.  Just the day before, my brother had commented on some animal tracks and I’d stepped back in time to that moment when someone  else important to me had told me the same thing.  I remembered the information, but I’d forgotten the situation where I’d been given this information, and having to recover that memory, having to grab it back from oblivion, was frightening and disturbing for me.  How could such precious memories be gone? 

Not that they were specifically more precious than others.  It’s been my norm to remember all those moments, not just the highlights.  My ex used to say that I remembered every detail between us, things important and unimportant that he’d long since forgotten (probably as soon as the next five minutes afterward).  I never could understand how he could not remember things until I walked him back down that lane and painted a few pictures to jog his memory.  Memory joggers were something I didn’t really need.  All the memories were always there.

When I walked away from the incense in that shop, I felt frantic.  I was used to every memory being right under the surface.  Now, it’s there if I, um, jog my memory.  I can read back over what I wrote in my journal from those nights and it all comes back, beautiful and vivid.  Or I might see something that reminds me, but the memories are under a layer of time now.  That’s different for me.

My friends and family tell me that this is the norm for them.  They still see my memory as extremely sharp, just not what it was a year or two ago. I never thought of it as a super power, just…normal.  For me. 

But as I absorb this, I understand better now why people in my past became frustrated with me for not “letting go” of something, someone, some situation and moving on.  To them, they could forget easily and had little trouble letting go of memories when I might have welcomed losing a little of the edge of things that were painful.  I would become irritated with their constant preaching to “let go and let God” when I literally could not let go.  The moments were there for me as present now as when they happened.  Everything from my past had crowded into my present and could not be forgotten or forsaken.  I couldn’t let go of the memories because I wasn’t wired to, and they wouldn’t let go of me.

Having this kind of super power memory was a curse as often as it was a blessing, but now that it’s gone, I really appreciate–and miss–having the rawness of the original moment with me at all times.

Lorna Tedder, adding a little spice to life…or at least to a wonderful Winter Solstice feast.  Photo by Aislinn Bailey; all rights reserved.

Most people I know make New Year’s resolutions, manage to give up on them in defeat within two weeks, and feel like failures for the rest of the year because they couldn’t manifest a handful of changes in their lives in a few days’ time. I do something different, something that really works for me.  I call it the Burning Bowl Ritual, and it’s perfect for Winter Solstice, New Year’s Eve, or even special occasions throughout the year.   I’ve designed a ritual around it, one that can be adapted to almost any occasion or spiritual gathering.

Here’s how I adapted my usual ritual for a Winter Solstice “feast” that includes guests of all religions:

The timing of the Burning Bowl ritual is important to me.  I prefer to do it on the day of the Winter Solstice because of the symbolism.  Not only is this the longest night of the year, but it’s the day many cultures and religions celebrate the “Return of the Light,” as the days begin to lengthen after this night.  It’s also the first degree of Capricorn, an astrological symbol of manifestation–and the beginning of the new year of manifestation–whether you call those intentions or resolutions. 

For this year’s Burning Bowl ritual, once our feast was complete, I handed out sheets of paper to each guest and asked them to draw a big T on the paper. This was their personal list to take home, so they can put away their list and review it later in the year.   On the left column, they were to write down the things they want to honor and bid farewell to in the coming year.  Saying goodbye to these things will make room for better things to come.  I gave examples from my own list for the year:

Fretting over the lack of ——– in my life

Any insecurity or jealousy over ——–

Worry about ——-

Most of my dinner guests chose things like bad health habits, obsessions over certain people, money worries, unfulfilling jobs, and long-carried emotional pain. 

Once they were done with the things they wanted to say goodbye to, I had them turn their attention to the right column and write down things that they welcomed in for the next year.  Not things they resolved to do.  Not things they “invited” in, but may not come.  Rather, things they “welcomed” in because that implies that these things are definitely coming to them and they’ll be happy to have these things in their lives.  In my experience, the majority of things in this list arrive effortlessly throughout the course of the coming year.  I gave a few examples from my own very long list for 2009, beginning on Winter Solstice 2008:

Continue and expand my social circle and spiritual circle of friends and students, with wonderful lessons coming to me and from me

More loving relationships with family, friends, and daughters

An amazing, fun, intimate, creative, and intense sex life –and for my partner to be able to keep up with me

Learning new  things and meeting new people, including things like knife-throwing, archery, and motorcycles

Business opportunities that bring me many different streams of abundantly flowing income and allow me to be mobile in my workspace and hours

A deepening of my romantic love relationship with ————, to include much happiness, serenity, and a ————

My dinner guests welcomed in a huge variety of things that were very personal to each.  I thought that was funny that we tended to want to get rid of the same things that weighed us down but what we wish to come into our lives was quite diverse.  I loved some of the younger guests’ desires for good mentors, career guidance, confidence, and many of the things that my older guests didn’t consider until they heard these later.  I was amazed at the maturity of some of the youngest guests when it came to participating in this exercise.

When everyone finally had their list completed, I asked them to consider a verb for the next year and a simple phrase or mantra.  These are, in effect, my themes for the next year, and usually go hand in hand. I have to pick the exact words, and that sometimes means digging out the thesaurus to make sure each word has exactly the connotation I’m looking for.   My themes for the past few years and for the coming year? 

2006:  Manifest  and Risk Everything

2007:  Enjoy and Allow Miracles

2008:  Thrive and  Celebrate Everything

2009:  Enchant and Be Delighted

My guests began to think of their themes for the next year, some brainstorming with others to come up with the perfect word. Once they had their themes, they committed them to memory for later in the evening.  They chose words like Relax, Recalibrate, Have Fun, Be Adventurous, Succeed, Liberate Myself, Accept, Live Life to the Fullest.

For the next part of the evening, I brought out wine glass goblets that I’d bought for 50 cents each from a local pottery store.  I could have gone with plastic champagne glasses but I wanted something that my guests could take away with them.  I’d also tried to find those little rings–wine glass jewelry–that dangle from the stem, but couldn’t find them anywhere in town.  While walking through a discount store after a sushi lunch with my eldest child, I happened on an earring display and found not what I was looking for but something better.  I picked out about 10 pairs of deeply discounted gemstone and shell hoop earrings that closed the hoop with a clasp.  Each fit perfectly around the stem of a wine glass and made a nice souvenir to be imbued with the energies of the evening and taken away as a souvenir, to be worn later, attached to a car mirror or lamp pull, etc. 

Next, I handed out little inventory tags to my guests.  These were purchased at the local Office Max in the section where they sell tags and stickers for garage sales.  Each tag was about 2 inches long, with a string attached.  My guests wrote a symbol, picture, or word on the tags to represent what they wanted to say goodbye to and placed the tags in the goblet’s bowl.  These were placed inside the glass because their cups are already full of these things.

My guests then wrote symbols, pictures, and words on the tags to represent things they wanted to welcome for the coming year.  They tied these tags to the stem of the glass and let them dangle.

For the actual ritual, I’d hoped to gather in my backyard, but the below-freezing weather made it impractical, so we moved my grandmother’s aged cauldron into my open garage and started a very small fire in the cauldron, which served as our burning bowl instead of the usual barbecue fire pit in the backyard.

We formed a circle around the burning bowl, each of us holding a candle.  I lit mine and then then person’s next to me, she lit her neighbor’s on the left, and so forth until the circle was complete.  Because our guests were of varying spiritual backgrounds,  we asked the Archangels–something common to most belief systems present–to witness our intentions. 

After some brief explanations about the symbolism of the ritual, each guest tossed tags from inside their glasses into the fire, saying goodbye to the things that no longer serve them and that they wish to get rid of in the coming year.  Some called out these things proudly.  Most performed this part of the ritual silently, as was their perogative. 

Then, one by one, and in no particular order, the guests allowed me to cut the tags from the stems, leaving evidence of their desires in place around the stem, and offered the tags representing things to be welcomed in into the fire, with our intentions carried away by the smoke to come to fruition over the next year.  Some of the guests were exhuberant at this point and it was so much fun to see them enjoying this and feeling so much lighter and more hopeful.

When all the tags were gone, I then offered each guest a choice of grape juice or champagne and filled their glasses.  We each called out our themes for the new year and toasted to them, clinking our glasses.  Then we closed our evening with thanks to the Archangels for bearing witness.

The biggest difference, I think, in this Burning Bowl ritual filled with intentions toward what we welcome in and the usual resolving to do  a host of things that will get rid of bad habits to that so many of our intentions are not things we actually have to go do (and fail at) ourselves.  These are more like a wish list to God, the Universe, Goddess, or whatever belief system you follow so that we allow Deity to bring these to us and we simply welcome them when they get here.  Since I’ve been doing these Burning Bowl rituals, about 90% of my desires are fulfilled within the first 8 months of the year–and some are ones I just never thought would have happened, and certainly not on my own. 

As for this year, only 48 hours after the ritual, I’ve already had two unexpected things to welcome in that are stepping stones:  1.  I have reconnected with someone from my past whom I thought was lost to me and 2.  a colleague (who didn’t attend the party) dropped by my house to wish me a happy holiday and loaned me 3 sets of weighted knives so I can learn to throw them!

Photo by Eladesor; creative commons license

Certain types of incense make me feel calmer, others put me in the mood for loving, and some just remind me of the serenity and sacredness of home.  Seems there’s some science now to back up my weird impressions. 

Discover Magazine reports  ( http://discovermagazine.com/2008/sep/26-smell-your-way-to-happiness ) that at least one incense has uplifting effects in an article that may have depressed people burning more incense.  That particular incense is frankincense, one of my personal favs.  I’m especially fond of frankincense and rose oil mixes. 

Others on my list of personal favorites–not including ones that are meant for specific rituals– are:

Nag Champa (the general incense of my home when I have summer guests)

Sandalwood

Dragon’s Blood  0r Dragon’s Breath (the favored scent for romantic company)

Rose

Sweetgrass

Jasmine

My favs remind me of sweet, erotic, sacred, and wonderful times and just make the whole house (or my bedroom) feel great.  It’s good to know that frankincense will give me an emotional lift.  I’ll keep that in mind for times when I’m feeling a little lonely or missing friends.  I like being a Happy Witch!