I didn’t put up Halloween decorations this year, contrary to what you might think.  I mean, I’m the neighborhood witch so certainly you’d think I’d have all sorts of styrofoam displays, ghosts hanging in trees, plastic skulls cackling on the front porch.  Nope, not this year.  In fact, I’m not even putting out my usual jack-o-lanterns and displays for the trick-or-treaters.  I’ll have the light on for them, and a big bag of treats, but that’s it this year. 

Why?  Because I need to take back Halloween.

It’s one of my special holy days and the proliferation of Halloween lights, plastic, and …commercialized garbage…has it looking like a horror-show version of Christmas and Easter.  I’m not against displays, lights, costumes, parties, etc.  Just…this year…I need a quiet holiday.  All the “stuff” cheapens the meaning to me.

So this year, I’m not even having a big gathering at my home for a Samhain feast.  Instead, I’m handing out candy to the neighborhood kids–truly a scary thought to me after refusing to let junk food in my house again–and then I’m spending the rest of the evening by a quiet little bonfire in my back yard, where I’ll comtemplate the wheel of the year and the abundance of harvest as I move into a new year. 

Then later in the week, I’ll join friends and family at the Florida Pagan Gathering to honor my spirituality with a group, sit under chilly night air around a huge bonfire and watch the sparks off it join the stars above while drummers beat in unison.  I may even have a couple of Dixie cups of mead.  And then I’ll come back home after contemplating life, death, and the veil between with a new lease on life that feels far more real than something plastic and packaged from the local WalMart.

A great feast with friends!  Photos by Lorna Tedder, copyrighted

If I can learn a lesson spiritually, why can’t I apply it to the mundane?

If there’s one thing that will upset me to no end–that I’m trying to end–it’s a no-show in my “mundane” life.  If I have long-awaited plans with one of my daughters and she decides at the last minute to hang out with her friends instead, then wow, am I going to be pissed!   It’s not just about my very busy schedule, but more about how much I was looking forward to spending time with her. 

If I spend all week looking forward to a lunch date or movie date with someone and at the last minute (literally, sometimes), he calls to say something brutal just happened at work and he’s so entrenched in it at the moment that he either can’t or shouldn’t see me because his focus is still on the chaos there instead of on me where it should be,  then I’m angry.  Yeah, yeah,  I know he’s trying to spare me when he’s in a bad mood, but still I’m upset.  It’s not so much because I now have to make other lunch plans or rearrange my schedule, but because I was so looking forward to enjoying time with him, bad mood or not, because his bad mood doesn’t last when I’m around. 

In either case of a no-show, it brings out a strong, unfavorable reaction that can affect me for days.  And I want to be able to let go of that feeling much more quickly.

I don’t really have that problem when someone doesn’t show for one of my gatherings or spiritual circles, as I realized while cleaning up after the Lammas feast at my house.  Two of our members hadn’t been able to make it, and while I really wanted to see them, it was…okay.  In one case, I’d known for two weeks that she wouldn’t be able to attend.  And that was fine.

Why fine for spiritual events but not for more personal events?

Back in 2000, Maggie Shayne, Evelyn Vaughn, and I led an Open Circle in Washington DC at the Romance Writers of America National Conference.  It was very well-attended, but one of the women who’d really wanted to participate had a minor mishap on her way to the Circle.  A sprained ankle or something of that sort.  She had to sit out the event and watch from a distance.   It was at that point that Maggie passed along something to me that I’d heard for the first time but was reiterated to me in my own spiritual practice over the next few years:

Don’t be upset if someone isn’t able to attend a ritual, service, or group event.  You may not know the reason, but they aren’t meant to be there at that particular time.

As I’ve discovered over the years, some situation or discussion would come up at every single gathering where there was an absentee–that could not or would not have occured if the absentee had been present.    One of the first times I saw this in my own spiritual groups was in the spring of 2005, and I was dreadfully upset that a romantic interest of mine had not shown up that night and couldn’t be reached.  Later I found out he’d fallen asleep after an unexpected double shift at the hospital and had slept right through the gathering, but at the time, I really wanted him to be there.  As the evening wore on and only women showed up that night, I saw firsthand how his absence opened a door for a very meek attendee to express her powerlessness to protect her young son from the sexual predator she was (still) dating and her physical fear of angering the man.  The bulk of the gathering shifted to focus on getting her and her children to safe harbor.   Right time, right place, right mix of people for that conversation to happen.  Any other time, place, or attendee list and she might not have gotten the help she needed. 

I’ve since seen people with deep personal issues of their own not be able to make it to a feast and the solution to their problems come up while they were away. I’ve also seen people show up who shouldn’t have….they kept the rest of the group from getting the fellowship they craved, insulted me as hostess and leader, and destroyed any chance of a cohesive spiritual mindset that evening.  Then again, perhaps they were meant to be there because we got a chance to see their real motives and decide to remove them from our group early on.  I will never angrily demand to know why someone didn’t attend Circle, just as I never liked to hear my Southern Baptist upbringers judgementally demand, ”And why weren’t you in church today?” without knowing or caring why not.   Most people who are no-shows at spiritual events are either not ready to hear what’s taught there, need to have an experience right where they are more than they need to be with me, or they unwittingly need to allow a doorway for someone else at the event to cross through.   Their absence creates a different envionment that might benefit others more than their own presence, just as with my predator-dating guest.

So I’m not worried about my  guests who call and tell me they’ve come down with the flu or have an emergency going on.  I can stop worrying that they’re okay and know that they are right where they are supposed to be.

But in my mundane life?  So much harder.

As for my sometimes no-show guy, I need to remember that there are some things that he has to work through on his own, with me nowhere around, in order to be a more whole and more healed person.  It’s hard when I so want to help him thorugh rough times and he wants to keep me away from his rough times.  I must remember what a gentle soul he is and that these absences are for his personal growth and not about me…except to the extent of being able to accept that everything will be all right.

As for my daughters, it’s about understanding that they are adults with their own lives and can schedule their social lives as they see fit.   It’s also about me remembering to make my own plans and them understanding that Mom has a life of her own and not always on a shelf at home waiting to be activated by their needs.   That part is a struggle, but the surest way for me to learn my lesson of not forgoing my own needs and plans.

Every year around this time, I do a little life coaching exercise that’s featured in Give Your Life Direction.  The idea is to make a list of things I wish I could say but, for whatever reason, can’t.  Maybe because the other person is dead.  Maybe because it would be too dangerous to confront them.  Maybe because the other person lives far away.  Or maybe because I just don’t feel I can be honest with my emotions, whether they are jealous, angry, or wounded.  My fifth chakra, the throat chakra, has often been rather weak, but I’ve been actively strengthening it.

The first year I tried this exercise, I had a list as long as my arm.  It was only  “supposed” to be ten things, but I kept going, shocked at how much I’d kept bottled up.  A few years later, the list was down to the five to eight range. Last year, I had to dig a little harder and still ended up in the five to eight range, thanks mostly to some secrets I was keeping for someone else. Every year of this exercise, the burden gets a little lighter. 

Last year, for the 2010 version, I had absolutely nothing.  No anger, no jealousy, no I’m-hurt, no why-did-you-do-this?, no nothing of that sort.  I had little to nothing that I had bottled up, no emotion I was swallowing because I was afraid to say it or feared the ramifications if I did.

Every year, the burden gets lighter.  I speak up so much more.  I find it’s good for me to do that, even if some of the people in my life may be a little alarmed and even though it sometimes scares people at work, especially the bosses…if I’m being especially candid.  But it feels so much more like I walk in my own power.

But don’t assume this year isn’t any different from last year, just because there is absolutely no one in my past or present that I feel I wish I could say something to but can’t.  The biggest difference this year is not in what I wish I could say, but that I have people in my life who not only allow me to say what I feel the deepest or the scariest things that come to mind, but also welcome what I have to say.  There is nothing, absolutely nothing, I feel I need to hold back.  I can speak up and be heard and still be cherished for what I have to say. 

Took a really long time to get here, but I’m glad I came.

Continued from Losing 20 Pounds in 30 Days: Part 5 — Are Your Parents to Blame for Weight Gain? 

So why did I fire my doctor?   First, my apologies for taking so long to come back to this blog to continue this series, but between the new job, tons of overtime, and bestest friend, my time’s been very limited.  But as I promised many of you, I will explain fully why I left my family doctor–fired him–and why I believe anyone who encounters the same should fire his or her physician as well.  And just so you know I’m not totally down on classical medicine, I have since found a new doctor who said all the right things, did all the right things, and is monitoring my health rather than dictating my lifestyle for the rest of my life.

(Photo at right:  Down 22 pounds as of  11 March…and dropping)

I decided to fire my doctor for essentially four reasons:

1.  He didn’t believe me.

Look, I didn’t have to go to the doctor.  No one dragged me there or carried me or convinced me to go.  I went because something didn’t make sense and I wanted his help to prevent me from becoming very sick or for illness to progress to the point where it could not be reversed. 

When I told my doctor that I was gaining weight while doing P90X doubles–and that it was not all muscle but that I was also gaining fat–he did not believe me.  The best he could muster was to tell me to “keep doing what you’re doing.”  The second thing he didn’t seem to believe was when I told him it didn’t make sense to me because not only was I exercising hardcore for around 15 hours a week, but also I had been “eating clean.”  Now, granted, I didn’t realize there were hidden sugars in the healthy vegetables I’d been eating or all sorts of unpronounceable ingredients in my favorite Low-Carb Cauliflour dish as my favorite healthy restaurant.  Still, I had been eating well-balanced, healthy meals and keeping my calories at 1500, even with two major workouts a day. He seemed to have this image of me as sitting on my butt all day, eating bon-bons and lard, and joyously wasting his time with lies about diet and exercise. 

To put it mildly, his lack of belief in me really pissed me off.  This was the same doctor’s office that forced me to pay for a routine pregnancy test six months earlier, even though it was physically impossible for me to be pregnant–it was a few months after I’d ditched The Toad and the only way I wanted some lying dirtbag anywhere near me was if I had a baseball bat in my hands to thwap him upside the head with.  Not being believed is one of my hot buttons, going back to my childhood when I was attacked by a vicious dog and was told I certainly must have provoked him.   How could I expect my physician to help me find the problem when he didn’t believe what I had to say?

(Note:  My new doctor thought it was unusual but believed me.  To him, the fact that I was getting lots of good exercise, eating right, and still gaining weight meant we needed to investigate further.  Well, exactly!)

2.  He was too quick to prescribe a pill rather than investigate more alternatives.

He skimmed over a three-year-old test, one shortly before I began my diet and exercise regimen, where I had some borderline results as a result of bloodwork with another doctor.  Based on those results, he told me that I would be seeing a lot of him because I was most likely diabetic and would be on meds for the rest of my life, particularly Metformin.  I asked if we should get an updated tests or if there were alternative we might investigate, but he waved me off, giving me instead a prescription for a glucometer and telling me to come back in two weeks, and to expect long-term care.

(Note: My new doctor insisted on getting updated tests, including an A1C test, which showed that I am NOT diabetic.  He did offer to put me on Metformin if I didn’t get the results I wanted, but also told me about the side-effects my first doctor did not mention and that I don’t need it to stay within normal numbers.  By the way, my last three blood sugar test strips were 81, 89, and 91, and my blood pressure was 106/64.)

3.  He blew off my questions.

If there’s any hot button that gets to me more than having my integrity questioned, it’s being ignored.  When I began asking him legitimate questions about my lab tests, he ignored my questions or side-stepped them–or, when I asked about a mistake his office had made, my fears were trivialized.  Not allayed.  Trivialized.  Discounted. 

If my doctor cannot or will not answer simple questions and expects me to just “trust” him, when he doesn’t trust me enough to believe me when I tell him what my diet and exercise are like, then no.  Trust is a two-way street.  My doctor works for ME, and I’m paying to get answers, not to be blown off when I ask a legitimate question.

4.  He failed to send me for IMPORTANT follow-up tests.

While asking questions about my lab results and an ultrasound from six months before, I peered over his shoulder because he was being evasive.  They’re MY lab reports and I paid for them, so I expect to know what’s in them, not just that “they’re normal” or “they didnt’ find anything significant.”  This experience, if nothing else, taught me to get copies of my test results for myself, and my new doctor volunteered my first set of results from tests he’d ordered. 

It was fortunate for me that I saw the last paragraph of the ultrasound results and stopped him before he could move on.  I was particularly interested in the sentence that said I needed to have a follow-up scan in 6 months, and it was–on that day–6 months since he’d had the test results.  The results were non-conconclusive, so they needed me to return in 6 months to see if suspicious spots had grown (an indicator of cancer which could be treated immediately) or not (benign).  I had not heard from his office so I had followed-up myself and been told that nothing was found when in fact, something WAS found and I needed a re-test to rule out cancer.  The re-test came back showing no growth (good!), but I was livid.  I would never have gone for a second test had I not asked about it while reading over my doctor’s shoulder.  What if it HAD been cancerous?  I would have lost valuable months of treatment, or it may even have been too late by the time I could feel the spots. 

That was the last straw in a really disappointing doctor’s visit.  I was lucky.  Lucky that the results turned out to be good instead of dire.  Lucky that my doctor was having such a bad day with me–or else I would not have left him and I would stil be 26 pounds heavier (yes, as of today, I’m down 26 pounds, thanks to what happened next that changed my life), and I never would have left him for a new doc who is really on the ball, very positive, and truly understand what I mean about the “sick care” style of medicine that is practiced here rather than real “health” care.

My next health-related post will explain the rather bizarre turn of events that got me started on my detox program.

This photo is a great example of #9 below.   Copyright by Lorna Tedder.

1.        The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 Color Mobile Scanner:   The smallest ScanSnap document scanner—multi-page, double-sided scanning, all sized of documents from receipts to legal paper, fast, up to 10 sheets at a time, up to 600 dpi.  It’s a teensy tiny scanner that takes up very little room on my desktop—so it’s always there!  This one little scanner in the past year has helped me clear out NINE filing cabinets of important papers, now in my Dropbox account,  and keeps me organized because I simply scan and forget about any important mail or documents as they come into my house.    Makes it easy to NOT be a hoarder!  Check it out or take a look at a slightly bigger version.

2.       Shakeology nutritional shake:  A low glycemic index shake with 70 nutrients, Shakeology functions as a meal replacement or a meal supplement.  It’s like a liquid-vitamin-slash-protein-shake to me with only good side effects:  more energy, lower cholesterol, better digestion, and very quick and easy.  I drink it daily as breakfast and, if I get a late evening craving,  as a “chocolate mousse dessert, ”  which is about, oh,  3000 calories less than what I used to eat for a chocolate dessert!  My favorite way to drink Shakeology is the 140-calorie (far less than a candy bar or soda) method of pulverizing a double handful of ice cubes, a little water, and a scoop of chocolate Shakeology in a blender.  The end result, depending on how much water I use, is somewhere between a chocolate slushee and a thick chocolate mousse, and I do like the taste.  It’s pricey and not sold in stores, but I’ll tell you the best deal.  You can order it (money back guarantee) here at $4-$5 a shake, but if you like it and find it helpful, sign up as a “coach” as I did and the price comes down to a very manageable $3 per shake/meal and free shipping.

3.        A second computer monitor:  Shoot, I’d have four if I could hook them all up.  This is a must-have for the multi-tasker like me.  I’m just too fond of being able to compare or work between multiple documents in multiple programs all at once.  When I bought my newest desktop, I picked up this one as well.  An ex-boyfriend used to joke that my desk—a near-circle of monitors and techno-geek tools, looked like something out of a Captain and Tennille concert. 

4.        “Getting into the Vortex” Guided Meditations and User Guide (CD and Book):  A musically-scored, breath-enhancing CD of four 15-minutes meditations for General Well-Being, Financial Well-Being, Physical Well-Being, and Relationships.  I’m a big fan of meditating but this is a bit different from other meditation CDs in that the breathing sequence is extremely calming. I’ve noticed a greater sense of serenity in myself since doing the 15-minute daily meditation (easy!) and have even noticed my college-student daughter’s increased calmness and sense of joy since she’s been meditating every morning before school. 

5.       Roku streaming player:  Stream movies, music, and TV shows to your Roku through channels like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Video-on-Demand, and Pandora.  I actually have two Roku players now—one for my home gym where I watch daily while on my treadmill and one for the family room where houseguests tend to gather and watch reruns of Buffy, Xena, Torchwood, and …the XFiles.

6.       The Amazon Kindle:  Okay, I’ve been a huge advocate of ebooks and e-readers since the late 1990’s when my indie publishing company first pubbed an e-version of Access and two non-fiction guides for writers, back in the day when authors were actually ridiculed and omitted from published author forums (like within Romance Writers of America’s organization) for not having a  “real book” published by a “recognized publisher” (yes, I was there, and the elitism is why I left).  We’ve come a long way in the past 10 years, as much in technology as in a change in mindset.  Though a number of my own books are already available on Kindle, this year ebooks became real to the rest of my family.  My 17-year-old saved her money and bought her own Kindle to she doesn’t have to carry huge textbooks and assignments to her college classes.  Because the Kindle is so easy for her to handle, she now reads a book a day.  My 81-year-old mom is getting one for Christmas this year—she loves reading those huge (expensive), hardcover Republican propaganda books that weigh about 7 pounds, so now she’ll be able to curl up in her favorite chair with a device that weighs and handles about the same as a small paperback and buy ebooks on her retiree income at a substantial savings.   Me?  I went with an iPad, which I love, but for different reasons other than reading…but I do have an iPad and iPhone app for Kindle.

7.       Knowledge:  Learn a new skill, technique, or language using services like Elance and Odesk.  This year, I gave my teen an upgrade in her professional Photoshop skills for her photography business by putting out a request for quote on Odesk.  We found the perfect expert in the Philippines—the exact background she was looking for—and for $35, we purchased a series of one-on-one lessons via Skype over several months’ time.  It was all around a wonderful experience in which she greatly improved her skills, got the chance to interact with and learn about another culture, and her expert got to send hours at a time practicing his (perfect) English. 

8.       P90X exercise program:  Seriously.  It works. 

9.       An experience:  Ditch the expensive collecting of “stuff” and take a trip instead.  Or go to a special event.  I decided a couple of years ago to give my daughters an “experiential Christmas,” which meant we put our Christmas present money into a Carnival Cruise out of nearby Mobile AL to Mexico.  We spent our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day climbing  Mayan pyramids and trudging through archeological digs in Santa hats.  This year, depending on the weather, I’m hoping for a special adventure that includes ziplining over a river and bird sanctuary or perhaps visiting a wolf sanctuary.

10.   Pheromones:  An over-50  female physician I admire swears by this stuff.   The Athena Pheromone 10x for men or 10:13 for women lets you add the laboratory-synthesized product directly to your favorite perfume.

Whether it’s a conversation or a confrontation, you can learn a lot about yourself through your interaction with others.  This became very clear to me during a polite but futile conversation with a local grocery store manager.

I’ve bought almost all my groceries from the same Winn-Dixie store for almost 20 years.  It’s 2 miles from home and I pass it on my way to and from work every day.  The prices have risen a bit in the past year due to the cost of food items, and then they rose quite a bit more after the store re-modeled.  Unfortunately, as a loyal customer, I’ve become disenchanted and have started using them much like a convenience store–pay the higher prices but it’s quick and easy when I run out of toilet paper at 10:39 PM on Friday and have weekend guests.  

But here’s what I learned about myself from this one trivial experience:

After almost 2 decades of loyalty, I’ve found myself frequenting more inconvenient grocery stores or stopping in at Fresh Market or Walmart when I’ve over in Destin on an errand anyway and have already paid for gas and the toll bridge.    Why?  Because the milk–which I need once or twice a week–is often bad within a day of buying it and sometimes bad when I open it as soon as I get home.  With a teen who guzzles it, that’s a big deal. 

I’ve bought thousands of jugs of milk at this store over the past two decades.  When 3 of the past 5 jugs of milk have been bad, then it’s a problem.

Realizing that my grocery shopping habits have changed because  of sour milk,  I decided that I still liked Winn-Dixie and their management enough to let them know.  I’ve told them about the milk before and they’ve offered a refund if I’d bring back the carton but I’ve just rolled my eyes at that. I don’t keep sour milk around and I don’t have time to haul it back to the store if I did.  The last time, I got home and was so sick with allergies that I didn’t shop for almost 3 weeks.  Just too danged inconvenient. 

But I learned a lot about myself from my brief conversation with a manager.  The conversation was pleasant  but she immediately launched into all the excuses or possible reasons why and how it happens at lots of stores and her own personal experience with it. 

Hmmm.  Strange.  I wasn’t interested at all in WHY the milk was bad or HOW OFTEN it happens elsewhere or WHOSE FAULT (vendors) it was.  I’m pretty sure my eyes started to glaze over during this part of the conversation.

Then she offered me a refund or a gift card and reminded me that they’re always willing to refund.  She was really very, very nice about it.

Hmmm.  Strange.  The refund offer didn’t make any difference to me, even though it was certainly owed me.  My time is worth more than the $2.49  to $3.99 a  container to unpack a jug of sour milk, serve it to houseguests, pack it back up, leave my guests, drive back to the grocery store, stand in line, explain the situation, and get another jug of milk that might be bad, too.   She kept offering her loyal customer a refund but she was missing the point, I realized, and ended the conversation.  I wasn’t interested in the MONEY aspect of it.

What I realized rather suddenly was that I was interested in THE PROBLEM BEING FIXED so I wouldn’t have to deal with sour milk again.  It became clear quickly that my conversation would not accomplish that.  The solution, for the store, was to offer a refund, not to fix the problem or even to investigate beyond assigning fault or accepting that sour milk just happens sometimes.  If I buy sour milk, yes, I can get a refund, but there’s no effort at all to ensure that my time will not be wasted.  That is an aspect of customer service that matters much to me.

I won’t fault someone for the problems they’ve made in the past and it’s completely up to them if they choose to continue with the same problems, but they don’t have to be a part of my world.  In fact, this is an excellent metaphor for all the negative people who move in and out of our lives.  If your milk is sour and you do nothing about it but make excuses or tell me I have to accept it when I interact with you, then I’ll nourish myself elsewhere.

When Maggie Shayne asked in her weekly blog, “What will you be when you grow up?” I laughed at her answers, partly because we have a lot of similarities.  Maybe that’s why we’ve always gotten along so well, though.  Many people who know me only as a writer ask, as with Maggie, “If you couldn’t be a writer, what would you be?”  Usually, they have no idea how many other things I’ve been.  And then there’s the AARP’s “When I Grow Up” campaign, which I think is excellent for adults who need to remember how many options they still have.

That’s the thing about the question:  it gives us all options. Whether you’re 13 or 113.

I hated it when the local school system forced my daughter at 13 to declare her major.  To me, given the fast spin of the planet and how quickly technology and politics change the world, I’m not sure that the same set of majors will be available to her between the 8th and 12th grades.   I’m sure the school system had good reason for setting the kids on a track that early, but I still rail against it.  I hate the idea of deciding at 13 “what you’re gonna be for the rest of your life.”   Maybe if they’d rephrased it as “what foundation you’re going to lay first and the build many possible careers on.” 

For me to imagine what else I might have been or will be, I have to look at what else I’ve done or dabbled in or wanted to do.  Essentially, these are where my interests lie, what I’m good at, what I still have a passion for.  I always–at least as far back as the age of 3–wanted to be a writer.  My mom wanted me to be a musician, which was her dream, but for as much as I love music, I never had it in my blood like I did writing.  But what else would I have become if not a writer?  Well, I did become a contract negotiator for Department of Defense.  It’s been a good career with lots of excitement (and stress, too), but it’s definitely afforded me a chance to travel, use my mind, make a difference, and stand on the cutting edge of technology.

The next childhood dream I had of what I wanted to be when I grew up was “master spy” or “secret agent.” I was fascinated with the world of espionage from a very young age–still in the single digits–but alas, I never became La Femme Nikita or Alias’ Sydney.  I poured those fantasies into my suspense novels with characters like L. Madison Steele in The Lorelei Files’ Access or Aubrey de Lune in the Madonna Key’s Dark Revelations. While I don’t have the physical stature of Angelina Jolie or Katherine Heigl to be a secret agent, I did very seriously consider joining the CIA or FBI when I was in college and, even a few years ago, switching to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI).  I would have been–and would still be–good at it.   As it turns out, I have a real knack for researching, analyzing, and preparing persuasive cases.

I also considered becoming an English teacher.  A professor, to be exact, with a specialty in Dark Ages and folklore.  Having wiped out two years of college with CLEP tests before I ever left high school, I was on the track to having my PhD shortly before I turned 23.  A change in the university system got me off track for a while, but at one point in my mid-20’s, I tried to return to it, with plans to be an English professor in a junior college, but I instead was hired by the Department of Defense.  It’s still an option, though.  I have the Master’s Degree and could easily–and lovingly–teach at a local college or online college.   I might also think about teaching English as a foreign language while I travel the world.  Or I might teach acquisition skills I’ve learned in my Government career once my younger daughter has fledged and I’m free to travel more.  Oh, but I love options!

Another thing I dream of being was a photo-journalist.  That, too, is still an option.  I have a degree in Journalism, I’m decent with a camera,  I have the investigative skills, and who knows?

I also wanted a career in marketing, but I added in bits and pieces of that to my writing career and for a while in the 90’s and into the turn of the decade, wrote a couple of successful books (now out of print because they’re way out of date) and a newsletter for writers on how to promote their books.  I got too busy with other parts of my life to continue it, but I still love brainstorming publicity ideas with anyone who asks. Marketing, in various forms, is still a viable possibility for when I grow up.

I wanted to be a life coach about 8 years ago, took the courses and training I needed, and do it on a part-time basis now.  It was primarily a skill set I learned from my Federal career–the combination of coach, trainer, and cheerleader.  I’ve loved working with my clients to help them make their dreams come true, but  so far, I’ve chosen not to make it a full-time job.  It’s still a good possibility though.

There were various other dreams that came and went (like being a doctor) and still hold a spark, but it’s oh-so-great to know that everything I ever strongly yearned to do or be is still an option, at least some form of it.  Whether I refresh an  old dream when I retire or when my nest is empty or when I fall in love again and want to move to some place new and exotic or just want to do something different with my life, I still have lots and lots of alternatives.

At this pace, I may never grow up  if growing up means having to choose just one thing to be for the rest of my life.

I think this is what that Bible verse means about noticing the speck of dust in your neighbor’s eye while ignoring the wooden beam in your own.

It’s nothing new.  What is so, however, is that I’ve become acutely aware of it.  People gathering to discuss someone else’s business before attending to their own.  Case in point….

When I accompanied Aislinn to a wedding shoot in Panama City last weekend,  I made it into my play time.  No writing, no editing, no work.  Just…playing–for a big change!  I was so enjoying myself, wandering around by the water’s edge, smelling the flowers near the pier on the bay,  relishing the breezes, taking long naps.  Then I decided to have a slice of key lime pie in their restaurant and was seated at a beautiful window overlooking the bay.  Ah, heaven.

Then two women in their late 20’s to early 30’s arrived and sat at the table next to mine.  It was close enough that I could not avoid hearing their conversation, which wasn’t exactly soft or discreet.  It went something like this:

Blonde:  Darling, it’s so good to see you!

Brunette:  You, too!    How’s your divorce going? 

Blonde:  [ordering a Crown and Coke]  He’s fighting me for custody and saying I drink too much, plus he found out about the cute Seal I was seeing when he was out of town.  How are you? 

Brunette:  I’m good.  My car got repossessed so I had to get a taxi here, and I don’t know how much longer we can avoid foreclosure.  I borrowed more money from Daddy, so we don’t have to do anything for another 6 months.

[further small talk about their problems]

Blonde:  So let’s get down to the business of why we needed to meet here to talk.

Brunette:  Great!  [orders her second margarita]  I’ve been dying to talk to you about what to do.

Blonde:  Me, too.  I think it’s time for an intervention.  Red is out of control!

Brunette:  Agreed.  Have you seen what she’s been wearing lately?  Somebody needs to give her a lesson in how to dress.  Those colors are not good for her.

Blonde:  I know!  And I just want to scream every time I see her because all her clothes are last season’s colors.  Do you think she’s losing her eyesight? 

Brunette:  Or maybe she can’t afford this season’s fashions?  

Blonde:  Or maybe her new boyfriend thinks she shouldn’t wear bright colors?  Maybe we could get together with her for drinks and drop a few hints.

Brunette:  Think so?  I mean, there’s got to be something we can do.

I finished my dessert and left before they did, and when I paid my tab, they were still conspiring over how to fix Red’s wardrobe and potential other problems with finances, relationships, career.  I found it so amusing that both women had huge problems of their own that neither, based on a few comments here and there, were doing anything to correct yet they had detailed plans for how to fix someone else’s problems. 

I so wanted to say, “Why are you so concerned about whether her magenta sweater dress clashes with her hair and how that’s ruining her life?  Even from your own accounts, she’s deliriously happy these days. Why are you spending so much time on someone else’s minor “problem” when you have so much work to do on your own issues?”   

It occurs to me that the cleaner and  more serene my own life becomes, the less inclined I am to care about fixing someone else’s problems.

In Esther and Jerry Hicks’ The Teachings of Abraham DVD IX of the Law of Attraction in Action series, Telling a New Story!, Abraham says that the best way we can teach our children to become “aligned” is by the example of our own alignment.  That may be true, but with my own kids, I seem to learn quite a bit about myself and my own alignment by watching them.

Shannon, now 20, was first aggressively exposed to the Law of Attraction when she was 16.  For her, there was already a lot of resistance in play.  She’d certainly seen enough in my life!  Early on, a lot of my own practice took the route of bringing to me exactly what I didn’t want, and I wasn’t quite as good at it then.  I wasn’t as serene or positive as I am now.  Still, I’ve been amazed over the past year at watching her manifest.  She’s gotten the hang of it far more than she gives herself credit for.

The most fun I’ve had watching her manifest was when she wanted a different place to live and made a list of 30+ rather unusual things she wanted–tile downstairs with carpet upstairs, a screened patio,  a big kitchen, a front porch, vaulted ceilings, two bedrooms, three bathrooms, a townhome/house, a safe area, close to work/grocery/shopping/gym, some utilities included, pets okay, washer/dryer included, a peaceful atmosphere conducive to study, close to campus–oh, the list went on and on, and all cheaper than her current, noisy, small, 3-roommate apartment with negligent managers and elephants for upstairs neighbors and drug dealers across the hall.   That was a slightly rocky time, when the perfect place–or even a dingy imperfect place– was not turning up.  Just when it seemed she might be tenting somewhere while her current lease ran out and her third roommate bowed out of plans to room together for another year, she discovered that her lease erroneously included another month and she had another month’s time to find…home.  She knew it when she saw it from the outside–absolutely the perfect spot, even before she saw the inside and all of the features she’d put on her wish list.  She’s been happily ever since.  And to me, it reminds me a lot of the little house she lived in when she was three.

I’ve watched her manifest all sorts of things in the past year that have me awed, even though she sometimes forgets how well she does this.  I’ve seen her fret over getting research projects and opportunities that just seemed to fall into her lap and provide a delicious landmark on her career path.  I’ve seen her bring incredible internship and symposium opportunities to her where she was pursued when, logically, such opportunities shouldn’t have been there for her at so young an age.  It’s fun to watch, though I recognize she still has some resistance at times, and I recognize it because I’ve so often been in that same spot and I feel she mirrors my own methods of manifesting (or not) at times.

With Aislinn, I’m mostly just amazed at her manifesting skills.  She’s really, really gotten the hang of it.  At barely 17, things manifest very quickly for her.

She was first exposed to the Law of Attraction at 13, and I honestly regretted it.  No sooner had she watched The Secret for the first time, than she did what many  did when they first jumped on the Law of Attraction bandwagon (and soon after fell off).  She rushed to her bedroom and taped a dollar bill to her ceiling, over her bed, so she could focus on…MONEY!  I really disliked where she took her focus, which was all about money, shopping, stuff. Not that stuff is necessarily bad, but she was at a materialistic stage in life and bought into the get-rick-quick hype that later made the Law of Attraction the focus of the general public in the 2007 time frame.  She wasn’t old enough yet to understand all the other things she can attract to her.

When she was 16, I began to see big changes in her, and she began to listen in discreetly while I played audiobooks at home, putting what she heard into play.  Many of these audiobooks and downloads were Abraham-Hicks offerings, which gave a more spiritual, self-improvement bent to the Law of Attraction than so much of the money-money-money-themed products out there. She began to change the way she handled herself, finding alignment more quickly, not focusing on the past as I have often done.  She began actively listening to the Abraham-Hicks workshops on her iPod on 12-hour bus trips to forensics competitions.  She started actively setting her intentions and then checking them off as they happened, with seemingly little to no effort at all.

I’ve seen this with her change  in schools 15 months ago to a place where she has blossomed and is appreciated for who she is.  I’ve seen it with her grades and classes and career plans.  I’ve seen it most of all with her photography business. I’m am still blown away that she is a junior in high school with 7 weddings to shoot in the next year and more appointments than she can comfortably handle.

In many ways, it seems easier for them than for me to let go and manifest their dreams.  They don’t have the years…the decades…of ingrained resistance that I have.  It makes me so excited as a mom to see them catching on so early in life.  And, it’s a great reminder to reach back to my early childhood, to the times when I could play freely and play creatively before I succumbed to the resistance and structure of the world around me.  That’s not a bad thing, though.  My life leading up to now has given me a lot of “contrast” and because of so much of it, so young, I’m now very sure of who I am and what I want.

When you’re in the midst of a heartbreak or trauma, it’s very easy feel stuck in the muck.  I have come to see the turning points of my life in a different light, because that’s exactly what the worst moments of my life have been:  turning points….turning to something better, even if that was impossible to see then.

If I look back on the path my life has taken, every time there was a really rough patch, it forced me to change the course I was on.  Usually, I was not content with the course I was on but I didn’t know how to change it, to craft it into something better for me.  In a way, I suppose I brought that to me, Law of Attraction-style, because I was looking for something that would force a decision. I wasn’t proactive in an action sort of way but rather in a thought sort of way. 

That was true of my back injury when I was so focused on my career that I wasn’t doing much toward fulfilling my dreams or tending my spiritual needs.  It was true of how my marriage ended. It was true of home-business decisions.  It was true of health decisions.

It was true of several relationships I had that were really forks in the road for me.  I was happy with how things were going but wanted more.  If I’d gotten more, I would have been taking a particular fork that would have led to misery.  I couldn’t see that at the time because I needed that aerial perspective to see where the path beneath me was headed….into fire pits, swamps, and far more heartbreak than I got from a break-up.  Those break-ups put me on different path, one that was smoother, wider, gentler, and far less violence to the emotions.  The break-ups were just a few horrendous days wide as I got pushed onto a different course, rather than the miles of sameness before walking through years of hell.

What started as heartbreaks put me on better paths to more confidence, independence, happiness, serenity.  I could have spent the rest of my life–easily–with any one of those men.  I would not have grown in the ways I have, been loved in the ways I have, or learned to love myself.  If I were to map my life, you would see drastic zigzags with markers at each course correction, each with a name or event, but each directing me to higher ground.

Photo copyright by Aislinn Bailey; all rights reserved

For much of my life, I have felt guilty.

Whether I’d done anything or not.

Whether I’d done something–like stop harm to someone else–or not.

I carried the weight of my actions and everyone else’s.  I would be responsible for other’s actions if they didn’t take responsibility.  That was me–Miss Responsible.

I don’t do that anymore.  In fact, I don’t feel guilty about anything–at all–anymore.  The weightlessness of that lack of guilt, that burden, is sometimes overwhelming.  There’s a beautiful peace and serenity that comes with not feeling responsible for the rest of the world, not feeling guilty about things that I cannot change.  I’m responsible only for myself now (and to a degree, for my soon-to-be-an-adult daughter).  I rarely kick myself for what someone else has done, or for something I didn’t see coming, or for something I should have seen and been proactive about instead of being blindsided.  It does happen, but not every minute of every day.  Without that sense of guilt, real or imagined, I feel light and flow-y.

But there’s another side to realizing that I don’t carry that burden of guilt. It’s realizing that I have love for myself that I didn’t have before.

I’ve heard wise people talk frequently about loving yourself.  It’s always sounded so obnoxiously silly to me, perhaps because I remember being a young adolescent in the I’m-OK-You’re-OK 70’s when we were all told to love each other and love ourselves.  My Baptist church preached that we should love others as we loved ourselves, yet as I’ve found throughout my life, most people don’t love themselves and don’t treat others with love.  They stay in abusive relationships because they feel they’re still being treated a tiny bit better than they treat themselves.  When I was growing up, my  Christian religion sneered at the thought of self-love, seeming to assume that everyone was so arrogantly wrapped up in their own narcissism that self-love needed to be tamped down and stomped out in favor of giving to others.  I didn’t dare, even if I could have, answer that I loved myself.  I didn’t understand then that loving myself wasn’t a sinful decision but that loving myself was about honoring myself and respecting who I am.

But as I have shed my own shadows over the past decade and emerged in sunshine, I have stopped feeling guilty for my actions and for others’ actions.  I cannot control the actions of others, only my reaction, and  I’m letting others be responsible for themselves, whether their actions prove that they’re cowards or sons of bitches.  I can’t control the timeline of what is, in regard to any less than honorable action or mistake I’ve made, so there’s no need for me to carry the guilt of it.  What’s done is done.  If I can made amends or end a continued hurt, then I’ll do it  because that’s my responsibility.  No guilt over not doing it–just do it, just fix my own mistakes, and press forward in loving respect for who I am and try to be.

I’m honestly not sure which came first:  no longer feeling guilty or really loving who I am.  What I do know is that they happened in very short sequence.  Self-love replaced years of self-loathing for not being good enough, smart enough, quick enough, or just…enough.  Lightness and forgiveness replaced guilt.

And freedom from self-imposed burdens is sweet indeed.

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 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.

Have you ever discovered that your intentions came true, just not in the way you planned?  Happens to me all the time.

A little over a year ago, I put the intention out there in a Law of Attraction exercise to take more courses, particularly enjoyable courses.  I didn’t have a set agenda of which courses, but I simply wanted to keep learning more and keep expanding my mind and knowledge.

And yet, I never did renew that Spanish language course I’d been taking at work because I didn’t have time there.  Nothing exciting showed up in the local college schedules that I hadn’t already taken.

It seems I spend so much of my time teaching, and it’s important to me to continue learning.  I don’t need yet another degree, but learning is extremely important to me.

As the Winter Solstice drew near—the time of year when I focus on my intentions for the next year—I thought about my intentions for the year that had just passed and how I hadn’t spent much time in classes at work or at home.  Very few conferences or workshops!

Fortunately, my day job requires that I take 80 hours of continuing education every two years, including lots of free online courses…but that doesn’t help with the enjoyable courses I’d wanted to take.  By boss came to me rather suddenly, reminding me that I was behind on my 80 hours and needed to submit any type of workshops or courses I’d taken recently, so I went into mad-scramble mode to keep from ending up on some big boss’ list of outcasts in the next few days.  I really had to strain my brain to come up with anything…at first.

I’d not only attended a two-hour geo-political lecture by George Friedman related to his book, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21^st Century, but I had downloaded the entire 9-hour, 41-minute audiobook and listened to it while cleaning out files at the office.    I decided to push my luck and see if I could get credit for the book, which was directly related to my work—and did!

That got me thinking.  Maybe there were other audiobooks I had listened to that would qualify.  As I began making a list of all the courses, speeches, lectures, workshops, and guides I’d listened to on my iPod while getting some exercise, gardening, or cleaning house, a pattern emerged that surprised me.

I’d been listening to plenty of enjoyable courses.  Without realizing it.

Though I prefer to download speeches and recorded-live workshops from Audible.com, I can get many of the more popular non-fiction guides through my local library and listen to them on CD.  I can also listen to a gazillion college lectures free from iUniversity through iTunes, and love listening to psychology courses my daughter recommends.

What’s on my iPod this week?  The Anglo-Saxon World by Dr. Michael D.C. Drout, part of the Modern Scholar lecture series.  I understand if the migration pattern of Beowulf’s people isn’t your cup of, um, mead, but then, there’s also an audiobook on the history of beer-making….

Intuition is a funny thing.  Most people never trust theirs.  Sure, later–after they’ve been mugged–they talk about the icky feeling they ignored because they didn’t want anyone to think they were silly or illogical. I’ve heard the same sooooooo many times from women who were certain their spouses were cheating, but they convinced themselves they were being crazy or paranoid or insecure–only to discover after they were alone with no money and a couple of kids that their intuition was a lot more trustworthy than a ton of charming reassurances from the hubby.   I rarely see anyone under 40 follow his or her intuition without fail–even famous spiritual teachers I consider to be extremely wise–and not exactly crowds of people over 40 who do either, though the numbers are still significantly more. Maybe that’s because most people need decades of data to know to follow their own internal guidance.

If there’s but one good thing I hope to pass on to my children, it’s to trust their intuition, regardless.  If you have a bad feeling about a date, don’t go.  If you have a bad feeling about your mate, know something’s amiss.  If you have a bad feeling about walking through a dark parking garage, make other arrangements.  As I was told once, your intuition isn’t a crazy little voice in your head talking to you–it’s God talking to you.  Every time I have ignored my intuition, I’ve been burned, whether in my professional or personal life.

I went through years of not trusting my intuition.  After my divorce, I didn’t feel I could trust it because I felt I’d been fooled so badly.  But as my teenage daughter pointed out to me then, it wasn’t that my intuition was bad; I just refused to listen to it and follow it.

I’ve had several recent opportunities to see the matter of trusting intuition from the other side of the story, and I’m seeing my own past a little differently.  I have walked away from a couple of situations where there is nothing I can say.  Nothing.  I’ve been asked repeatedly for the truth, and I’ve given it repeatedly, but not what they want to hear and certainly not what they want to believe.  Deep down, I know that deep down they know the truth. Otherwise, they wouldn’t keep asking.  They keep hoping my answer will be different, but it doesn’t change facts.  So I’ve stopped answering the questions.  At some point, they’ll come to terms with the truth, and when that happens, I’ll probably be the last person to know it.

I’ve been there myself, most notably with a woman who kept telling me the truth as she perceived it.  Deep down, I knew she was right but I didn’t want to admit it.  I argued with her about it all the time.  My own intuition told me she was right but it was easier to dislike her than to admit that not only was she right but so was the intuition I was ignoring.  I was furious at her because she just wouldn’t shut up about it, and it made me feel that I had to defend my decision to believe something I really didn’t believe.  My whole focus on proving that she was wrong took me away from dealing with the hurt over a situation that had nothing to do with her, and it took me much longer to work through it and ditch a bad situation that was causing me grief.   I wasn’t able to see that and work through it until she and I stopped associating with each other.  Our break was largely because of her comments on her own intuition on  my situation, which provided me with a good excuse to get her far away from me.  In hindsight, there were many other valid reasons not to have this person around me, but years and years later, I can see clearly that our semi-friendship came to a head over my unwillingness to trust my own intuition and she just happened to be the mouthpiece for it every time I squelched what my gut said.

It’s my core belief that the truth always comes out.  Even and especially the ugly truth, and regardless of how long you delude yourself.

Every year around this time, I do a little life coaching exercise that’s featured in Give Your Life Direction.  The idea is to make a list of things I wish I could say but, for whatever reason, can’t.  Maybe because the other person is dead.  Maybe because it would be too dangerous to confront them.  Maybe because the other person lives far away.  Or maybe because I just don’t feel I can be honest with my emotions, whether they are jealous, angry, or wounded.  My fifth chakra, the throat chakra, has often been rather weak, but I’ve been actively strengthening it.

The first year I tried this exercise, I had a list as long as my arm.  It was only  “supposed” to be ten things, but I kept going, shocked at how much I’d kept bottled up.  A few years later, the list was down to the five to eight range. Last year, I had to dig a little harder and still ended up in the five to eight range, thanks mostly to some secrets I was keeping for someone else. Every year of this exercise, the burden gets a little lighter.

I sat down a few days ago to make my list for the year…and nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

The closest I could come was a conversation I’d like to have with one particular man in my life who has been out of town, but I’ve held off only because it would be nicer to have the conversation  face-to-face, alone.  It’s nothing bad–no anger, no jealousy, no I’m-hurt, no why-did-you-do-this?, no nothing of that sort.  Instead, it’s just a nice talk about something personal and lovely.

Right now, there’s little to nothing that I have bottled up, no emotion I’m swallowing because I’m afraid to say it or fear the ramifications if I do.

I kinda like it this way.

My birthday’s coming up in just a few weeks, and you know what that means?  I’m finishing up a year when my Solar Return Sun was in my Eighth House. Yeah….

I admit, I’d been really dreading this past year for a long time now.  I have heard dire warnings from astrologers to consider traveling just to make certain that my Solar Return Sun was either in the Seventh House of relationships and partnerships or in the Ninth House of education and travel.  Any place but in the Eighth House!   The idea was that I might be at some other spot on the planet at that exact moment and by traveling on my Solar Return birthday to somewhere else, it would change the position of the houses within my Solar Return Chart.  Lost yet?

A Solar Return Chart is a special chart for your birthday year based on where you are on the day that the Sun is in the exact place that it was on the day you were born. Though my birthday is March 3rd, my solar return usually takes place on March 2nd.  A chart is cast for that day when the Sun matches its position on the day of my birth and it’s like a natal (birth) chart for the entire year–yep, with planets and houses and everything.  The thing is, while the planets for that day are in the same conjunctions, oppositions, squares, etc, regardless of where you are in the world, the houses can change–a little bit, at least–if you travel, thereby putting a planet in a more favorable house.  Some astrologers believe you can alter your chart for the year by making a birthday trip and others think that your chart reverts back to where you live most of the year and so a trip out of town just isn’t worth it.  Most people can’t afford to fly to Europe for a better chart, anyway.

For me, it didn’t really matter that much.  I would have had to travel out of the country to have made any difference with an Eighth House Sun, and it would have adversely affected a lovely stellium (a whole bunch) of planets in my Seventh House of relationships.  I accepted that there was little chance of escaping an Eight House Sun and instead, made plans to enjoy a quiet day at home in my garden and try not to be too afraid.

What makes an Eighth House Solar Return Sun so terrifying?

When it comes to astrological charts and their twelve life sectors, called “houses,” the scariest piece of the pie is the Eighth House, followed closely by the mysterious Twelfth House.  The Eighth House is about death, sex, regeneration, other people’s money, secrets.  If your Sun is going to be shining a light on all those issues for you in a coming year, then yes, it can make you anxious.

I’d heard so many horrendous stories–though in hindsight, they were mostly from amateur astrologers who knew just enough to assume the worst and then blather about it.  Even the best of astrology websites talked about a Solar Return Eighth House Sun bringing massive change and upheaval.  And let’s face it:  for most of us, the idea of change is frightening.  We think of change as away from the security we know and love–and even sometimes hate–and rarely toward a good thing unless life has been really terrible recently.

Take heart, fearful ones, because here’s how it manifested for me.

Looking back over the past eleven months,  I have to agree that it’s been an extremely important year where death, sex, secrets, other people’s money, and regeneration were all spotlighted for me.  Most definitely a year of transformation but not in a bad way at all…and that’s after being at a nicely serene and happy place in my life the previous year.   If you feel good about where you are in your life, then the idea of change is something you’re probably quite resistant to.  But life can get even better.

Death — Death is probably the biggest concern when it comes to the Eighth House.  I did in fact have to face mortality issues throughout the year.  The second time happened half-way through the year when an X-ray technician failed to follow my doctor’s orders for a routine exam, resulting in a lot of un-necessary X-rays and ultrasounds–as well as a month of excruciating worry because the medical offices involved tried to cover-up their mistakes, leaving me to think they’d found “something really bad.”  The first mortality issue occurred at the beginning of the Solar Return year.  A medical problem cropped up that had some dire consequences but I found metaphysical ways to deal with it and over the course of the year, it went away.  One of the big lessons for the year was in figuring out how to let go of emotional wounds that caused physical illness and injury.  Overall, this year about the death of a lot of old ways of thinking that no longer served me.  It was also about the death of a few key friendships, but to be honest, I don’t miss them and am surprised at that.

Other People’s Money — This wasn’t a particularly big area for me except that my debt increased somewhat.  I was able to make changes in my retirement accounts before I lost major bucks in the stock market, so that part was good.  Seeing everyone’s retirement accounts drop and how people who planned to retire soon had to change their plans, I rethought how I look at retirement and realized that I probably never will.  Instead, I’ll take mini-retirements and have fun along the way instead of deferring life to when I’m oldest.  That in itself was an eye-opener about how I want to design my future.  I also borrowed money to make some  long-overdue house repairs and updates, including repairs that weren’t finished after Hurricane Katrina.  These reflect Second House possessions issues (on the opposite side of the chart) but were more about transforming my ideas on money.

Secrets — I’ve always been very good at keeping secrets (when asked) but this was the year I finally made the distinction of where other people’s secrets were hurtful because the secrecy made them my burden to carry and somehow not the responsibility of the person who’d instigated the secret.  I hadn’t realized what anchors I’d attached my helium balloon out of loyalty to friends.  Most of my dealings with secrets overlap into the other Eighth House issues I had.  The paradox of it is that while I’ve been living my life “in the open” for several years now, people I was loyal to were not, and their secrecy and dishonesty had a negative effect on my health.  What I learned from the Eighth House is that I will not be hidden by other people in my life, whether it’s my views, my existence, or my feelings.

Sex – I really don’t know what to say about this one.  I think I went into the Solar Return year wondering if I was going to discover that I’m really a closet lesbian or get a sudden craving for a sex change.  I didn’t feel that I’d partner up with anyone on a definitive long-term commitment basis, which made me wonder how the year would go.  I’m leaving the year with some new perspectives on sexuality and much more relaxed than I’ve ever been.  Overall, the sex was fantastic–best ever!

Regeneration — If the Eighth House is about death and rebirth, then yes, there was much regeneration for me this past year.  Not just transformation, but regeneration. While a lot of my old ways of thinking died and were reborn or re-focused into something even more productive,  this regeneration was never a bad thing.  It always got me to a higher level of being and to increased vitality and happiness.  I saw a physical regeneration that astonished me.  To an outsider, these may seem small but they were huge changes to me. I’d ignored dermatologists for years but one visit and a prescription skin regimen and I was doing the very uncharacteristic thing of staring into a mirror for 30 minutes at a time.  The changes made me look as I had maybe fifteen years ago, back when I had had no appreciation for my appearance because most of the people in my life spent their time pointing out my flaws. A new pair of contact lenses had big ramifications, too, not just for the sake of appearance but eased my aggravation with reading glasses.  I discovered a few health products that helped me detox and feel better than ever. I felt more vital and aware of my body than I probably ever have.

In summary

So, yes, an Eighth House Solar Return Sun brought big changes–good changes–into my life.  I’ll have another Eighth House Sun in a few years and I’ll keep in mind that they don’t have to spell disaster–they can mean better changes than I’ve ever known existed.

Healing old wounds of childhood trauma and self-esteem doesn’t come easily, but when it does come, it’s unexpected.

Thinking back on my childhood, I might just as easily have been a child suicide. I remember thinking about it when I was nine years old, right after being humiliated in front of several hundred kids at school–by a faculty member–for following my religious convictions, which were then devout Christian. Even in the third grade, I had strong beliefs and a different way of thinking from what everyone around me in my small Southern town had. How I saw life made me different, and in many circles, an outcast.

Healing old wounds means understanding the universality of childhood traumas and how they affect us for the rest of our lives. As I’ve discovered through counseling numerous people, even the most outwardly confident of us has or have had those horrible buried issues of low self-esteem where our parents instilled into us their worst darknesses, for which we in turn instill our own fears and inadequacies into our own children. For me, it went far deeper than that–I spent most of my childhood and half my adulthood feeling that my spaceship had crashed on this strange planet where I never had and never would belong.

How do you go about healing old wounds when the traumas were commonplace for many years? I remember far too many times when I was publicly ridiculed for the way my mind worked. I was called weird, bizarre, and later, more euphemistically, different. And when I say “publicly ridiculed,” I don’t mean simply by bratty kids my age but also by teachers and adults with the kids applauding. I grew up in the “I’m-OK-You’re-OK” 70’s…but the message was always that I wasn’t OK because I had different ideas about life.

Those ideas didn’t go away. My way of thinking and seeing the world didn’t go away either, even though I learned not to share my views unless I was willing to catch grief for them. As an adult, I knew that if I didn’t follow the crowd’s way of thinking that I’d be ridiculed, and the conservative non-creative people around me didn’t disappoint! That included most brutally my ex-husband and his friends. The differences in viewpoints were vast, and I was so outnumbered. My view of the world then was more closely aligned with how today’s twenty-somethings see it, so to them, I don’t seem as different as to my own peers.

Here and there, over the years, I found other people who thought much as I did, but they didn’t hang around for long. They tended to move to larger cities where there were more like-minded people. That didn’t do much for healing old wounds because, if anything, their disappearances tended to reinforce childhood trauma and that sense of my alien race wandering toward extinction.

When, thanks to the Internet Gods, I found that there were many of us out there who were different, it seemed we were a whole secret society. We were Wiccans, we were writers, we were polyamorists, we were free-thinkers, we were visionaries, we were rebels. Whatever we were, we didn’t fit in.

It’s funny that for all the things over which I have been ridiculed as being different, they are the exact things I’ve earned a living at. I spent an entire decade being the revolutionary in my career field who was willing to take risks and “think outside the box”–even though my supervisors thought thinking outside the box should apply only to my work project and not to how I saw other things in life.

I didn’t really get to the point of joyously relishing being different until sometime after my divorce, when I began re-crafting my life to be the way I wanted it to be and with lots of other people around me who were as eclectic in their thinking as I was. It’s meant being in relationships that were deeply rewarding but cannot be defined in any socially acceptable terms, even to the silliness of saying “in a relationship” because we’re all in a relationship of some kind and heaven knows, being in a marriage is not synonymous with security. It’s meant finding people who understand the power of the mind over what we’ve always seen as reality and designing our own lives and definitions of success that most people from our pasts will probably never understand. Healing old wounds doesn’t necessarily mean that people from your past will ever, ever understand you.

But the final chapter in healing old wounds has come to me via the Internet, particularly through Facebook, MySpace, and a couple of other social networks. Within a few months’ time, I heard from dozens of people from my childhood, teen years, and early adulthood–all times in my life when I felt so alone.

The unifying theme of what I hear from these reunions is that I was “the most unique person” they’ve known to date. It’s not said this time (and these people didn’t say it then) in a way that’s meant to hurt, diminish, or wound. It’s said in a gentle, loving way. I have discovered childhood friends who were devastated that I changed schools and never saw them again. I’ve discovered boys I was crazy about in high school and college whom I thought didn’t think I existed yet they thought of me often. I’ve discovered girls and young women who were appreciative of little things I did for them that I thought had been unnoticed and unwanted because I never heard anything to the contrary.

It makes me want to gather them all up in my arms and hug them now, and help them with healing old wounds of their own.

I confessed to Obiwan, my coach who listens objectively when I need a sounding board, that as far as healing old wounds from my childhood and beyond, these reunions have been such a tremendous blessing to me. And she, in that unique way she has of pointing out just the right thing at just the right time, told me, “You’re being shown that the love was always there for you even though it was never really expressed until recently.”

I’m finally healing old wounds–some of the oldest. And I’m claiming this planet for my own.

Amen to that, and so mote it be.

Photo copyright by jennifer buehrer; creative commons license.

Personal Development tools, when actually used, can help you find your life purpose and evolve into your best self. Hundreds of free, original articles suggest ways of managing your personal growth so you’re on solid ground when you face a mid-life crisis, major tragedy, or upsetting shake-ups.

The problem?

All those articles, books, courses, and life coaching seminars mean nothing if you don’t actually apply what you learn. And that’s the hard part, isn’t it? Taking real steps to make those changes and transform your life into what you want it to be?

I grew up in a small community where the local church members frequently worried over the topic of evolution. They obsessed over the question of where we came from. At some point in my life—probably after my divorce, when I was a single mom going through a mid-life crisis and determined to heal myself through deep self-inquiry—I decided the questions of man vs monkey were not the least bit important to me. I was no longer interested in where I had come from, except to look at the patterns in my life that were holding me back from becoming my best self. Instead, I began to focus on evolution not as what we as a species had evolved from but what we’re evolving into, particularly how best for me to evolve as a productive, spiritual person.

Personal development means personal evolution and the only way we can evolve is by taking a proactive approach to our personal growth and actually applying the tools given to us.

Photo by archangel_raphael; Creative Commons License

Not caring can be a powerful thing.  I don’t necessarily mean apathy—more of a conscious sense of not caring and simply allowing rather than stepping in to participate or force a change.

The first time I got a real sense of how empowering it could be to not care (split infinitive intended) was the morning of a high profile workshop I was presenting to a few hundred people.  I’ve forgotten the details now.  I no longer remember if it was a seminar for a regional writer’s conference or a national Romantic Times Convention or Romance Writers of America or a theater full of acquisition professionals in the Department of Defense.  I don’t even remember the subject—how to submit your manuscript to Silhouette Books, how to streamline a multi-million-dollar Department of Defense acquisition, how to market your writing through shameless self-promotion, or how to structure a Wiccan prosperity ritual for the maximum bang.    And I certainly don’t remember if it was a blossoming case of the flu,  too-rich food from dinner out with a New York editor, or an upset over a broken relationship.  What I do remember is that at that particular moment in time when I took the stage, I didn’t care.

That was very different for me.  Normally—and especially when I was just starting on the occasional lecture circuit—I cared.  A lot.   Public speaking is just short of Baptism by fire for me, and my comfort level of speaking to crowds has always been about…eight people.   The first time I spoke to a group was when my fellow writer and mentor Vicki Hinze twisted my arm into being a co-presenter at a monthly meeting of the First Coast Romance Writers in Jacksonville, Florida.  When it came my time to talk, I didn’t make eye contact with any of the handful of people there and basically mumbled, “Yeah, what Vicki said.”  As I began doing more and more of the dreaded public speaking, I loved hiding behind lecterns so no one could see my knees shake or that I was holding on for dear life.   Times have changed since then and I’m now more inclined to go sit cross-legged on a table in the midst of my audience or use a replica of a Medieval sword as a pointer to keep ‘em awake.   I still really despise public speaking but in those early days, my stomach would knot with anxiety at the mere thought of opening my mouth before a crowd and having all eyes on me.

But on that day, instead of being so sick-to-my-stomach anxious that I could hardly speak, I was so sick to my stomach ill that I just didn’t care what my audience thought of me or my material.

I walked off stage to cheers.  People told me how amazingly confident I was and that I was a natural-born speaker (I’m still laughing over that one).  They told me that my love for my subject was obvious and powerful.  I didn’t dare tell them that it was the power of not caring—not the power of love—that had made my speaking engagement a success.

The power of not caring can be a very freeing thing, especially for an overly emotional Pisces chick like myself.  I live in my emotions.  It’s hard not to care, even when it’s not my place to care or not something that in any way touches my life except by observation.  It is my nature to care.

And caring often means that you lose your personal power.

That’s why, I believe, so many fuck buddy relationships fail.  The power between two people flows evenly as long as everything’s casual and no one cares whether the physical relationship becomes an emotional one.  But the moment one of the two begins to care, the balance of power changes.   They have to both stay casual or both agree to move to a different level emotionally.

A man who was once in my life—quite scientific and personable—once told me that the person in a relationship who cares the least is the one who drives the relationship.  He gave the example of the man whose wife is uninterested in intimacy so he focuses more and more attention on her and pleasing her and getting her attention, to the point of neglecting his own needs.  This man explained that relationships could be manipulated using this theory:  the rejected husband could pretend to be less interested and pull in the opposite direction, thereby appearing to be the one who doesn’t care and therefore begins to drive the relationship, and his pulling away will prompt the neglectful wife then to do the work of trying to regain his attention.  This man had scientific terminology for his theories that I’d forgotten until several years ago when, in a memorial ritual, I burned all his love letters and found his oh-so-scientific sketches and diagrams of how this theory works.  Me, I call it game-playing when it’s used to manipulate.   I do agree with the idea of the less-concerned partner having control of the relationship, mostly through withholding affection.  I saw it often enough with this man himself, and when I was to the point where I was the one who no longer cared, I certainly wasn’t pretending.  I was done and I really could not have cared any less about his feelings.

When I reached that point of not caring and recognized it, those old chains slipped off and set me free.

Most of the people around me live their lives in chains of some sort, usually based on what society or family or an anonymous “they” will think.  Of course, this is hard when you don’t want to disappoint the people you love by having a different opinion, different dream, different purpose in life—but they need to get over it!   Once you stop caring what others think, the freedom is mind-boggling.

For all the stories of the power of love that I’ve heard, let’s give some credit  to the power of not caring and the extraordinary freedom it can bring.

What’s with all these water problems? I mean by that, problems I’m have with the water element.

For several months, I’ve had every imaginable water problem. That includes roof leaks, leaky toilets, ice dispensers overflowing out the door of the house, backyard flooding, sprinkler systems not sprinkling, wells not flowing, ad nauseum. Why all the water issues?

I’m drinking plenty of water and enjoying long, hot baths. No health issues related to water, at least. Like dehydration or incontinence. Thank goodness.

But the water element is also a symbol of emotions and their flow. Being a Pisces several times over, I do tend to live in my emotions. I no longer dam up anger, for example, but let it out.  READ MORE

In the 5 years that have passed, I’ve busted a lot of myths. These were told to me by my ex, yes, as you might guess. But I also heard many of these from family who loved me and friends who supported me.

- A divorce won’t solve your misery: you can’t be happy.

- Expecting a man to be a romantic is unrealistic.

- I understand you better than…READ MORE

Actually, this is one of the easier Law of Attraction questions to answer. Remember the old saying about how to figure out what “George” is really like, just look at his friends? The reasoning is-and I’ve found this to be true-each friend has some quality that either reflects where George is or where he wants to be. If a cherished friend (or more than one, especially) tends to be a little rebellious and likes to discuss radical ideas, then George is probably a bit of a freethinker, too, and secretly-or not so secretly-enjoys challenging The System. If George’s friends are rather diverse and seem to be left of center in their personalities, then there’s probably a part of George that is that way, too, even if it’s not obvious from the start or he tries to hide it. That’s truly the Law of Attraction at work, gathering like together.

So to figure out where you’re vibrating right now, look at your closest friends and acquaintances. Look specifically at the people and relationships where you spend most of your time and effort. What are they like?

I can look historically at my friends from different eras of my life and see where I was-emotionally, spiritually, and “vibrationally”-at that instant. At one point, my friends were all very focused on career, including promotions, resumes, and whatever it took to get ahead in the workplace. The people of that group who are still in my life and just on the periphery now, now when I’m no longer on the fast track and don’t care to be. That was a miserable, unfulfilling time for me.

During another era, my friends were all focused on churning out book after book, pleasing editors who didn’t get our vision, pleasing readers who were skimpy on cash and fickle on subject matter, and constantly worrying about rejection, reviews, and plagiarism until they were also worried about ulcers. We fed off each other, all our insecurities, fears, and doubts. That’s what groups of writers do.

Another era of my life-and I admit that some of these eras overlap-my friends were mostly overly helpful, great at advice and guidance, over-protective, and fierce. So was I. That was the good part, though. When I started making changes in my life, the transition didn’t run smoothly because I was changing AWAY from the similarities I had with many of these dear people. They resisted my changes and the helpful advisor aspects turned very controlling. I insisted on my changes in my life and following my own guidance, which was much of what they were like also, just not in my situation where I was breaking free of old habits and relationships. I was mired for a while, but my friends of that era were entrenched as well in their own doubts, fears, and strong negativity.

In the current era of my life, to see where I’m vibrating, all I have to do is look at the people I focus on. There are more strong, independent, confident women in my life than ever before. My friends are mostly upbeat and happy, in spite of whatever disappointments or tragedies might come into their lives. They are mostly serene, even though there is occasional drama brought to their doorstep. They tend to be compassionate, self-sacrificing individuals (that’s somewhat of a problem), with a lot of openness, spirituality, and genuine love. Family and spiritual growth are priorities for them. They’ve almost all experienced abuse and some continue to experience abuse. They have overcome tragedies to become stronger individuals. They look for adventure and fun but without intentionally hurting anyone else. They worry a little about money, sometimes more than other times. They love Nature and want to live a “full life,” an uncommon life. They’re rather “different” in how they think, especially in terms of romantic relationships and partnerships. Some are a little OCD but they’re all very tender-hearted, even if you don’t see it at first. Most of them could never, if you really knew them, be considered either ordinary or traditional.

That’s my vibration right now. It’s as simple as taking a paragraph to describe what all my closest friends and relationships have in common.

A day to remember. Not for what I accomplished but for what I didn’t. It was my day off, my day to catch up on things around the house, including laundry and dishes and correspondence. I had a billion things on my to-do list and finished…two and a half.

The folks at work were, I’m sure, expecting me to finish some files over the weekend and on my time off, even though I worked a whole extra day last week and then took a sick day as a result of a marathon-briefing-induced neckache. In fact, I got a message Friday wanting to know if I’d finished a review yet that I have a whole 5 days allowed to do. I’m much faster than that but they wanted to know why it wasn’t done already in less than 2 days. Sometimes, it doesn’t pay to work too many miracles, and I’m thinking that Star Trek’s Scotty had the right idea about everything being impossible and finding the answer at the last possible minute…so that people appreciate what you do or can do and don’t always take for granted that you’ll save somebody’s ass and they can reneg on their own duties. The lack of appreciation irritated me, but the snarkiness combined with the expectation that I’d save the day (quietly, with no applause) put me over the edge, and I opted for a no-work weekend.

***Pic: the view from my “office” today while chatting with a friend.***

So instead of racking up a list of all the things I accomplished today, I did next to nothing. Just enjoyed the serenity of the day, the beauty of it, the peacefulness.

I knew I still had many things to finish, both in the house and online, but instead of hyperventilating over everything, I concentrated on enjoying the moments, the baby birds in the box over my head, the bluejay that kept picking up bread from the wonderful Gathering in my home last night, the flowers that reminded me of my quick trip to Georgia this weekend. What little work I did do, I did outdoors in the world’s most perfect office, the one on my patio.

***Pic: the more relaxed view from my “office”–yes, toes up!***

That’s what makes today memorable–not the X’ing things off my checklist of things to do, but just enjoying an ordinary day that was extraordinary in how serene it was.

This Special Post on the Full Moon  is sponsored by

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The April Full Moon, aka the Pink Moon, occurs in Libra on April 9, 2009 at 9:55 AM Central time here in the Florida Panhandle. This Full Moon, I feel, is all about…moving into new territory with relationships and how we want things to look.  More on that in a moment.

Libra, an air sign, is generally balanced, romantic, charming, idealistic. This particular full moon will be rather intense, considering that Venus (love, money, creativity) is retrograde and squaring an obliterating-then-rebuilding Pluto.  For a lot of people,  this Libra full moon balancing a fiery, move-it-forward Aries sun will bring about an urgent desire to make something happen in a relationship, bringing old drama to a head in a perhaps less than ideal way.  (But it will clear the deck for something better.) Last month was so filled with turbulence but this month?  There’s a sense of the Tarot here, a Lovers’ card.   A chance to find some grounding and make choices about relationships and partnerships and whether to be with a particular person, and at the same time, an opportunity to have many different relationships or partners but still say to one special person, “I choose you, regardless of how many people I may love, and choose one does not lessen the love for anyone else.”  There’s an intimacy to it of two people, but at the same time, an openness of loving groups of people who are not family but we choose to make them family, regardless of social templates.  This isn’t so much about lovers but multiple loves and not so much about a choice but choices, and the tension of Venus squaring Pluto will force some kind of decision in how we handle those relationships.

For those of you who routinely read my suggestions for meditations, you know how this works. I share this unraveling of images I have just before a New Moon, Full Moon, and/or Eclipse and you’re welcome to use what makes sense to you. For most of last year, I’ve been following this “story” of a river of emotions connected with Moon phases–everything from bridges over rivers to the structure that holds the river in its banks, to surfing the river, to becoming the river, to rising above the river in a parasail…all taking me “around the riverbend” to a beautiful new vista that is lush and green. For those of you who know me personally, you’ve watched in amazement and then horror at how some of these influences have played out in my life and how I’ve been healing from some heartbreaks and reached a place of happiness again.

For links to previous meditations, just search the Astrology or Ritual category on this site.

Thus far, the past year’s meditations have included Bridges, Riverbanks/Structures, Surfing/Sailing, Parasailing, Becoming the River, Rocks, Rebuilding the Riverbanks, Covered in Healing Mud, Washing off the Mud and Dancing Naked in the Sunlight, Beginning to Play in the River Again, Full-on Splashing in the River, Speeding around in Fun but Directionless Circles in my little boat, and Picking up a Passenger or two as we zip forward.

Which brings us to this Full Moon’s meditation: In this meditation, I am well past that point of standing beside the river, licking my wounds after the bashing from last Autumn. I have been dipping my toes in the river, dancing tentatively in the sunlight, and splashing watch all around. I have hopped into my little boat, the one without oars or a rudder. In spite of all the hurt of this past year, I’ve decided that it’s worth it to get back on the river and see where it takes me, even though I’m not steering. My motor has been running and I’ve been moving forward even though I don’t really know where I’m going, but along the way, I have picked up a passenger…a travelling companion for this journey.  I have leaned out the boat and linked arms to pull him into my craft with me, to this safer place I have to offer.

But here is the new part of this progressive meditation: as I move forward down the river, swirling this way and that in the current and not steering at all, I realize that I’ve picked up not just one passenger, but several.  These are lovers and dreams, wishes and desires.  These are those who support me on this journey and those whom I support.  The boat is so heavy with passengers that the rim is only inches above the water, that deep emotional current I’ve been in for the past year.  The boat lurches forward and swerves and…runs ashore.

This is not a bad thing.  One more passenger, and we might have been gurgling to the bottom of the riverbed.  Instead, we simply express mild surprise that we have found ground, something solid after so much emotional wateriness and uncertainty.   We climb out of this boat, onto solid ground, this time lush and not muddy.  I’m barefoot and feel the cool moss-like grass under my soles.  We can decide to get back in our boat, leaving someone behind so that we stay afloat, and continue along the course of the river…or we can explore this adventure that’s presented itself to us.   Ahead of us, opposite the riverbank, is a deep forest, and this is our other choice.  It is vast and beckoning with mysteries in the shadows and enchantment in the light.

Watch for choices to be made in the next month.  You may feel both restless and relentless in reaching a decision but ultimately, it’s about how you want your relationships to look—a very Libra kind of quality!