Today, I read with confusion that the rain that fell here on the Gulf Coast yesterday was black with oil and that I’m being prohibited from speaking out about the true conditions here  in the Northwest corner of Florida because I’m secretly under martial law and some sort of lockdown.  Really? 

These words were spoken with authority by some guy who’s never stepped foot in the area I’ve lived in since 1985 and still live, work, and have the freedom to say pretty much whatever I damn well please.  But he read it somewhere, or saw it in a conspiracy-theory website somewhere, and therefore it must be true.  As my readers know, I have nothing positive whatsoever to say about BP or the oil spill (just search oil spill in the search box to the right).  However, some of the spewing of rumors is ridiculous, baseless, and deeply upsetting to people who aren’t getting balanced coverage, no reference to FOX News intended.  Some are, however, quite fascinating as conspiracy theories.

I’m not a big fan of fear-mongering, but I am a big fan of conspiracy theories.  I love to write them, love to read them, love to watch them in movies.  Maybe that’s because I like the kernel of truth, the plausibility, the drama and excitement of it, and yet it’s just outlandish enough that I can recognize the paranoia and know that it’s not wholly the truth.    In other words, I’m not so focused on the barely disguised hope of conspiracy theories  being true that I see conspiracy in every utterance of life.

Something about the human race seems to crave End of the World catastrophe and apocalypse.  In my non-writing career and in my Southern Baptist the-last-days-are-upon-us childhood, I’ve heard thousands of theories, all focused gleefully on doomsday.  Maybe there’s some fantasy of who might survive such a doomsday–certainly the characters in my books don’t perish and somehow manage to stop it or delay it and save the world.  Maybe it’s our ultimate fantasy to get out of this world alive, even if we’re the ones fleeing the planet on a spaceship, saved by an alien race or whatever the current movie of the week delights in.

And yet, it’s disturbing to watch people focus so much on disaster that they  spin themselves into nothing but disaster.  The Law of Attraction would say they bring it to them…and I’ve seen that more than once–which is what scares me more than anything else.

I work with many different individuals and teams, and one group in particular makes me want to run screaming from the room every time I meet with them.  They’re skilled, competent, nice people who had a few distractions early in their project, resulting in what seemed like a short run of bad luck.  Yes, these things happen. Most professionals push ahead and focus on a positive outcome. Not these good folks.  They got into a downward spiral of “how much worse can it get?” to “we’re cursed” to “nothing ever goes right.”  On that last count, it became a reality.

The group wasn’t focused on conspiracy theories but most of my social time with them was spent listening to BP oil spill comments and watching them spin themselves into tizzies over things none of us can control.  From there, it became a huge what-if list that stressed them out.  These attitudes spilled over into their professional demeanor.  They began cataloging daily earthquakes around the world, not quite understanding that the planet moves within and always has but now we have the technology to record tremors we never knew existed before.  Then they added various catastrophes– tsunamis, hurricanes, airplane crashes.  They had a whole wall of one room dedicated to disaster after disaster after disaster. 

Were they a positive bunch to be around?  No.  Did they have the slightest belief that they would finish their project without a hitch?  No.  In fact, I have never seen a project have as many unforeseen glitches and disasters as theirs.  In spite of their competence, they constantly spun themselves into worry and upset.

I do believe that we fulfill our own prophecies.  If we look for flaws, we will find them.  If we look for disaster, we’ll find that, too. 

In regard to all the reporting on the Gulf oil spill, I guess I’d just like to hear and see the truth, without the spin of fantasy, and keep all my conspiracy theories and wild-eyed reports of apocalypse by non-witnesses on the screen or in books where I like them to be.

One of the hardest things for me to do, up until recently, was to relax and enjoy the moment–something that greatly hindered my happiness quotient.

Sure, I would see all the beauty around me, but instead of enjoying it, I would immediately find something to worry about and skip ahead to what I “needed” to do.  Perhaps I would see an Eastern Bluebird–a rarity–and instead of marvelling at it, my mind would skip back to people who interfered with my mom’s bluebird trail 15 years ago or skip ahead to wondering what might kill off this little bird’s fledglings–snakes, ants, drought, predatory birds,  ignorant kids, you name it. 

Perhaps I’d notice the blue hydrangeas beginning to bloom in my back yard and instead of glorying in their beauty, I’d acknowledge them and then immediately remind myself that I needed to haul some limbs to the curb or burn some trash left over from trimming an oak. 

Instead of enjoying the afterglow in the arms of my very sexy lover, I would soon find my mind wandering to the morning, whether the clock would go off and he’d make it back home in time for work,  whether I’d oversleep, how the next afternoon’s business  meeting would go, and what time he was coming over the next night and if we’d have time to drive out to Seaside together.  Yes, my mind would be too busy plotting every possible fix to any possible problem that might arise. 

Staying “in the moment” was awfully hard.  If I wasn’t flitting back to the past to something that usually wasn’t near as pleasant, then I was trying on different possible futures…none of which tended to be as pleasant.

The biggest difference is that I’ve learned to milk it.  Milk the moment.  Enjoy it.  Glory in it.  Several of my friends refer to it as “basking,” which is a verb I like. 

Instead of noting something sweet and then marching full speed ahead into something not so sweet, I linger on it now, marvel at it. I stay focused on it for as long as I can.

For example, while walking down by the lake at sunset, I spotted a flurry of blue flying from the woods to a bird box someone had put up at a quiet spot on the bank of the lake.  Instead of thinking, “Oh, a pretty bluebird!” and either walking on or diving into a whirlpool of what-if, I took out my camera with the telephoto lens and started taking pictures.  I got this profile shot and that one, one of him with his mate in the box, and couldn’t stop grinning as he seemed to pose for me.  When a car passed us slowly, he flew to a sign that had been put up about 20 feet away.  I followed and had to laugh at the sign he’d chosen:”  FISHING BY CATCH & RELEASE ONLY.   I let all sorts of fun scenarios play out in my head, most of them ending with that tiny bluebird tossing a big fish back into the lake.   A man and his son, who were fishing nearby, chatted with me about bluebirds and photography, and by the time the bird finally flew out of sight, I had spent a good 10 minutes soaking up the beauty of the moment.    I focused on enjoying nothing but that moment and its beauty, and a single moment of beauty turned into 10 minutes of it. 

So now when I see something or hear something or feel something glorious, I don’t rush ahead to my daily life or the future.  The side effect is that my daily life overall is happier, as long as I remember to milk the sweetest moments.

Honestly, the worst of it is trying to figure out how to make both a movie date and a yoga workout in the same evening.  I’m blissfully busy!

My daughters are vacationing with relatives in Canada, and within the first two days, concerned friends and colleagues are already in the empty-nest mindset, worrying about me now and what will happen when Aislinn leaves for college in a year.  I’m shocked by the number of people who suggest I sell my house and buy a smaller one–as if I must justify my space with children rather than houseguests or a live-in lover or…pets?  Really, if I sell my home, I’ll be moving to some exotic place or planning a long-term round-the-world trip, not a scaled-down version of life.

I’ve focused on not living my life through my children or making them the center of my world, especiallty now that they’re older and becoming independent.  I’d love to save them from mistakes, but I fullly recognize that that’s how they learn and they’re not here to be a do-over for the way I’ve lived my life and dreams.  I don’t hound them about what to do with their lives.  It’s their lives–and I’m instead focusing on mine while very much enjoying them. 

So my well-meaning friends amuse me as they fret over me and invite me to more social events than I could fit into the next six months in order to fill up some void they think I must have in my time or heart.  They don’t need to worry– my life is full, busy, and fun.  And I’m thankful to have good friends who would certainly help to fill a gap if there should be one.

One of the quickest ways to lift a bad or negative mood is with music, but what happens if we expand on a mood-lifting song?  What happens if your music is uplifting for, say, 2 weeks or a month?

By uplifting, I don’t mean “praise music” necessarily,  or Pollyanna-Happy-Tunes.  I mean whatever music makes you feel good.  Maybe it’s not Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine,” that uber-upbeat song from the 80’s because that particular song was playing when your first boyfriend dumped you.  Maybe it’s headbanger music from the 80’s  or electronica or even moody Goth.  Maybe it’s tribal drumming or classical.  Whatever has that pure element of feel-good for you and you alone. Maybe these are heart-pumping songs that you work out to.  Maybe it’s a song that reminds you of how far you’ve come–Joan Jett’s old “I Hate Myself for Loving You” is one such song for me because it’s the anti-thesis of how I feel.

These do not include songs that have any hint of dredging up distasteful memories. For example, I was seeing a guy for a whole year before I found out he was lying about the FOUR women he was seeing, two of them very seriously.  I used to associate jazz with several male friends from college–good memories!–but now I associate all jazz with him, so…I’ve stopped listening to it.  In time, perhaps I’ll feel differently or maybe I’ll meet someone new who makes me delight in it again.

So here’s my proposal:

Let’s create a playlist on our iPods/iPhones/mp3 players of feel-good songs.  Upbeat, positive songs. Not songs that are based on neeeeeeeeeeding another person to make you happy but music that makes you grin or sing out or wiggle.  Pure bliss kinds of songs that no one else listening to would automatically know are feel-good songs because they are so personal to your own life’s soundtrack of good times. You may even move half the songs from your music library to your playlist if the fit the requirements.

Now, pick a period of time for nothing but this playlist.  Sure, let it shuffle, but if it’s a considerable list of great songs, try listening to only that playlist for at least 2 weeks.  None of the sad stuff or whiny tunes about lost love or cheating boyfriends or longing.   Feel good!  Keep adding songs if you want, but for just this little while, make sure that the music you take in is of a more positive caliber for you.

When you’re done with your 2 weeks (or longer), take stock of how you feel.  Look at what’s going on in your life.  Is your mood better overall?  Are better things happening for you?

Just to give an example of how varied these songs can be, here are a few from my Feel Good Playlist.  Note that I’m not including much of my beloved Goth, Celtic, or lyrical indie music on this particular list, and much of it is old stuff that still–after all this time–makes me feel up, up, up!

“Play That Funky Music” — Wild Cherry

“She’s So High” — Tal Bachman

“The Future Will Blow Your Mind” — Simon Stinger

“Cum On, Feel the Noise” — Quiet Riot

“A Life Uncommon” — Jewel

“I Sing the Body Electric” — Fame

“Zeina” — Petrol Bomb Samosa

“Spirit in the Sky” — Norman Greenbaum

“Does Your Mother Know that You’re Out?” — ABBA

“She Blinded Me with Science” — Thomas Dolby

“Bitch” — Meredith Brooks

“Closer to God” — Nine Inch Nails

“Hymn to Herne” — S.J. Tucker

“Superfreak” — Rick James

“Joyride” — Roxette

“Back in Black” — AD/DC

“Black Jack Davy” — Sharon Knight

“In the House of Stone and Light” — Martin Page

“Fat-Bottomed Girls” –Hayseed Dixie cover

“Sexy-Back” — Justin Timberlake

“Temperature” — Sean Paul

“Soul Meets Body”  — Death Cab for Cutie

“White Wedding” — Abney Park

“Dancing with Myself” — Billy Idol

“Living Dead Girl” — Rob Zombie

“Belladonna and Aconite” — Inkubus Sukkubus

“Move Along” — All American Rejects

“Hunka Burning Love” — From the Lilo and Stitch Soundtrack

“Big Girls Don’t Cry” — Fergie

“Like a Prayer” — the Tori Amos bootleg

“Pagan Girl” — Emerald Rose

“Aria” — Mediaeval Babes and Delirium

“Three Small Words”– Josie and the Pussycats

I’m stunned that I forgot to set goals.  That’s so unlike me.  Goals are the guideposts to the future and without them, I tend to amble off the path.

One of the benefits of monthly sessions with a  life coach is that they keep me on-track in my busy life and help me to fine-tune new things I want.  It’s therapy, in a way, and it’s a nice objective sounding board for me—one that doesn’t judge  in the way a close friend or colleague with an agenda might.  My coach simply helps me to talk through worries and come up with a game plan.

In this month’s session, my coach asked about a certain project.  I had mentioned to her how well it was going, and her resulting question was, “So what goals have you set for this project?”

Huh?  The question really caught me off-guard, and it shouldn’t have.  I stuttered a bit and had to admit that I’m not sure of my goals for this project.

I had goals for it, over a year ago when I first started it.  They were very specific goals, and the project has met those expectations and more.  Way more.  But I realized when she asked the question that it’s not meeting my goals so much now.  I don’t really know anymore where this project is going.

Somewhere along the way, my original goals were met and I began looking for something more, even though I hadn’t set goals or intentions for something more.  I’ve been wondering what more might come of this project and wanting more from it, but what exactly I want now, I can’t say.

See, I met the goals for that project but since the project is on-going and pleasurably so, I never re-set those goals.   And I have no idea where the project’s going.  It’s just sorta fun and undefined right now.  What I needed it for originally is based on my emotional needs over a year ago and not on my emotional needs now.

That’s my assignment for the next few days:  figure out exactly what I want out of this project now.  I certainly honor that it met my intentions joyfully and has been a sweet addition to my life,  but what exactly are the needs I want it to fulfill now?  Once I figure that out, I can set new goals for it.  I can put my intentions out there…and I can take a path to new heights.

Reaching a goal is not always the end result.  Sometimes, for anything ongoing, you need to revisit your original intentions and see what needs to be update in the goal department.

What projects, relationships, or dreams do you have that have met your goals and need a new and improved set of goals?

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.

Originally published in Third Degree and Rising, 2007.

This is important for reasons I cannot yet fathom, except that I’m looking for what is real.

We’re so sure of what reality is. We gaze at the night sky, at what’s not visible in the glare of harsh light, and congratulate ourselves on seeing the reality that those stars are there, both night and day.

But is that reality? Some of the stars that we perceive as real burned out many generations before we were born. We may see the remaining light of long-dead stars that are no longer there. Or perhaps there are new stars there but their light has not yet reached us. And still other stars are too distant to be seen but burn the brightest.

But what is visible to us and to the rest of the world is not what’s real.

Here on this planet, we look up from its different corners at bears, hunters, dogs, and seven sisters in the sky and clearly see their fixed design as both our lovers and those who passed centuries before us have seen their fixed design in the sky. But the permanence of those designs depends on where you are in the Universe. The stars within those constellations are not clustered in animal and human shapes but rather, we have aligned them in our own points of view to make sense of them.

From Aldebaran, perhaps the Big Dipper appears as the Big Palm Tree. And from Antares, maybe those same stars line up in a different perspective as the Big Waffle Iron. Yet here on Earth, every inhabitant sees the pattern from where we stand.

Reality is not fixed. The patterns we’re accustomed to are not permanent. Some things look a particular way from where we are right now, both where we are in time and where we are in space. That doesn’t mean that it’s real.

These thoughts are important, but I don’t yet know why. They’re important in regard somehow to my ability to love again.

Once upon a time, I was determined not to let past wounds stop me from trusting again and loving again with an unguarded heart, and I put my heart on the line in multiple friendships and more and it was not reciprocated. I let myself get wounded again, and so I’m less inclined now to open my heart to the possibility of being loved as I am than I was a few years ago. My guard is up these days. I really do not like that it is, but it is, and that’s honest. That’s not saying that I’ve closed my heart, but just that I’m a bit more protective of it now.

Now I’m the one who needs the healing touch instead of soothing others’ pain while I leave my own heart wide open. Now I’m the one with the little birdcage bars around my heart.

Because I’m not sure which stars are there and which have burned out and which new ones have been born into a reality I don’t see right now. And I’m not certain yet of how to cluster those stars into a pattern I can recognize.

But I do have faith that it will happen.

Photo credit by PierrickBlons; creative commons license.

Little things can be so compelling.  Sometimes they’re red flags that end a relationship.  Other times, they’re white flags of surrender.  Most of the time, they’re signs all their own, which–put together–can tell a story that lifts or break our hearts.

I enjoy observing human dynamics, how people interact with each other, what drives a person.  I love it when I witness some small compelling thing that elicits an “Awwwwwwww” of awe from me.  I hate it when I learn something that’s a deal-breaker in a relationship, not from gossip but from comments posted by that person on a social network like Facebook, MySpace, Buzz, Wave, or Twitter.

A man can be very sweet and open-minded when he’s trying to get a date, say all the right things, do all the right things, and yet a pattern of Facebook updates spotlights a man who is extremely judgmental of appearance, skin color, and age.  An “upstanding Christian” at work can break half the Commandments in the privacy of a friends-only forum, leaving you to wonder if you ever knew this person at all.

A man I was somewhat interested in recently friended me on a social network.  My heart sank a few days later when the “real” man began to show up in his statuses.   It wasn’t his crazy photos or any self-deprecating humor, as some people do.  What saddened me was the photos he’d secretly taken of strangers and the cruel and hateful things he had to say about them.  It didn’t matter to me that those people would never know their photos had been ridiculed and passed around or that he’d done this in a private but extremely large forum.  What mattered to me was the grand lack of compassion I saw in him that I had not seen in my personal interactions with him.

I guess status updates on social networks are just another way to get a glimpse into the real person, a tool that wasn’t there a few years ago.  Yes, we’ve given away our own privacy.  Not just those of us who are writers or teachers and actively share through the written word, but everyone who shares of themselves on a social network.  Every action creates another window into who we really are.   Before, we could keep our racist, sexist, ageist, and other prejudicial thoughts quieter and less known.  Now,  the way we think and the way we treat other people are all right there, announced loudly, clearly, by our own selves.

That’s not all bad, though.  One man whose company I enjoy touched me deeply a few months ago when he posted a simple status update.  It wasn’t meant to impress me or anyone else, and many people would never have said it out loud or stated it publicly, but it was a comment from his heart that really stirred my own.  He’d had something remarkable happen, a dream come true.  It was the result of someone else’s misfortune that he had nothing to do with and he stepped up to the task readily.  He’d been downright giddy about the upcoming event for months, that he’d get a chance to help, to make a difference.  I’d thought his happiness about this dream-come-true was endearing, and he’d gone out of his way  to make things easier on the people who were on the losing end.  The day before the Big Day, he posted about how much his heart ached for the people who were hurting even though the torch being passed to him temporarily meant the world to him.  His compassion for others was so clear in his words.  He could have been dancing and singing “Nanny-nanny-boo-boo” to others, but instead, he let kindheartedness show through.

If what we say online betrays who we are, then let it betray compassion, kindness, and treating each other well.

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

Thwap!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit by -RobW-; creative commons license

From the upcoming book, 23 Ways I Screwed Up My Life  with the Law of Attraction—and How I Fixed It

I had a date with a  man I can’t get out of my head.  Normally, that would be a wonderful thing because—normally–there would be something pleasantly fascinating about the man.  In this case, I’ve had problems figuring out how I ever attracted him into my life in the first place.

As my readers know, when I talk about such scenarios, I use composites or describe the guy in such a way that none but my closest friends have any idea who I’m talking about.  The man in this case was someone I’d met through a website, sight unseen.  He’d posted something interesting on a forum and I responded, and in turn he asked me to dinner.  He was older than most of the men I usually date but was open-minded and willing to take a risk.  The worst that could happen?  We’d continue a great conversation started online, with a focus on our professions and what they have in common.  He swore he was more adventurous than his age might lead me to believe, and I had a great attitude as I dressed for our date.

As most guys over 40 do, this man had quite a few “requirements” for the women he dated, most of them laughable.  He had quite the fantasy woman in mind.  But the thing that struck me as really…I don’t know–I couldn’t put my finger on it…was something in his attitude that bothered me.  Though I’ve had men in the past demand to see a driver’s license to prove my identity, this one wasn’t quite so obvious.  At least, not at first.  I guess the thing that bothered me was that he was suspicious. Of who I was.  Of my motives.  Of…everything.  I barely noticed at first, because given our day jobs, we’re required to have a little bit of paranoia about meeting new people. (They might be spies, you know.)  But he also had a habit, which he later admitted, of asking misleading questions to try to catch a date in a lie.  Which explains some of the oddball stuff he asked me that didn’t make sense.

After a good 30 minutes of telling me about women who’d used fake identities to get to know him online, who had stolen pictures off Facebook to “prove” they were whom they said, who had lied about their attributes for months while dodging face-to-face meetings, I was seeing a strong pattern here.  Every woman who turned out to be “real,” didn’t measure up to his requirements.  Every one who did, turned out not to be real but a scam artist.  He even questioned how I could be authentic if I didn’t have the same fears he did, to which I answered, “I prefer to stay positive and assume that you’re as real as I am.”

After another couple of minutes of his thinly-veiled paranoia about how all women are liars, I snapped my official ID down on the table and joked about it, hoping to lighten the tension I was starting to feel.

His response?  “That just proves you do the job you say you do.  That doesn’t prove you really are who you say you are.”

Ooooooh-kaaaaaaay.  Somehow, I’d thought that by showing up for the date, I had taken a big step in proving who I was.  I didn’t realize I should’ve brought my portable polygraph with me.  Nor had I done anything to deserve the assumption of being a fraud. If anything, he seemed a little disappointed that he didn’t catch me in a pack of lies so he could tell me off, as he said he’d done to countless other women.

We had a nice date, and then it sorta fizzled out over the paranoia display.  When it fizzled, it was okay with me and I was ready to go home and relax.  Relieved to be leaving his presence, even.  Only, I couldn’t relax.  This man’s quiet paranoia (and subsequent witch-hunt) kept tugging at me for days.  He was NOT the usual kind of date for me.  The previous few men I’d dated were happy, relaxed, fun, carefree but caring.  In other words, the men I’d been attracting to me and back to me were a good reflection of how I myself felt about life in general.  So why the sudden ick?

That’s when my analytical side took over.  I don’t want to be around a date, romantic partner, or even a stranger like that, so how could he have shown up in the middle of sweet and easy-going men who are usually my company?  I went back to the moment he appeared in my life and back-tracked.

That night, I’d checked out a forum I’d been to no more than two times in the past year.  I was in a little bit of a funk when I did, but I saw his intelligent post and wanted to discuss it with him.  My spirits picked up after that and I actually ended up talking to someone far more interesting a couple of hours later who is more in line with my usual upbeat mood–and perhaps I’ll be seeing him soon.

Taking it a step backward to before I checked out the forum where I found the topic of discussion, I’d spent the previous couple of hours feeling a little not-so-happy.  I’d received an annoying email from a man who–ironically, now that I think back on it–had the same first name as my date.    That had come in the middle of feeling a little perturbed that a man I see occasionally hadn’t responded to a text  message I’d sent him, which had conjured up old fears that he was ignoring me or lying to me or….well, basic unfounded paranoia rather than the fact that he was dealing with something harsh he didn’t want to share with me because he was worried it would bring me down.  And right before that, I was laughingly telling a friend that I had an intention for the weekend of at least one date.

It’s amusing now, looking back at how I went from being joyous and feeling good and great friends to letting myself slip out of that serenity just long enough to worry about something totally unnecessary and unreasonable.  I got it back together a little later, yes, but that window of blooper-tunity was wide open just long enough for my weekend date to show up.  And as much as I hate to admit it, he was a very apt reflection of my angst for the 2 hours before he manifested on the forum I was visiting–his first ever visit.

Once you figure out how to manifest what you want, it becomes especially important to stay aligned and not let yourself slip out of those good feelings–especially over something ridiculous.  The rewards for getting to the point of fast manifestation are exquisite, but if you drop out of alignment, it can be a cold slap in the face.

Two women from the Philippines are helping me with a home project. They’re smart, they work hard, and they’re compassionate. Traits I obviously admire. And even though they’ve both been handed their share of tragedy, they still agree, “Life is good.”

One is a single mother of six who just made the newspapers for being the victim of her former employer, a man she—along with quite a few other men and women—trusted and had great compassion for because of tragedy in his own family. She has a good heart, and because of it, she borrowed against everything she owned, including her home, to help someone she considered a friend.

She’s still singed from the fire but at the same time trying not to lose her sense of trust and compassion. That’s such a part of her that it would be a shame to lose not just her life savings but also her sense of innocence.

“But I’ve got great kids,” she tells me with a smile.

“Life is good,” echoes the other woman.

She’s keeping a positive outlook, which amazes me considering what she’s been through. Her friend tells me that people in the Philippines don’t suffer from depression like Americans do. Maybe it’s the pace of life here or maybe it’s the lack of attunement to Nature, or maybe it’s just not being ourselves. She finds it curious.

Then she adds, “Life is good.”

Before I can wonder how she can say that, she tells me that her husband was murdered in the Philippines in the 90’s but she had four children to raise and she had to go on with life.

“Life is good,” she says again.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. Even when things are bad, there’s still enough good to make it all worth the effort.

My dearest, darling Lorna:

We are about to send you someone who will tell you some great and useful things, many of which you already know but need a new way of thinking about them… but the real gift will be more in what this man shows you than in what he tells you.

Love you muchly,

All the Hosts of Heaven

I was getting messages from the “Universe” long before I signed up for Mike Dooley’s Notes from the Universe mailing list.  Since the mid-90’s, I have frequently referred to Deity—God, Goddess, The Trinity, The Higher Power, That Which Is Greater, The All, The Source—as the “Universe.”   Though some people (surprising to me) consider it a disrespectful term, my use of it is to convey the vastness and magnitude of Deity, whether I’m talking to a Christian, Wiccan, or occasionally an atheist who can find commonality in more scientific approaches.  In any case, I often ask for insight and the Universe doth provide!

Last year, I was trying to figure out how to pull all my projects together to get them out to the people who need them.  I’d come up with a solution—put it all in one place—but didn’t have the right processes in place at the time, so I spun my wheels a lot.  The vision began to develop but I had qualms, and those stopped me from pushing forward toward fulfilling my vision.  There just weren’t many role models for what I was doing.  So I asked the Universe to send me some guidance.

Enter Mike Dooley of TUT.com and his famous Notes from the Universe that landed him a part on Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, the hype-friendly movie about the Law of Attraction.

Okay, well, I did ask the Universe for help—and what happens?  The Universe sends me notes.  I’m still amused by the irony of that.  If the Universe had sent me textbooks, I probably wouldn’t have paid attention, given my sometimes short attention span.  I mean, who wants to read Textbooks from the Universe?

I’d heard about Notes from the Universe much earlier but only in mid-2009 did I join up and become a fan.  In case you’re not familiar with them, the notes are uplifting insights—often humorous—and they’re sent from the viewpoint of the Universe and personalized with the recipient’s name.  (You can sign up at Tut.com.)

They reminded me a lot of the Gifts for the Goddess mailing list I started over 10 years ago and, in spite of its uber-fast growth,  let lapse because my own personal life crises (divorce, extended family illness, job changes, etc) got in the way.  For almost a year, I sent out a short article every day, Monday through Friday, each day focusing on a different category.  After three months, I suddenly realized I had enough “gifts” to create a seasonal book.  I did the same for all four seasons, though the last two books got side-tracked for a number of years while I agonized my way through family issues.  The series was well-received, and when I offered to give away free ebooks in a non-ebook-friendly world of a decade ago for a period of 2 months as my way of giving back to the community, I was shocked that my fledgling publishing company gave away $75,000 worth of Gifts for the Goddess on a Hot Summer’s Night, which is the shortest and simplest of the four books (and actually my least favorite!)

Whereas I abandoned my free “Gifts” mailing list when it was at its peak subscription count, Mike continued with his freebies, building a list that now swells to 275,000 or more.  His “Notes” became his connection with a market of 275,000 fans—and potential buyers for any other products he created.  So when I joined his subscriber list, I was pleasantly surprised that he lived in the same town as my daughter’s college and gave monthly speeches there—and that he had a single upcoming hometown seminar that was within a day’s drive of me and about 20 minutes from Shannon’s apartment.  I was so excited!

I loved his 6-hour seminar, “Playing the Matrix and Getting What You (Really) Want,” by the way, and did get a lot out of it.  Although I’m already quite well-versed in Abraham-Hicks, The Secret, and a whole host of other Law of Attraction gurus and  although Mike’s material was not anything particularly new to me, he had a different point of view that helped me make a few wonderful changes in my life.  But that was based on what he had to tell me in his products, not what he had to show me.

By becoming a buyer of most of Mike’s material, I saw something that I wouldn’t normally have felt comfortable with for myself or that it would work for me:  the whole idea of how you package your products…and repackage them.   The first time I “bought” Mike was through his free “notes.”  That sold me on his style and unique humor.  The second time was when I found out he offered a subscription to the audio from his live monthly speeches, which are usually 1 to 1.5 hours long.  I bought the yearly $98 subscription so I could tune in once a month and hear new goodness.  After the $200 6-hour seminar I attended, I purchased his 12-CD series for $80, bought a new CD series called Leveraging the Universe and Engaging the Magic for $30, and bought a book.  Okay, for most people (including me)  these were not inexpensive and I ended up gifting them to friends.  The information was very worthwhile, however, and might have been even moreso if I were not already so familiar with works of this type.  I always appreciate a new perspective.

But what Mike showed me that is affecting me so much now is that much of his material is re-packaged.  During one of his CD series, I recognized most of the stories from his seminar.  Told a little differently but still the same story and same lesson.  By the time I’d finished another CD series and gotten half-way through the monthly audio subscription, I wasn’t finding much that was new to me—but it was being told to me in different formats.  And that was what Mike had to show me that went beyond what he had to tell me.

Back in January 2005, I had started my Supergirl@40 blog—what I called my healing journal—to work through the aftermath of my defunct marriage.  My older teen convinced me to use her own blogging group and I started very small, with just a handful of people I didn’t know  off-line.  I kept few things truly private and wrote my rawest emotion, usually working through situations cathartically to get to my solution.  In the process, I uncovered occasionally profound insights into human nature, spirituality, and life in general.  It wasn’t long before abuse survivors started showing up to share their stories with me, as well as people who were currently going through the same territory I’d just come through.  As I worked through my starting over process, I started to note the patterns in my life and make course corrections though my self-inquiry.  I also started digging into much older wounds and patterns from my childhood and then clearing out very old shadows.  That doesn’t mean that everything became perfect or that I turned into some kind of Ascended Master or something as some of the New Age gurus seem to have achieved—I still backslide sometimes but I can note it and correct it more quickly now, and  then share my process for my latest “course correction”  with others.

Over a few years’ time, I quickly wrote around 3000 essays, though essay is usually a rather negative term for epiphany-filled scribblings.  I learned a lot in the process about how much people have in common beneath the skin, and ever moreso the closer to the bone you go.  I began getting letters from readers who told me they were “addicted” to my articles and that they used my writings as a “blueprint” for their lives.  I heard from strangers who swore I was writing about their own lives—right down to the same stories about in-laws,  things that go bump in the night, and OMG-I-put-together-a-home-gym-that-can’t-be-taken-apart-and-won’t-fit-through-the-door-when-I-sell-the-house.  Strangers marveled that I seemed to be writing about their lives while people who knew me swore I was spilling secrets that they’d never told me.  I did not, however, go the way of many writers and “monetize” my blog at that time with AdSense or corporate ads.  I simply wrote what I felt and shared it.

I wasn’t aware of Mike Dooley at the time to copy him and I no longer remember how I came to the decision, but around the time I’d written half a million words  in blogs and articles, I decided to take the best of the articles from the first year or two and put them in a “blog book” for my readers who wanted to catch up on the earlier material.   There was just one problem:  how to decide what to put into the package.  My friend and mentor, Vicki Hinze, was the one who suggested that instead of publishing one book with my favorite articles, I should publish them all, but break it into a trilogy.

“Life is in the details,” she told me, explaining that the greatest value of my articles was in the detail of what happened and how I worked through it.

So I turned my articles into fifteen 150-page blog books covering January 2005 to Fall 2007, in chronological order for those who wanted to follow my story and my growth process.  I have now made 11 of the 15 available in digital form on this site—4 are still in production—and the first 4 are available in print.  For much of the work I did at the end of 2007 and through the next year, I packaged both old and new articles into themed books, which became—thus far—The Long-Awaited, Honest to God Secret to Being Happy (which I also teach at regional spiritual gatherings), Give Your Life Direction:  23 Life Coaching Tips to Motivate You, Re-Focus Your Time, and Overcome Resistance to Positive Change (which was a bundle of my favorite coaching tips), and Attract Him Back:  Master the Law of Attraction to Bring Back Friends, Lovers, and Relationships from your Past (different ways I’ve used the Law of Attraction to bring former lovers and friends back into my life).  Those 3 ebooks have outsold everything else I’ve published that wasn’t overtly sexual in nature.

But my dilemma has been what to do about “overlap.”

Thanks to Mike Dooley and his Notes from the Universe and all the material that launched from that experiment, I’ve stopped worrying about overlap and I’m gleefully pushing my work out there to an audience that craves it and can made good use of it.  At this point, I plan to reconvene the chronological blog books under the Third Degree Diaries series but also package them (along with new material) in themed collections with many more on the Law of Attraction and its lessons, on romance and relationships, on starting over, on meditation, on empathy and intuition, and on bizarre metaphysical events.  Some of these will become audio books, and others will become new courses that can be licensed to the life coaches who read this site so that they can teach from my articles and make money doing it.

I’ve considered all this before but felt unsure of my steps.  I wasn’t sure where the draw the line between the books, but I don’t necessarily have to.  I’m glad I asked the Universe to send me some guidance—and that I’ve had the chance to see how Mike puts his material out to his audience.   I don’t see myself climbing on stage in front of crowds—I’m more a fan of writing than talking—but who knows what will turn up next?

From the upcoming book, 23 Ways I Screwed Up My Life  with the Law of Attraction—and How I Fixed It

I’ve really been screwing myself at work. The day job, that is.  Once I realized what I was doing, I put an immediate stop to it.  I’d let it get out of hand, and it was causing me some serious issues here and there—increased blood pressure, lack of daylight, some missed romantic opportunities, and that general feeling of being overworked, overtired, and out of balance.

In my career with the Department of Defense, it’s usually August and especially September—the end of the fiscal year—that are ludicrous with extra work.  I’ve been through many years where my supervisor refused to allow me to take a day off during September for a 1-day trip to see a medical specialist, even though I was already working 12 hours a day and weekends. Last August, I decided to just take a deep breath and press forward, assuming that all my projects with a drop-dead date of 30 September would be done by then and life would free up in October when the new fiscal year began.

It didn’t happen that way.

Looking back, I realize how overly focused I was on getting to October not because I’d finally have a sweeter workload and more time for dating and home life, but because of the oppressive feeling of “When is this ever going to let up?”  Beyond all expectations, the projects with the 30 September drop-dead dates got extended into October, and at the end of October, I was finally where I’d expected to be a month earlier.

I kept thinking about how busy I was at the office.  I kept thinking about how stressful work was becoming again because everyone’s schedules were slipping and coinciding so that a carefully juggled schedule that included one big project per week turning into everything coming due at once.  After about 2 weeks of a lighter workload in November—I was at a spiritual retreat for half of that—I suddenly was back in the throes of work and crazy schedules.

I told myself it was only for a little while, an exception, that I wasn’t going back to the days of working late and weekends and not having a home life.  I really worried about it, and you know what they say:  if what you’re thinking about is what you’re planning, then your worrying about something is the same as planning it.   I felt my life starting to spin out of balance as I gave up much of November and December to take care of work matters that only seemed to grow as I put more work into them.  I had started doing the unthinkable….taking work home with me every night and ignoring my creative work, family life, exercise, eating right, and—(!)—romance.  It’s unthinkable for me because I’ve done that too often in the past and for my own mental health, I can’t put work ahead of everything else in my life because my health immediately suffers.   When I found out near Christmas that this new crazy influx of work would be my new norm, I panicked.

Panic didn’t make January go any more smoothly.  The first few weeks were the busiest I’ve seen in over 20 years, but then I got my schedule juggled to the point where I could spend quality time on each project.  Still, I kept focusing on how busy work was and how crazy my schedules…and within a week, everything lined up again.  By “lined up,” I don’t mean that my world became lusciously aligned with positively.  I mean that my spread-out schedule of projects suddenly rammed into each other and they were all due at the same time again.

Time travel and cloning, I said, should not be a requirement for me to get my job done.

I was so worried about letting something in my workload slip or not being able to get something to the guys in Iraq or Afghanistan on time because I couldn’t be three places at once.  My boss seemed perfectly happy with my performance—more than I would have thought—but I was the one who wasn’t happy with how much I was doing—from the point of view of doing too much and not doing enough.

I walked into work today complaining about how my 2 immoveable objects that are my regular workload just got switched around to coincide with the 3 unstoppable forces that have been assigned to me throughout the rest of this year.  When is it going to let up? I kept thinking.

…Just before I got a notice that I’m overdue on 4 mandatory training classes that should have been done yesterday.

Can you feel the downward spiral into more and more work?  Hurtling toward rock bottom?  Because the last thing to hit me was a notification of a periodic security investigation that I need to make a top priority and get my paperwork together for—this month.  What am I supposed to do with this?  This is crazy.  Crazy!  Cr….

Whoa.  If I’ve learned anything from studying the Law of Attraction, it’s that being upset, angry, overworked, etc, and getting “more of the same” is a big clue to stop and see where I am. I’ve been focused more than anything else on how busy I am and this insane schedule with my day job.  I’ve been putting off romantic liaisons, fun trips,  and home projects because I’ve been worried that I’d have to drop something for work.  This has been precisely the wrong thing to do.

So I’m backing up and not worrying about schedules.  They seem to have a life of their own, with no help from me.  I’ll handle whatever’s on my desk and get to it in the order someone sends it.  If other people can control their schedules, I’ll keep a window open for their projects and fill it with something else if they miss it…and then let them get in the back of the line for the next open slot.

I’m re-focusing on getting through each day productively and pleasantly, with interesting and pleasant discussions with customers and co-workers, and going home on time to spend an hour or more exercising,  eating a healthy dinner, sharing pleasantries with my teen, socializing with someone delightful, and indulging myself in some creative  and fulfilling work.  I’m re-focusing on upcoming weekend trips, romantic get-togethers, social and spiritual gatherings, and planting flowers in my garden.  Walking in the moonlight, walking in the sunshine, painting my toenails.

That’s better.  I felt the shift from panicked and busy to being able to breathe again serenely.

Did you?

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.

While working on a refurbishment project both inside and outside my house, I had begun to notice a pattern I’d somehow missed. It’s a pattern of doing without, of sacrificing, of settling for less than I want, of living with other people’s cast-offs. It’s obvious now only because I have gotten rid of so much accumulation over the years that I can now see what’s left, and it’s mostly the things I’ve felt I could not let leave my life.

I still have a few hand-me-down pieces of furniture when I’d really rather have a very different look and energy in Shannon’s old room now that she’s left home and something different for whenever she’s visiting. I’ve thought about it recently, about getting a double bed for that little room so that future couples vacationing at my home will have something more comfortable than a single bed. I’ve seen exactly the headboard I want. Then I thought, no, I could save a few hundred dollars by hanging onto the old stuff, even the uncomfortable old stuff. Just close the door and live with it. I could, as so many times in my life, just “make do.” Not what I want but there are a good dozen excuses why not, starting with the economy. The one reason why seemed to be that it was something that I wanted. I can afford it, I have room for it, I want it-but that’s not good enough. I don’t care if it’s the best or the priciest or the cutest little antique. The bottom line is whether my really wanting something is enough to have it.

And I’ve decided that it is.

The same has been true of replacing the long-gone hot tub. Too expensive. Too lavish. Too much upkeep. Too…whatever. Yet something I enjoyed immensely and have longed to have again. What’s stopping me? Me. It wasn’t something I reallyreallyreally needed, even though it would be wonderful for my knee injury or relaxing away stress. I settled for less than what I wanted.

And I’ve decided to change that, too.

All around my home, this change has been taking place over the past year. I am now beginning to have the gardens I’ve long wanted. My house is still freshly painted from last summer, with the floors in the foyer and kitchen re-done, new countertops, new curtains, and all the little idiosyncrasies that bring people to love my home. It’s full of candles, scents, sunshine, prisms dancing on the walls, lots of color and stone and wood and metal and fabric.

My home is an intricate reflection of my inner world, and even my gardens remind me that the reason I have 3 shades of azalea in one small bed is because I didn’t think I could afford the few bucks more to have what I really wanted. This isn’t a cry for rampant commercialism that I’m espousing: instead, it’s about being true to pursuing what I really desire instead of going nearly all the way to my goal and then settling at the last few steps of the mile. It’s about getting what I want. Both in and around my home-and in my life.

I have my sanctuary, I have upbeat new friends and an solid Circle, I have talented lovers and deep love and warm affection, I have AMAZING daughters, I have fun trips and interesting classes, I have students and clients who bless me by knowing them, I have creative projects and popular websites, I have emotional support and incredible relationships with loved ones near and far, I have books that delight me to write, I have a prosperous job that has better moments now than before, I have music in my home, I have flowers on my table, and I have a now-healthy body that serves me well and is served well.

I have more now of what I’ve always wanted, and none of it is almost there, second best, or making do. I’m not settling anymore. I’m finally getting what I want.

As part of my newest personal/spiritual development stretch, I’m raising my coaching rates and no longer discounting the prices on the books that I write. This is definitely a stretch for me.

For several years now, I’ve had clients and readers tell me, usually crying, how my assistance turned their lives around. Whether it was a one-on-one coaching session, steady reminders to stay on course toward their goals, or a short e-course or book on dealing with grief, I’ve helped to make a huge difference for some of the people I’ve worked with. I’ve modestly played it off in the past as how I’m just a conduit for the Divine to work through me. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m a conduit to be used up and melted down too ooze in the process. Not if I’m to continue to be a conduit and help people connect with their sacred path.

This is the part of me in which all those years of being told to be charitable, be selfless, to give-give-give is so ingrained. (Yeah, I’ve in the past been a vibrational match for a doormat.) I’m still wrapping my mind around how much my gifts are worth and railing against the decades of reminders that I should just open any vein should someone but ask. I did a reality check this week and compared my rates to others and yes, I’m in the middle of the range. I’m even a little higher priced now that so many others are lowering their rates to account for the economy.

There’s a part of me that says I need to lower rates to bring in more customers in order to see the same income levels. That means I’m working harder and harder…and I’m tired of worker harder for so many years. I want to work “easier” and be more appreciated. The people I generally sell to are highly spiritual–and broke. I’ve always gone in that direction, but I’ve decided to change it. Why? Because my own vibration has changed and so had my vibrational match.

To take better care of myself and bring myself more of what I do want–enjoying the work, freedom to be creative and mobile, the ability to share and be compensated for the energy I expend, the joy of sharing and teaching. I’m very good at what I do and there are plenty of other people who do the same type of work at lower prices. They’re still out there and clients and readers looking for a vibrational match will find them, I’m sure.

And they will (and are!) finding me at my higher rates. My business is actually trending up for my higher priced projects because I’m finding the right vibrational match in my clients and readers, and they willing and able to pay more for that particular match. It is–and there’s a huge lesson in this–the projects that were written with the greatest ease and the work that pays me the highest wage that is selling best for me.

What about all my readers and clients who can’t afford me? I’ve taken care of that in a different way, and there’s something for them as well. First, I have a small group of people I work with, my own spiritual circle, and I’m available to them in person once a month as a group and by email individually. I charge nothing and I enjoy the exchange of energy because to keep getting, they have to keep giving of themselves and working toward their sacred path. I also have several spiritual Initiates I work with on an as-needed basis. Some live nearby; some don’t. They also, in order to receive, must put themselves wholeheartedly into their life lessons and move forward. I enjoy both groups immensely and my need to volunteer and give is fulfilled.

But for others, those who want everything free or those who simply don’t have the money to afford some of my projects, I offer a different kind of vibrational match. I have several websites right now with tons of free material. I’m doing a bit of consolidation which will result in about 3000 free articles online. So even if someone can’t afford a $250 coaching session or a $50 course or a $20 ebook, that’s okay. They can find what they need, what they’re vibrationally matched to.

I won’t feel guilty over that–I’ll feel happy about that–while I’m being appreciated on a different frequency by those who can afford it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Jean Goff; creative commons license   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Netream; creative commons license

For many of us–especially those of us raised in an environment of real or imagined scarcity–getting into a mindset of abundance and prosperity is a real milestone on our spiritual journey.  Reaching that peak is a true celebration, yet we can fall off that peak and back onto a pit of impoverished feelings rather quickly…if we’re not careful. 

In keeping an attitude of prosperity, we must either surround ourselves with others who have mindsets of abundance or we must make sure we don’t lose our focus on and thankfulness for the prosperity we enjoy.

To demonstrate, here’s how my relationships have affected my own ability to attract prosperity.

My parents and family:

I’m one of those people who was raised in a mindset of poverty.  If we did have anything of material prosperity, then there was pressure to give it away.  This came from our religious beliefs that poor men got into heaven and charity equaled love and spirituality. My family had plenty of stories of “good women” who “would give away their last dime to help someone else.” This attitude didn’t apply just to material resources but also time and desires.  It came with a ready-made sense of self-sacrifice, that you could never have what you really wanted, and that you’d always have to make some great sacrifice to have even part of what you really wanted.

My marriage:

My two-decade marriage, while materially prosperous, was emotionally impoverished and I never felt I had enough of anything—time, money, love, happiness. My salary as a professional grew quite nicely and yet, I had no idea of my worth.  I never felt I made enough money and I felt that any of the things that made me happy were burdens on my family, especially financially.  Even when we were paying more in taxes than my annual gross salary, I still felt poor.

When I divorced, I was terrified.  I was so buried in my mindset of scarcity that I had no idea if I could make it on my own.  I figured I’d never be able to afford a haircut or a modest dinner out again.  But after my divorce, that began to change and I started feeling prosperous for the first time.  Part of this was that I’d always let other people tell me how to spend my money and, if it was for something I wanted to do that they didn’t value, the answer was usually no.  Now I no longer “had to ask permission” to enjoy any of my earnings.  I began to feel prosperous, though I was still careful with my money.

Prosperous men:

When I began dating again, it was mostly professional men.  I dated several physicians and defense attorneys, as well as businessmen with their own jets. In general, they were all very financially prosperous. With one of them, my prosperity mindset was a brief issue.  He was a sweet man, a physician making about $30,000 a month. He was religious and might have been spiritual as well—there was a strong hint that he might have explored that theme more deeply if we’d been together longer. We dated for a short while, with him wining and dining me at the classiest restaurants around, driving me around in his luxury cars, begging me to spend weekends at his little beach cottage at a resort a few hours way.  I had a little bit of an issue with the way he spent money on me—I had my pride and I felt I couldn’t return these expensive favors.  I quickly came to terms with how we were at different places in our careers and lives and, in terms of percentages, he wasn’t spending much at all on our relationship and there was a balance between us.  I figured out how to let go and keep my attitude of prosperity, thankful for what I had and what he had and that we could share some fun times.

Not so prosperous men—and where I lost my sense of abundance:

Another man who was very special to me—still is—came into my life at a time when I was a little queasy about the money I’d spent on house repairs, especially when my house value and retirement accounts had just taken a considerable hit, thanks to the souring economy.  I’d started to worry about money and felt I needed to cut back.  I felt scarcity creeping in.  That’s when I met someone who earned considerably less in a year than the doctor I’d dated made in a month.  It’s a shame that our country pays such terrible wages to the men we expect to protect us, but that’s another story, and wages have absolutely nothing to do with his value.   Not that his income mattered to me.  Not at all.  But it did to him.

He was very much like me in that he had his pride and wasn’t looking for a free ride from anyone else.  He tended to give away everything, to take care of everyone, to spend almost nothing on himself.  He was extremely spiritual, devout, and had that sense of “spirituality equals poor” because material wealth was not his goal.  He was more focused on service to his country, family, and spirituality—all beautiful, high-minded ideals that really impressed me and rang true to my own values. The other side of that coin was that he had the same mindset of scarcity I grew up with and had lived with for so many years—a lovely theme of entwined nobility and self-sacrifice.  He was in such a state of loss and impossible choices between competing desires and felt he had no way of winning, even if he managed to get just one part of what he wanted. All he could do was try not to lose everything while being more concerned for the health and future of others than for himself.  Many of our conversations were centered around loss and fear of loss and the struggle to save everyone else, everyone but himself.  He was willing to be a martyr if it was required of him. Yes, I knew these themes well.

It was through him that my own prosperity was emphasized, but in a negative way.  My previous relationships with men who brought home high-six-figures were not an appropriate baseline for me to see my own abundance.  With a man who earned much less than I did and who struggled to budget money for food while sending his income to others, I began to see my prosperity in a different light, even to the point of being embarrassed by it.  I actually stopped feeling grateful for everything that I had.  The poor guy could barely afford gas between my house and his work, and I risked wounding his pride when I filled his gas tank once or twice. I was at a place in my life that I felt I’d worked hard to get to, but instead of celebrating it with him, I felt bad about my prosperity, mainly because I thought it would make him feel inadequate.  I understood this because I’d felt the same way, initially, with the $30,000-a-month suitor.

This is not to denigrate this man—all his other qualities made up for any negativity over money issues, and he is one of the most exquisite beings I’ve ever met.  I share this only because of the tremendous insight he gave me into my own attitudes. The deeply spiritual tie to his poverty and self-sacrifice seeped into all aspects of his life, to the point where it sometimes seemed he was giving up all of himself to placate everyone else.  His focus became “what I can’t have” and “what I must sacrifice” rather than how very much the Gods were offering him.

For me, I not only stopped feeling grateful for my prosperity, but I also started to live in those moments of scarcity from my past.  It was too easy for me to remember being in his situation, back when I was in my early twenties and my furniture was Early Salvation Army, my fanciest meals consisted of noodles and tomato sauce, and a friend cut my hair whenever I butchered it too badly.  I wanted him to understand that I knew his financial situation even if I personally no longer had those constraints and in doing so—empath that I am—I put myself back into those days of constant worry about money and loss. 

The first inclination that my mindset had changed came over Labor Day weekend when my garage and car were burglarized. For the past year, whenever I had loose change, I dropped it into a compartment between the front seats.  It was full and heavy, and I’d saved about $300 in coins.  A few weeks before—when I’d had more of an attitude of abundance—I’d asked my younger daughter to take out the money and we’d use it for a special trip but she’d gotten caught up in school activities and hadn’t managed it. Sometime during the night, someone broke into my garage and got into my car, trashing the inside of my car and taking all but a few dollars.  Nothing else in the car was taken, including clothes and electronics.  Nothing in the garage was taken, including lawn equipment, power tools, and sports equipment.  Nothing but small change.  And that’s exactly what I’d begun to focus on—my small change and losing it.  I remember thinking the day before that I was focusing on small change instead of my prosperity.

I didn’t listen to that, though.  I had too much else going on in my life to pay attention.  I was more aware than ever of the abundance and prosperity I had on every level, especially how happy I was, and at the same time, acutely aware of the potential for loss, the probability of loss, the nearness of it.  For all the happiness of that season, there were some very important losses that expressed around me.  Underlying those losses was a theme of scarcity—if not at that moment, then coming soon.  I began to feel I could not afford anything anymore.  At all.  That all my dreams were on hold.  All I could feel was lack.  It seeped into everything.  I felt I had more than I’d ever had in my life, but the fear of loss obliterated the joy.

That’s not to say that my downgrade in abundance is his fault.  I tend to merge with people I care about, and in understanding what he was going through, I lost my grip on my own prosperity.  I had hoped to bring him to my prosperity mindset but instead, I was the one who shifted to his sense of lack and sacrifice. We’re enough alike that I could tune into those feelings easily…too easily.

Finding my way back

When I started focusing again on my home and what I have and what I love, I started to feel that sense of abundance coming back to me. It took a little time, and I gained new insights through new relationships.  It was odd, but I began dating two new men who had a surprising amount in common with the last one.  Same jobs, identical pay, almost the same birthday.  Yet these new men drove fancy cars and bought themselves $90 hoodies without blinking an eye.  It was a shock at first to see that other people earning the same income could take it so far…though they were taking it that far on themselves.   These men are not very spiritual and we don’t resonate on many levels, and they do not live in the mode of scarcity or fear of loss.  I date them for non-spiritual reasons and without any intentions beyond friendship and fun before they deploy. But I’ve learned something from contrasting how they view their material wealth.

My own income has not changed over the past month, and yet, I am back to feeling more prosperous this month, and my bank account is rising unexpectedly and my book sales are suddenly up.  A couple of months ago, I was afraid of missing a payment—something I never do—but today…I am fine.  The difference isn’t in my salary or expenses…it’s in my outlook, and that brings in more prosperity of the physical type to match the mental and emotional prosperity I feel.

Photo by  Lorna Tedder, copyrighted.

One of my colleagues, when she was 8 months pregnant, was asked with great disdain why she would consider having a child and didn’t she know that having a family life would hurt her career as a contract negotiator?  I wanted to think we’d come a lot farther in women’s equality, especially since I’ve never in 20 years in this career field heard a colleague ask the same of a man. Here we are in 2009, not 1989.  

I used to hear the same thing when I was first starting a family, not just with career but with anything and everything. It was as if, okay, you’re having a family and so your life is on hold for 18 years.   In fact, the morning I found out I was pregnant with Shannon, I tamped down the morning sickness and headed to work, where I queasily boarded an elevator with an up-and-coming businessman.  He noted I was driving a new convertible and then that I must not plan to have children.  That was in 1989, and some of my favorite moments with the girls were top-down days with them in the backseat with hands in the air, pretending Mommy was driving a rollercoaster.  Those are moments I’m glad I didn’t put on hold.

Before we started our family, my ex and I used to say that if we had kids, we couldn’t just take off and head to the mountains for the weekend or stay out dancing all night.  We had other married friends who spent every weekend on a new adventure.   They didn’t have kids either.  But then, we never just took off for the mountains on the weekend and we never stayed out dancing all night.   Babies weren’t stopping us—we were.

I’ve grown weary over the years of hearing what you can or can’t do because you have a family, particularly when it comes to fulfilling your own dreams, travel, and lifestyle.  I love stories of couples who pack up their little kids and live in Peru for six months, then in Costa Rica for 3 months, and then in Thailand for two months as they travel the world in their mobile careers and give their kids a different kind of education that immerses them in other cultures (too bad WifeSwap’s infamous snob, Stephen Fowler, didn’t take such opportunities to learn compassion for others by learning how other people really live, both in and out of the U.S., but that’s another story).  My point is, you choose your lifestyle and you can bring the kids along for the ride or you can decide that no, I can’t do anything adventurous because “I have kids.”  My best Christmas ever was climbing Mayan pyramids with my daughters in Mexico. 

Then there’s the other side of the coin.  One of my colleagues used to tell me that she just knew I couldn’t wait for my girls to leave home because then I could finally do what I wanted to do—travel, write, take classes, whatever.  What she didn’t seem to notice during that time was that I wrote millions of words (many of them published), finished my Master’s degree and several major certifications, and visited foreign countries  5 times.  Okay, so I did have to forgo a trip to Israel because of the kids—I was  6 months pregnant with Aislinn and kept going to the emergency room in premature labor.  Okay, so she had me there!

I talked at one point about having another child in my 40’s, and she overheard and balked.  She lectured me on how I didn’t need any more children, on how my daughters were close to leaving home and I could finally do all these things I’d been wanting to do.  Of course, these were all things that SHE had wanted to do—travel, write, take classes, have some adventures.  She, at about a dozen years my senior, had long since pushed her kids out the door and now sees her grandchildren a couple of times a year.  She and her husband are financially independent but she still works full-time.  Yet, I realized today, that all these years she’s told me how my kids were stopping me from living a “full life” and having time to travel, learn, and experience new things,  she’s been free of child-raising responsibilities and able to travel the world, able to quit her day job and take courses in new languages or types of art, and have the full life she’s lectured me about. 

All these years of feeling trapped every time she opened her mouth to tell me how oppressive motherhood is, and only today did I realize that free from its “burden,” she’s not made any motion toward these things.  She’s never practiced what she preached relentlessly. 

The adventures I’ve had in my life have been mostly while I’ve had children at home, and it wasn’t the kids who stopped me from some of the adventures I had with my ex and with various friends.  It was the people around me.   When I found people who were willing to choose a different lifestyle and incorporate adventure rather than find excuses for not being able to do anything but sit at home with the kids and the TV, then I began to enjoy a lot more of my own dreams for adventure than I’d been giving myself credit for. 

Not my feet, but wow, this looks like fun!   Photo by elainevdw; creative commons license.

For a born romantic, I’ve never really been a fan of Valentine’s Day.  Maybe that’s because, to me, the best way to show me affection is throughout the year rather than with a dozen roses on the same day everyone else gets a dozen roses and a card  from Hallmark.  I have much fonder thoughts of Valentine’s Day in terms of the birds, to be honest.  The birds here in North Florida start scoping out nesting spots around mid-February, and that’s a sweet thought for me.  It’s natural, yes.  Biology-driven, yes. It’s also without pretense.  Good for those birds!

Being single and not in a traditional relationship is not always easy come mid-February.  Annoying, most of the time, because the women at work want to preen over the flowers on their desks, sent to work to show everyone that someone loves them (or succumbed to guilt).  And that’s another part of my impatience with February 14th–the ads that say “Show your love”…with flowers, candy, cards, etc.   To me, the sweetest of sweethearts have shown their love in little things, special things that no one else would notice but mean the world to me.   Can you tell how much I hate the commercialization of what should be special occasions?

This year, I have a choice of lovers to spend Valentine’s Day with, but I’m thinking of taking a trip instead, partly because I don’t want any of these men to feel an undue pressure about our relationship on this particular day, and I know them well enough that they will and I don’t want them–or me–to feel awkward.  I also don’t want to have to choose one over the other and risk hurting feelings.

I won’t get into my usual rant about how Valentine’s Day is a form of prostitution or either a form of forced commerce by florists, but I’d like to note two things for other single women to take to heart:

1.  Ignore books about how he’s just not into you.  This is just another way to beat yourself up and bruise your self-esteem because your relationship doesn’t look like someone else thinks it should.  Adult men with real obligations, particularly of the family sort,  can be very into you and not act on it in the way that an 18-year-old without any family responsibilities would.  The men in my life about whom people have uttered, “Maybe he’s just not that into you,” were VERY “into” me but had to make sacrifices in their relationships for family and career.  Just because  I haven’t legally married any of them doesn’t negate their feelings for me or mine for them during our relationship.  On the other hand, I was married for many years to a man who really…truly…just wasn’t that into me.  Only you know the real feelings between you, and they’re not always obvious by your relationship status on MySpace or Facebook.

2.  If you’re looking to attract a sweetheart into your life, the best way to do it is by just being happy.   You don’t have to go bar-hopping or join a local hobby group.  If you’re happy, someone wonderful WILL show up.  When I look back at the sweetest romantic relationships of my life, I was at a happy, glow-y place in my life and when and where I least expected it, someone wonderful showed up–in a random group of friends, in a random online forum, in the reception area of a professional’s office, standing in line at the grocery store at midnight.  These were all men that were so perfect for me that I couldn’t have had them personally designed for me any better than they were.   Some had been under my nose for years and I never knew.  In none of those cases was I out desperately looking for my Valentine or fretting over being alone.  I was content with what I was doing and who I was, and they found me. 

So if you don’t have a sweetheart this year or your sweetheart isn’t in town to celebrate, be your own sweetheart and go celebrate yourself.    Happiness first, then everything else falls into place.