For readers of The Spiritual Eclectic, here’s a freebie on January 13-14 — a pagan love story.

For as much magick as we work and work hard at, too, sometimes the hardest part is just letting go and “allowing” things to come to us in a better way than we could ever imagine or just letting Deity act as our Universal Manager without our being so stirred up with anxiety.

Last week, everything was turned upside down for me when I found out a supposedly spiritual person–a fellow pagan who professed to a creed of harm none–was stealing from me.  Openly.  Admittedly.  I give a lot away in my time, resources, and money, but when someone steals from me, that act strikes a chord that is cacophonous and bitter and makes me want to close down and not be quite so giving…at least not of good things.

To further my embitterment over the theft, she rationalized it away as doing it for the poor, or for poor people in “the South,” and she’d generously (her word, not mine) said nice things about me while taking money out of my pocket.  All I could think was, I was raised in South Georgia, a good 20+ hour drive south of her in the tightest notch of the Bible Belt, and though we didn’t have much when I was growing up and I’ve always worked for every last thing I have, I never ever stole.  If I didn’t have the money, I did without.  That excuse for stealing won’t fly with me…or as they say back home (about 100 miles from where I live now), “That dog won’t hunt no more.”

Needless to say, I was upset.  I was very close to posting a map to her house and her philosophy that it’s okay to steal if you have a reason.  My blood pressure was up for a couple of days and then, suddenly, I just turned it over to Deity to take care of for me, as sure as if God, or Goddess, or perhaps Archangel Michael–whom I work with quite a bit–had said, “Stop fretting about it, Lorna, because I’ll take care of it.”

I guess that would be akin to something I was frequently told in my Southern Baptist childhood:  “Vengeance is mine,” sayeth the Lord.  That takes on a whole  ‘nother level of meaning when you’re a priestess of The Morrigan.

So without a whopper of a zap-you-back-bitch spell or prayers for her destruction enlightenment, I turned it all over to Deity, letting go and letting God take care of it, without any further worry on my part.  Within minutes, a calm came over me.  Just a deep serenity and knowing that it was “taken care of.” A few hours later, yes, I found out it had been.

That’s not the first time that’s happened, that letting go followed by a sudden sweet serenity, peace.  Allowing is one of those harder things for me to remember because I first have to recall that I CAN find calm again and how I do it every time, and then get into the right headspace to let go.  For most of my breaths and heartbeats, I am calm, happy, creative, and very productive.  But not always.

It’s hardest for me to maintain that serenity–or remember to “allow” when turbulence occurs–when I feel ill or weak or heart-wounded.  It’s become so easy for me to manifest when I can “just allow”  my needs and desires to be taken care of.  There’s no resistance in my energy to letting go and letting my Gods deliver my heart’s desire in little things and even bigger things that have been yearned for for years but finally have come when I’ve let go.  I look back at what’s been delivered in the these last 18 months and I find myself giddy with disbelief. It’s come so easily after so long of struggling!

It’s harder sometimes with the things that are closest to the heart, in allowing them to come, in letting go and no longer resisting with our fretting or worrying over them.  It is often in those places where we feel the weakest, whether through physical sickness or insecurity or fear over possible loss at a wrong step.  Those fears wrap around our desires and we hold onto them, more tightly than the little things or the less important things.  Our desires are weighted down and can’t fly freely.  Being sick or in a grief state reinforces those feelings of fear and weakness, makes it harder to break through and turn them over to Deity to handle for us.

It would seem, wouldn’t it, that when we’re weakest, we’d be quicker to turn over our weighty fears and problems–wouldn’t it?!–instead of hanging onto them?

Sometimes we need reminders.  For me, that’s a simple little ring I have that says ALLOW MIRACLES.  I gave it to my daughter when her heart was broken, and later when my heart was broken, she gave it back to me.  Those heartbreaks were, in hindsight, miracles that set us free to be loved by far kinder men who enhanced our lives rather than drained.  Whenever I am shaken by turbulence, I chase down that little ring and wear it a day or two or until I can find my calm again and allow…because when that calm comes, I know that in spite of the current queasiness, there is a far better outcome on its way to me, and all is being taken care of without–especially without–my worrying about it.

Just something that brings me delight:   Different metal trivets stored against the stove’s back splash brings out the metallic tile colors in the wall and appliances.

I generally don’t associate with people who are extremely judgmental, and if they judge me, I will break the friendship, cut them out of my life, or otherwise distance myself. I find that–most of the time–the people who judge others, whether by actual or perceived actions,  aren’t focusing on their own business enough. But then, hey, maybe that’s a judgment on my part.

I learned my newest and best lesson on judging from American Power Yoga 60 instructor, Kurt Johnsen. I’ve tried yoga many times before, but it’s never stuck until recently. This time, I believe that it is because of the instructor.  The APY 60 course is essentially 60 days of yoga classes, each day consisting of a 15-minute warm-up with life coaching lessons from Kurt and then a 45-minute lesson which is repeated six days, then a rest day before beginning the next lesson. Most of the life coaching and diet tips are already firmly in my regimen.

But I did discover something new when Kurt introduced the idea of wearing a bracelet band on your wrist to remind you not to judge.  The part that really caught my attention here was not the judging or not judging other people but the judging or not judging of situations.

He gave the examples of something bad happening which turned out to be a very good thing, and how life ebbed and flowed from seemingly good  situations to seemingly bad and how the exact opposite was justly likely come out of it.   He suggested not judging the situation as good or bad but that it just is, and wait and see how it plays out.

When I take these examples and look back at specific times in my life, things that seemed really bad–some of the worst things that ever happened to me in my life–turned out to be the best things because they put me in a much better road. They were life changing, yes, and at the time they seemed like they were terrible life changing things.  Later, those things opened doors to true happiness, that would never have opened otherwise.

Since being exposed to  Kurt’s advice, I have actively tried to observe myself judging events and situations, not as bad or good but as just…they are…just life…just events and situations that lead me forward on this journey.

Within the first three days after hearing this advice, I watched one situation played out, back and forth, ups and downs,  little rollercoasters causing my heart to pound and then leaving me nauseated.

In one particular situation, I received the good news of having full time help in an area where I have been doing the work alone. I was overjoyed. This is a good thing, right?

Finally I was getting the help I wanted and needed, but then I got the bad news. My new helper would not be allowed to work on certain projects with me for personal legal reasons. That was bad news, but then I found that I had another project, a huge project that could consume most of my time for the coming six months…and I could turn it over entirely to my new helper.

Great news right? I know, I know. It’s sounding like joke!

Then I found out that the new project was tied into –unbeknownst to either of us at the time–his personal legal situation so he couldn’t work on that project with me. However, that project–which was going to be so time consuming–suddenly went away.

And that was good news right? I mean, seriously, didn’t Grandpa Jones back in his HeeHaw days have a routine about this?  By this point, the good-news-bad-news shifts were plain funny.

All these up and down in a matter of few days!

I saw these same little rollercoasters going on in my romantic relationship during that time because now I was looking for events and situations that I was judging as either bad or good.  These also went from bad to good within a matter of hours and back to good again. What I learned from looking at this was not to get caught up in all those rollercoaster, hairpin-twist-turns, upside down and flung this way and that, but just to keep going forward and instead of being in a rollercoaster, just surf.  Just surf between the ups and downs, the seemingly good and seemingly bad situations. Don’t judge any of them as being bad or good, but just as being a matter of course, all moving me forward.

100 and More Ways to Feed the Body and Soul: Baby Steps to Less Stress, Better Health, and More Energy

by Lorna Tedder

Published by Spilled Candy Books

Over 100 tips for stress relief, ergonomics, desk exercises, and health in general.

*******

Download to your Kindle or Kindle app now.

Before I explain why I fired my family doctor right before I lost 20 pounds–and yes, your doctor works for YOU, in case you missed that–I’d like to touch on a couple of other subjects:  1.  Why going it alone in a health regimen may be better than having “help” but isn’t the preferred way and 2.  Whether we should blame our parents for the food choices they made while we were growing up.

I’ve seen it happen to many people, almost exclusively women…the diets and failed diets and the attempts at regular exercise and the failed attempts at regular exercise…the years of struggle with weight, only to get near a goal and be undermined by those closest to them.

About a decade ago, I watched a close friend get within 2 pounds of her goal of a 50-pound loss and nearly have to become a hermit to make it.  She was so hurt!  After 2 years on a nationally recognized weight loss program and one-hour-a-day of hard exercise, all those people who originally urged her to lose weight turned into her worst enemies–or worst tempters, as the case was.  Her family and friends suddenly began trying to tempt her with pizza, alcohol, and lots of junk food.  She learned from her sponsor that this was all perfectly normal–grown children would suddenly see mom as a threat and best friends in need of a little toning would be overcome with jealousy.  Her trusted levels of support would become insecure in their own body images and try to sway her when she was readiest to celebrate her hard work.

Lack of support isn’t just a matter of personal insecurities raising their ugly little heads among your supporters.  There are also the people who seem to think you’re an idiot when you say you can’t or won’t eat certain foods for health reasons you have that they don’t.

I went through this for years with a former in-law who loved to cook–and expected me to eat it.  When I began turning down her goodies, it became a struggle for control. She would lie to me about certain ingredients–my daughters sometimes reported later what they’d seen her put into the food and that she got a kick of my eating her ”health” food and loving it and how it wouldn’t hurt really me.  Except, now that I’ve done this detox diet, I know that some of the ingredients she  pretended weren’t in her treats really were harmful to me.  They gave me headaches, congestion, bloating, asthma, upset stomach, weight gain, and sometimes rashes.  Only I didn’t have any idea and I’d trusted that she hadn’t used certain ingredients, so I didn’t connect the foods with the reactions.  But hey, my ex-in-law got the benefit of an ego trip so who am I to argue?  She will never ever make another “healthy” food for me.

It’s not quite as bad as the birthday girl’s mom who defies the parents of the kid with a peanut or dairy allergy, shrugs it off as over-protectiveness, and then feeds the food-sensitive kid something that will  send him to the ER before the birthday party is over.  Still, I have no use whatsoever for people who intentionally sabotage a restricted diet, whether it’s for “vanity pounds” or a matter of life or death within the hour or something in between.  Lying about what you feed a person is unforgivable–and yes, I’ll talk later in this blog about what the food industry and restaurants cover up.   I have rarely spoken to my former favorite uncle after he years ago tricked me into eating venison and I knew in the first bite that it was not steak.  I am still angry when I think about his guffawing over convincing me to eat it, his sheepish grin to see if I’d know something was amiss with that first bite, and my parents looking guilty for going along with his lies.  Yes, I knew the difference, and no, I did not appreciate it.  I put it right up there with stories of restaurant workers who have spit or pissed in a patron’s food or medieval tales of poison slipped into the banquet fare.

Not that intentional or unintentional sabotage are the only forms of killing a good diet.  The biggest diet-killer for me was always the extra work.  Not really the prep time for my meal’s restrictions.  Some diets do require more prep but for my detox, many of my healthy meals have been ready in 10 minutes or less.  During my 2-decade marriage, my spouse and I took turns cooking (he had 3 dishes and I was more…experimentive).  If I was on a diet, the only way it would work was if I cooked all the meals.  He either didn’t offer or didn’t know how to cook for whatever was on my diet.  The extra work to cook my own dishes and for the entire family eventually became so time-consuming that I gave up my diet, especially if I had achieved my weight loss.  Why stick to a great style of eating for my own needs if I was forever burned out on the extra food duties? 

Part of my success with this detox diet has been that I have gone it alone.  I didn’t want loved ones weighing in to question my intelligence at applying a diet they knew nothing about or one that was different from theirs and would only create extra work for them.  Been there.  Too much energy spent defending my food needs as reasonable.   I either wanted total support or for no one to know.  I told almost no one what I was doing and planned the first two weeks of my detox for a time when  most of  my co-workers were out for the Christmas season.  I mentioned it to my daughters, who were really quite supportive during a time when they were both home and used to holiday excursions to lots of restaurants with Mom.  I felt a little guilty that I couldn’t take my older daughter out to dinner when restaurant food is a big deal for a starving college student.  I did have to mention a couple of times to my younger daughter (in the pic above from several years ago) to clean her own dishes because, regardless of other reasons,  it just wasn’t fair for me to have to scrape cookie dough remnants off a plate before putting it in the dishwasher!  My daughters are old enough now to make their own meals without me having to cook twice as many meals to accomodate them.  The worst of the problems is that every now and then, I have to smell chocoloate chip cookies baking in the kitchen, beckoning to me like a hag with a poison apple….

The other person I mentioned my impending diet to was a “person of interest” in my life, right before he was away for several weeks.  He was super supportive and the very first person I discussed my plans with.  When he returned, I was half-done with my detox and down 13 pounds by that time.  He was super supportive in ways I have never known from a friend or family member:  looking up food info for me, downloading spreadsheets for me, sending me links with info he’d researched on some side-subject I was interested in, propping me up if a favorite food caused me grief, trying my experiments for himself, and just generally cheering me on all around and making me feel like an adored queen for my triumphs.

So to an extent, I “went it alone” on this adventure, but I got some great support, too.  The biggest difference in the support was  that with previous diets…in a time of previous people in my life…I had a guy showing up to eat and talk healthy foods instead of bringing junk food into my house, someone urging me ever onward instead of challenging me to defend why I needed to do my diet instead of his,  someone boosting me up instead of telling me I’d just fail this diet or gain all the weight right back.  I got real support, wonderful support.

That’s the way it should be.  And if you don’t get that level of support, then I think it’s definitely best to “go it alone.”

Continued….  Is your diet your parents’ fault?  Have you screwed up your own kids already?  And why, oh, why did I fire my family doctor?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continued….

That’s me in the picture.  Maybe 21, if that.  With the hat, gloves, and heels, I may have topped the scales at 105 pounds but it’s doubtful.  I confess:  football players in college used to ask me to walk on their backs in my stocking feet because I was just the right weight for everything to crunch pleasantly for them.  But even  back then when I was anorexically thin, there were early indicators of weight gain to come.

I know that when my daughters were in their early teens, I really hurt their feelings without meaning to.  They would try on clothes I wore in college and through my mid-20’s and…the clothes wouldn’t fit.  My out-of-college, newly-married, and owning my own home clothes that I’d saved out of sentiment were too little to fit  two slender, healthy teens.  They took it as a defect but I never meant it that way–I could see only that sudden realization of just how thin I was in my teens and 20’s, even though I often worried back then about being overweight.  And yes, that includes how I felt about myself in this photo. 

But as for the early indicators of weight gain that would catch up with me later–and that something was amiss–they fall into two categories

1.  “Feed me now or I’m going to kill something and eat it raw!”

I’ve come to understand over the last decade that it’s a product of uneven blood sugar, but it’s important to note for soooo many reasons.  I was tested a number of times in my 20’s and 30’s and told, often with annoyance by my physician, that no, you do not have diabetes and all your numbers are in the normal range.  True–they were in normal range.  In fact they are still in the normal range for this test, even though I now realize I’ve always had problems with my blood sugar.

More than anything, the indicator was the insane hunger than no one around me seemed to understand and–usually–intentionally made worse thinking I was being a either a rebel or a brat.

It’s hard to explain the hunger but when my blood sugar drops to a certain point, I can’t focus on anything but food.  Finding food, getting food, eating food, NOW.   It’s a little touchy to haul something to eat into a meeting with a bunch of Colonels and Generals and sit there and munch away because you are five hours into the meeting without a break and someone in charge has just decided that it’s more efficient to work right through lunch.  The last thing you want is an angry VIP asking you if you brought enough for everyone, so you sit patiently–no longer thinking of the subject of the meeting but only of when you’re going to get to EAT–until the entire day has passed without food and you are shaking all over and nauseated to the point you’re not sure you can drive somewhere and get food.   Sure, there may be vending machines nearby–sugary drinks and loaded candy bars for those of you who had no idea a short meeting would turn into an all-day affair–but that only makes the problem worse. 

I didn’t notice this so much in my 20’s and early 30’s but that was mainly because of where I was working at the time.  We rarely had meetings that lasted more than a few hours and I had a lot more control over demanding  breaks where I could wolf down something fast before reconvening.  Though an all-day-with-no-lunch-break meeting was rare, it was the norm when I moved to my new assignment…and the extreme hunger became more noticeable.  In that job, every Monday–and frequently other days that weren’t announced–started with a 7:30 AM meeting that was supposed to be over by 8:30 but never was.  It dovetailed into the 9:15 AM meeting, which was supposed to be over by 11:00 AM but rarely was.  Often enough, the VIP in charge of the meetings would send a lieutenant out to bring her a sandwich while the rest of us stared at powerpoint briefings.  Well, except for me.  I was staring at her food.  The 9:15 meeting would over run over into the 1:00 PM briefing, which would last until 4:00 PM or so. Our VIP took bathroom breaks and lunch breaks while the meetings continued, and for those of us who were required to attend all 3 meetings, it was miserable.  But that was when my blood sugar drops became pronounced and my hunger so strong that I would yelp at anyone who spoke to me.  I didn’t mean to be impolite or unprofessional–it was just a survival instinct of focusing on nothing but food, food, food, food, food.

Normally, I could control my hunger away from work without any problems…except on family vacations or outings.  Then, my hunger became the subject of huge marital disputes.  We would have a good breakfast as a family and hit the road.  Around 10:30 or so, I’d tell my spouse, who was almost always the driver, that I was starting to get hungry and that we’d need to look for a place to eat in the next town but definitely within the hour.  It became a battle of wills somehow–him thinking I was unreasonable and dictating the choice of restaurants when he didn’t want to stop at a particular chain that happened to be the only restaurant in the next town and me thinking he was being an ass for waiting until after 1 PM and 8 towns later to stop at a chain restaurant he preferred.  Usually by the time we stopped, I was too nauseated and shaky to eat much and was car sick the rest of the day.  Since I was usually to the point of opening the passenger door of a moving car and leaping out to raid a convenience store’s shelves, I eventually started carrying protein bars or small ice chests with me on family trips so that I would never be at anyone’s mercy again.

Since the people “in charge” of holding me captive in meetings or cars had no inkling of what it was like to feel the hunger I was feeling and the desperation of the survival instinct to eat as soon as possible or DIE, I endured some miserable experiences that–as least in my husband’s case–could not be explained.  If you haven’t lived it, then you’re likely to think the person bringing crackers into a very staid and serious briefing is a rebel and that the passenger who’d rather leap out of your moving car than wait another hour is obviously just being a drama queen.    No one else around me seemed to be having this problem but, in looking back, I now see that it was a big indicator that something was amiss and that I needed to take better care of myself when my body said I needed to eat–and not vending machine junk food either.

It was an indicator for two reasons: 

1.  Since I wasn’t allowed breaks for meals or to have food in the meeting areas, my initial weight gain (that I later lost through exercise and better eating at my next assignment) was the result of grabbing something from a badly stocked vending machine.  It usually came down to a choice of Pepsi vs Coke and Peanut M&Ms vs a Snickers bar.  Seriously.  Those were the healthiest choices we had, short of cannibalism. My blood sugar was all over the place all day long.

2.  It was an early warning sign that something was amiss with my blood sugar–even though this was years prior to my parents’ being diagnosed with diabetes late in life.  Maybe I could have been more insistent that my physician run additional tests or talked to nutritionist back then about my food sensitivities. 

Continued…..

The first picture you see here was taken at Thanksgiving 2010.  I was working out 6 days a week–hard–and had been for 5 months with good results but no significant loss of weight or inches. 

The second picture was taken  in January 2011, just 6 weeks after I started a detox diet and had lost 20 pounds.  Easiest, fastest weight loss of my life.

Okay, technically, I lost 20.6 pounds in 29 days on a detox diet I’d considered trying for years.  My weight has fluctuated a little in the past 3 weeks since I started adding foods back in to see what I’m allergic or sensitive to (lots of surprises!), but I’ve kept about 19 pounds off and have begun adding back exercise.  The best part is that I lost 6.5 inches off my waistline and 5.5 off my hips.  The biggest indicator that I was sensitive to something in my diet was a drastic 4-inch drop in my waist in the first week of eliminating specific foods.  I’m still not sure what it was but I do have my suspicions, as I’ll discuss in this blog.

In this series of articles, I’ll cover what got me started on this adventure, how I turned myself into a human guinea pig (a la Tim Ferriss of Four-Hour Body fame, though I didn’t follow his regimen…just his self-experimentation mindset), food sensitivites and how they affected my waist and weight, good friends with really horrible advice, the demons in my pantry–and in the grocery store and restaurant, why I wasn’t eating as cleanly as I thought, why I had to double my caloric intake to lose weight, and how I’m meshing exercise with this regimen.  And more, too, as other things become important to analyze.

Let me say that this attempt at getting as healthy as possible (with the wonderful by-product of dropping 2 dress sizes almost overnight…or so it seemed) is not anything new.  In fact, I’m a little perturbed at people who say silly things to me like, “Oh, that’s wonderful that you’ve decided to focus on your health.”  No, I didn’t just decide this now.  I’ve been working toward this for 3 years, 1 month…and a number of times before when I’ve given up.  Most people don’t know that I did my first round of P90X last summer or that I was doing P90X doubles in the autumn.  To get to where I wanted to be–and to where I’m going–it took more than even P90X doubles (about 15 hours a week of strenuous exercise), clean eating, calorie restriction (bad, bad, bad), and portion control.  It took turning my eating patterns into a scientific experiment and figuring out exactly how I reacted to everything I consumed. 

I have learned that I usually have a choice–do I want to eat this 2 ounces of cheese badly enough that it’ll be worth the horrendous 24-hour headache that awaits me?  It’s an on-going experiment, and one of the things I set my intentions for at my 2010 Winter Solstice ritual.  If the body really is a temple, it helps to know what you’re painting the walls with and whether it makes the temple stronger or tears it down.

When I spotted the CNN headline, More teenagers adopting ‘mutant’ Christianity, followed by “Author:  More teens becoming ‘fake’ Christians,”  I inwardly groaned and wondered if someone else was making the connection with eclectic spirituality.    Instead it was a pitch for Kenda Creasy Dean’s book, Almost Christian, and a story that read like a scare tactic for parents of teens who fear their children will grow up and leave the Christian faith.  There’s a lot of blame placed in the article, with the conclusions drawn from the author’s “in-depth interviews” of teens who were indifferent  about being Christians.  I also read the article as a call to parents to get tougher on their kids.
 
Two points I’d like to make, both based on my personal observations and in-depth conversations with people of all ages over the past decade. 
 
1.    You should be passionate about your beliefs. If not, then don’t call yourself by that religious affiliation.  If you’re not passionate about your beliefs, it’s tantamount to fraud.
Maybe these teens are indifferent about their faith because Christian has become the expected way to classify oneself when an American is asked about religion.  It pops up everywhere—not just in conversation but in write-ups for awards at work and on dating sites.  The same people often will talk about not ever going to church or the social aspects of church and not seem to make the connection with spirituality…which we assume one would find at church.   Idle talk at a water cooler about what happened at church last Sunday will more likely include what someone wore and shouldn’t have, who was there with whose ex, or some particularly detestable drama that should have its own reality TV show, “The Real Christians of the Local First Baptist Church.”  Sometimes there’s mention of a particularly meaningful sermon, but when the discussion turns to spirituality—when and if it does—the talk is very personal, about the close-to-the-bone situation, about God, about hurt and healing and forgiveness and compassion and figuring it all out.  And none of that is specific to Christianity, but the tone is much higher and lighter in purity of spirit.  Many of the people I meet who claim to be Christians aren’t practicing Christians.  It’s more like they had to choose a religion and Christianity was more familiar than anything else on the list…being it’s the  best known religion in America.
 
Keep in mind that the fastest growing religion in the US is not Wicca or Islam or Satanism or The Cult of Lorna, but none of the above or unaffiliated. For many who would otherwise call themselves Christian, perhaps eh, whatever might be the more accurate classification, even though it would certainly lessen the numbers of “Christian America.” 
 
This news story seems to say that teens leave the Christian faith they’re raised in because they’re not passionate about it.  If that’s true, maybe they should be exploring other faiths, other belief systems, to see if they’re more passionate about a different form of spirituality.  I definitely recommend exploring different belief systems over forcing your teens into going to church every time the doors open, drilling them to make sure they stick to tightly-structured interpretations of Christian belief out of fear that they might become church drop-outs or “unchurched.” 
 
2.    If you want children and others to follow your belief system, then live it yourself and be the best role model for it you can be.
Technically, I am considered by Christians to be “unchurched,” because—even though I’m still an inactive member of the First Baptist Church in Donalsonville, Georgia—I no longer attend Baptist worship services, regularly or irregularly.  Never mind that I’ve been a Wiccan Third Degree High Priestess since 2004, that I strive to live each day in the sacred way, that I’m quite often mistaken for a “good Christian” because of my compassion and kindness toward others.  To many Christians, I am not considered to have a religion unless I have theirs, and they don’t bother to find out how much we actually have in common or that the God I worship now is the same one I worshipped as a devout Christian. More to the point, they cannot understand why I—or anyone—would ever leave the Christian religion.
 
My reason is similar to what I hear from many other Wiccans and Pagans who have left behind a religion, but never left behind God.   Probably half of the Wiccans I know were raised as Christians,  Baptists in particular.  Another good percentage of converts came from Catholicism, already rich in ritual and an understanding of  Trinity.  Most describe it as I have…like “coming home.”   Almost every convert from Christianity has a familiar story—either the hypocrisy or mistreatment drove them away.  Not one incident, but time and again.
 
For me, it was the hypocrites, all the way up to the Chairman of the Board of Deacons to the Pastor and his staff.  So many of the people telling the youth of my hometown church how we needed to live and what we should believe simply didn’t live it themselves.  The ones who made the biggest impression on me actively did not live by Christian principles.  So when I left home for college, I left the Baptist Church.  It wasn’t, as Kenda Creasy Dean alleges, because I wasn’t passionate about my beliefs, but because my Christian beliefs seemed out of place with so many of the people around me.  It was the people in the church itself who caused me to decide to leave it.
 
I later wanted my children exposed to the Southern Baptist brand of Christianity I grew up with so they could make up their own minds.  I also exposed them to other belief systems, so they could find which form of Deity resonated best for them  (in other words, which form of God spoke to them).  I allowed them to attend church with my dad, but that stopped when my older daughter was  nine years old.  She came home after witnessing the ongoing mistreatment of several old men by more aggressive adults in the church and announced to me that she wanted absolutely no part of it.  I told her it was her choice, that I would not force her to go back, but if she ever wanted to, she could.  She didn’t.
 
Do you think that children don’t notice if you don’t practice what you preach to them?   If they notice at the tender age of nine, do you think they’ll still give adults a pass when they hit their teen years? 
 
I’m not saying that Christianity is the only religion with its share of hypocrites.  I can attest to having discovered plenty of hypocrites, drama queens, and petty minds in Wicca and paganism as well, with a few being so inept at following their own guiding ethical principles that my children have shied away from involvement with Wicca at times. 
 
I do still think that the best way of encouraging  (if that’s what you want to do) someone to join your religious beliefs is to live your life by those standards, being the best Christian/Wiccan/etc  you can be.   It’s called living by example, and when your favorite teens see what works for you, they’ll be much more likely to continue with it or return to it because they’ve seen first hand what it means to know God through that religion.

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

It was a surprise, mostly to me. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You cannot have a big house and lots of stuff and be spiritual,” the girl tells me.  “You’re either materialistic or you’re spiritual but you can’t be both.”

This is the eye-rolling wisdom of a girl who’s all of 22 and is, for the first time in her life, trying to make ends meet all by herself.  She looks at my big house in a nice neighborhood and immediately jumps to conclusions.  She doesn’t know why I’m in this house or what I had to do to keep it when I divorced.  She’s struggling on minimum wage and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and has no idea that I’ve been where she is now.   I’m not wealthy, but yes, I do like my “stuff.”   All she sees is my “stuff,”  and she is painfully aware that she does not have “stuff,” and that makes me materialistic in her eyes.

She’s one of many spiritual people who cannot reconcile the idea of a spiritual person owning much of anything.  She’s impoverished, both in her bank account and in her mindset.

The fact that I have “stuff” is something I’ve struggled with, too.   I’ve never been one to demand a designer home with pricey furniture but I certainly do have a psychological need to have a home that feels like a sanctuary to me.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a mansion-sized house or a one-bedroom cottage–I LIKE having a space that reflects my personality in all its eclectic facets.  And whatever space I have, I’m going to fill it with “stuff” I like, whether it’s from a thrift store or hand-made or an expensive antique shop.

It’s easy to pass judgment on how people spend THEIR money and insist that WE spend our money on much more important and justified things than they do.  I’ve been told I should, instead of making a nest for myself that feels joyous to me, spend my money on a mission trip to another country or give it charity because that would be a more spiritual thing to do with my money.  Never mind that the people telling me this aren’t exactly practicing what they preach.  It’s a way to feel superior spiritually.

I’ve given a tremendous amount of time to charities in the past and now give more of that time to my own spiritual pursuits while still making time to teach and share freely.  I’ve given a  lot of money and donations to good causes, too.    So why should I feel guilty for spending money to create a wonderful space for me to enjoy my life?  Some people find that kind of security through money in the bank or freedom to travel where they want to go or socializing with friends  or even a relationship.  My psychological security is in the roots I create and the safe haven my “stuff” creates for me.

As for spending money on stuff, I’m contributing in a way that most spiritual people don’t usually think about.  Here’s how: 

Let’s say I want to buy a new sofa to replace the broken one I’ve had for 15 years.  Instead of going to a chain furniture store, I decide I want a hand-crafted piece of furniture that costs less but doesn’t fit into any typical expectation of what my home should look like.   I  AM getting something material, something I love, but I’m also giving money for it as a fair exchange for the time, energy, and love put into that piece of furniture created by someone who is eking out a living.  I am helping them to keep their livelihood afloat in a bad economy, to feed their kids, to put a roof over their heads by supporting their handiwork with an exchange of cash.  I could give the same amount of money to a local charity or a charity far away and part of it would go administrative costs and very little, if any, would support that craftsman.   Since I have no problem giving money to charity, why should I feel bad or guilty for giving money that supports a craftsman in a way we can both feel good about? It’s my way of passing along my prosperity and honoring that connection we all have to each other as well as the  exchange of energy and coin in the transaction between us.

Eventually, in a few months, I’ll have to give serious thought to buying a big-ticket item–a  car–but this time I’ll see it differently.  I’ll understand that my purchase will help the income of the person selling me the car, and that person will be able to buy groceries or pay tuition or maybe even purchase another car from someone else who needs the money to  buy groceries or pay tuition or…..  The money I pay goes back into the economy, like energy spreading out from me to many, many others.

One of my friends worries that her version of God isn’t taking care of me, but my version of God is.

There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t recognize that I am taken care of.  Nowhere is that more obvious than after a near-miss with disaster.  Many times, I’ve followed a path right up to a major life-changing catastrophe–including falling in love with the wrong person or trusting the wrong guy–and I’ve been pulled back from the precipice.

More than once, I have been stopped cold when I was within days or hours of making a decision that would have destroyed my family, my career, my relationship, my health, my reputation, or my life.  It’s been as if an huge, unseen hand has cupped around me, protecting me.  It’s not punitive–I’m not being punished for wrong decisions or living with an open mind or opening my heart.  Instead, I’m given all the freedom I could want and then, when things might turn badly, I am saved from disastrous results.

Sometimes, being saved from unpleasant things is completely joyous, and other times, it’s upsetting if losing what I’d wanted is part of the process of saving me from what would have happened if I’d gotten it.

It helps me to trust a little bit more in the Universe that I’ll be taken care of.  All I have to do is look back on all the times I came so close to getting what I’d thought was a wonderful thing but was no more than a puff of smoke.

 A small, dense object only twelve miles in diameter is responsible for this beautiful X-ray nebula that spans 150 light years.

At the center of this image made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short…..

Photo copyright and more info at 

 http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2009/b1509/.

Huh?  What am I working on?

Maybe it’s just a writer thing—because I don’t usually hear it asked of “normal” people within 10 seconds of someone meeting them  or reconnecting with them—but I often run into people who immediately after saying hello launch into questions of what I’m working on.  They don’t mean the multi-million dollar projects I’m working on in my non-writing career or my latest home repair-refurb-redecoration. You writers, artists, and musicians know what I’m talking about.

I don’t get the question from people who are very, very close to me.  They already know what I’m working on.  They hear it all the time because I’m excited about it, Gods help them.  The question is always from acquaintances or friends outside my small inner circle.  They know how much I love writing but don’t keep in touch that often…or just stay out of earshot when I start plotting a novel.

What I’m currently working on, writing-wise, is editing a Lauren Hartford project and several non-fiction ebooks, including 23 Ways I Screwed Up My Life  with the Law of Attraction—and How I Fixed It.  And I’m almost done with some last-minute tweaking of  Waiting on the Thunder.  I’m done, but I’m having a hard time letting that one go.

But I’ve started a new novel, too.  First time in a long time that I’ve started a new project.  I still have three finished books yet to edit since I started my last new novel, and I wrote all three of those while power-walking daily with a digital recorder, busy girl that I am.

It’s hard to explain what this new fiction project is, but it’s a suspense novel with the working title The Hand of God.  It’s not a religious book, though I’ve definitely thrown in some Law of Attraction.   The title refers to a specific image, and that’s the genesis of this new novel.  You want to know how I get my ideas?  Right here. 

Last week, while visiting with family out of state, I drove past an out-of-the-way spot that had a really strong visual allure to me.  An image there stood out, and to me, it looked like a “Hand of God.”   Later on the trip, I took my family out to dinner, to a place I’d never been—a hole in the road that served everything fried, including gator tail.  On the wall behind us was the same symbol I’d seen earlier, several miles away, painted into a mural.  That’s when the story began to form. 

I’m not sure how to explain it yet without giving away the story, but I know who the villains are…and the victims…and the protagonist.  The protagonist is not in any way based on me, but she’s the imagined adult version of a child I observed earlier this year.   The crime is based on something that never happened to me because, wow, am I ever being watched over!  But I came close enough that it got my attention and this novel will put it to bed for me in a therapeutic way.  The 24-year-old protagonist has abandonment issues—both the constant abandonment throughout her childhood and her adult patterns of abandoning others before they can abandon her—and those abandonment issues from her childhood are tied to someone else’s dark secret and even darker revenge.  Yep, my kind of story. 

The best part is that I’m not writing it according to any guidelines or any preferred market.  I’m just lettin’ ‘er rip.  Having a blast with discovering the twisted past she’s repressed and how it endangers her.  I’m not writing it for any particular audience or publisher.  I’m doing it for me.  It puts me into a joyous place, all this creativity, and when I’m done, people who love it will recognize the spark in it and love it, too.  It’s not the path to money or fame or anything but my enjoyment.  Anything more that it turns into is just gravy.

So what are you working on?  And is it for you?

It took a long time to make peace with my job after I started hating it.  Hating it didn’t happen overnight, and getting back to a place where I was comfortable with it also didn’t happen overnight.

I was considered a “super star” early on in my career, earning the privilege of signing contracts on behalf of the US Government when I’d barely been in the profession for four years.  At the time, such responsibility that early and that young was highly unusual.  I was at the tail-end of the Baby Boomers and there were lots of people with far more experience than I had.  I loved my job in those days, even with the insane overtime and pressure cooker stress.  But at some point, I didn’t feel like I was getting much support from others in my field, that I was tiring of working double and triple workloads, and it manifested in a back injury that took my off the fast track.  Mentally and emotionally, I wanted to be on the job, but physically, it was an awful struggle that, because it was a back injury that couldn’t be seen and  back injury frauds were on every TV news magazine at the time, I was suddenly considered a liability.  I’d put my career ahead of everything–including my health and my family–and the favor was not returned when I was in physical hell after lifting a box of files on the job…files I’d worked on all weekend at home so my engineers could stay on schedule.

My on-the-job injury was a life-changing experience.  It took me off an all-consuming fast-track and I got back to my spirituality and eventually to a more balanced life.  For all the pain, it was one of the best things that has happened to me in my life because it corrected the course I was on.  But there was also a lot of resentment toward my employers and “the system” for letting me down when I needed them.  That was probably the biggest damage to how I felt about my job.  Not that I stopped working hard…I just didn’t feel passionate about it anymore.

For probably 10 years or more, I frequently came home and cried because I was so miserable.  Financially, I could have quit during that time. We paid more in taxes for the last several years I was married than I grossed in a job I hated but my ex was adamant that I not quit to pursue my dream of being a full-time novelist.  Funny, how things work out.  The publishing industry tanked around the time we divorced, and I ended up glad to have a steady job with a good income that afforded me the luxury of writing whenever I wanted and whatever I wanted.

The biggest difference has been these last couple of years, and I’ve gotten to a comfortable place with my job.  It doesn’t consume me anymore because I have many passions now, and I rarely stress to any degree of what I once did.  The job is as stressful as ever and, given the past year’s drastic changes, probably more stressful for most people.  The change has not been in the career field but in my mindset, and that’s made all the difference. Here are a few highlights of how my mindset changed and thus how I stopped hating my job:

1.  I shifted the pressure of my own expectations. For a long time, I resented my job when I was hoping to leave for a career in the arts.  If I’d worked a minimum wage job, it would have been much easier to convince my husband that we could do without my steady income.  Instead, it seemed that I was being punished for being successful in my career.  I focused my frustrations for not being able to sell enough books regularly to a publishing house (thanks to fertile young editors constantly orphaning me to new editors who had a different vision of the books I should write) on the career field I wanted to leave.  Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but the more I struggled to be a full-time writer and make that jump while working 60-to-80 hour weeks, the more I disliked my non-artistic career.  It was always the same career.  None of that had changed.  But it took shifting my expectations of the publishing world and where I wanted to go next with my dreams before I could make peace with my employment.

2.   I began feeling grateful for my career. After my divorce, when I needed to make sure I could maintain a home for my children and feed the three of us, I was happy to have a good-paying job where I was good at what I did and trusted with my work.  If I’d jumped to being a full-time writer right before the publishing industry hit the skids, I would have had to go back to something more secure.  I let myself feel thankful that I had reasonable job security, a steady paycheck, health insurance, and could afford the roof over my head.  It didn’t have to be my vision for the future, but I could find things that I was grateful for today.

How it used to be in Acquisition

3.  I changed my expectations of where my income would come from. As part of the shift mentioned above, I stopped associating my wealth with a specific career.  I didn’t have to make my fortune off my writing or anything artistic.  Or off my non-artistic career, either.  I simply set my intentions to include 1. a good income and 2. fulfilling and creative work.  They don’t have to be at the same place.  That one little change made a huge difference in taking the pressure off my expectations and began to help me make peace with my job.

4.  I decided to stay in the position I was in. Rather than move to a new office that would require travel and time away from home or go for a promotion that would add a lot of extra stress, I chose to stay in my current position and not ask for something different.  I looked for ways to enjoy where I was rather than go to different offices with people I enjoy less and working conditions that aren’t as good.  If some other place had offered better, I would have jumped at it.  But I didn’t jump ship as expected because I wasn’t excited daily to be where I was.  I decided to jump ship only if some other office could increase my happiness.

5.  I began looking at horrible bosses from a psychological point of view rather than as their victim. Most of my bosses (either direct or up my chain of command) have been either control-freaking weasels or wimps.  It’s hard to find anything in between, though I’m really happy with my current supervisor who backs me up when needed and the rest of the time, stays out of my way and lets me do my job. Once I came to understand the whole dominance and submission game, I could easily see all the dominatrix types at work, cowing the men and keeping other strong women in line as well.  It became very interesting to watch objectively as our then highest-ranking woman insisted on destroying my confidence in a briefing by jumping down my throat for doing exactly what she asked me to.  And the 30 people sitting at the table with us knew it but were too chicken to speak up.  Once I realized the pattern of dominating anyone and everyone, regardless of whether they were right, I began to play back.  I kept my confidence and if she raged at me, I didn’t lower my eyes and beg for her blessing as most there did.  When she saw I wasn’t being submissive, she would usually then turn and berate one of my bosses, who’d lower their eyes and yes-ma’am her until the beating stopped.  But I never ever felt like a victim again.  Afterward I learned that, I was often–to be truthful–amused by the animal behaviors in the boardroom.

6.  I began to change the way I saw myself and changed my role. This took several years, I’ll admit.  I couldn’t find a comfortable way to see myself.  For most of my career, I’d been the reformer, the visionary, the change agent, the outside-the-box thinker, the forerunner, the guinea pig.  I’d spent years being the one who thrilled to do something risky first and pave the way for others.  When “acquisition reform” and “streamlining” were killed off around 2005, I struggled with my place in the acquisition career field.  No one was allowing me to do anything that I felt made a big difference anymore.  Eventually, I found a comfortable new scenario for myself where I was the human archive, the vault of information to train newbies and middle-managers who didn’t have the corporate history I did.  The career field changed to one of bureaucracy that allowed me to challenge it, to transformation and reform that I loved, and then back to killing off any chance at doing anything differently and an insistence on sameness and structure.

And number 7…..  (watch for Part II)

From the upcoming book, Passion to the Third Degree

(Originally published in 2007)

“Mommy, I’m so proud of my camera card: it came through the washing machine just fine!”

“‘Fondle-able’ is not a conjunctive adverb. Try that with someone who isn’t an English major.”

“‘Beware that hooded man at the rudder!’” (“Don’t Pay the Ferryman”)

“No, Shannon, I’m not behind your car in one that looks like mine. I’m behind my desk. No, that’s not me waving back at you.”

Writer Daughter to Writer Mom: “If I ran over someone with a bicycle, what kind of injuries would they have? It’s, um, for a story I’m writing with my friend.”

Writer Mom to Writer Daughter: “I understand, honey, but I really don’t know. However, if you need to know the best way to decapitate a pregnant woman, I’ve already researched that.”

“Lita Ford still reminds me of ass-less chaps.”

For over a year, I’ve been listening to my friend Sharyn rave about attending live Abraham-Hicks Law of Attraction workshops all over the country and on cruises around the world.  I was already enthusiastic over their books and recorded workshops, but I had no idea what an experience a first workshop could be!

Last summer, I decided to become a regular subscriber of their monthly download program of edited workshops.  That lasted a few months and I decided I was getting so much out of the downloads that I went to the twice-monthly downloads.  There were live workshops within 7 hour’s drive  (Atlanta and Orlando) but they happened to coincide with trips I’d already planned, so I decided I’d give one a try in the Spring rather than in the Fall.

Orlando was an easy choice for me since I have a daughter in college at UCF and I’d be able to spend the weekend with her.  If I’d had any idea how useful a live workshop would be to me, I would have coughed up the extra $400 for my 17-year-old and 20-year-old to attend with me!  Here are my thoughts on what I observed:

1.         I was surprised by the number of people in attendance.  From the DVDs, YouTube videos, and websites, I would have guessed that the crowd would be small, intimate—maybe a hundred or so people at around $200-250 a pop.  The last seminar of this type I attended was a Michael Dooley TUT workshop in Orlando that had  probably 75 seats and a surprising number unfilled.  At the Abraham-Hicks workshop, there must have been 700 or more people, and only a dozen or so who made it to the “hot seat” to ask a question.  The attendees were from all walks of life, all ages, all backgrounds—but everyone I met was hungry for knowledge.  The room buzzed with excitement and the air conditioner kept things a little on chilly side as a nice accommodation for the heat of group energy.  Most of my lunch companions were repeat attendees.  Some were long-time followers of the teachings.  Some obviously “got it” by the glow on their faces and spring in their steps while others talked the talked but hadn’t clicked into their stride yet.  By the way, I didn’t ask a question or try to get to the hot seat–no need:  everything I wanted to ask got answered for me.

2.       Watching Esther channel Abraham was…convincing.  I’ve been around an occasional channel before and I’ve seen much the same effect as an intuitive or strongly psychic person who is tuned in to something at a frequency higher than where I’m at.  Their faces change somewhat and their voices become different.  There’s an odd relaxing that I can’t explain but have witnessed a few astonishing times.  I didn’t have a good idea from the recordings I’d seen and heard how long it would take Esther to settle into the merge with Abraham, but it was consistent with what I’ve seen with channels and intuitives I know personally.  There is a point where I can tell by the voice that they are tapped into a Higher Power or something that’s ascended a few level above the rest of us.  If I ever had any doubt that this woman is channeling something bigger, I don’t doubt it now.  No offense to Esther, but there is simply no way a human being can be that quick, consistent, and wise, never missing a beat with a question.  Since I’ve known some of the people in the hot seat personally, I know for a fact that the questions are not plants.

3.       The length of time “in the vortex” was surprising but shouldn’t have been.  If I can get to my happy place while listening to a one-hour recorded and edited workshop, sitting through a day of four sessions with the energetic buzz of hundreds of other people around me isn’t four times the focus and fun.  No, it’s more like to the fourth power!  Abraham said that after spending a prolonged time in the vortex at the workshop, we’d leave and see a lot manifest for us over the next few days.  Absolutely correct!  I had been through some serious shake-ups in the 48 hours before the workshop and back to my happy self long before I left the workshop.  My daughters picked me up from the hotel lobby and pointed out that I was glowy, happy, and excited whereas the night before had been a bit rough.   Over the next 3 days, some incredible things manifested for me, seemingly out of thin air.

4.       The group mind at work became evident quickly.  We were the audience that suddenly shifted into a fist-pumping rendition of “Eddie! Eddie!  Eddie!”—which hopefully will become an Abraham-Hicks video treat.    I have no other description for it except “energy” as people together began to focus together, all getting into that happy vortex together, progressively by the end of the day so that we all felt completely motivated and blissful.  It suddenly reminded me of times when I was a kid and had to go with my parents to a week-long tent revival-type series of church services.  Most of the time, they were horribly long and boring, but every now and then, we’d have a guest preacher who said brilliant things  and really connected with his audience so that everyone seemed to be enthralled and caught up in a powerful moment of oneness with the Universe and everyone in it.  That revival energy, at its very best, was like this live Law of Attraction workshop.

In summary, a first-time, live, Abraham-Hicks Law of Attraction workshop is exponentially better than their terrific recorded workshops because of the energy boost of like minds and being held in such a serene state of mind for hours at a time.  If you get the opportunity, don’t pass it up!

I have a spare bedroom I’m painting and refurbishing so that it’ll make a beautiful guest room when my daughter is home from college or has friends over.  I didn’t finish it earlier in the year when I was too busy, but I’ve had plenty of time to wrap things up in the last two weeks.  I haven’t.  I know better.

I’ve been avoiding putting any of my creative energy into this room for one reason:  someone did something extremely hurtful to my daughter and me a couple of weeks ago and I know that all that anger and hurt would just go right into my creation.   And anyone sleeping in that room would feel the angry energy bouncing off the walls.

I’ve been very picky about who I’ve gotten to help me with refurbishing my house and yards.  Captain Earl has done wonders for my gardens and lawn, and it’s a sweet energy there when I walk around the outside of the my house.  He’s helped with my indoor creations, too, including my home office, to create a beautiful serene, lovely place for me to create and work.  When Justin was here with me, he helped me “build castles” out of my home, doing all sorts of chores and handyman jobs enthusiastically, and helping me design my rope-lighted patio.  With Todd, he commented often on all the things in my house that he appreciated, though he wasn’t part of building this serene place where I live.

I’ve long understood that what you put into a creation is energy and that energy stays with it.  I saw this with the clothes my mom made for me while I was growing up and with the clothes she made for my daughters.  Every stitch made with love–and putting a little part of herself into every stitch.  The girls always  told me how loved and safe they felt in dresses Grandma had made them.

So my guest room with the planned teal and tan paint, the bamboo curtain rods, the wood blinds, and the walls hangings will wait a little while longer.  My serenity is returning after a terrible upset, and when I’m sure that all I’m broadcasting is love and peace, that’s what I’ll put into this room.

Photo copyright by Lorna Tedder.  All rights reserved.

I’m excited.  But honestly, I think everything should be exciting.  I think that if you don’t feel excited about your work, your hobbies, or the person you’re with, then you should turn your attention to something or someone you can feel passionate about.

I’ve just added a few creative passions back into my life after a long absence.  One is the jewelry-making that Daughter #1 (Shannon) and I used to do that I set aside when I had eye problems that I no longer have.  The other is a matter of bonding with Daughter #2 (Aislinn) over her sideline as a portrait photographer and returning to my old passion for nature photography.  Both are fun, creative pleasures I can share with my kids, and I probably would not have remembered how much I love nature photography were it not for the enthusiasm of Aislinn and my friend Todd.  I don’t know how I could have forgotten.

I feel the same way about my home business now–and I’ve added back a few things that I’ve been passionate about in the past but had set aside due to lack of  time and focus elsewhere.  I’m now reclaiming those and having a blast.

I’m excited about my home and the decor that I love and that all my guests love.  It feels so good to get home every day, not just because I can’t wait to start on my creative passions but because I’m so excited about the atmosphere and serene energy of my home.

My friends and romantic ties are full of excitement for me, too.  There’s no ho-hum about seeing someone–I can’t wait!

When I was a trainee in my day job, one of my co-workers had a cartoon of a guy putting tinker toys together.  The caption read, “Life is nothing without passion.”  Tongue in cheek, yes, but so true.  Everything–every hobby, job, art, space, and relationship–should be this exciting, this full of passion.

Shannon is on the verge of 20, a college senior in Psychology, and stressed to the max.  She carries a heavy course load, works 20 hours a week in a counseling clinic, and is focusing on complicated research projects in sociology and psychology while preparing her grad school admissions packages.  So how to combat the stress?

With creativity.  That’s right–doing even more in the time-restricted schedule.

To some people, that’s odd, but not to people with creativity in their bones. It’s not uncommon for a creative person to be chastised for complaining that they’re too busy, that they have no time to get things done, but in a spare moment (or not so spare), there they are–knitting, painting, writing, beading, taking pictures, sketching….

“If you don’t have time to clean your room, how can you waste time doing something artsy?” becomes the question.  From someone who doesn’t get it, obviously.

Creative people like to stay busy, but staying busy with the analytical and logical tasks of their professions can be draining.  The stress relief isn’t from vegging in front of the TV for a spare 3 hours but from engaging the creative side of the brain.  I know several physicians who work 15 hours a day in emergency rooms, and then skimp on dinner so they’ll have enough time to indulge their musical genius in the evenings.  They don’t have to be rock stars at night–just unleash  their less analytical passions.

For Shannon, that’s either her knitting/crocheting or making jewelry.  She and I learned to bead several years ago, and now she specializes in unusual belly button rings and jewelry.  She loves the creative burst of energy from designing and making her own jewelry, and she makes a nice profit if she chooses to sell it rather than keep it for herself.

I can already see this need to balance the left and right brains in her younger sister who, after a busy day of college classes and forensics, can’t wait to spend a few hours in an uber creative photo shoot, followed by laborious CS4 editing to get the right vintage  or Hollywood look.

For me,  writing has always been a great de-stressing tool.  I used to joke about it–I’ve learned with so much workplace violence to be more careful about my offbeat sense of humor–but I would come home from a grueling 12 to 15-hour day of dealing with lieutenants, slimy defense contractors, idiot Federal employees, and Gutless Wonder bosses and…beat them up or kill them off in my fiction, which at the time was my End Times thriller, Access.  I was rather powerless at work to fight back, so I unleashed it in my suspense novels and had a blast.  I’ve taken my creativity in other directions, too–sewing, beading, photography–that I’m feeling called to re-explore.

But no matter how little time I have left in a day that’s full of high-stress analysis or possibly life-or-death situations, if I don’t make time for at least a few minutes of creative bursts, I cannot maintain balance or happiness in my life.

So go ahead:  try it.  Find something artistic to do to balance the daily logic, even if you feel you’re no good at it or can’t make any money from it.  Do it for the passion of it.

Photo Credit by pdjs-photos; creative commons license

Keeping secrets can be dangerous. It’s not that they can’t be kept, but if they’re kept at a price, then that price tends to manifest into something harmful.

Though I’m fairly open myself and have very few secrets, I still know and keep many secrets that aren’t harmful to me, but there’s a difference in the nature of those secrets. Those are the secrets told to me by someone I’ve counseled. The secrets are shared with me, but they don’t involve me directly. The same is true of secrets that friends have told me over the years. Some have been truly awful secrets that they felt they had to share with someone and I was it. I never asked to be their confessor but I treat those secrets–ones that never had anything to do with me–as their private information that stays private. I was specifically asked to keep it secret and, since I’m not culpable in these cases, I have. I’m sure that there are former friends of mine out there who worry that I’ll write about some terrible secret that happened 20 years ago that had nothing to do with me, but they need not worry: I’ve never disclosed their confessions.

In all of these cases, I did not take on the burden of the secret myself. It was confessed to me, but the burden was not shifted entirely to my shoulders. And that’s the difference between a secret I’ll keep and one I won’t.

In both my personal and professional lives, every time I’ve let someone shift a secret to me instead of bearing it themselves, I’ve gotten burned–both personally in my health and professionally in my reputation. For example, in 2003, a colleague came to me with a secret. She alleged fraud, and by telling me in the position I worked in then, I had no choice but to take responsibility for what I’d been told and follow-up on it. She shed her ownership of the burden of what she knew by telling me, and put me in a precarious situation of having to report it to my boss, even though she was the eyewitness to it. Three other people followed her lead and made the same allegations, all of them turning the secret burning in their chests over to me and to the people in my office. They all gave evidence but only if it was anonymous. The whole thing blew up in our faces before we’d gotten more than a couple of days into our investigation, with the person we were investigating calling for us to be fired for even thinking there might be fraud. The identity of one of the four–the first and most senior one–was discovered through someone else and when asked by a council to explain her allegations, she recanted, later apologizing to me because she was afraid she wouldn’t get promoted if anyone knew she was the one who’d come to my office for help, afraid that the person she’d turned in would retaliate. The other three were terrified of being found out and remained silent out of fear of retaliation and because the most senior of them had hung her head and said it was all a misunderstanding. Meanwhile, my office was left looking very foolish and vindictive because I was ethically unable to divulge any identities.

That will never happen again.

In my personal life, there have been a few occasions where I’ve carried other people’s secrets. I didn’t mean to be the sole one bearing that burden but in each case, the other person unloaded the secret entirely on me, somehow made me responsible for keeping it, lied through their teeth to save their own skin (much like my colleague who desperately wanted a promotion), and then walked away to breathe easily because they’d dodged the bullet.

And I caught it. Between my teeth.

I let that happen. I felt I was the stronger in each of those cases, that I could take it on until they could better bear their circumstances. They never reclaimed it though. They became content to let me bear it. A few have come back into my life to tell me how ashamed they are that they dumped it on me and ran away. Most avoid me now out of fear that I won’t be responsible for their secrets any longer. That’s probably a good idea.

Because in all those cases where I was keeping someone else’s secret while the person who committed whatever act pretended to know nothing–even in some cases pretending not to know me–I let myself bear the emotional and sometimes physical strain of it. I let myself stay up nights worrying, while the real owner of the secret was quite happy not to stay up worrying.

There’s a fine line between keeping mum about someone else’s secrets while that person works through his issues–and agreeing to keep someone else’s secrets so that he doesn’t have to own up to his own problems.  Sometimes the other person, the one whose secret it is, has to man-up. Other people will not grow if I take on their secrets as my own…and neither will I.

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

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

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

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

Besides, I’m already immortal.

Photo credit by 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.

Photo Credit by the PhotoPhreak; creative commons license

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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