“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.

Photo credit by Ko_An; creative commons license.

From the upcoming book, Searching for Serenity:  the Spiritual Way to Declutter your Life and Create Sacred Space

I’m intrigued by a Tarot card known as the “Two of Swords.”  In most decks, the card features a person holding a sword in each hand, often in a defensive position.  The visual often reflects two equal forces in a stalemate situation.  The swords are sometimes crossed, suggesting a clash of ideas, words, or motives.

The traditional meanings for the card are struggle, balance, decisions, an impasse, confusion.  Some refer to these as putting up barriers to the truth or hoping the truth will go away.

A friend of mine interprets this card in a more positive way that I find beautiful.

“Look at the woman,” she says.  “She’s holding a sword in each hand.  She’s very good at defending her position, but she’s got her hands full.  If something wonderful comes to her, she cannot accept it because her hands are full.  To open her hand to something new and wonderful, she must put down one of the swords.  She must let go of something first.  She must release before she can refocus and accept something new and better.”

During my process of decluttering and re-creating the sacred space I’d lost in my home and life, I thought a lot about that Two of Swords card.  I had been like that strong woman, defending my position at all costs, never daring to risk failure by setting down one of my swords.  My hands were full, too full.  I couldn’t get it all done.  I had too many things pulling at me, and I had that constant clash of which to do first and how could I possibly do them all and which would I let fail if I didn’t defend it.  It was a constant struggle, strain, and stress.

To move forward in my life and accept newer, happier ways of being and new “gifts” from the Universe, I had to make room in my life. I had to let go…of things that cluttered my life, whether they were physical, emotional, spiritual, or something else.  When I was able to release on one level, there was a sudden cascade of release on all levels in a matter of weeks. As I got one level to its simplest form, the others could not stay cluttered.  That powerful releasing energy took hold all at once, and I let go, finally, and began very quickly to refocus my energies and my life in a new direction that felt wonderfully free.

The new direction meant taking the newly emptied spaces in my life, not fearing the voids left by releasing, and filling them instead with love and joy, turning them into sacred spaces.

And there, in sacred space, is where serenity lives.

It’s easy to get caught up in everyone else’s world and forget to pamper yourself a little.  In fact, pampering yourself can feel downright selfish, even if you did just put in a 100-hour work week.  Yet, if you’re trying to maintain or reach a place of balance and happiness, a little self-treasuring can go a long way.

Here’s my personal list:

1.  Make time for meditation–20 minutes is plenty. I’ve worked with teachers, coaches, and advisers who’ve said things that made me feel guilty.  They’ve chastised me for not taking a hour to meditate and spend that time on myself, and I distinctly remember explaining to one spiritual leader that it took me 30 minutes to get ready for work in the morning because that’s all the time I had when a toddler wasn’t hanging onto me and every time I tried to meditate, I was so exhausted that I fell asleep.  I no longer have toddlers demanding my time so I try to catch 20 minutes’ meditation time every day, usually between work and my evening relaxation because it helps to get me focused and out of the “office” mode.  Sometimes I simply set a time for 20 minutes, close my eyes, and listen.  Who cares if my mind roams?  Rejuvenation!

2.  Flowers.  Fresh flowers.  Once a week. I prefer them from my own garden, but it that doesn’t work, a small bouquet from the grocery store is just fine or, even better, a flowering plant that can later join my garden.  I love the scent and colors and a few fresh flowers a week add a touch of spring to every day.

3.  Nightgowns and lingerie. When I was newly single, I stashed away lingerie for “eventually,” when I was in a relationship again.  No more sleeping in T-shirts!  Now I choose a different nightgown every night and feel wonderful in it whether I’m in a relationship or not.  When unattached women wear crappy clothes to bed when they’d never wear them with a mate, they’re saying they’re not worth the little pleasantries.

4.  Satin sheets. I’ve loved satin sheets since college when I splurged on a set of wine-red ones.  For a long time, I didn’t have a mate who fancied them.  Now, I have them in emerald green, ice cream pink, chocolate brown, shiny gold, and–of course–wine red.

5.  A good night’s sleep. This is the hardest for me still.  It’s said that every hour of sleep you get before midnight is worth 2 hours.  Aim for sleep times that are multiples of 1.5 hours, the typical sleep cycle for the best rest ever.

6.  A hot bath. I had to travel a lot when the kids were in pre-school, and I made the most of those hotel stays alone.  The rocket scientists who traveled with me were out on the town but not  me!  I ordered room service and ate uninterrupted, watched TV uninterrupted, and then took a long, hot bath before crawling into bed for uninterrupted sleep.  Back home, my one uninterrupted treasure was 30 minutes in the bath a few times a week–and that’s when I caught up on my reading.  I still make it a must-have several times a week.

Everyone’s list is different, and even then, it can change from time to time.  Your list might include music, incense, candles, pedicures, massages, or a glass of wine.  The point is, come up with a short list of little things that feel luxurious to you, that make you feel like you’re selfishly putting yourself first for a change–and then commit to enjoying a few on a regular basis.

If you don’t treat yourself well, why should anyone else?

Photo credit by -RobW-; creative commons license

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Life is good,” echoes the other woman.

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

Then she adds, “Life is good.”

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

“Life is good,” she says again.

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

In every dysfunctional family, there’s at least one do-goodin’ peacemaker who is either a blood relative, an in-law, or a “concerned family friend.”  Ironically, it’s usually not so much about making peace among hostile relatives but about being a hero—even through manipulative tactics designed to force everyone to make nice that really achieves nothing below the surface.  At least, that’s how it has been in my family…over and over and over again. So how do you bring peace into families where there’s never been peace and bring families back together when they’d just as soon each other disappear from the planet?

I grew up in a dysfunctional family.  To the core.  Not only was my immediate family dysfunctional, but my extended family all the way to fifth cousins was dysfunctional in ways that you normally find only in fiction or on Jerry Springer.  My extended family made the Dukes of Hazzard look like the intelligentsia of the South.  Too bad we couldn’t have had reality TV cameras following the various family branches around or we would  have been one of the longest running shows around because there was always DRAMA. DRAMA in all caps. No editing needed for maximum dramatic impact. Not the occasional tiffs that most families have every few years because the wrong sister was the Maid of Honor in a cousin’s wedding or somebody named a baby after Grandpa first, but near-daily DRAMA.

When I was a kid, I seriously never knew when I came home from school each day which relative outside my immediate household was going to be big news—who was going to be in jail, who’d hit somebody with a pipe,  who was avoiding the repo man, who’d tried to run my car off the road, whose window was shot out during the five minutes they weren’t sitting in front of it, who’d unplugged whose freezer on the back porch and spoiled all the food but left their distinctive shoeprints in the dirt, who’d destroyed an expensive piece of machinery in my dad’s barn after taking it without asking,  who’d just reneged on a debt that made half the local stores refuse checks with my surname on them, or who was covering up an affair with a little extra religiosity.  My extended family thrived on conflict—some still do—back before conflict was popularly rephrased as DRAMA.

They say blood is thicker than water, but in my family, so is toothpaste. I love my mom and brothers dearly, but I have plenty of relatives I don’t care to ever see again or expose my children to, and I don’t appreciate outsiders or self-appointed peacemakers telling me what I “need” to do “for the family.”  Usually those people have no idea of the constant turmoil I saw when I was growing up…or the more  recent threats to “beat [me] up” for talking openly about my relationship with a grandparent who never showed any affection to me,  the frequent cyber-stalking and bad-mouthing by cousins I haven’t seen since I was 5 years old, and the busy-body who refuses to speak to me (thank Gods!) for blogging honestly about how I dealt with my father’s death. Outsiders and family peacemakers usually have an ideal in mind that I have personally not known with my family in Georgia, though I do know it with my own children—and that’s why I’m one of those people with no desire whatsoever to bring certain long-lost relatives back into my fold or have a big family reunion with them

My life now is 180-degrees from how I grew up.  I have a wonderful relationship with both my daughters and our home life is peaceful.  At this very moment, there’s excitement over my 17-year-old’s  trip to Harvard to compete in a national forensics competition, the multiple weddings she’s been asked to shoot, and the prestigious summer camp she’s paying for herself out of her photography business—and I’m equally thrilled over my 19-year-old  college senior and the sudden unfolding of opportunities for summer internships either with a well-respected university or a lengthier internship with a counseling clinic or the out-of-state symposium she’ll be presenting at as an undergrad or the potential special research project she’ll spearhead herself that’ll look great on her resume’ for grad school. My family is happy and prosperous and loving and just…amazing.  Why would I ever want to muck that up with people from the past who constantly stir up DRAMA and drop problems on my doorstep?  There is nothing hostile relatives have to offer my happy little family and far too much to endanger the serenity we have.  We are thriving and blessed just as we are, and I refuse to let anyone guilt-trip me with her fantasies about what “family” should be into doing something that goes against my intuition.  My family already is what it should be.

Yet, every so often, someone wants to step in and “set things right.”   Sometimes the person is young and idealistic, with no idea of the past familial patterns.  Usually, it’s a church-inspired ego trip that’s still not going to get anyone into heaven by successful good works, often by women who have not acted ethically in the past.  I have witnessed these over the years where someone new to the extended family decided to ensure discreetly that various hostile parties were in the same room at the same time, thinking proximity would dissolve years of back-biting and they’d be praised for being a hero.  It has not worked and it will never work—and as an added bonus, at least some of the people who felt tricked and manipulated will never trust them again.

That’s not to say that families can’t be reunited or that re-discovering long-lost cousins can’t be wondrous.  I have cousins on my mom’s side of my family whom I knew as children, and in the past few years—with no help from anyone trying to intercede—we’ve found each other as adults.  I happen to think they’re some of the coolest people on the planet.  I don’t know them as adults as well as I’d like to, but I enjoy the conversations we have and look forward to building happy relationships with them in the coming years.  I’ve introduced them to my children because they augment my idea of family rather than merely extending it. It’s peaceful in ways that my other extended family relationships aren’t.

So how do you, if you want to see a family “get back together,” go about the task of bringing peace to a Hatfield/McCoy relationship?

1.        First, ask yourself why you’re getting involved. Really, is this any of your business?  Are you trying to look good to your church, to Grandma of the clan, to your sweetie?   Do you dream of what everyone will say when you’re done?  “Oooh, isn’t she wonderful because she brought the family back together single-handedly after a whopping four generations of bad blood?  Aren’t we so lucky to have her!”  Because if it’s in any way about YOU or what YOU get out of it or how people will think of YOU, back away now.  Even if “I just lovvvvvvve helping people” or “I feel good bringing fighting families together” is your motivation, that’s still about YOU.  It’s YOUR emotional reward.  Instead…

2.       Work on yourself. If your motives are honest and you really just want the family to stop fighting so there’ll be more peace in your life, then work on making yourself a more peaceful person.  You cannot change other people.  You cannot make Cousin Emmie Sue turn into Aunt Bessie Mae’s best friend overnight.  You can’t change Cousin Emma Sue’s penchant for kleptomania or Aunt Bessie Mae’s paranoia that everyone, including the Government and aliens, are stealing from her.  But you can change yourself into someone who is accepting of all family members.  Which is why you….

3.       Don’t admonish family members for things you think they’ve done or haven’t done to improve a dysfunctional relationship. Don’t write letters or make phone calls or send emails flaming them for what you haven’t even witnessed for yourself but heard about from another family member with his or her own agenda.  You may not know that Cousin Billy Bob doesn’t speak to Uncle Jimmy Chuck  because Billy Bob spent the entire fifth grade trying to keep Uncle Jimmy Chuck’s hands out of his pants.  And if you did know that about Jimmy Chuck’s pedophilia, you absolutely have no business lecturing  now-grown-up Billy Bob on forgiveness when you did nothing to stop Jimmy Chuck.  That’s because…

4.       People will let go of their animosity and forgive each other when they’re good and ready to, and not before. There is nothing you can do to fix it for them.  When they are ready, they will release what’s kept them apart and begin to mend what was broken or create something new.  Some will probably never be ready—do you think my brother will ever look kindly on the relative who sic’d growling dogs on him when he was showing off his baby daughter for the first time to her great-grandmother and he had to outrun them with a baby in his arms?   But if you really want family peace, there are some things you can do, one in particular….

5.       Be a good friend to all. Keep an open mind, stop gossiping, stop listening to gossip, and befriend every member of the family.  Not just the ones you like or the ones who’ve convinced you they’re right and everyone else is wrong.  Listen with your heart and keep your mouth shut.  Don’t contribute to the bad blood with imaginary scenarios that never happened in the past and aren’t true now.  Don’t speculate on what someone really meant or why they felt a certain way about a family member when you never even saw the interactions between them.  Ask, if you must, but don’t invent answers.   If you can be open-minded and a friend to everyone, you’re more likely to….

6.       Take notice of when a family member is ready to let go of old hatred and make peace—and actually be able to facilitate a feel-good reunion for all. This is NOT when YOU decide that it’s time for them to get back together because “Oh, wouldn’t this be nice if they got along?” or “They’re not getting any younger so they better hurry up so they can be right with God when they die.”  No, this is when Uncle Jimmy Chuck pulls you aside in a tearful confession and tells you what terrible things he did to all the boys in the family twenty years ago and how sorry he is and if he only knew how to ask for forgiveness, he would AND Cousin Billy Bob mentions privately over a beer  on the tailgate that he’s been struggling with forgiveness like his preacher talks about but can’t quite manage it because he feels that Uncle Jimmy Chuck has no idea of the consequences of his actions.  Notice that I said AND, not OR. If Jimmy Chuck wants to make amends for what he’s done, it is not your place to go to Billy Bob and open old wounds and try to force a reconciliation when Billy Bob isn’t ready to talk about the past.  Only when both are ready should you get involved.  “Both” equals “Invitation.”  “One” or “Neither” equals “Mind your own business.”  If Cousin Emmie Sue tells you she is still angry that Aunt Bessie Mae accused her stealing that jade ring that’s been in the family for years and Aunt Bessie Mae is still telling you how terrible Emmie Sue is for stealing it, leave it alone. You’re not going to convince either because they’re not ready.  If Aunt Bessie Mae confesses she found the ring in a drawer two years after it disappeared and is too embarrassed by her false accusations to say anything, then you’ve got an open door to suggest that an apology may set things right—but it’s Bessie Mae’s responsibility to go to Emmie Sue and fix the relationship, not yours.   And that’s why…

7.       You continue to focus instead on being the best person you can be—positive, compassionate, loving, understanding, open-minded, and serene. If you are all those things, then that’s the kind of atmosphere that will be around you and you won’t be dealing with fighting families.   Really…their crap won’t matter to you.  This can take a little while to transition through but it’s very worthwhile when you get there.  If it’s far more fun for you to spend your energy on fixing a family full of dysfunctional people, you’re missing out on fixing your own dysfunctions that stay so well hidden because you camouflage them with other people’s DRAMA.  As for me….

8.       It’s become a game, a splendid revelation of secrets, and it has not been wrong yet.  People who get all up in my business always have something of their own to hide, to divert attention from. The surest way I know that all is not well in their world and with their self-esteem is when they come out of the woodwork with their focus on how to fix ME.

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

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

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

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

What makes an Eighth House Solar Return Sun so terrifying?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In summary

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

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

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

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

It didn’t happen that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did you?

Photo credit by El Ray; creative commons license

Who doesn’t love a good story of a comeuppance?  There’s justice in that, and balance.  What goes around comes around, as you sow so shall you reap, what we send out returns to us three-fold, the Law of Attraction–it’s all the same.  Karma, justice, balance, completion.

Every day, we “send out,” usually without conscious thought of what will come back to us.  If you live your life by walking in truth, then there’s really not a lot to worry about.  If you send out truth, compassion, and love, then having those things come back to you is simply a multiple blessing.  If you live your life that way, then you probably already recognize the process of getting back what you send out–even if you don’t call it that–and you probably have a sense of serenity, comfort, and gratitude for much of what’s in the life you’ve created for yourself.

That’s because what you are “sending out” is what creates your life.  I doubt anyone’s done a scientific analysis of the Threefold-Law to see if what is received after being broadcast or sent out is an exact multiple of three, but it does seem to come back in a greater magnitude than sent out. It’s too bad we can’t see it as a whoosh of blue energy sailing away from us like a boomerang and walloping us back.  That return of energy, that boomerang, comes back with greater force and definitely affects where you’re standing.  If you’ve sent out the darker side of yourself, then it certainly does come back with a punch, hard enough to shape what you’ve started building and multiply many times over.  So what you send out becomes your world, what you’ve created.

How is it two different people can view the same planet and its daily occurrences so differently?  One sees flowers and sunshine and dancing by firelight.  The other sees nothing but lies, conspiracy, and impending doom.  It’s the same planet but worlds apart.

If you send out fear into the world, then it comes back to you, and that becomes your world.  You see doom and conspiracy everywhere you look, even in the simplest of things.  Every word out of the other political party is a lie, every action taken by employees of a company is a conspiracy, every minute is one minute closer to a post-apocalyptic future.  The more you look for it (sending out those thoughts), the more it comes back, geometrically expanded.

I’ve seen too many men whose self-talk throughout the day is “How am I?  I’m old, fat, and bald,”  even though most of the time I’ve heard them mutter this, they were still young and athletic, with a head full of hair.  How odd that they became old, fat, and bald within a year or two.   Whereas none of these men would have walked up to a stranger and said, “Hey!  You’re old, fat, and bald!” they said it to themselves and about themselves all the time.  Like a daily affirmation or prayer request, throughout the day.  That’s what they were sending out and back it came.  I’m always astonished to see how quickly this self-talk comes back to them and their world changes to match it.   They hear it all the time, then they believe it, then they become it.  And it started with them.

It’s sad to watch, but a rather common story.

“Benita” puts out a “nothing can go right and then I’m going to have to fix it” vibration.  She seems to have more bad luck than anyone else I know, however sweet and selfless she is.   If something goes right in her world, then it’s obviously a fluke, as she will tell you.   If I drop by her desk at work, she’ll tell me—every time—about an incredible disaster with her case load that just happened, and it will be the strangest screw-up you’ve ever heard of.  Not her fault but she’s always left to fix it.  And she does.  If I drop by her house, there will always be some kind of mess that is more than a little inconvenience.  She’ll tell me all about it and what a pain it is—the frozen and burst water pipes that flooded the kitchen, the small tornado that clipped the roof, the tree that fell in a freak windstorm and bisected the new car, the computer virus that wiped  out the database for her home business, the rats that chewed through the electrical wiring in the attic and started a small fire that was caught just in time but caused way too much damage.  Then she’ll explain that it looks like anything than can go wrong will find her.   She lives in a world of misery and inconvenience that never seems to end.

It’s sad to watch, but a rather common story.

“Eb” is different.  Unlike Benita, he doesn’t mumble “negative affirmations” about how bad everything is.  Instead, he tries to create the world he wants through deception.  Yep, he lies.  If something crops up in his life that would make his world a little worse, instead of listening to the feedback and seeing what he’s been sending out, he chooses the easy way out.  At least it seems like it’s the easy way.  At heart, he’s a coward.  He can’t man-up and walk in truth, so he uses lies like Band-aids.  They seem to patch things up for the moment, and he’ll worry about the next moment when it gets here.  And for that next moment, he needs a bigger lie.  He has told so many lies that he can no longer remember what is a lie and what isn’t, and he camouflages them by insisting that everyone else is lying.  The world he lives in is in constant turmoil.  His lies have cost him the trust of people who love him, created trouble with supervisors who can’t depend on him,  and caused suspicion among those who would do business with him.  His world becomes more dire each day as he sends out more lies and they come back in a form that threatens his dreams and continues a vicious karmic cycle.

It’s sad to watch, but rather a common story.

“Evie” has had some really hard knocks in her life.  You name it, it’s befallen her.  The abusive husband, the sexual abuse as a child, a lingering but terminal illness of both parents,  children with drug problems,  a costly divorce, a failed career,  losing her home thanks to her husband’s gambling habit.  That’s all in the past now. The one good thing, she says, about having been in such a bad place for most of her life, is that she no longer sweats the small stuff and now knows what really matters.  What really matters to her is having peace and tranquility in her life.  She takes daily walks by the little stream on her new farm, enjoying every step and loving how peaceful the trail is on early mornings.  She spends half an hour every evening under the stars, often with her new boyfriend who loves and cherishes her in ways she’s never known existed.  She is exhilarated by wonder of life.  Even though she still has intense money problems left over from her marriage, she doesn’t sit and weep over them—and after some crazy brainstorming ideas, her new business prospects have begun to improve enough that her old debts have dropped by more than a half.  She sends out a signal to the world that “I am loved and am always taken care of.”   The answer comes back in a wave of energy that makes her feel at peace with everything in her life, and she lives in a beautiful, happy, fruitful world.

It’s a pleasure to watch, but rather an uncommon story.

I have a lot of friends who read Tarot cards–and every last one of them is pretty good at it!   Invariably, when we get together, we somehow end up drooling over the beautiful artwork of the newest deck among us and “throwing cards” for each other.  Whether we do this separately or in groups, it always turns into a brainstorming session where there are new insights to be discovered in how we’re approaching our own peculiar situations.  I’ve noticed that no matter how many different groups and how many different readings, certain trends tend to emerge.

An extremely talented psychic who uses multiple decks of cards in his readings once told me that almost every reading he does falls into one of two categories and rarely does he see anything remotely differently.  They’re either about romance/relationships or they’re about–to a lesser degree–job/money/career situations.  These seem to be the two most important questions on seekers’ minds, and I can attest to that, based on the questions and interest my articles and books on the Law of Attraction receive and what people most want to attract into their lives.

When I was married and trying to get my writing career off the ground, my questions were always about…of course…my writing career.   When I was single and trying to figure out what my heart wanted now, my questions were about romance and relationships.  That’s rather typical, I suppose, that you’re more acutely aware of what you don’t have currently but would like to achieve.  These are those “rockets of desire” that Abraham-Hicks talks about in their Law of Attraction books.  My questions for the past year have been a mix of both as I’ve tried to navigate where it is I next want to go with my career and creative work as well as feeling the pull toward partnering up in a long-term relationship

The work issue comes up occasionally for me, and the readings are always very similar:  huge shake-ups–to the core–in my Department of Defense career field but with me being in a good place.  All that turbulence around me but I’m okay, happy even, and finding more and more balance between the day job with the nice paycheck and the creative work, like here at The Spiritual Eclectic or writing novels I love.  Regardless of which friend is reading, which deck is being used, where the reading takes place, or the date of the reading, this has been the trend over the past year, but with an ever increasing smoothing out for me in terms of my own path, even though the path is jagged all around me and drops off into nothingness at times for others.

The similarities in readings related to my romantic life have been even more remarkable.  They all reflect each other well, and there are rarely any surprises, although some interesting new developments are now showing on the horizon.  Throughout the past year, the theme that has emerged prominently has been one of “romance at a distance.”   Quite accurate for this past year.  Every man in my life was either already living hundreds of miles away or living close-by but deployed/moved within a few months of our meeting.  One, a young Navy Seal demi-god named Tyler, left for a sudden new assignment two weeks after our first date, though neither of us knew it when we met.  The only local romantic interest who didn’t leave the area during the year was away on business far more than he was at home.  So the repeated readings of “romance at a distance”–a term used independently by several readers–proved to be accurate.  It was also the fluidity I needed to get me through a year of much change and regeneration when I knew I didn’t need to be in a more settled relationship.

I was sure last fall that one of my relationships was going to be going into a higher spin–and not certain which one either–when Lord Midlight read for me, looking at a six-month period that ends today.  I had met someone new and interesting over the summer and the first words out of his mouth were, “I”m back from the desert and I’m not going anywhere.”  I knew absolutely that this man was going to be in my life through the late summer and autumn months.  Lord Midlight told me, without batting an eye, that these six months would be filled with “romance at a distance” and that I’d be perfectly content with it that way.  And…I was.  The new guy had too much baggage and though I tried off and on for five months to create a good connection with him, it fizzled until there was no fizz left.  Though it was an active dating period for me and I had some grand times with consistently sweet and sexy young men, my real romantic spice was with someone who was seldom in  town.  Little things happened between us that really endeared him to me, fulfilling my feelings of a higher spin in one of my relationships. Lord Midlight and the others who’d read for me over the autumn months were all right–romance at a distance but very hot when it was in town. And, with him, though I wanted to see him more often, I really liked our relationship the way it was.

The most recent readings I’ve had have all continued to show that trend, all repeating that same phrase:  “Lots of romance coming 2010, in a big way, and solidifying later in the year but at a distance–and you’ll be perfectly content with it that way.”

They’ve all found it necessary to point out that not only will I have a fulfilling relationship that has some aspect of physical distance between us, but that I’m–gasp!–okay with it that way.  There’s always some hint of confusion that I could be content if I’m not with someone 24/7.  The readers’ own filters become obvious as they, in light of their own relationships, don’t quite understand the contented nature I could find in one at a distance.

Having this pointed out to me so frequently over the past year, and especially over the past month or so, I’ve been thinking more about it and about what I want in a relationship.  Though I’m feeling more and more of the pull toward a long-term partnership as all sorts of things line up in my astrological transits–various Juno transits and conjunctions, Juno conjunct Vertex, solar return focuses on the fourth-fifth-seventh houses, progressed chart configurations–there’s a part of me that rebels.  I realized this only last night under circumstances that might make other women feel a little lonely or upset or needy.

I was alone in my home.  My daughter was out at a photo shoot.  Of the two men I had expected to see over the weekend, one had an adverse reaction to the H1N1 flu shot and the other had an obligation to his child.  Friends I’d hoped to spend some time with were out of town. My other daughter was busily finishing a task for her psychology research lab and didn’t have time to talk.  Even my 80-year-old mom was out checking on a sick friend and wasn’t available when I called.  I was most definitely alone and going to be that way for the evening.

But instead of feeling lonely–at all–I relished my time alone, my independence, my home with its jasmine incense burning and candles flickering and the aroma of dinner cooking in the oven.  There was a very sweet feeling in my house and I was content with it.  I also cranked out a ton of creative work that I enjoyed every second of.  I took a break and sat down to dinner and a Netflix episode of Torchwood and that’s when it hit me.  If I had a man in the house full-time, he’d be playing video games or watching TV or listening to distracting music while I was working on this particular night and would expect me by his side for the evening, even it I was more enthralled with my own work.  The truth is, for as much as I like having a man in my home, I like my alone-time, too.    So I’m perfectly content with having a great time with a guy when he’s around but I’m also content when he goes off and does his own thing–his job, his creative work, his friends, his athletics–and leaves me to mine.  I also had to wonder if maybe my enjoyment of my alone-time is an energy that pushes away having a live-in mate because I’m secretly not wanting to give up that part of me again as I did for so many years when I was married with small children and two careers at the same time.

These aren’t things we’re supposed to admit to a romantic partner–”I adore you but could you please go play with your friends for a little while now and let me have some me-time?”–and my last few romantic partners became defensive no matter how sweetly or logically I put it.  It’s strange even to admit it to myself because it’s a delicate balance.  However, my Tarot-reading friends have forced me to confront this part of myself that says I must, for my own sanity, hold aside a part of myself to relish just being me and me alone.  The rest of the time, I can be deliciously emotionally merged with someone but yes, there must be a little safe-room there for me to take sanctuary in and it’s in no way a rejection of anyone I care for.  Instead, it’s an affirmation of my caring for my own SELF.

So yeah, romance?  Bring it.  And if he’s not around 24/7  to hover over me or get underfoot, well, I guess I’ll just be content about having it that way.

Decluttering your home, your mind, and your life can help you find serenity. Meditation and clearing out clutter are two paths to peace of mind, more time, and less stress—and that means more happiness.

If someone says “peace of mind” and “inner peace,” you know exactly what they mean, even though the words themselves have little impact anymore. The phrases have become trite and overused, but that’s only because so many people have sought that feeling of serenity. Seeking that contented state of emotional and mental tranquility is a fundamental trait of us weary humans.

We live in complicated, complex times when our world is busy every second and our minds seldom shut down long enough to get a good night’s sleep. It’s nearly impossible to finish a small task without the distraction of an email, phone call, text message, or instant message to pull our attention away. How many of us remember all our passwords, especially if we have to change them frequently to intricate codes of letters, numbers, and symbols in nonsensical patterns? And don’t most of us keep calendars either online, on our walls, or on our PDAs to keep up with the never-ending flow of appointments? Sometimes, it seems like it’s all stressful gibberish banging around inside our heads and it’s too much to sort out or remember. All that mental clutter becomes noise, just as much as the physical clutter in our homes seems to suck away our energy, too. It all needs decluttering.

The clutter takes on a life of its own–It’s All Too Much! –and decluttering becomes a priority…if we can find the time to do it.

Meditation, among other tools, helps to release the inner clutter and find that quietness of mind that takes us away from the stresses of the day, shows us snippets of insights and creativity, and re-fuels and replenishes our clarity. Whether used a spiritual tool to get in touch with our Gods and our intuition or just as a way to sort out our busy minds, meditation is one of the best paths to decluttering the mind. It’s too bad the most people don’t understand how to meditate or have unrealistic or inaccurate expectations of the process.

Hopefully, most people are quicker at learning to meditate that I was. I tried it off and on for at least ten years, finally succeeding and succeeding extremely well once I put aside all my expectations of what meditation had to “look like.”

My attempts at meditation were also squelched over the years by its other foe: time. As part of a hypnosis “adventure” that involved most of the women in my family and their friends—they wanted hypnosis to help them with smoking cessation and weight loss and I wanted it to help me de-stress—I was taught the techniques of meditating. All I had to do was set aside 40 minutes a day. My two teachers were divorced empty nesters with what I considered to be oodles of time to meditate, and they could not understand when I explained that I couldn’t spare 40 minutes a day for myself because of my career during the day and my small children at night. They insisted I must take time for myself, regardless, and spend a full 40 minutes to complete their daily program and that I had to put myself first. Though they meant well, I took their insistence as criticism and failure, and I gave up for many years.

How I finally learned to meditate was to stop putting constraints on myself. I stopped trying to force my process to be exactly like someone else’s and I stopped insisting the results look like anyone else’s. I was able to figure out what worked for me, and now I meditate as frequently as I need to quiet my mind, decluttering it and reconnecting with that deep sense of self and safety inside me.

Time management techniques improve both your productivity and—if you’re willing to change your point of view—your quality of life. It’s not really about finding time to do all the things you must do, but finding time to be all the things you want to be.

I still recall standing in the public library one evening after work when I was a busy, chaos-wrestling 25-year-old career woman (“career woman” was the term we used back then). I set my briefcase aside as I handed the librarian my choices—at least 3 sets of time management courses on cassette tape and probably 40 hours’ worth of listening. Time management had become an obsession for me because I had so much to do and so much I wanted to do—I was working 80 hours a week and I barely made a dent in either my weekend chore list or my job assignments—and I was constantly taking on more. You’re heard of The 4-Hour Work Week?

Not for me! I felt lucky to get four hours’ of sleep a night.

I listened to the tapes while I commuted, while I gardened, and while I cleaned house, but I was disappointed. I was looking for the secret treasure trove of tips. Most of it, I’d heard before. Some of the productivity techniques were good, but most were either about delegating your work to someone lower on the corporate ladder when I was the lowest or how to cram every possible minute with yet another little task to juggle with the rest. Life became an elaborate checklist.

After a time, I became quite good at what I thought was time management. Or so I thought. I really wasn’t managing my checklists—they were managing me. But I sure looked great to everyone else! In fact, you might say that I became the Poster Girl for Productivity.

Friends and colleagues marveled at how much I managed to accomplish in the same 24-hour day that they managed to go to work, feed themselves, and watch a little TV. As I finished my advanced degree, got promoted to even more responsible jobs, and started both a family and home business—all at one time—I joked that someone should clone me. That, in hindsight, was a warning signal because if I needed to be cloned a few times, then I was doing too much task juggling and not enough living.

I was so very good at managing my workload and yet my non-stop complaint was, “I don’t have time” or “There’s never enough time to do ______.” How could I accomplish so much and not have time to enjoy the moments? Life became a blur of checklists.

The key to changing my way of thinking about time management and productivity was to understand that many resources are renewable. I can always make more money, for example. What I can’t make more of is time. It’s the one resource that, whether wasted or spent, is gone and will never be renewed. I found that I could hire out tasks I had no passion for, and often at a much less rate than the value I put on my time. I found that I could hire out jobs I would have spent weeks learning the basics of, just to become productive. I found that I could hire out parts of big projects to specialists and clerical help, which meant I had the fun parts of coming up with the money-making ideas and then integrating them into one package. I found that I really could delegate most of the things I hated doing and focus my time—my most precious resource—on what I really wanted to do…and more importantly, on being what I really wanted to be.