Letting Go of the Reins

A few days ago I wrote about the "ladybug effect" of aligning with our soul's intentions and then allowing ourselves to be supported by the Universe.  (Ladybugs, 1/17/16.)  As I open myself to what the second half of my life will look like, opportunities to explore have just come to me about items on my "Things to Explore List."  It happened again today.

One of my items was "architecture/design."  I have no illusions that I will become an architect, but I have been passionate about the appreciation of architecture for most of my life. When I was younger, I liked the regularity and predictability of classical architecture, but certainly over the last two decades what has truly excited me has been modern architecture--20th and 21st Century.

I've made two trips to Spain to metaphorically worship at the fount of 20th Century art and architecture in Barcelona, making a 10-hour side journey to Bilbao to see Frank Gehry's marvelous Guggenheim Museum masterpiece.  The poetry of Frank Lloyd Wright's "Falling Water" mesmerizes me, and when I visited New York City with a friend a couple years ago, Wright's Guggenheim was the only thing on my list of this to see.

Today in a friend's Facebook post about a totally different subject, there was a magnificent building in the background.  I used my snipping tool to send the image to another friend who lives in the city with the question, "What's this?"  I discovered another architect.  I don't have to understand where this part of my exploration will end.  All I have to notice is that my heart races a bit like a young woman in love when I see these buildings.  It was just on my list and, like ladybugs, it came to me so that I could notice what brings me to life.

Literally, almost in parallel, I was listening to a podcast of "People's Pharmacy," a show to which I had listened for decades before moving to Washington. My local station didn't carry it. I just discovered their podcast, and  I've been binge-listening to their programs from the last two months. I was intrigued by an hour-long interview with neurosurgeon Dr. Allan Hamilton, who also trains horses and wrote a book with a similar title to mine--Lead with Your Heart in the Horse Pen and in Your Life.  Well, the title was similar until the Horse Pen part, but many of the topics were similar.

About the time the picture of the new-to-me architect's building was landing in my email inbox, I was listening to Hamilton describe a situation he'd been in with a skittish horse.  He was in the mountains when a storm blew up.  His particular horse was afraid of water.  If you haven't had the privilege of being in the mountains, especially above the tree line, when a storm blows in, it is about the most terrifying thing I can imagine, as lightning flashes all around you.  I can't even imagine being on a skittish horse at such a moment.

Hamilton said that his first instinct was to try to control the horse because of its history, but almost as quickly he was moved to just let go. Hamilton said he tied the reins, laid them down, and let go.  The horse found its way down with no episodes with the horse's fear, and soon they were in the parking lot.

The other half of the ladybugs story is the laying-down-the-reins part.  Putting on the list is the first part. Receiving is the third.  In the middle is putting down the reins.  I haven't exerted a second's time on my "Things to Explore List;" they've just happened, and I've been receptive.

However, in a very different way, I've been trying to make something happen with this blog that doesn't want to happen. When I was writing every day a couple years ago, I had around 700 regular readers all over the globe.  I have no idea how they found me but some of the same ones were there every day.  I was particularly interested in three people in Albania that read almost every day.  I did nothing to stimulate these readers or lead them to the blog.  I metaphorically let go of the reins, and they found me.

Then, as I wrote more rarely, readership dropped off to almost nothing.  Now that I am writing regularly, I wanted more readers again.  It's what we're supposed to want to happen, isn't it?  But, the truth is, I think I write as much to help myself on my journey as I do for others, so why should it matter?  Getting readers had never been an intention for the blog; it was always about sharing my journey and hoping others would benefit from it. If a few people read it, and find it helpful, shouldn't that be enough for me?

I think it should, but I haven't been satisfied.  A friend taught me the rudiments of Twitter, and a couple weeks ago we began tweeting about my posts.  Almost immediately my readership grew to 6-7 times its previous low readership.  Not a bad start, I thought.  What else could I do?

Last week I asked three people who I knew to be regular readers if they would retweet our messages. None of us are really tweeters, but they have been supportive, but an interesting thing has occurred. The number of readers over the last week has dropped...to fewer than before my "efforting," a term sometimes used when we try to make our intentions happen, rather than being receptive to allowing them to occur.  (My apologies to my friends that I've engaged in my efforting.)

Maybe I am only writing this blog for myself and for a handful of readers.  If that is the case, that's fine because I get benefit from writing, and they value reading it.  So, I am taking Hamilton's advice and putting down the reins.  We might also use a phrase I've used in this blog before: "Let go and let God."  But, no more efforting.

Endings...Beginnings...

While I am by no means an authority, for a long time I've been interested in the Jewish mystical study of numbers.  I apologize for anyone out there, who may actually be an expert in this field if I in any way misrepresent the study of numerology, but I will do my best to share what I have taken from my limited exposure that applies to what has been on my heart lately. I do so completely from memory because, as often happens, I apparently loaned my book to someone who hasn't returned it...and I don't remember who that was.

Numerology looks at the Jewish Tree Of Life, a set of spiritual lessons, which each person works through in cycles of nine years.  Each lesson has a feminine aspect and a masculine dimension. Throughout our lives, we repeat each of the nine lessons, one per year, and then we start the cycle over again. Some years the focus is the masculine side of the lesson; other years it is the feminine. Similar to the hero's journey about which I've written previously, although the basic lesson is the same each time, we go through more advanced versions of the lesson. We go through the cycles individually, and planetarily.

The cycle has been on my heart because the energy of the planet is now transitioning from the end of the cycle to the beginning of a new one.  The transition began at the Jewish New Year (October 2-4 this year.)  It will end at the Winter Solstice (December 21.)  During that three and a half months, it is our spiritual work to "clean house."  2016 has been a "9" year, which is about endings.  People often leave jobs, even careers, end relationships, sell houses, and let go other significant parts of our lives that have served their purpose, but with which we are finished.

By December 21, we should have cleaned out anything that is not part of a new beginning for us. What we carry into the 21st will be with us for another nine years.  I've had this on my mind, but all of the sudden this week I realized that I just have a month left, and I haven't done much cleaning out. Frequent reader of this blog and my friend Amy Frost told me in the Super Moon, which occurred a couple weeks ago, that we should write down anything we wanted to let go of and then set the paper on fire, letting the smoke release the energy of the past into the atmosphere.  That was a busy day, but I did some general letting go into smoke that day.

But I know I have way too much baggage to carry with me into the future.  Let me count the ways.

Besides the energy of spiritual baggage, there is some literal baggage I am dealing with.  Almost a year ago, construction in my apartment building's storage area required me to bring up everything from my storage unit.  It has been sitting in my bedroom closet since then.  I knew I needed to clean out, but I haven't made doing so a priority.

When I left my last job in August, I hastily packed up anything that was mine personally and brought five boxes home with me...also in my bedroom closet.  (Fortunately, I have a bedroom closet big enough to party in.)  I know there is a lot to be left behind there as well, but sorting through my office boxes has not been a priority either.

I thought I was going to have the time to just sit in my closet this weekend and sort, but I have allowed the approaching holidays and associated activities encroach on my time. I am not sure whether that is avoidance or choosing my future to be with friends...or a little of both. While I make an effort to keep my Sabbath sacred, I have decided that this spiritual sorting exercise is an appropriate Sabbath activity, and I will sit in my closet on Sunday afternoon.

I also have a desk at home that I have been sorting through for two weeks, and I am close to seeing the surface of at least a third of it now.  There is more, for sure, but great progress.  What remains are my time-consuming projects, and I am not sure when I will find the time, but doing so is a priority for me now.

There are bookshelves that are bulging as my appetite for new books always exceeds the time I have to read them.  My folder of clipped recipes was so full at the beginning of last week that it wouldn't close.  I am grateful for Thanksgiving and Christmas menu planning for nudging me to begin to go through it two evenings earlier in the week.  There is more, but I have found that some of the recipes just don't look good any more, and pitching them has been easy.

When I think about what I want to take into the next nine years, though, more important than cleaning out "stuff" is being conscious of what habits I am ready to let go of and what new ones I want to choose for my future.  As I reflect back over the last nine years, I think that this cycle has been about the time period during which I've forfeited the intentional life I had built and allowed myself to be overtaken by work, in every variety.

For decades, I ate healthfully, exercised daily, meditated at least once a day, did extended meditation retreats, danced several times a week, practiced gratitude daily, spent time with friends and laughed a lot.  Morsel by morsel, most of that has slipped out of my life since 2007, and I want to reclaim "my" life and let go of whatever has consumed me.

New habits are formed in 30 days. I could be overwhelmed as I look at all the new habits I want to form.  However, at least for me, I respond well to any positive change in my life.  Intuitively, I know that if I change one thing, changing others seems much easier.  I feel it is almost like flipping a switch back to the "real Kay," rather than changing eight different habits.

In my as-yet-unpublished book Choice Point, which I thought was "finished" in 1997, I wrote that life should be a meditation, and in each moment we should consciously ask, "Is this a 'yes' or is this a 'no?'"  When I think about reclaiming my life, the question I need to ask isn't will I exercise or not today, it is "Will I be who Kay's soul intended her to be today?"  A single question, applied to every situation, asked consciously.  Life as a moment-by-moment meditation.

What I know in my heart is that all I want to carry into the next nine years is the consciousness to ask that question a 1,000 times every day...and the courage to act on what I know.

Death of a Dream

During my vacation in September, I read The Pilgrimage, a novel by best-selling author Paulo Coehlo's.  It had a number of several exercises that I thought might be helpful in my upcoming retreat, which I dog-eared, as well as a some passages that I wanted to note.  (When I have finished with a book, it is well-marked with lots of pages turned down.)

The night before I started my retreat, I pulled it out and looked over some of the passages, and one which spanned several pages was about the death of a dream.  Now clearly I had not just read this passage but had read it carefully enough that I'd marked it for a return visit, but I really didn't remember it.  Yet as I read it on Thursday evening, I did so with great attention.  In the almost month since my retreat, I have continued to "chew" on the passages.

The passage is a conversation between a spiritual teacher/guide and his student on the Compostelo de Santiago pilgrimage in northern Spain.  The teacher is telling his student how/why our dreams die.  "The first symptom of the process of our killing our dreams," the teacher says, "is our lack of time." Those who have read this blog for awhile will know that this immediately grabbed my interest.  My dream of writing regularly, even for this blog, has seemed to be gobbled up by lack of time.*

As I reread this passage, I looked at it differently.  The teacher doesn't say the dream dies from lack of time.  He said that we kill our dreams because of our failure to make them priorities--to make time for them.  Suddenly, the lack of time for writing has moved from a passive thing that is out of my control to the deliberate and active action of killing my own dream.  I am keenly aware of the choices that I make at this busy time of the year.

"The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties.  Because we don't want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life...we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those engaged in battle.  For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what's important is only that they are fighting the good fight."

Hmmm. Fighting for our dreams. Sir Winston Churchill once admonished: "Never give in. Never give in.  Never, never, never, never..."  I know that fighting the never-give-up fight for all of our dreams is not possible or even wise, which means that we have to choose the ones that we really fight for and which we allow to languish.  Yet, more often than not, I do not make conscious decision to let go of one dream so that I can consciously put more energy--more fight, if you will--into a more important dream.

"The third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace..."** I am passionate about using my special talents and gifts.  Doing so may be seen as a "dream."  But I do have more than one gift.  I like to think writing is a gift.  So are dance, gardening, and cooking.  When I do any of those things, I do fall into what approximates a peaceful meditation.  I lose track of time.

When I write, I also lose track of time, but I also wrestle with angels as I struggle to find the truth of what I want to say.  When I was younger, I was much more certain what was true.  Now, not so much.  I am reminded best-selling writer and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck's work The Four Stages of Faith in which he described those who were most dogmatic as having a lower level of faith than those who have gone through a period of questioning and understand that faith is almost never black and white.  My writing dream may have succumbed to the more peaceful passions of dance, gardening and cooking. Questioning is work, often hard work.

What bothered me most as I first read, and continues to annoy me when I reread Coehlo's description of the death of a dream is what happens when we allow a dream to die.  "...Dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being.  We become cruel to those around us..., and one day the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death."***

I am not suicidal, nor do I expect to be.  However, I have from time to time begun to feel the rot of dead dreams within me...before slipping back into the peace of auto-piloting through life rather than fighting for them.  I don't believe I've been cruel, but I certainly do become irritable from time to time.  Some days I just don't like myself much, and I believe those to be the days when I feel the rot of abandoned dreams most strongly.

In five weeks I am supposed to leave the temporary assignment I've enjoyed so much and return to my regular job.  Over the last two weeks, I have occasionally felt physically ill thinking about going back, even though I am returning to an almost completely new leadership team.  My new boss is someone I've worked with from another location, and I liked working with him a lot.  There is some toxicity left among staff that I dread, but as I've pondered, in my heart of hearts I am certain that my nausea is about going back into a situation in which I fear that my dreams will once again succumb to the fast pace of day to day work that doesn't inspire me.  What The Upanishads call "The sleeping state that men call waking."

I will write more on another day about consciously choosing to let go of a dream, but, for today, my learning is to just keep my dreams conscious until I intentionally let go of them, rather than letting them rot and making me a person I don't like very much.



*Coehlo, The Pilgrimage, P. 57
**Coehlo, The Pilgrimage, P. 58
***Coehlo, The Pilgrimage, P. 59

Being Flexible with the Universe

As I've written in this blog a number of times before, I love to take a few days at the Jewish New Year to reflect on the past year and to imagine the path before me in the next year. I choose to use this time to set my intentions for the year ahead. The date of the holiday fluctuates, but it is generally between mid-September and early-October.  This year it began at sundown on September 13.

I am not Jewish, but coinciding the timing for such reflection with the holiday makes sense to me, perhaps because I spent so many years, either as a teacher or student, starting a school year in the fall. I love to learn, and the anticipation on new lessons always excited me. Similarly, my reflections inevitably reveal lessons from the year past and point to potential learning in the year ahead.

Or maybe the timing makes sense to me because I am a gardener, and fall marks the conclusion of the harvest and the dropping of seeds into the ground to sprout the following spring. It is always rewarding to consider what I've grown in the past year and to wonder what I will seed in the year ahead.

For whatever reason, taking a few days of silence at this time of year has become essential to my spiritual growth and development for the last 20 years.  You can understand my consternation, then, when I discovered that this year's somewhat early holiday was going to occur during a short trip to Spain that I'd booked some time ago. I was book-ended on the trip with work commitments and a training session, making it difficult to extend my vacation in either direction. What would I do?  Fortunately or otherwise, the pace of activity leading to the trip overcame thoughts of figuring out what I would do.

As it worked out, I was in Barcelona on the 13th.  I love architecture, and there is nowhere that I've been which is more richly endowed with extraordinary edifices as those seeded by Antoni Gaudi about Barcelona.  At about noon on the 13th, as I sat soaking in the light and color, awestruck again as I'd been during an earlier visit in 2012, the date occurred to me.  For someone who loves architecture, there could not have been a more spiritual setting for reflection.  So I sat and reflected.

(For  more images, see: https://www.google.com/search?q=pictures+of+la+sagrada+familia+barcelona&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CDgQ7AlqFQoTCMz83Lif_scCFYVWPgodmpQFtA&biw=864&bih=494#imgrc=5xYv7yXQlAZ4LM%3A)

The funny thing is that when I'd shared my dilemma about not having my meditation retreat with my friend Amy a few weeks earlier, she'd suggested that I find a church wherever I was and meditate. Without conscious intention, that is exactly what had occurred. Over the next 24 hours, I kept bumping into experiences that stimulated reflection, and the day ended with me sitting and reflecting in the Cathedral of Barcelona, the only Gothic cathedral in the city.

Furthermore, during the week I was in Spain, I ran into one situation after another that encouraged me to look inward. (More on some of those in the next few days.) So, my time of reflection was quite different than had been my norm, but by being flexible with the Universe and letting it leading me where I needed to be, I accomplished the intention of my annual retreat in a very different way. (And for my listening and flexibility, the Universe threw in some very good Spanish food and wine as a bonus--have to say that really beat my usual fasting regime.)

Hanging On To What I Don't Want

I rarely give advice when I am coaching.  I prefer to let the session be a self-discovery process.  On those occasions when I do give advice, however, what usually happens sometime between instantly and five minutes later is that I realize the advice I gave my coaching client is advice I should have given myself.

Today the advice was to be wary of hanging on to things that my client doesn't really want just because they are hers now.  Almost as the words were coming out of my mouth, I thought, "Kay, you should be listening to this advice yourself."

Over the years, there have been others that have tried to hang on when they shouldn't.  One pattern that I have experienced is the person who has a job they've never really liked or wanted but they've had it so long that they are terrified of leaving it or losing it.  One executive that I coached needed to tell his CEO something, which he knew would anger him.   I asked him what the worst thing that could happen would be.  He sat quietly for a few seconds and said, "I'd be fired."  He smiled, shook his head gently, and continued, "from a job I never really wanted.  Freedom: that is what would happen."  Hanging on to his own personal prison.

A heart surgeon was oppressed by the stress of the job.  When I asked him why he continued, "Because my father wanted me to be a heart surgeon, and my brothers are heart surgeons.  It's the 'family business': my father wanted me in the family business."  Hanging on to what he never wanted.

In the work I do, it is really quite common to have a new manager with functional expertise to micromanage their staff because they don't want to let go of what they are "expert" at doing in order to grow into a new role.  Unable to step up to what they've wanted because they are hanging on to what they had been yearning to leave.

There are lots of other examples, but in both my own life and in those of the many clients who have wrestled with letting go of something with which they are finished.  In many ways the leap of stepping into what we want and letting go of what we don't is one of faith--faith that the other side will be better than where we are and not some the-grass-is-greener illusion.

After I gave my client advice today, I pondered: what am I hanging on to that I don't want.  A laugh-out-loud moment followed: let me count them. It seemed for a bit that every thought passing through me brought another and another. 

A couple weeks ago I wrote about feeling like I was pregnant--about to give birth to something new, maybe even a whole new life. (11/2/13)  A woman about to give birth becomes something new: she becomes a mother.  That role doesn't come with an instruction manual.  She must risk moving into a totally new world with no assurance that she will do well...or even can do it at all.   The baby can't wait for her to calculate her odds for success; it will be born. 

In the instant that she becomes a mother, she lets go of who she was before the birth.  Unless, of course, that she decides that she can't do it.  Well, of course, that is crazy.  She can't decide when she is going into labor that she isn't going to have the baby.  I think that is where I am.  Yet my hands are locked in a white-knuckled grip on what I don't want.  Tonight I will ask for help--help letting go of what I don't want, so that I can give birth to this new life.