To Thine Own Self Be True

As I settle into the final day of my Winter 2017 meditation retreat, two lessons have emerged in countless forms.  The first and most constant has been the question: "Where am I in my becoming?" Interrogating me in almost every thought, its answers have taken me closer and closer to my Truth.   The companion haunt has been the challenge to move away from my viewpoint and explore whatever comes up from every perspective.

I should not be surprised then that in my morning meditation on my last day that they once again present themselves to take me deeper. Most of all, they have distilled to its essence most of the challenges with which I've grappled over these days.

Over the course of this retreat, when I've meditated, I've slowly and deeply breathed in "Where am I in my becoming?"  My exhales have also been slow as I breathed out the name of God.  Today I was surprised that with each exhale what came from my inner voice, "To thine own self be true," Polonius's admonition from Shakespeare's Hamlet.  Polonius continues:

            "And it must follow, as the night the day
            Thou canst not then be false to any man."

Over the last day and a half, I'd been accumulating "material" for a forgiveness exercise that I often facilitated with coaching clients for my Intentional Living Intensives.  Three lists are compiled:

• Those people you need to forgive
• Those people you need to ask for forgiveness
• Things for which you must forgive yourself

I've done the exercise many times with clients and a few times previously with myself.  I've never witnessed a time when the results weren't dramatic.  So, it shouldn't be a surprise that as my theme for yesterday was "Trust and Relationships" that the forgiveness exercise came to mind.  I'd expected to do it last night, but when I did my sundown meditation, my guidance was that the time wasn't yet right. I spent the evening probing other aspects of my consciousness, adding a few more items to my lists along the way.

As I shared in my post of two days ago*, I was chagrined to think how selfish I'd been when I explored the topic of scheduling time from the perspective of those who wanted to schedule. Since then, I've learned something surprising from almost every lesson I've had in front of me when I examined it from different perspectives.

When "Where am I in my becoming?" was coupled with "To thine own self be true," my forgiveness exercise changed dramatically.  Now, my guidance was to look at these lists from the perspective of what my role was in creating every one of these situations.  While I don't think I had much role in eliciting my mother's treatment of the newborn me, every other item on my list, I could have influenced if I'd been true to myself.

There are a companion pair of saws that are often used among self-help practitioners:

• We teach what we need to know
• We write what we need to learn

Over decades, central foci of my work have been to communicate, listen, ask questions, dialogue--learn from each other, and collaborate. Whether I've been facilitating workplace Bickersons, strategic planning, or culture change or writing a book or this blog, these topics have always been central to my work.  When I looked at my forgiveness lists, I could almost always have influenced the outcomes if I'd done just those things...but I hadn't.  I hadn't to my own self been true: I hadn't been true to what I knew in my heart. And, I hadn't be doing what I'd been teaching for decades.

Years ago when I was facilitating an intentional culture creation exercise with a small group of leaders from Hewlett-Packard for their newly created Line of Business, a key player and the person who had hired me for the exercise came to me on the first break.  She asked me, "Do you know what your gift is?"  Duh! I stumbled.  "I guess I don't."  She continued to say, "You are a master at asking questions."

At the time, I thought it was a dumb gift.  Since then, a number of people have made observations about how a single question completely changed how they'd looked a challenge.  I don't think it is such a dumb gift now, but as I revisited my forgiveness lists this morning, the most common failure on my part was the failure to ask questions--before I got into a situation, when I was in it and something didn't feel right, when someone did something that didn't add up.  I've just made assumptions, which often times were incorrect and which eventually resulted in something hurtful occurring.

All of that brings me back to "Where I am in my becoming."  On this mapless journey of spirit, I am at the place of honoring my Truth...honoring what I know in my heart.  When I am present, I can no longer point a finger without recalling there are three more pointing back at me. If I don't ask the questions that will help me know whether the assumptions I am making are accurate ones, who will? In the clear daylight of open communication, I can be true to myself and true to those with whom I am in relationships.

*"Seeking all Sides of a Challenge," 1/3.

Where Am I On my Becoming?

"Where am I on my becoming?"  That question has haunted me nearly since I began this retreat.  I am intrigued, and playing with Rabbi Kula's description of commandments in Yearnings as things to which we are to examine from the inside-out, I continue to play with it as I breathe the question in and out.  (See yesterday's post for the commandment.)

Knowing where I am on my becoming would be much easier if I had been handed a map at birth to which I could look periodically to see how I am doing.  Is my journey one from Portland, Oregon, to Miami, using the Pythagorean route of the shortest distance between two points being a straight line? In which case it would be significantly more helpful in knowing where I am on my becoming if I could see I was in Boise, Denver, or Atlanta...or, dread, in Boston.

But, my route might be from Portland, Maine, to Miami, meandering the Inter-coastal Waterway, or from Seattle to Houston.  It might be the T.S. Eliot route:

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -- T.S. Eliot*

Maybe where I am on my becoming is somewhere between Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, knowing it again for the first time.  (Since I haven't been there since high school, and only then rarely, knowing it again for the first time wouldn't be much of a stretch.)

I still have to believe that if we listen and follow what we know in our hearts, they will inevitably take us on the right route, assuming there is a right route. My sense is that our hearts tell us what is True North for us but Kula would probably challenge whether there is a right or wrong route or if it matters. Perhaps dallying in Philadelphia might prove rewarding, even if it is out of the way. At this point, I am so unclear (a good thing, I think,) I am not sure there is a wrong route.  I am, after all, the maven of "not-knowing as a way of life." I am pretty confident that we will know were have gone astray if we aren't truly present to the journey or if a stop sucks the life out of us and we linger there too long. 

As I ponder "Where I am on my becoming," I've had a compelling desire to get on a bus and ride across the country, stopping wherever I feel called to stop. (Alas, I am not free to do that right now, but arrangements could be made to do so soon.)

Like Alice Through the Looking Glass, I am not sure of much.  I could be falling down or up, but I am assured that friends cannot be neglected, and I've probably been doing a bit much of that in recent years. So, where am I on my becoming?  I cannot know for sure, but at about 12:45 this morning I felt like the Universe had flipped my switches and I was more alive than I've been probably since 2000.  Every cell in my body tingled.  I awakened lighter, more joyful, and definitely more hopeful.   So the journey continues...





*Brainy-quote.com"

Seeking All Sides of a Challenge

On November 11, the Veterans' Day holiday, I had the opportunity to participate in a simulation of The Bigger Game.*  If you imagine a room-size game board that roughly approximates a Tic-Tac-Toe grid, you will get the idea.  On each of the squares is written a word.  At the start of the game, the facilitators instruct participants to survey the words and to choose the one to which they are most called.

I was probably the first to choose, and I moved to "Hunger."  Now while I might have been a little physically hungry, due to oral surgery two days earlier and limited intake of solid food, but that was not the reason I chose "Hunger."  We were told that "Hunger" is that "deep 'fire in my belly' impact that must be satiated."  I felt it in my soul, and I've felt it for a long time as I've increasingly lost myself in my work.  Choosing "Hunger" was a no-brainer.

Yesterday, after my post, I went to my over-flowing bookcase filled with unread books.  I usually like to start one of my retreats with inspirational reading, and I was immediately drawn to Yearnings, by Rabbi Irwin Kula.  The book was copyrighted in 2006 and the pages were yellowed.  Like many of my unread books, I am not sure how long I'd had it.  Yearnings seemed to follow nicely my call to "Hunger" in The Bigger Game.

I am not sure that Yearnings ended up being exactly what I expected, but as always occurs when I allow myself to be led, it has nudged me in places that I needed to explore.  Although the book makes references to several faith traditions and some non-religious traditions, the rabbi leans heavily on stories from the Abrahamic faith traditions.

In explaining the creation "poem," as he calls it, he relates that the phrase that is most often translated into "Where are you?" in English at the point when God comes to the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge might more accurately be translated as "Where are you in your becoming?"  Rather than asking a question with a one word answer, God is asking those he has created a question about where they are in their process of knowing themselves.  I was quite moved by this question, and I have used it several times to guide meditations in my retreat.

Later in the book, Kula talks about the Ten Commandments in a different way than I've generally heard them discussed.  Rather than being edicts, we are encouraged to explore our actions around each of the 10 topics fully and completely: to look at them inside-out, if you will, and really understand the ramifications of what is being asked from each "edict."

"Where are you in your becoming?" is particularly poignant for me as I have thought about a number of questions with which I've openly wrestled in this blog.  When coupled with exploring every side of a topic, my meditations have predictably taken me to places I'd rather not see in myself, like arrogance, Narcissism, and even selfishness.

The two topics with which I've often grappled in this post that kept coming up in my meditations when enlightened by these new perspectives were those of getting "stuff" I didn't want and scheduling time with people rather than being spontaneous.  I realized that there is a major flaw in my understanding about what to do with divine guidance that we receive.  Is that perhaps, I've asked myself, why Choice Point, my long unsold book on the topic of walking moment-by-moment as we are guided, still gathers dust on my shelf?

What moved me as I explored each of these topics more fully was what the people who want to schedule and want to give me stuff must feel.  My spontaneous approach is fine for a single person with little family, but when I think of one friend with a very busy job involving travel, two grown kids and a husband to keep up with, and an art interest she is growing, I thought how terribly selfish of me. I should want to work with her to find a time when she can be available.  When I only thought about my relationship with God and where I was to follow, I totally neglected her needs.  I am so sorry!

Similarly, when I thought about the people who persist in giving me stuff, I recalled how as children we had a special aunt and uncle who refused gifts.  They were younger than I am now, but I am sure that not unlike me, they were at that stage in life where they really wanted to live smaller.  When they were not much older, they sold their larger home in Ohio and moved to a smaller one in Florida. From my current perspective, I totally understand their desire to avoid adding "stuff," but I really didn't when I was 9.  I really don't want stuff, but looking at the concern from different perspectives has been humbling.

Now, back to the question about "Where am I in my becoming?" For today, I am certainly becoming more humble, and I have new perspectives to bring to what seem like easy questions to me. In The Alchemy of Fear I wrote about who we are becoming as a solid endpoint.  "Becoming" as a process offers me much more opportunity to grow and fewer excuses to not get moving.

In the bigger Universe of "Where am I in my becoming?" I have a still-unwinding, albeit very different, perspective on what it means to follow guidance.

I am reminded of an image I used to create on stage when I was delivering a speech.  It would start with a single heart (Valentine kind.)  Then I'd draw another...and another...and another.  Finally, I would connect them with a ribbon and say that every person in the world is connected through that ribbon, heart to heart to heart.  That image now takes on new meaning.  Rather than a one dimensional relationship to divine guidance, I now see a complex, multi-dimensional relationship in which we are all supporting each other in who we are becoming and how we will change the world.




*The Bigger Game: www.biggergame.com. Our game was facilitated by David Andrews (davidtoddandrews@gmail.com) and Catherine Allen (catherine@allenimpactgroup.com.)

Doing Something That Scares

I am solidly in the Hallmark Channel demographic, and during the holidays I fully embrace the back-to-back rom-coms that always have happy endings.  In one of them yesterday, I was struck by a line spoken by one of the minor characters to our protagonist.  She said, "You should do something every day that scares you."

I've heard the line before, but perhaps because it landed on New Year's Day, it has hauntingly lingered in my memory.  When I sat to meditate later in the evening, I pondered when I last did something that scared me.  Maybe 10 years ago when I pulled up stakes and moved to Washington without a job?  I recall feeling terrified six months earlier when I had given my notice at both of my teaching jobs, but at the actual time of the move, it just felt right.  In fact, I have done some things since then that maybe should have scared me, but they felt so clearly true to my heart that I recall no fear.  (Giving my notice on a "good government job" last spring when I didn't have another, maybe should have felt some fear?)

Then I melted away the boundaries of my denial and was honest with myself: no, I haven't done anything that scared me in a while.  But, as I reflected on the absence of fear-inducing activity, I realized that I've been running from the things that scared me, while using excuses.

Last week a friend who had lost his wife last summer wrote that over Thanksgiving he'd taken a retreat.  I wrote back congratulating him on his courage.

You see, I knew the courage required for several days of silence. I used to take four-day silent meditation retreats twice a year. I did it for at least 15, maybe 20 years. About two days in, I'd always spend a few hours "wrestling with my angels."  I'd discover something about myself that I didn't like. I'd heal it, and at the end of the retreat I would almost certainly be a more whole person.  Yet I knew that "wrestling with my angels," while reward-producing at the end, was terrifying when I was in it. My friend was courageous to take his retreat.

As I reflected last night, I recalled my correspondence.  I couldn't remember when I had displayed the courage to take a four-day silent retreat.  First I had gone from twice a year to once a year. Along the way, four days became three and then two, even though I knew that it took at least two days of silence to get deep enough to find my angels and then wrestle with them.  On occasion, I would start a retreat but get restless and, instead of staying with my restlessness, I'd abandon my efforts.  Is that something I should admit that I am scared of doing?  Absolutely!  So, as soon as I publish this post, I will begin my first four-day silent retreat in years.

But there were other truths that bubbled up last night when I was honest about doing what scared me. I've used the busyness of my schedule and the exhaustion from my work as an excuse to not write in this blog with regularity.  Almost every time I write, I wrestle with a truth that I know in my heart but would rather run from.  If I keep moving and don't write, I don't have to face those truths.

For long stretches of my adult life I haven't even owned a television, and for even longer stretches when I had one, it would sit for months without being turned on.  Increasingly, I've come home and turned on the TV as a way to escape my truth.  The truth is that I miss having someone to come home to. While I've lived along for 23 years now, I don't think I am well suited to living alone. The noise of the TV makes me feel like someone is in my apartment with me.

I have laughed that I have dinner with Stephen Colbert every evening as I watch his late-night show from the evening before while I eat.  Occasionally, I substitute John Oliver or Samantha Bee. I like to laugh, and one of the things that I miss most about living alone is the side-splitting laughter that erupts spontaneously over the silliest of things.  If I dine with comedians, I can be assured laughter daily.

That's where the Hallmark Channel comes in again.  I love being assured a happy ending.  I think that sometimes I am afraid my life will not have a happy ending, and these happy movies, while never without a stumbling block, always have a feel-good finish.

Somehow I've fallen into a television addiction--a verifiable addiction, because I use it to separate from my feelings.  I turned off the television at 10 last night, and I don't plan to turn it back on for a week.  Dinner alone without humor...now that scares me.

In my silent retreat I am going to figure out what else scares me and build the courage to do something every day in 2017 that scares me. In my heart I know that a year from now, I will be closer to reclaiming the Self I came into this life to be.

Being in the Driver's Seat of My Life

As I contemplate this new year, I want to make sure that my heart and I are in the driver's seat.  I am not sure exactly how it happened, but in recent years the pace of my life has been accelerating such that I feel like I am exhaustingly busy...all the time...and yet at the same time, I have very little time for what is important to me.

Readers will recognize the "no-time-for-exercise" and "no-time-for-writing" laments.  Those are priorities in my life.  How did they get pushed to the margins?

Yesterday I read part of an article by a women who entered 2015 with a pledge to exercise every day. She too was very busy, so she knew that it would be important to bite off manageable exercise chunks.  Her goal for that year was "15 for '15." She would commit to exercising for 15 minutes every day.  It had to be hard exercise: she had to sweat and get her heart rate up.  She knew that no matter how busy she was, she could get in 15 minutes each day. When she wrote the article toward the end of '16 she had not only accomplished her goal for 2015, but was on track to do so again for the year just ended.*

I was inspired.  Even on the busiest of days, I can do 15 minutes of exercise.

As soon as I had that realization, I had another reckoning.  I could write 15 minutes every day.  Now that is certainly something I know in my heart is core to who I am.  Decades before most people begin to show visible signs of arthritis in their hands, two of my fingers bulge and one is bent.  These are the exaggerated manifestations of signs of the writer in me that I've carried since I was 10.  How could I not give writing 15 minutes a day?

These seem "no-brainers." Yet there have often been days in the last decade or two when I have hardly had time to go to the bathroom or take on nourishment.  At the same time, I did manage to attend a lot of useless meetings.  I met with people I didn't care to spend time with, out of a sense of obligation.  Just that quickly, my 15 minutes of writing and exercise evaporated.

Sometime ago, and I'm not sure when it was, I discovered that if I were to spend time with people I cared about I needed to schedule the time.  FOMO--fear of missing out--had grabbed hold of my calendar.  I relish the time that Amy Frost and I spend twice month, sharing our intentions for the spiritual journey.  When I had the opportunity to spend more than a day with my college roommate in October, I realized how much I miss her and how I value her presence in my life.  I am so excited that we've committed to walking and talking together, something we enjoy, but this time, thanks to the wireless world, by phone.  On bad weather days, we will Skype and drink tea (her) and coffee (me.) Another valued friend has reached out to schedule Skype with me.  I can't remember when we last had time together, but I cringe to think it was last winter or spring.

At the core of my spiritual knowing is that we are intended to listen to our guidance and follow it...when it is given.  I have great stories to tell about the magic that occurred when I did so, and equally disappointing tales of when I didn't follow or followed two or three years later.  Yet, whether the commitment is to lunch, to talk with a friend of a friend, or to finish teaching a course which I'd committed to teach until May when my guidance in February is to move out of state, those commitments get in the way of my followership.

I also believe that the very best things are the spontaneous ones.  I used to call another friend at the end of a work day, and we'd hatch a plan for a thrown-together dinner or a movie or just a walk around the Mall. Once we created a beautiful stool for my kitchen over a bottle of prosecco.  (She's the artist; I did the grunt painting. It was fun nonetheless.) As I have less and less spontaneous time, we've spent less and less time together, an incredible disappointment to me.

And, it isn't just people.  I've wanted to take some MOOCs--free massive online courses offered by prominent universities.  Just this morning I discovered an inspiring design class and a future-cities architecture class, both offered by the University of Zurich.  I can feel my heart racing even as I write about these two topics for which I have great interest.

I also found a health and wellness certification class for coaches, an endorsement for a topic for which has interested me since my grandmother first talked to me about vitamins and organic vegetables when I was 10. I've been enrolled in the class twice before and had to drop it. Some of these things have to be scheduled or I miss out.

As I stand on the cusp of an era in which I've pledged to be true to my heart, which do I do?  Do I schedule things so that I make sure the important things happen, or do I hold the space for the spontaneous, knowing I will miss much without it and also knowing that I will miss much without scheduling?  How to I remain true to both of these things? And, how do I make sure I still have time for the 15 minutes of exercise and writing.

As I write this, I am reminded that beginning from my childhood, I wanted to dance.  My mother didn't want me to dance.  As I got older, I was too busy to take lessons and didn't have an interested partner.  Then, in 1995 when my neck broke spontaneously, and I teetered on the cusp of quadriplegia or death, I knew beyond doubt that if I walked again, walk being the operative word, that I must dance.  I did walk. I did dance.  It brings me more pleasure than almost anything in my life...and I make time for it. I schedule a car, usually a week or two in advance.  And, yes, occasionally I don't feel like going, and I cancel the car.

I also make time for cooking, something I find I  much more enjoyable when it is spontaneous than when I plan an event to cook for.

When I worked more closely with leadership teams to increase their effectiveness, I  developed a meeting management concept that most found extremely valuable.  For a couple hours before their weekly meeting, they would submit two categories of agenda items.  First were things that were urgent and without a decision in the next week, there would be irreversible consequences. Then, they were to submit topics that were important to the future of their enterprise, but for which they never had time to talk.  At the start of the meeting, items were ordered.  Rarely were items of such urgency that dire consequences would occur if they weren't discussed. By giving thoughtful dialogue to one or two really important items, they did the important work of consciously choosing the path for their organization's future...and often resolving "urgent" items along the way.

Here I am on January 1 with no clear answers about what is the right approach for time in my life. I wonder if the right answer is that there are no right answers for every day. I just need to be fully present to my intentions, acting at the time instead of reacting to my calendar.  What comes to me is that if I take the learning from my meeting management approach, starting each day with what is urgent and what is important for that day, my spiritual priorities may just resolve themselves without any "right" path which works for every situation.



*Alyssa Shafer, "The Do-It-Daily" challenge, Dr. Oz The Good Life magazine, Jan/Feb 2017, P. 48.

Rule No. 1: I don't have to keep gifts

December 21 has come and gone. Somewhere about the 15th I knew that I wasn't going to have time to go through every single thing in my house to assess what is part of the future during the busyness of the holidays.  In lieu of actually doing the manual sort, I made clear commitments to my intentions: what would and would not be part of my future.  Among the commitments I made was to include beliefs, attitudes, and habits.

My day start with an email exchange with an old friend about refusing gifts to avoid the commercialization of Christmas.  I started about 25 years ago by asking friends to give to charity in lieu of giving me gifts.  That didn't fly at all.  Now two and a half decades later, I continue to tell people that I don't need or want "stuff." I would be delighted, I tell them, with the gift of time: a walk, a cup of coffee, cooking together, or a movie and popcorn on the couch after the holidays have passed...or anything else that they'd like to do.  I don't see nearly enough of my friends: spending time with them would be a gift I'd really like to receive...and it doesn't clutter my tiny apartment.

The paper today shared a practice of giving something to charity for everything that we receive.  The example was that if you got a new pair of shoes, you had to give a pair away.  Or, if a child got two toys, he/she had to give two toys away.  If I do keep gifts, I think I will discipline myself to give away in replacement.

Perhaps it is because I've had the accumulation of gifts on my mind that this evening I had an aha! moment when I opened my medicine cabinet which is bulging at the seams.  I surveyed all the stuff in it and realized that I hadn't bought most of it.  Often when I buy cosmetics, I am gifted with a package of generous-sized samples of fairly expensive products.  Some of them I do use, and I am grateful for travel-sized versions of products that I usually purchase for my travel bag.  However, most of the products are not ones I will use.

As I assessed the contents of my cabinet this evening, I started pulling off all the stuff that I know I won't use, didn't want in the first place, and don't want.  Just because someone gives me something doesn't mean I have to keep it.  I haven't taken the time to do so on this eve of Christmas Eve to go through other cabinets and drawers, but I am certain that just following the rule that I don't have to keep gifts will liberate me from a heap of stuff.

Now, I realize that it will be much easier to throw away gifts from Estee Lauder or Clinique than gifts that were given to me by friends, but it isn't like I don't tell them every year that I don't want stuff.  I already spotted homemade food gifts that don't particularly appeal to me.  They will be a good place to start cleaning.

What joy this discovery has made me!  Perhaps this is the gift that I really wanted for Christmas this year: spiritual housecleaning -- freedom to be relieved of the burden of unwanted stuff.

No! Not that!!

Sometime in 1993, I think it was, that I loaded the trunk of my car with five or six (maybe more) bankers boxes and drove two hours from Eugene to Portland, Oregon.  I was delivering a professional treasure trove to a friend from graduate school.

Before going to graduate school I'd been a human resource (HR) director and employment manager. Actually, since I started working on my 16th birthday, I'd been working in HR.  I developed skills and experience as a teenager that many of my peers wouldn't have for a decade.  Because I had the experience, I ended up working my way through college in HR jobs.  Then, that was where I got jobs afterward.  I never even considered if I enjoyed these jobs, they were pretty good jobs in a small city that didn't have many good jobs. So, I did them.

Although I had the distinct intention when I returned to grad school that I would work in organization development (OD) when I finished, when I actually did finish and started my business, what I knew how to market was HR.  So, not surprisingly, people hired me to do HR. Within a week of starting my business, I was booked three months in advance--what every new business owner hopes to happen. However, 18 months into the business, I realized that most of my projects had been the work I'd done before grad school and that I'd hoped to leave behind, rather than OD work that I had hoped to do.

I recall a crystallizing moment when I sat at my desk and knew I just couldn't/wouldn't do that work anymore.

In typical fashion, the Universe very shortly sent me two tests.  I got two opportunities for work that were HR opportunities that I had just pledged not to do, and one of the projects was with a company I'd been trying to get work from since I'd hung out my shingle.  I nicely declined, and I put each in touch with someone I knew who would do a good job for them.

Gulp!  I hadn't turned work away before.  Then, crickets....for about two weeks.  I stood my ground and waited.

Finally, the calls started.  Two nice OD jobs landed in the same week, and each would be four- to six-month assignments.  I had turned the corner.  During that quiet two weeks the temptation to go out and market had been great, but I stayed true to what my heart was telling me.

All that is the background for my trip to Portland.  My friend did want to do HR consulting, but had only been working in the field since we graduated.  I called her and said I wasn't going to take anymore HR projects.  I had a lot of books, articles, and other resources.  Did she want them?  She was delighted. In that two-hour road trip, I separated from my HR umbilical cord.

Last Sunday afternoon I sat on the floor of my bedroom closet, trying to figure out what did and what did not feel like it was part of my future.  I was able to throw away about a box and half of stuff that I would never have packed up if I'd had taken time to sort before packing.  (See Endings/ Beginnings, 11/25/16.)  There were things that left me stone cold, like the four-inch thick federal procurement manual. Definitely not feeling it in my future.  And, there were a very few items, like the book Awakening the Heroes Within by Carol Pearson, that I would have loved to sit and devour in the moment.  Definite save those.

In the zone somewhere between "definitely go" and "definitely stay," was a box into which I put the gray zone items. I just didn't know...or at least I didn't think I knew.

As gently as the moment 23 years ago, when I knew in an instant that I could no longer take HR projects, I knew "No! Not that!! None of it...." None of what was in the gray zone is part of my future. I will continue to go through boxes to make sure there are no "definitely stay" items, but I expect that almost none of it will stay.

I don't like to throw things away...especially books, but this time I have no one that I can pass my resources on to like I did my grad school friend.  To just throw things away will really be an exercise for me, but I know there is no turning back.  I have less clarity about what will be in my life after December 21 than I do what won't, but 23 years ago, I had to sit and wait for two weeks...and then I did know what I wanted my future would be.

For at least a year I've been saying that I felt pregnant.  Now I've never been pregnant, so I am not sure how I know what the feels like, but it does feel like something is gestating deep inside me, and it wants to be born. I just don't know what.

I've written that our hearts are the compass to our lives and written on the backs for each of us is what is our true north--what is exactly right for us.  The only thing I have clarity about right now is that I need to clear out the static which keeps me from hearing what is next.

Earlier this week I was doing an exercise in the workplace setting where a colleague and I were supposed to interview each other.  The first question she asked was, "What are you hungry for?" I didn't think even a split second before saying, "Time, sleep, exercise, meditation..."  Those were not thoughts; that was truth, completely skipping my brain and spewing forth without thought.  I just knew.  Like I just know what isn't in my future.

Every item on my "hungry" list was an activity that help me hear where the compass on the back side of my heart is pointing me--helping me connect with whatever is gestating.

I will continue cleaning out, even knowing that I will throw good stuff out to just remove it from my energy field.  When December 21 arrives, I want to send a very clear message to my heart that I am getting rid of static.  Then, I will bring in the static-clearing activities that I shared with my interview partner.  That is my future.