No, admittedly, I do not have a taxidermied baby alligator in what appears to be a wedding dress in my house.  If only… and yes, yes I would in a heartbeat.  I can attest, however, that similarly to the thought posed in the journal entry below, when you enter “weird stuff” into an image search engine to find a suitable lead picture to swipe, the options with which you are presented prove the true subjectivity and multiple layers to the definition of the word “weird.”

This is probably something like Weird Stuff In My House version 5.13 or something, so don’t be surprised if you see some things in here you’ve seen before, especially if you live in my house or have been here a lot.  With all the crap I’ve got, it’s possible that you live here in my house and don’t even see all of the weird stuff around you.  It likely just blends into a great big weird stuff ball.

I have often described my decor as “imagine that the Goodwill Store and the Super Glue Factory were side by side and blew up at exactly the same moment.”  My house is like a museum of weird stuff.   I haunt thrift stores looking for those “under $10″ awesome things to haul back to my house to showcase.  They make me happy.  I know I should not be so attached to material things, but they are a part of me and reflect my own inner weirdness.  Actually, why do we imagine that we should not love our material things??  I don’t know what sainted person came up with THAT notion or why we are so deadset on propagating the stupidness of it.  I LOVE my stuff because stuff is FUN.  If I wanted to walk the earth like Cain and have no earthly possessions, I’d learn Kung Fu.

Anyway, here’s the newest edition of my weird stuff.  Might as well get something to drink and kick back.  You’re going to be here a while.  I do have to issue a disclaimer.  When you look at these photos, you are going to see an insane amount of dust and cobwebs.  Crazy.  I kid you not.  After living up here in the mountains with no sidewalks or paved driveways to break up the flow and not a lot of rain to keep down the dust, if you make it important to you to keep ahead of the dust, you will quite literally do nothing else but clean up dust every day of your life.  I did not give up. I did, however, stop caring much.  Twice a year at specific times (March and October), I take a day or two and go through and completely bathe the stuff in my house.  Every couple of months or so, I clean out the cobwebs.  Once a year, I’ll give the walls a wash and spot clean in the interim.  My house has really stupid placement of lighting which keeps it in low light almost all the time.  The flash on the camera really illuminate the dust and cobwebs, so you get the technicolor view.  So yeah, you’re going to need to cope with seeing a good bit of dust because frankly, up here, the dirt is dirtier than where you live.  Click the pictures to enlarge them.  So here we go:

So I am two weeks or so into this whole pleasure cruise of life thing.  OK, not quite two weeks, I guess.  According to my Virgoean kept records, I started this process on January 10th, which means tomorrow is two weeks and let me tell you, I feel pretty doggone good.  in fact, if I took any different kind of supplements than I am taking, I would think I was high a good bit of the time.  Also, that banner up there is a big fat lie.  I didn’t know I would feel good. I didn’t even have the confidence to hope I would feel good.  That’s just want James Brown sang and I wanted to stay with the flow, you know.

Also, when you look up pictures to steal in Google images, you can get a lot of interesting stuff when you search for keywords like “pleasure” or “satisfaction” or “bliss” or “ecstasy.”  Ecstasy is mostly pills.  If you type in “basking,” you get sharks (?!).  This photo is not of me. It’s some model who can likely be blissy on demand.

So I am completely sold now on the idea of being joyful and happy as a choice and a mindset rather than a condition of outside forces.  I think that is when we really set ourselves up to fail and I know from what I speak because I have spent something like fifty years telling myself the exact conditions that would make me happy and holding the Universe and everyone around me accountable for those conditions being met and not allowing myself to be happy unless and until those conditions are met.  Of course they never are all met, so if you put your joy as conditional on a set of experiences happening, you’re never going to get it.

…then you die.

Where’s the fun in THAT, I ask you??

In my whole life, I have never enjoyed having photos taken of me. In fact, most of our family photos are of anyone in the family except me because I am usually the one who is taking the photos specifically to avoid being in the photos.  This means that my whole life has gone largely undocumented.

The reason is, of course, that I never, ever like how I look in photos.  I am not terribly photogenic and because I tend to eat and talk a good bit, whenever someone takes my photo, my mouth is usually hanging open.  There is some essential *zing* that is there for me in real life that does not come through in photos.  In my whole life, I have had maybe 4-5 photos of me that I actually liked on the spot and – no lie – one was a drivers license photo.  I asked for reprints and they denied me, the fascist DMV bastards. The times when I took photos that I actually liked were times when I felt happy and confident.  That’s why there are so few of them.

Now, when I look back over the photos that I hated before, I think about how pretty I looked.  When I thought I looked horribly fat, I look back now and see that I was a normal sized person who was completely miserable over her normal sized weight.  When I thought previously that I looked lumpy and homely, now I just see a person with sad, haunted eyes who did not love herself enough and absolutely was not being nurtured or valued by the people around her.

It always sounded so silly and simple to say that if I did not love myself, I would not be loveable.  I was loveable, but people believed what I showed them, which was that I did not feel I deserved happiness or respect because I didn’t give it to myself.  People routinely showed me tremendous disrespect because I taught them through my own actions that respecting me was not necessary.  I did not respect my own limits, my own needs, my own wants, my own value… but I sure wanted them to do it for me!  If they would just do that, I would be happy.

I did not value myself as a person and did not trust my worth in a relationship, so in my relationships, I tended to work overtime to make myself indispensable.  After a while, I would get tired of being so damned indispensable all the time and would resent the other people in my life for depending on me when that was the very dynamic I’d worked to set up.  I was the do-er. I was the fix-er.  I was the support team.  I was the pit crew for everyone else who actually got to drive around the track.  I never let anyone think that I needed support or that I needed them and I surely did not show them how to do it.

I remember saying to Eric not even a year ago that I hated my life because I spent all of my time doing things I hated doing that largely involved taking care of and cleaning up after other people.  In an entry I wrote a while back called, “The Glass Ceiling:  Break It, Don’t Windex It,” (it is a subtitle of “Valley of the Shadow”) I struggled to accept the fact - not just the possibility – that all of the things I did in a day that I hated were things I actively chose to do.  I made people around me feel miserable and guilty for taking me up on what I freely offered!  That’s actually pretty twisted.

During that tough time, which was back in October, I realized that my family wants me to be happy.  That’s really it.  They don’t like feeling as though I resent them for needing me.  That makes them feel set up, is what it does.  They don’t like having to second guess whether I am offering something to them out of love or obligation.  The real fact is that my family wanted me to be happy, wanted to take care of me, but they had no idea how to do it because I was the one who insisted on always being seen as the capable one who did not need help or nurturing.  I worked hard to make everything fine for them, but not for myself.

When I changed how I am in the world, I did not make a big announcement or bring anyone else directly into the loop.  I just changed me.  I adjusted my vision so that I could see my situation more objectively and not personalize my relationships or obligations while I took a good look at them.  Then, I started telling people exactly what I wanted to do and I let them know how happy it made me that they were doing it.  I praised them like mad, batted my eyes, smiled big enough to break my face and thanked them profusely. They loved it!

In the past, when someone would help me, I felt guilty because it seemed like they where doing my job, which meant that I thought they thought I was not doing it well enough myself.  Eric has a thing about the dishes being done (we do not have a dishwasher in which to hide them) and if there are even 3-4 dirty dishes in the sink, to him it feels like the entire house is filthy.  He would often come in and start washing dishes.  He wasn’t angry.  He didn’t blame me.  He just saw something that needed to be done and did it.  I would be upset because I thought it meant he was judging me.  Now, I give him a big hug, tell him how much I appreciate it and he puffs up like he’s preening.  Nathan is 12 and when I ask him to do things, I thank him and tell him what an amazing helper he is.  He now makes the biscuits for our family because he does such a good job.  I don’t need to control how well he does it.  I just need to love that someone else made the biscuits and was excited to do the job for me.

Dylan is 14 and is very willing to help me if I tell him what to do.  My problem all along is that I expected my kids to walk into a room, look at it and automatically know what needed to be done to clean it.  Kids brains just don’t work that way.  They don’t see what needs to be done and you have to lead them to it.

These days, I walk around like I am the Goddess herself.  I constantly run thoughts about how much I love life and enjoy my body and I tingle with joy.  These are thoughts that I directly put into my own brain and now they are beginning to come as though they are organic.  They float around in there unbidden and I don’t always have to stop and intentionally run them through.  I smile a lot and not just because some outside source causes me to smile.  I started doing that on purpose and now it happens automatically.

I tell my family what I need or want from them and they just do it and if I am gushy enough about it, they get excited about doing it.  I do special things just for myself.  I started wearing shirts that are lower cut because my decolletage is one of the things about myself that I really like.  I give myself awesome, extended foot rubs and hand massages.  Last night, for the first time in over a year, I put on fancy fingernails because I have short, stubby fingers and they make my hands look slimmer and more elegant.  I stopped using them because I had deemed them impractical.

I (again) packed away all of my soccer mom clothes and threw out my stained clothes and got some new, inexpensive items that are flattering.   I bought new make-up. Not expensive Lancome stuff because I don’t know that I would ever spend that much on make-up, but just some moderately priced stuff that is more flattering to my skin tone and age issues.  Next, I will get a good haircut.  I dyed my hair burgundy because I always thought Rita Hayworth looked awesome with her red hair and I wanted me some.

I looked hard until I found exercises that I don’t hate doing and now I only do those.  I don’t make myself do exercises that I hate.  I used to spend my day eating food I didn’t love because it is what I should eat.  Now, I only eat foods I love dearly and only until I am full.

I take care of things (or ask others to do it for me) that improve my quality of life.  For weeks now, I have been bothered by how dim the light is in the kitchen.  Mind you, it bothered me and that was the end of it.  Yesterday, I actually had Nathan and Eric climb up and replace the bulbs with higher wattage ones.  Problem solved and I am no longer irritated because I took the few minutes to commission someone else to fix the problem.  I have never learned enough how to take the time to make my life better.  Now I am.

I don’t feel bad if the house is not perfect.  I mobilize the forces and get the boys to help me. I hate peeling and mashing potatoes, for instance, and Eric is great at it and doesn’t mind doing it and so he does it for me now.  All I had to do was ask.  If he doesn’t want to do it, it doesn’t get done and we have baked potatoes instead. I simply do not do the stuff I really don’t want to do and you know what?  Nobody cares.  Some days,I am able to do those thing and not feel oppressed or depressed doing them and that’s whey they get done.

The family has yet to get wound up over anything I don’t do.  In fact, they’re happier because they can tell that I am happy too.  I spent so much time putting it onto other people to find a way to make me happy that I never took the time to make myself happy or show them how to make me happy.  Now, I do.  They seem to like taking care of me and finding ways to make me smile now.  I also kind of work a “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” kind of deal on them by being so happy and dismissive of it that they can’t imagine that anything is actually wrong.  I set the tone for my home and if I’m happy and joyful, they just follow suit.

In the past, I always thought I would be happy if we had a steady income.  I would be happy if the kids would keep their rooms clean.  I would be happy if I could lose weight.  I would be happy if we could go on vacation.  I would be happy if the dogs would behave. I guess I just got tired of waiting and now, I’m happy and all that other stuff can happen or not. I can’t keep holding my joy hostage until The Universe meets my list of demands.  The problem with basing your own joy on the actions of another person is that you’re gambling with your own happiness.  They may or may not do it.  If I, myself, create the actions and thoughts that manifest my own joy, I can bank on it.

So I’m writing this to tell you that the process is still working great.  If nothing else, I am happier than I was the last time I wrote because the feelings are now less forced and more organic.  Sure, it has only been 2 weeks (well, 13 days) and of course, things are going to happen in my life that are tough, but when I feel like this most of the time, it makes me feel more like I can face the tough times and not crumble.  I’ve gotten my reserves up really high by not overgiving to others and by turning my nurturing full force onto myself.  I don’t feel emotionally depleted and I don’t feel resentment.  The more I love myself, the more love I feel for and from other people.

Common sense is trying to tell me that this should level off at some point and I should hit a baseline of contentment, but for the time being it is still climbing like crazy.  Hey, I’ll take it!!

…because I’ve earned the right to be a woman and not a girl.  Not going back for nuthin, no no no!

I am on such a roll and really, I am going to do my best to explain it here because sometimes, the feelings are just too big for words.  Like Tinkerbell said in Hook, “This is the biggest feeling I’ve ever, ever felt.  This is the biggest feeling I’ve ever had and this is the first time I’ve been big enough to feel it.” No matter how big I have gotten on the outside, I was never big enough on the inside to feel what I feel because I always let fear and ego and delusion get in the way of it.  As I look back, I am surprised by how hard I worked to get in the way of my own happiness.  It is as though I conspired to create my own misery.

Back in 1996, I made a wish and put some things into motion as a result.  My wish was that I wanted to have joy in my life.   It’s hard to believe that was 16 years ago…March, in fact.  Within a few months, my whole life fell apart and a lot of you already know this story.  At that time, I had no idea what joy would even look like or feel like because I had never really had it.  I’d had happiness, but those are fleeting moments and are different than joy.  When most people talk about happiness, they do it in terms of a passive action.  “This makes me happy” or “That will make me happy.”  It’s about something else affecting you and creating an effect of happiness.  Joy is about a prolonged state of being.  I think there is a reason why “joy” is a noun and “happy” is an adjective. 

I don’t know when all of this really started.  From an esoteric standpoint, it began the day I was born or even before.  From a tangible position, I would say it likely began a year ago when Eric and I took some time for therapy to get some objective insight into issues we’d tried to resolve on our own for years and had not managed to best.  I think we both went into the experience, at least on some level, with the objective of “Fix THAT!” (that being the other person).  I don’t believe either of us was prepared for the remarkable insights we would receive about ourselves.

Since then, I feel as though I have been on a magical mystery tour, with little indicators and directions signs showing up one after another, sometimes on top of one another.  I’ve been led to people and books and lectures and lots and lots of technique practicing.  The end result – not that this is anywhere near the end – is that I have discovered how I want to be in the world and my life’s quest.  It is for the total pursuit of my own pleasure.

Never before have I allowed myself to think in such completely selfish terms and construct my entire world around what makes me happy and let me tell you, Peaches, it is NOT an easy task!  I am continually surprised by all of the ways that I court negativity and welcome adversity into my life.  I am shocked by how often I find myself gravitating toward exactly the situations and experiences that I really, really don’t want.  I automatically strive to make other people “happy” at the expense of joy in my life.  When I have real joy in my life as my baseline of operations, I automatically want to spread that joy to others by helping them find their joy. You begin to recognize your own sacred gifts and are able to share them freely without feeling over-extended or depleted.

The pursuit of pleasure at first sounds frivolous and hedonistic and in a way, it is.  It is about eating the foods you love with great gusto.  It’s about having the best sex you can possibly have (even if it is with yourself).  It is about spending your time the way you really want to spend it.  It’s about listening to the music you love, watching the TV shows that really entertain you.  It’s about adding beauty to your life in the simplest of ways like burning incense or lighting candles or creating a completely silent home.

It’s not about necessarily spending a lot of money.  It is about finding the beauty and the pleasure in what you have.  We get so focused on fixing the things that are wrong with our lives that often, we ignore the things that are right.  Focusing on providing self-pleasure does not make the problems go away, but it does give you a whole new perspective on them.  It creates a power source within you that is vibrant and strong and able to handle almost anything.  The effects are absolutely amazing and I am here to testify about it.

Our “No pain, no gain” society teaches us that we have to suffer in order to earn our way to happiness.  We have to work for fifty years and then we can rest at the end and enjoy life for a few years before we die.  We have to give all that we have to others and then try to survive on the crumbs we have left for ourselves.  This makes us a “nice” person.  Seriously, what do you imagine when you think of a “nice” person?  Isn’t it usually someone who is always there for other people, always giving, always smiling, always making others feel as though their needs are going to be met on some level or many levels?  I don’t want to be a “nice” person.  Nice people get tired.  Nice people get depleted.  Nice people give away so much that they do not have enough to give to themselves.  So here are the deceptively simple steps that I have found really, really work:

Remember this?

You probably do if you have ever ridden in an airplane.  Put the oxygen mask on yourself and THEN help others.  Same premise.  Take care of yourself first.  If you do not tend to your own needs first, you will not have enough in reserve to tend to others when they need you.  When you are depleted, your blood pressure goes up, you become irritable and anxious, you can’t sleep well or your sleep all the time, you eat automatically, sometimes without even knowing that you’re eating or what you’re eating, you have extreme emotional reactions and you are angry and resentful a lot of the time, even if it doesn’t show.  When you take time during ever day to give yourself indulgent pleasures, life does not feel unfair and you feel better able to share your own fulfillment with other people.

Use a lot of superlatives and expressive words when you speak.  “This was the BEST DAY EVER!”  “I have had such an AMAZING hour!  I spent the whole hour listening to music and giving myself a foot spa treatment.”  “The traffic on the way to work was SPECTACULAR!  I hit every green light and cut off five minutes!  I was a driving GODDESS!”  Celebrate every single one of even the tiniest wins to the max.  Brag.  Brag out loud.  Smile broadly while you do it.  Smiling will feel foreign and feigned at first, but then it will feel very natural.

Get excited!!!  Get pumped up about things you are going to do and make sure you do things that are worth that excitement.  Get into the sensory aspect of the tasks you perform.  If you are waiting at a bus stop, it might not be exciting to think about getting on a bus, but you can think about the warm sun on your shoulders and how cool it is that you have a big vehicle that is willing to come around and haul you to where you want to go for a small amount of money.  You might hate to do laundry, but don’t they feel wonderful and warm when they first come out of the dryer?  Isn’t it great that we don’t have to beat them on rocks to get them clean any more?  Doesn’t the detergent smell nice?  Wasn’t Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog wonderful?

Flood yourself with the good parts of any experience, even if you have to reach for them.

Promise yourself that you will never again engage the world in an automatic, detached way.  Plug in and experience every moment.  How can you sift it for the good stuff if you aren’t even there?  To demonstrate how often we are not really in the moment, can you really tell what your partner looks like?  Sure, you can pick him or her out of a crowd (we hope), but do you really see them?  There have been times when I have had my hair dyed a whole different color for days before Eric noticed.  Eric once shaved off his beard and mustache in the morning (which is a remarkable change for him) and I didn’t notice until late in the day.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at one of my kids and thought, “Wow, you’re really tall!”  Sometimes, I will spend a whole day in town with my kids and then be looking for them in a store when we got separated.  I would be surprised to realize that I had no idea what color clothes they were wearing even though I’d been “looking” at them the whole day.  I’ve even had someone compliment my earrings or necklace and realize I had no idea which one I was wearing.

Have you ever lost something that you had in your hand earlier the same day and realize that you have no idea whatsoever when you last had it?  You have gone on autopilot to the point that full minutes are impossible to recreate.

For crying out loud, Plug In!  You’re missing your life and the minutes are precious!

Only eat foods you really love.  Many of us have, for years, lived in a state of constant or periodic deprivation in regard to food and drink.  If we do eat something we love, we flood ourselves with guilt or we make the appropriate “tsk tsk” sounds to ourselves about how “I really shouldn’t be eating this” or “I’m going to pay for this later” or “I was bad yesterday and ate…”  I say do think unthinkable and eat on purpose and eat ROBUSTLY and make sounds and enjoy and celebrate every single minute, but do that every time.  I’m not saying to eat dessert as a way of life, but when you eat breakfast, don’t just grab an old doughnut and a cup of coffee.   Get up a few minutes early and eat breakfast.  Have ready the foods you love for breakfast and have a real breakfast that is fulfilling to you.  Eat what you want for lunch and dinner without apologies.  Say out loud how delicious it is and make all of the “mmmmmm” sounds you can.  Talk about how delightful it is.  Talk about the specifics, “This sauce on this chicken is to die for!“  Once you are really, really loving the food you eat, you take away the feeling of deprivation, then you don’t have to feed the emptiness anymore.  You automatically eat less as a result.

The other side to this is that you never, ever, ever engage in automatic eating.  There is no denial of anything (provided the denial is not medically indicated – if you are allergic to shellfish, don’t decide to ‘mmmmm’ your way through lobster and go to the hospital), but know and register everything you are eating.  That goes back to being plugged in.  If what you would be denying yourself is Lays potato chips, take out a few handsful of Lays and eat them, but don’t sit down in front of the TV with the bag and mindlessly eat.  You have to stay in the moment of the pleasure of eating.

Also, plugging into your eating means that you take your time chewing your food and savoring it because remember, it’s the food that you love, not the foods you’re forced to eat instead of the foods you love.  When you’re talking about how delicious it is, (yes, even if you are alone and yes, especially if you cooked it yourself) you are interjecting space into your eating process.  This lets you better register when you are full and then stop.

When you are full, stop.  No more.  Why?  Because you are never going to deprive yourself again and you can have it again when you want it.  There is no longer a position of want, craving or deprivation in regard to food.  There is only pleasure with every meal or even snack.

Tell other people what you need or want.  Of course, this means actually knowing what you need or want and most of us get a kind of blank stare on our faces when that question comes up.  We look like this  o.O  This means we have to start a list and yes, an actual list.  It goes from the tiniest things, “I want my kids to get up in the morning without a fuss” to the biggest “I want a house on acres and acres of land with servants and plenty of room for me to hide.”  Then there’s everything in between.  Write it all out.  Write until your hand hurts and then rest your hand and write some more.  Write down, “I wish my hand had longer endurance.”  I want I want I want.  I want a bigger DirecTV package.  I want a dog.  I want my floors mopped. I want someone else to do the laundry.  I want another car.  I want some Shake and Bake for the chicken tonight.  I want a pool.  I want to get something fun in the mail today.  I want to sleep well tonight.  I want to take tango lessons…

The trick is that the things you want have to start from today and move forward.  They can’t go back to the past.  “I want my mother to still be alive.”  “I want to be sixteen again.”  “I want to go back in time and not marry my husband.”  Those things don’t count because they involve something happening in the past and when you process that kind of want, you are going to immediately through down more resistance than you will to things that are even remotely possible.

Write it all down, pages and pages and pages.  It might go slowly at first, but once you get into it, your hand will not be able to keep up with your brain.  If you can’t get your brain to kick into gear on it, just start writing anything, no matter how ludicrous.  Stay with it.  It will come.

Have you ever had the experience where you can’t even decide on a restaurant where you want to eat dinner?  Your husband or friend says, “Where do you what to eat?” and you freeze up and wait for them to make a suggestion.  You volley back and say, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter to me.  What are you in the mood for?”  This can go on forever until a decision is actually reached.  The next time you ask, don’t let it degenerate into the vulture’s conversation from Jungle Book.  Honor the fact that someone cared enough to ask and say, “Bar-B-Que!”  Say, “Olive Garden.”  Say, “Sizzler!”  Say, “Carl’s, Jr.”  Say something, but make it something you really want to eat.  Have a second and third choice in the hopper just in case you get blind-sided by an “Oh, I’m not really in the mood for Italian” counter-attack.

Say what you mean.  One of my biggest regrets, and this one is a doozie, is that I have trained my children to have to second guess me to the point that they no longer believe me when I tell them what I really mean.  I have invested so much time saying “yes” when I obviously meant “no” and my body language conveyed “no” that they can no longer trust my words.  Quite a while ago, I got into a mode of never giving to anyone what I knew good at well at the time that I would resent later.  Even though there has been a long period of time where I told my children exactly what I meant, there was still enough time before that where I didn’t that they just can’t quite kick it yet.

If someone asks you to do a favor for them and you could, but you really just don’t want to do that, then don’t.  Tell them no.  You don’t have to go into elaborate detail about why you can’t do it.  You don’t even have to give them a reason at all.  People are not entitled to your every thought, your every nuance.  Just say, “You know, I don’t think I can do that.”  If they persist, say something like, “I’ve said my peace and counted to three.”  OK, you don’t have to say that, but you can just continue to let them know that it’s just not going to work for you to do what they want.  People are resourceful and you are not their only or last hope no matter how hard they try to convince you of that.  Kids are a different story because they are often completely dependent upon parents to do things for them.  That does not mean you have to be at their beck and call.  As I used to tell my daughter when she was little, “You know, honey, sometimes, the answer is just no.”

If this is enormously uncomfortable to you (and it often is at first), you can use Oprah’s technique of deflection.  She will put the person off for a day by saying, “I have to pray about this and I will let you know tomorrow.”  Now of course, you already know that you are going to say no.  You then go back to them the next day (be sure and do that because you’re a jerk if you make them come back to you and ask again) and say, “I prayed about this and Jesus said, ‘No.’”  I don’t like to blame Jesus for the choices I make and I like to give people ample time to find other solutions, so I just tell them no as graciously, but firmly, as I can on the spot to avoid the time lapse.

It is absolutely essential that you teach your children that the time, energy and interests of other people are just as important as theirs.  There is a fine line between teaching them to honor the needs of others versus teaching them to become cynical and be a doormat because they never, ever have what they want honored.  Kids are hard-wired to be egocentric and I use the word “egocentric” in the most possible way.  Humans are not really capable of truly forming externalized thought about the needs of others until they are will into their 20′s, which is why delayed parenthood can be beneficial for all.  Kids are very in tune with their own needs because that is necessary for survival.  Kids don’t have to be programmed to keep other beings alive, but they do have to know what they need in order to convey that they need it.  That’s why they often jabber about needing every toy on TV and every cereal in the grocery store aisle.  Their biology and their psychology is screaming for them to be self-involved.  That being the case, it is up to you to say no at the right times.  That doesn’t just include saying no to purchasing the cereal that has the toy they want floating inside cups and cups of cereal they will never eat.  It doesn’t just mean saying no to spending the night at Tracy’s when her parents are away and ten other kids will be there.  It also means saying that you won’t put down your novel and get out from under your heated blanket and drive them to the mall to hang out with their friends because you just don’t want to do it.  We do not have to be martyrs who are completely subservient to the wants and needs of others.  If you do this and the guilt comes, push it away.   Remember the labor.  Remember the nights they were sick and you did not sleep.  Remember the endless homework assignments and meals cooked.  Remember the times when you DID get up and take them when you didn’t want to go.  Sometimes, the answer is just no.  As Kate Northrup (daughter of the esteemed physician/author, Christiane Northrup) says, “If the answer is not HELL YES then the answer is NO.”  Only say yes if you can do so with your whole heart, a giant grin and zero reservations.

On the other hand, don’t say no when you mean yes.  It is amazing how many fun things we can talk ourselves out of doing.  We have a thousand reasons why we can’t accept invitations that might be fun or do things for ourselves.  If you find that you are turning down opportunities for things you want to do on behalf of others, then you have a problem.  If you find that you are turning down opportunities for things you want to do because you are afraid, then you have a problem.  That is when it becomes time to trust other people to manage their emotions or to trust yourself to manage your own fear (or both) and listen to the Nike commercial and just do it.

Example:  My husband says, “Do you want to go for a walk with me?”  I’m thinking, “The hills out here are so steep.  I’ll have a heart attack. What if he wants to go further than I can go?  What if my hips or arches start to hurt?”  I can give into the fear or I can say, “Yes! I want to spend time with you and get some fresh air and a little exercise” and then I can take control and tell him what route I want to take and how far I want to go.

Fear controls us in so many more ways than we know.  They’re just little tiny pushes, little words that whisper in our heads and tell us we aren’t capable, we aren’t powerful, we aren’t safe.  For instance, I was at a Christmas party for my husband’s work and one of the ladies who works with me who I completely adore called me over to her computer monitor and said, “Would you ever take a class like this?”  She then showed me YouTube footage of a burlesque class that involved strip tease and tassels and such.  My first reaction was to think about how my body is just not cut out for that.  I didn’t want to do it and didn’t even want to think about it.

Instead, I said, “You know, that really wouldn’t interest me, but I would love to take a class in belly dancing.”  It’s something that has been on my bucket list forever and I have avoided because… and there goes my list.  I don’t think I can afford it.  I’m overweight and it won’t be pretty.  I am not graceful.  I am not coordinated…  I could stay here for a while listing all the reasons why I have not taken belly dance classes even though they are offered in my town and even though in the past, I have had friends who took them and even invited me to go with them and even though I have always really, really wanted to do that.

So this time I did something different and threw it out there.  Immediately, she and another woman who works with Eric said yes, they would take classes with me if I would get the information.  I called around and found an instructor and the only person I could find teaching beginning belly dance classes taught them at 8:30pm.  Now you figure that even if the class is an hour long, a conservative length for a class, I still have 35 minutes of driving to get back home again.  That means I’m not home until 10:15-10:30pm.  Wow!  Very late. There was a time when that late hour would talk me out of it and boy, I would make it sound perfectly reasonable that I’d backed out.  This time, I said, “Nope, I’m gonna do it!”  Turns out the beginner classes are only 4 weeks long to teach the fundamentals, then you join a multilevel class that meets earlier.  Hey, I can do this for a total of 4 times, right?  Just 4 times!  I have now had half the classes and I am enjoying it and guess what?  I’m very uncoordinated and I am not very graceful and I am not very good at it, but I’m having a good time trying.  I could write it off after the 4 times (I already did pay for all of the classes) and say I’m not very good at it (giving in to the negative thoughts) or I can just keep practicing until I DO get good at it!

As I result of taking the belly dance classes, I noticed the Zumba classes that our instructor teaches right before our class and you know, it looked fun!  I saw people of all sizes and levels of fitness doing it and having a good time, so I considered taking those classes.  The instructor told me the first class was free, so last week my second class, I made plans to come early and try those out too.  I had every intention, but after when I woke up the day after the first belly dance class, my right hip, which tends to be tricky anyway, was absolutely killing me.  It continued to hurt through the week and was still hurting the day of class.  Ibuprofin just was not cutting the pain, so I made the executive decision not to stress it further with Zumba.  I did, however, get to class early so I could watch more of the Zumba class and yes, I have decided I really want to try it.  In the interim, I have learned that there is a Zumba for the Wii and I really want to try that out.  Delena showed me clips of Just Dance 3 and that also looks like a lot of fun.  I am finding a lot of alternative ways that I can get moving and enjoy myself as well.

Those are just a few of the ways that I am working to say YES to things instead of talking myself out of the fun I could have.

Smile, smile, smile.  Until I made an effort to be aware of my expression (PLUG IN!), I never noticed how much I walk around with a neutral or unhappy expression on my face.  I have had several times in the past that Eric or one of the kids would ask me, “What’s wrong?” and then not believe me when I said, “Nothing,” believing it was one of those “Nothing”s that really means, “You need to keep digging to find out” or “If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.”  It’s not a trick.  There’s really nothing wrong, but my default expression is not joyful because my default feeling is not joy.  I have made myself so miserable through my own actions, that something extra has to happen for me to be happy or joyful.  Isn’t that just stupid??  My default feeling should be joy and the only time that should deviate if if I have to stop for a moment and get perspective on a challenging situation!

We have opiate sensors in our brains that biophysically program us to be happy.  We have to actively work to be unhappy and happy is our natural state!  How often do you see children or babies (minus the ones with horrible home lives) who are naturally unhappy?  It does happen (Nathan was a prime example among my kids), but most kids are by default, smiling and happy!  Over time, we train ourselves out of that by creating expectations of others and ourselves that cannot be achieved.  That locks us into a failure cycle that trains us to expect to be disappointed on a regular basis.

So SMILE.  You have to train yourself to get back into the habit.  The way to do it is the obvious one.  Whenever you remind yourself to become self-aware and plug-in, you smile, as big and wide as you can make it.  Put small stickers of some kind, any kind, around your house, your car, your work and when you see that sticker, plug into your world and smile big.  Just the action works, but it’s even better if you can connect it to something wonderful.  Baby ducks!! SMILE!  Christmas lights!  SMILE!  Popcorn at the movies!  SMILE!  Baby laughs!  SMILE!  Everyone, no matter how jaded and cynical they are, has something that will make them grin. Find yours!

Speaking of smiling…

Smile and Say “Thank You”  As the caregivers, we often take a great deal of our self-value from being able to do it all and not need any help.  In fact, we can sometimes get crabby when people try and help us.  Sometimes, we might feel defensive or insecure as though they are showing us that what we are doing is not good enough.  Another place where we get gummed up in not being able graciously accept a gift or feel comfortable when someone does something nice for us or says something nice to us.

How often when someone pays you a compliment, do you demure and say, “Oh, this old thing?” or “Are you kidding? I look terrible today!”  How often do you immediately insist on returning the compliment, “Oh, it’s not as good as YOURS!”  “You looks amazing too!”

Pssst:  It’s not a contest.  Let me tell you straight out that you devalue the compliment someone took the trouble to pay you when you negate it.  If you return it with a compliment of your own, they don’t know if you are saying it because it’s true or as payback for complimenting them.

Just smile as big as you can and say, “Thank you!  I feel really great today” or “I’m glad you liked it, I had fun making it!”  or “You know, this is one of my favorite outfits” or “I LOVE this haircut!”  Make THEM feel good and glow for having noticed and they will compliment you more often because it feels good to do so!

If your husband gets up and starts sweeping or washing dishes, even if you know he’s doing it maliciously, (And Lord yes they do, sometimes!) force yourself past the insecurity and frustration and those awful tapes in your head and treat it as though it is the most precious gift in the world.  Give him a hug and say, “Thank you.  That made my day.  It is such a blessing to have your help.”  Or you can go foxy and say, “You know it makes me so hot when you do that.”  Just smile your biggest, prettiest smile and act like he just handed you the world on a silver platter.

For the longest time, I had trouble accepting gifts from people.  When they asked me what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday, I would say, “Oh really, don’t get me anything.”  If they give me something, I’d immediately say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have!”  On some level, I am genuinely telling them not to ever buy me gifts when inside, I want gifts!  EVERYONE wants gifts when it comes down to it, but we don’t want to look greedy.

Do you know what we look like when we treat a gift or the offer of a gift that way?  It’s not humble.  It’s not gracious.  We look ungrateful.  Someone took the time to pick out a gift they thought we would like and WE tell them that they shouldn’t have done it.  SHAME!  When you make that list I talked about before and get in touch with your wants, pare it down to a list people can actually get for you, things of all different price ranges, have it ready and vow that you will make copies of it and pass it around to those who ask!  Even simple things like “I want a new coffee mug!”  “I want a pen that works!”  “I want silver hoop earrings!”  People LOVE to fulfill the wish list of someone else and it makes them feel special and good to take care of others.  Will you really deny them that because you are so broken you don’t know how to say thank you?

A very dear friend of mine is ill with cancer and has been fighting hard for 2 years now.  She has not yet had chemotherapy, but because the cancer is in her stomach, she has bouts of tremendous nausea.  A mutual acquaintance of ours asked her if she needed anything and true to the tradition of women in our generation, she said, “Oh no, I’m fine.”  Now this is a woman who, that day, could barely walk because she was so nauseated.  Her husband travels on business and she is frequently alone.  The lady she was speaking to brought her over a tureen of soup and my friend admonished her, reminding her that she’s said she didn’t need anything.  The woman stopped her and said, “Have you ever considered that this might be my ministry?  Please don’t take it from me.”  My friend learned a valuable lesson in “just smile and say thank you” and I got a great story to tell.

Let the people around you have their ministries.  Let them feel good by helping.  Empower them to do good things by letting them do good things.  If you tell them enough not to do it, it will burn right out of them.  We can look around and see the obvious results of an generation of people who were taught by the previous generation that their help was not warranted or appreciated.  We said, “No, I can do it” too many times.  Now, we have to take that back and re-empower the people around us.  Then, everybody wins.

I can’t call myself the Pleasure Queen because that title has already been claimed and the last thing I want to do is usurp the wonderful lady who has earned it.  Instead, I’m going to say that I am on a quest to live a life that is completely pleasure based.  There was a time not so long ago when I hated my life and, in fact, would whine incessantly to Eric about how I spend my days doing things I hate doing.  I was miserable and angry and I knew that somehow, some way, it was his fault.  Worse, he knew that I knew it was his fault and he had no idea how it was his fault.

So what I did was I stopped doing the things I hate doing.  All of them.  If I don’t feel like washing the dishes, they don’t get done.  Just giving myself permission to not do them is usually freeing enough that I don’t even mind doing them after all.  If I don’t want to make up the bed, then it’s “air the bed out” day.  If I don’t want to mop the floors, I do it the next day and the world keeps turning.  If I don’t want to drive to town for groceries, I find a way to make the groceries I have work out.  If I don’t want to go to bed, I stay up.  If I don’t want to watch a show Eric wants to watch on TV, I read my Kindle or go downstairs rather than sit with him and suffer through yet another fucking episode of “Survivorman.”  I literally do what I want to do and rarely do what I don’t want to do.

I have blessings in my life, but I would not say that I have a particularly charmed life in comparison to others.  I’m not wealthy by a long shot; not even the longest shot you could imagine.  I have four dogs and I’m not even a dog person.  My husband and I have gone through enormous struggles in our time together, both internally and externally.  We have six kids, three grandkids, a mortgage we don’t pay, many feet of snow pending in the near future (presumably), a long drive to pick up anything we happen to need from town, a lot of miles between us and anything like family, very few friends to use as a pit crew and my husband has the attention span of a gnat.  There are lots of holes in the wall plenty big enough for stress, fear, panic, insecurity and conflict to leak through.  The trick is to make good and sure that what comes through those holes is sunshine, fresh air and blessings.

It’s not that frustrating things don’t happen, it’s that I’ve worked hard to change how I respond to them.  It’s not that there aren’t aggravating people around me who try my patience and push all my buttons and hurt my feelings, it’s that I don’t spend time with those people and if I am put in a situation where I have to be with them, I have complete faith that it’s what was supposed to happen and that it’s time for me to work through that lesson.  I also shore up my reserves and make sure that there’s no way they can have my power.  They can’t bring me down to that painful place where they live.  If they are so hell bent on hurting someone else or making them miserable in some way, they must really be conflicted and in pain themselves.  Regardless, it’s a bummer they hurt, but I’m not going to let them feel better by taking away my joy.  It’s not theirs to break.

Instead of being angry and frustrated that there’s seven feet of snow on the ground and I can’t get out of my house, I feel grateful that I’m warm and there’s plenty of food and I’m with the people I love.  Instead of being upset that our power is out again, I am grateful that we have a generator and a wood stove.  I look for the joyful stuff and celebrate that to the complete max and somehow, that makes the tough stuff not seem to have so much power over me, just like those small people who want to act like assholes.  My joy is just not going to be sold out that cheaply.

So that’s where I am at.  As I look back, I can see so many of my experiences over the past several months leading up to this.  I can feel my plan for the year taking shape and I am so excited for where it is heading.  There are 8000 nerve endings wired up as receptors for pleasure sensations in the body.  I plan to find and exhaust every single one.  I hope you’ll join me in the Pleasure Crusade!

So I set about going around re-gathering my power eggs (see previous post) from the various places where I’ve left them.  Some were given to people who earned them. Some were given to people who were entitled to them by birthright.  Some were practically thrown at people who didn’t really want them.  Some I just sat down on the side of the road so I didn’t have to carry them any more.  I was pretty careless with my power eggs.  I think a lot of us are because our own empowerment is a lot to embrace.  It’s easier to blame other people and not have any kind of ownership of the things that made my life hard than to accept that in every way, we really do create our own reality.

I was reading in a book by Marianne Williamson called “A Woman’s Worth” and she goes into her take on the fairly recent societal change of men being present in the birth experience.  At the time she wrote the book almost 20 years ago, Williamson was not in a relationship and I was discouraged by how negative a lot of her writing was about men.  She very correctly maligns the (also a relatively new development) patriarchal society that has disempowered women, creating a situation where we have had to work our way up from being little more than chattel.  There are still a lot of work we have to do to get to where we ought to be, but you know, my experience both with myself and with counseling other women leads me to believe that the conditioning is less with fixing the rest of the world that has a really jacked up view of how women should be and more of fixing our own misperceptions and warped views.

In that book I mentioned above, there is a mention of the relatively new experience of men going into the birthing area when women are having babies to offer their support.  Now something you might or might not know about me is that I worked in birth for almost 20 years.  I attended a lot of women who were having both home births and hospital births and I taught childbirth classes for all of that time.  When I started in 1980, it was still the new thing for men to be in the labor and delivery rooms in hospitals.  In fact, not long before I started that particular career, a guy (I think he was in New York or Chicago or someplace back East) was arrested because he had handcuffed himself to his about-to-deliver-a-baby wife so he could not be removed from the birth experience.  In the hospital where she would deliver the baby, it was customary for the man to be present with the wife to comfort her during the labor, but to be sent away when she was taken into the delivery room.  He was having none of that.  He did get to see his baby born, as I recall, but he was also promptly arrested for trespassing.   

As I made my way through the next two decades, it became standard practice for the woman to have at least one comfort person with her all the way through the process.  Sometimes, it was the husband/partner and sometimes, it was not.  From my own professional perspective, sometimes the husband/partner was the most ideal comfort person and sometimes, they were not.  Mothers are often the worst support person a laboring woman can have, especially for the generation delivering babies at that time.  Moms often had a horrible childbirth experience and being with their birthing daughters was sometimes a complete disaster.  Specific to men, however, they were sometimes a tremendous asset and sometimes just a pain in the ass.

The point Ms. Williamson seemed to be making in bringing up men in the birth experience wasn’t all that stuff I just said.  That was incidental.  What she was referencing is that men often are gung ho for being involved with witnessing the strength, empowerment and magnificence of a woman giving birth (and truly, it is an awe-inspiring feat to witness and never lost its edge for me a bit), they are reluctant to give that kind of support to a woman who is birthing a new life in other ways, through her creative, empowered efforts.

You know.  I’m just not convinced that is true and I don’t think it gives men the benefit of the doubt.

As women, we are by our very nature creators.  There is an internet meme that was going around a while that said this:

One of the greatest measure of a man in this society – and I do believe this is true – is not how much money he makes, how much weight he can bench press or how fine his lawn looks.  It’s how happy he is able to make his lady.  When you see a woman walking around with a big cheesy grin on her face like she’s the cat that just ate the canary and has the sweetest secret anyone ever knew, some part of you has to think that her man is doing something right.  This means that when you work to make yourself happy, whether he knows it or not, it’s going to make him look good as well.

When you meet a man who has a wife who is just bitchy and crabby and demanding and shrewish and awful, you might feel bad for him, but don’t you also kind of think less of him?  As a woman, don’t you wonder even a little bit if maybe she wasn’t always that way, but maybe he turned her that way?  Men are not likely wondering that, but I imagine they are speculating why this guy would stay with someone like that.  Why are they letting themselves be treated in such a way?

When a woman is happy and glowing and thriving, everyone around them shines a little brighter and looks a little better.  I’m telling you the Goddess’s only truth, though and hear me now and believe me later:  They can’t give it to us.  We have to create it all ourselves.  We are the life givers and we just have to be able to to give ourselves life sometimes too.

There is an insidious truth that hides behind all of this that is sort of like the big white elephant stomping all over the room that not very many people mention.  Taking control of our own life and making the changes that need to be made for us to flourish and thrive is really, really hard work.  I would love to be able to tell you that once you take those first few steps and get up off the couch and claim more for yourself that the wind is at your back and the road just rises right up to meet you.  A good bit of the time, that’s true, but sometimes, the wind knocks you down and the road rising up to meet you is aimed at your face.

Let’s take an example with which I am very, very well acquainted: the overweight woman.  My husbands did not cause me to be fat, neither one of them.  Both have let me know they had a problem with it.  (Point noted)  My kids did not cause me to be fat.  My jobs did not cause me to be overweight (despite all of them being desk jobs).  My genes did not cause me to be fat, despite carrying a predisposition toward it.  What caused me to be fat is that I love food and I ate to feel nurtured and comforted when I was going through a long, painful time of my life.  What caused me to be a fat is not that I sat all day for work, but that I did not make an effort to move at any time during my day.  The years compounded and here I am.

I will feel so much better when I lose around 40% of my body weight.  Most of you can do the math and figure out that such a weight loss is of Biggest Loser proportions.  That is a LOT to contemplate and the enormity of that accomplishment is a component in why it has not happened yet.  It’s not the reason, but it is a part of the puzzle.  I can work up the motivation. I can intellectually see that it needs to happen.  I am well aware of the impact my extra weight has on my family and on my ability to fully enjoy life in a plugged in, engaged way.  A cognitive awareness of those issues is clearly imbedded in my head.  No matter how much support I get from family, friends, husband, physical trainer or people on a message board, I have to do the actual work myself.  I have to get on the treadmill.  I have to count my calories.  I have to lift the weights.  I have to sacrifice my comfort strategies or develop new ones.  All of those *I* messages are very clear that no matter how much someone else wants it for me or supports me, the responsibility rests in only one place and that is me.

My weight loss journey and ultimate destination will have a negative impact on my family as well as a positive one. Sure, I will probably live longer and my husband will have a healthier, more active and possibly more attractive wife (although I really cannot imagine it because damn, how much better can it possibly get?).  I will be able to do more with my kids.  The positive changes will be incredible!  Then we get to, “Hey!!!  Why do we have no cookies/chips/candy in the house?”  “Why are you working out all the time?”  “You need to buy new clothes, again?”  “What do you mean there is nothing at this restaurant you can eat?”  My husband is a very jealous person (according to him – I have not really seen evidence of it) and he has never known me when I was not overweight.  I wonder what kind of can of worms that could open?  How much safety does he derive from me being fat and not considered to have a socially acceptable body?

I use this example to illustrate a few issues.  One is that no matter what specific change you overlay onto the example, you are the one who has to do the work.  No one can do it for you.  That also means that you get all the credit for success.  Another is that no matter what changes you make, there will be fallout, both positive and negative, but can you really let the potential negative effects stop you from having what you want?  No.  Should you accept that the responsibility is yours?  Absolutely.  Should you let other people deal with their own reactions and trust that ultimately, they are entirely capable of handling whatever comes up?  Most certainly.  Should I get up off that couch and put down the Cheetos and start moving more?  Yes, I sure did.  Who am I doing this to benefit?  Me.  It’s not about my kids or my husband or anyone except me and the goals I have for myself and my life.

It has always been so much easier for me to pull the covers back over my head and dissolve into the oblivion of sleep, metaphorically speaking.  So many times, I have made a good start and then when the real work of it all set in, I gave up and started eating again.  I could pretend it was because some minor crisis threw me off track or blame other people all day long, but really, I failed because it was because it was hard and I did not want to do the hard work.  I wanted to eat and self-medicate and not work out.  That’s really what it was all about.

To show how it overlays with other problems, one of the other challenges I am currently facing is that I have no “in person” female friends.  I have women who I love to pieces and some who I see every few months for a few hours at a time, but no one who is in my life on an ongoing basis, right in front of me.  Part of what I am writing about in my books that are under development is the concept of “familiar pain.”  This is a theory I have that our spirit connects into a pain that happened to us during our formative years and continually recreates circumstances in our lives to duplicate that initial pain.  This continues to happen until we dig out that original pain and heal it, at which time we can move on without having to repeat the same painful situations.  This is a little too Freudian for my typical tastes, but it rings true for me.

In my counseling practice, I encounter a lot of people who are seeking out the same relationships over and over (just with different faces), playing out the same cycles over and over and wondering why nothing ever changes.  We all have these familiar pains in our lives and it is an integral part of the process toward our own self-actualization.  Sometimes, in self-defense, we push people away from us in order to avoid those cycles rather than healing the pain inside.  That will usually touch on an entirely different familiar pain, which is that of abandonment and loneliness.  Between the opposite reactions of going into the repeated cycles and pushing everyone away to avoid them, there is no “right” way of handling the situation.  Either will work or not work because the key is to figure out what the common thread is to the pain in your life and to work to heal that old pain, which helps you to understand and heal the new pains.  You can do that alone or you can do that while you are in the repeated patterns.  It doesn’t matter.

I believe that these patterns of repeated familiar pain are not indicative of weakness or mental illness or instability.  They are simply a part of life.  No matter how wonderful our parents were or what great relationships we had with our siblings or peers, none of us are blessed with a perfect life and hurts will be created.  When they are created, big or small, they will be duplicated until they are resolved and put to rest.  This is how our spirit heals itself, just as our body is able to produce antibodies to heal itself.

I also do not believe that we are normally in a position to heal those old pains until we are older and have greater understanding of human behavior and spirit connectivity behind us.  Some people can, but I think it mostly comes with the lessons of aging, which are wonderful and dynamic if you lean into them.  Around the age of 29-31, the planet Saturn (planet of limitations and challenges) comes back around on its orbit to the same position it was in when we were born.  The orbit is elliptical, which is why the length of time varies.  This seems to be the first true encounter with what I would call “dynamic self-awareness” and at that time in the life of most people, there is a formative event that changes their life in an extreme way, usually quite profoundly.  If you can effectively math your way through it, you’ll see that it happens again around the age of 58 or so, which is another touch point for this kind of development. This kick off tends to start a process of internal restructuring and begins building on the foundation of who we are to be for our adult years.  The foundation we established in childhood is still there, but the building that was on it is usually razed to the ground in favor of a “new build.”

Now, I told you that to tell you this.  My familiar pain lies in interpersonal relationships with women.  I’m just not good at it.  My relationships with women in my first 16 years were not particularly great.  My mom started off well, but when I was ten, it seemed like she was ill a good bit of the time with frequent hospital visits.  This put me, as the oldest child and only daughter, in a situation to have to take care of my brothers and my father.  The shift in the parent-child dynamic was not good for my relationship with my mother.  I loved her intensely, but it was hard for either of us to really ever know where we stood with the other one and as a result, it was very difficult for her to provide any kind of nurturing to me.  This is significant because anyone who knew my mother will tell you immediately that she was one of the most kind and nurturing people you could ever hope to meet.   I thought this was all in my head until my mother died and I received a copy of her book of poetry.  It was never published, but my aunt made copies of the poems my mother had written in longhand and put them into page protectors in a big binder.  That book is one of my most prized possessions.  Mom wrote poetry about nature, about the things around her, but mostly, she wrote about the importance of the people in her life. There are poems about her husbands, her father, her mother, her siblings and her sons and her grandchildren.  There are poems about her relationship with God.  There is, however, not one single poem about me in the entire book and that told me a lot of what I needed to know.  I was simply not a factor in her world or at least not one she could focus on in a creative way.

My friendships through school were strained and at times, I was too clingy.  I was so desperate for anything that kept me rooted in childhood that I held on too tightly to the girls who would be friends with me.  I know this made the relationships uncomfortable for more than just me.  I wanted to be a kid.  I wanted to be a teen.  But I was in a situation at home where I had to act like an adult.  I had to decide in the morning what we would have for supper that night.  I had to get my brothers ready to go out to school before I left.  I had to make supper around doing my homework and try to keep the house clean.  Dad worked all the time and was very traditional in his thoughts about labor division in the home, so there was not a lot of support there. I don’t remember ever even hearing thank you from either of my parents.  It was just assumed that the tasks fell to me and I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.

I was teased mercilessly from first grade until I left high school in my junior year.  I literally do not remember a single day of school when I was not spit on, called names or physically pushed around, usually all through the day.  When I look back on my school years, all I sense is a nightmare of tears shed and unshed and friends who drifted away and were not available.

I fell deeply in love a few times in high school in that intense way that teenage girls can love. Feeling loved and appreciated was exciting and new and refreshing.  Don’t get me wrong.  My parents loved me tremendously and I have no doubt of that.  They just had absolutely no clue what to do with me.  The young men I loved did.  The one who I most loved quickly set me straight that I was too young and that he was not obtainable.  I drifted to others who were.  When a rumor was started that I was a lesbian, I immediately became pregnant.  “See how wrong you are?” that seemed to say, which created little satisfaction when the ultimate result was that I was 15 and expecting a baby.

I got married and went away and started a family.  I married a man who degraded and ridiculed me on a regular basis and that was normal to me.  We invariably move toward what feels familiar to us.

My friendships with women for the next twenty years remained very surface and fragile.  I had many, many people at any given time who I would say were my friends, but who were not there to provide any kind of significant support to me.  They were warm bodies who came and went at my house and provided enough noise and distraction that I did not have to investigate any of the things that were wrong with my life and with me.

Right on schedule (Hello Saturn!) at age 30, my marriage began to fall apart. It had never been particularly strong to start with and after 14 years of struggling, Paul just let go of the tug-of-war rope and I fell flat on my ass.  I made a lot of self-destructive choices after that and fell right down a spiral that consisted of nothing but immersion in familiar pain with no real resolution to it.  I hurt absolutely all the time.  Relationships came and went.  I had a beautiful daughter, which was the best thing to come into that time, but she was born to a mother who was tremendously broken and emotionally, spiritually and mentally ill on several levels.

Two years later, I remarried Paul, mostly because as I said, we drift toward the familiar.  Also because he asked and I was not doing anything better.  We quickly began to repeat old patterns (a frequent relapse of the lessons Saturn tries to teach us) and he left two years later, this time for another woman.

The pain was exquisite, but this time, I was determined not to fall into the same trap as before.  What friendships I did have were unstable and very imbalanced.  I left for California and tried to heal.

I married again a year later.  This time, there were a whole new set of emotional challenges to work through, as well as some manifestation of the “familiar pain.”  I did not have many friendships at all over those years.  By then, I was in the rejection  phase where I avoided contact with people to avoid the familiar pain.  Plus, Eric was providing enough of that on his own.  It took years for me to work through and heal myself and he was a big help in that.  I literally could not have done it without him and my wonderful counselor.

The familiar pain of my relationships with women is another story and clearly he is ill qualified to help me with that one, although he does try, God bless’im.  He is a social butterfly and has a lot of friends with whom he spends time.  He does so away from me.  I do not drink alcohol, which, I have found as an adult, is a huge impetus to socialization.  I don’t like to drink and I don’t like to be the only sober one in the room and it is amazing how many adult social settings involve alcohol.  Even if people are just getting buzzed instead of drunk, there is an energy shift that is almost palpable.  I’m not in the club.

Several years ago, frustrated by my lack of immediate friendship and at the prodding of Eric to get out in the world and do something (I was an admitted hermit), I got involved in the community and tried hard to cultivate friendships.  I was growing girlfriends and let me tell you, I was not good at it.  The whole experience was another nightmare and yes, it completely reconstructed that horrible time of school peers.  Dear Lord, what an effin mess that turned out to be.  The long and the short of it is that the whole situation, which went on for several years, only served to reinforce to me that women are not people who deserve my attention.  The ones I was with where catty, two-faced, unpredictable (not in a good way), back-stabbing and emotionally crippled.  If there were any in the ones I met who were not that way, they were drowned out by the ones who were.  Ultimately, it was too much work and too much pain and too much ick and I turned around and walked back into my house after 3 years and closed the door.  My friend, Jackie, survived the turmoil with me and I cherish her, even though circumstances make it so that our only contact is a frenzied catch up every 2-3 months.  She is one of those wonderful people I know who is not in my life on an ongoing basis even though she lives 2 miles from me.

In a more removed fashion, I set up the same dynamic with my website.  I have run “Eye on Soaps” since 2000 and last year, it developed into “All My Writers” to encompass a broader scope of coverage.  I started the site to empower writers, mostly women, to step up and have their voices hear and over the years, some amazing women (and Sage) have been involved with the project.  I became personal friends with many and at one point, was very emotionally close to everyone on my staff.  This was how it was for several years sure enough, the same scenarios developed.   People came on board who were abusive, who were users, who exploited the site for their own gain and who behaved deplorably and were just not very nice or mature people.  My experience with those people caused me to pull back on that front as well.  I have a great staff now, don’t get me wrong, but I find myself hesitant to invest emotionally.  I am not sure if that is good or bad.

I also want to say right now here and in public that I am truly and deeply sorry for the pain I caused to any innocent bystanders when I was working through my familiar pain regarding this issue and was struggling to find my way in some really assed up and dysfunctional relationship that resulted.  I was rarely my best self when I was going through the re-creation of these hurts and I know I did not honor the people around me who were not actively involved in those scenarios that played out.  I am truly very sorry for not being at the top of my game, which is what you deserved.

I went back to shutting myself off and Eric pretty much agreed “Yeah, wow, you really suck at this.”  That was something like 3 years ago.  I have kept to myself mostly since then.  Last year, I started to feel as though I really wanted the company of women and read back through some of my old journals to remind myself of why I didn’t.  I do well in the company of men, mostly because I had brothers instead of sisters and sons instead of daughters (5 to 1), but a woman who is friends with men is treated as suspect around here and really, it’s not Eric’s first choice either.

I began to put out the beacon that I wanted to make friends with some women who are emotionally strong and steady, who are insightful and have a good, healthy spiritual relationship with whatever makes them feel spiritual and who provide me with a safe, loving and positive place to grow and learn and socialize.  The first thing that happened is that I tuned into the relationships I have with the women who are involved with my sons.  Amber and Kayla are amazing, strong young women and I adore them, as does Delena, my daughter.  I love them both tremendously and feel a strong connection there.

Over 2011, I connected with other strong women around me whose company I very much enjoy.  These are women who have been through adversity and are still, to some degree, coping with it, but who refuse to allow it to define them or keep them down.  They are not trying to prove anything through their friendships and are  more invested in the quality of social environment they are creating for themselves than in the number of people they can collect or the social status their friends bring them.  They are good at elevating themselves and the people around them through positive support rather than making themselves feel more superior by attacking and demeaning others.  They raise themselves up rather than lowering others around them.

All that being said and with the blessings around me of having met some amazing women, I find myself succumbing to the old conditioning.  I keep expecting them to act like the other women who have hurt me.  I keep expecting to walk up on the conversation I was not supposed to hear that tells me how they *really* feel about me.  I keep expecting to be rejected.  I keep expecting to be humiliated.  I drew in the quality women who I want as friends, but I can feel myself working on that familiar pain and having to constantly deconstruct the expectations I put in place.  I have to actively work to stay open to the “new” experience and not create the old one.  That causes me to move forward, pull back, expand, contract, reach out, pull back.

I struggle to find the balance between protecting myself and being available.  I work to say yes when I would normally say no and to say no when I would normally say yes.  I so much want these healthy relationships and I know that part of the contaminant that has caused problems in the past is inside me.  I also know that in the past, I was less healed of this particular pain and so I drew in the types of people who would play out those scenarios for me.  I instinctively know that the women I have met in the past year are different from that by my own design in drawing them to me, but I have to be careful not to layer my own conditioned filters over the relationships.

To reach back up to the example I gave of the weight loss struggle, again, the work that has to be done is mine.  I am responsible for the way I engage this new opportunity at friendship.  I have to do the internal work to break down the old conditioning and expectations and remain open to what it is like to have positive and loving relationships again.  I have to learn to trust women.  I have to challenge my own previous experiences and step out of what is familiar and learn a new way.  I have to provide an emotional place inside of me where these new connections can thrive and flourish and prosper into supportive and loving friendships.  Just like with the weight loss, I have to do the work to make it happen or I can go back inside and never have that experience.

So that is what I mean when I say that some of my power eggs are broken.  That is the sacred struggle that I’m working on now and I am grateful to be involved in that process.  I would rather be self-aware and involved in active healing, even if it is sometimes a painful and dicey process, than to have my head stuck in the sand or be running on autopilot and endlessly repeating the same hurtful cycles.

Ultimately, my goal is to create a loving, supportive network of amazing people to carry me and us into our golden years.  I want to minimize the drama and playing out of old, hurtful cycles and surround myself with people who make my world a better place to hope I do the same for them.

It is said that the true measure of a person is how we feel when we walk away from spending time with them.  Do we feel joyful, empowered, happy and blessed?  Do we feel drained, depleted, sad and bereft?

I want to be the person who engages in a mutual dynamic of uplifting and empowerment with the people I know and love.  I guess that is the goal I am planting for this year.  I also want a stereo for my caddy, but that is a whole other column altogether.

What a ride this has been and what an experience I have had!  No, it’s not anything in particular, but just more of the mysteries of life unraveling.  In my spiritual path, the time between August 1st and September 21st represents the First Harvest which is when your hard efforts for the year pay off and you begin to see results from the goals you planted in March.  September 22nd – October 31st is the Second Harvest and that is when you get the extra blessings or “The Boon.”  Those are the benefits that are the gifts from The Universe.  I cannot even begin to express how bountiful my blessings have been this Fall and even spilling over into Winter.  I stop and think about it and I get overwhelmed with joy.

After all these years of struggle, this year, the struggle just fell away and the joy took over.  I feel like layers and layers of filters were peeled off my vision and I can see things clearly for the first time in my life.  I have always engaged life in such a way that I felt like if things were going right, I was cheating.  I would sit and wait for the other shoe to fall and things to go to shit again and than I would finally feel comfortable and in my element.  I didn’t take time to enjoy the happy moments because I was too busy being braced for the inevitable crash.

This year, I finally really internalized the thought that I can have it all and not because I work the system and keep all the plates spinning in the air at the same time, but because I’m simply entitled to it.  I can be happy because that is our natural state and being unhappy is what we have to work to achieve.

In the past few weeks, I feel like missing pieces of the puzzle all came together.  In fact, I think I was previously working about 3 different puzzles all mixed up in the same box.  Maybe I was working the puzzle in the dark and someone happened by and turned on the light.  Regardless, I can see the picture now and it’s something pretty beautiful.

So I’m  happy and life is good.  I have been journaling a lot in longhand, which is something I have not done in literally over a decade.  This time, it is mostly about my struggle with weight loss and how the extra weight that is on me now that I have fought and fought to get rid of for good but just keep sticking around is a physical representation of every time I gave my power away.  I let someone cause me to feel a particular way and I would look for comfort in food to numb that feeling.  I would let food have power over me because it was always there, always comforting and never let me down.

I remember watching a show called “I Lost It” on some TLC channel or another and in one of the segments, a woman talked about walking to pay for some gasoline and having a homeless man say to her, “Girl, you got too much food in you.”  Let me tell you, peoples… “I got too much food in me.” I am not one of these people who says, “I hardly eat at all!  I don’t know why I always gain.”  I eat a lot.  Or at least I used to.  Now I don’t so much.

I am genetically predisposed to being fat.  My mom and my dad both weighed, well, a lot.  I was raised in an environment where food was love and food was comfort and there was a lot going on that needed to be comforted.  I just carried that tradition right over.  The Nature versus Nuture debate is long over and science knows that both our genetic make up and our environment contribute to our outcomes.  Just because I am predisposed to being overweight does not mean I have to be overweight.  For a period of about 10-15 years, I was a nice size, but my husband at the time didn’t think so and was very critical of my weight, so I thought of myself as fat.  I remember finding a diet book at one point where I had started my weight loss journey one week to the day after my second son was born.  I was 18-years-old and I was dieting down from 131.  I have never known a time in my life where I could look in the mirror confidently and feel good about what I saw, even when I weighed 120 pounds of pure muscle from running 3 miles a day.  I always saw the little baby pooch and the breasts that were no longer perky from breastfeeding and the curves that just would not go away.  I felt fat all the time and pretty soon, I was fat.

Things happened.  Things hurt.  I ate so I wouldn’t feel them.  That continued until, oh, probably about 2-3 months ago.  I had some successes, such as losing 40 pounds a couple of years ago, but as soon as I internalized the idea that I was succeeding instead of just having a brief moment of losing weight, I would sabotage myself right away.  I was afraid of not having my comfort measures available if something went wrong. I was afraid I couldn’t ever be happy if I did not have the option of gorging myself on food if I “needed” to.  I had to have my arsenal ready in case shit got real and if I lost the weight and then needed the food, I’d have failed after succeeding and that would be so much worse than just staying fat.  Since it felt like I was being hurt and challenged on a regular basis, I was never at a loss for a reason to eat and comfort myself with food.

I thought a lot about what wisdom I had in being fat.  We always, always do what we do for a reason.  It works for us in some way or we wouldn’t do it.  I realized that because almost all of the adults I’d known as a child were fat, I equated fat with being grown up.  Weird, I know, but it was in there for me.  I look at thin people and they do not look strong or substantial to me.  I worry that the slightest little wind will blow them away.  It’s like the bumper sticker says, “Fat people are harder to kidnap.”  I was weak when I was a smaller person and I was interesting and smarter as a large person.  Inside, I equated being fit and slender with how stupid I was back then (and trust me, there was a whole lot of stupid going on there).

If I gave birth to you or you knew my mother when she was a child, please do not read this next bit.  I’ll tell you when it’s OK to come back again…

Another part of the problem that I refused to look at before menopause beat me severely about it is that over years, I completely mortgaged away a whole part of myself and my personality.  I am by nature a very sexual person and I stopped being that for a number of very self-protective and quite reasonable reasons.  I cut away that whole part of myself and associated it with a lot of humiliation and emotional pain.  I also came to equate being slender and shapely with that aspect of my personality and I absolutely did not want to feel the bad things that came along with that part of myself, so I divorced myself from it.

When Madame Menopause came along, all that changed.  She’s definitely the force that will not be denied and takes over sort of like a hurricane takes over the land.  There’s not really very much negotiation that goes on and it’s more Her way or the highway.  The books got balanced really quickly in that respect and what had been denied for decades was not going to stay buried any longer.  The dragon woke right up and you just can’t ignore dragons when they start roaring.

…..My children and people who knew my mother as a child may come back now.

Anyway, so now everything is in its proper place and I am still working through some of my residual issues regarding medicating with food.  Mostly, I feel completely empowered and ready to rock.

A lot of you people have gone down this road with me many times before.  My life for the past thirty years or so has been one big back and forth struggle with food and my weight.  I will work up determination and will power and off I’ll go.  I’ll find a new exercise, a new pill, a new eating plan and off I go.  My success has always, always been minimal ultimately and I have always returned right back to where I started or heavier.  This time I know will be the one that is real.  It’s a quiet knowing that all of the pieces have come into place and all of the hurts have been healed and now it is just a matter of clean up.

I found a nutritional plan that works for me.  I’ve already lost 8 pounds within the past month and I feel wonderful.  My blood pressure is down and my heartburn is gone.  There is a quiet peace inside that likes how I feel now.  I don’t have any cravings.  In fact, I lost 2 pounds over Christmas and never once felt deprived.  I still love food, but I don’t have to have large servings or eat constantly to love it.  I love my body and think it is beautiful, so I enjoy giving it the good foods it wants and needs to be healthy.  The same goes for exercise.  My body is so eager and excited and happy when I walk or play or do strength training.  It responds quickly and feels really good.  I like working in harmony with my body instead of being angry at it and fighting against it.

I used to compare going to the grocery store when on a diet to going to the grocery store with a three-year-old.  “Can I have that?”  “No.”  “Please??”  “NO!!”  “I’ll be good the whole rest of the week!”  “I said no!”  Now it’s like going to Disneyland.  “That looks good!”  “Oooh!  Let’s try it!”  “Can we get some of that fresh pineapple?”  “Yes yes yes!”  “How about that steak?”  “Great idea!”  The processed foods, sweets and transfats don’t even appeal to me any more.  I look at them and see poison.  I eat what I guess you would call “real” food.  If it takes a lot of processing, I don’t eat it.  The only exception is whole wheat bread, which I do eat.  If a food has been bleached, chemically altered or taken far away from its original state, I don’t eat it.  The only oil I use is extra virgin olive oil.  I was surprised at how easy the transition turned out to be.  I don’t miss the biscuits, the white bread, the cookies, the candy, the bacon (mmmm, bacon), the french fries or the chips.  Even crackers are too heavily processed for me.  It’s surprising how many foods really do jump through a lot of hoops before we get to eat them.

Just that simple adjustment of only eating foods that are close to their natural state made such a difference in how I feel.  I plan to stick with that and begin a more regimented daily exercise plan.  So far, I’ve just been upping the activity in my daily life and moving around more rather than staying in my desk chair for hours at a time.  Making gentle changes over the past month has worked out great and now I look forward to making some more aggressive changes.

I once heard about an analogy that was, I believe, Native American in extraction.  It talked about our basket of power eggs and how we give them out to the various people and projects until we have none left for ourselves.  I have lived so long with the martyr factor that I have been giving my power eggs out right and left.  My excess weight is about the times when I let myself be less than or beneath where I should have been.  Those were the times when I was disempowered and sacrificing my health and my happiness in favor of what other people wanted or demanded.  It is about when I let other people make me feel unworthy or weak.

Now I am quietly and gently taking back my own power.  Most of the people who have it don’t care about it and aren’t using it anyway.  It doesn’t have the value to them that it does to me.  I refuse to be subdued anymore and I will not sacrifice myself for others anymore.  I can honor them in their own space, but I will not subjugate to anyone again.  I never should have done that in the first place and the reasons why I did so are completely irrelevant to the process.  I have worked through all of that privately and I’m not that person anymore.

I won’t be creating a separate blog or doing any kind of public tracking on this process.  It is what it is.  (I love that saying – it’s so concise)  I fully expect to be at a healthy weight within a year’s time.  I am excited and honored to be having this adventure.

I am fortunate to be starting this from a healthy place.  I am lucky that my weight has not adversely affected my health in any kind of profound way.  So really, I’m not going from unhealthy to healthy but from healthy to even healthier.

Life is really, really good.  I am writing again, which I fully enjoy.  I am taking classes this semester that seem interesting and fun instead of grueling.  I am gently and firmly setting my boundaries and defending them in a loving way.  I am taking care of myself on every level for the first time in my life and I am doing so with love and reverence.  I am eliminating the places in my life where love and reverence is not reflected to me.  I am not saying that challenges don’t still happen and that everything is perfect in practical terms, but it is sure a lot easier to handle the tough stuff when you are coming from a place of self-respect rather than defeat and self-loathing.  What a tremendous step it is to get from one to the other!

I am just tired of being in the audience for my own life.  I want to be on the field playing.

I have finally put a really rough semester behind me.  The material was not horribly challenging, but one of the professors was difficult, which made the class really tough.  I managed to pull through it with my 4.0 GPA intact and complete a full year of college.  I never thought I would do something like that and it’s nice to feel the left side of my brain kicking up a little dust.

Now, I have 4 weeks off school before the new semester begins.  For 3 of those weeks, the kids are home, but so far, meaning “we aren’t even into vacation yet and it’s still the weekend,” they have been pretty cool.  I have not yet fully scheduled my upcoming semester and will know more when the waiting lists start to move.  All in all, it looks like it will be an easier semester than the others I’ve had.

When I am in school, my brain looks like the picture above.  Being a full time college student tends to take over my life and when it’s not going on, I feel like I have missed a step on a staircase or forgot to touch a couple of the bases when I cross over home plate.  I often feel like I am forgetting to do something important (usually it’s true) and that I’m on the verge of being overwhelmed.  When I’m not in classes, I don’t really miss it, but I feel even more as though I am not doing something I am supposed to be doing.  It’s like getting off of a roller rink floor and feeling like I’m still skating when I’m walking.

All of my classes are online and I have had people be kind of dismissive of that as though it’s not “real” school or that it must be so much easier.  In many ways, it’s harder.  I am good with the discipline of sitting down and doing the work and rarely put off anything to the last minute.  If, however, you don’t understand something from the material, it’s often a bit of a process to get answers and also, your explanation is not going to be demonstrated and spoken to you, it’s going to be written.  I go through a LOT of printer toner and highlighters.  I study like mad.  Hours and hours a day, usually seven days a week, I spend working on classes.

Now that I no longer have to think about things like dendrites and whether a stated philosophy is closer to Behaviorism perspective or psychoanalytical, my head looks more like this:

I plan to fill those spaces with writing material.  I am completely on fire to write the books that are rolling around in my head and I want to take advantage of both the time and the  motivation.  Plus with next semester being quieter, I should be able to transition the process over into a nice blend.

I am also excited about the writing.  I have a novel that I have worked on literally since 1983.  It is a romance and ghost story.  Next comes the daily devotional with a small reading for each day to give us something wonderful to think about.  Then there’s the Tarot book that needs refining.  I’ve got a book on our CUSP spiritual tradition brewing.  My nurse practitioner and I are working on a book about creating vibrant health from the inside out.  I am still working on a really fun book of memoirs.  I also recently had a tremendously profound revelation regarding reincarnation that I am eager to get into writing.  How many is that? Seven?  Yes, I will be a busy girl.  Less talk…more writing.

I don’t have a segue for this, so pretend I do.

I can’t even tell you how many times I have wished that I was a drinker or even a user of the occasional illicit drug.  My personality is completely at odds with the role of “teetotaler.”  Not to mention, whenever people find out you don’t drink, you forever get thrust into the role of “designated driver.”  I have never cared for the taste of any alcohol and never cared for the feeling of being tipsy.  I tried cocaine once and just got a really nasty tasting post nasal drip and watched the snow on the TV for about 30 minutes and thought, “Well, this is just completely not worth it.”  I used to love to smoke pot because I would get giggly, then philosophical, then hungry, then aroused, then sleep blissfully.  As I got older, that progression turned into bypassing everything except “go to sleep,” which I can do anyway most of the time.

I used to love downers like the ever popular (if you’re over 40, you’ll remember these) Quaaludes.  Those went away and sleepy time was never the same again.  That pretty well leaves me empty handed.  It sucks to always be the only sober person in a room, so I don’t end up socializing very much.  I’m pretty interesting when I’m not chemically altered in some way, but I am probably not interesting to someone who is altered.

Basically, this means that unlike the vast majority of Americans, I go through my life unaltered other than the occasional carb coma or insomnia induced dementia.  I used to be able to sleep any time, anywhere.  I have slept on the back of a motorcycle many times.  I’ve slept standing up.  I’ve slept at concerts (Michael Schenker, to be exact and maybe Ratt – I don’t remember if I was actually asleep for that one or it was just that bad).  I’ve slept through countless movies.  Sleep was never, ever a problem for me.

In the past 10 years or so, the menopause induced insomnia has crept in from time to time. It’s not restless leg syndrome, but more of restless mind syndrome.  I’m not worrying or in a state of anxiety.  My brain just rolls and makes it hard to sleep.  It’s like the shut off switch is broken.  Sometimes, I can get to sleep, but when I wake up at 2am to go pee and the dogs hear the upstairs floorboards creek and start whining to go out and I cycle out 4 dogs and get them back in again and then try to sleep, it’s a long time coming.

My wonderful health care provider suggested I try Trazodone and it definitely helped me sleep.  When I went to see her after a year (this was a little over a month ago), she asked me how it was going with the Trazodone.  I told her it helped me and that I took it once a week or so to catch up when I didn’t sleep well through the week.  She sort of looked at me and blinked and said that the idea was that I would take it most of the time and not have to catch up because I would have slept…most of the time (I’m paraphrasing).  She then let me know that the dose she gave me was 1/8 of the maximum dose.  I remembered taking two by accident once and being a train wreck the next day.  One doesn’t make me sleep, but helps me sleep.  Two makes me into a zombie.  I can’t imagine taking 8.

I went back this week for a blood pressure recheck, being old and all.  I told her I’d started taking the Trazodone every day and yes, I was sleeping every single night, but during the day, I had a kind of blunt affect and wasn’t really plugged into anything. I had no motivation and I spent a lot of time sitting and staring.  Fortunately, I did well on my finals in this condition, so…whatever.  Still, I didn’t like feeling emotionally flatlined and missed my usual zip.

She commended me on my bp drop and my weight drop in the month’s time and also on my ridiculous pansy-assed, wussy nature toward medications.  She told me she could prescribe _____ for me (I can’t remember the name of the medication) that would give me very specific, intense munchies (“I want a chocolate sundae with almonds and raspberries right now or I am going to kill someone and it’s 2am.”) or Ambien, which in someone with my limited tolerance would cause me to wake up in my driveway with my keys in my hand, my car engine warm and me with no memory of where I’d been dressed in a tutu, opera gloves and swim fins.  The other option was to take half of a Trazodone instead of a full one and not use it if I have plenty of make up sleeping time at my disposal (like the next 4 weeks).  I went with Plan C and it’s workout out great.  Within two days of not taking the Trazodone, I was re-engaged, had my motivation back and was me again.  Go team.

I had a “Healthy Woman” appointment this year and got a clean bill of health.  My body is pretty good at talking to me and I like to think I am good at listening and so I wasn’t completely surprised that all was well.  It had been twelve years since my last physical.  The only reason I had a bit of concern was that after all that time, I had a very strong compulsion to go get checked.  That thinking is (obviously) not in my usual “original thought” line up.  I guess because of all the years of working in the medical field, to me that sense of urgency equated out to “something must be wrong.”  Everything was clear, but the compulsion was explained when I hit it off exceptionally well with my nurse practitioner and we are now collaborating on what will be an absolutely wonderful book that you will all want to read.  I am blessed to have her come into my life as an ally and a friend.  I guess it’s a good lesson for all of us that hearing the push to “go do this right now” can merely be a matter of timing and not a matter of crisis.

I started using an eating plan called “Nourishing Traditions.”  My aforementioned nurse practitioner recommended it at the first of my two appointments this year and I started to feel better almost immediately.  My blood pressure has dropped remarkably and my heartburn and acid reflux are minimal.  I haven’t had any cravings and I lost 7 pounds in a month, which isn’t much, but it’s at least going in the right direction.  The main premise is letting go of most white flour products, refined sugars and fats that are not animal produced or olive oil.

The next step is to start some strength training and a little aerobic work.  Strong Women Stay Slim is the strength training program.  All you need are ankle weights, which I got at the thrift store for $3 each and hand weights, which I already had.  By the time it warms up again, I want to be healthy enough to start walking the hills here.

I am giving this process a year and a day, which is a lovely time period for good changes.  Since this coming year is a leap year, it will automatically be built in:  Winter Solstice to Winter Solstice.  Given the amazing things that have happened to me in the past two years, I am excited to see where this goes.

Christmas is turning out quite well so far.  (Nathan just read that and suggested I use the word “amazing” instead of “quite well.”)  Normally, we celebrate Winter Solstice on the Sunday before it occurs, but this year, Amber – my outlaw* via David – could only get Christmas weekend off work, so we delayed it out.  The “at home” boys opened 3 of their gifts today and they were happy with them.  This Christmas just feels so delightful.  The primary source of my good feeling is that I am surrounded by people who I love tremendously and respect to the fullest.  It takes a LOT of work to surround yourself with support and a good pit crew and a lot more effort to distance yourself from the people who cause you to feel limited, drained and uncomfortable, but it is so completely worth it.  I speak from experience here.

I feel better than I have probably felt in my whole life. I am ready to begin the journey of truly embracing vibrant, flourishing health.  I’ve known the ingredients for literally decades, but I have never really been in a psychological state to fully accept the process.  This is dancing under the full moon, reaching up to the skies in sheer joy, closing your eyes and feeling your skin tingle truly happy.  In that fertile field, absolutely anything can grow.

*Since the wonderful, beautiful women who are in relationships with David and Josh are not actually married to them, I can’t really call them my “in-laws,” so they get to be my outlaws.

The prodigal columnist returns.

I recognize that if a person looks at this journal and checks the entry dates, the immediate impression would be that I have not been writing in it for quite some time.  That is a tremendously reasonable assessment.  I have, however, been writing just as much as usual.  I’ve just been deleting it all.

Back in September, I started a column called, “The Glass Ceiling:  Break It, Don’t Windex It” about the limitations we create for ourselves and how we are comfortable living inside little boxes of our own design and complaining about being trapped in them.  I went back to that column at least ten times, trying to express what I was feeling and make sense of my thoughts.  Each time, I ended up walking away and coming back again later and rewriting.  I probably wrote a couple thousand words that are now gone.  The column will find its way into this journal if for no other reason than the fact that it is a fantastic title that must be honored.

As many of you know, when I write out these entries, I heal things inside myself, come to realizations that I did not have when I sat down in the chair and find a good catharsis in letting it all out.  Given my repeated struggle with engaging that particular column, I have to believe that there are issues there I am not yet ready to address.  (Then why did it come to me in the first place?)  At first, I took that to mean I needed to just keep pushing through it, but we can see where that got me:  two months with no column at all.  Clearly, that isn’t working, so this is more like the stunt column until I can manage and pray and cry my way through the other one.

I am still not sure what is that is holding me back.  There must be some boundaries I have set for myself that are holding me back that I do not acknowledge, but you know what?  I’m tired of working on it.  It’ll come when it comes.  Meanwhile, as Vivi says, “I’ll just chew on it until all the flavor’s gone and then stick it in my hair.”  Tra la.

I actually had an extremely uncharacteristic brush with mortality (not morality, no way) courting in the past two weeks and if you don’t think that is linked to the whole glass ceiling bashing subject, I’ve got bridges and ocean front property to sell you.  I love getting older and I feel better and happier now than I ever have in my life.  I am not afraid to get older or old.  In the last couple of weeks, I felt this near breathless, choking urgency regarding all that I have left undone and the short amount of time I’ve got left to do it in.  I looked back on a lifetime of taking care of other people, although sometimes not very well, and felt fear grip my heart that it was all I was ever going to do.  I mean, I love the people who The Universe chose to put into my care, but I’m also painfully selfish and want to get busy doing some of my own fun stuff too.  Eric suggested that it would all work itself out in the next life, that such a thing is what reincarnation is for – you live a life of service in one life and get paid back in the next.  I suggested to him that perhaps as one of the primary recipients of my service, mebbe he was not exactly the most objective philosopher in the think pit on this one, having a dog in the fight and all.  He pshaw’d me.  What I know is that I don’t want to wait until my next life to feel as though I am living a fully engaged and personally rewarding life. Right now, to be truthful, I just don’t.  A lot of times, I really just don’t like my life very much, even though it’s a pretty good life.

This time of year is all about getting comfortable with the shadow side of things, so that is what I am working to do.  When I begin to feel depression looming, which fortunately does not happen often any more, I make a point to talk to it and see what it is trying to tell me.  This one was more like a screaming, hysterical child and it took some time before I could get it to calm down and make (or hear) any sense.  I am still working on it to a degree, but it seems to be starting to sort itself out.

So now that I’m a good ways into this entry, let’s just do it:

The Glass Ceiling: Break It; Don't Windex It

Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.  In 1970, a cartoonist named Walt Kelly created a poster for the very first Earth Day and he featured one of his own long time published characters, a rather thoughtful ‘possum called “Pogo.”  The poster is below:

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Of course, the phrase was used on the poster and coined to represent what completely selfish, sloppy asshats we all are for being litterbugs and trashing up Mother Earth. I cannot help but think, however, how much those nine words sum up so much of what we, as individuals, consider to be our problems, whether on a personal scale or a global scale.

“We have met the enemy… and he is us.”

“…he is me.”

I have a list of “I can’ts” in my head and when put to the true litmus test, most of them I probably could.  Whether people want to accept accountability for it or not, the reality is that we create our own existence.  The life we have as adults (I have to leave kids out of this picture because they are pretty much at our mercy) is the result of a series of choices we make, even if that choice is to do nothing.  We always have choices, but often, fear keeps us from seriously considering them.  If you and I look around in a moment of clarity and see what our life really is, we have to own responsibility not only for where we landed, but how we are going to get out of it if we don’t like it.

The biggest problem is that it is so easy to blame other people for our own lack of progress.  As I’ve mentioned in this column before, people don’t make changes or move unless pain is involved on some level.   If things are comfortable and nice, they will remain perfectly still because they are afraid of upsetting the status quo and rocking the boat.  If things are uncomfortable and unsatisfying, they will stay where they are because they are afraid that making a move will take them someplace worse.  It’s not until things really hurt that anything happens and by that time, they’re burnt and anxious and jumping rashly.

“We have met the enemy… and he is us.”

I was thinking about the story about how to cook a live frog (don’t judge me).  You don’t throw the live frog into a pot of boiling water.  You put him into a pot of room temperature water and gradually turn up the heat until he cooks.  I think we don’t realize that things are bad until it’s too late because we are too busy blaming everyone else for our unhappiness or else pretending that everything is good when it’s not.

Anyway, my issues are the limits I impose on myself that do not have to be there. I have tried several times in the past to let go of my mindset that tells me, “You can’t do that” or “That’s not nice” or “You have to think of how that is going to affect other people.”  I can talk myself out of just about anything.  Meanwhile, the walls I’ve created seem to be closing in and my world is getting smaller and smaller instead of bigger and bigger.

I cannot and will not live in a world that is based in fear.  That just isn’t me.  Fear makes me tired and makes me feel small.  Fear closes doors instead of opening  them.  I’ve talked such a good game for such a long time and I’m getting tired of talking.  Maybe that’s why I couldn’t write words well about this.  I’ve talked enough – not that this will stop me – and now it’s time for doing.

A while back, I redesigned this website to include my other site, Second Sights, which is my life coach side of things.  It was the practicality of having things in one place that motivated me.  When I was trying to think of a new tagline for the site, Dr. Wayne Dyer’s words about how we are Human Beings not Human Doings came into my head.  While I thought he was being quite clever, I also thought that I kind of wanted to be both.  I want to do and to move forward, evolve and progress.  I also want to be and spend time resting and processing.

I don’t have a clever segue for this, so pretend that I do…

Clockwise or counter-clockwise?  Most people have seen this illusion and it’s pretty crazy. Focus on it enough and you can make the dancer turn in either direction, even though the graphic never changes.

A vase or two faces?  Look at the dark, look at the light – you see two different things.  Perception is the key in both of these situations.

When I said that we create our own reality, I wasn’t just talking about on the outside.  Things that happen in life are actually neutral.  “Good” or “bad” gets applied to them based on our emotions and our inner conditioning.  That shows how much our emotions color our world and bringing our emotions under control is one of the highlights of human evolution.   It doesn’t mean that you don’t feel anything.  It means that you are in control of what you feel instead of what you feel being in control of you.  We’ve all seen people really lose control of their emotions and likely have done so ourselves.  Emotions are natural and children do not have the skill set to control the actions their emotions create.  Adults do or should if they have a normal psychological state.  That’s part of what happens as we grow up.

In adolescence, we begin to use hypothetical thinking to solve problems.  Although children can easily move into fantasy, which is a form of hypothetical thinking, they cannot normally generalize that thought to the real world around them and use it to solve problems.  If information and events are neutral, it would seem that the best way to manage our emotions is to try and step back from the situation, overcome our conditioning that creates those knee-jerk reactions that tend to get us in trouble and objectify what’s happening so we can think more clearly.

Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this.

“Barrack Obama has been elected President of the United States.”

That is a neutral statement of fact.  It does not become “good” or “bad” until someone assigns an emotion to it.  One of my friends was celebrating when they heard that neutral statement and another took to her bed for two days in complete devastation.  Just like those optical illusions up there, these women looked at the exact same information and saw something totally different that shaped their world view and their experiences in completely opposite ways because of their own emotional reaction.  That seems to indicate that if we can control our emotion responses, we can control and change our outlook.

That takes us back to the glass ceiling and the box that I built to live in.  Through the glass ceiling, I can see that the whole world is out there for me, ripe for the taking.  There are so many things I have told myself I can’t do.  I need to break through that glass and work with the idea that I can do anything I want to do.  It’s not the people around me who are keeping me from doing the things that will make me happy.  It’s not “The Man” keeping me down and creating a life that isn’t fulfilling and does not nurture my spirit.

“We have met the enemy… and he is us.”

I’ve spent a good bit of time lately letting my emotions carry me.  Although emotions are natural and healthy, they can lie to you and seduce you into a pretty dark place if you let them and I did just that.

After tonight, less being and more doing.

Whew.  Finally got that column written.  Based on my performance over the past couple of months, that’s a whole lot of doing, so I figure I’m off to a good start.  From this point, I need to get more pro-active about making things happen without falling back into the trap of helplessness.

There is a psychological state called “learned helplessness.”  Scientists (who are mostly assholes) took dogs and put them on an electrified floor with fences as tall as the dogs themselves and a fenced covering, creating a full pen.  They then shocked the dogs repeatedly (sigh, I know).   They then took the fenced covering off of these poor traumatized dogs so that the dogs could easily escape.  The dogs would sit and shake and wait and then when they got zapped again, they yelped and fussed as expected, but even though they watched the scientists assholes take the lid off of their pen, they still didn’t jump out.  They just stayed there and endured it.  They’d been taught they were helpless and could do nothing about their situation.

Recently, I’ve spent some time in that same cage and well, screw that.  Over the fence!

Huzzah!

Now what I need is some sleep.  Doing makes me tired.

I am 6 hours into a perfectly peaceful, nearly silent day.  These are the days I have dreamed about for months, just to have every now and then.  Delena is happily stowed away in her new home playing Sims and enjoying a day off from college.  Dylan and Nathan are both in school.  Eric is at work at the VA.

Continue reading

When I awoke today, suddenly nothing happened
But in my dreams, I slew the dragon!
And down this beaten path, and up this cobbled lane
I’m walking in my old footsteps, once again…
Colin Hay

I have started this column and walked away from it several times because it is painful to write.  It’s not just painful on my own behalf, but for all of you who are reading this, no matter where in the matrix of this experience you fall.  You might be a husband whose wife feels this way.  You might be a child whose mother feels this way.  You might be a friend who loves someone who feels this way.  Regardless, I want you to know that I know this is hard. Continue reading

I was thinking today while I was driving about smiling and how they always say that it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile.  Then I was thinking about how when you’re feeling down, people always say stupid shit like “Smile!  It won’t break your face!”

There is very little I hate more than someone telling someone else to “Smile!”  While I understand that it’s done with good intention, it’s still fairly arrogant.  “Smile!”  My husband broke my heart this morning and I may have to leave him because I can’t stand to hurt any more.  “Smile!”  My house is in foreclosure, the sheriff comes in two days and I don’t know where we will live.  “Smile!” My child is ill and I have to work and can’t be with him.  “Smile!”  My car wouldn’t start, I don’t have money to have it looked at and my friend could only give me a ride to work today and if I am late again, I’m going to lose my job.” “Smile!”  I just found out I have cancer and I’m really scared because my father died of cancer.  [Note:  Those are just examples.  They are not about me.] Continue reading