Snap Goes The Rubber Band of Resistance

Hurray!  The rubber band of resistance and procrastination does not stretch to infinity and beyond.  There is a limit and mine has finally gone snap.  I finally inaugurated my Couch to 5K IPhone application.  Yes, the one that I have had for at least 4 months and had collected the proverbial cobwebs.  

I am not announcing this publicly because I am proud.  In truth it is because I hope the shame of not sticking to this after having announced it will help me keep my commitment.  I used to love running and exercise.  I even thought I wanted to be a personal trainer at one time.  I know the benefits yet getting back on the bandwagon has been tough.  I surely wish my love of self was stronger than my fear of shame.   But I have to pat myself on the back for knowing myself. Right?  After all, fear of shame has a good track record with me.  It got me to quit smoking 2 plus years ago when I partnered on the endeavor with my dear friend.  Well maybe it was pride of not letting friends see me fail.  Yes, pride and shame, opposite ends of the same coin huh?  And, in truth, you may not care if my lethargy was leading me to be a candidate for the next season of Biggest Loser, but I’ll pretend you do and I’m going to use pride aka the fear of shame game, to be kinder to my health. Juicy rationalization or not.

I do feel that I have to give some credit for this big snap to Ann Randolph who lead a phenomenal workshop at Kripalu called Sharing Your Life Story.  It was a 5 day writing and improv workshop.  I know at Kripalu, you may be thinking it was a bit woo-woo.  Don’t get me wrong, I do like to dip into the woo woo pool.  I’m an ex-junky of  woo-woo workshops.  And some may call my Lulu Loving Life healing and ceremonial practice a bit woo-woo too.  But if you’ve been around me, you’ll realize I prefer  things a bit tart and spicy.  If it’s too sweet and syrupy, I go into diabetic shock.  What I found refreshing, and the beauty of this retreat, was that participants could be as cathartic as they wished as long as they were willing to take responsibility for coping with the potential angst.  And we focused on the prize of creation.

Ann provided creative and inspirational exercises and prompts for both, our improvisational and writing exercises.  Silly me I thought I was just going to be focused on writing for the sake of writing.  The transformational impact took this ex-workshop junky by surprise.  Based on my extensive and diverse workshop experience as well as my personal diligence and dedication to my personal transformation, I feel entitled to say that I’m a person who has processed a lot of her shit and garbage.  Don’t let my expletives demean the intent of the words, nor connote a bad thing.  After all what do you think fertilizer aka manure or compost is composed of?  And what does fertilizer create? Yes, the answer is a beautiful garden.  

Sure I know the onion has many layers and was was still delighted at the additional insights I received about my life experiences.  I constantly preach that our wounds are also our medicine and it has became crystal clear that there is such power in expressing ourselves in story, whether it be written or performed.  After all we can only tell our stories if we have survived our stories.   And, in becoming the story teller of our hardships and life circumstances, we release the hand cuffs of victimization and transmute surviving to thriving.

I left this workshop feeling inspired, confident & courageous.   And I’m savoring the lingering taste of creativity and possibilities. I left reminded of why I started to blog.  After using it as a way to keep friends abreast of my life when I was living in India, I thought I would continue sharing my love for life, it’s humor and the metaphors that help me grow and trust.  Instead it has turned into a place for me to keep an anthology of the New Moon New Life Ceremonies that I hold every month.  Don’t get me wrong, I do love  the ceremonies which are filled with playful metaphor; however, I love so much more than that and life is inherently filled with metaphors that can be transformative catalysts a.k.a. insights or personal aha’s, or, at the least, a giggle.  I enjoy finding the metaphors amongst the silliness and craziness life provide and using the shit to create a blossom.  So why not share it.  And to play the fear of shame game one more time (after all practice makes perfect), I commit to blogging at least once a month other than the New Moon New Life recaps.  I’m the first to admit that it’s a fine line between wisdom and a good juicy rationalization so I’m going to let you take responsibility for what my sharing evokes and continue to keep loving life and blogging about it...

Total Receptivity Under Skeptical Times

This morning, before sitting down to blog, I was reflecting on why did I choose the theme or TRUST this week.  And I was trying to think of the inspiration and my rational mind said it's because of an epidemic that I have found to be rampant.  I call this dis-ease the OLD Perfection Paradigm.  This is the belief that we are less than perfect because for some reason we feel that we don't stack up because of all programming that we have inherited from our families, the media, our communities...    All too often, I hear really awesome people doubt themselves all the time and it makes me a little sad.  And we know that sometimes hard times and challenges come up.  And this event may trigger negative thought patterns and make us feel like we are NOT enough to handle it or they need something that the don't have whether it be money, education or training, ...

If you noticed I do use the word WE here as it's also important to realize this is an epidemic and I too am not always immune.  But feel fortunate that I do have a few tools in the medicine cabinet to help eliminate it.  After all it's a process and we keep peeling away, one layer of the onion at a time.  After all even the Owl in the Tootsie Pop commercial, asks how many licks does it take to get to the center of the lollypop.  Hmmm, perhaps this months prasad should have been a tootsie pop so we can try it out for ourselves or a tootsie roll so I can give you the yummy gewey center without the sucking (metaphor intended).  And what would be the fun in that.  However, I have digressed and that is not this months surprise although perhaps a new inspirational treat is foreshadowed.

So the NEW Perfection Paradigm and the truth of the matter is, the only thing missing is trust in ourselves.  My wish for the world is that we all welcome what is occurring to us right now and who we are is absolutely perfect.  If it's yummy enjoy it and of it's a lemon make lemonade.

Another thing that was going on around the same time and it happens to me from time to time, is I start pondering my life and then I start to giggle with delight.  I start to giggle with delight as I realize that if, like in the Christmas Carol and the ghost of current Lulu came to visit me about 15 plus years ago and showed me that I was going to be never married at 46, clowning in Costa Rica, traipsing off to India and Peru to visit temples and work with healers or doing shamanic lunar ceremonies every month I would have dismissed it as a bad dream or I may have even made every attempt to make that not happen and perhaps may have choices to intentional thwart the prophesy.  Heck 15 years ago, I hadn't even fully embrace the name Lulu yet, I was very much Lisa, not even Lisa Hari.  Yes, my middle name on my birth certificate although not intentional on my parents part is one of the Sanskri name for God.  And funny how I had shame around it as a child but now am quite proud.  Just shows how we can tranform, huh?

And  although I definitely had an image of who I was going to be and where my life was going, I'm so glad that my soul was whispering  "Go For It" loud enough so that when the breadcrumbs were being put in front of me, I said what the heck let me follow them.  I certainly could not have written the script of my life.  And, without hesitation, I say THANK GOD for that, as I have a feeling that if I lived the script that was in my head there would have been much more needless suffering and if I knew it in advance, it may have taken the fun and wonder out of it.  I have to say my life has been a blast across the spectrums of highs and lows and I truly wouldn't trade in any part of it because they have made me who I was.  I have to admit that it was more a deep sadness than trust that motivate me.  And if I had not had the sadness (as unpleasant as it has been at times), I may have been more complacent and never explored a Life truly worth living.

Oh wait, I was blogging to give you guys a summary of the ceremony and not a diatribe about my life, let me continue.  We started the ceremony by calling in all the participants.  The attendees introduced themselves to the mesa and I called in the sombres of each of the dream workers as well as lite participants.  So thank you again for participating.

So because of all the above I was pondering trust.  And like the aconym I was given once for fear which is false expectations appearing real, I easily came up with one for trust - Total Receptivity Under Skeptical Times.  I really would change the word skeptical for challenging but then we'd have truct and not trust :).  And like Dr. Stone, founder of Polarity says, "Obstacles are God's design to make man with a spine."   I truly believe that the core to being a trusting person is allowing yourself to be fluid and receptive to all that life has to offers.  Sure, sometimes life brings in some clunkers, which is why we have to be fluid, like Tai Chi, and let things move through us and not hold onto anything.

I also realized that I was never really taught about the importance of receptivity until later in life and boy how it would have shifted my life if I knew it sooner.  I know, I know.... I just told you Obstacles build man with a spine and I don't want to be spineless and it certainly has empowered me to know this from my experiences rather than something I was told from someone else or read in a book.  After all another favorite quote from one of my teachers is, "Would you rather learn from someone who says, this is my believe system or this is my experience.  After all belief systems are just B.S."  However, I will admit that it can help to hear the belief system and follow up with the homework, or should I say dreamwork, that turns the belief into an experience.  And when we come up with an idea based on our experience, it's truly an innovation.

So why are we not receptive.  It goes back to our education.  Yep, schools focused on the three R's, Reading, wRiting and 'Rithmatic.  For me that is the wRong three R's.  I want to create another new paradigm and change required Three R's of Education to Receptivity, Reactions and Responses.  I believe I've been pretty clear on the importance of receptivity so far.  Afterall it's the key word in the acronym for trust; however, I will spend a little more time elaboating on how I would differentiate between our reactions vs our responses.  In my dictionary a reaction is more unconscious and basically it is the initial response to a situation and is often based on our programming.  Our responses are our actions that are based upon our reaction (or our understanding of our reactions).  The reason I diffentiate is that if more people understood their reactions, their response may be more kind and in alignment with how they would prefer to behave.

Let's face it, life is going to present us with challenges or people, whose behavior really pushes our buttons.  And rather than blame the situation or the person and making ourselves look like a victim, we can look closely at our reaction and what it is truly triggering inside.  Is it triggered by a shameful belief that we are not good enough.  Or perhaps it's triggering our mightier than though judge that knows the cardinal rules better than anyone else.  So if we understand why we had that reaction, like I want to run and hide or perhaps I want to rip someones head off, we can respond to the situation more responsibly and from a place of wholeness.  We can't control the actions of the others but we can work towards understanding our reactions so we don't respond from our wounded places.  There are too many people that are acting from their wounded place and, in my opinion, that why we have wars.

So I've elaborated on it from a blog sense but truly only touched the surface on this topic.   I could right a book about understanding our reactions, but I don't need to as there is a trusty resource.  If you want a resource on working with your reactions a little more, Echkart Tolle has a great chapter (chapter 5 to be specific) entitled The Pain-Body in his very insightful book, A New Earth.

And, although I thought I was done, I just want to stress how important I feel it is to understand our reactions.  And I do mean UNDERSTAND them, DO NOT JUDGE them.  They happened for a reason and we need to love our imperfections.  In my case,  I can tell you it certainly wasn't a conscious trust that lead me down the path.  But through my experiences I see the value of working the New Three R's and that leads me to give you another thing I read that motivated me to make sure I am lovingly diligent and understanding my reactions.

I was reading Stephen Levine, who is a psychiatrist and Buddhist that has done some really amazing work with the dying.  And the important thing that he stresses is that you die as you have lived.  So we can't expect our patterns to all of a sudden change we learn of our death.  Sometimes, people know in advance when they are going to die and have the time to make amends and be more loving than they could have with family and friends.  In many cases, deaths can happen by without warning.  (Actually as I type this I realize this may have been inspired by Ram Dass who has many amazing books himself, but it's about the story not the teller.)

I've been told that Ghandi's last words after he was shot was, "Ram, Ram, Ram..."  Ram is the name of a God in the Hindu tradition.  I have to add that he spoke Ram adoringly and not in a bargaining or damning manner.

So think of the last time you were cut off while driving in traffic and your reaction.  And depending on circumstances that can be the last event of your life.  Do you want your last words to be "Oh Shit or that Mother....." or your name for God (and if your atheist, you can use the word Love as a synonym).  You want to mean it and not speak it like a script or because someone said you'll have a better after life it you did it.

So we went into the surrender process, to release any of the old patterns and programming that keeps us being receptive, keeps us from feeling loving towards ourselves, our lives and those that cross our paths. We did this to Bless The Broken Road by Rascal Flattes.  (For a link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkWGwY5nq7A)  Because as I said earlier, it's our entire life that made us awesome, even the "broken" parts.  

So now that we have surrendered and a receptive, we go into the seed planting.  As I said it's about our experiences more than our belief systems, so the only way to really trust is to Live Life and make it the medicine we share with the world.  So we go into our true unmasked self inspire us with the seeds to be planted.  This we did to no other than Dolly Parton's, Better Get To Living.  (For a link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKeulwZ3sGE )

And as I often say, you can't make this shit up.  As I type this, I have my itunes on Shuffle. And what song just came up but Dolly Parton.  Not the song we did the seed planting, but I Will Always Love You.  And as much as I can go into more about the ceremony the prayers for others and garland of dreams of which each of your seeds was transferred into and then offered to the East River.  I leave you with  the lyrics from Dolly that still ring in my ears and are my sign that I've done enough typing.

And I hope that you have all

That you ever dreamed of

Oh, I do wish you joy

A I wish you happiness

But above all this

I wish you love