Shelter first. Compassion second.

November 16th, 2009

Most of the time my heart is spilling over with compassion for people. But then there are times when compassion just doesn’t come easy even when I know from past experience that it is the catalytic force required for change.

What is the block I’ve wondered?

Compassion is a softer state of being, compared to anger and defense. It requires an open heart and resisting the instinctive nature to strike back.  Sometimes when someone is repeatedly violating your values (especially those that are really close to home) it can be difficult to soften while the shots are firing overhead. During these times, expecting yourself to go straight to compassion just might be too much of a stretch. 

In these situations, what I need to do first is to care for myself when the other person is failing to do so. The first step is to deliberately remove myself from their harm: create some shelter. (In a previous blog, I shared how to liberate yourself from a harmful battle. Please see What to do with Wrong Doers ).

Once I’ve created shelter, it is from this safe harbor that compassion comes flooding in.

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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Rather than flip out – check it out.

October 28th, 2009

Personally speaking, the single most powerful force that either constructs or deconstructs a healthy conversation is my level of self-awareness.  Let me try to explain.

There is a 3 part process that naturally goes on inside of you at any given moment,  it is one of nature’s designs that just takes place.  To help you better understand this process, recall a conversation that you had recently. A conversation that didn’t go so well. Let’s walk through that conversation or conflict.

First, you took in information – words he said, something she did.

Second,  you made meaning of the information you took in.

Third, before you knew it, the meaning you produced directed a specific emotional reaction. Anger. Sadness. Self defense. Thoughts of divorce!

While you were busy making conclusions and reacting to those conclusions she/he was doing the same with the information they took in. Hence the exasperating messy conversation you experienced!

The change that will change your life is this: spot yourself in action.

Notice the information you take in – I heard such and such words…. I saw a look….

Notice what you do with this information. Notice the meaning you personally assign to it. She’s mad. He doesn’t care. He’s blaming me.

Notice how you  react to such meaning. Hurt. Anger. Jealousy. Withdrawing. Retaliation.

Once you spot yourself in action, you can change the conversation for the better by responding with your new self-awareness.  Rather than flip out - you check it out: 

What did you mean when you said such and such?

What was your intention in doing such and such?

I’m thinking your aren’t believing me. Is that true?

I’m feeling mad because I think you are saying …. Is that right?

The point is to stop speaking from the covert workings of your mental filters and unchecked beliefs (”oh I know what she/he is up to” type thinking) and to start speaking to your internal participation (e.g your interpretations, conclusions, assumptions, and feelings).

Like anything else that you are good at, this too is a practice.  I grew up on this communication stuff and still today there are times when I am not there with the learning. Especially when the stakes are high, I’m emotional and the issue at hand really means something to me.

Remember, it only takes one person to change a conversation. Even if the other person’s level of self-awareness is low you can make a difference by stopping the reaction – reaction cycle with your new self-awareness. 

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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What to do with “wrong-doers.”

October 21st, 2009

The benefit of living what I call an “examined” life (i.e. turning over the stones you’re standing on and looking closely at what’s underneath) is that you discover a whole lot about yourself. Sometimes you discover helpful insight or a limiting pattern of behavior.  Sometimes you discover something not so pretty about yourself. But the beauty of each discovery is that you get the chance to change.

While facing one of the most difficult situations of my life, a situation I believe we all find ourselves in at one time or another, I discovered a real gem. It was during a time of being “wronged” by another. What I mean by “wronged” is being mistreated, blamed, judged, lied about or lied to.  What I discovered flies in the face of our natural reactions to such unpleasantness. However, the discovery was the only response that enabled me to shed all kinds of yucky feelings and free myself from a very unpleasant person.

When we are being wronged we want justice, we want honor. We want the wrong-doer to own their wrong-doing. This wanting, as I discovered, will devour you more so than the wrong-doing itself.  It holds the power to consume you, making you miserable. It will seek out the fighter in you and ask you to betray your wisdom.

The wanting motivates us to move into the boxing ring to fight for justice, to seek our revenge, to retaliate until surrender. However, the reality is every time we step into the ring we lose.  By virtue of participating in the game, we lose the very power we wish to claim. 

The ultimate revenge, if you want to look at it this way, is to live as if your truth never needs defending. How do you do this? Stay above the fighting mentality. Refuse to enter the ring. Refuse to allow this person’s wrong-doing to cross the circle enclosing your life. 

In the moment will this choice satisfy your urge to fight back? Maybe not. In the moment, will it calm the anger you feel about the injustice? Maybe not. In the moment, will it satisfy your urge to defeat? Maybe not. What we need to hold onto during the moment of choice is this: the wrong-doer is playing a game. She feeds off the energy of the game. She finds the purpose of her life inside the game.

Take off your boxing gloves and turn your back on the ring and there is no game.

And if there is no game, what is there? An empty ring. A lone fighter standing in the dark. In your silent absence, the fighter is left alone to face the cold shadows of herself. And somewhere off in the distance, you will be standing in the light of your highest power.

When I envision the fighter alone in a dark ring, stripped of her cause, my anger subsides and I feel compassion and sadness for her.

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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To pursue or be pursued?

October 8th, 2009

I’ve been thinking that perhaps certain women just aren’t designed to pursue men. Perhaps this explains how a woman can go from hardly thinking about a man to obsessing about him over night after initiating just one phone call. Or, how a characteristically calm, composed woman becomes panicked the moment her pursuee doesn’t text her back. 

If you find yourself tied up in knots while awaiting a return message perhaps you would be better off being pursed. Maybe you would be at your best if he did the pursuing, the calling, the initiating. If you were not born to be a pursuer, just as some of us were not born to be brain surgeons, and you assume the role of pursuer, you may end up clamoring your way along with anxiety and panic conducting you.

If you would actually prefer to go about your day devoid of fretting and freaking out, then you must allow for him to pursue you. This is going to take a whole new belief in yourself and a new action plan. It will require the faith that you will attract the right person if you stay committed to the course that brings the best in you out. This means staying away from the behavior (aka pursuing) that arouses panic and other forms of freaking-out-ness.

Imagine how lovely it would be to have his love in pursuit of you. And, imagine yourself in the absence of fear as his pursuee.

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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“Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.” Sharon Creech

October 5th, 2009

Whether we take a glimpse or a long and lingering look into someone else’s life, at best all that is ever available to us is what poet Rumi described as “idle speculation.”

Because we are severely limited to “idle speculation” I think advice giving or diagnosing is perilous. Not only dangerous, I think advising snuffs out all the possible creations that take on life when two people listen outside of their judgments.

What I’ve treasured about one of my closest friendships is that no matter what we never told one another what do to. No matter how treacherous the landscape became, we showed up for the moment free of judgment, full of camaraderie. “I will walk or run this mile with you because I believe in you” was the unexpressed philosophy of our friendship.

Advising is easy, judgments are a dime a dozen. But taking time to truly understand is priceless. I think we all need someone to take the time to understand life in our shoes.  We aren’t aching for another “you really should do this and that.”  We don’t need someone who hasn’t walked a minute in our day to tell us how it is. I think we benefit each other in the most meaningful ways when we forbid the delivery of our own limited speculation and venture beyond.

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

 

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Stargirl – a shining example.

September 23rd, 2009

I first read Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli with my daughter when she was nine. It is one of my all time favorite books.  I often give it as a gift to the women (young and old) in my life.

Stargirl is a shimmering exhibition of courageously living out loud as oneself. Sprouting authenticity, Spinelli describes her “as real as hope, as real as possibility, as real as the best in human nature.” He “elegantly and accurately captures the collective, not-always-pretty emotions of a high school microcosm in which individuality is pitted against conformity. Spinelli’s Stargirl is a supernatural teen character–absolutely egoless, altruistic, in touch with life’s primitive rhythms, meditative, untouched by popular culture, and supremely self-confident. It is the sensitive Leo whom readers will relate to as he grapples with who she is, who he is, who they are together” Editorial Review by Karen Snelson

Take an afternoon, brew a pot of  tea and read this work of young adult fiction together with your daughter, or your niece, or a friend.  As foreign as she may seem, I think the book will leave you longing for a little more Stargirl in your life. 

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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If you must fight, fight fair.

September 21st, 2009

We search the planet for that very special person to love and create a life with. We are often hard pressed, at times in excruciating ways, to find the calibre of connection we seek.  Yet despite the universe answering our call with the delivery of such love, how often do we manage to fight on behalf of our relationships? 

Without warning a storm rolls in and there you are hollering in the face of the very love you swore you would die for.  Against all odds you found each other, yet you allow unfounded accusations and hurtful verbal assailants to become the forces that divide you.

Of course we are going to disagree and be upset with one another. At times your ego will be bruised or your hurt will want to retaliate, but find the strength within yourself to leave out all the reacting that is divisive: incriminating each other, accusing, or simply being unfair or unkind.

Stand up for your love rather than for righteousness.  Only you can protect the purity of your relationship when forces threaten to weaken your bond. If love isn’t handled with extreme care how will it survive?

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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When he isn’t interested

September 11th, 2009

Your plea: “He’s not interested in me. He’s glued to the tv. He doesn’t make time for us anymore.”

One columnist advised her readers to “go take pole dancing lessons – that will get his attention,” she said. Pardon me?! What?! You have to have your way with a pole in order to get your man’s attention?! 

Here’s my thinking, if he doesn’t find you interesting or exciting he needs to turn himself onto life and onto your relationship! That takes work, as well as active, ongoing dedication on both people’s part, not a passive attitude on the couch. You, on the other hand, instead of spending three nights a week with a cold pole, spend that time developing a life to love - become a passionista at whatever makes you feel alive and whole.

Pole dancing could be a fun way to bring in some vavoom, I’m not critizing it. I’m just saying if you are using it as a tool to save your marriage or unglue your guy from the tv it’s time to look in the mirror.

While he sits disinterested in life, go get one girl!

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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Together-alone.

September 8th, 2009

I’m reading from A Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She is talking about the different forms our relationships take over time. Lindbergh describes the early stage of a relationship as “pure, simple and unencumbered. It is like the artist’s vision before he has to discipline in into a form. The relationship is free of ties, claims, and responsibilities,” it is unburdened by worries about the future. “There are no others in this perfect unity.”  The relationship is “pure and excludes the rest of life.”

As we move on together further into a relationship, life encroaches more and more into our bed of bliss. That all absorbing together-alone time is now fleeting as we’ve let the rest of life in. Lindbergh claims that overtime our personal connection with each other is replaced by functioning. Perhaps this is why some people choose an affair – they are looking for their identity that disappeared in the abyss of functioning together.  They believe a fresh start -  re-experiencing that pure relationship with someone else is necessary in order to find or feel themselves again.  Of course it is easy to find one’s identity inside such a pure relationship because it is untouched by career, kids, responsibilities, and watching him take out the trash. But the purity doesn’t last.

We may have moments of living the purity of our relationship - of what brought us together in the first place – but it is not continuous. Finding ways to be with each other and re-experience and recapture the essence that is the two of you, is essential as life disciplines your relationship into form. Protect the purity – have breakfast alone without the kids or your iPhone. Leave the laundry and go sit under the moon. Look for opportunities to steal personal moments with each other everyday. Avoid overly functioning like you would thirsting in the desert.

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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Eat Pray and then what?

September 4th, 2009

When it first came out I read Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and absolutely loved it.   I will definitely read her new book Committed: A skeptic makes peace with marriage (to be released January 2010). As much as I loved Eat Pray Love, it left me wondering about all the lovely women who have done brilliantly career-wise and parenting-wise; Who have braved the waters of womanhood, and worked courageously, no matter what, to make a life, yet haven’t connected with love. Or, they did find love and it walked out the door on the arm of a younger woman. Or they lived happily in matrimony for  years and then lost their husband to cancer and since have faced life independently. How would such a book end for these women if their ending doesn’t culminate with the entrance of a loving adoring ready to commit man?

Of course love can take its time to find its way into our lives. It was 13 years between the passing of my daughter’s father and reconnecting with the love of my life. Over the years, there were dates and such but not love – not the kind of love that sustains you through the years of fatigue and fear, and the arduous climb of creating your dream and the discomfort of falling into and out of discovering yourself. 

I know fabulous women who have been without love for a very long time.  How do we champion them on through the days of running a race with only one shoe on and the weight of being soul provider, mother, and dreamweaver strapped to their backs? If there was an ending of a story that rivals the calibre of Gilbert’s memoir yet doesn’t sign off with love, what would it be? Perhaps it would read that single-hood is the time to do the necessary preparation for love. I don’t mean advertising yourself on eHarmony or going to single social events as preparation, I mean doing the inner work that will move you towards wholeness. Although Gilbert’s ending was love with a man, I think her journey beautifully portrays the inner work it takes to move closer to wholeness.

If love is what you ultimately seek, how devoted are you to tending to the garden in which you expect the love to grow? This time, while you are single, before love arrives is the time to unearth the dead tree stumps. It is the time to revitalize the soil with enriching nutrients. It is the time to strengthen the roots – the pillars of the garden so that a strong, mature, lasting love becomes possible.

Being single is the opportunity we are given to ready ourselves for the perfect love we seek.  Use the opportunity wisely, it may not come again. 

On living up to yourself,

Carrie

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