Morning Pages - 3.30.16

3.30.16

Good morning. My body was ready to wake up at 5:45 AM today, which is interesting to me. I needed a new organizing principle for my days. Apparently, it’s getting up early. I’ve been trying to do this for years; maybe 3 or 4 years ago, I went to a coaching event where the host said, “wake up an hour early for a year, and it will change your life.” I tried, and I failed. And I tried repeatedly. At first, I felt bad about it. But over time, I decided to let myself off the hook. I noticed that sometimes in the personal development and coaching space, there is shaming that happens.

I once posted a picture of me doing sit ups and there were a comments on the thread from other women saying something to the effect of “why would you do sit ups?” The implication being that there are more pleasurable forms of exercise and sit ups are a male thing. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I read it the wrong way. But I felt judged. By other women who are aligned around the idea of pleasure and femininity. Clearly, that was not their intention. But my perception was this insider/outside thing, they get what being a woman is about, and I’m just another rube who keeps trying to be a man.

Of course, I’m totally making this up.

But that’s one of the stories I tell myself.

I’m not here to shift or transform or liberate myself from that story. I get so tired of that shit. And people trying to coach me against my will.

Wow. I am angry at coaching. Or something that is calling itself coaching, that actually isn’t.

There’s this authority or power-over aspect that makes me angry. I find myself hesitating here, afraid that I’m going to tick someone off. Rats. I don’t actually resonate with the word coach. I’ve had great coaches, but I don’t think I ever want another other. Whoa. Feels dangerous to admit that. But I’ll just say it. I welcome mentors, collaborators and colleagues into my life, but I am taking a break from hiring other people to help me work out my shit.

I was trying to remember how many times I’ve been to therapy. One was after Jen and I broke up, and I was feeling completely busted up and unstable. But seems like maybe there was another time too. I made sure to find myself a therapist that wasn’t judgmental about gay people. Even in my fragile emotional state, I had the wisdom and the discernment to see that therapists bring their judgments and their personal biases to the table, too. I can’t remember her name, but this therapist was in training (I had no money; I paid on a sliding scale, and even that felt like an indulgence) and she said something that really resonated and has stuck with me: “therapy is like taking your car to the shop. It’s temporary. Your car gets fixed, and you get back out on the road.”

I think she ended up firing me. “You’re cured!,” she said with a laugh.

That was helpful. I’ve since read that talk therapy doesn’t actually improve people’s outcomes. They did scientific studies, and it didn’t beat the placebo. But for me, just giving voice to my feelings and my inner world was helpful. So was being told that I was cured by a laughing therapist. We talk to helpers who help us iron out our feelings, our interpretations of events, our meanings we assign to what’s happened to us, and then we get back out on the road. I want to add: until the car breaks down again, but what if it doesn’t? What if you learn regular maintenance on your body-mind-system car, so that even if you get in an accident you didn’t see coming, it’s all good?

That kind of perspective is dangerous.

I am afraid of adopting that perspective. It’s safe to be cautious. It’s safe to seat myself in the “nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” camp. But what I scoot over to the other side of the spectrum, and embrace all of the experience of being alive as a gift?

There’s a little girl beaming inside of me right now.

When Sam and I rode bikes on those trips, one of the mantras was “love it all.” I kinda think that’s the approach. If it’s all made up anyway, why not tell yourself a story that everything that happens to you, you love it all?

I feel a little crazy when I think about that.

I remember when we were riding bikes and about to go into a really dense forest in northern France. There was a slow, gentle climb. Above our heads, the clouds were gathering. I was tired and sleep deprived. The skies opened, and it started raining pretty hard.

“Only crazy people do this!” I said. “And so we are the crazy ones!”

Shizzle. Thirty minutes left and I am not sure what else to say here.

I was tired last night at dinner. From about 3pm on, there was muzak playing in my mind and I kinda tuned out. My intellect had left the building. By dinner time, I noticed that my mind was saying awful things to me and making me feel bad. I got in this weird mental rut where I felt like I’m “not doing enough” and maybe am “not enough.”

I just heard somewhere that this is something that many humans deal with, this story of “not enoughness.” And I know that it’s been a thing for me, so when I see that guy creeping into my inner landscape, I know something’s off.

I’ve been opening myself to books by really accomplished men who have built huge companies. In the past, I’ve written them all off categorically — “not interested!” — but have been noticing a shift here. A curiosity. An openness. That said, it’s kind of confusing me. And making me feel bad, or not enough, that I am don’t desire to built a big multimillion dollar empire. Then I feel bad about it, like there’s something wrong with me, that I don’t want to. That I am blocked in some way.

This is the weird head trip.

So I admitted to Mark that I had my head up my bum and needed help pulling it back out. I am practicing saying whatever’s on my mind with people I trust, to test out the idea that it’s only the stuff we don’t admit or give voice to that waits for us in a back alley with a broken bottle to attack us.

I have been thinking about what it is to be a woman. For all my love and respect for these super smart, ambitious dudes with the big entrepreneurial companies, not one of them shares my value of cooking my own dinner, laying on the couch in the sunlight at the end of the day, or laying down under a tree for a holy nap. Not to say that that is a woman thing, but maybe. And it’s definitely a me thing.

So I’ve been reading a witchy book in the mornings as a counterpose. And M suggested not reading the super entrepreneurial books for awhile. Think that’s a good idea, until I can find that still point within myself where I cease to try to make myself in the model of someone else who has Accomplished Great Things… and return to my desires and what I am creating as the yardstick for discerning whether something works for me.

I also think that what Nicole said about the emergence of a new leadership that balances the feminine and the masculine, the active and the receptive, is a clue along my path. It’s not about being a man or being a woman; it’s about everyone moving into a wider range of being, relating and doing.

What else.

What else.

What else.

I bought a hot new dress from Mike and Christina’s wedding this weekend. Skin tight and smokin’. I love beautiful clothes.

What else?

What else?

What else?

Noticed that my intake of other people’s ideas has increased dramatically since I realized that I was kinda in my own head and isolated. Which was fine, and even needed for a time, but then the dance changed, and I needed to nourish myself and feed my head. It’s wild how much feeding and nourishing I require these days. Food, sensual and tactile, ideas, experiences, time with other people, time with nature, time with myself, rest. I’m curious to see how having kiddos shifts that. Lately I’ve been feeling into the possibility that it can be simple and spacious, amid the complexity and more beings and craziness under a roof. I have no idea how that will come to pass, but I have examples of women who have done and are doing it. Also, the idea from Brian Tracy that when you get married and have a family, things shift. I really appreciated his baldness and clarity. That’s not how I write or talk, but he said a few things that were so simple and clear and true, I was like, “oh, yeah. That’s right.”

And again, I don’t need to be Brian Tracy. I can just appreciate him and how he expresses himself.

Hmm.

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