Inner180

Suzanne left a comment to the post from a few days ago: The Joy of an Insolent Teenager.  She’s so right–the most challenging relationships are the ones we learn the most from.  I’m posting Suzanne’s comment here, so the you can listen to the song as you read it.

From Suzanne:

Part of me says “Thank goodness I have passed the stage and lived through it with my children.” One was easier than the other.  In hind sight the most difficult one was the one that taught me the most.

On his wedding day, the mother and son dance was the song by Carole King called “Child of Mine”.  Most of the song (see below the lyric) was very appropriate to my son and I wanted to honour him with it.  I must say I was and still am proud of that beautiful moment.

CHILD OF MINE

Although you see the world different than me
Sometimes I can touch upon the wonders that you see
All the new colors and pictures you’ve designed
Oh yes, sweet darling
So glad you are a child of mine

Child of mine, child of mine
Oh yes, sweet darling
So glad you are a child of mine

You don’t need direction, you know which way to go
And I don’t want to hold you back, I just want to watch you grow
You’re the one who taught me you don’t have to look behind
Oh yes, sweet darling
So glad you are a child of mine

Child of mine, child of mine
Oh yes, sweet darling
So glad you are a child of mine

Nobody’s gonna kill your dreams
Or tell you how to live your life
There’ll always be people to make it hard for a while
But you’ll change their heads when they see you smile

The times you were born in may not have been the best
But you can make the times to come better than the rest
I know you will be honest if you can’t always be kind
Oh yes, sweet darling
So glad you are a child of mine

Child of mine, child of mine,
Oh yes, sweet darling
So glad you are a child of mine

Child of mine, child of mine
Oh yes, sweet darling
So glad you are a child of mine

This is our week of feasting on the joy diet.  We’ll begin with a ritual marking the celebration of the feast, experience the connection with the nourishment this feast provides us, and feel our gratitude for having this experience.  Over and over during our day, we’ll have the opportunity to direct our attention to what we have right before us, to re-experience and acknowledge how it feeds our souls, and our gratitude for these experiences in our lives.

I’ve transformed a small ritual into a feast, and given it my full attention.  Before each class I teach and before each client I coach, I brew a fresh cup of tea.  I noticed how it nourishes my senses: the warmth of the cup in my hands, the vapor and smell rising from it, and the feeling of the warm liquid as it travels inside me.  Then, a moment of feeling the gratitude I have for this gift that I receive, over and over, through my day.

What ritual do you already perform each day that can be transformed to a feast?

From Joy Dieter Bonnie’s journal…

I’m up early, 4:30.  I put on Christmas music, light a fire in the fireplace, and pour the first cup of freshly brewed coffee.  I get out the card stock printed with a poem from Martha Beck’s book Steering by Starlight. I have bought a stamp of cascading snowflakes, an artsy ink pad and glitter to add a touch of magic to the insert for my Christmas cards.

I stamp the first poem. Hmmm. It doesn’t look so special. Hmmm. I add some glitter. Oh **!!??!!!**!! I blobbed. That looks stupid! I try again. I blob again! I take my finger and try to artfully smear my blob. Oh !!!XXX******1?!! I have tons of these to do!! Pull yourself together girl! After all you are an artist. This stuff, these stupid stamps and dumb glitter, is for kids for goodness sake!

I notice I don’t feel so Christmassy. My faced is screwed up. My shoulders are tight.  As I’m holding the glitter bottle, I notice that my hand and my teeth are clenched. I yell at my cat when he comes onto the table and attempts to relax amongst the craft supplies and just hang with me. Damn cat! Damn Christmas cards! Damn, damn, damn!

I move, to brood, in front of the fire. My journal is there beside the couch. I pour a second cup of coffee and write: “What are you thinking girl?”

“The inserts look stupid. I thought this would be fun. I thought they would be special. They’re not good enough.  I want people to like them, to think that they are special. I should have gone back to the place where I bought those bookmarks last year. Everyone really liked them and I got a lot of compliments.”

Whoa! Hang on one minute.
THEY aren’t good enough? Is that true?
That’s a really special poem you’ve got there.

“ I want the insert to be special. I’m giving it as a gift. I want it to be something people will like and appreciate and value.”

Sounds pretty demanding to me. Sounds pretty manipulating. You send it, and they will what?,  do what you want? be how you want?  Reminds me of a ransom note, Do this, or else… How do you feel when you think the inserts aren’t good enough?

“I feel like throwing everything out. I feel like trashing the cards, like throwing them in the fireplace.”

Doesn’t sound like peace and goodwill to me.
.
“I want people to like them.”

Like them? Tell me where I’m wrong here, but it sounds like it’s about you – about whether people like you. You want people to like you, isn’t that what’s true here?

“Okay, I do want people to like me. But, I want people to like the insert in the card. I just don’t think the inserts are good enough?”

You think, the INSERTS are not good enough?

Hmmmmmm. “Maybe I’m thinking I’m not good enough!”

What could you send if you felt, “I am good enough.”, or,  “I Am enough.” ?

“I could send love. I wouldn’t even need to send cards, I could engage every person on my card list in my heart and send them love. Or I could send love, that I’m actually feeling, with each card.”

How do you feel when you think, “I can send love.”?

“Good! I feel happy and open and Christmassy. I feel loving.”

Okay. Lets start again                                            :
Martha passed along a gift, pass it on.
Where did the gift come from?

“Hmmmm, The Source. The Source so loved the world a gift was given….
Hmmmm. The African people received the gift and passed it on.”

Good. Martha received a gift and passed it on…

“I received it and I pass it on.
The card insert receivers receive it and… that’s their business I stay out of it.”

Good! How do you feel now?

“I feel unwound, happy, relaxed, I feel Christmassy. I can feel the warmth of the fire, I can hear the beautiful Christmas music and I realize my cat is snuggled up beside me as I journal.”

How do you feel about the stamping and the glitter and everything now?

“I look forward to playing with the stamps and glitter. Really playing, joyfully playing, imprinting each card with joy and love and goodwill, blobs and all. I receive and I pass it on….I’m going to live while I’m alive!”

Live while you are alive…
Learn to be what you are in the seed of your spirit
Learn to free yourself from all things that have molded you
And which limit your secret and undiscovered road…
Never forget that love
Requires that you be
The greatest person you are capable of being,
Self-generating and strong, and gentle -
Your own hero and star…
Be grateful for life as you live it,
And may a wonderful light
Always guide you along the unfolding road.

Last night, I attended Art Basel Miami Beach, a yearly international contemporary art exhibition that takes place at the Miami Beach Convention Center and other shows all over town.  I wandered among a huge crowd, inches from thousands of original works by Picasso, Miro, Chagall, Matisse, Hockney, Rothko, Calder, Kandinsky.

But this isn’t an art museum.  This stuff is for sale.  And people are buying.  I eavesdropped on a conversation about price:  “300,000?  Hmmm.”

I began doing nothing in the presence of the crowd: young New York hipsters in amazing, creative outfits, Cuban couples holding hands, women with straight red hair cut in angular shapes.  Everyone looked so beautiful through eyes looking out with joy.

I stopped at a photograph by a favorite, Sally Mann.  It was her daughter, probably about twelve, holding a candy cigarette as if it were real, the insolent, defiant face of a young teenager stopped in time and on full display.  I’ve seen the shot in a book I own, but there, full-sized, it was even more powerful.

I saw that same look on my daughter’s face so many times during that stage of half-adult, half-child.  A look of I love you but I’m going my own way now and I’m going to experiment and break rules and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.

I stood before the photo, happy to see it and even more happy that I don’t live with a thirteen year old girl right now.  A small crowd began to join me.  I turned to the woman next to me.  She was smiling lovingly too.  And everyone who had stopped was looking at this child in the photo with the same loving eyes.

We began to chat and laugh about the photograph. One woman said  she used to love candy cigarettes too.  And I remembered the fun of pretending to “smoke” them.  Someone else said they were living with that face at home right now—their own fourteen year old.  We all laughed together, in our collective adult wisdom.

I’ve never had this kind of experience at an art exhibit before.  Who knew there was such overwhelming joy in the presence of a defiant teenager?

I’m being visited by a family member who is a master at pushing my buttons.  Instead of experiencing the joy of connection, I’ve been going back to the truth exercises over and over.  It went on for two days out of a four day visit, with no relief.

It was so obvious that she is in pain.  And so obvious that I was accepting the invitation to dance an old dance again.  And I couldn’t stop.  (At least that’s the story I told myself.)  And we were having a rotten, miserable time together.

Then I remembered the exercise I wrote about on Day 14—Is our Loved One’s Pain Contagious?  When I initially wrote about it, it was in the context of becoming immune to someone else’s low spirits.  I just discovered that the exercise works with when our loved one is pushing our buttons.

Here’s what I wrote then:  realize that you are bigger than the other person’s emotion—so big that you can hold their emotion without it impacting you.  It can simply pass through you.

I began to imagine that I was literally huge, that I extended ten feet in every direction with compassionate, loving energy.  I visualized this both in and out of her presence.  I almost felt like I was floating, I became so large.

It worked.  Her “stuff” stopped bugging me.  I stopped wanting her to stop, I stopped asking her to stop, I stopped asking her to notice what she was saying and doing.  I was so large, it didn’t impact me. It passed right through me.

It worked like magic.  It stopped.  Our reactivity to each other vanished.  We began to connect again.  Now, we are smiling and laughing and hugging.  It’s downright joyful.

In a comment to yesterday’s post, Jenny writes: It seems almost effortless to cultivate joy and acceptance when I am away from my normal life and routine. As soon as I return, I fall into the old patterns so easily.  Do you have any ideas for allowing the joy and acceptance to flow into your daily routine as easily as they do when you are away?

Here’s what I’m wondering: what if the statement, “It is easier to be joyful when I am away from my daily routine” is itself a painful story?  What if “when I am in my normal routine,  joy eludes me” is simply another version of it?   What would happen if you exposed those statements to our Truth questions:

What am I feeling?
What hurts?
What is the painful story I am telling myself?
Can I be sure this painful story is true?
Is my painful story working?
Can I think of another story that might work better?

What might you discover?

I spent the evening with a group of long time friends.  I practiced being in my joy diet place of peace while at this gathering.  It was amazing how much love and tenderness I felt for each person there.  It seemed as if I was able to experience each of them in greater detail than ever before.  Without worry and envy and judgment I was able to really see and hear and feel each of them with more intensity.  It really came alive.  More peace, more life, more joy.  Pretty good, this joy diet.

I went to a lunch meeting today, and practiced doing nothing in the presence of others.  I found that I was less judgmental of those around me.  But I also noticed that I tended to be quiet, and worried about that.  I judged others less, and me more.  Interesting, isn’t it?  I don’t think I’ve mastered this step of the joy diet yet….

This week our joy diet focuses on relationships, and encourages us to be truthful in them to maximize our joy.  Although we’re encouraged to begin with small steps, I got a bigger opportunity, right away.

Last night I worked with a group of coaches-in-training and got caught up in my own “stuff.”  Blindly.  Unintentionally, to be sure.  But to be honest, I steered the session they were coaching in a direction I wanted it to go.  In other words, I got attached to the outcome.

This violates a fundamental rule of good coaching.  I was there as their mentor, a Master Coach, doing the exact opposite of what I’m there to help them learn.  And the joy diet principle of playing at work so that it becomes more like a game, where the outcome is less important than the process?  Let’s just say I forgot about that too.

In the discussion that followed the coaching session, I was initially bewildered by what one of the participants said:  “You wanted it to go in one direction and I had a different direction in mind.”  Ouch.  What made her statement painful was its truth.  She was absolutely right.

As we talked further, I recalled an earlier moment in the session when a remark the coaching client made touched an old sore place within me–something I thought had healed and resolved long, long ago. I wasn’t even aware of it until we began de-briefing the coaching session.   And there it was, open and oozing again, this time right in front of my students.  And being recorded as well.  I suddenly felt very defensive.

And then I got it.  I woke up to what had been going on inside me.  And I told my students the absolute truth—that I had a personal agenda.  Because my old judgments and hurts had been triggered.  We call this coaching in our blind spot.

Once I saw what had happened and opened up to my students, my confusion and defensiveness melted right on the spot. Immediately, I felt such a profound connection with these wonderful people.  I felt such admiration for the woman who’d spoken up to me about my pushing.  That took amazing courage.

The trainee who was getting coached by us had been discussing a very personal and painful topic in her life. She graciously emailed me after the class and I want to share her words because they demonstrate the awesome power of truth in our relationships:

“Thank you for your coaching tonight but most of all for being so TAO [transparent, authentic, and open] with us. I understood (intellectually) . . . how important it is but tonight I felt how important it is thanks to your sincerely being transparent, authentic and open with us. It will totally effect my coaching as well as my life.”

Tears welled up in my eyes when I read this.  I felt so honored to have screwed up in a way that helped her.  And helped the group. And helped me enormously.  I’ve struggled mightily with my perfectionism.  Last night, there was almost no struggle, as my perfectionism exposed its soft, pale belly to the light.

And you know what?  I think even if I had a chance for a re-do, I wouldn’t change a thing.  It was so much better this way.

My deepest thanks to all of you on the call last night.  You are awesome coaches!

In our Joy Diet class today, I mentioned Evy McDonald, who suffered from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), an incurable, usually fatal, neuromuscular disease where the body’s motor neurons, which control voluntary movement, degenerate.  Sitting in her wheelchair, Evy chose to literally face her disease, and sat before a mirror looking at her deteriorating body.  In the beginning, she was revolted by herself.  Gradually, she became able to find aspects of herself to admire.  In time, she made peace with herself, both her healthy as well as her weakened body.  And then a miracle occurred.

Evy wrote about it in a newsletter of the Canadian Holistic Healing Association: “I couldn’t pinpoint just when the shift occurred, but one day I noticed that I had no negative thoughts about my body. I could look in the mirror at my naked reflection and be honestly awed by its beauty. I was totally at peace, with a complete, unalterable acceptance of the way my body was – a bowl of jello in a wheelchair.”

Although she had been given only a year to live, Evy ultimately made a full recovery from the disease.  In writing about her process, which you can read more about here, Evy stresses a point we have discussed at length in our Joy Diet class: she let go of outcome in her quest to accept herself.

She suggests this as a step in the healing journey, a step we can all wisely follow, no matter what kind of healing we are doing:  “Release all expectations of how it will turn out. Your body may heal completely – or not at all. You may find that a wheelchair, cane, walker or crutches becomes an integral part of your daily life. That does not determine whether or not you live in a state of wellness.”

Our wellness, indeed our wholeness, then, does not depend so much on whether we lose the weight, heal our knee, or find the perfect career.  We become well and whole when we make peace with all of us.

Our jobs then, as joy seekers, is to make peace with our overweight bodies, our strained backs, the times we yelled at our kids when we were tired and angry, the unkind things we said to ourselves, marrying the wrong person, failing the test, and on and on.  When we can accept all that we are, all that we’ve done, all the decisions we’ve made, all with an open and loving heart, we become whole.

The only thing that’s stopping us is the our failure to see the truth about our beauty and our magnificence.  Luckily, as joy dieters, we know the steps to get there.  And we’ll keep taking them.