My friend Ann and I were chatting a week or so ago about a project she was thinking of doing. Ann is one of the smartest chicks I know – she’s a technical writer and an extremely engaged parent, whose sweet, gleeful children could converse with heads of state and leave the diplomats craving more.

Ann has been pretty shell-shocked by the election fallout. She spent the first week assuring her ½ Filipino, ½ white, 100% American kids that they would not be deported. Then, during Week 2, Ann was personally on the receiving end of a racial slur by a neighbor who expressed his pleasure at the prospect that “people like you” (Filipino Moms, apparently) will be “going back” (where? to Manhattan? SMH/shrug/ignorant/whatever, dude). In that same moment, she was on the receiving end of alliance and defense by a bystander.

Suffice it to say, it’s been a mixed bag.

Ann’s been spending a lot of time thinking about how to convert frustration and sadness and anger into thoughtful action. She’s done this in a bunch of ways, being a very proactive participant in school district communications around the election and teaching the Girl Scout troop she leads about tolerance and alliance.

But when we were messaging the other day, she sent me the photo of this sign, told me she was thinking of having her Girl Scouts sell them, and asked for my honest take on whether I would put one front of my house:

My house is elevated off the street level by about 40 stairs, so it’s not the best place to showcase messages if you want anyone else to see them. But I liked the sign and the intention behind it. Even more, I liked where her impulse to do this project came from. I honor and appreciate her internal character and love, the things about her that would even make it occur to her to be involved with such a project. And I wanted to tell her so.

Ann is analytical, so she had run some numbers. Our chat thread went like this:

Ann: If I sell this many signs and donate this much from each to the ACLU, we should be able to donate $200. Does that make sense?

Me: No. It doesn’t make sense that you would spend that much time selling and delivering signs to give $200. You could just write them a check for that.

Ann: I know. I did already. To them, and Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Clinic, and, and, and.

Me: I know you did, girl. What I’m saying is I don’t think it pencils. But I think you should do it anyway. The math doesn’t matter. Whether it makes sense or not is the right decision rule.

You should do it because you feel an urge to, and I think that’s a sign you’re onto something. Do it because it’s just a pure and beautiful thing to do. And because it’s out of love that you’re doing it. And because it’s so powerful and will be such a memorable thing for these little girls, to be a part of this. But also just do it because it’ll make you feel so good, Ann.

But, no it doesn’t make sense. And I think you should do it anyway. And please set two aside for me, thanks.

Ann: *thumbs up

So she did it. She just started doing it a few days ago. And she is really, really onto something.

Within a couple of days, I started to see dozens of Facebook posts from people I know putting these in their yards. Not only had Ann made herself feel good, she’d created this gorgeous upswell of connection and love and conversation and emotion. It’s given families who didn’t feel they had any other way to be heard a way to voice their love, and to connect with each other. People were posting photos, other people in their circles were asking to order signs, and within a few days she had cut the first $400 check to the ACLU. And she’s just getting started.

Image: Some of Ann’s Signs, in Action NOTE: If you want your own, email inthishouseproject at gmail dot com.

Here’s the principle: the older I get, the more I realize how important it is to feel good about a decision or a project, before I move forward on it. I say this not because I’m selfish, or a hedonist. I say this because once I worked a lot of old outdated triggers out of my system, and my emotions were grounded more often than not, I started to notice that my emotions are an incredible, instant, God-given source of wisdom, clarity and direction.

If I feel bad about something, it’s not the right thing. Even if everyone else thinks it’s a great opportunity or idea. And if I feel great or expansive about something, even something that doesn’t seem like the best use of time or resources, it’s what I’m supposed to be doing.

We have this idea that good things must be hard, or that the struggle is real, or that there’s great honor in doing things that we don’t want to do because someone else thinks they are responsible or worthwhile.

But I’ve found that the things I just plain old want to do, love to do and desire to do, are often worthwhile and wildly more fruitful than things I’m doing out of obligation.It is in-built in the human spirit to want to do things that serve something bigger than you. Often even very hard work on these sorts of projects feels easy and energizing to do. I’ve learned basically all of my love-driven activities and decisions elevate my emotional state, and they elevate those around me, though, whether they’re for the Benefit of Humanity or they’re purely for fun.

Allow me to correct the messages you might have received from culture. Joy, love, fun, I just want to, I feel called to: these are all worthy reasons to do something. Let this guide you. On behalf of the world, I beg you, let this guide you.

By the same token, internal turbulence, tightness and discord are a beautiful guidance system. This, I’ve seen and learned over and over again. I’ve seen it so often, in fact, that now I just listen and make the needed adjustments, quick-like and without attachment. Without upset. Most of the time, without complaining. I’ve learned to see it as a treasure when I get these sorts of feelings, because I’m grateful for the guidance and I know it will pass.

And so many beautiful things have come into my attention and focus and life, as a result of making these adjustments.

Let’s take this Inaugural Writing Challenge, for instance. Issuing it was an impulse, which felt so strong and so good that I just followed it. I followed it even though people were like wait: are you charging people for this? Nope. I followed it even though it took probably close to 75 hours of extra time out of this last month or so.

And I would do it all over again, right now, in a heartbeat. It has been one of the most delightful, juicy, free-flowing work experiences I’ve ever had. And it’s been FRUITFUL: I’ve gotten to share in the shifts people have experienced while participating in this, I’ve been able to connect with people around a lot of previously untold bits of my own story, and I’ve had incredible new insights into what I’m being called to do.

Long/short is, your emotions can be a wise divining rod for the projects, decisions and relationships you choose, if you allow them to be, and if you tend to them so that you start from a baseline of grounded-ness, not triggered-ness. Then, when you get a leap in your spirit about something, please follow it. And when you get a gut warning, follow that, too.

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. I wrote this post on Day 29 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

Today marks Day 27 of the first 30 Day Writing Challenge I’ve ever issued publicly. I’ve done such Challenges before, privately, issued to and from myself, several times. I’ve had a daily writing practice for a long time, though it has ebbed and flowed in strictness over the years. After what I call the Not-So-Great Recession, I wrote my way out of debt and made about half my living blogging. At one point was under contract to write about 14 blog posts per week.  So I wrote every day.

Once that season was done, I struggled to get back into writing daily. I’d kind of written myself out. I’d made it a grind; a job.

I did NaNoWriMo one year, somewhat halfheartedly. I’ve written a book or two in relatively short order, having taken on the project in a structured Challenge format.

But somewhere along the way, I learned about Morning Pages, the practice of free-writing 3 pages longhand every morning. These pages are to be a total brain dump: completely unedited, completely uncensored, completely private, so as to get rid of the need for them to be great (or even good, or even coherent, for that matter).

I started to do what I call my Pages, but I did it in Google Docs. And those Pages became the landscape on which I rebuilt my life. Post-recession, post-divorce, post-trauma, I worked all kinds of stuff out on those Pages. And I found a series of post-traumatic breakthroughs there. They’ve never stopped coming. I found a lot of new skills and elements of my grown-up operating system there, too.

In my Pages was where I learned how to practice boundaries; when I was faced with a situation in which I’d normally do some dysfunctional enabling, when I’d normally swoop in and save the day for someone who’d actually created the crisis, I’d write about it, and I’d find my own patterns and the clarity to stop them, in their tracks.

In my Pages was where I developed the capacity to be a wholehearted, conscious leader of my life and of the businesses with which I work. When I was twitterpated about something, I’d write it out on the Pages. When I needed to have a hard conversation, I wrote it all out in my Pages first. And oh, how my capacity to engage in grounded, thriving relationships grew as a result. Sometimes, I’d actually have the conversation later on, but minus a lot of my own BS, having seen it in black and white in my Pages.

Back when having hard conversations was so stressful to me, back when I didn’t have the skills to just do that off the cuff, I’d write them out first in my Pages and realize that some of those conversations didn’t need to be had at all. Sometimes, I needed to exercise way more aggressive boundaries and actions to remedy a broken dynamic than just a conversation. And other times, the issue was not the other person or the relationship at all; it was me.

And I could spot that in my Pages, before I ever acted out my own mess on anyone else. In my Pages, I developed these skills that are now encoded deeply in the way I think and breathe and interact with others. And it has leveled up the type of human I attract into my world these days. From employees to clients to friends and sweethearts, I am able to communicate at a level of wholehearted, joyful freedom and clarity with people these days that I never even saw modeled in my younger years, even though I now have many more relationships than I ever did before.

When I needed to work out a complex business problem, understanding the impacts on all stakeholders, and cultivating the clarity to make decisions based on first principles and values (vs. profit over all), I worked it out first in my Pages. In my Pages was where I’d empty my brain and my mind and my spirit of all the chatter and irritations of a normal day, and beneath that was where I’d find solutions to business and life and relationship challenges that were so elegant, so inspired, they actually surprised me.

And you know, I learned a lot about myself in my Pages. I could spot my own patterns there in a way that was hard to do elsewhere. Or my therapist or my coach and I would work on something together in our hour here and hour there, then I’d write about it over the subsequent days or weeks in my Pages. It was like increasing the return on the investment I’d made in therapy, doing my Pages, because I’d continue to connect dots, have a-ha moments and integrate lessons in my Pages for days or weeks following the therapy convo.

I also fell in love with my life, and with myself, in my Pages. In my Pages was where I learned that I love adventure. That I’m a stellar decision-maker, when I let my gut have the wheel. That there are literal, and I mean literal, miracles happening at an incredible rate, inside me and all around me, 100% of the time. If I look for them, that is.

In my Pages was where I realized that it’s 100% true that 100% of the Very Best Things in my life are things that came into my life with relative ease, because they were meant to be mine. I have worked so hard in my life. So hard, guys. And I believe in work. But if the work I’m doing doesn’t feel like play, or if the things I’m are trying to make happen are just really, really excruciating to bring together, I now have the Pages-found wisdom to release those things and thank the experience for the guidance back to the realm I call Effortful Ease.

In my Pages was where I developed an incredible clarity about what I’m here for, and what is and is not on purpose for me. In my Pages is where I cultivate and maintain that clarity everyday.

Of course, there’s still ebb and flow to my Pages. The more I have going on, the more I’m challenging myself in my work or in my life, the more interior work I’m doing, the more there is to write.

ButI no longer see my Pages as a Challenge. They’re now just a luxurious spiritual space, where I have the privilege of going (anytime I want!) to work things out and think things through and say crazy stuff and play with new visions. They’re where I go to document miracles small and large. And they’re where I prime my mental mechanism, to churn up my daily flow, so I can write formal projects everyday, from books to strategies to business plans and even emails.

So, I’ve issued this Challenge. And it’s literally the most fun I’ve ever had with a work project, probably because I issued it with no expectation. I issued it because I know how healing and joy-bringing my daily writing practice has been for me, and because I wanted my people (that’s you) to have that experience, too. I issued it because I know a lot how to build a container for having a breakthrough-finding experience of daily writing, and I was constantly fielding daily requests for wisdom I knew I could deliver via this container.

So now, I’m working to level this thing up into its next iteration. Trust and believe I’ll let you know what that looks like. But in the meantime, I wanted to take one moment to say that if you’re ever thinking about doing a writing challenge or taking up the practice of daily writing, you’re feeling that urge because it’s for you. It’s calling you.

There’s something of yourself to be found in the practice, and I hope to have given you some inklings or ideas of what they could possibly be, in sharing about my own Pages. Of course, the time you’ll need to write everyday will have to displace some other thing you’re currently doing. (I’d like to put watching TV or scrolling Facebook on the table. Just some ideas.)

I think of it like this: writing in my Pages is the equivalent of having one conversation a day. One deeply rewarding conversation, that you don’t even have to leave your home (or your bed) for. You wouldn’t say, “eh, I don’t have time for one more conversation.” So don’t say you don’t have time for writing every day.

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. I wrote this post on Day 27 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

I have this friend who is always reminding me that I’m human. I know this to be true, and I’m grateful that it is.

But I don’t always love it when she says that. Sometimes, what I hear her say when she says that is: watch your perfectionism, it’s getting out of hand. But other times, I hear her say: it’s ok to slack off. It actually makes me feel better when you don’t go quite so hard.

So sometimes, I listen to her and appreciate her for the intervention. And other times, I leave that comment – you’re human – right where it comes from.

At the root of this disconnect is the truth that she and I have fundamentally different ideas of what being human is and what being human means.

Real talk: one can never 100% know what someone else thinks or feels. But as I perceive it, she thinks it to be human means to be irrevocably flawed, imperfect and, sure, to try to get better all the time, but also flawed and imperfect.

I think that to be human is to be a child of God, is to be an heir in the lineage of perfection. Does this mean that I expect or want to be perfect? Definitely not. But it does mean that I hold myself to a spirit of excellence at all times, that I push myself at times others would give me a big old hall pass to take a breather, and that I have bold expectations that grace and supernatural forces will take my intentions and my actions to a level closer to perfection than I ever could have taken them under my own steam.

I learned that my work is to every day, be more and more unapologetic and bold about claiming my inheritance as a child of God. My inheritance is everything. Yours is, too. We just forget sometimes. And my work is also to every day, more and more, approach my own flaws and humanity with ease, compassion and humor, while still working constantly to elevate who I am and how I am to a standard befitting of a child of God.

Maybe our difference of opinion is simply a matter of the conclusions we reach from the same st of facts. We both agree that to be human is to be flawed. But she feels that our flaws let us off the hook, and make it silly to set super strict standards for ourselves. I see it differently: our flaws simply create the landscape for us to experience growth and healing and to act out our craving for the divine, trying to edge ever closer to the supernatural from right here, on this ball of dirt we call ours.

Last night, I went down an Internet poetry rabbit hole. Of all Internet rabbit holes, I recommend this one, perhaps, the most. I came across this beautiful short poem called Romanesque arches, which touched on precisely this issue of being human, and being proud of it.

Romanesque arches

by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly

Tourists have crowded into the half-dark of the enormous Romanesque church.

Vault opening behind vault and no perspective.

A few candle flames flickered.

An angel whose face I couldn’t see embraced me

and his whisper went all through my body:

Don’t be ashamed to be a human being—be proud!

Inside you one vault after another opens endlessly.

You’ll never be complete, and that’s as it should be.

Tears blinded me

as we were herded out into the fiercely sunlit piazza,

together with Mr and Mrs Jones, Herr Tanaka and Signora Sabatini—

within each of them vault after vault opened endlessly.

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. I wrote this post on Day 26 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

Maybe two years back now, I was walking Aiko and Miko in the hills up the street from my house. One corner house we pass every day had a new addition, a well-built wooden version of a real estate flyer box, nailed securely to a tree in the front yard. There was a bright pink post-it note on it that read:

Neighborhood Poetry Box: Take a poem, or leave one!

For the last two years, that box has always been full of print-outs of poems.

I rarely take them. But I always read them, and I occasionally take a snapshot of the ones that really resonate. They’re often seasonal, or relevant. They’re always sweet, probably sweetened in my mind by the idea that my neighbors are going out of their way to keep the box full.

Once, sometime last year, the tiny, vibrant, white-haired Asian woman who lives at the house was in the yard when I walked by. The girls and I stopped to thank her for investing the time and effort to turn such a lovely idea into reality, and to let her know that we read it everyday. She was so excited, so thrilled, that the box has become part of our daily routine.

This afternoon, we walked by the Neighborhood Poetry Box, and found this poem inside:

Children, everybody.
Here’s what to do during war:
In a time of destruction,
create something.
A poem.
A parade.
A community.
A school.
A vow.
A moral principle.
One peaceful moment.

It’s common that the poems in the box are attributed to their authors with a note at the bottom. This one, however, was signed in handwritten script—Maxine H. Kingston—and then attributed to a work titled The Fifth Book of Peace.

I took a photo of it. And later sent it to a friend. Because I think this is what we’re doing right now. We’re in a time of chaos, and we’re creating something. We’re creating lots of things. We’re creating bonds and love and moments. We’re writing and writing and writing. We’re committing. We’re building community at a level of depth I’ve never before witnessed firsthand. We’re creating farms and schools and movements and moments.

There’s something about the elegance and sparsity of this poem that I especially loved. I mean substantively, it was for us and about us. Obviously. But it didn’t seek to explain why or how or to make a case for what’s to be done in times like these. It was simple instruction.

Loving instruction, from someone senior to us: Children. Here’s what to do.

When I sent my sweetheart the photo of the poem, I again noticed the signature. I was inspired to Google the name, Maxine H. Kingston, and what a treat I found when I did. Maxine Hong Kingston is my lovely, tiny, neighbor, the proprietress of the poetry box! I read a few profiles of her incredible history, life and career, which started with her 1976 publication of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Over the years, this book alone has sold over 1.3 million copies.

A lauded UC Berkeley professor (now Emeritus) and White House humanities medal awardee, she’s spent the last few decades in peace activism, and was once notably arrested with another literary giant, Alice Walker, for protesting the Bush Administration’s plans to invade Iraq. Ms. Hong lived here 25 years ago, when the Oakland Hills fires swept through these streets through which I now walk the girls, and her home was burned to the ground, along with the manuscript of what was to be the Fourth Book of Peace. (In Chinese legend, the first three books of peace are said to have held the secrets to ending all war and, as such, to have been burned by the powers then in charge.)

So I’ve just ordered the Fifth Book of Peace. And soon, I’ll reach out to my neighbor to thank her again. But this time, it won’t just be for the poetry box.

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. I wrote this post on Day 25 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

In the US, it’s Thanksgiving today. And while I know this year has been trying for so many, I can’t help but be intensely thankful for so, so many things. I’m grateful that I was born when, where and to whom I was born. I’m grateful to know God up close and personal. I’m grateful for my extraordinary friends, the life I’ve led, my son, the incredible healing I’ve had, and for the incredible thoughtfulness of the lovely gent I’m seeing these days.

I’m a little under the weather, which always makes me a bit existential. So I’m even more acutely grateful than normal, today, for the extraordinary health of every cell in my body. I’m grateful that God has prospered and protected me, all the days of my life, and I’m grateful for what’s ahead.

And OH!, I can almost not convey with words the extent of my gratitude for the experiences I’ve had. Travel, work, life, love: you name it. I’ve cycled the islands of Croatia, boxed with the Muslim boys of Brussels, worked to bring healthy food to people who’d otherwise not have had access and executive-ed a Silicon Valley startup, all the way to acquisition. Unbelievable.

The teachers I’ve had along the way have unlocked a lot of my capacity to live into—and revel in—these experiences. Most of the celebrity teachers I’ve had, I’ve learned from via their books or online work. But in the last 8 weeks I’ve had the honor and privilege to be in the same room as a number of those people I’ve learned from, from afar; people like Deepak Chopra, Anne Lamott, Brené Brown and Marina Abramović , each the undisputed best at what they do.

Brené changed my life, Anne cracked me entirely up and Marina opened my eyes. But Deepak? The thing is, Deepak and I go way back. Perhaps the first personal growth or “wizlit” book I ever read, besides the Bible, was his book Quantum Healing, which I read when I was about 14. I had several of terminally ill relatives I was watching experience their illnesses, and some of the ideas he suggested rocked my world, in that context. The idea that the cells of our bodies renew entirely ever 7 years, for one. The idea that there is a literal, proven connection between our mental state and the health of our bodies, for another.

These concepts were not just revolutionary to me because I was a child; they were quite revolutionary in the world at large, in 1989. And they were certainly revolutionary in the setting of my childhood, good old Bakersfield, California.

I found these ideas deeply exciting and comforting, at the same time. They felt like a gift, like an endowment of a new level of understanding of how our bodies heal, and a new sense of control over my own body and my own health outcomes, something that had previously seemed so mysterious and opaque it was almost terrifying, given the stakes.

I recently attended a Deepak lecture in San Francisco. Sometimes, I’m intentionally negligent at documenting these things on social media, mostly when I decide to stay all the way present in the moment, where I am. I did manage to post this photo and somewhat cryptic caption to Facebook, though:

Takeaways from tonight’s Deepak Chopra lecture: There is no such thing as a thing. Nouns are a convention of language. Everything is activity. You: Born this day. Dead this day. Birth and death every day in between.

A photo posted by Tara-Nicholle Nelson (@transformationaltara) on Sep 28, 2016 at 10:44pm PDT

This post was met with two, really different reactions. The people I know who have done a lot of workshops and personal growth work in the East-meets-West realm, their reaction was something like this:

Translation: PREACH, Deepak.

But the other people in my world, many of them thinking, wisdom-pursuing people themselves, had a slightly different reaction. It looked more like this:

So I thought I’d break it down a little bit, because these principles are eye-opening and mindset-shifting. 

First, Part A: “There is no such thing as a thing. Nouns are a convention of language. Everything is activity.”

At a scientific level, smaller than our cells, really at the level of atoms, nothing is an actual, solid, fixed thing. Even the wood of the table before you consists of trillions of atoms in constant motion, moving so fast that we perceive them as solid. Places are in constant flux, too. Climate change is one example, but just one. A map of the world 5,000 years ago would be nearly unrecognizable, and the pace of change is actually witnessable even ore easily when you look at places like Venice or the coast of Malibu.

The only constant is change. This is even more true with our bodies, where cells are constantly dying so that new ones can be born. And even more true when we look at the landscapes of our lives, who we are, with whom we co-exist, what we do, and how we operate.

My pal Deepak was just saying that this idea that we have about nouns, that there are people, places or things that are constant, is just a linguistic hack we use to help simplify the world and the way we talk about it. But really, we’re all—everything is—a verb. We are in constant motion, constantly in action, at every level of being. There’s something peaceful about acknowledging that. It helps begin to un-click the attachment we can have to the way things are, which can often be at crossroads with the inevitable flow and motion of life.

Part B is related: You: Born this day. Dead this day. Birth and death every day in between.

The cells of our eyes regenerate every 48 hours. Colon cells renew every 4 days. Our livers? Every 6 weeks.

On one level, Deepak was saying that we are literally dying and being born, at a cellular level, literally every single day of our lives.

But the more esoteric elements of our being are also dying and being born continually. Our traumas and hopes. Our fears and memories. Our daily routines and life partners, our housemates and what we do. Our identities: literally, how we see ourselves and who we are in this life we live. All of these things are extremely malleable. They change all the time, but we often feel at mercy to their incessant change, terrorized by time. When we decide to accept this change, learn about them and be intentional about how we operate vis-a-vis this constant death and birth, things get very fun and possibilities begin to unlock that we never might have seen when we were fighting the flow.

Mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn once said that “You can’t fight the waves. But you can learn to surf.” That’s what I think Deepak was ultimately saying a few weeks back, when I saw him speak. That the waves of life are constant activity and constant change. Learn to surf them, and you’re in business: the business of an intentional, joyful, well life.

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. I wrote this post on Day 24 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.