Listen, I know just about everyone is ready to put 2020 to bed.
But there are still a few things you can do this year that are really, really worth doing.
Here’s my hit list of things you can still do this year to feel a little bit less fearful, less repressed, more free and more whole:
You can thank someone in a deep, specific and heartfelt way. Specifically tell them how you felt as a result of what they did or said or how they showed up for you.
You can still start something. What is up to you.
You can stop future-tripping, even just for fifteen minutes, and tune yourself to the channel of right now.
You can close some open loops.
You can end something that you’ve outgrown.
You can reconnect to someone.
You can disconnect from someone.
You can disconnect from your lifelong, automatic fear and scarcity thoughts and remind yourself that they’re just thoughts. They feel real, but they’re not true.
You can stop telling that struggle story. Yes, that one.
You can still find wisdom in your right-now circumstances.
You can still allow yourself to want what you want.
You can still get in alignment with whatever it is that you want.
You can still be honest about what’s not in alignment.
You can still be honest with yourself about one single thing that’s not in alignment.
You can still release, shed or destroy whatever it is that’s not in alignment. That way of being. That way of thinking about yourself. That relationship pattern. That willingness to participate in low-vibration conversations. Those burdensome belongings. That way of looking at the world. Those beliefs that keep you hiding and holding back.
You can still start practicing a declaration or mantra like: “I am poised and powerful, radiant and magnetic.”
You can still speak life into your dreams, your loved ones and yourself.
You can still enjoy this moment. And this one, too.
You can still take a baby step toward speaking up for yourself, saying what you mean, asking for what you need. Even one time. Or 100 times, before the end of the year.
You can still plant something. In your yard or in your heart.
You can still fire someone. From your team or from your life. Lovingly, but still.
You can still see what needs seeing.
You can still say what needs saying.
You can still adopt a dog. Or a highway. Or a person.
You can still change your name. (I just changed mine. I’ll tell you all about it soon.)
You can still take a journey, figurative or literal.
You can bless the memories of those you’ve lost this year or this lifetime.
You can bless someone. Anyone. You can go all out and reverse a curse. Or you can just bless your food or grocery delivery driver with a massive tip, even though you’ll never meet them face-to-face.
You can decide that life is long and let yourself daydream every day about what wonders could come into your life, in hypothetical, surprising and delightful ways.
If you’re not familiar with it, US Highway 1 is a loooong, two-lane road that twists and winds its way up the cliffside along the California Coast for hundreds and hundreds of miles.
And there’s a quirky little thing on the side of this iconic road that always cracks me up.
When I drive north on the 1 from the San Francisco Bay Area toward Mendocino, what unfolds to my left is the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, swirling and crashing in all its majesty and power.
And all along the drive, on my right, there are a series of small, plain brown freeway signs interspersed occasionally along the road.
They say, simply:
“Coastal View”, in white, with a little white arrow that points to the ocean on your left.
Like: “Hiiii! If you’re looking at this sign… look to your left. You’re missing the ocean!”
Every time I see one of those signs, I laugh at the idea that someone might miss the entire ocean because they were looking in the wrong direction. (Real talk, apparently enough people did miss the ocean to justify putting up signs.)
But the truth is that we all do this exact thing in our real lives, all the time. We are all always surrounded by the people, resources and opportunities we need to fulfill our sacred contracts to be, do, have, learn and create whatever our souls are calling us to do.
These resources are all around us all the time.
But we’re only able to see those collaborators and energize those opportunities and accept the assistance that is all around us through the lens of our present beliefs and expectations about the world and about what is available to us.
These beliefs and expectations are often wired into an inaccurate, isolating, help-obscuring relational template with life early in life, whether from the trauma of being forced to survive without sufficient help very young, or from consistently being rewarded for doing hard things without asking for help and without inconveniencing the adults in our world.
If you were labeled “gifted” as a child, you might even have been conditioned to believe that needing help is weak or makes you susceptible to bad things happening, that you cannot trust that things will work out well in your life unless you personally spin every single plate, 100% of the time. This template miswiring is the source of “duck syndrome”, where you try to appear cool and calm on social media while silently struggling and flailing and flapping your feet madly to stay afloat, under the surface.
This broken template is the source of all manner of what I call “moats”, signals we broadcast that keep the people who desire to help us do the hard parts of life at a distance, depriving ourselves of help and of love, connection and community.
This miswiring is the source of the extreme, dysfunctional ultra-independence I call “I’ll do it myself” syndrome: the detrimental, unconscious inability to receive help or support from others. This is the joy-limiting, soul-shackling, life-limiting curse of the hyper-competent that causes you to spend your whole life doing All of the Things All of the Time, because something deep down thinks you’ll lose points or lose love or lose everything if you stand down, sit still and let others do their part.
So then you attract people who want you to fix everything and do all of the work.
And you cripple those around you, teaching them helplessness by doubting their power.
And you don’t ask for the help that is your Divine Inheritance.
And you keep your visionary light hidden, because you’re so overextended and busy Getting Things Done, even if they’re not really the things that are the most important to you.
And at work, you don’t make the business case for the resources you really need. The people you need. The budget you need. Instead, you stay small and play small by doing everything yourself instead of learning how to create and activate a team.
And then your personal and business dreams begin to feel so daunting and impossible because you’re already overextended, and when you envision your dreams you assume that you’ll have to do all of the work yourself, too.
Until one day a crisis or problem in your life flat-out requires more than you can do on your own. And that forces you to seek and receive help. And if you let it, that experience kickstarts the rewiring of this broken template of isolating, dysfunctional ultra-independence. You start to see that there’s a vast ocean of untapped resources all around you, above you, and within you, too. And you begin to learn how to see and leverage those resources.
I’ve learned that the scariest situations and most overwhelming problems in my life are like those brown highway signs. It’s rare, but every time I feel like I might be approaching a breaking point, I’ve learned that I’m being asked to turn my chin to the left by just 6 or 8 inches… so I can see the ocean.
Here’s what I mean.
Last Transformation Tuesday, a couple days before my birthday, my 27-year-old son was gravely wounded in a violent crime in San Francisco.
He had life-saving emergency surgery. He’s still in hospital, as we speak, but his recovery prognosis looks hopeful.
As the days immediately following his injury unfolded, as we hurtled toward the weekend, when two-year-old Londyn wouldn’t be in daycare, I wondered how on earth I would manage the sleep deprivation and emotionally exhausting days of phone calls, visits and medical conferences for him and also care for a very high-energy, extroverted, outdoor-obsessed 2-year-old with five-star food and customer service standards.
Enter: my best friends. Or, as Londyn calls them: The Aunties.
First, my homegirl Auntie Felicia showed up, took Londyn for the day and gave her the time of her life.
Then that evening, my bff Auntie Kysha and her daughter Selah came through.
Next morning was Auntie Rebecca.
That afternoon, Auntie Monisha and Uncle Jonny.
It was like that old Kanye “Woefully Misguided” West lyric: “So many Aunties we could have an Auntie team.”
Every time another Auntie showed up, my little extrovert squealed with glee.
That night as I put her to bed, she ran through the list of everyone she’d gotten to see this weekend and threw her arms around me and said “thank you, Mamaaaaa.”
She’d had a wonderful weekend.
And I didn’t do anything to make that happen, except to allow others to show up for us.
This was an eye-opening experience.
Because basically all of these people have been offering to take Londyn occasionally and give me a little downtime, for many, many moons.
But I’d been telling myself a bunch of stories to the effect that I couldn’t really take them up on those offers.
I’d been telling myself the story that I needed to spend all of her non-daycare time with her.
I’d been telling myself that I needed a deeper roster of paid sitters, vs. imposing on my busy, powerhouse friends.
I’d been telling myself that they really might not understand what hang-time with a 2-year-old is actually like.
And in telling myself these stories, I was building a moat. Help was on the way, but I was keeping it at bay.
I was missing the ocean.
This help with Londyn from The Auntie Team was just one of a dozen different oceans of help, resources and collaboration that opened up to me, in the past week.
It’s one thing to live through this sort of traumatic terror.
But it’s a different thing to live through it knowing that both the beauty and the terrors of life are always revealing important things to you, if you stay open to seeing them.
And it’s a radically perspective-shifting experience to live through something like this and feel… YES… exhausted and so sad, but also so supported. So resourced.
It starts to heal your “I’ll do it myself” feedback loop that was miswired when you were so young.
It starts to remind you to look for help. To ask for help. To allow help. To receive help.
And not just from above, which I’m pretty good at.
Help from all around you.
If you relate to the idea of being extremely, dysfunctionally ultra-independent, let me tell you something, [First Name].
Despite what you learned when you were little, you are not getting extra credit in life for doing hard things all by yourself.
You are not getting extra credit in life for doing things the hardest possible way.
Despite what you learned when you were young, working your heart out is NOT the way to create your dream business or your dream life.
In fact, the opposite is true.
The people who build the big, life-changing things know that you can’t build big things on your own.
The way to real-ize your life-changing dreams is to get clear on your vision and get into alignment with it, by becoming a magnet to all the collaborators and components of your dream.
You might not think you have the connections or the money or the whatever you need for the dream that’s in your heart.
But in my experience, you almost certainly know someone and have some resource that you need to take the next step into your calling right now, that you are simply not accessing or leveraging.
You might not be fully leveraging your inner resources, like your inner wisdom and all your sacred gifts and talents.
Almost no one I know is fully leveraging their relationships. Every week I talk to at least one high-achieving human who has told themselves their house, their finances, their business plan or their website isn’t yet good enough to reach out to this person or that one who could unlock major new possibilities for them.
And that, [First Name], is how you miss the ocean.
As I write this, I’m reminded of a scene that stuck with me from the Netflix documentary about Clarence Avant, who they call The Black Godfather.
There was a moment when this power broker, who was behind the scenes of the careers of everyone from Bill Withers to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, looked straight into the camera and said these words:
“I don’t have problems. I have friends.”
And you do, too.
Friendly, universal forces seeking to assist you.
Physical, human friends.
Collaborative components lighting up and lining up all around you.
So when the unfathomable happens and you’re not sure you have the capacity to handle it, remember this: Ask yourself what you’re not seeing. Open your eyes to the resources you already possess, but aren’t leveraging. Turn your chin just maybe 6 or 8 inches to the left, so you don’t miss the ocean.
Don’t be literal-minded about it, but get still and quiet and tap into the essence of what Clarence Avant said when he said: “I don’t have problems. I have friends.”
Head up + heart out,
The Inner Critic Coach™
P.S.: When I say leverage your resources, I mean that in the very oldest sense of the word. A lever is what the cave-folk used to lift boulders bigger than they could have with their limited human muscle.
Every time you’re feeling called (or forced) to do something bigger than you think you, personally can do, look for your leverage.
And if you start looking for leverage, you’ll find it. You’ll find it in your focus, in your clarity, in your connection to the higher forces that run this place and in your connection to other people.
Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq. Founder + CEO of SoulTour
Ninety five percent of the high-achieving people I work with feel like their life hasn’t ever fully taken off, even well into their 40’s, 50s and 60’s… even when their lives look wonderful from the outside looking in.
Pavlovian parenting from decades ago has almost everyone you know holding their breath to enjoy their life until they “make it”. Like only after you cross off some herculean task from the great To-Do List in the Sky, can you finally take a nap and give yourself a food treat.
But that clenching and waiting transmutes, over a lifetime, into a hard-wired Inner Critic script of “you’re not ready”, chronic delay and false prerequisites.
And that becomes a chronic habit of procrastination and hiding your own light.
Then your Inner Critic judges you for that, too. The worse it gets, the worse it gets.
The antidote is to remember that radical acceptance doesn’t just mean loving your cellulite.
Radical acceptance means radically opening warm arms to the realities of how life works in this Universe.
The reality that small things grow and you don’t have to make that happen.
The reality that every creation requires a period of gestation.
The reality that everything is a process and you’re not the boss of the timing.
The reality—the Universal law—that all expansion is preceded by contraction: the labor pains of this Universe.
The reality that Divine Timing is real and always in your favor, even your delays will bless you if you let them.
Stop future-tripping.
Stop waiting.
Stop controlling.
Your life is right now, in the process of wanting things to change and not yet knowing how they will. In the process of feeling the disharmonics that will call solutions and alignment forth.
Your life is right now.
The day you catch this principle and stop holding your breath is the day you start to get your life back.
Head up + heart out,
The Inner Critic Coach™
P.S.: My 45th birthday is Friday! I’ve wanted to be a 45-year-old woman since I was 9, so this is a particularly sweet one.
These last few years, as US politics have gone totally bonkers, I’ve found a number of my seeming quirks to be pretty helpful for my own mental health and spiritual sovereignty.
So I thought I’d share a few of them, in case you want to borrow a little of my personal weird as tools to get through the next week.
It’s been helpful to have had the Old Testament history lessons I received as a child.
Because, if you’ve studied the Old Testament, you know: World rulers have always been bananas. King Herod, anyone??? In a bizarre show of toxic, malignant narcissism, King Herod — a real person in history — issued a government order to massacre all baby boys in the land under two years old because he heard that the next big king had already been born.
And he wasn’t the only world leader with a disturbing lack of scruples. King David wanted to sleep with Bathsheba so he had her husband sent to war and killed. Yeeeeeah.
King Solomon was the wisest man on Earth, they say, but one of his court orders went like this: There’s a dispute about which woman this baby belongs to? Okay, saw the baby in half and give one side to each of the women who claims she’s the Mom.
Sure, he was trusting that the real Mom would protest the verdict. But, like, what??? That is not a good court order.
Yet somehow, despite the stunning inhumanity of some of our world leaders, humanity always finds its way back. We lose the thread. But we always find it again.
It’s been a blessing, this past few years, to have this default worldview, which is a cosmic point of view.
The point of view that knows that what we can see with our physical eyes, is just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s been helpful to take the zoomed-out, eternal point of view.
In a time of spiritual crisis, it’s a helpful thing to be wired as a spiritual contrarian.
And it’s been helpful to know the laws of the Universe, including the one that says all expansion is preceded by contraction. That just means that shit gets really real sometimes, before it gets better, and the upheaval is part of the process of things getting better.
It’s been helpful that I used to be a lawyer back in the day. So I have an understanding of how this country came to be and how the laws and culture here have evolved, and how they are evolving right now, right before our eyes.
It’s helpful to have the point of view that sometimes it is the total and utter breakdown of a legal or cultural institution that must take place for the next season of evolution to begin.
It’s also helpful to be reading Animalium with Londyn right now, with its lovely Tree of Life. It’s helpful to remember how the evolution of species works, how the sponges grew new body parts when they needed to do more than whatever it is that sponges do.
And how it took hundreds of generations for the frontal lobe to become a thing.
It’s helpful to think about how we don’t judge the sponge for not being quick enough to evolve, which is helpful reminder to refrain from judging or criticizing humanity for the process of evolution that we are in the middle of right exactly now.
On Facebook the other day, a client expressed her deep fear and anxiety about the coming election, here in the US.
“What will happen?” she wondered.
My answer is this:
Humanity will continue.
Divinity will continue.
Evolution will continue.
Regardless of who’s elected.
Will the more beautiful world we all know is possible take longer to become real? Will the bumpiness of that road differ based on who’s elected?
Maybe… maybe not.
But you don’t get to be the boss of that.
And neither do it.
What we do get to be the boss of is our own business.
And your own business is your mind, your body, your affairs.
Your thoughts, your actions and your emotions.
The most powerful asset you wield is the power of your attention and your focus.
Will you spend it wailing and wringing hands, fretting about possible events beyond your control?
Or will you reclaim your sovereignty, reclaim your energy and reclaim your focus so that you may tap into that repository of energy that is at the very center of you, and uncork it, allowing it to flow to and beyond you?
It’s totally possible to do a little bit of both, by the way. You can major in sovereignty and minor in wailing, if you need to.
Honestly, you may even need to major in wailing for a minute. Just don’t pitch your tent there, okay? The rest of us need you.
If you decide to major in sovereignty, know that that’s the one where you get to hear what you are being called to do in this season and have the energy to act upon it.
The choice is up to you, and I trust that you’ll make it in Divine Timing.
The Adlerian psychologists have a few wise things to say about so-called “defiant” children.
They say all misbehaving children feel misunderstood.
Facts.
And they say all children — behaving or misbehaving — have two buckets they need filled every day: an attention bucket and a power bucket.
Fail to fill either bucket and acting out occurs.
More facts.
And this usually becomes an unholy, unruly cycle of defiance, whereby:
Kid doesn’t get attention.
Kid acts out.
Kid gets attention, even if it’s negative attention.
Kid learns that the way to get attention is to act out.
It’s almost ridiculously simple.
Most of the people I work with have identified that they have a problem with self-motivation in that they struggle to stay focused, to be all in and to stay on course when it comes to the things that matter the most to them. They get chronically blocked by conscious fear and self-doubt, and unconscious forms of fear and doubt that usually manifest as distraction.
Most of the people I work with are also high-achieving, which means they have a pretty incredible track record of actually doing things, just not the things that matter to them. They have a great track record of doing things that get them validation, status, money and approval in the eyes of other people.
Sometimes it’s helpful to think of this kind of self-motivation impasse — this inner resistance — as kind of like having a defiant inner child that acts out when you ask it to help you do something that matters to you.
When you’re in a season of trying to get into action on your own callings, dreams, self-improvement aspirations and creative projects, and you hit that wall of Inner Resistance, ask yourself these three questions:
1. What within me feels misunderstood right now? Extend an open, warm, listening opportunity to your own emotions and thoughts.
Write them out freely without censorship and without self-criticism. Delay and suspend your own judgement of your own self.
Don’t try to reframe anything or talk yourself into feeling something you don’t feel. To do so is to divorce and abandon yourself. Just listen to yourself. If you feel sad, feel sad. If you feel afraid, feel afraid.
Feel your feelings, and let them do their work within you, and they’ll leave you alone before too long.
2. What within me needs attention right now? I mean this on every level. Do your feet feel cold? Put socks on. Need to pee? Go do that, not in 15 minutes. Now. Are you hungry. Stressed. Anxious? Angry?
Do you need more sleep? Do you need better nutrition? More physical activity?
Do you need to stop pushing parts of yourself away? Do you need to stop hiding your own light? Do you need to start grieving or mourning something?
Do you need to get some help?
3. What within me needs to be empowered right now? You have so much more power than you’re likely exercising. We all do. So make it your practice of regularly empowering your inner child – the playful, innocent, eternally hopeful core of your own inner being — to have some power and call at least some of the shots of your life.
You can do this by devoting more time to playing with dogs and babies. By devoting more time to playing, period. By dressing up when you have nothing but Zoom calls on the calendar. By being lighthearted and playful. By giving someone or giving yourself the (unearned) benefit of the doubt, just because. Or by taking a chance on some endeavor that the hardened, cynical part of you would think is foolish.
You empower your inner child by creating a life that doesn’t make you dread getting up in the morning. You do this by taking things off your plate that you hate to do. By reducing the number of things you hate to do that you have to do on a recurring basis, as part of your everyday life.
If you fill your inner child’s buckets with “credits” for attention, power and understanding today, you can cash those credits in weeks or months in the future. So if you make a habit of filling your inner child’s attention bucket and power bucket a little (or a lot) every day, you will hit less resistance and less defiance when you try to self-motivate.
Back in the 1900s (lol), they used to call “defiant” children “spirited”. I hate that phrase, because it sets up this idea that the parent is the opponent of the child’s spirit, and the goal should be to surgically extract the spirit from the child. And that’s exactly how so many adults you know had all their brilliant, spirited edges filed off, dulled down and locked up when they were young.
So if you have what feels like a defiant inner child, change the way you think of it. There’s not something within you that’s defiant. You have a “spirited” inner child. And your goal is not to take the spirit out. You don’t want a spirit-less inner child. You want to unlock that spirit. You want to team up with that spirit. You want to get to know it and let its brilliance infuse everything you ever do. You want to give the reins of your life to that spirit.
And you do that by giving your spirited inner child some understanding, your attention and the power to control a little bit of your everyday life.
Try it and let me know how it goes.
Head up + heart out,
Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq. Founder + CEO of SoulTour
I’m well-known in my circle for being very comfortable with awkward social pauses.
This happens most often when someone is venting or complaining about something, and I simply refrain from joining in.
Listen, whatever you do or so is okay, but your words contain great power. You are a spell-caster, whether you know it or not. And can create whole worlds with the words you speak, for better or for worse.
So if you desire to operate in the most powerful possible way, think twice before you engage in the habit of chronically complaining or venting.
Now, before you tell me venting is just a healthy form of self-expression, let me ask you a few questions:
When you vent, are you expressing yourself, or are you expressing your fear?
When you vent, are you expressing yourself, or are you expressing your doubts?
When you vent, are you expressing yourself, or are you expressing some catastrophic story of “the other shoe is about to drop” that you’ve been under the influence of, maybe for a lifetime?
When you vent, are you expressing yourself, or are you expressing your desire to control someone else, your outrage that they’re not doing what you think they should be doing?
Yourself is a fractal of the Divine. You are the offspring of the Infinite Intelligence, the Limitless Love and the Creative Power that formed all worlds.
So I ask to tune into who you really are, and consider this question again: Are you actually, effectively, expressing yourself, when you’re venting?
I see all of us as spiritual strategists.
So if the conversations you’re having chronically are not leading you in the direction of freedom, growth and joy… wholeness and liberation… intelligence, love and power, then your conversational strategy ain’t an effective strategy.
Venting is effective at a bunch of things.
Venting will get you laughs from your friends.
Venting will get you the dopamine hit of bonding with others over struggle and pain… that feeling of belonging to the tribe.
Venting can give you that feeling of moral superiority over those you deem wrongdoers.
Venting can even get you the temporary soothing of staying within your comfort zone as you rehash the stories and scripts that keep you believing inner peace and a more fulfilled life aren’t really possible for you.
But chronically venting also keeps the energy of struggle alive in your spirit and in your life.
If you want an effective escape route from the struggle zone, try the Spiritual Strategy I call: Third Time’s a Wrap, inspired by something my friend Kathi Joy once told me.
You get to vent or tell your bad-feeling story three times.
And after the third time, you either stop telling the story or you have to tell a more empowered version of the story.
This always works to shift the energy of a subject or issue in your life.
And I know this from personal experience.
I have vented a lot in the past few weeks.
I’ve vented about freeway noise.
I’ve vented about voting stickers, outraged that our culture gives adults stickers for what I judge to be expected, responsible behavior.
And I’ve vented about poop, because: potty training.
So let’s talk about poop.
The other day, I decided to take my own advice, and let the third time I told the struggle story about potty training be a wrap.
And my entire experience of potty training shifted.
When I stopped telling the story, I was able to set the struggle down.
I reminded myself this is just a developmental milestone.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Nothing emotional.
Nothing to get agitated or upset about, even when there’s poop ON THE BOTTOM OF HER FEET.
Yes, y’all. On the bottom of her feet.
I sat Londyn down.
I talked with Londyn about how much I love and respect her.
She nodded, solemnly.
I talked with her about dignity, and about how I won’t be rushing her to the potty or pressing her about it anymore.
She didn’t understand these words with precision.
But she did understand the energy.
At the end of the conversation, she said: “My Mama is my best friend.”
You shift the energy.
You affect the atmosphere.
Don’t tune yourself to the channel of angst and outrage, complaint and grievance, agitation and struggle… and then expect to hear the sweet sounds of liberation, joy, success, happiness and abundance.
That ain’t how it works.
And if you’ve been a chronic complainer, there’s no need to judge yourself for that now.
That was just part of your process of becoming who you’re becoming.
Choose to see it as a treasure that you’ve discovered this new thing to release, in the words of Louise Hay.
Right now, I invite you to reclaim your sovereignty over how you feel and over the results you get in your life, starting right now.
Stop letting your Inner Critic be the boss of how you see and narrate the world.
Wield the power of your words lovingly, wisely and with intention. Notice when your conversations get a little performative, when you might be saying to get a laugh or to stay “on brand.” Choose to be quiet and turn your attention inward, even 2% more than you normally would.
Speak life over yourself and your dreams. Use your words to pour respect into others. Talk about high-minded things, beautiful things. You be the creator of the energy you keep active in your life on every subject by the stories you choose to tell.
Build your life into the empire of your soul, and start doing it today with the power of your words.
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: I had a totally different newsletter planned for today, but this lesson came as a divine download while I was walking my dogs this morning. I observed how the billions of blackberries that were on the bushes at the park two months ago have now been totally plucked clean by kids and people and birds and raccoons.
I thought about all these beings savoring the berries, juice running down their chins.
I thought about you, too.
And I said a little prayer that you might experience one moment today (or 1,000 moments) that you savor and delight in as much as all those beings savored and delighted in all those berries.
So let it be.
Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq. Founder + CEO of SoulTour
My current hometown of Oakland California, has a legacy of supernaturally fit old guys. Jack Lalanne came from here, and there are many local guys who are doing their best to fill his shoes. I’ve been a gym rat in Oakland for about 22 years, and I’m endlessly charmed by the old dudes that were getting it in decades before I arrived, who are still on the gym scene.
There’s this one guy who I estimated to be about 100 years old back when I first met him, in 1998. He might be one of the fittest people I’ve ever met. I still see him running all over town, around and around the Lake, even during the pandemic.
A few years back, I ran the first Oakland half marathon. Thirteen miles. And I’ll never forget this same super-fit old guy running past me. He ran to the finish line, turned around and then ran back to cheer on the rest of us.
As he ran back from the finish to the start, he would lovingly accost individual runners to encourage them.
I must have looked really tired on my mile 12, because he ran right over to me and bellowed: “You’ve got this!!! You can do this!!!”
“YOUR BODY IS LYING TO YOOOOU!!”
I thought: “You know what? My aching feet are lying to me. I’m almost there. Turbo time.”
*Tara: zoom*
As I sat down to write this morning, that gentleman came to mind.
In some ways, with that one sentence, he became my role model for my life’s work.
If you think you have a problem with perfectionism, procrastination or self-sabotage…
If you have a savage Inner Critic who has ever stopped you from doing something you truly wanted to do…
If you feel like you spend more time with your fears, self-doubts and struggle stories than you do expanding your capacity to live the life you dream about..
Or if you just have some kind of struggle switch inside that flips on every time you have a dream or desire to level up…
I’m here to tell you that I’ve run that race, Brilliant One.
And my life’s work is to run back from that finish line.
I’m running back, calling out to you just like that guy called out to me, but with a tiny twist.
I’m yelling: “Your Inner Critic is lying to you!!!!”
Your fear is lying to you.
Your programming is lying to you.
Because your fear — the old, played-out programmed habits of thought that speak in the voice of your Inner Critic — your fear is saying things like:
Who do you think you are to even dream that dream?
That’s not really possible… for you.
You’re smart, but you’re not THAT smart.
Nobody cares about your story.
You made your bed, now lie in it.
No one you know has ever done something like that, successfully.
You never finish what you start. There must be a little bit of something wrong with you, deep down.
That’s what your Inner Critic is saying.
But I’m here today, just like that super-fit old guy was on my half marathon course.
And I’m running back to tell you that your Inner Critic is lying to you.
Because here’s the honest-to-goodness truth, [First Name]:
You are offspring of the Divine. Your birthright is freedom, wholeness and joy.
You ARE allowed to want whatever you want.
And it IS possible for you.
You ARE that smart.
People DO want to read what you have to write and buy what you have to sell.
You DO get to outgrow things, and patterns and ways of being.
You might BE the first person you ever know to do that. You get to be that.
There’s nothing wrong with you, because you’ve had great ideas before and not finished them.
The truth is that all of that was part of your journey, your process, your becoming who you came here to become.
That means you’re doing it right.
All along the way you’ve been groomed, you’ve been prepared, your skin has been thickened, your heart has been softened.
You’re coming into a time when you’re really ready.
Catch this principle today, my friend: Your Inner Critic is lying to you.
Head up + heart out,
Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq. Founder + CEO of SoulTour
You might recall that I just spent six weeks at Farm on the Beach 2020. What you might not know is that we had a bat in the house for the better part of a week.
But it was a farm, and when you’re on a farm, you share your space with all sorts of living things.
When we got back home to Oakland, Londyn started mentioning “my raccoon”, and pulling my hand so I could come meet it. Sure enough, I went out to the back deck and saw a large number of little creepily humanlike paw prints all over the brand new white Pottery Barn slipcovers I’d put on the deck furniture right before we left.
Then, just yesterday my little black pug Sumiko walked in the house barking like a madwoman at some little rodent-like thing that came right on in the house with her.
After building a barricade to keep it in the room and calling every exterminator and friend I could think of, I pulled on a unitard and some combat boots, grabbed a broomstick, took a deep breath and thought: “Oh, who am I fooling? I’m not going in there.”
So I ran down all 40 of my stairs, thinking I’d knock on my next door neighbor Perry’s house. But before I even got to the curb, I saw a gleaming UPS truck turn onto my street… and I waved both arms wildly. He stopped, I ran over and asked him to come up to my house and help me evict this little creature.
The driver, who was not heading to my house, by the way, kindly pulled over, got out, came all the way up my 40 stairs, let me brief him on the whereabouts of this thing and hand him the broom, walked through my room, out the slider, over to the still-open back door, moved the couch and discovered… a baby possum, playing dead. I’m pretty sure it was paralyzed with fear from Sumiko’s barking which, I assure you, is not a fearsome sight. Because: pug.
So he gently swept this thing out and cautioned me not to open those doors again for a while, as the little guy was still hanging around close to the house. I thanked him and he left to go deliver his route.
Somewhat bizarrely, this is the SECOND time I’ve had a possum in the house, two decades, cities and houses apart.
I’ve just told you about a number of moments that I’ve branded, in my mind: “encounters con animales”. I’m not sure why; Spanglish just seems like the right language for this.
In interpreting them or taking meaning from them, I tend to follow the advice of the author Laura Day, who suggests that we make everything be good luck. So I like to look up the ancient cultural and spiritual meanings of the various animals who make themselves very, very known to me, and sit for a moment with whether my Inner Intelligence wants to take anything away from the encounter that is particularly relevant to me in that moment.
I have fun with it, and I don’t take it too seriously. So when a few friends suggested I inquire within as to whether there’s anything in my life or in my constitution that is currently “playing possum” (playing dead), I sat with that and journaled about it. I asked myself as I often do: “What wonderful thing is trying to come to me or through me by virtue of this experience?” And I actually did find some subjects and issues on which I’d like to be more proactive and assertive.
But that’s not actually what I came here to say.
I came here to share that I was texting with a friend as this whole thing played out in real time, and when the UPS guy came through she texted back “I love you. That’s the most Tara resolution EVER.”
And I sat with that for a minute. I reveled in it for a minute.
Because she’s right. And because that was not always true about me.
I’ve learned, over the years, that help is always on the way.
I’ve learned that assisting forces surround me.
I want you to learn, starting now, if you don’t already know it, that assisting forces surround you.
They’re all around you, but you can only see them through the lens of your worldview, your paradigm, your beliefs, your expectations.
Many, many people in this world desire to be good to you. Many circumstances in your life are lining up to help you, but if you don’t expect or ask for that help and goodness, you cannot receive it. And you can’t see it.
I used to see the world as a scary and scarce place, where you have to work your heart out to earn or to deserve or to be worthy of a good life.
I used to second-guess whether I deserved help and I’m still working on knowing the full breadth of help that is available to me.
But the floodgates of universal assistance opened and started raining down on me when a few things happened.
I began to shift from being stingy with myself to being lavish with myself.
I shed the lies of my Inner Critic and started affirming this truth daily: that “I was born to be loved, cherished and adored.”
I started to study what love actually is — openness, warmth, appreciation, attention, affection, allowing — and started overruling the stinginess of my Inner Critic and extending all of these things to myself.
I came to know the law of this Universe I teach my students, which we call pronoia: that everything in this Universe conspires to bless you.
And, right at the same time as I began to travel the world extensively, I started declaring that “I am in love with everyone and everyone is in love with me.”
I started to see all the help that has come my way, past and present, and started wiring in my awareness of that, focusing my attention on that, reminding myself constantly that I’m not alone, and that the highest forces in this Universe are constantly trying to assist me.
And this has been my experience of life, ever since then, everywhere I go in this world.
People just give me things. They just do lovely things for me and say beautiful things to me. They’re wonderful to me. They show up for me. They show out in ways that benefit me.
And I do the same. I don’t care if I know them. I delight in having little beautiful moments of sweetness with people I will never see again.
And Londyn’s even better at all this than I am. She can walk into the post office and you can almost see visible sparks of electricity shoot out from her to connect with the other people in line.
She knows no strangers, as my friend Rebecca says.
But this way of being, where you can magnetize the UPS guy up to help you with a thing he has literally zero obligation to do… it does take these mindset shifts. That you are loved. That the world longs to be good to you. That people desire to help you.
And that you need only walk around, BE your brilliant self, look and ask for what you need.
That you need never, ever, ever worry about what someone might think or how they might look at you if you do ask for what you need. That if someone says no, that’s perfect: you just got closer to the help you need coming from someone else, from above, or from within.
You can’t lose, Brilliant One.
I’ve come to think of these shifts as no more than spiritual, developmental milestones that you can learn and practice and reach over time, like learning how to walk or potty training. Might take longer than you want, but who cares?
The depth psychologists — the ones who study the unconscious — say that we all fall under the influence of family and cultural programming that doesn’t feel so good. So if that’s you, you’re doing human-ing juuuuuust right.
And the depth psychologists say that if you begin to see that this programming is just programming, and if you begin to break the stranglehold of your inner repressive parent by around middle age, you’re doing it juuuust right.
And the depth psychologists also say that if you spend the next 40 years re-membering your own glories and the glories of this Universe, then you’re really doing life juuuuuust right.
So today, just wake up to this: That you were born to be loved, cherished and adored.
That there are assisting forces all around you.
That it’s your job to let them line up and light up before you.
And that it’s also your job to expect help to be on the way, and ask for that help and to receive it with grace when it shows up.
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: I was taught that if you pray for rain, you bring an umbrella. When it comes to receiving help, if you don’t expect it, you will miss a lot of the help that’s all around you trying to get to you, on whatever subjects matter to you.
This is important, because if what you want to create is important or big, you can’t do it all on your own.
So whatever you’re dreaming of or working on, whatever you desire to call into your life in this season, make sure you envision the help you need to. And ask for it. And expect to receive it. Bring an umbrella.
Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq. Founder + CEO of SoulTour
I want to tell you a quick story about something that happened while I was in Monk Mode the last six weeks.
The time was intended to be my querencia. This is a concept from bullfighting that I teach all the time. The querencia is a place in the ring of a bullfight. It is a geographic place and a place in his mind where, even among the madness and the fear and the rage, he can find a temporary refuge.
If a bull finds this place, he takes a sacred pause, stops reacting to incoming stimulus and taps back into his natural strength and power. And when that happens, a wise bullfighter knows what to do: Get out of the way. Because a bull who finds his querencia becomes unstoppable, and will run through anything in his path.
Farm on the Beach 2020, was my querencia.
A sacred place to take a sacred pause. To reset and recalibrate. To tap back into my natural strength and power.
And I treated it as sacred.
I got still. I took a physical journey, and created a sacred space once I was there. I cleared my calendar. I cleared my headspace.
I cleared my heartspace.
I listened. And what I heard was a Divine Download of clear answers, but also (as always) those answers beget some fresh, new questions on the subject of what I will do with the next season of my wild and precious human life*.
In my process of inviting the answers in, I talked with a few of my own guides and advisors, one of whom has a particular gift for seeing energies that can’t be translated by your physical eyes… yet.
I’m blessed with great discernment and boundaries, so I obeyed my Inner Intelligence and made the call.
One of the first things he said to me was this, a sentence I will never forget. He said: “Tara, till your dying breath you will never need to worry about money.” And then we went on to discuss what I’d called him to discuss.
But I want to focus on the first thing he said. See, I hadn’t asked him about money. And I don’t identify as someone who worries a lot about money. Money flows to me with ease and abundance at this stage in my life, though I’m always inviting more, and I give thanks for that flow and tune into that flow every single day. I have for years.
But baby, when I heard those words through Zoom that day — “Tara, till your dying breath you will never need to worry about money” — let me tell you about the space that opened up inside my chest. The breath-holding that ceased. It wasn’t at all like you’d think. I wasn’t all “woo hooo let’s go to the beach! Passive income, it’s my birthday.”
Noooo, it was more like this wild final frontier of freedom and possibility opened up, where I could just purely do what I was called to do without worrying about, well, anything. I could trust that everything is always working out, like I’ve been practicing for years, and I could settle into that knowing.
I remember thinking to myself in the very next moment after he uttered those words: “I don’t care if he is a total crackpot (which he is definitely not), I RECEIVE THIS AS TRUE with no conditions.”
Wheeeeeeeew.
That’s the benefit of a blessing. The benefit of someone you respect and trust speaking an anointing or a blessing over you. It shatters an inner glass ceiling, immediately. It invites you to a leap in your way of being: into a new paradigm beyond your old imprinting, your old conditioned and practiced beliefs.
See, paradigm shifting takes time, and it usually plays out in tiny, incremental shifts. That’s because all transformation takes place outside of your comfort zone, and your old identity and beliefs will fight to stay inside your comfort zone. So every time you seek to, argue with or silence your old beliefs, for example, they will find evidence from marketing messages or culture to argue for your own limitations.
But there are really two ways to get out of your current, limited paradigm of reality on any subject. You can gradually shift, and this is a good capacity to build and practice, because this is how 90% of deep, lasting change happens.
But on occasion, you can make a leap — you can actually JUMP into a new paradigm, usually when someone or something helps you see, in a moment, an opportunity or possibility that you just couldn’t see before now.
In honesty, paradigm jumps are really just moments of clarity that were actually in the making long before they happened. You laid the groundwork and planted the seeds of them in a million different ways, all along your journey. And the moment you get into alignment? A whole new world opens up.
Here’s a silly little example.
I invite you to jump with me into a new paradigm where:
You are absolutely beloved and worthy of all wonderful things.
And you never have to earn it: it’s just your inheritance by virtue of existing as a human being on this planet.
You have everything you need, exactly when you need it
You can not fail, because Divine Order is using every experience you ever have to line up the ingredients of your highest good
Every resource in this Universe is available to you, and you access it by consenting to access it (not hard work or perfect performance)
Can you suspend your disbelief? Can you just take my word for it, even for a moment? How does that moment feel?
If it feels good, or like space opening up in your chest, get curious about whether these things might actually be true, and your Inner Intelligence knows it?
But this lesson is called ‘Have you ever felt cursed?’. So let me get to that part.
The day after I talked with the real estate clairvoyant, I went to the apothecary shop in the tiny town near the farm. I spent a few minutes shopping for loose leaf teas and talking with the woman shopkeeper, who looked to be in her sixties. As we talked, for some reason I ended up sharing the story of my advisor telling me I’d never need to worry about money. Never in life.
Her eye’s opened wide, then her expression quickly changed to something like: crestfallen.
She said: “Someone said the exact opposite thing to me.”
I said: “Wait. What?”
She goes: “When I was in my twenties, there was an astrologer just up the street from here. She told me I would never have any money and I would always struggle financially. And that’s been true.”
Then the phone rang, and she answered it and started taking an order, while I sat with what she’d just shared.
A few minutes later, she hung up and rang up my purchase. I paid, then started to leave the store, but my Inner Guidance got the better of me.
I turned to her and said: “Sheila?”
She smiled and looked at me, expectantly.
I said, “You don’t know me, but I think I was led here to break that curse off of you today.”
“I know that woman told you you would never have anything.
But I’m here to tell you that that ends now.
Avalanches of abundance now begin to flow through you, over calm seas, under grace.
You now become a magnet for wonderful things and they will flow to you in wonderful ways.
And you won’t have to work hard for it.
You’ll be surprised and delighted at the perfect ways your needs will now be met.”
She stood there, so still. She exhaled.
Then she said: “Thank you so much for saying that to me. That just made my day. I feel so relieved for some reason. Who are you?”
I smiled and said: “I’m just doing my job.”
Her next question cracked me up. “WHAT IS YOUR JOB??!!”
I replied, “I come from a lineage of blessers. My grandmother taught me how to bless people just by laying my eyes on them. My job is to see the very highest and best possibilities for someone’s life and to call it forth,” I said, making the ‘come here’ movement with my index finger, indicating calling her blessings forth.
She said, “Wow.”
On my way out the door, I replied, “Yeah, it’s a pretty cool job. I hope to see you around!” and waved as I left the shop.
What do I want you to takeaway from this story?
That your words have power.
That you can be a blesser.
That you can shift paradigms. And you can jump them, too.
That you can break curses. You are that powerful.
But nobody outside of you can curse you, unless you believe they can.
You can activate life, wellbeing and prosperity in others. And in yourself.
You can unlock your own floodgates.
And that you can do it with the power of your belief.
Avalanches of wonderful things are now flowing to you, too, [First Name]. Over calm seas. Under grace. In surprising, delightful, wonderful ways.
So let it be.
Head up + heart out,
Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq. Founder + CEO of SoulTour
The other day, Londyn crinkled her forehead and squalled the squall of Righteous Toddler Indignation.
I turned around from doing the dishes and asked her what was wrong.
She replied: “I WANT MY GREY BLANKEEEEEET!!!!!!!” Volubly.
My eyes scanned the room and quickly lasered in on it, lying right under her bum.
I went over and drew her attention to it.
And I said: “Mi amor, you never have to cry for what you already have.”
When I said that, I made a note to circle back this Transformation Tuesday and tell you something: That you don’t have to cry for what you already have, either.
As quiet as it’s been kept, you already possess every ingredient you’ll ever need to fulfill your sacred callings, dreams and desires, small and large.
The success formula already flows through you.
You came here with the gifts, talents and unique spirit and personality to do what your heart is calling you to do.
But you can only see the opportunities and resources to actualize your True Self through the lens on life, on yourself and on the world that you’re wearing right now.
Most of us are wearing the lens of our Inner Critic:
the voice of fear, scarcity, self-doubt and unworthiness that runs on a loop in our minds
rooted in early childhood patterns and cultural programming
that has been solidified and internalized through no fault of your own, through nothing more than a lifetime of practice.
Your Inner Critic doesn’t want you to understand the true depths and contours of your own glory, your own magnificence. Because knowing that would free you from the seeming safety of shrinking yourself down, hiding and holding on to old, self-limiting ways.
But I promise you this: On the other end of the Inner Critic stick lies your own, sacred Inner Intelligence. And it’s trying to speak to you and through you all the time.
It’s getting louder all the time.
In fact, the louder your Inner Critic gets, the more likely it is simply trying to obscure the increasing volume of your Inner Intelligence, which speaks to you in Divine Downloads, inspired ideas, dreams, desires, callings, hunches, nudges, impulses, resonance, the feeling of shackles off and those perfect place/perfect time moments, the moments that feel like you’re psychic, and what my friend Artie calls golden threads of inspiration.
So. We are going to work together to transform your Inner Critic into the clear signal of Inner Intelligence over the coming months, years and maybe even decades, [First Name].
But today, I just want you to be still.
To stand down.
To stop searching for direction or stability or security OUT THERE.
To refuse to give into the Inner Critic lie that says you need more credentials, a better body or more money before you’ll be ready for your life to take off.
I’ll never forget what our Uncle Rumi said when he said: “You wander from room to room hunting for the diamond necklace that is already around your neck!”
Catch this principle today, [First Name]: The diamond necklace is already around your neck.
You’re not going to find it out there.
It’s already on you.
You already have what you need, including the radiance and magnetism to attract in the other components and collaborators of your dreams.
Our work together will be to stop dimming that radiance and magnetism. To stop blocking it.
You already have what you need, including the ingredients of your own coming clarity.
You already have the Inner Intelligence that will help you discern whether you desire to do a course of education for the enrichment of who you are and for the joy of your own learning, growth and development or to assuage the anxiety of putting yourself and your talents out in the world.
You already have the seeds of the desires that will call forth your own growth and greatness so that you might fully participate in your own destiny, even though your Inner Critic might be constantly in your ear asking you who you think you are to even want what you want, so you’re chronically shrinking your dreams down to make them more palatable.
You already have what you need.
But. And. You will have to get out of the way of the creative infinity — the infinite ocean of creative power that is within you. You will need to transform your Inner Critic, unless you want to white-knuckle the rest of your life and end up still living short of your true capacity for creation and for joy.
You will need to radically accept that all of this life is a process, and that there’s nothing wrong with you because your destiny is taking time to brew and ripen and gestate and bear fruit and take off.
I promise you that the day is coming when you’ll find yourself able to start doing what the author Tara Mohr calls “playing big”: investing more of your time and energy into your dreams than into your fears.
I promise.
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: I had a super strong reaction to the flurry of “oh shit nooooo” texts I got upon the announcement of the passing of RBG, may her memory be a blessing for generations.
I shared my reaction on the social thingies, occasional profanity and all. (Consider yourself warned.)
Since then, about 700 people have shared that it was just the perspective shift they needed at this time.
P.P.S.: I got a few dozen incredibly insightful replies to my question last week’s Transformation Tuesday newsletter: What does your Inner Critic say to you?
As I mentioned then, I’m working on a book all about the Inner Critic and how to transform it, and your input is taking this project to a whole new level, so thank you.
This week, feel free to hit reply and let me know this:
What has your Inner Critic stopped you from doing, in your life?
I’ll be teaching some free master classes on this body of work for Transformation Tuesday readers in a few weeks, and I’m putting the people who answer these questions on the priority invite list.
Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq. Founder + CEO of SoulTour
