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How I Learned to Act My Age [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 7]

I’ve been desperate to be 40 years old since I was 9. My parents co-owned a racquet club back then, and it gave me life to get to do step and dance aerobics with the 40-ish chicks at the club. This was the 80’s, Jane Fonda was in full effect, and so were leotards, white tights and even whiter high-top Reeboks.

I, of course, could only wistfully dream of being able to work out in such incredible gear on a daily basis. (And no, it does not escape me that this is still one of my favorite parts of what I do every day, if you swap out the tights for lululemon capris and swap out the step for a spin bike.)

Anyhow, I was always a precocious child. And always an entrepreneur. My Mom tells how I tried to sell my newborn brother in the grocery store. And how I charged my preschool teachers $1 to watch the other kids during naptime (because Lord knows I was not interested in naps or in other children) so they could run to the corner store next door.

I was actually named Valedictorian of my kindergarten, which is not even a thing that should exist. Of course, I didn’t perceive this as undue pressure at the time, even though I was five and shouldn’t have had a say in the matter. I actually saw my kindergarten teacher a few years back, while visiting family in my hometown. She walked right up to me and said, “TARA-NICHOLLE BEASLEY.  It’s me, Mrs. Sowers! I’ll never forget. You were 4 years old and you asked me how to spell the word s-o-p-h-i-s-t-i-c-a-t-e-d. You look exactly the same.”

I even remember actually praying for a life fast forward button, when I was little. In part, I was motivated to get out of some painfully repressive circumstances at home. And in part, I was motivated to learn how to do it right, to figure out how to do a family right, to create the warmth and acceptance and affection I didn’t feel at home. I wanted to figure out how to do that and have that, and I couldn’t wait any longer.

So, I basically made my own fast forward button. I got married when I was 16, to a man who came with an infant son already in tow, and had a son of my own when I was 17. When I said I wanted to fast forward, I wasn’t messing around. The thing is, you can’t heal emotional wounds and fix spiritual problems by bolting a bunch of new facts and people and conditions on top of the old wounds and hurts. Of course, you don’t know this when you’re 16 years old. (Of course, you don’t know much when you’re 16 years old.)

Anyhow, this craving for age didn’t end there. I married two men much older than me. I worked as a probation officer during grad school, and learned to dress like a much older woman to be taken seriously. Pantsuits all day, erryday. I did the same when I was a lawyer. I learned to like old lady-style things. I even painted my houses in the same two-toned color scheme, every time I moved: toasted almond (taupe) on the walls, Swiss coffee (white) on the ceilings and mouldings. Done and done.

I hung out with women who were a lot older than me, but were badasses and gorgeous and so vital, because I felt like they were teaching me how to outpace life. I developed a storyline about how I planned to live until I’m 250, and be cute and work out and eat kale and parent pugs until I was at least 249, after which time I would let it all hang out. And I looked forward to every birthday because it was getting me closer, somehow, to what I saw as a respectable age. In retrospect, maybe I thought that there was some magic age number at which you just figured things all out, and things weren’t so painful anymore.

But then one day, the shit hit the fan. The edifices I’d built in my life on top of a cracked foundation began to crumble. At one point, all that was left was me—that cracked foundation. Slowly, I started to excavate the foundation and rebuild it, fixing the cracks. I had to rehab the structure of my soul, then make some space available for an injection of spirit. I started rebuilding my life and my family with emotional integrity. And while I was working on all of this was when my therapist said to me: “You know, it’s never too late to have a great childhood.” And I took her up on that offer.

I started to dance. And play. And sing. And gravitated toward other, wounded, healing, beautiful souls who had also learned to cherish hard work and sacrifice and discipline and excellence and music and deep connection and friendship and travel and play and reading and art and such. I made some incredible friends in the unrepressed, well-parented, 4-year-old girl set. I especially liked the little girls who wore crazy things I’d never worn at that age, like rainboots with a lacy church dress and a unicorn hoodie.

Then one day, in therapy, I was on a little rampage and my therapist said, “wait, what did you just say?”  And I said, “Lookie here, world, I’m 40 years old and I just have this freedom to not have to do thus and so anymore.” And she said, “Tara, how old are you?” Me: “36.” Her: “I need you to do something for me.” Me: “Anything, of course.” And the she said, “I need you to be the age you actually are. No more fast forwards.”

As the kids would say, BAM.

Since that time, I’ve been trying out what it’s like to be the age I actually am. And it turns out to matter. It’s been part of my experience of learning to respect the seasons of life, the necessary beginnings and necessary endings, and learning to joy trip through the process of becoming versus holding my breath until I am a certain way or have a certain thing or have achieved a certain achievement or milestone.

I still hang out with a bunch of badasses, but they’re incredible people of all ages, from 6 to 60, and beyond. I still consume an extraordinary amount of kale, and I know that I’ll open a pug retirement home when I turn 80 and need a new project.

But I’m also delighted to have been 40 this past year, and to be turning 41 this weekend. It’s been quite lovely, really, this learning to act my age. It’s a beautiful gift to be able to look around my life everyday and realize, hey, I really like it here. And now.

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. But I wrote this post on Day 7 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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Spiritual Contrarianism: What happens when the rules don’t apply to you [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 6]

I recently spent a week in Brussels, Belgium. I spent the week in a three-story, 17th century home with a few folks, locals, all researchers and professors. One morning I woke up to a mini-hullaballo taking place because one woman had been awarded an academic prize, including a small stipend, for a paper she’d written.

Normally, this chick is the kind of person my friend Rebecca would describe as “salty”: generally predisposed to crank and irritation.

But this morning, she was literally flushed with excitement. With joy and victory. Her housemates seemed pretty meh about the whole thing. But I asked her to tell me about the prize, and by about 30 seconds in I’d caught her exhilaration like it was contagious.

Mind you, this mood, which was so out of character for her, is basically how I feel when I roll out of bed most mornings. If she wanted to be exuberant with company, she had definitely chosen well to do it on a day I was in the house.

My heart nearly melted when she re-read the award email, smiled as broadly as humanly possible, looked up and said to me, with her Slovenian accent: “I feel like EVERYTHING is possible.”

Me: “YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS, honey. Work.”

Her: Visibly deflating. Sigh. “But I know that’s a lie.”

Me: Screech, pump the brakes, sister. “Nope. Not it’s not. Everything IS possible. I know. I’ve experienced it.”

Her housemate: *pointing at me, eye roll at the ready: “Remember, she’s American.”

Me: “Hey, guys? My great-great grandparents were slaves. I am a Black girl with braids in my hair, I had a kid when I was 17 years old. And here I am, fresh from island-hopping through Croatia, hanging out in Belgium, heading to Amsterdam. I travel the world when I want to. I do unreasonably fun work and make a ton of money. I eat beautiful things everyday, and every cell of my body cooperates with me – I’m in better health at 40 than most 20 year olds I meet. I have a gorgeous home, and am generally protected and provided for by the God who created the Universe. EVERYTHING, about my life is a miracle. Every single moment is the dream of my ancestors. So, yes. I’m American, and you know what? Even that is a wild blessing, come to think of it. But also everything actually is possible. You can’t tell me it’s not. Get it.”

Now, even in that moment, it did strike me that this was possibly a little intense for the breakfast table. But my experience has been that statistics and culture and what’s normal for your family and your friends will tell you to manage your expectations, and create a limited understanding of what’s possible for you. And that is one way to look at it. But it’s only one way.

It would be unconscionable for me to live the life I live every day and also believe that the limited-possibilty way is the only way. Because almost every single area of my life defies statistics and defies culture and defies what’s “normal” and defies “reasonable” expectations. And I am intensely aware of it and humbled and grateful for it. Deeply, deeply grateful.  

So, humor me. What if I’m right?  What if you’re a miracle? And what if the statistics about what’s possible don’t apply to you. What if the rules don’t apply?

I don’t believe they apply to me. And I don’t believe they don’t apply on grounds that I somehow deserve amazing things that others don’t. Nor do I believe this on grounds that I am just great, excellent, disciplined and brilliant (and cute), although I am all of those things.

But you can be all of those things and not experience supernatural health, prosperity and restoration. I was all of those things and had my entire ass handed to me in life. For real.

What I know beyond doubt is that the grace of God has shown up over and over and over again in my life. It’s what we call undeserved favor at church. I’ve experienced dozens, hundreds, probably thousands of circumstances, “coincidences”, synchronicities, opportunities, relationships and alignments sliding together over the years, all lining up in a way that all have worked together for my good.

And sure, I showed up. I show up, present tense, on the regular. I do the work. I go hard in the paint, as my ball-playing nieces say. I have a spirit of excellence. I am disciplined. I take risks. I work on myself. A lot. 

But it’s not all me. And thank God for that. 

God’s grace was when 16-year-old me went to see my high school principal in the Spring of my junior year. I went in to tell her I was pregnant and to ask for her advice. God’s grace was when she said: “I wasn’t planning to tell you this, but you’ve actually had enough credits to graduate for awhile now. You’ve been getting extra credits for all your AP Classes and those night classes you’ve been taking at the college.”

God’s grace abounded when she made a call to the local University and they immediately admitted me, on a full scholarship, on grounds of my GPA and her advocacy, no SAT necessary. It was definitely God’s grace when the University assigned me a Professor/Mentor who’d also been a teenage Mom. At our first meeting, this Mentor of mine told me she knew my 16-year-old, 6-month pregnant self would be going to graduate school, so she would be preparing me for that from day 1. And it was God’s grace every single day for years, when she did in fact prepare me and I did in fact get a Master’s degree, at 22 years old with a 6 year old son.

God’s grace was that time the registrar at the now-long-defunct Bakersfield School of Law receiving my Law School Admissions Test results, ringing me on the phone and breaking it down for me, saying “Honey, you scored at the 98%th percentile. Listen to me. YOU CAN’T GO TO SCHOOL HERE. You can go to school anywhere. Every school will let you in. Half of them will pay you to go. Pick where you want to be.” God’s grace fast-forwarded me, in that moment, from the likely Valedictorian of the Bakersfield School of Law to a full scholarship to UC Berkeley School of Law.

God’s grace was when I thought I was wrapping up a 3-month consulting gig at MyFitnessPal, presented the CEO with a proposed org chart and he said “you can hire anyone on this chart you want except the VP of Marketing, because that’s your job.” And when, after offering me that job six more times over the next six months, he said “Take this job. I’ll make it the best job you’ve ever had.” It was God’s grace when I believed him. And when we were acquired 2 years later, catching me up financially from being an effective-single Mom for years, from having been in the real estate business during the real estate recession, and much more.

This is just a few examples. I could literally do this all day.

Some people say they wish this whole grace thing was true, but struggle to wrap their heads around it. I encourage them not to bother, and to try wrapping their hearts around it instead. I know folks that struggle with the use of a word as simple as “grace” to indicate a phenomenon so out-of-our hands, so beyond the natural laws we all agree exist and so life-changing.

So let’s call it something fancy. I’m a marketer, after all; let’s “brand” it. I like to think of it as spiritual contrarianism.

What would happen if we experimented with this spiritual contrarianism for awhile? But like, only when it really, really serves us.

What if we decided to just flat-out disagree and stopped playing along every time culture says we shouldn’t be able to do something? Or that something isn’t really possible for you because you’re Black/white/male/female/too young/too fat/too aggressive or just too TOO much for people?

Or that we should fixate and ruminate and constantly complain about what’s wrong with people and the things that pain us? Or that we should outsource our peace and serenity and ability to fully be who we are to, say, ISIS or Donald Trump or the Drama of the Day, versus showing up, doing the responsible adult thing (e.g., helping refugees, voting, etc.) and then doing the work of living our lives to the best of our ability?

What if we turned this whole storyline around? What if we decided that we can actually experience some ease and joy regardless of our current circumstances and conditions? Actually, what if we decided that basically any circumstance we’re experiencing now could and even would turn around to our advantage?

What would it look like if we were able to feel that rush of All Things are Possible and Everything is Working out for Me all the time? Not based on the present conditions of our world. What if we decided, like we say at church, that praise precedes the victory, meaning you have to sit in a place of faith and belief that you will win in life before you actually can?

There are non-religious versions of this principle, too, if that’s your jam. Vibration precedes manifestation, for the woo woo. You must believe it before you can achieve it, for the more pragmatic.

Here’s what would happen. First off, we would just feel better a lot of the time than we do in our normal tendency to fixate and ruminate on what is, versus what is possible. And we wouldn’t lose anything by virtue of no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop or worrying about what bad could happen. The Bible poses a question we can all grasp the meaning of, regardless of faith: “ Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his lifespan?”

I’ll wait. . . . . mmmhmm. That’s what I thought. Me, either.

Real talk: what would happen if we practiced this spiritual contrarianism is something called transcendence. I like to think of this as opting out of unnecessary drama and beliefs that pain or limit us, just because we want to. I also like to think of it as opting into freedom, dwelling in possibility and allowing grace to track us down and do what it does.

We can do this, and have this. But we must be intentional about opting into possibility. We must be conscious about the words we use, especially the way we talk to and about ourselves. We must be intentional about the people we surround ourselves with, the content we take in. We must be disciplined about what we allow to take root in our spirit and fester, and about what hurts and experiences we excavate and release.

When I look in the mirror most mornings, after I admire my eyebrows and whisper sweet somethings in my own ear, something occurs to me. It occurs to me that most girls who look like me around the world could never dream of living the daily life I live. And I inwardly vow to make the most of it for myself and for all of them. And very, very often, I sing to myself this particular lyric of one of my favorite modern hymns, a song called Lord, Your Grace:

Lord Your grace

Covering me like a soft summer shower

Raining down on me

Goodness and mercy

Loving me daily

Forgiving me freely

 

As I look back over all the years that I made it through

I can’t imagine where I’d be now if it wasn’t for You

Why Your favor rests upon me I can never explain

But I’m so glad that I can say

Your grace in my life lasts forever

Your goodness and mercy and grace lasts forever

Your grace in my life lasts forever

 

Thanks, God. ~T

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. But I wrote this post on Day 6 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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Adulting: Choosing What Defines Us [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 5]

I have this weird thing about eating at certain buffets, where just looking at them makes me never want to eat again. Something about big piles of food seems like a trough to me. And it triggers the reverse effect on my hunger. My strategy in these situations generally is to locate a piece of fish and make a pile of dark greens on my plate then quickly remove myself from the vicinity of All That Food. Blargh.

As I think of it, it might be an aversion I worked up during my first official job ever, as a hostess at the Sizzler: Buffet Court PTSD.

This is absurd, as I hope is obvious. But it’s a microcosm of something we do all the time, allowing a life event or experience to plant triggers in our operating systems, so that we always cringe when we see that kind of car or shut entirely down when we meet a certain kind of person.

This is very normal. It’s the extreme version of learning, but it’s a deeper sort of learning, it’s almost like a spiritual encoding that happens. And taken to great extremes, we can find ourselves defined by a single life event or something someone said to us 40 years ago. This is natural, and maybe even normal, but it can also be very painful, dysfunctional and limiting.

I know it’s normal, because when I meet new people (which I do nearly every day at work), I generally share my own story, then I ask them flat out to tell me their life story. It’s really a Rorschach of sorts, to see how people interpret that question, and where they take it, whether they go general or specific, the overall tone and whether they take a career story or personal story or combined approach. The way we tell our general story drops clues to how we define ourselves, I think. Another set of clues is in the stories we tell about our histories and our lives, over and over again.

I tell the story of my family migrating to California around 50 years ago, with some regularity. I tell it to explain why I am uninterested and uninitiated in the ways of the South and, to a lesser extent, the East Coast.

I tell the story of going from Honors Student to teen Mom and then, to college/grad school/law school, all the time. I tell it to express my gratitude for a life of miracles, and to share how I know God is real.

On the personal side, I tell the story of how I heard a Tony Robbins CD about the Power of Identity and then lost 60 pounds, twenty years ago, at least a few times a year. I share it to help people know that I’m a contrarian. That I don’t always do things the way others do. That my health has played a central role in my life for a long time. And that I am a woman of change, action, power and growth.

I tell the story of my 86-year-old grandmother and her three sisters, all Black women from Texarkana, Texas, all of whom have college or nursing school degrees, as often as I can. I tell this so they know that #blackgirlmagic is real. But I also tell this so people understand that I come from a matriarchal lineage, and to explain why I was damn near 40-years-old before I realized that other people saw being Black and a woman as a disadvantage, while I grew up with the explicit and implicit understanding that being a Black girl meant you could do anything. Literally, anything. Circumstances are irrelevant.

These things, I tell, because they define or, at the very least, depict major components of who I am.

But there are other stories I’ve allowed to define me, too, at various times in my life. Stories of repression. Stories of emotional chaos, allowed to spiral and embed for years and years. Even stories of multi-generational beliefs that were both blessing and curse. And it’s been interesting to see how, as I develop and heal out of some of these patterns, I find myself telling those stories much less frequently. But I do want to share one with you, now.

My grandmother is a force of nature and supernatural spirit. Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother was a saint. After her mother died very young, my grandmother helped her three sisters get educated, then got her own degree, while raising her own four children alone. Her own alcoholic husband had long since left her for the West Coast, and my grandmother gradually migrated from the South (Texarkana), to the Midwest (Omaha), to the Southwest (Clovis, New Mexico) and finally landed in Bakersfield, California, right around fifty years ago. She and my Dad still live there, to this day.

My grandfather and grandmother had not, until that time, been officially divorced, but he had moved on to a series of other women, somehow also winding up in Bakersfield. Because their lives were so separate, my grandmother was shocked and dismayed when she went to buy a house and was advised that California was something new to her, something called a Community Property state. That meant that all the debts my grandfather had run up and reneged on actually belonged to her, too. Which meant that for her to buy the home for her children she’d worked and saved for, she’d first have to pay or make arrangements to pay all of his bad debt. She was able to figure it out, but it was heartbreaking. And she did eventually divorce him.

But the scar of that heartbreak long remained. My whole childhood, my sweet, piano-playing, hymn-singing grandmother dove joyfully into her duties to teach me How to Live a Good Life. She taught me how to love God, how to clean house, how to prioritize school above all, how to balance a checkbook, and how to churn butter (I’m not joking). She also taught me never to rely on a man to support myself or my children. Never to have children unless I was 100% certain I could support them on my own. She was remarkably free of bitterness about it, but she was exceedingly clear and insistent on this point.

And I took the message. In fact, I took it and ran with it. Somehow, her message mixed in with my perfectionism, my own ambition and my own Daddy issues, and showed up in my spirit as an extreme, dysfunctional over-self-reliance. So I attracted in people at the level of my own bullshit, as one does. I married men who had no capacity to be full partners in my life. And I created a life in which there wasn’t much room for deep partnership and interdependence, because I didn’t believe, deep in my spirit, that I could really have those things.

And at some point, after my spiritual teachers and coaches and therapists helped me see that I’d allowed this childhood message to define a whole area of my life, I couldn’t un-see it. I thanked my family for cultivating my independence and raising me to be an unlimited being, because I am that. I honor and will always be independent and impactful. But I also had to release the isolating extremes I’d taken on.

I put an end to the patterns that kept me isolated and unsupported by being extreme and dysfunctional in my over-self-reliance, slowly, slowly, slowly. I started to spend a lot of time with my friends who were in beautiful partnerships, who’d built healthy families and who had created long, loving, two-way relationships. I wanted to experience that model and what it looks like everyday, up close.  

I’ve talked with lots of people who define themselves by a thing that happened to them 30 years ago, or something their Mom used to always tell them—even a thing their Mom used to say about herself or, especially, her body. I know people who define themselves by a past failure, a family death, or a victory. I know people whose self-definition is heavily painted by their geography or profession, or the fact that no one in their family has ever been educated/happy/healthy/sober.

Often, we take on an extreme commitment to our defining family or personal history dysfunction. But it can be just as unwise to define ourselves in aversion or opposition to our long-gone experiences, like I do with the Buffet Court. Exhibit B: I wear some version of the same outfit every single day. I do it because it’s comfortable and beautiful and removes so much decision-making from my day. But it also helps that my “uniform” strategy makes my Mom a little crazy. 😀

We’re all in the process of working this stuff out, some more intentionally and effortfully than others.I’ve learned that we have a lot more choice about how we define ourselves than we think. We truly do have the power to decide and shape and rewire who we are, even though our past programming might be encoded at a level of depth that seems permanent and inescapable. It can seem like as much a part of us as the shape of our eyes or the size of our feet.

We get to pick the elements of our past that are expansive or contract us, that spark joy and pride and possibility, or that revert to the sometimes comfortable, limiting storylines we’ve always heard and by now, have started to tell ourselves.

And we also get to pick our todays and tomorrows, and we get to exercise intention about how we define ourselves every single day. “That was then, this is now” means something. And it doesn’t mean you disrespect your family’s trials and tribulations or the people who raised you, to keep what serves you and release or discard what no longer does. That’s what I call wisdom, and what the Interwebs call “adulting”.

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. But I wrote this post on Day 5 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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Demolition Woman [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 4]

My therapist once told me that it’s never too late to have a great childhood. I took her up on this, and promptly set about releasing the old traumas and outdated life operating systems I’d acquired over the course of my literal, chronological childhood. And I made it the sport of the day to dive into my not-too-late new childhood, rewiring my emotional habits and my life with a new sense of joy, play and lightness.

I redecorated my house to suit my 9-year-old self (see photo), started having a bunch of adventures around the world, and re-taught myself the curiosity, enthusiasm, wonder and trust of a well-parented kidlet.

Recently, my cousin posted a photo on Facebook that brought my not-so-great chronological childhood to mind. She currently lives on the same street I grew up on, maybe 15 houses down from my childhood home. That home was the site of great, great pain and devastating emotional wounding to me, as a young girl. It was the place where I experienced the most traumatic events of my life, the ones I had only really been able to acknowledge, integrate and release twenty years later, after years of therapy and a general commitment to healing every area of my life. 

The photo my cousin posted was a stark one. It was a photo of her current home which, until recently, stood in the midst of an upper-middle-class subdivision of similar two-story, 80’s construction homes. My childhood home was one of them. But in this photo, her home stood alone, amidst a vast expanse of well-manicured dirt. After decades of threatening to do so, the State of California had surprised nearly everyone in town, and moved forward with plans to raze the neighborhood and run a freeway through it. My cousin was one of the last people in the area to move, and so ended up living in a home that remained standing while those around it were completely erased off the face of the earth, one-by-one.

On a whim, I shot her a message on Facebook. After asking her whether my old house was still standing, and hearing that it was indeed, I asked her to go take a quick photo of it and send it to me, which she did, a couple of hours later.

I sat and considered the little square on my screen for a moment. It took me a moment to recognize it as my house. The paint job was different, the lawn was brown, the roofline was saggy in the middle. It was clearly suffering from the absence of constant grooming by my meticulous, Marine father. To be fair, I’m certain its owners had permanently deferred maintaining the place once they realized it had a date with the wrecking ball.

Maybe it was this shabbiness, or maybe just my adulthood and tons of trauma release therapy, but the place also just didn’t seem scary to me anymore. It didn’t seem loaded, at all. It seemed a little sad, actually. Like, I was sad for the house, for all that it had witness over the years, versus being sad for myself. Of course, I knew what the house, as a non-sentient ‘being’, could never know, which is that it had no more than a few weeks to exist. Demolition was unavoidable, and imminent.

The few moments after my cousin zapped the photo of my old house to me across the Webs were each coded with an emotion. Moment 1: wow, the house looks bad. Moment 2: hm, I don’t feel as bad as I thought I would. Moment 3: poor, sad house. It has no idea what’s about to happen. It’s dying and doesn’t know it.

Then in that fourth moment, it really dawned on me: the house was being demolished. The site of my deepest trauma, of the worst moments of my life, was about to be completely obliterated off the face of the planet. Gone. Fini.

Except, actually, not fini. Instead of fini, my beloved State of California was actually going to run a freeway through it. As a lifelong Californian, I have always had a strange love of freeways, those strangely gorgeous wonders of geography and engineering that allow us to traverse vast expanses of our obscenely un-walkable state in unnatural ways and at unnatural speeds. My personal Ground Zero was going to be erased, then replaced with the ultimate symbol of forward motion, freedom and activity.

YES.

So, I went on about my morning, saying a little prayer of gratitude for the lessons I’d learned from my pain, and for the person it helped create me to be. I affirmed that there was nothing more for me to glean from that stuff, and bid the pain of that part of my life, the pain that had been symbolized by that house, a final farewell. I went on about my day, getting a cup of tea and getting dressed to walk the mongrels.

As I got ready, I noticed some construction noise in front of my house. It was like heavy, heavy drilling, odd for so early in the morning. I walked out onto the front porch, and saw that the entire freeway frontage road near my house had been blocked and studded with cones overnight. A massive sign messaged that the freeway entrance was closed temporarily to repave the road and install a protected bike lane, and that traffic was being redirected to another entrance.

But that’s not where the noise was coming from. Immediately in front of my house, some guys were drilling into the sidewalk, installing a bright orange ‘Detour’ sign. They saw me and waved hello. I smiled, waved back and walked back inside, shaking my head and laughing to myself as I went.

detour

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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. But I wrote this post on Day 4 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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Simple food—and people—rules [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 3]

I love simple food rules. One of my favorites comes from culinary anthropologist and author, Michael Pollan: “Eat real food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” But I have my own, too. A number of them, which now that I think of it, might actually defeat the purpose of simplicity. Anyhow, here’s one decision rule I have about food. I require the food items I eat to fit one of the following items:

  1. It must be filling
  2. It must be nutritious, or
  3. It must be truly, intensely delectable.


But no one food item needs to be all of these things. This is how I come to have a daily diet that consists 90% of hemp protein powder, avocado, eggs, kale smoothies, french fries and a collagen drink my friend Alice tasted, then immediately deemed “wet dog soup.”

My food rules work for me.

And they came to mind this morning when I met with an old friend I’ll keep nameless unless and until he tells me it’s okay to do otherwise. He and I worked together at the best company ever. He’s a super smart dude and one of those generally wonderful human beings you’re glad to know type folks.

My food rules came to mind when my friend told me how he thinks about companies. He said, when we worked together we had the complete trifecta: a product we loved, a mission we were on fire about, and a CEO and team we were devoted to. But after looking at and talking to literally dozens of companies, I’ve realized what my Most Important Criterion is: for me, if the CEO and team are smart and coachable and engaged, that’s good enough for me. I can help with or be okay with the rest.

This, I found fascinating. It was like simple food rules, but for work and leadership and, really, for people. Part of the reason I found it fascinating was that I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with my coach to rehabilitate some of my dysfunctional and, frankly, inaccurate, long-held beliefs about men and relationships. After spotting and calling me out on some of these deep-down, beliefs, we actually put together an affirmation: that there are abundant caring, capable, dependable men who are attracted to and available to me.

Three simple rules.

Sounds great, right? The problem is that I quickly corrupted this affirmation, tacking on a bunch of other criteria. I thought, hmmm, I have met and know a bunch of guys who are caring, capable and dependable, who are attracted to and available to me, but I’m not really into them. So I need to narrow this down a bit more. Be more specific. So I bolted a bunch of criteria onto this affirmation, and it became:

There are abundant sexy (to me), caring, capable, dependable, trustworthy, active men who are attracted to and available to me.

It has come to my attention that this is just too many things. It’s a little like in leadership, when you see companies try to focus on six things a year, and they end up focusing on nothing. A couple of my friends even mentioned it: hey, that’s too many things to be looking for. You’ve gotta decide which 3 things are really critical to you. That’s all you can really ask someone to be.

This required some emotional and intellectual rigor. And in the process of meeting people, trying relationships on and feeling into what I’m really attracted to, in both friends and romantic partners, I realized something: that I had been creating this laundry list of things by thinking about what I didn’t have or what didn’t work in previous relationships, then listing the opposite of those traits as what I really wanted.

Once I had that insight, it hit me like a bolt of lightning that I was doing it all wrong. not the way to create what you want, to get clear on what you don’t want and move to the opposite of that. Sometime the contrast between what you don’t want clarifies what you want, but more often, it keeps you stuck in the energy of struggle and scarcity. It keeps you stuck in a focus on what doesn’t work.

After years of practice, I’ve now (mostly) released the stressful approach of focusing on what I don’t want. I was only really able to do this after I cultivated the skills of setting good boundaries, speaking my own truth in every situation and identifying red flags that signal a person or relationship is not right for me.

But it still took some emotional discipline to listen to that still, small voice in my spirit closely enough to identify just three characteristics I consistently find attractive. These are the three things I feel so strongly about that I am willing to put a stake in the ground around them, when it comes to deciding who to partner up with, date, hang out with and share a life with. Here are the three I selected.

I want to be in relationship with people who are intentional.

I want to be in relationships with people who are caring.

And I want to be in relationships with people who are resilient.

Intentional carries a connotation of integrity to me. Intentional people are principled and purpose-driven. They are thoughtful and deep. They are active, and take actions with deliberation. They don’t let life happen to them. They move through the world with clarity, wisdom and consciousness, even if they shift the direction of that motion in different seasons of their lives.

Caring people just give a shit. They are engaged and listen, but also are willing to pour themselves into the specific people and causes and projects and work and play that trigger their personal or spiritual mental frames for “Things I care about.” They don’t act bored or like they’re too cool for school about everything. When something is important to them, they act or feel or engage with bold enthusiasm, love and even joy. With care. They think about how their actions or inactions impact others, and they factor that into their calculus of how to act and be in the world.

Resilient people carry a testimony about how they got from the deep, dark nights of the soul to the beautiful vibrance of today. Part of that testimony is the faith that they can handle what may come. I love resilient people because of the triumph of spirit they represent, and because things happen in life, so it’s really game-changing to know that the people in your life have your back and won’t flip out when shit gets real, because they’ve already been there and lived to tell the tale. Resilient people also have a glow of brilliant perspective about them. They don’t major in the minors, because ain’t nobody got time for that when you’ve been on death’s door or lived in misery and came back or got out. And they do major in the majors, like loving the people in their lives and having adventures, and making bold life decisions in the direction of their highest purpose and joy, because they count every day as the precious blessing it is.

Maybe one day I’ll get it down to one. One simple people rule I send out into the vortex and connect with people around. For now, I’ll stick with these three. And I’ll work on developing tolerance and communications skills and appreciation for the varying ways humanity shows up in the form of individual people.

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. But I wrote this post on Day 3 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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The Tao of Pugs: Life Lessons from Canine Royalty [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 2]

Psychologists say that neurons that fire together wire together. They call this neuroplasticity, a recent scientific observation that we create new neural connections based on learning and behavior and habit throughout our whole lives.

The positive psychologists have built something on top of this finding they call self-directed neuroplasticity. This means that not only do neurons that fire together wire together, but that we can actually choose which new neural circuits we create by mindfully selecting what we focus on, what behaviors we engage in and what habits we form.

There is a lot of wisdom out there in the world about how to do this. But sometimes, when your wiring is really off, or when most people around you have the same faulty or outdated wiring as you do, the most helpful thing in the world is to actually see someone in your real, everyday life model a new (to you), graceful, powerful circuit.

And sometimes, like, let’s say, if you’re me, one inspirational model of setting the bar high for life and the people you let in your life, is the model presented by your dogs.

I mean, listen. I have a high bar for myself. Always have. I’ve had an inborn spirit of excellence, which was reinforced and encoded into permanence by my dear old Dad.

In fact, my standards for myself have sometimes been too high. But I haven’t always had super high standards for the people I let into my life. And I haven’t always been good at setting boundaries for my loved ones. This took a lot of rewiring, and my dogs were my model.

“The girls,” as they’re known all over Oakland and the blogosphere, refers collectively to my dogs Aiko and Sumiko. They are ½ Pug and ½ Japanese Chin, and were intentionally bred as a so-called “designer dog” mix by a Bay Area breeder. The breeder sold all the other pups in their litter, but because Aiko and Miko each had an umbilical hernia, the breeder surrendered them at 6 weeks old to the San Francisco SPCA. Which is where I found them, and immediately changed their pound puppy names (Mugsy and Bugsy, Lord have mercy SMH so hard) to something more fitting of their station.

The rest is history.

Speaking of history, for you to understand how my dogs because my gurus, you must first understand the history of their breed. Pugs were specifically bred to be the lapdogs of the Chinese Imperial family. Tragically, they were bred not to be able to walk too far from the laps they were supposed to warm, as the palaces in which they lived were vast and easy to get lost in. So Pugs were bred to have short legs and to resemble the Lion Dogs, aka Fu Dogs, of ancient Chinese myth, which is how they come to have such very short nasal passages. (Side note: This is why most Pugs can barely breathe. Fortunately, the girls have longer legs and are leaner than the average pug, given their mixed-breeding. Side note 2: This is why mutts are great.)

Because Pugs couldn’t go far, each Pug in the palace was historically assigned their own, dedicated eunuch. When the dog wanted something, their wishes quickly became the eunuch’s command.

So, in just the same way as shepherd-breed dogs still need something to herd even if they live in Manhattan, Aiko and Miko still require an extraordinarily high level of customer service, just like their Pug ancestors would have had in the Imperial Palace. Even though Aiko and Miko live in Oakland.

And for the most part, they get it. They get it at home, where I’m trained to feed them at precisely 6 am and 6 pm. Even my son knows what to do. When he walks in for a visit, they run up, he kisses them each on both cheeks, then they walk off. When I get out of the shower, they show up, lick my knees and peace out. On College Avenue, where we walk every morning, they know which people have treats waiting for them. I’ve decided the human brain has a neuron triggered by pugs, because so many people flat-out love them, for no reason at all.

But also, these two get extraordinary customer service because they require it. When Miko wants to be picked up, she walks up to you and lies down. You know what to do. Even people who’ve never met her, somehow know exactly what she wants them to do. And when Miko gets too much attention, Aiko walks up and just nudges her out of the way, somehow ensuring that the hand you were just using to pet Miko lands neatly on her little head.

When they hear a treat bag-sounding noise, they sit on their little butts, as taught, with the expectation that you see them seated and will deliver. As you’ve been trained to do.

They are clear on what they want, in their own minds. And they clearly communicate what they want and need. But here’s the thing: they don’t freak out when they don’t get it. Nor do they get existential or destructive or irate when they don’t get it.

They will let you know. They will speak up themselves and ask for what they want and need. They will howl a little bit or paw at you if they want to be picked up. They will howl a lot if it’s time to eat. But if they don’t get what they want, and it’s not a dire need, they will either walk away and either get over it, fast, or walk away and find it elsewhere. They will find someone else willing to perform to the customer service standards to which they are accustomed.

It’s in their royal lineage. They were bred for this, to know what they deserve and are entitled to, purely by virtue of being who they are. Not because they deserve more than anyone else or are better than anyone else. Just because they are.

So, this is one of the lessons I’ve learned from these precious little mongrels of mine, one of the things they’ve modeled for me. The truth is that we all have a royal lineage. We are all children of God, the Creator of the Universe. That means everything is our inheritance: peace, joy, health, love, prosperity, enthusiasm. Everything. Not because we’re better than anyone else, and not because we deserve it more than anyone else. Because it’s our inheritance. All of ours.

But we forget this sometimes. And we take so much less from the world, from the people around us. And we think this is normal, for a few reasons.

Some of us think it’s normal, because we grew up with very human, mostly good enough parents. And they model for us that we shouldn’t make so much noise or ask for so much, or we should learn to put up with things that really, we shouldn’t. You get what you get and you don’t get upset, they tell us, sometimes about things that actually warrant upset. Our loving parents do this because they, too, were taught this. They, too, believed the lie that there’s only so much to go around, and that something bad will happen if you make too much noise.

Or our well-intentioned, perfectly flawed parents themselves modeled dysfunctional relationships. Dysfunctional relating. They didn’t show us how to set boundaries, so we didn’t see it and we didn’t learn it. This, too, they do because they had their own emotional wounds, or never saw healthy relationships modeled themselves.

But you know, they really were good enough as parents. Good enough that we now can take the opportunity to heal, to be more deliberate, and to rewire these circuits intentionally.

Or sometimes, we think it’s normal to require less of the world, and the people around us, because our culture has normalized the broken and dysfunctional. Have you ever tried to find a love song to listen to that’s not about heartbreak and betrayal or addiction and codependency? Nope. Because healthy interdependence, true partnership, mutual love and respect, careful stewardship of another’s precious soul, the hard work of building a life together? These things are boring, compared with the fireworks of lyrics like “I hate you so much right now.”

A friend once brought her little dog-traumatized boy, about 4 years old, to my house to meet the girls. She hoped the exposure to my very mellow mongrels would help him get comfortable around dogs again. It worked. Thirty minutes into the visit, he was sitting in their bed with them, hugging and squeezing them, and trying to sit on them. He crossed boundaries, for real.

And their response was brilliant and instructive. They didn’t snap at him, bite or even bark. They didn’t go through all kinds of gyrations and dramatics to try to get him to change or act right. But they didn’t take it either. They both just got up and walked away. And they kept walking away every time he tried it. He had to learn that they would only tolerate certain behavior if he wanted to hang out with them. And he did.

There’s one more big life lesson I’ve learned from these precious sugar plums of mine, and it isn’t about the standards to which they hold people, or the standard for behavior they tolerate. It’s about the standards, the conditions if you will, they put on their own happiness.

Exhibit A: The girls in their happy place

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Exhibit B: The girls when they’re calm and just got treats

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Exhibit C: The girls when they want something

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Do you notice anything? These dogs have achieved pro-level equanamity. They feel emotion. They respond to situations, as needed. But they don’t allow the situation to determine their overall state. And they don’t allow situations to cause them to act outside of their normal, regal selves. They are nonplussed, in virtually every situation. Exceptions being squirrels and peanut butter.

They trust and know they will be provided for, and they are. They expect great things, and they get them. They require high thread-count linens and grain-free, Omega-3 fatty acid balanced dog food with raw freeze dried bits, and that’s exactly what comes to them. And if by chance circumstances aren’t precisely to their liking, they stay steady and know that things are always working out for them. And that’s exactly what happens.

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. But I wrote this post on Day 2 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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Beautiful, Living Ruins [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 1]

I spend a lot of time in gyms and fitness studios: dance, yoga and especially spin. Some of my best friends are people I met spinning and burpee-ing. It’s not at all uncommon for me to walk into a studio and run into 7 people I know and love coming out of a class.

As we go to kiss and hug each other in greeting, unspoken protocol is for the sweaty person to issue a disclaimer: “Ugh. I smell bad!” or “I’m so sweaty!”

This is so common that I’ve practiced something like a standup comedy bit, which I say in reply. “I like my people sweaty,” I always say.

It always gets a chuckle. But real talk is: I actually do like my people sweaty. I respect the sweat. I respect the people who wear the sweat. I love them for being the type of person who come in, day and and day out, after a long day at work, and doing what it takes to make the sweat happen. So when I say, “I like my people sweaty,” what I mean is “Hey, girl. I see how hard you’re working every day. I love and respect you for it. You are my kind of person. Don’t let my diva tendencies fool you. Kissing you is more important to me than not getting sweaty.”

I’ve noticed recently that there’s another kind of person I tend to like: people who are vital and alive and happy, and who have also been through traumas and nightmares that would make your blood curdle. People who are, the psychologists would say, seriously resilient.

This is a pattern in my relationships that I’ve noticed very recently. I had met a few people over the past year with whom I really connected. And they all shared a theme. I’d sit down and talk with them on first meeting, and just get a hit that said: “Hmm. I really like this chick. She is cool. We are vibing. She’s got an energy that feels great to me.”

Then, an hour into the meeting, each of these people entrusted me with a story of something they’d gone through. Two of them had been on their deathbeds, recently. Like, the kale that is currently in my vegetable beds was in already in those vegetable beds while these people across the table from me were fighting for their lives. And as I harvest the leaves today, they sit on the spin bike, or take meetings with me, or travel the world with me.

Two more had been through intense betrayals in their marriages, followed by rejection and just plain meanness and mayhem.

Another shared with me the day-in and day-out horrors of caring for an aging husband as he leaves us, slipping into incoherence and incontinence, all while she also raises their children and working a full time job. Still another shared a mental health diagnosis from decades ago, notwithstanding which he’s built an incredibly rich, healthy, love-filled, fulfilled life.

And these people are out here, in the world, after the event they thought would do them entirely in. They are living and thriving. Loving people and loving life.

I used to think it was coincidence that I met so many people like this. Now I know the truth, which is that there are medical miracles and spiritual triumphs happening all around us all the time. Miracles that we have no idea are taking place unless and until we take a moment to connect with people, deeply.

I also know the truth that like attracts like. And that one of my special talents is helping people feel safe and uplifted as they share kind of scary stuff they’ve been through. As a result, in the same way that a biased researcher will make sure they find what they’re looking for, I tend to find these dark nights of the soul the people I meet have been through. And survived. And thrived in spite of. And been developed by.

Calling this a talent is not the right word, though. It’s more like what it says in the Bible, that deep calls unto deep.

Because I’ve been through some stuff, too. It may be all cashmere cardis, pugs, metallic sandals and acquired startups at my house now. But the foundation of that life is my soul. And this soul, my soul, was honed in the fire of my brother’s 25-year prison sentence, a gut-wrenching custody drama, two divorces, near-bankruptcy, teenaged motherhood and a series of childhood traumas and abuses.

Marianne Williamson, writing of romantic relationships, once said something that stuck with me ever since. She said that we attract people in at the level of our own bullshit. This is the truest story ever told.

So it’s been fascinating and frankly, delightful, to observe the leveling up of the people I attract into my life, over time. I see it as evidence of my own growth. It’s not that the people I used to attract in were terrible and the people in my life now are perfect. It’s more that the people I used to attract in and get and stay in very close relationship with were married to and desperately holding onto their wounds, their dysfunctions and their struggles.

My second husband flat-out broke it down for me once. He said, “Tara, the thing about you is that you’re a fixer. The problem is, that quality about you attracts people who need fixing. Including me. You have to watch out for that.”

Listen, all of God’s children have issues. And, to give myself a little credit where it’s due, I definitely meet my old type of person still, on occasion. But Wise Adult Tara makes Wise Adult Decisions about not getting involved with them. And she certainly watches for red flags that her fixing tendencies are being triggered. Wise Adult Tara has a rule and mantra about this: “I do not intervene between people and the natural consequences of their behavior.” This is a helpful, helpful rule. You are welcome to borrow it. 😀

But the people who come into my life regularly these days? I think of them as gorgeous, vital, thriving ruins. Walking phoenixes. People who should have been out for the count, for real for real, as the kids would say. And who rejected that. Who were victorious. Who have chosen to be victors, not victims.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Croatia the last couple of years. I’m sure I’ll write much more about that in future posts. It’s the most gorgeous place on earth, really. But when people ask me for the #1 reason I love it there, I tell them: it’s the living ruins.

In the coastal Croatian town of Split, 1700 years ago the Roman Emperor Diocletian built his retirement palace out of limestone, a few football fields long. And it’s still there, in roughly the same dimensions as it always was. But here’s the rub: in Split and elsewhere in Croatia, these “ruins” are vibrant and alive. Unlike anywhere else, where the ruins reek of decay and the sadness of long dead civilizations, the Croatians somehow got it into their minds that it was okay to build their downtowns right inside these ruins.

So Diocletian’s Palace is a limestone ruin that you can get a tour guide to walk you through, just like at the Coliseum in Rome. But in the Palace, you can also eat at a restaurant inside it, run your hand over the back of the 3rd century Sphinxes Diocletian left lying about, or lounge about on the steps in the evenings and sing along to old Prince songs with the locals. People live in apartments inside the Palace, work in banks in the Palace, go to the movies in the palace and worship in churches in the Palace.

These people have turned this structure, which should by all accounts and customs be a dead, destroyed ruin, into a thriving, vital center of life. A vital ruin. Just like the people I love and am proud to be attracting into my world. Just like me.

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. But I wrote this post on Day 1 (!) of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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10 Day Writing Challenge FAQs: What I am—and am not—challenging you to do

UPDATED FOR MARCH 2019 10 DWC

Q: What exactly are you challenging me to do, TNN?
A:  I am challenging you to write something every day for 10 days starting March 19, 2019.

Ideally, you should aim to write the equivalent of 3 pages longhand every day.

Three pages longhand roughly equates to 750 words typed. Writing speed varies a lot person to person, but many people will find this to take about 30 minutes to complete, daily, on average.

I recommend you do your writing in a dedicated Google Drive folder, with each day’s writing on a new, dated Google Doc. This creates a permanent, searchable, secure repository of your writing. (Notebooks work well, too!.)

Once you’re done writing for the day, I recommend you copy and paste the day’s writing out into 750words.com, which will create a running dashboard that visualizes how much you’ve written across the month, will help keep track of your daily streaks and progress and is generally awesome. It’s also free. No one else can see your account or your writing, FYI, unless and until you decide to share it on the SoulTour Community Group.

I am not affiliated with 750words.com – it is a tool I personally have used and think work well for this.

Q: What are you not challenging me to do?
A: I am not challenging you or asking you to publish your writing, though occasionally we’ll throw out a “Share a Snippet” call on the SoulTour Community Group, for anyone who wants to. In the past, some people shared everything they wrote, some shared a paragraph here and there, others kept it all private.

I am publishing what I write to you, as an exercise in vulnerability, but this is your challenge. You do what you need to do. And you know what you need to do. If you don’t know now, you will soon. Just get started.

I am not challenging you to bare your soul or to write about any specific topic. I will provide writing prompts daily, but you can take them or leave them. And I will bare my soul, because that’s the kind of chick I am (becoming). A couple of you have shared that you are planning to use this Challenge to refresh your children’s excitement about writing, looping them in and having them do the Challenge with you (which I adore). Others are using it to set goals. Still others need to process the past or find a breakthrough. This Challenge will work for all of these things.

Q:  What should I write about?

A:  Every day at midnight Pacific I’ll send you an email with the writing prompt of the day. The prompts are designed intentionally to trigger shifts to new levels of personal growth and unlock previously untapped inner greatness. 

On any given day, you can use the writing prompt, you can free-write, or you can work on your own book or blog project.

Q:  What is free-writing? 

A:  Free-writing is a brain dump exercise: put words on the page. Any words. Whatever’s on your mind. It is meant to be private, so no one will ever see it. Uncensored.

If you want more information on free-writing, Google “Morning Pages.” From Lifehacker:

Every morning, take a pen and three blank pages and write down whatever you want to fill those pages.

Q: Do I have to publish what I write?

A: Nope. The moderators and I will publish some of our writing to the SoulTour Community, just for fun. And you’re welcome to do so. And you’re welcome to do so on the Group, which is Private.

That said, if you’re doing free-writing or Morning Pages or journaling, I actually encourage you to start off with a plan to not show your writing to anyone else. The goal of these exercises is just to get your mind and soul and spirit trained to pour out freely, without censorship. And the best way to do that is to know that you’re writing for yourself. That it’s between you and you.

And that said, don’t be surprised if, by the middle of the month, you’re just excited about what you’re writing or discovering and you want to post/publish it.

Q: What if people don’t like what I write? What if someone finds or reads my writing and gets upset?

A: One of the Patron Saints of our Writing Challenge is Anne Lamott. She earned that distinction with this quote, from her book on writing, Bird by Bird:

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

#preach #Amen #tellyourstories

This applies to people who read anything you write publicly.

With respect to your private journaling or free-writing, writing in Google Docs will help, because: password.

Also, anyone who reads your private writing anywhere else and gets upset or confronts you about it is just giving you a great opportunity to speak your truth and practice boundaries. By boundaries I mean righteous indignation and expressing the unacceptability of reading your private thoughts. Yeah, that happened to me. It was uncomfortable and fantastic.

Q: What if I’m terrified?

A: If you’re terrified, you’re doing it right. See also this blog post:

Q: What’s the SoulTour Community Group for?
A: First, here’s the link to join the SoulTour Community.

Second, it’s to connect with others doing the Challenge. To share your experience. To ask your questions. To get inspired. To stay on track. To get back on track, should you need to.

Third, I am maintaining an archive of the PODs (writing Prompts of the Day) in this Spreadsheet. And I’m also adding videos, thought starters, inspiration and other juicy goods to the Community Group on a daily basis.

Fourth, I love you.

Head up + heart out,

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Are you both excited AND terrified by the 10 Day Writing Challenge?

Marvelous. It’s already working!

Are you both excited AND terrified by the 30 Day Writing Challenge?

I’ve had notes from a number of you expressing this general sentiment. So many notes that I thought we should talk about it.

Let’s take these emotions in turn: first the excitement, then the terror.

The excitement is impulse. But not impulse the way we normally mean it, like dysfunctionally impulsive behavior. That excitement you feel when you come across a Challenge like our 10 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders is the kind of impulse that happens when you get a glimpse of something that will lead you to what you desire, deep down in your spirit.

I believe that a lot of what we desire, we desire because it resonates with something way down deep. The excitement, the impulse, you get when you’re given this sort of Challenge like a spiritual breadcrumb on the path to what you really desire and who you really are.

To be clear, I’m not talking about desires like, say, a Tesla or a ring. I’m talking about deeper desires than that. I believe the things we are spiritually encoded to desire the most are to give love, to receive love, and to live a life of meaning.

My whole life changed when I started consistently paying attention to these kinds of impulses and started letting myself follow the paths to these deep desires. I don’t follow every single inkling or urge, but I do try to honor and give some attention to those that trigger a deep twinge of something that feels like resonance with who I really am or what I really want.

To do that, I had to (gradually) train myself out of the thought habit of immediately countering these desires. I had to stop focusing my energy on the internal struggle and start investing it in doing the work of following these impulses.

In the olden days, I’d have an impulse that felt like it might be the first step of something possibly major. Then my immediate next thought would be to counter that impulse with fear, with all the reasons why I can’t/shouldn’t follow that path. Does that ever happen to you?

I still did some big, glorious things in my life. But this internal dialogue made them harder, fewer and farther between than they needed to be. It led to years of playing a smaller game than I’m here for.

The idea that I don’t have time to tend these little spiritual bonfires was a go-to line of mine for years. And I’ve heard it a lot from those of you who hesitate to commit to this Challenge.

But I practiced my way out of it. And I invite you to take the challenge as as an opportunity to practice your way out of it, too. Trust me. I’m a busy chick. But It’s very rare that that “I don’t have time” even occurs to me anymore when I’m facing an impulse or project that I feel like might be an important part of my journey. And when it does, I’m very sweet and compassionate with myself as a I note the “no time” thought, then choose instead to focus on speeding that makes me feel expansive and aligned and just GOOD.

I’m committed to making time to follow the sparks that have proven over time to keep my soul stoked, my spirit open, my creativity and emotional groundedness flowing. Even if I have to stop doing some other, less critical thing.

I see Challenges as powerful little micro-seasons for growth and breakthroughs. I do them in lots of areas of my life, most often self-directed/DIY. They allow me to try on a practice or a habit or a new way of being, for a finite, manageable period of time. Sometimes, I like the practice and keep it, or some element of it. Other times, not. But even if I don’t integrate it into my daily routine for the long term, I’ll usually have made some sort of progress on a project or an issue in my life in the process of trying it on. Or I connect some new dots, or have some clear idea or insight, in the course of the Challenge that I wouldn’t otherwise have experienced.

The other thing about Challenges is that they’re just FUN. I think of them as growth games for grownups. In a Challenge, you can try on a new practice or way of being on without a death grip or terror because hey, guess what – YOU chose to do it and you are the boss of your own Challenge. It’s between you and you.

That POV allows me to take on Challenges with a spirit of both play and excellence. And that makes me feel proud and energized and engaged and alive during and after the Challenge.

Okay, so what about the horror part. It’s what Steven Pressfield calls Resistance. We’ll talk about that a lot more in the actual Challenge.

For now, it’s important to know that this Resistance is simply a habit. It’s a thought habit. You can rewire it. Doing Challenges, when the stakes are low, can be an early step toward rewiring yourself into freedom from Resistance, or at least into the consistent new habit of overriding Resistance when it arises.

I’ve heard a number of variations of fear in the “I want to do it but am afraid to do it” notes a few brave souls have sent me. And I’ve given various corresponding forms of advice, in these one-on-one conversations:

  • Failure isn’t a thing here. What happens if you only write for 2 or 5 days of the Challenge? You’ve written for 2 or 5 days more next month than you did last month. Seems like a net positive to me!
  • This is your Challenge. You can do it while you’re traveling, or you can take it as a 5 or 7 day challenge or whatever you need to do. If you want a breakthrough, try to do something every day. But you get to define success here.
  • The more consistent you are, the more progress you’ll make. But you know what? If you have a day where all you can write is a single sentence? I hereby give you official permission to count that as a win.
  • If you’re doing this to get clear or set goals, you might not need as much writing as 750 words x 10 days. You might have clarity on day 4. If you’re trying to experience a real shift or trigger clarity or flow, you might have your breakthrough on day 7. Or you might need to keep writing until day 49 or day 99. That remains to be seen, so it’s a good thing you’re getting started!
  • If you want to write a book, you can use this Challenge to “turn pro.” 750 words a day is probably what you need to do, and consistency matters. I’ll hold your hand. Trust me when I say that you can do this.

Obviously, which advice is right for you depends on your situation.

But what I’m about to say now applies to everyone.

This is a growth experience. There’s a reason they call them growing pains. If I were challenging you to do something you already were doing or already had the capacity to do or was super super easy to do, there wouldn’t be any growth potential in it.

Game design guru Jane McGonigal speaks and writes a lot about why games (including Challenges, IMO) are so engaging than reality, including something she calls Hard Fun:

“If there’s anything I’ve learned as a game designer, it’s that the hard part is the fun part. We need a good challenge to have fun, to feel alive, to unleash our strengths, to turn strangers into teammates and allies. This is why we play games – sports, videogames, all games. We play them because nothing makes us happier or stronger than tackling a tough challenge that we choose for ourselves.”

If you’re both excited and terrified at the prospect of this Writing Challenge, again, you’re doing it right. It’s already working. I want to invite you to see that as a sign that you’re in the right place, and that signing up is the right thing to do.

But I also want to invite you to have a little shift of state and spirit around it. Yes, this is a Challenge. Yes, it’ll be challenging. Yes, you might see some scary things inside and be challenged to make some changes that are even more scary. Or not. But in any event, remember that you are choosing this Challenge for yourself.

It doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t have to be terrifying. You can decide not to be a martyr to the Challenge. Try easy. Go easy on yourself. Be light and playful with this project. Allow for the possibility that your challenge will be a fun, exciting adventure into new territory, inner and behaviorally.

I see your bravery, and respect you for it. Let’s do this. Our Challenge begins MONDAY, JUNE 9TH, 2018. It’ll cost you nothing but a little time and more spirit and soul. Here’s the sign-up link.

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Clarissa Pinkola Estes: Letter to a Young Activist in Troubled Times [Full]

A note from Tara for context: Legendary psychologist and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes shares how she occasionally writes open letters to souls around the world, this one, aimed at young activists in troubled times. I think that group includes conscious business leaders, right now. All of the below are her words. I believe they’ll bless you the way they’ve blessed me.
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Clarissa Pinkola Estes: Letter to a Young Activist in Troubled Times

The letters are sent out to sustain those who see the greater world and the personal world but without wearing the usual anesthetizing blinders. They go to those who see all suffering, and thus can use small reminders that they and their souls are still fully capable and not alone, those who are carrying precious goods in thought and action.

The letters are sent out just to remind people that the outcome in the moment may not be the most of what to aim for, but rather something else, something far more mysterious that comes on wings or wind.

Here is one of the “letters from the ark” for you now …

Do not lose heart, we were made for these times

Mis estimados:

Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.

I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world right now. It is true, one has to have strong cojones and ovarios to withstand much of what passes for “good” in our culture today. Abject disregard of what the soul finds most precious and irreplaceable and the corruption of principled ideals have become, in some large societal arenas, “the new normal,” the grotesquerie of the week.

It is hard to say which one of the current egregious matters has rocked people’s worlds and beliefs more. Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

You are right in your assessments. The luster and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is — we were made for these times.

Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. I cannot tell you often enough that we are definitely the leaders we have been waiting for, and that we have been raised, since childhood, for this time precisely.

I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.

I would like to take your hands for a moment and assure you that you are built well for these times. Despite your stints of doubt, your frustrations in righting all that needs change right now, or even feeling you have lost the map entirely, you are not without resource, you are not alone. Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. In your deepest bones, you have always known this is so.

Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.

We have been in training for a dark time such as this, since the day we assented to come to Earth. For many decades, worldwide, souls just like us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways over and over — brought down by naiveté, by lack of love, by suddenly realizing one deadly thing or another, by not realizing something else soon enough, by being ambushed and assaulted by various cultural and personal shocks in the extreme.

We all have a heritage and history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially: we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection.

Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered — can be restored to life again. This is as true and sturdy a prognosis for the destroyed worlds around us as it was for our own once mortally wounded selves.

Though we are not invulnerable, our risibility supports us to laugh in the face of cynics who say “fat chance,” and “management before mercy,” and other evidences of complete absence of soul sense. This, and our having been “to hell and back” on at least one momentous occasion, makes us seasoned vessels for certain. Even if you do not feel that you are, you are.

Even if your puny little ego wants to contest the enormity of your soul, that smaller self can never for long subordinate the larger Self. In matters of death and rebirth, you have surpassed the benchmarks many times. Believe the evidence of any one of your past testings and trials. Here it is: Are you still standing? The answer is, Yes! (And no adverbs like “barely” are allowed here). If you are still standing, ragged flags or no, you are able. Thus, you have passed the bar. And even raised it. You are seaworthy.

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency too to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.

We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the Voice greater? You have all the resources you need to ride any wave, to surface from any trough.

In the language of aviators and sailors, ours is to sail forward now, all balls out. Understand the paradox: If you study the physics of a waterspout, you will see that the outer vortex whirls far more quickly than the inner one. To calm the storm means to quiet the outer layer, to cause it, by whatever countervailing means, to swirl much less, to more evenly match the velocity of the inner, far less volatile core — till whatever has been lifted into such a vicious funnel falls back to Earth, lays down, is peaceable again.

One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair — thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts — adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take “everyone on Earth” to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. A soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.

The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of the soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both — are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

There will always be times in the midst of “success right around the corner, but as yet still unseen” when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.

The reason is this: In my bones I know, as do you, that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here.

In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But … that is not what great ships are built for.

This comes with much love and prayer that you remember who you came from, and why you came to this beautiful, needful Earth.

Excerpt “Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times,” (a/k/a “Letter to a Young Activist in Troubled Times”) Copyright ©2001, 2003, 2004, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, All rights reserved. This particular work is released under a Creative Commons License by which author grants permission to copy, distribute and transmit this particular work under the conditions that the use be non-commercial, that the work be used in its entirety and not altered, added to, or subtracted from, and that it carry author’s name and this full copyright notice. For other permissions, please contact: projectscreener@aol.com