Posts Categorized: Surrendering

The Hour I First Believed

in Approval, Body or Aging, Radical Kindness, Surrendering

Body in Swirls

My body for so long was my secret shame, the taboo subject. I remember lying on the couch, looking at my seven-year-old legs and declaring to myself that they were too fat.

I had become a believer. In that specific moment, all the judgments I’d absorbed from the world around me just popped into my head, a full-grown bundle of beliefs that I’ve carried most of my life.

My religion had simple rules: it was good to be thinner. Read More>>

Still. Here. Now.

in Noticing, Spring, Surrendering, Wordlessness

The Well

It’s been a wild ride the last six months. By that I mean that it’s one I don’t want to repeat. Lots of unexpected challenges coming from the outside world that I didn’t choose. Things like being hit head-on at a high speed, followed by my daughter being hit by a drunk driver two months later. At the same time my mother was suffering and requiring surgery across the country. Those kinds of challenges. Read More>>

Restoration from the Place of Unknowing

in Confusion to Clarity, Surrendering, Wordlessness

“There’s freedom in hitting bottom. In seeing you won’t be able to save your daughter, her spouse, his parents, or your career, relief in admitting you reached the place of great unknowing. This is where restoration can begin, because when you’re still in the state of trying to fix the unfixable, everything bad is engaged: the chatter of your mind, the tension of your physiology, all the trunks and wheel-ons you carry from the past. It’s exhausting.”  ~ Ann Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

Last year contained a series of surprises and physical injuries, which are still healing and nearly healed, assuming there aren’t any setbacks. I was hit head-on. Two months later my daughter was rear-ended by a drunk driver. My mother and brother were hospitalized far away shortly afterward and it was my job to get on a plane and take care of matters. I could go on and on about the heroic tasks required of me.

This is how Fixer and Rescuer identities got the toe-hold once again. Then a strangle-hold. What began as an innocent response to urgent and real needs turned into a (false) belief that I COULD fix whatever is broken. For everybody. Now. Or (better yet) yesterday.

Surrendering the Big Girl Britches

in Identity, Radical Kindness, Surrendering

A little late? The car was totaled, I was hurt and in shock, surrounded by the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, and I’m going to be a little late? For body work? Make that “a little late, but we now have a pemanent relationship.

An uber-responsible reaction is one sure sign I’ve pulled on my Big-girl Britches to Rise to the Challenge. My Big Girl Britches have gotten my through a lot of crap. When something hard needs to be done, there she is. She knows she can count on her common sense and guidance to get to the other side of through. But there’s a cost, too. She tends to push too hard, be too ambitious, thinks she knows stuff (like how long it takes to heal). Read More>>

Emotional Weather Front

in Noticing, Radical Kindness, Spring, Surrendering

Flower in the Snow

There’s an old saying here in Oregon. “The only people to predict the weather are fools and newcomers.” Guilty on the first count. It’s March 1st, and I had planned to wake up to warm spring breezes and beds of daffodils swaying. Instead I get this blanket of pure white beauty tucked softly over the hills. Lovely. But hardly what I planned. Fooled again.

The last couple of days the weather has brought other surprises. Sleet. Heavy winds. Chilling to the bones. I didn’t like that surprise. But one thing that Oregon has taught me is not to take the weather personally.

I’m noticing the same thing about feelings. We humans have these pesky emotions that seem to come through just like weather fronts. When we don’t take them personally, each one of them leaves a particular gift or shows us something we need to see. And then it moves on.

Subtracting Insult from Injury

in Noticing, Radical Kindness, Surrendering

Instead of adding insult to injury, I’ve been learning to subtract. Three weeks ago I broke my collarbone in the middle of the night on Day 2 of a long-anticipated tropical vacation with my husband. I slid on some slippery Mexican tile and catapulted down three steps to land on my collar bone. At three a.m. on a Sunday morning. The story of How I Spent My Vacation starts with that event, with riding a ferry from the island to a hospital and harnessing myself into a splint for the next two weeks.

The Cafe at the End of the Search

in Getting Unstuck, Noticing, Radical Kindness, Surrendering

I’ve spent a whole lot of my life in a search for truth, beauty, goodness, The Way. Much of what has motivated me has been from that deep longing that propels each of us to connect with the sacred in life.

No regrets. But lately I’ve been thinking of calling off the search. Because it feels like peace. (What better reason would there be?) When I’m craving something to eat, drink or do that will fill a hole, I’m usually believing that my current state isn’t okay.