I finally got around to writing my New Year’s letter. I figure that any day can be the beginning of something big – of a new year, of starting now. I dated it December 31 2012 and I addressed it to my Divine (my inner guidance system) but you can address it to yourself, to your higher power or to Dear Diary. It just helps to be writing to someone.
I started by giving thanks for a most amazing year and looked back over 2012 to acknowledge the changes in all areas of my life: spiritual growth, love, career, financial situation, health, my relationships with my family and even the state of my beloved puppies. I carefully considered how I would like to see things evolve and develop in each area and how I would like to feel. Some things were easy and predictable and grew out of seeds that I have already planted and been tending. I made sure to leave room for surprises and unexpected twists and turns. I made sure to acknowledged inner growth, especially an ability to roll with the punches, stay light on my feet, be flexible and curious.
I really got on a roll imagining how I’d like things to be: what I’d like to stay the same and what I’d like to discard. I felt as though I were in a giant cosmic try-on room where I could play with alternate scenarios, push the envelop, be daring and even discover desires and parts of myself that were shy and in hiding. I got to create an amazing year for myself – and in so doing I got the chance to explore and examine my own heart and its deepest longings and create my year from that place.
It’s a work in progress and I get to change it. Today when I reread it (as I have done each day since I wrote it) – I was struck with how cool my year is shaping up to be, how exciting it’s getting and how eagerly I am anticipating everything all that is about to happen.
I made sure to include in my letter that “what is troublesome and difficult will work out even if I don’t know how” and that solutions emerge to all that makes me anxious, including my own ability to soothe my energy, see things differently and stay grateful.
From where I now stand at the beginning of 2011 AND in my imagination on Dec. 31st 2012 – all is well. I have imagined a year that feels wonderful, entirely plausible, possible, likely and includes everything that floats my boat – adventure, romance, spiritual connection, health, personal growth and I’ve left room for surprises, for not knowing, for being taken somewhere I had no idea I wanted to go or even existed.
When I referred back to my letter to tell my sister how a particular situation was going to work out, I realized that it’s working, that I believe myself and that I know in my heart that the seeds that I have planted have been nourished by putting them in writing. They are already sprouting.
I signed my letter and placed it in an envelope that I’ll open on Dec. 31, 2012. In the mean time, I am enjoying how this ritual has changed how I am stepping out into my life. I am eagerly anticipating what I already know (it was in the letter) is at this very moment, simmering into a most delicious recipe for abundance on all fronts. I set forth this morning curious about the details and expecting to be surprised. Like ‘enhancing a photo’ – there’s a new level of clarity and color and energy that wasn’t there before.
Since What you can do with your life has little to do with what’s going on in the world And everything to do with what you see as possible, I suggest that you ‘sit right down and write yourself a letter….”
I’m on my way to Jost Van Dyke with my honey and his daughter, bf and family. We’re taking them sailing and we’re going to get the trip (and the year) off to a memorable start at Foxy’s: great company, great music, high spirits (no puns intended). I’m already cultivating one of my themes for 2012 – Eager Anticipation.
There’s a lot to be said for being excited about something that’s coming up. The psychology of the Advent calendar has us approaching the big day with excitement and starts each day with the high vibration of eager anticipation. There’s nothing like it for build up and it’s powerful ripple effect. Eager anticipation makes everything taste better and it is contagious.
As a coach I get lots of emails at this time of year offering programs and seminars and tele-conferences focused on goal setting, finding the love you want in 2012, being abundant in the new year, getting your business off to a rousing start, shifting gears, stepping up to the plate etc…. I too have a great year-end completion and New Year beginning exercise that I’m going to do but this time I’ll be adding a heaping dose of eager anticipation to the recipe. It’s the best way I know of to make sure that whatever it is I’m wanting to see, do, experience is something that not only floats my boat but fills my sails and carries my spirit aloft in a big way.
You may want to lose weight, stop smoking (the top resolutions), exercise daily, reduce your cholesterol, stop swearing (I heard that one the other night), mediate regularly, be a more attentive parent, a more loving spouse, earn more money, stop biting your nails. But when you think about it – how excited are you about any of these?
Maybe you could get excited about going on a hiking trip with your honey next summer. With that big day in mind, exercising daily, losing weight, becoming a non-smoker are the natural precursors for your eagerly anticipated trip.
You dream of writing a book and are looking forward to attending a writing workshop in the spring. You can’t wait to study with authors you admire. When you sit down to write each morning before you go to work, you picture getting on the plane with a finished first draft of your memoir feeling deeply satisfied and excited and it’s that feeling you carry forth into your day. It makes everything better and it keeps you writing even when you’d rather sleep late.
What turns you on? What are you eagerly anticipating? When you close your eyes and dream, what are you doing, being, and having? What’s going on inside and outside in the life of YOU that makes you sing and dance and want to tell everyone all about it? These are not idle questions? The answers are the building blocks of creation. Imagination is the cosmic soup from which everything arises.
That’s what I’m aiming for in 2012 – a year of eager anticipation.
Like one of my favorite poets Mary Oliver says:
“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
Please join me in fanning the flames of eager anticipation. and say “thank you for everything” to 2011 and “yes to all that will be” in 2012.
Happy
New Year.
It’s easy to be thankful when things are going well, even if we sometimes need to be reminded how lucky we are and not to take things for granted.
It’s harder to be thankful when things are not going so well and we are struggling with finances, relationships and inner demons.
And then there’s that place in between, where things are actually pretty good, but we’re caught in the gap between our expectations and what’s actually going on. Maybe we feel badly that we haven’t been able to reproduce the Norman Rockwell portrait of a happy family sitting around a table smiling. Maybe we are far from our families and nostalgic for better times. Perhaps we decided to invite people over for Thanksgiving dinner and all but a few had other plans so we felt abandoned and rejected. Perhaps you are alone – a stranger in a strange land and you weren’t invited anywhere and perhaps you received multiple invitations and got all twisted up inside trying to avoid hurting this one’s feelings and honoring how you really wanted to spend the day.
What if we could separate gratitude from the object of our thanks. What if grateful were a state of being, inseparable from who we are; a quality that we exuded from the inside out. What if everything we encountered were automatically bathed in its’ light?
What if gratitude were not a reaction we had to something that we have labeled good or desirable but something we brought to the party no matter what?
What if gratitude were like kindness or beauty – a quality of being that we could cultivate. Instead of facials or massages we could keep gratitude journals, find something to appreciate in everyone we meet and tell them about it, meditate, pray for our hearts to be filled with appreciation and starting with our own breathe move over our bodies: thank you feet for carrying us this far (even if they hurt), thank our eyes for being the windows to the world (even with our glasses) and to our souls and our amazing pump of a heart for keeping our blood oxygenated and circulating – just for starters. if we really got going here the list would be endless and….. that’s just the point.
If you were a grateful person, how would I know? How would you show up differently? Happy for sure – because gratitude and joy are inseparable first cousins; enthusiastic about everything – the people we meet, the sunsets we see, the rainbows that wow us almost daily at this time of year as well as the tougher situations that help us grow, humble us and remind us of the resiliance and fragility of our shared human condition.
We get so caught up in having and doing, especially over the holidays and what we leave out is being. Instead of have, do, be – I’m switching the formula around to Be, Do, Have.
Be gratitude, Do what someone who is grateful for everything would do and I guarantee that the having will take care of itself.
Whatever is going on in your life, take a few minutes today and everyday to water your inner quality of gratitude. You’ll feel it. The people in your life will feel it and the world will be a better place because of you.
Relationships are at the heart of life, from the start of life. There is no life with out relationship. Starting with the connections between the particles out of which everything is made., we have relationships with our parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends, colleagues, teachers, neighbors, ourselves, others and with God (higher power, divine, inner guidance). There is no way around being in relationship, even for people who say, “I’m over relationships. I just have a cat.”
When we have conflicts with people in our lives we suffer greatly. We spend a lot of time and precious energy trying to change the people we think are responsible for our suffering (including ourselves for not measuring up) and we exhaust ourselves trying to ‘fix’ things and rearrange reality.
I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t change anyone else. I’ve twisted myself into various shapes and sizes and that didn’t work either. I noticed that I kept playing the same roles in different relationships and choosing people who had similar qualities even if the packages looked different. At one point I realized I’d married my mother and that certain thorny issues that I had with one friend cropped up with other friends. I wondered why I kept finding myself in situations where I played second fiddle, met men who were non-committal and got upset around people I called “pushy”.
Despite lots of self-help books, therapy and a profession focused on helping people through tough times, it took discovering the Law of Attraction and A Course in Miracles to experience, what the course defines as a miracle, a change in perception. When I started seeing people in a new way all my relationships changed – for the better.
I remember struggling to stay in my marriage and having the wind taken out of my anger when I looked over at my spouse and, instead of seeing an angry out or sorts man, I saw a toddler with hair uncombed and his boxers sagging and – angry and in pain. My heart opened and softened and the anger dissolved into compassion.
I had a client who was troubled by a rocky relationship with her son and spoke, guiltily about her days as a young mother. She’d done the best she could but had made big mistakes. We spoke of forgiveness to open and soften her heart, clear the way for healing and welcome a new relationship with her adult son.
The Law of Attraction says we can only create in our own reality – not someone else’s. The best things we can do to enjoy positive, loving relationships are to:
1. Practice self love.
2. Focus on what we love in another.
3. Understand what we find distasteful in others is a projection of parts of ourselves that need to be healed.
When people ask me how I met my honey they want to know the name of the dating site so they can sign up and get a honey too. They are missing the point. I’m grateful to dating sites and cyber-cafes but I know that I met and am still with this same wonderful man because I’ve done a lot of inner work. I’ve uncovered a lot of unconscious limiting beliefs and assumptions that kept me from enjoying the kind of relationship I craved, and I’ve started to release them and take responsibility for who and what I attract into my life. I get that we are all deliberate creators, that the world is our mirror and the more we clean up what’s going on inside of us ( how we feel about ourselves, how we’ve dealt with past traumas, hurts and the resentments we’ve stored away for so long), the more the world reflects joy, well-being and love right back at us.
There is nothing more important than shifting the way we perceive and connect with each other. Our very lives and life of our planet depend on it. 
Now
I got up early, meditated, made a fruit and kale smoothie and smiled about the day ahead: sailing at the Ritz, lunch with my daughter, a massage with my favorite masseuse and, as if that weren’t enough, winding down at the Nirvana Temple’s evening meditation to the sound of the surf.
Pinch me please! People pay for days like this and long for a life that, my sister says, is fit for the rich and famous. I laugh, because I do enjoy that life and I’m not rich and I’m not famous (yet).
As I headed to the Ritz, I confess that, in addition to smiling at my good fortune, I was also feeling guilty. I kept thinking I should really be working on my book and focused on making money. Voices in my head said, “What gives you the right to la-di-dah around? Get real!” I wondered if joining the morning rush hour would make me a better person and assuage my guilt.
As if on cue, I started to worry about my future. I heard Suzie Orman (and my mother) scolding me for foolish financial decisions. I made a to-do list for my books and my courses and, was haunted by unfinished paperwork and then…
I realized that I had totally left the present moment. I had moved from the land of my most amazing life to a run down project and a none to pleasant future that was bringing me down.
Tuning back into the lush tropical landscape, I saw what that I was polluting and diluting the rich, shimmering present moment with negative thoughts about the past or the future. I was my own party pooper and I had a choice.
Even if I call Suzie Orman and hand out my resume tomorrow, I get to choose whether to be present to my life right now. I can meet it head on or live in the imagined past and future. There’s a big difference.
Vigilance is required. I’m constantly going astray and bringing myself back to the here and now. My chattering monkey mind lures me elsewhere and, otherwise occupied, I keep missing my life in its full on HD intensity.
I decided that starting right then and there(once again) I’m was going to choose the present, even if I had to do it over and over and over again.
We’re taught at an early age to censor our desires, not to toot our own horns, to buckle down, work hard and keep the peace. We love the idea of unbridled joy but have a love/hate relationship with people who are fully present to each moment.
It’s much more fun to do things fully and forget yourself. When you realize you’re in the past or future in your mind, just come on back. Bring yourself back with your breath and scan your body. Get curious about all that’s going on in the here and now. Savor each moment. Expand its edges.
The only thing preventing us from fully enjoying our lives is our monkey mind selves (our egos). The antidote is cultivating practices that encourage ‘presence’, like playing music, meditating, sailing, yoga, sunsets and being ‘mindful’ of what we are thinking. When we pay attention to our thoughts we can intervene when they head south and return ‘home’ to now.
Thinking you should be somewhere else, with someone else and be someone else, is an automatic joy squashier. It leads to a life of going through the motions. You cheat yourself out of the charge of direct touch, full immersion living.
The late, great rock musician and song writer, Warren Zevon had the right idea when, shortly before leaving this earth he told his fans to “Enjoy every sandwich.”
I’m almost at the Ritz. The rains have turned the foliage lush and neon green. I inhale deeply and find myself back in this present moment of yet another amazing day. I roll down the window and tell the guard, “Good morning. Sailing school,” and turn into the manicured grounds of the luxury hotel property as if I belonged there as if I owned the world.