“Nobody loves me.  Everybody hates me; I might as well go eat worms.” ~ Camp Song

It’s ten o’clock and, quite frankly, I’m glad this day is almost over.

It started badly – anger, anxiety, frustration, feeling disrespected, let down, and as if my time didn’t matter – all at an hour entirely too early for what was supposed to be my day off.

By the time the whole issue was resolved, I was 45 minutes late for a commitment that I’d made and I knew I was in trouble.  Anyone coming close as I bolted to my appointment would have been treated to a just-under-my-breath muttered tirade about my own worth.  Occasionally, words and phrases would burst forth.  A snarled, “It’s not FAIR,” being the most common.

Thank god I had a reprieve while hanging with my god kids.  I giggled, drew flowers, tickled, hugged… I really thought I was beyond my morning.  But after leaving and going home, I just… tanked.

All that anger and ire had resolved itself into this stagnant puddle of grief that just seeped into all my thoughts… oh yeah, the pity party had begun!

This doesn’t happen very often.  My usual demeanor tends towards being fairly upbeat and terminally positive.  (I actually had a boyfriend once who, in the midst of an argument, threw at me, “What do you think it’s like for ME living with someone who’s so CHEERFUL all the time??”)

So on the rare occasions when I find myself in this place, all I want to do is take a vacation WITHOUT MYSELF.  If I could find a way to unscrew my head and leave it’s whiny, crabby, self-pitying self behind and take the rest of me to the beach, I’d do it… ugh

I’ve been reading Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies again, and, at the height of my pathetic-ness, I remembered something she said.  She was talking about forgiveness and about letting someone off the hook.  She actually pictured herself reaching up, and taking the offending party down from where she had hung him for punishment.  And that’s when I knew…

I needed to let myself off the hook.

I’m human; I’d had a really not fun morning that had flooded my body with all kinds of unnecessary chemicals and left me emotionally wrung out at the end.  If anyone had come to me in a similar situation, instead of being angry and disgusted with them, wanting to get as far away from them as possible, I would pet them and soothe them and help them to feel whole again.

So, I took myself to my favorite used bookstore and bought a fluffy novel by one of my favorite “beach read” authors.  I went to the gym and ran myself clean; then sat in the steam room till my body and heart went soft again.  I bought a beautiful salad, and came home to watch one of my favorite tv shows.

I forgave myself…

And, to quote one of my all time favorite cranky bitches, Scarlett O’Hara, “After all…. tomorrow is another day!”

Thank God

“Love yourself—accept yourself—forgive yourself—and be good to yourself, because without you the rest of us are without a source of many wonderful things.” ~ Leo F. Buscaglia

“Learn to let your intuition—gut instinct—tell you when the food, the relationship, the job isn’t good for you (and conversely, when what you’re doing is just right).”~ Oprah Winfrey

Today, The Secret guru James Arthur Ray was arrested on charges of manslaughter for the deaths of three of his students during a vision quest sweat lodge last year. For those interested in the full story, please see the link below:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100204/ap_en_ot/us_sweat_lodge_deaths

Three people died because someone they trusted told them that, in order to be a spiritual warrior, they needed to push through their limitations; he “chided” those in the group who wanted to leave the sweat lodge.

This isn’t an unusual tactic – my guess is that at one time or another, each and every one of us has been subjected to something similar, whether it was in a classroom, on the sports field, or part of some boundary pushing experience.

But this time, things went badly wrong.

How the legal case will come down is anyone’s guess, but this case shines light on a deeper, systemic problem.

For the past several thousand years, we have been telling people not to listen to their inner truth, but to the voice of authority instead. If we read the Greek myth of Pandora, the lesson we learn is that by following our own instincts instead of the will of the gods we invite disaster not only for ourselves but for everyone we hold near and dear.

“Big deal,” you might say, “it’s a story.” …. but listen to the news. The number of times “Pandora’s Box” is mentioned is shocking. What’s more astonishing is that we all know exactly what the newscasters mean when they say it. This millenniums old story is part of our social consciousness; it affects us culturally every day.

We have stopped teaching critical thinking in our schools; we have stopped questioning the information that is fed to us by the media in all its forms. We have stopped hearing our inner wisdom; we have lost faith in our discernment.

Is it really any surprise that we are willing to ignore the signals of our bodies, and put our trust in the words of an authority figure?

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”~ Steve Jobs

“Channels are blocked in the mind, from the day.  Lie down in blackness of night, forgotten remnants rush to the mind, or creeping slowly appear in the dreams.” ~ Nathaniel LeTonnerre

“A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read.” ~The Talmud

I had a terrible dream this morning…

It was a weird, restless night – in part, I think, because I didn’t take my Vitamin D3 before I went to bed, and because there’s a lot of shift happening within me.  Things that have been the foundation of my life are changing, twisting, disintegrating in order to reform themselves into what I trust will be some new, more spacious order from which to continue my growing and experiencing.

So, after waking at 4 AM and alternatively floating in that strange asleep/ not asleep space and wandering to the kitchen to eat oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, I finally fell back into a very deep sleep.

I dreamt that I was in the bathtub.  Not the bathtub in my current apartment, but the bathtub in the summer cottage where my family used to vacation every summer.  I sat in the water with my computer, working – on I don’t know what… and somewhere along the line, I started to nod off.  So in the midst of my dream, there’s a blank space, from which, still dreaming, I suddenly catapult… because in falling asleep in the tub, I have dunked my laptop.  I think that I’ve only wet the casing, but when I lean back out of the tub with the computer, water is pouring from it, dirty brown water streaming out of disk drives and usb ports…. I squeeze and the water continues gushing out all over the floor.  And yet, the screen is still up… I am able to save whatever I’m working on before it fritzes out.  And I find myself weeping and mourning over my mac… sobbing and apologizing, and stroking it like it was a loyal kitten that I had let drown through my own negligence.

And then I woke up… heavy, cumbersome, as if I was waterlogged myself.

And I had tears on my face.

Clearly something is going on.

Dream Analysis expert, author, and teacher, Jeremy Taylor believes that, “Dreams come in the service of health and wholeness.” And they don’t come to tell us things we already know in the waking world.

So this isn’t simply a lesson in computer maintenance.

Within the world of dream analysis, there is a school of thought which conjectures that the scariest of our dreams actually herald the coming of new consciousness.

For instance, the classic nightmare in which someone or someones are chasing us down in order to kill us can be interpreted as the dawning of our new stage of consciousness.  Our Ego, which fights to maintain the status quo and feels most comfortable in situations and circumstances that it already knows – even if they are unhealthy – runs terrified from new ideas and understanding which, if owned, would force it/us out of our complacency and into a strange new world where – horror of horrors – we might be happier.

In this case, the nightmarish part is really perspective – Ego doesn’t want to die to what it knows, and so it sees new opportunities for growth as murderers.

Which is often the case in life as well.

We lose jobs, relationships, friends, things shift, change, disintegrate, go in directions we never suspected.  And it feels awful.  It feels like life is over.

And it is – at least the old life that brought us to this place of loss is.

But what if, just like the dream, this death signals the breaking of a new day – if losing that job is the kick in the pants we need to go back to school in order to have the job we’ve always dreamed of?  Or the ending of that relationship encourages us to set better boundaries, and change our patterns of behavior so that when the right person comes along we’re ready for them?

The belief within the dream world is that if we could just stop running from our murderers, turn around, embrace them, and allow ourselves to be killed, that we will be automatically transformed.  New consciousness will descend upon us like a soft comfy robe, and we will be off on our new adventures, quickly and painlessly.

I actually know someone who allowed himself to be stabbed in a dream, and within weeks his entire work life, which had been stuck and frustrating for several years, untangled itself as if by magic.

Coincidence?

Maybe.

“Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and pulleys.” ~ Emma Bull

“Laughter is carbonated holiness.” ~Anne Lamott

I thought about going to services this morning; I even looked up which minister was speaking at the church I’ve been thinking about checking out.

Instead I ended up neck deep in a bubble bath, candles flickering, soft music playing, laughing SO hard that the bath water threatened to jump the tub and swamp the entire bathroom.

I LOVE to laugh, and there are a couple of authors I can always depend on to make me cackle out loud… Anne Lamott, Janet Evanovich, Terry Pratchett all come immediately to mind. I have laughed till I’ve cried on beaches, in airports, and on the EL at rush hour.

One of my all time favorite memories ever happened when my family was on summer vacation. We were staying in a house on a lake and everyone but my dad was awake and down on the beach.

Suddenly, we heard this wild howling coming from the house. We all leapt up and went running, the noise getting louder as we got closer. We burst through the door and thundered up the stairs to throw open the door to my parent’s room. And there was my dad…

He was sitting in the middle of the bed, literally shrieking with laughter. His face was bright red, the tears were streaming down his face; he was holding his chest as if he might laugh himself to pieces if he didn’t. It was absolutely infectious. Before I knew it, we were all rolling around on the bed giggling like mad.

Finally, we settled enough that he could share with us what he was reading. It was Stephen King’s The Body (which eventually became the movie Stand By Me). There’s a passage in there where one of the boys tells his friends a story that ends with an entire town throwing up on each other… pretty typical 12 year old boy stuff.

OH, but the way King tells it… we all ended up in hysterics all over again.

“Slowly, a sound started to build in Lardass’ stomach. A strange and scary sound, like a log truck coming at you at a hundred miles-an-hour. Suddenly, Lardass opened his mouth, and before Bill Travis knew it… he was covered with five pies worth of used blueberries. The women in the audience screamed. B ossman Bob Cormier took one look at Bill Travis and barfed on Principal Wiggins, who barfed on the lumberjack that was sitting next to him… But when the smell hit the crowd, that’s when Lardass’ plan really started to work. Girlfriends barfed on boyfriends. Kids barfed on their parents. A fat lady barfed in her purse. The Donnelley twins barfed on each other, and the Women’s Auxiliary barfed all over the Benevolent Order of Antelopes. And Lardass just sat back and enjoyed what he’d created-a complete and total barf-o-rama!”

And when it was over, I had the most wonderful, joyously wrung out feeling… I felt completely connected and bonded to these other beings in the bed, not only through family but by what we had just shared, with a sense that all was right with the world and always would be…

Not very different really than when I climbed out of the tub this morning.

Just because I didn’t leave the house this morning doesn’t mean I didn’t go to church…

“Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.” ~ Karl Barth

“No matter what age you are, or what your circumstances might be, you are special, and you still have something unique to offer. Your life, because of who you are, has meaning.” ~ Barbara De Angelis

From the time I was 16 years old, I felt like I had a directional signal in my head leading me ever forward toward my goal of being a professional actor. It made choices very easy; things either brought me closer or they took me away. And if it gave me blinders to other possibilities, it was a small price to pay for having such clarity.

Until 10 years ago when the signal went off.

It was like the Wizard of Oz in reverse. My entire world went from Technicolor to gray. The landscape had no definition, nothing stood out; every choice was equal.

I didn’t know how to operate without purpose.

The depression followed… and that I really didn’t know how to deal with.

Fortunately, my therapist Mary did; she told me this story:

Years after World War II ended, a woman who had survived the concentration camps was being interviewed. The reporter asked her how, when so many had perished, she had managed to survive. The woman said that there had been another woman in her barracks, a woman who was frail and sickly and much worse off than the others. Every day, our survivor would eat only a portion of her bread ration, saving the other piece for her ill bunkmate.

“I knew that if I didn’t survive, my friend would soon die without the extra bread,” she stated simply.

Mary finished, and we sat quietly. After a moment, she looked at me and asked, “So…. What’s your piece of bread?”

And I knew.

I knew that, despite the fact that I no longer felt pulled to succeed in the theatre, I was still excited by the idea of being part of transformative experiences. At the root of my desire to be an actor was a call to participate and facilitate Ah-Ha moments in people’s life…

It was enough.

I never did recover that same sense of surety, but I had learned that it was a false security anyway. I became comfortable with not knowing what the rest of my life was going to look like. I practiced looking a month, a week, or a day out in front of myself rather than years.

Today, I am fortunate enough to work to help others find their way out of the gray, but I am always open to the possibility that the modalities may shift or be added to. What will never change is my desire to help people to find their own power and purpose…

What’s your piece of bread?
“I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
~ Edward Everett Hale