Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

The Sasquatch Of Weight Loss

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Like many of us, weight and everything that comes with it have been an issue for me for quite some time now. And after many different attempts, where I lost weight but then couldn’t sustain the program, and then gained back all the weight and more, I finally realized that I was tired of doing it this way. If it were going to work, it would have by now. I’m ready for a new way to do this, even though I have absolutely no idea what that new way will look like, or when I might possibly discover it.

So I was talking about all of this with my coach, and she said, “The only way weight loss works is if you do it in a way that is kind and loving to yourself.”

I said, “Well, I hear the words you are saying , but I don’t know anyone who’s ever done that. So when you speak of these things, I feel the same way I do when someone claims to have discovered Big Foot in the North Georgia mountains. I mean, do you actually know anyone who’s ever done that?”

“I do,” she reassured me.

“Well, you’ve never lied to me before, so I guess I’ll take your word for it.”

“No, I’ve never lied to you. And I promise, this is not a Weight Loss Urban Legend.”

My Declaration Of Independence (Which Turned Out To Be Quite Long)

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I have been in a very quiet, contemplative place lately, watching as some new energy percolates and rises to the surface, and I am now in a place where I am ready to declare independence for myself. I am declaring independence from the belief that I have to make my life match up to anyone else’s definitions of success for my life, as well as from all the places in my mind telling me that my life should somehow be in any way different from the way it is right now.

About six years ago I decided to leave the work-a-day world and go into business for myself. I’ve spent a large portion of those years with different classes, workshops, books, seminars, and programs designed for entrepreneurs. It’s all great information, especially since I was on a pretty steep learning curve. But I’ve reached the point now where those products are actually keeping me out of my life.

I realized that what I genuinely desire, and what the people who produce those products desire, are not the same thing. And I’ve been making myself wrong and feeling guilty for wanting what I truly want, and not wanting what they say I should want. Let me explain.

After six years of trying out a lot of different possibilities, I realized that my goal in life is not to be a worker/earner. If I had to give a name to my “reason for being”, I would say that I am a spiritual contemplative/mystic/writer/professional dreamer. So I like working about 10-12 hours a week, with lots of time left to create a nurturing home, take care of the errands of daily life, maintain my connections with other people, think, observe, process life, and create.

I like that the way I contribute to and help change the world is through working on myself, and transforming my connections to the people around me, one encounter at a time.

Unfortunately, even in the personal growth/New Thought community, that business model is never really presented as a viable option. It seems to me that whenever people are talking about things like The Secret, and The Law Of Attraction, and other principles of Deliberate Creation, the emphasis is always on BIGGER, and MORE. If the concept of “enough” is ever addressed, it only seems to be in the manner of finding a way to temporarily let what you have be “enough”, only so it can move you to a different place where you can finally get MORE. There doesn’t seem to be much work addressing the question of genuinely being satisfied and feeling like you have enough.

And that is where I started to feel disconnected from the popular concept of personal growth, because I could no longer ignore the fact that I am really satisfied with my life right now.

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What Do Mayflowers Bring?

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Lately I’ve been reading the book Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick. I always enjoy learning the stories behind history, but this particular part of history has a special place in my heart because I am the 15th generation descendant of 4 people who came over to the New World on that ship.(Important Side Note: Which does not at all cause my husband to crack frequent jokes about “inbreeding” at my expense.)

This material is dovetailing nicely with all the things I was thinking about after reading Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, back before my intestines became the unfortunately fertile breeding ground for Hostile Alien Bacteria. Specifically it’s helping me to answer the question, “What’s my word?” Because not only have I realized that, of course, my word cannot be anything other than FREE, all this reading about my ancestors has given me a good idea of where that might have come from.

Of course we all know the traditional story of the Pilgrims and their desire for freedom from the king of England and his church, but it’s the way that Philbrick describes these desires that sometimes has all my hair standing on end in amazed recognition.

When I read things like, “…the Puritans had chosen to spurn thousands of years of accumulated tradition in favor of a text that gave them a direct and personal connection to God,” I remember how powerful an experience it was for me to go through the workbook of A Course In Miracles for the first time (Philbrick, p.8).

Or when I read that they wanted to be “…free to establish themselves on their own terms”, I think about how I have done the very same thing in creating my own work, my own contribution to the world, and my own role within my marriage (Philbrick, p.16).

And when I read that during their services, “…the entire congregation had participated in a passionate search for divine truth”, I almost shot out the top of my head, because that is what my entire life has been devoted to (Philbrick, p. 12).

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Those Two Little Words

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There are many things for which I am grateful to my friend, Lynne, but one of my favorites is the fact that she was the person who introduced me to the fantastic phrase, “Just ‘cuz.”

Until I met her, nothing in my life had ever been done “just ‘cuz”. I always backed up everything I decided to do with case plans, legal arguments, graphs, pie charts, handouts, and a Power Point presentation so that, if asked, I could at any moment give a detailed presentation on exactly why I should be allowed to do the activity in question, and exactly how it would lead to some sort of measurable result such as more money or a better job.

Then I met Lynne.

And one day when I was telling her about some kind of training I wanted to take, and I finished my whole song-and-dance routine of justifying why I wanted to do this, she said, “What if you just did this. Just. ‘Cuz.?”

For a while I was speechless, mostly because I was involved in picking all the pieces of my brain up off the floor. And then I was all, “Oh, sure, but first why don’t I go rob a bank, and then go knock off a chain of convenience stores because, HELLO!, you are not allowed to do something just because you want to and you think it will be fun. What’s wrong with you?!”

But truth be told, I was fascinated with this idea. It was sort of like mental cocaine, the idea that maybe, just maybe, I could actually do the things I wanted to do just ‘cuz. No need for any lengthy dissertations or comprehensive oral exams where I had to prove my worthiness. Just. ‘Cuz.

So ever since then I have been luxuriating in the freedom this thought brings. Like, the kind of luxuriating where you roll around naked in giant piles of money while your handsomely oiled and scantily-clad pool boys fan you with large palm fronds and hand feed you individual pieces of gourmet chocolate on the beach of your own, private, Caribbean island.

Yes, I’ve been living it up big time with these two little words. And then recently, I discovered yet another liberating aspect of this powerful thought.

As I’ve written before, during the past few months I’ve been very involved in learning how to manage my anxiety disorder. I’ve also had to deal with a lot of health challenges, as I often do in the fall.

And while I love all the personal growth work I do, the shadow side of that comes out when I blame myself for my conditions and tell myself things like, “Well, if I were more enlightened, I wouldn’t be having all these problems. If I were just doing this stuff right, I wouldn’t be so sick.”

And once again, Lynne stepped in and helped me see this another way.

“What if,” she suggested, “you are not to blame?”

“What if this is just a thing, like, you just have an anxiety thing?”

“What if,” she posited, “just like we can be happy ‘just ‘cuz’, we can just have an anxiety thing ‘just ‘cuz’?”

“What if you could let yourself off the hook?”

I’m not exaggerating when I say that there is no number high enough for me to describe the amount of shame, judgment, and blame that lifted off my shoulders when she said these things to me. It was such a tremendous relief to have another way to view this situation, one that did not involve the need to constantly abuse myself mentally.

Such a powerful little phrase, those two little words. Once again they are proving to be quite the lifesaver for me.

To read some more great posts about how we can let ourselves off the hook, check out:

“Doing our work” by Lynne Morrell, and

“Positive Attitudes: All Powerful…or Maybe Just Warm and Cozy?” by Alix North.

What’s Your Word?

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“I remember something that my friend Maria’s husband, Giulio, said to me once. We were sitting in an outdoor cafe, having our conversation practice, and he asked me what I thought of Rome. I told him I really loved the place, of course, but somehow knew it was not my city, not where I’d end up living for the rest of my life. There was something about Rome that didn’t belong to me, and I couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

…Then he went on to explain, in a mixture of English, Italian and hand gestures, that every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you could read people’s thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be-that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don’t really belong there.”

-Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

I know exactly what she’s talking about.

I’ve visited places that, for no apparent reason have felt just as comfortable as a perfectly broken-in pair of jeans, as well as places that, for no reason I could see, made me feel so uncomfortable that I just wanted to peel off all my skin and flee the planet.

I’m in a very good place right now, and since my environment is such a great match for my word, now I’m really curious as to what exactly that word might be.

I definitely know some words that it is not. I spent many years forcing myself to stay in environments and situations that did not match my word, as apparently I sometimes like to take the extra special bonus course in Learning Things The Hard Way.

I served a tour of duty in BLIND OBEDIENCE.

I did some hard time over in IMAGE AND ILLUSION.

I dabbled in ACADEMIA and BEING A PROFESSIONAL.

I served a sentence as LABORER.

And I spent an inordinate amount of time in the land of VICTIM.

Of course, the fact that I was constantly beaming out a vibration of VICTIM into the Universe meant that I was constantly attracting people into my life to play the accompanying role of VICTIMIZER to my VICTIM. For me this showed up as an endless stream of low-paying, dead-end jobs with horribly abusive female bosses. We’re talking y-e-a-rs here. (I was apparently going for my Ph.D. in Misery and Suffering.)

And then one day, somehow, a little space opened up inside my brain and let in a new thought, which said…maybe…just maybe…it’s me…not them…

That was the first time it had ever occurred to me that if I was in a situation I hated, a situation that kept repeating itself in ever increasing amounts of horror, that maybe, just maybe, I needed to change something within myself, rather than something external.

I think this was a result of September 11th. Looking back now I can see that, because everything about that time was so horribly beyond anything I’d ever imagined was possible, it also opened a space where maybe, just maybe things could also be joyful beyond my imagination.

And so I finally gave my notice to that last, soul-sucking, dead-end job, and the very day I did I went to a workshop where I met my very first coach and began the process of taking responsibility for and creating my own life.

During 2003 and 2004 when I was doing A Course In Miracles (aka, “The Year Where A Giant Hand Reached Inside My Brain, Stirred Everything Up, And Then Turned It Completely Inside Out”), I learned that the woman who scribed the course had had a very similar thing occur to her. She was in a very difficult situation at work, and finally she and her boss (I think) said, “There has to be another way to do this.” And once they opened up that space, the Course was born.

According to the Course a miracle can be defined as “a shift in perception.” And that was what finally happened to me at the beginning of 2002, when I took the first steps down the path to finding my word (which I know, I know, I haven’t gotten to yet, but if I break this long epistle up then I have something to blog about next week too 🙂 )

Waking Up (This Is A Long One)

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Every week my friend and fab-o-rama coach, Lynne pulls a Tarot card or a rune for the week, to give us readers something to think about or to explain why certain issues might be “up” for us. This week’s was quite a doozie but I knew exactly what it was talking about, because it pretty much sums up what this past year has been like for me. You can read the entire text at her blog; I’ve excerpted the parts that were particularly applicable to my experience here.

“The role of Nauthiz is to identify our shadow, our dark or repressed side, places where growth has been stunted, resulting in weaknesses that are often projected onto others.”

“This is a time to pay off old debts, to restore, if not harmony, at least balance.”

“When something within you is disowned, that which is disowned wreaks havoc. A cleansing is required here; in undertaking it, you will fund a will and strengthen character.”

“Thus you are required to undergo the dark side of your passage and bring it into the light.”

Yup, that pretty much sums it up quite nicely. But as you know, if you’ve ever gone racketing around in your own unconscious for an extended period of time, there’s a b-i-g difference between reading these words on a page and actually undergoing the process. A difference which I think can best be expressed by the phrase HOLY. F&%@!!

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Goals

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This weekend I attended a workshop on EFT and my classmates and I got into a discussion about all the different areas where we could use this great healing tool.

Since we were all women, unsurprisingly the conversation turned to the question of weight, and one woman offered this possible alternative view.

“Say you weigh 150 pounds, but you want to weigh 125,” she explained. “If you think about it, you do already weigh 125-plus a little extra. So you could use an affirmation that says ‘I am at my goal weight’ because you are.”

“That’s true,” piped up another woman. “Apparently a lot of us are just overachievers!”