Tag: perception

When the Earth Slept: A Quarantine Fairy Tale

Melissa3

Picture Created by Melissa Wooten Art

*Due to the overwhelming response I have received from this story, it is currently in the process of raising funds to be published.  If you’d like to support this journey by pre-ordering a copy, please do so HERE.  You can also share this story with others who may benefit from it!  Thank you SO much for your help!

Once upon a time the Earth got VERY sick. Her temperature rose and rose and rose until it erupted into a slew of wildfires that ravaged the land. She shook with chills, causing massive earthquakes and every time she sneezed, torrential winds kicked up. The people called them tornadoes and hurricanes. She cried because she felt so awful and her tears created floods that washed over the soil.  Try as she might, the Earth could not get her sickness to go away. There was simply too much that she had to do to support all of the living organisms walking along her surface and she was not able to get the rest that she needed to heal and thrive again.  She thought and she thought, and she thought, until finally she came up with a solution. She would look to the people to help her.

So, she came to the people and she asked them to go their homes.

She asked them to spend time with their loved ones and to close their doors and to stay inside for a while so that she might get the rest that she needed without having to worry about them and take care of them.  So that she could rest her weary spirit, just for just a while.

At first, the people felt wary and afraid. They had never been asked to close their doors and stay inside. How would they keep themselves busy? How would they work and make money? How would they entertain themselves if the stores and the movie theaters and the bowling alleys and the playgrounds were all closed? They crossed their arms and shook their heads no and the Earth wept harder and the floodwaters rose. She shook with despair and the grounds cracked beneath the people’s feet.

Eventually, after watching the Earth continue to struggle and realizing the damage that her struggles were doing to her, the people began to talk to one another.

“We would not allow our own kind to suffer this way without rest,” some of them exclaimed. “We must give her the chance to sleep and heal as she carries so much responsibility on her strong shoulders,” they said.

And so, it was decided. The people shut down their shops and their movie theaters and their bowling alleys and their schools. They cancelled their plans to fly away for vacations and they agreed to postpone their meetings and their get-togethers and their parties. They went into their homes with their loved ones and they closed their doors.

Then a heavy silence fell over the Earth. Gone was the din of cars swooshing past one another on the roadways. Gone were the sounds of jet engines roaring overhead. Gone was the clanging of hammers and the growl of power tools as construction came to a halt.

The Earth took a deep breath in and let a giant exhale out as she settled in to nap.  She was lulled to sleep by only the sounds of the birds chirping, and the crickets playing lovely tunes; the wind whispering through the trees, and the gentle crash of the waves upon empty shores.

Many suns rose and set, and the moon cycled from new to full and back again. Meanwhile, behind their closed doors, many of the people became restless. They had not yet learned to appreciate the stillness and the quiet.  They were afraid of the unknown; afraid of how long the Earth might sleep. They wondered if they should wake her. They talked together and decided that they should try to.

And so, on a beautiful, early morning, just as the sun was peaking over the horizon, the people went outside and they began to dance. They started slowly at first, hoping that the gentle rhythm of their feet drumming against the Earth would tenderly wake her from her slumber. Still, she slept. The people began to dance faster. Still, she slept. And so, the people began to jump and yell and shake their bodies, twirling in circles and prancing across the Earth.

Still, she slept.

Yet somehow, as the people danced, they forgot that they were trying to wake the Earth from her slumber. They realized, as they moved and shook and allowed joyful sounds to burst from their mouths, that they were reviving an old song together. One that had not been sung for many, many years but that they felt rise up from deep within them.  They felt cheerful and connected to one another, some of them for the first time in ages. They smiled and laughed. They felt appreciation for one another and for their strong bodies and capable hearts.

As this shift happened in the minds of the people, the Earth finally began to stir. She stretched her long limbs and blinked her eyes opened. She looked about and saw beautiful things happening all around her. Animals that she had not seen in long passages of time crept slowly out of hiding to drink from her rivers and streams. Thick smog that had hung heavy over the mountaintops began to dissipate and she was able to see snow-capped peaks that had been hidden from her view for ages. She took a big, deep breath in and noticed that the air tasted sweeter and cleaner. She saw the now crystal-clear oceans shimmering in the distance.

And then, she saw the people. All of them dancing together, creating beautiful music, rejoicing in each other and massaging her skin with their rhythmic steps.

She felt the sickness slowly leaving her body. Deep within her core, a stirring began, like a small flame flickering in the breeze. As she continued to watch the people, the flame began to grow and grow and grow. The more that the people danced and sang and rejoiced, the more powerful this warm buzzing in her center became. She realized that their joy and love and connectedness were her medicine and she felt stronger and stronger still as she observed them.

The people, lost in their exhilaration, had stopped thinking about their stores and their bowling alleys and their money and their vacations. She noticed that they were remembering, instead, their deep connection to each other, to her, and to all the ways that she supported them. As she healed, they began to heal and as they began to heal, so continued her healing. They were part of the same and were learning to work together in new ways. However, the people knew they could not dance forever. So, one day, they stopped dancing.

When they did, they took the time to look around them and they too began to notice the animals coming out of hiding, the icy mountain tops in the distance, the crystal cleanliness of the air and the beautiful blues and greens of the oceans.  As Earth once again allowed her people to come back outside and enjoy her many natural playgrounds, she noticed that they did so with a new respect and sense of wonder.  They took greater care to keep the beautiful Earth clean and to honor her wildlife. They took the time to learn more about her plants and the natural medicines they could provide.

They devoted their energy to finding solutions to heal the very things that had been making their beautiful Earth sick in the first place.

As the people took better care of the Earth, the Earth responded with great love. She offered up new resources for the people to use to keep her soil and waters and air clean.  She granted their wish for more knowledge and taught them the ancient ways that they had become so disconnected from. She continued to show them the beauty of simplicity and encouraged them to take the time to dance whenever they felt called to do so.  Together, the people and the Earth created a new way of being.

And so, they all lived happily ever after.

Learn more about this story by clicking HERE.

The Power of a Tribe and Divine Female Energy

thumbnail (2)At first glance, you may look at the above picture and believe that I am lost in a powerful moment of prayer, breathwork, or meditation, but I am here to assure you that this is not at all the case.  In fact, when this picture was snapped unbeknownst to me, I was in the middle of the ocean on a beautiful, sunny day, skin kissed by a warm breeze, in the throes of the most terrifying and life-altering panic attack I have ever experienced in my entire existence.  In fact, the story I am about to share with you was quite honestly one of the most vulnerable and powerful moments of my entire life.

My weekend adventure immersing myself in the warm, calming flow, and bold, brilliant colors of the middle of the Atlantic ocean started out amazingly well.  As my best friend and I jumped into the water with our masks and snorkels, I was instantly engulfed in the beauty and mystery of the coral reef below me.  I spent forty-five fascinating minutes exploring before we decided to head back to the boat, take off our gear, and go for an unencumbered swim.  I removed my flippers and mask, ran to the back of the boat, and jumped right into the crystal clear water.  I remember a fleeting thought entering my consciousness…”The world is SO big and I feel so small right now.” and all of a sudden I was gripped by panic.  My body became instantly cold and numb as waves of fear washed from my head all the way down through my toes.  I felt as though I couldn’t breathe, my heart racing a million miles per minute.  I couldn’t get out fast enough and when I did, it took every effort to suck in enough air to prevent me from passing out.  With forty other people milling about, I’m sure you can imagine that it wasn’t exactly helping the onset of panic.  As I sat on the front of the boat trying desperately to calm myself down, a realization hit me that I was completely vulnerable out here.  If I was indeed dying in this moment (as my mind kept assuring me that I was), there was legitimately nothing I could do about it.

I made my way cautiously back to my seat and something of a miracle happened then.   As I lifted my gaze to focus on the horizon, my eyes caught those of a woman across from me who was probably in her late 50’s, early 60’s.  She mouthed, “Are you okay?” to me, and my usually stoic composure crumbled as I mouthed back, “No.”  Without hesitation, this woman crossed the deck, sat down next to me, and swept me up in her arms.  She softly reminded me to breathe and to close my eyes as she rocked me back and forth and wrapped me up in her towel.  Another woman brought me water, and yet another encouraged me to eat a small snack.  At first, my typical self-preservation kicked in and I resisted the temptation to curl into the unknown comfort of this mystery woman, but gradually, I felt myself allow her to draw me in and I rested my head on her shoulder as she continued to squeeze me close.  This amazingly beautiful woman held me like this for a full 45-minute boat ride, never even knowing my name or anything about me…and I allowed myself in that moment to let go of all of my defenses and be taken care of.

As we neared shore and I began to feel more at ease, I sat up a little straighter and looked around me.  One by one, every woman on the boat locked her gaze with me and nodded, almost as though they, too, were breathing easier for me.  I was later informed by my best friend that the moment my body curled into this woman who had been holding me, each woman on the boat sat up straighter and closed their eyes, taking deep, methodical breaths.  She said it was the most incredible thing she had ever seen.  I thanked my amazing Angel Mama (who I found out was named Anne), and although she humbly accepted the gratitude, I don’t truly know if she understands what she did for me.  I don’t know that any of those women do.  I am notoriously a person who takes care of herself and others.  Rarely do I allow myself the opportunity to be truly nurtured, particularly by strangers, but these beautiful women from all over the world who spoke probably six languages between them, came together in a stoic show of support to provide a safe container for me to experience the very real terror and weakness that I was feeling.  I don’t want to exclude the men here either, all of whom tapped into their own Goddess energy and supported me by offering a smile, a squeeze as I walked off the boat, or as far as Anne’s husband goes, his wife.

When we got back to my car, I let myself cry harder than I’ve cried in a long time.  We often move through life forgetting that we need others to support us in our moments of weakness, maybe even sometimes feeling like we don’t deserve to be supported.   When we can cross over those self-imposed blocks, we open to possibility and allow Universal love to flow to us and even through us.  The truth is, it is always there, even when we don’t see it, and the scary thing is that if we let our fear of looking weak or vulnerable become greater than our need for love and connection, we may stand to miss out on the incredible freedom and power it can bring into our lives.

What I experienced this weekend was the power of love, the power of a group of women working toward a common goal, the power of the Warrior Goddess energy that exists within each of us regardless of our sex, and the power of treating others as though they are not separate.  At the base of it all, we are all humans, needing, seeking, and desiring love, acceptance, and the right to be ourselves at any given moment.  These women and men gave me a gift that I will work hard to pass on to others in any way that I can.  We often have no idea how great of an impact our small acts of kindness might have on another person.  As far as Anne and the other passengers on that boat go, they have unknowingly helped to heal some long-existing wounds that have prevented me from fully allowing myself to become close to others, females in particular.  They have helped to birth a better version of myself and have encouraged me to pass that feeling along. Hopefully, this story inspires you to do the same.  Let your Warrior Goddess light shine bright…the world needs it so badly right now and always.

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Open to Grace

17In Yoga Teacher Training, we are taught that opening up to grace is an integral part of our practice.  It’s that moment in a yoga class where your teacher is instructing you to settle into the space around you, let go of thoughts, worries and to-do lists that might be sabotaging your relaxation, and let yourself become present and aware so that you can receive your yoga practice.  In a dimly lit studio, sprawled out on your mat, with no disturbances other than the gentle sound of you and your neighbors breathing, soft music playing in the background of your thoughts, this can be a relatively easy and safe space to do just that…to completely let go.  After all, that’s why you are there in the first place, right?  What happens, though, when you’re not on your mat?  Opening to grace feels a lot more difficult to do when you are in the throes of your day to day activities, children arguing in the background, a pile of bills arriving in the mail, stacks of paperwork to get through at the office, a lawn to mow, and the mountain of laundry spilling out of your clothes hamper staring at you every time you enter your room.  However, these are the times when opening to grace is absolutely the most important.

Grace is defined by dictionary.com as “simple elegance or refinement of movement”, but to me, it is so much more than that.  It is a willingness to surrender to the truth that we are each going through exactly the things that will help us to become the best versions of ourselves, even (especially) in the moments where it feels completely the opposite.  It is the ability to find strength in our struggles and to participate fully and completely in all aspects of our lives, good, bad, scary, exciting, or otherwise.  It is the knowledge that our perception of what is happening in our lives is so much more important than the situations themselves, because the situations are impermanent.  It is the power to stand strong through the storms, holding firm to the knowledge that calmer waters are ahead of us and that there is an important lesson for our soul within each and every moment.  How amazing would it feel to bring the same peace, calm and quiet that you find on your mat, or out in nature, or in your bath (or whatever it is that you do to connect to this space) into the daily situations that are a natural part of life?  Well, you can, which is pretty good news.

Take a minute to inventory what’s going on in your life that’s stressing you out or causing worry or fear.  Write it all down.  Read it back to yourself without any judgement.  Instead, maybe you can find a little curiosity.  What is your soul trying to help you to learn by these difficult situations?  For most of us, our difficulties often become repeating patterns, causing us to feel like something is wrong with us or that we are just destined to always have this particular issue in our lives, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.  These moments that challenge us are opportunities for us to get know ourselves better.  For example, if you are somebody who is constantly struggling financially and worried about how to pay the bills, this might be your soul telling you that your job is not in alignment with what you really want.  It may also be an indication that you have some limiting beliefs around money that need to be acknowledged and explored so that prosperous energy feels welcome to flow into your life.  If you find yourself struggling with relationship after relationship, perhaps it is your soul trying to urge you to look in a different place, or to learn to love yourself first so that you can openly receive true love back.  Maybe it is an indication that you subconsciously don’t feel worthy of love and so you are inadvertently pushing it away.

Remember, we attract the energy that we put out…like attracts like.  Therefore, it’s not what we WISH we believed or what we WANT to believe, but the actual beliefs stored deep, down within us, that are shaping our realities.  It can be scary to dig down and unearth them, but consider for a moment, a diamond.  My dear friend and colleague, Amy Lombardo, put this in such great perspective for me.  Diamonds are formed way down in the Earth’s mantle (about 100 miles deep), and start as chunks of coal.  It takes a tremendous amount of heat and pressure to create this sparkly gem, but once the work has occurred, the diamond is pushed to the surface naturally for all to enjoy.  Your thoughts are like these diamonds.  YOU have that same sparkly gem deep within in you, just waiting to be exposed to the heat so that it can emerge and shine brightly out to the world.  When you can accept that knowledge and open to grace, knowing that you have a deep well of untapped potential within you and the power to change your reality, the world opens back to you.  Your sparkly gems are naturally pushed to the surface and the Universe responds by shining back.

Where in this very moment can you open yourself to grace?  Where can you replace fear with curiosity, and hopefully learn something about yourself through the process?  Start right now.  The more that you practice this the easier it becomes.  Opening to grace is not something that needs to be confined to your yoga mat.  It is accessible in each and every moment to help you come back to center, find your calm and elevate yourself towards all of the possibility just waiting to be discovered within you!

If you need some help unearthing your spark, please visit my website HERE to learn more about transitional life coaching and my 12-week program, Ascend to New Heights.

 

The Unlikely Life Skill I Learned From Being a Smoker

crazy-funny-old-man-smoking-image

First off, no, that is obviously not me in the above picture, but I’m apt to believe it may have become a pretty accurate depiction of me had I continued to smoke.  Hehe.  Pretty sexy huh?  So yeah, I was a smoker for a pretty long time.  I know, I know…save your judgement.  I get it…it’s gross…but I have to say, at the time I sort of liked it.  Throughout my years as a smoker, I learned a few things, some more enlightening than others.  For one thing, phone conversations are far easier to endure when you have something to preoccupy you (I hate the phone).  For another, smoker’s cough is really unattractive, smelling like an ashtray is a great way to discourage people from intimate conversation, and if you want to spend a lot of money on a whole lot of nothing good…smoking is a good way to achieve this goal.  However, I digress.  As the title suggests, there was one incredibly valuable lesson that I did learn from smoking.  Let’s start with a little story, shall we?

When I was 19 my head was pretty much as far up my ass as it could possibly fit.  I had gone through a series of really shitty events that left me feeling out of touch, out of place, out of friends and looking for a way out of my current state of being.  In other words, I was pretty freaking miserable and totally lost.  So, imagine my excitement when my friend mentioned that he was taking a road trip cross country.  This was a great idea, barring the fact that he had no car to take aforementioned road trip.  Enter Jillian and her ruby red Hyundai Accent…my way out of reality surfaced right before my eyes and we set off barely two weeks later.

Now, aside from the excitement of being on the road blasting Allman Brothers CDs with the windows rolled down, a Hyundai Accent packed to the gills with my life’s belongings, proved to be pretty tight quarters for two pig-headed, opinionated kids with their heads up their asses.  Needless to say, within a few weeks, road trip buddy and I were starting to feel a little overwhelmed with our close proximity to one another.  We found ourselves smoking more cigarettes than usual, however, being that we were on an extremely limited budget with no source of income and no timeline in place for this marvelous adventure,  this wasn’t going over so well on our wallets.  Road trip buddy made the executive decision to buy loose tobacco and rolling papers, and save our very convenient, pre-rolled cigarettes for special occasions.  Now of course, he, being the initiator of this marvelous idea, was naturally in charge of what and when these special occasions were.  How very convenient.

Fast forward another week or so.  Ruby red Hyundai rolls into Denver with two clueless kids sitting in the front seat…arguing.  To this day I can’t recall what we were arguing about, but I assume it was probably something very important, like where we should eat lunch or whether we should set up our tent or sleep in the car that night.  (I mean, the big decisions you have to make when you’ve shirked all of your responsibilities to gallivant across the country are just never ending).  Long story short, road trip buddy gets especially aggravated and dips out for a few hours, leaving me sitting in the parked car, more than a little annoyed, in the middle of an unfamiliar town.  I reach into the glove box for a cigarette and what do I find?  Apparently he has decided that this is some sort of special occasion, because he has taken all of our pre-rolled cigarettes and left me only with a bag of loose leaf tobacco and some rolling papers.  Only problem…I can’t roll a freaking cigarette to save my life!  Of course I have no trouble at all rolling other things (snow balls guys…I’m talking about snow balls), but my cigarette rolling skills are definitely lacking.

15 minutes pass and turn into 20 and then 30…no sign of my friend or my Marlboro Lights.  I try to bum a smoke off of passerby, only to be met with dirty looks (it could have been the dirty, bedraggled, slept-in-a-car-last-night look I was sporting…or maybe I smelled from lack of showering…I guess I’ll never know).  I finally grab the papers and the tobacco and try desperately to roll cigarette after cigarette, each of them falling apart in my clammy, nicotine-deprived hands.  I mean, wtf, right?  30 minutes turns into an hour and I’m getting more and more pissed. A desperation takes hold as my aggravation mounts.  I roll and roll and roll and fail and fail and fail, each failed attempt making me feel like more of a total loser.  Finally, when I am just about to give up, one of my pathetic attempts actually ignites enough for me to take a large, glorious inhale into my panicky lungs.  A wonderful sensation fills me, but it’s not from the nicotine.  It is the feeling of success.  Dipshit (I’m sorry if you read this…you know I adore you) has still not returned, but now I’m motivated.  I spend the next 2 hours rolling cigarette after cigarette after cigarette, and each one gets looking a little bit more like the real thing.  By the time I see his figure walking down the sidewalk, I have a whole bunch of them strewn across the dashboard and a shit-eating grin on my face.  However, he doesn’t need to know exactly how well I’ve done, right?  So before silently gloating and lighting one up as he opens the car door, naturally I stash a little supply in various hideaways in case this ever happens again.  Needless to say, he was more than a little surprised and I didn’t go without a smoke for the rest of our trip.

So, while this may not be the best example (it kept you reading though, right), I learned a very valuable lesson that day.  I was at a very low point in my life where I was pretty set to give up on anything and everything that wasn’t working out for me, because, to tell the truth, not much was.  I had thrown my hands up in the air in pretty much every area of my life and determined that I just wasn’t good enough or deserving enough or smart enough at anything to succeed.  Road trip buddy inadvertently did me a huge favor leaving me in the car that day, yearning for just one drag of a freaking cigarette.  He gave me a choice to either accept the situation as it was presented to me or to take charge, persevere through the obstacle, and change the reality of it.  So often, we forget to do this.  We get so overwhelmed or discouraged by the perceived problem or roadblock in front of us, that we don’t even try to seek an alternate solution within ourselves.  We accept that this is our fate and we just have to grit our teeth and bear it, rather than digging deep and remembering that we have the tools and solutions to all of our obstacles within us.  In the Yoga tradition, this perseverance is called Tapas.  It is the ability to stay the course even if things feel a little daunting or uncomfortable (what a gift it might have been had I chosen to apply that Tapas to quitting right then and there, but that is to ponder another day).  It is a choice available to all of us, and when we choose to keep working towards whatever the goal may be, even through the obstacles or the not knowing what the outcome will be, this is where we find the antidote to the obstruction…in my case, the nicotine to my hankering.

Ironically, this perseverance was much needed as well when I decided to quit smoking 10 years ago.  Although this story may seem insignificant to some, it has stuck in my memory as a moment where I was able to move through a feeling of powerlessness to emerge triumphant.  Learning how to roll a cigarette…a habit that has no value or significance in my life today…who knew how much it would influence me?     I have used the memory of this day over and over and over again to remind myself what I am capable of if I just stay the course, even through the uncertainty and discomfort.  Something that simple and unimportant.

Dig deep for a moment…if you feel powerless, find that one, tiny thing that you have done that made you feel triumphant…even if it seems small and insignificant.  You never know…it could be the one thing that encourages you to find your power and persevere for years to come.  You’ve got this!

If you need help finding your personal power or feeling unstuck, I’d love to help you start living your most brilliant life.  Visit my website HERE or follow me on FACEBOOK HERE

 

 

What You See is What You Get: The Power of Your Perception

tentI lived in a tent for almost a year once up North.  I was 19 years old and had just finished a trip cross-country with my then-boyfriend.  We had grandiose visions of a 6-month trip to backpack across Europe and we carefully laid all of the plans.  We would set up camp in an empty field on  my friends property, spend the summer landscaping ridiculous hours, eat like college freshman and spend every penny we saved on backpacking gear, plane tickets, Eurorail passes and youth hostel reservations.  It was fool-proof, right?

Everybody else seemed to think I was crazy.  I’ll never forget the look on my poor mother’s face the first day she took the dirt road down my friends property line, swung a hard right into the field and pulled up outside of my new digs.  I think she said something along the lines of, “Oh my God, you are kidding me, right?”.  Her husband just kept shaking his head as we proudly showed him around, continually mumbling, “Wow” under  his breath.  My sister laughed her ass off at me and told me what a dipshit I was.  Even my cat, Doja, tilted his head disapprovingly when I showed him the perch we built in a nearby tree to keep his food away from the coyotes.  He gave me that look implying I must be fucking joking.  Had it really come to this?  Not that I could actually blame any of them…this wasn’t exactly the first in my long line of questionable decisions, but I wouldn’t be deterred.

I worked my ass off that summer, digging trenches and pits, planting trees, grading properties, spreading mulch and rocks, mowing and trimming trees.  Bruises bloomed all over my body with the physical labor and my muscles ached like nothing I have felt before or since.  I still have a giant scar on my left thigh from the damned hedge trimmers!  The boys called them rat bites, and I imagine the feeling was quite similar.  Still, we would go back to the tent each night, full on fast-food, exhausted and sun-drenched, but ready to face the next day with nothing but our end goal in sight.  Nothing could slow me down.

While everybody else saw a shitty little tent, boyfriend and I saw freedom and opportunity.  I saw myself getting closer and closer to pursuing a dream that I was determined to make happen.  I was able to overlook the lack of amenities, running water and hot food.  I was able to find some comfort in taking my showers at the landscaping office loft in a rickety stand alone stall while my fellow co-workers milled around below.  I was able to smile confidently when others scoffed at what I was doing, because I saw it so differently.  It didn’t matter what anybody thought of me…I was following my dreams.

Fast-forward to September 11, 2001.  Ring a bell?  That’s right…the day the Twin Towers went down.  We had been tent-dwelling for 7 months by this point and our departure date was fast approaching.  The reality of the news broadcasts hit me like a ton of bricks.  Everywhere I turned were warnings that Americans should not travel abroad…that it was not safe.  I remained undeterred, still completely convinced that this was my fate, but I was soon to learn that she (fate, that is) is a tricky little Diva.  For whatever reason, boyfriend and I had purchased our plane tickets at different times.  As we sat down by the light of a kerosene lamp in our teeny little tent, unpacking and repacking our backpacks for practice, something rather important came to our attention.  We realized suddenly, that unbeknownst to either of us, we had booked our tickets 10 days apart.  I was beside myself pissed!  How could this have happened?  October 01 was just weeks away and, instead of getting on a plane to skip off to London for an adventure, I would have to spend another 10 days milling around Cape Cod while a gray, dismal Autumn set upon it.  Boyfriend urged me to stay positive and promised to meet me back in London the day my flight came in.  He left a few weeks later, leaving me and my tent and the gray weather some time to think.

During this time of introspection, a few things became clear to me.  The first was that lots of people had some pretty valid reasons why they didn’t want me to take this trip.  I was urged not to go by every childhood friend I’d ever had, my parents, my sister and countless others, which of course, only made me want to go more.  Then one night, I had a random conversation with a stranger, and for whatever reason, his words resonated and I had a moment of realization that indeed, this was not my trip.  It was boyfriends trip and I was just along for the ride, living somebody else’s dream.  This knowledge was further compounded when 2 days later, 3 days before my flight was set to depart, I received notification from boyfriend that he had missed his flight back to London and would not, indeed, be able to pick me up at the airport.  I would have to meet him in Amsterdam.  I clenched my teeth and painstakingly made the decision to cancel my trip.

All of a sudden the tent morphed into something sinister right before my eyes.  All of the long summer nights spent sweating my butt off within its walls, sharing a single mattress with a man that moved too much in his sleep, the relentless sweeping and sweeping and sweeping to try to get nature back on the outside of the tent…I resented it all.  I hated the musty odor, the way I had worked myself to the bone every day doing physical labor and the fact that I had not a penny to show for it, spent as it had been on this trip.  And now, it was getting colder and rainier outside every day and I was sitting here alone…cold, tired, aggravated and feeling like a failure, stewing in all of this anger, while boyfriend flitted across Europe with my portable cutlery set.  My perception of the situation transformed as my relationship to it did.  Suddenly, I saw no hopes and dreams manifesting, but a waste of 8 months of my life instead.

I share this story for two reasons.  Number one, because it was a pretty interesting time in my life and it’s always a funny story to share.  Number two, hindsight being 20/20 like it is, I have come to find so much value in this experience and I have realized how greatly it has helped to shape the woman I have become…particularly my rather warped sense of humor (tee hee).  Most importantly, it has really helped me to realize how much our perception influences our emotions and life situations.  When we can stare a difficult situation in the face and find a silver lining, we are giving ourselves an opportunity to create possibility for something positive.  In coaching, this is called a turnaround.  Alternately, if we get so entrenched in the negative aspects of a situation, we are allowing ourselves to fall prey to its perceived power over us.  In coaching, we call this a limiting belief, holding us back from the greater possibility that lies within the lesson.  In the story above, my relationship to the greater goal helped me drive myself forward and look beyond the hardships of the situation, however when that goal was removed, it was easy to let myself slip into dismal territory.

This happens so often.  Maybe all of a sudden the job you prepared for, interviewed for and were hired for, loses its luster 5 years down the road.  Perhaps its a relationship you are in or a way of thinking that has become engrained.  Possibly its a habit you deem bad.  Your wants and needs have changed and whatever you are doing, isn’t growing with you.  Do you sit back and stay where you are, knowing that perhaps its “easier” or it’s what’s expected of you, even though your relationship to the situation has changed, or do you see that you are being offered an opportunity to change?  Do you get lost in the routine and monotony, or do you find the silver lining?  What have you learned from this place which has provided tools for you moving forward?

So where are you holding yourself back?  Where are you perceiving the people, circumstances and situations that make up your life in a negative light?  Where are you getting stuck?  Name all of those things, and then spend some time searching for the possibility.  What have you learned from these perceived trials?  What might they potentially blossom into for you if you could try to see them in a more positive frame?  How have these things helped to motivate and inspire the current you?  How have they showed you who you are and what you want from life?

Each of us holds the key to our own happiness.  The pen is in your hand, so write the story that you want to live.  If what you’ve written so far isn’t making you feel happy or excited, crumple up the paper and start over again.  Change your perception and change the whole game.  You are the only one who can decide whether to see it as a tent or the Taj Mahal.

Note:  The above picture is not of my camp sight, but it definitely gives the basic idea.

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