Category Archives: Aging

How do you create a new life when you’re still living in the old one?

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House being demolished

How do you create a new life when you’re still living in the old one?

How do you change your life and live from your heart without destroying the things you love about the life you’ve already created?  

How do you stand tall and strong, when the structure you’ve built up till now wants you to stay crooked and small?

Three things:

1. Courage. Heart-based radical trust in your inner wisdom and goodness. Trust your unhappiness, boredom, frustrations, longings, desires.

2. Clarity. Get just a little clearer on the next thing. Maybe the next two things if you’re an overachiever. You don’t have to have the whole vision. Ask yourself: What tugs? What delights? You know what’s next.

3. Conflict. It’s gonna happen. Learn to manage the inevitable conflict that arises when you change how you live your life.

It’s tempting to just move out of the house. And sometimes that’s necessary and it’s what you know you want to do. You could be the woman who seemingly out of the blue divorces her husband and moves to (Santa Fe, Seattle, New York City, a farm in Iowa, fill in the blank) to follow her passion for (ceramics, whales, the theatre, organic fiber, fill in the blank) and no one saw it coming.

We’re so afraid of causing conflict. Making trouble. Rocking the boat. We’re so convinced the life we’ve built is real – immutable, rigid, solid – and if we wiggle and stretch it’ll all come crashing down. Maybe it will.

If the life you’ve built is that fragile – if all that’s holding the structure of your life together is your precious energy and power, then it might need to collapse. If you’re holding the foundation up like the Incredible Hulk while your people upstairs walk around oblivious, then you might want to stop doing that.

Over and over I hear in my clients a deep fear of talking honestly about their frustrations, anger, and yearning with their husbands.

Sometimes they’re fearful because they made a commitment x number of years ago to this man. I hear these women say, “He hasn’t changed, so why do I have the right to be unhappy? I just need to get over myself and wait out this frustration. My kids would be devastated if I left him.”

Sometimes they’re fearful because their husbands are fine with things as they are. I hear these women say, “He’s perfectly happy. I must be wrong. I must be the one who needs to be fixed. I’m being crazy and hysterical.”

Sometimes they’re fearful because they’re afraid of being dismissed by their husbands. I hear these women say, “What if he doesn’t listen? What if he blows me off? What if I’ve opened this can of worms and nothing changes?”

All of these reasons are a variation of the belief that they need permission from someone else to know what they know, feel what they feel, say what they mean, and do what they want. (Words lifted from Martha Beck’s forthcoming book, The Way of Integrity.)

We’re so well-trained by this patriarchal culture in which we live, move, and have our being, that, as women, we need to look outside ourselves for authority. That we’re irrational and we can’t trust our inner wisdom. That the only things that matter are the things we can measure.

My friends, this is bullshit. I don’t know why it is that women seem to need to to grow and change more than men. Maybe it’s because we live in cycles. We embody change. We are rooted in a deeper reality than patriarchal culture.

Why ultimately doesn’t matter.

What matters is that you trust your courageous heart’s voice, you take the next step that delights you even if it’s scary, and you learn to manage the inevitable conflict. Let me know if I can help.

Photo by Haley Hamilton on Unsplash

How to feel sad.

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"Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer... when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings." Pema Chodron

Are you feeling sad? I am. Lately, I’ve been feeling sad pretty much constantly. I have abundant reasons for sadness these days – gun violence, climate chaos, divisive politics, and the accumulated losses of my last six decades among them.

But I don’t enjoy feeling sad. I’d really like not to feel so damn sad. But not feeling sad doesn’t work. If I don’t feel my sadness, it just keeps hanging around asking for attention, getting more and more demanding.

In my 60s, I’m learning to accept that sadness and her cousins grief and pain are necessary ingredients of this whole embodied enchilada.

I’m starting to suspect that sadness will be my constant companion for the remainder of my journey, and the healthiest course of action is just to plan for that.

Because to reject sadness – to numb it through distraction or addiction, to push it away – is to reject Joy.

Sadness, pain, and grief are necessary companions of joy and love. They walk together. They’re a package deal. We simply cannot have the good feelings without the awful ones. It just doesn’t work that way. We don’t work that way.

Yes, sad or mad or scared feelings are uncomfortable. They hurt. They make us cry and rage and cower. They feel terrible. And most of us weren’t taught how to live with the discomfort of so-called negative emotions. We were likely taught to push away sadness, fear, and anger in all their permutations.

But resisting our uncomfortable feelings makes us brittle and mean. Resisting our uncomfortable feelings makes us less compassionate toward ourselves and other beings. Resisting our uncomfortable feelings turns us into pale ghosts of who we could be – shadows afraid of our own shadows.

So, let’s learn how to feel the hard stuff. Let’s be the bad-ass warriors we are, and learn to be with the emotions that make us dig deep and grow up. Learning to be with sadness, especially, is how we heal.

Not wallowing. Not denying. Just giving sadness a place at our abundant table.

Feelings are meant to be felt, not rejected, stuffed, and numbed. Your emotions will not overwhelm you if you feel them. Feelings are simply sensations that carry information.

You can survive a feeling. You can be with yourself, all of yourself, and receive the gifts of your uncomfortable feelings.

Here’s one way to be with a painful feeling (adapted from Dr. Tara Brach’s RAIN process):

  • 1. Notice the feeling. This is often the hardest step, because we’re so used to pushing painful feelings away.
  • 2. Allow that feeling to be what it is. It’s surprising how quickly feelings pass when we just allow ourselves to have them without judging ourselves.
  • 3. Give kind, curious attention to the feeling. Where does it show up in your body? Is it hot or cold? Heavy or light? Open or closed? Does it have a color? A shape? A message for you?
  • 4. As the feeling wanes, give yourself kindness. You might want to mentally tell yourself you’re safe, I love you, I’m sorry, I’m here. You might want to put your hand on your heart. Experiment to find what words and gestures bring you comfort.

And why do we do this, again? Why would we choose to feel challenging feelings?

Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön puts it this way:

When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself.

In the midst of loneliness, in the midst of fear, in the middle of feeling misunderstood and rejected is the heartbeat of all things, the genuine heart of sadness.

We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet when we don’t close off and we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.

Only when we embrace all of ourselves, including uncomfortable feelings like sadness, fear, and anger, can we truly embrace other beings. Only when we embrace all of ourselves can we be a true fountain of healing water for our thirsty world.

Some Resources:

Buddhist Psychologist Tara Brach’s RAIN of Self-Compassion, from whom I’ve adapted the process above.

Pema Chödrön: When Things Fall Apart

Contact me if you’d like to explore feeling your feelings further. I offer a free, no-obligation consultation and would love to walk with you through this process.

Photo by Aliyah Jamous on Unsplash, edited on Canva

Seek Sanctuary for Your Soul

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In his essay “Sanctuary” from On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old, author and activist Parker Palmer describes the mandatory church attendance of his childhood, and how he came to associate the word “sanctuary” with stained glass windows, hard wooden pews, and the strong desire to flee that space and its terrible feeling of captivity. He continues:

“Today—after eight decades of life in a world that’s both astonishingly beautiful and horrifically cruel—“sanctuary” is as vital as breathing to me. Sometimes I find it in churches, monasteries, and other sites formally designated “sacred.” But more often I find it in places sacred to my soul: in the natural world, in the company of a faithful friend, in solitary or shared silence, in the ambiance of a good poem or good music.

 

Sanctuary is wherever I find safe space to regain my bearings, reclaim my soul, heal my wounds, and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the storm—it’s about spiritual survival and the capacity to carry on. Today, seeking sanctuary is no more optional for me than church attendance was as a child.”

Later in the essay, Parker quotes Thomas Merton: “The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work … It destroys the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

Parker continues:

“Merton names one of our deepest needs: to protect and nurture the “root of inner wisdom” that makes work and life itself fruitful. Fed by the taproot some call the soul (emphasis mine), we need neither flee from the world nor exploit it. Instead, we can love the world with all its (and our) flaws, aspiring to the best of human possibility.

 

We can live that way only if we know when and where to seek sanctuary, reclaiming our souls for the purpose of loving the world. When service emerges from whatever nurtures the root of one’s inner wisdom, it’s much less likely to be distorted by the violence of activism and overwork. Once we understand that, we are moving toward the heart of nonviolence—the only way of being that has any chance to transcend and transform the violence of our culture.”

I am struck by Parker’s discussion of his soul as having its own life, in a sense. He describes his soul as an entity that’s part of him, yet separate—an entity that needs care and protection. It’s through care of our souls, he says, that right action emerges.

Right action, I believe, is crucial in our wounded country and hurting world. Especially now, on the eve and in the aftermath of the American midterm elections. We require action rooted in deep wisdom, action that flows from the sustaining, abiding Heart of Life.

This week, seek solace and sanctuary for your soul. Seek sanctuary for your soul, first for yourself.  And then do it for all of us, your fellow earthlings. When your work is deeply rooted in wisdom, your work will help us heal.

As Parker says, sanctuary is as “vital as breathing.”

Quotes from parker j. palmer’s On the brink of everything: grace, gravity, and growing old. BK Books, 2018.

art by ashland, oregon artist Denise kester, entitled “she let her words fly forth as blessings.”