Tag Archives: ownership

Four shifts to heal your life.

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Sun shining through fingers

(Three foundations – embodiment, awareness, and ownership – are fundamental. The four healing shifts – more soul, more acceptance, more intention, and more creation – are powerful. But making the shifts without the foundations is like building a house on the sand. I’m diving deeper into these seven facets of healing throughout November and December. You can subscribe here if this was forwarded to you.)

Shift #1: More soul, less façade. Explore the difference between your essential self and your social self. We all have both, and we all need both. Learn which one is in the driver’s seat, and how to change drivers if you choose to.

Many writers and thinkers have explored this core concept, often using different labels for these two parts of ourselves. Other names for “Soul” include Nature, Essential Self, Heart, True Self, and Must. Other names for “Façade” include culture, false self, space suit self, and should.

A couple of ways to begin to work with soul and façade:
1. Ask yourself these questions: What do you do because you should? What do you do just because you want to? What’s the payoff in doing things you don’t want to do but you believe you should? What’s the proportion of “should” vs “want to”? Are you happy with this?

2. If you played with last week’s “If God is … then I am … and my soul is ….” exercise, ask yourself what the opposite is. Is this a good metaphor for your façade?
Example: If God is an infinite underground river of living water, then I am a spring, and my soul is the place in the Earth where water emerges. The opposite of this could be something like “I am a Costco parking lot. I keep water from moving freely through the earth underneath me.” This feels like a good metaphor for façade to me, because wildness erupts when water is free to flow where it wants to go. So then I would ask myself where I’m hard and unyielding, stopping up living water.


Shift #2: More acceptance, less resistance. Explore your beliefs about the inevitable changes of being alive. To live is to change. Much of our suffering comes from misunderstanding and resisting change.

Change is a feature of this human life, not a bug. Because to live is to change, we have infinite chances to begin again, over and over. Every loss leads to new life. Where are you resisting change? Do you have losses to grieve? Thoughts about change to disbelieve?

Here are two blog posts from the archive for exploring this core concept further.
Seven things I wish I’d known about change fifty years ago.
Change and Covid.  (Written early in the pandemic, when we didn’t know what the hell was happening.)



Shift #3: More intention, less reaction. Explore how your thoughts cause your feelings, not the other way around. This is good news, because you can learn to choose your thoughts.

Learning to hear and question the thoughts that precede your feelings is the work of a lifetime. And it’s so worth it. When we’re in charge of our brain, we can choose thoughts that make us happier, healthier, and more whole. It’s that simple.

The most powerful tool I know to start hearing your thoughts is the Awareness Wheel. Remember, if a thought causes suffering, it isn’t true.  

Post from the archives: Thoughts create feelings. Feelings motivate actions. Actions determine results. Your results become your life.
If you want more of my writing about the Change Cycle, there’s lots. Just search “change” on the top right corner of the blog. 

Shift #4: More creator, less victim. Explore the victim triangle and the empowerment dynamic. Create the life you want, instead of passively settling for the life you have.

To what are you acquiescing? To what do you aspire? That’s all you really need to notice. Then ask yourself Dr. Edith Eger’s Four Questions:
1. What do you want?
2. Who wants it? (You, someone else, the culture, etc.?)
3. What are you going to do about it?
4. When?

Blog post from the archives: This will change your life. I’m not kidding. 


PS. We’re approaching the Winter Solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere. I love this time of year, not because of holiday energy but because of the growing dark. Despite the frantic nature of holiday preparations all around, this growing dark feels to me like a time for letting go. A time to embrace emptiness, silence, and waiting.

I’ve been doing this work for ten years now. I feel a new thing wanting to emerge, and I want to honor that feeling. So I’m trusting the cycle and letting go of my coaching practice as currently constituted. My surgery and subsequent newsletter hiatus created a lull in my client roster, so this is a perfect time. 

I don’t know what my coaching work will look like going forward. I have a hunch I’ll be writing and offering classes, workshops, and retreats. I’ll be organizing ten years worth of blog posts into categories and putting them under a coaching tab on my website as PDFs. I’ll continue to writing books, both fiction and nonfiction. I’ll continue to send this email as I have news and writing to share. Probably. What I do know is that I love this work, and I want to honor my soul’s mysterious “musts.” I also know that new life grows in the dark, and emerges on its own time. 

So much change happens in the dark. I’m wishing you abundant blessings of this dark time and the return of the light, and I look forward to connecting in the new year.
What does it mean that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?  ~Mary Oliver

Photo credit: Natalie Rhea Rigg on Unsplash

Foundation #1: Embodiment

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Baby held in big hands, Anne Geddes

Your body is the only thing you have for your entire life. Know your self as embodied. Know your body. Honor your body. Listen to your body. Celebrate your body.

You come into this world in a little wrinkled body, and you leave in a large wrinkled body … if you’re lucky. ~Wayne Dyer

But gosh, sometimes it’s hard to feel lucky, isn’t it?

Embodiment is the first foundation of my Coaching Intensive for a reason.

The process of disconnecting ourselves from our body begins at birth. We learn not to trust our body’s messages as we’re socialized in a capitalist culture. What your body wants is damned inconvenient for a product-driven, resource-draining patriarchal economy, so you’re taught not to listen to it.

This body-vacating, head-driven way of living is especially true for those of us socialized as women.

As women, we’re taught to be pleasing, which means small, quiet, helpful, compliant, and outwardly-focused. We’re taught that our bodies are not ours to do with as we please, but as others please. Our parents, our teachers and pastors, our husbands, Congress and the Supreme Court, the random dude on the street who ogles our breasts, the plastic surgeon who tells us we should want our pre-baby vagina back — all presume to take ownership of our bodies. After a while, our bodies never feel like ours, except in secret.  

Our body’s voice becomes the enemy’s voice, a voice we have to resist and tame. So we diet, we exercise hard, we ignore our sexual preferences, we hate on our wrinkles and folds. We fit into the small, quiet, helpful, outwardly-focused box labeled “feminine.” This process of disconnecting us from ownership of our bodies has been going on for so long it’s invisible. It’s the air we breathe.   

Abdicating ownership of your body is how you’ve learned to stay safe in a culture which only values your body as a commodity. It’s not your fault.

Stop reading and take a moment. Feel into your body. Is my bleak description accurate to you? Are you angry? Are you sad?

Again, vacating your body—seeing it as an enemy to be vanquished through self-criticism, diets, over-exercise, ignoring its cries for help—is how you’ve stayed safe in a culture that wants your body for its own uses and occasionally uses violence to get it. Being disembodied is not your fault. But, now that you see what you’ve been taught as the lie it most assuredly is, reclaiming your body is your responsibility.

Here’s what’s actually true.

Your body is yours to care for, direct, and enjoy. Yours, and no one else’s. Embodiment, being embodied, fully inhabiting and adoring your sweet pod, is necessary for healing.

Your body doesn’t lie. It only tells the truth. You came into this life only capable of telling the truth. Lying is a skill you acquired as your brain matured, and you became more savvy about how to get along in our sick culture.  

Our minds tell our bodies that only our minds know the truth, and over time we believe the lie. What’s true? When you “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” you will turn toward home.

Underneath decades of accreted socialization and associated untruths, there you are. The real you. The embodied you. The you that carries who you really are and what you really want.

That’s why this is where we start. We re-center our knowing in our bodies, because our bodies are where joy, wisdom, and truth live.

Your body is waiting for you. Go home. Go home.

PS. The Body Compass tool is the first thing I teach new clients, and we use it throughout our work together. Contact me to schedule a free no-strings-attached Clarity Call where we can explore how to access your body’s truth-infused wisdom. 

Photo credit: Anne Geddes

How to heal your life.

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Woman raising fist in triumph

These eight actions will heal your life. 

Three Foundations:

  • Embodiment. Your body is the only thing you have for your entire life. Know your embodied self. Honor your body. Listen to your body. Learn to love your body.
  • Awareness. Be courageously present to your life: body, mind, heart, soul, spirit.
  • Ownership. Examine your theology. Deconstruct and reconstruct as you choose. Reclaim your rightful authority over your beliefs. 

Four Healing Shifts:

  • More soul, less façade. Explore the difference between your essential self and your social self. We all have both, and we need both. Learn which one is driving your bus, and how to change drivers if you choose to.
  • More acceptance, less resistance. Explore your beliefs about the inevitable changes of being alive in a human body. To live is to change. Much of our suffering comes from misunderstanding and resisting change. 
  • More intention, less reaction. Explore how your thoughts are causing your feelings, not the other way around. This is good news, because you can learn to choose your thoughts. 
  • More creator, less victim. Explore the victim triangle and the empowerment dynamic. Create the life you want, instead of passively settling for the life you have. 

Put it all together.

  • Design a solid, personalized, do-able plan to create what you want in your life.

These eight actions are the core components of my Coaching Intensive, a culmination of everything I’ve learned in my six decades of loving, suffering, learning, and delighting in my one life.

I’d love to share them with more of you and dig deeply into them, so this space will be devoted to exploring them in depth, one each week until the end of the year.

Currently my Coaching Intensive is only available in a private coaching format. I’ll have a special announcement soon about another way you can work with me to implement these eight healing actions, starting in January. (If you just cringed because that feels salesy, I promise I’m not being coy. I’m just still working on the details.)

PS. Thank you for sticking with me as my right hand heals from its surgical intervention. I’m typing with nine fingers now! And emerging from my chrysalis full of words and ideas!