I miss you. And Happy Father’s Day.

I miss your sense of humor, your wisdom and the very un-Irish, Talmudic way you drove home your messages, with questions.

And yet, even selfishly, I’m not inclined to “wish you were here”. The world you imagined has not yet materialized.

How lovely it would have been had your story neatly concluded as did Judy Collins’ My Father story in her song.

I miss your rabid environmentalism…

Remember telling my 5, 6 & 7 year old self all about the natural world?

All about “Five Acres and Independence“?

You’ll be pleased to know it’s still in print. Good thing too – because while it was meant to teach subsistence living to a post-depression generation – there are a few generations coming who will likely need it.

More on the economics of that another time.

mde

Recently, I found a musty old copy of “The Silent Spring” which looks a lot like this one here.

Though a funny thing happened as I re-read it. I heard your voice. Not while reading Rachael Carson’s words – but in remembering all your asides. You know – the ones where you imagined that I’d live in a house with a rainwater cistern built into the plumbing or irrigating the garden. Where the sun and wind would contribute to my energy usage. And where I’d be using grey water from the dishwasher and washer to flush the toilets.

Sadly though, not yet. And not even likely in my lifetime.

Do you remember telling me that the oil embargo in ’73 was a good thing? We were going to drive smaller cars, rely less on fossil fuel and run cars on electricity. Electric cars took another 40 years and they’ve still not caught on. Cars only stayed small until we forgot. Less than a decade on.

We recycle now, as you said we would. Though not universally. Landfills overflow, and the oceans are full of plastic. A dead whale was found in Thailand with 17 lbs. of plastic in its gut. Even fresh water streams are polluted with micro beads of plastic from the synthetic clothes we wash.

And while the bald eagle is back, I’m afraid the last male Northern White Rhino died this year. Few seem to notice that we’re losing about 150 plant, insect, bird and mammal species every day.

I miss your compassion and concern for others…

Another lesson came to mind recently, on encyclicals, labor and social justice.

I was six.

How much did you think I could understand? Did you know we wouldn’t have enough years to talk about these things when I was grown? Or was it just the heady, optimistic times in which we lived?

I can still hear your belly laugh when I came home from First Grade with the campaign rhyme –

Kennedy in the White House talking on the phone, Nixon in the doghouse chewing on a bone.

And then he won. An upstart Catholic in the White House! You were sure that meant there would be attention paid to social justice. Sure wasn’t that why the “Power Elite” fought so hard against “the papist”?

And it was John XXIII’s time. I can still here the passion and faith with which you explained why you’d been an organizer, why labor unions were so important and how it had been the words of Pious XIII’s Rerum Novarum which inspired all that in you. You explained it all in my Communion year. You wanted me to understand the significance of a that year’s Papal Directive on Christianity and Social Progress.

For what it’s worth – the only part that really sunk into my young brain was the point you made about my uncles, your brothers. They were steel workers. You said they worked harder at back breaking work, than you did at a desk. You could do your job to 65 or 70 or beyond – but their bodies wouldn’t last to pension age. That was why a balance between labor and capital – as well as respect for the difference in an earned vs. an unearned dollar – was important.

How did you know that I’d remember enough?

Is that why you went on at great length about social justice, job provision and social safety nets? By then I was 10, 11 and 12.

I miss the power of your storytelling…

I loved the long drives and vivid recollections you shared during our Sunday visits – driving through the reservoirs, parks and forests built by CCC workers.  It wasn’t until years later that I understood it was your own experience of poverty framing your description of life in those camps. Bleak as it was, it offered the only housing and work available.

I remember all the buildings we visited – most artfully embellished with friezes and sculptures owed to the New Deal’s WPA architects. And that you appreciated the pragmatism born of desperate times, enhanced by a respect for the creative.

Often I recall your awe for the power of what the public and private sector could accomplish in the sheer depth and breadth of the infrastructure projects, iconic skyscrapers and the monuments you’d point out in our drives around New York City, upstate New York and New England.

I even miss “the look”…

I live in Ireland now.

In my imagination, we visit and I giggle most Saturdays mornings in all but July and August. It’s then that I bring in wood and peat for the stoves. It makes me recall your beleaguered expression and shaking head when you described life in Ireland on return from Grandpa’s funeral here. You always began with – “Kiss the American ground you were born on…” followed by vivid and unattractive descriptions of the third world country Ireland was then.

With each filled basket, I can conjure the look. Your loving eyes are firmly fixed on me from over the top of your glasses. I hear you exclaim, “You silly witch, did your grandfather not see to it that we were born in a world of boilers and indoor plumbing?”

And so he did.

But clearly there was a circle in need of closing.

I returned a century after he left. Nearly 50 years after he died. I wasn’t actually aiming for ‘his Ireland’, though I find myself stuck in it.

As penance for some as yet undetermined failing, I work at telling your stories, sharing your wisdom and hoping that as America has abandoned its promise, moving forward, perhaps Ireland can adopt it.

The call to ‘my Ireland’ came after years on an annual course. The week-long events were set in Sligo, Cavan, Antrim, Donegal, Down and Mayo studying Jung and archetypal psychology.  Here I met Bridget, Grace and Maeve – in a place where feminine characters and the land dominate in myth. That divine feminine is what called me and where my hope for this place resides.

Here I experience the ancient and natural worlds as you shared them. Living close to the land demands a respect for riotous springs, abundant harvests and the work of just showing up for the hard labor in between.

It invites us to celebrate the way seasons punctuate our year.

We closed a circle there as well. I am at home with an agrarian, eight season calendar grounded in ritual and festival. I felt it while rearing your granddaughters in a faith tied to festivals like Imbolc and Lughnasa,  known to them as Tu Bishvat and Sukkot.

And I live in medial space…

Literally. On the border of Ulster – just beyond the Pale. And not far from Mary Gale Earley’s home place. Her journey informs so much of my understanding here. From Ireland to America, Protestant to Catholic, who could have imagined that a quote from John Henry Newman‘s faith journey printed on her memorial card, would provide insight into my struggle to understand this land of them-uns and us-uns?

And figuratively. I live as you did. Devout in your faith, and excommunicated nonetheless. Neither in nor out of Rome’s good graces. I too, live as the other – an American neither Catholic nor Protestant neither in or out of communion with my neighbors.

And always, I carry with me your good humored observation that…

We’ll get there, by degrees. The way an Irishman goes to heaven.

And while ‘we’ll’ not get where you thought we were going in my lifetime, I am confident that your granddaughters will move the world in the direction of your dreams.

They made those very same road trips, they heard you marveling at those miracles of social and economic progress albeit in my voice, and learned the optimism and sense of possibility that your “Greatest Generation” brought to the world. And I’m reminding them here.

I too, offer every 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 year old too much information, enthusiastically – knowing that something will come of it. Even if it takes a generation or two.

So for now –

Good-night; ensured release,
Imperishable peace,
Have these for yours,
While sea abides, and land,
And earth’s foundations stand,
And heaven endures.

When earth’s foundations flee,
Nor sky nor land nor sea
At all is found,
Content you, let them burn:
It is not your concern;
Sleep on, sleep sound.

Reciting Parta Quies comforts me.

And it makes me smile to remember another look over the top of your glasses, with a beleaguered expression and shaking head. All while lamenting over your lot to have had a daughter who favored the work of Houseman over Yeats, Joyce and countless other Irish poets.

He was, in your words, “That drunken, gay, Brit”.

Sleep on, Daddy, sleep sound.

The question is posed by author and creativity consultant, Dan Zadra. His book has the look and feel of a child’s book, which leaves us open, available and curious.

This book celebrates the “want to’s”, the “choose to’s” and the “I can’t wait to’s” in your life”. Whether you’re just finishing school, starting a new venture, celebrating a milestone or envisioning your retirement, you are the hero of this story.

It’s less a work-book than a play-book.

Random list-making exercises invite us to explore what we value.

“Live your life on purpose” is a call to action – and we’re encouraged to write a personal mission statement.

It’s a book of motivation and inspiration. This isn’t a to-do list – it’s a road map.  And a training manual.

“You are the hero of this story”

…and you’re thinking – “Who me? There’s not a heroic bone in my body!”

So, let’s make “hero” a bit less intimidating.

First, throw off the superhero images. Just showing up and being available is Job #1.

Accepting the challenge to live life more purposefully, to imagine a new future and to lay the foundation for a new life stage – is what we in the storytelling business call – “The Hero’s Journey”.

It was described by Joseph Campbell, author of The Power of Myth.

Myths give external explanations and stories for internal strifes. Slaying monsters is slaying the dark things inside of you. If you’re telling yourself “oh no! I couldn’t do that! I couldn’t be a writer!” that’s the dragon inside of you, and you have to slay it.

Simply stated – our heroic journey begins with saving ourselves.

And then:

“Strong people stand up for themselves. Stronger people stand up for others”  Chris Gardner

And #DontGoItAlone – get in touch if you think I can help.

Not familiar with Joseph Campbell’s work?

Hollywood film development director, Christopher Vogler summarises it brilliantly.

Here’s what we know about heroes, they-

• are usually reluctant
• are often resistant
• will have to face down fear
• will survive, wiser for the experience

For more on the power of storytelling – join me here.

Yesterday I returned home, from home. Contradiction?  Perhaps not. Ireland is my home now, then again, so is the place where my children live. Sometimes that is the Philadelphia suburb where they were reared, sometimes New Orleans where two of them go to school. In March, it was Sedona, Arizona where I joined my good friends, their children and grandson as they gathered for a family visit – regrouping in the Arizona mountains now that everyone has settled far afield of “home” in Pennsylvania.

Home. It conjures images of holidays spent with family and friends, safe places, warmth and familiar comfort. Idealised images. Hardly the stuff of everyone’s experience. Yet we are, as a culture, obsessed with it. We outfit and decorate our nests with the care of young brides planning “their day” for years. We obsess about making the best choices. We choose houses and neighbourhoods for school districts, sometimes long before children are born. We make largely emotional decisions about the most significant investment of our lives. It is little wonder that we hold fast to the illusion of the “ideal” and deny what is often the “real”.

The purpose of this visit was to empty my house and sort through the “stuff” accumulated in the last three decades. I’d lived in this house a dozen years – having retreated to it as a sanctuary when my marriage ended. And a sanctuary it was. I’d “feathered it” with the “stuff” of my girls’ childhoods, a playschool “Hello Kitty” house, and the hand knitted sweaters given to my oldest and worn by her sisters after her. Photos and scrapbooks – and unfiled photos and scrapbook material.  Kindergarten report cards and every manner of report through high school and beyond; notes to and from teachers, untried recipes ripped from magazines and my own grad school papers and transcripts. When I suggested my children go through the piles and take what they liked, there was little that appealed to them. Though for the most part they delighted in teasing me for having squirreled it all away….

I was home, comforted by their rolling eyes and their giggles, their delight and frustrations with each other, and with me.  I was at home in the same familiar way I was in a Sedona market shopping for dinner as my friends and I had done over many years on other holidays with our merged clans. In the same way that I was at home when my dog greeted me at the door of my house in an Irish village – 3000 miles away from, well, home.

So in addition to Joseph’s Campbell’s wisdom, I will add Geneen Roth’s. The author of Women, Food & God reflects on what happens when you separate yourself from your story. I paraphrase here – but her message is that you are not your story; it is merely a familiar version of yourself. You without your story will come to prefer simplicity over complication, freedom over familiarity. You without a voice rehashing that version of you to yourself will begin to embrace that you are worth your own time, you will believe that longed for possibilities are out there. That you deserve a life without a “story”.

I’d already come to that conclusion (but still lose sight of it from time to time) when I made this home for myself in Ireland.

Having embraced that wisdom again, I am happy.  I am finally home. Home after a lifetime of longing for the childhood home lost to me at nine; after inventing and reinventing facsimiles of it; after telling myself I was homeless once and would likely be again. By letting go of that story, I finally know that I carry with me the only sense of home I will ever need.

Apparently it was waiting for me to own it, all along.

Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.  Kahil Gibran

Who chooses pain?

“Not me!”  I want to shout.

Yet on reflection, it’s clearly me.

Significantly, when I’m troubled, when focus is difficult and the morning pages have not been enough to quiet me, I pick up a book of daily meditations from one of the 12-step programs.

This quote about “the bitter potion “… begins a July meditation in the OA (Overeater’s Anonymous) book, For Today (1982).

If it were not for the pain, I wouldn’t be here (in recovery). Only when the pain of  (food addiction) became worse than the pain it was intended to kill did I become willing to abandon the pretense of controlling my life.

Getting in touch with my pain is a new experience. Until the day it brought me to my knees, food was my first line of defense against any and all pain, even that caused by the food itself.

In OA, I have come to understand that I must let myself feel the pain before I can recover.

For today: I no longer choose to avoid my growing pains. My Higher Power, my program, my meetings, my friends – all stand with me as I face, head-on, whatever must be faced.

Facing what must be faced…

Julia Cameron refers to the morning pages taught in The Artist’s Way as meditation suited to Westerners.  They work because one doesn’t actually have to be still; we write to access the wisdom of our interior self.

In my box of “recovery tools,” this one is the most reliable.  There are many others.

What works best?

“It works if you work it” is the chorus spoken in unison routinely to close most 12-step meetings.  Still, I find there are days I resist picking up any tool and “working it”.

Take Morning Pages, “I am cranky, so I didn’t write them” or is it “I’m cranky because I didn’t write them”?  Am I troubled and unfocused because I haven’t been vigilant, choosing self-care, good food, less drink, more rest? Have I been doing too much and not allowing myself to just be?

This month I can answer yes to most of those queries, and humbly admit that sometimes I still choose pain.

Have you chosen pain?

My guess is that if you are still reading and food, alcohol, drugs, or gambling is not your numbing drug of choice, perhaps workaholism, depression, perfectionism, or love addiction apply.

Whatever substance or behavior we use, we choose it to numb the feelings we think would otherwise overwhelm us.¹ 

What feelings are we numbing?

To know we have to honor the physician within us.

And choose to assemble the tools that will help us to get support for our inward journey.

We are our own physicians. Our sick or injured self is part of what keeps us from being the best we can be: the most content, the most available to joy, and the most fully present in each day.

Simple but not easy…

And let me offer an apology if this seems trite or canned or easy.

When my own struggle began I didn’t even know there was a sick self to heal.  I was fine. I was in control. I had it all.

The fact that I was irritable, cycling through moods from depressed and paralyzed to wildly energetic and creative was not a problem, that was simply “how I am”.

It took hitting bottom – multiple times to name the ways in which I avoid my pain.

You may call them patterns or ‘bad habits’, I know them as addictions.

Among them, are behavioral addictions to perfectionism, and cynicism. In relationships, codependence, control, and avoidance. And in substance, food.

Serendipity and synchronicity

Both played a major role.

And if you are still reading – I hope this provides that for you.

My way to 12-Step rooms came via an assignment for a master’s program in counseling.

The journey started with AlAnon meetings over thirty years ago, OA meetings and a treatment program shortly after, and therapy all along.

Sadly, as I re-read that – instead of the gentle voice I have cultivated in my efforts at self-care – I am hearing a bit of a judging tone, “Really, you needed thirty+ years to get this?”

So let me gently assure myself – and you –  that this is not a linear process.

Recovery is the journey of a lifetime

Choosing to live a conscious life is simple. It is not easy.

There have been, and still are, struggles along the way. Some are daily in doing the work itself, but the struggle hasn’t left me bloodied and scarred,  just honestly open and vulnerable.

This process is not about donning a layer of armor to deflect blows.

It’s choosing to strip down and shear off the thick coat of matted, coarse, and wiry fur that insulates us from real feelings.

Once exposed, we can begin to experience feelings of anger, grief, and sadness cleanly in the present moment. Furthermore, resentment all but disappears.

Present as a gift

Reacting and responding in real-time has been a learned behavior.

Ask yourself – Is the raw emotion we’re experiencing entirely related to the present situation – or is the pain historic.

I can get annoyed when a driver cuts me off. But enraged signals a link to an earlier wound.²

Un-armored, we open ourselves to the touches of kindness and support available when we seek it from the right people in safe places.

And if learning to trust the abundance of good people and safe places takes you less than my thirty + years, I’ve achieved my goal of supporting shorter learning curves than mine.

So, if throwing off self-chosen pain seems daunting, I can confidently assure you that every moment of pain in that process is redeemed with many more moments of exquisite joy.

July 2010

¹Escaping the Self: Alcoholism, Spirituality, Masochism, and Other Flights from the Burden of Selfhood by Roy F. Baumeister | Goodreads

² In a recent revision I have noted this 2020 description: “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” 

A gift of the discipline adopted from The Artist’s Way is the #MorningPages. Three pages written in the fugue state between dreaming and waking when we are most in touch with our wisdom. Wisdom un-soured by intellect. Our human being absent our human thinking and doing.

I am often astounded by what lies written on the page before me. Today, in the midst of a tumultuous period I ended with:

Buoyantly and consistently hopeful for the first time in my life. Not in the way of Jennie’s “when you grow up”…then again, was she right?

To explain, Jennie was the loving grandmother who would swoop into the chaos of my childhood and assure me that everything would be all right “when you grow up”.

I often remark that I learned none of the codependent behaviours learned by children of alcoholics, developmentally – over time and experience as an adaptive response.  I learned them at her knee – the express course. By the time I was five she’d taught me everything I had to know –she’d learned it by 1890 in the chaos of her own abusive and alcoholic childhood home.

She taught me to keep my head down, pretend everything was fine, foster the illusion of a “normal” family for the outside world, deny my feelings and be a parent to myself – and my younger brother. If I did all that perfectly well enough to keep tempers calm (because children really believe everything is within their power to control) I would grow up to leave home and be happy.

What I suspected in the thirty five years between leaving home and now, was that she meant well but that she’d missed the mark.  Because really, everything wasn’t “all right”.

Everything was what you would expect from the life of a child turned adult who brought to the world a wounded, un-parented self, unrealistic expectations that she could continue to “create the illusion of a normal family”, and on a mission to recover, besieged by the “two steps forward and one step back” that comes with the territory.

There were moments of blissful joy, dark despair, celebrated life cycles, achievements, depression, calm and cycles of more of the same. More dark than light.

The most significant “ah ha” moment in my recovery was in my mid thirties while mothering three young children with the wildly hectic and erratic schedules of suburban America. They had school, sports, ballet, figure skating, and religious school, play dates etc. The youngest rarely had a midweek nap anywhere but the back of a station wagon. I’d raced home between carpools to unload groceries from a mad shopping run.  With a sleeping child in the garaged car I was tearing through bags to unload the perishables.

SPLAT went a container of yogurt all over the kitchen floor. It smeared up and down the chairs, the fridge, the wallpaper – in short, beyond a mess.

And I lost it. I broke down into the keening, crying wail of someone who has lost everything. And I had.

Three decades of unshed tears, unacknowledged pain and sheer grief welled up in me. The floodgate I’d used to hold them back was gone. I heaved and cried and rocked on that floor for a long time. My cry was the hiccupping cry of a child. “I don’t want to be a grown-up” were the choked words through the tears.

What I knew in moment was that if I didn’t clean it up, no one else would. And I understood in a core way that I did not want to be a grown up when I was 5, 15, or 35. For just a while, I wanted to be taken care of – a well parented child.

Recovery for me has been that. Reparenting myself a day at a time. Trying to be gentle and to silence the critical voice that sabotages my efforts from the mundane of housework (Really, ?!  that floor looks clean enough to you?), to my appearance (Really, ?! that’s the best you can do with…..), to my work (Really, ?! that was your idea of “well prepared”).

Some days now I never hear it. Some days there is still a faint echo. But I wake every day knowing it will take discipline and the skills I have learned to keep it silenced.

It has been quieted enough and I have been rewarded with many more moments of joy in these last 10 years than the 40 before. I have been empowered to change my life significantly and I have been happier than I ever imagined being.

Still there has been a nagging, sabotaging little girl who really does not want to be a grown up.

And two days ago, for the first time in my life when I was called upon to take care of that little girl, to put her, and me, first I made that choice for her.

It was not without pain and even frankly, the resentment that would at times arise when I’d chose other’s needs and priorities over my own. There was, however, the loving resignation that there really was no other choice.

So really, Jennie Muscara, you were right. The day after I did, finally and fully decide to be a grown-up parent to my needy little girl, everything really was all right.

I am buoyantly and consistently hopeful.

My personal journey has involved letting go of my thinking self and trusting my feeling self.  Friends and clients have frequently heard me query (as wise mentors regularly challenge me):

Is that you the human being, or you the human doing?

One gift of my move to Ireland is that many of the old distracting “doings” are out of the range of temptation. I have distanced myself from the ‘automatic’.  When I do try to fill and clutter the days here as has been my lifetime habit, it’s hard now to deny my role in giving away my time, my power and my strength.

The journey to recover this strength and power is well outlined and often driven by the following:

If I am not for myself, who is for me? When I am for myself, what am I? If not now, when?  (Hillel)

I am for myself  

…is simply the advice to know yourself. Thankfully it provides the lesson and the tools we need to make it happen.  A fully integrated self has a foundation built on self acceptance.

When I honestly celebrate my gifts and talents and then name and accept my darker side- character defects like perfectionism, pride or cynicism, I have laid a foundation to bring myself honestly and openly to the world. Arguably my friends, children and clients have learned as much from the open and honest struggle with my dark or “shadow” side, as they have from the counsel, advice or information they sought.

Who is for me?

When I model for others how to treat me the tools appear for the task. When I am truthfully and wholly me, others respond accordingly.  My confident, competent self attracts confident, competent folk and they multiply my energy. My needy self attracts fixers, generally controlling by their nature.  If I am a perfectionist, I am cranky because everything is not quite right and this attracts folks unhappy with the world; they drain my energy.

When I allow imperfection in myself, my friends, colleagues and even governments, I have enough energy to see new possibilities. “That is just how it is, so what do can I do?” That’s an optimist’s response, and thankfully, now my own.

Instead of the pessimest’s – “Sure, it will always be this way, you will never change it”

Having been both, I assure you optimism is easier, more attractive and the research shows – optimists live longer.

“What am I?”

…is a hard question to ask. If you have answered with a shaming, pessimistic voice, giving a negative message about yourself, stop.

If you are reading this, you are entitled to answer: I am beginning and becoming. For me the answer is the “I am what I am determined to become?” I am not yet that fully integrated self, but to become her I am determined to stay mindfully present, own every day and decision. I will work to embrace my dark side and celebrate every small victory on the way.

If not now, when?

This call to action reminds me that even two centuries ago, change was hard and it is in our nature to avoid the difficult. I am gently reminded to be mindfully present now.

I am not Christian, but I believe that what we “take on faith” is common to all our religious and cultural traditions.

Therefore, Jung’s description of one’s inability to love oneself as tantamount to rejecting God’s love rings very true to me:

What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself — that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved — what then? … Had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed.”

Today, I would ask you to do for yourself what sages as disparate as Hillel in the first century BCE and Jung in 1958 both taught. Love thyself.

And if a Jewish Elder and a German Psychiatrist are not authority enough for your musings, try another.

There is a no more Catholic, didactic and dogmatic document than the Baltimore Catechism (1941) that informed my first lessons in faith:

Who made you? God made me. I was made in the image and likeness of God.

We need to ask ourselves –  Can I embrace a creator without honouring and loving the creation?

One third of the way through the Artist’s Way with a new group I am once again reminded of the power of the process.

Daily writing, weekly quiet time and assignments are all designed to have you resurrect the creative children once shamed and quieted into the dutiful, responsible adults we have become.

And if you are a happy dutiful, responsible adult, stop reading.

If you ache for something to be better, new or different in your life, read on.

I encourage anyone who wants to rethink where they are now and where they are headed to pick up a copy of Julia Cameron’s work. It’s not for artist’s only. Most of the language and methods outlined here are hers. I facilitate groups based on her work – I owe my own creative recovery to the disciplines learned from her.

Let me share some of the insights from the group now having completed chapters on recovering a sense of safety, a sense of identity and a sense of power. Have we recovered them. No. Are we recovering? Yes.

Creative recovery is ongoing. It’s like living with a chronic disease. Diabetics watch their diets, take insulin if necessary; alcoholics abstain and go to meetings. We are recovering, though never cured, we are vigilant about self care. We learn to exercise disciplines that have worked again and again.

This group has arrived at such a place. We can no longer go back to bad habits and not know we are responsible for being stuck. It is no longer a secret that we keep ourselves from moving forward by being self critical, judging our efforts harshly or believing we can’t have or do what we wish. We know we can create a safe place to nurture our fledgling efforts at a new career, a better way of parenting, or behaving better in our relationships. This is the safe place to grow into the selves we might have been or are choosing to be.

We can, as Cameron points out, choose to “go sane”. It feels like going crazy, because getting unstuck is hard. We can nurture our new identity by banning the “poisonous playmates” and “crazymakers” from our lives. These are the outsiders who reinforce the negative beliefs we have. We can choose to think better of ourselves and support this when we surround ourselves with people who are positive. We have learned to remember that it is our job to do the work of changing – not to judge it.

And in our effort to take back our power – take control over the direction of our lives we learn that anger is our friend. “Not a nice friend, not a gentle friend, but a loyal friend”. We are learning to listen to our anger. We are learning to listen for the good things that come our way – the “answered prayers” the synchronicity that catches us off guard. We are learning that “luck” truly is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. We are preparing ourselves by listening for it with a different ear, believing that if we “show up”, do the work of taking small steps every day, we will move forward.

We are gently coaxing our creativity back from childhood when we knew anything was possible.

This is the work of the first three chapters and I encourage you to read along. Should you feel the discipline of a facilitated group would help your process, let me know. But try it first, take up the morning pages and see how the process works. In the language of the 12 step rooms: It works if you work it!

To join an Artist’s Way Group on-line, or here in Ireland, get in touch via the form to the right.

To learn more about the tools and the process which I call Personal Change Management – follow the link.

Living intentionally is a choice.

It’s nothing short of a heroic journey – a journey of recovery. You will not hear talk of being recovered. This is an ongoing struggle.

In my case, I was enlighted by children who are my taskmasters. They caught and duly chastised me, when I utter aloud the negative self talk that holds me back. Admittedly, on occasion, they still do.

The inner critic, censor, or in my case, the prerecorded voice of parents saying I am not creative enough, artistic enough, pretty enough, thin enough, smart enough – all often after having been praised by others for great grades or an accomplishment. Why? Perspective. They didn’t want me to “get a big head”.

Or perhaps it was that they recognised something that irritated them. More objectively it was likely they were dissatisfied with something that bothered them about themselves or each other.

And like any dependent child who believes adults are infallible – theirs was the last word; they were the authority. I recorded the message and spent a lifetime playing it back.

In a recent conversation with one daughter she related some of the negative self talk she hears. I was appalled. She like her sisters, each in a unique way – is bright, beautiful and accomplished. Did I give you that message?  Did I ever say that to you? “No”, she replied, “but you said it to yourself”.  I was sure I had affirmed and assured each of them and it was my own self abuse that undermined the message.

So what will banish that voice? First I had to learn to recognize it. My wakeup call came in a counseling session 25 years ago. I don’t know which in the litany of inadequacies I used but it was something demeaning. The therapist raised her voice (completely out of character) and sternly asked: “Would you let anyone speak to your child that way?”

I quaked, certainly not!

Adopt the premise.

No children, no problem. Visualise a vulnerable child, friend or loved one.

Would you let anyone put them down, undermine their self esteem, or murder their creative spirit? When you muster the rage, that defensive fight vs. flight response in support of that vulnerability – you are on your way. Not there yet: picture someone angry about anything, who then goes over and kicks the dog.

Think about reclaiming yourself – your spirit, your optimism, and your potential by actively fighting off the wielder of toxic words. Sadly, often ourselves.

When you repeat the message that you can’t – you can’t. When you become your greatest ally and supporter, your ideal parent, you can do anything.

Need a cheerleader?  Find a cheerleader, create a tribe. Engage. Talk about why this is so hard, even though you know it makes sense.

Learn from the best parents and teachers. They love and accept the children given to their care. They don’t chastise or undermine, they encourage and empower; teaching them to explore and maximize gifts and compensate for or to overcome challenges.

Good parents and teachers know no absolutes, only possibilities.

#DontGoItAlone! If you think we can help, get in touch via the form at the right.

For more on embracing this heroic journey, ask yourself: Where will you be 5 years from today?