“Everything I write is for spiritual reasons—to help people keep their spirits up, to help transform misery into laughter or healing, to help people remember the truth of their spiritual identities.”

Anne LaMott 

There is a language in the recovery community sometimes taken for granted and confusing when spoken outside “the rooms”.  There is much talk of god and spirit.  I use the lower case and mean no disrespect. Those of us committed to change respect that we relate to the god of our understanding, each in our own way.  Those folks who came to this commitment to change their lives through traditional 12 step programs learned this on walking into those rooms.

All one need come to believe is that there is a power in the universe greater than themselves.  For some, broken and bent by the religion practiced in their families of origin – there was comfort and freedom in believing that it wasn’t a patriarchal or king-like deity at the helm, it was simply: Good Orderly Direction. Others seemed perfectly comfortable with embracing the idea that whatever the creative energy in the universe that ordains the rising & setting of the sun, the abundance of spring, all the mystery, random smashing atoms if you will, comes down to a power greater than themselves.

“…the truth of your spiritual identity”….

for my purposes I will refer to it from time to time as god, which is to say the god of my personal understanding. For you, please read simply the god of your understanding or – the self.

That which is the finest in you – the human being vs. the human doing.

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?

Sadly, last night I witnessed a poorly attended Dublin protest on the subject of the bank bailout.

This is not a post about economics.

The legacy of having lived so many years emotionally paralysed and trapped by an anorexic vision of my future, is that I am far too impatient when I witness it in others.  The old saw that “converts are the worst kind” is so very true.

That “conversion” was an emotional and creative recovery from a life where I limited the vision of what was possible. I refused to feed my hunger for a better life, a career & financial security, by focusing on deprivation and not abundance.

One perfect example was not returning to work after the birth of my second child.

Who will take care of them when they have sick days and day care won’t have them? How will I handle evening meetings and appointments? No one only works 40 hours and is good at what they do, how will I find a job that lets me work flexible hours?

That last option was not quite as common 25 years ago – but how would I know if I didn’t challenge my assumption? It really translates:

I don’t trust that in an abundant world everything I need will come to me if I take the first step.

I didn’t “test the water”; I decided in advance that even if it could be done, and others had, I couldn’t do it. So I stayed home, became depressed, self medicated with food and became morbidly obese.

I starved myself of the creative outlet of my work, the intellectual stimulation of colleagues and even the dreaded performance reviews that do leave you with a sense of accomplishment. Face it, even if we find child rearing more rewarding, the jury is out for nearly two decades. And when you’re in the throes of it, who knows how you are doing!

And lest you hear me beating myself up without cause, I had great training for it.

Many of us were reared to believe that facing difficulty is virtuous. Staying home with children was laudable. And it was hard, but hard was good, right?

Wrong.  I laugh now when I remember the day that a friend told me I was depressed because I was a perfectionist. My response: “I am not a perfectionist, look at me, I rarely get things right!”

If you can’t seen the irony in that, give it time, it took me years to really understand.

I did not coin this term “anorexic vision” – I owe it and so much of the language of my emotional & creative recovery to a book called The Artist’s Way. The author, Julia Cameron uses it to describe the process by which we empower ourselves with choice. When we refuse to feed our hunger for a better life by focusing on our deprivation we are assuming the universe wants us to have less than we want for ourselves. And I love the way she illustrates this point:

“Looking at … creation, it is pretty clear that the creator itself did not know when to stop. There is not one pink flower, or even fifty pink flowers, but hundreds….This creator looks suspiciously like someone who just might send us support for our creative ventures.”

I believe this now, because I have lived the result. I stepped onto a plane almost two years ago leaving a secure job, a house, supportive friends and family behind. By living my intent to pick up where I’d left off at 23, I was making way for the gifts that could only come if I actually began the journey.

“I am thinking about moving to Ireland” did not cause anything to happen. Visiting a friend and setting a date opened my world up to help from friends and strangers alike. Inside of six months, people had actually tracked down the paperwork for a passport (the documentation stymied me off and on for 10 years), located a house to rent, found me a job,  and even cared for my dog and ushered her through quarantine. And if that weren’t enough, within six months of my arrival, I’d established contacts who led me back to the career I’d abandoned.

“Regrets, I’ve had a few…”

Please don’t read “regret” into this. I reared three fine young women who learned and grew with the lessons I was learning. I have been late in modelling joyful, mindful living – and it was not an easy road for them, but we have walked this painful path together. They will, I pray, accept nothing less for themselves.

Do read this as- “it can be done”. This convert to living abundantly would like to preach the message of choosing life. The only obstacle is us.

My work as a career & small business coach and in facilitating groups is informed by my own struggle and success.

So be patient with my impatience when I hear you say: “Ah sure, but you can’t change it”.

The folks around me are doing and saying what I had done for years.

Believe me, there is another way: bank bailouts, closed hospitals, & senior/disabled citizens victimised by cuts to health care, will not change because we are thinking about it. As in my life there can and will be changes when we take a first step.

Nets do appear when we leap.

Permission to give up our perfectionism came with a directive that is thousands of years old:

“It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but you are not free to desist from it either”*

Stand up, speak up, and show up for life.

* If you think that 2000 year old quote has little relevance today – read what LinkedIn Influencer and Founder of Reputation.com has to say about it in his post – it’s about the effort, not the outcome!

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?