Stop!

Today I had this unnerving experience with a physio client and found myself teetering on the edge of screaming at her "STOP!"

Let me give you a bit of background here. She isn't the first client like this that I have encountered and in all likelihood she won't be the last. Seeking confirmation of her dire condition, she repeatedly told me the same story of her injury and its evolution several times earlier this week and then proceeded to repeat the same cycle again today. Firmly rooted in the past, placing herself repeatedly in the hands of multiple practitioners, playing their opinions off of each other and grabbing bits of information out of context she has now progressively complicated her physical situation to the point of utter confusion. Chaos has possessed her body and is swirling around her presence like the numerous eddies found in the white water rapids of a fast moving river.

....stop......

This was my simple message to her today. Rather than yell it out, I took a breath and found myself repeating the word softly, meeting her intensity with one word. Allowing her to sink into it and find its firmness. Holding myself back from offering the hard edge she was ready to bash herself against with a gentle, firm request to stop.

I'm not entirely certain that even when she reached stunned silence that she was able to hear what I had to say. Without wanting to judge whatever intelligence has been spinning her in self-imposed circles crafting an ever tightening web of victim hood, I hoped that she would be able to hear my invitation to stop where she was and look forward rather than back. She was unable to tell me what she felt in this moment .... only what the past few weeks have been like. I wanted her to discover that by simply becoming still, some of the chaos would abate, if even for a moment. I wanted to share with her the opportunity to take her power back with a simple choice. I can't say for certain that any of this information found its mark or made a difference. I trust that she is exactly where she needs to be right now and found myself wondering why I would attract this woman into my life as she clearly made an impact on my day.

STOP!

That message is meant as much for me as it is for her. My own sense of urgency is taking its shape as feeling as though time is scarce. I've been feeling like I'm running into self-imposed and arbitrary deadlines.

"Be fit and fabulous before 40 comes."

"Write that book that has been nipping at your heels for months now."

"Get _______ done before the baby comes, the house needs to be listed for sale, its time to move."

I've noticed that this conversation in my head gets louder every time I work, as though precious time is seeping away. Maybe it is. Perhaps that is what I need to stop. And of course this realization is accompanied by a chorus of voices that says "must be nice", "how lazy, spoiled, unproductive" I am. Hmmm. I don't have much to say in my own defence except that I can hear the gentle, firm voice that is my own, telling me to stop and that is the one that never leads me astray, even when the chorus pipes up.

Stop rushing, stop judging myself, stop the frenzied search. Be still. Be quiet. Take stock of what is present right now - not what was or what might be.

I'm grateful for the messenger that my client was today. Without her I would not have taken the time tonight to simply stop, breathe and be present right now rather than racing ahead or circling back.

Creative Community

I have started and re-started this entry, looking for my foothold among swirling thoughts. First and foremost is my great relief to have found some time to blog today. When I stop and just feel how elated and alive I am on the days that I write, I truly have to wonder why it is that I ever let anything else come between me and this time. The reality is that I do and then wonder where my spark goes after a few days of abstinence.

As mentioned in previous entries, working part-time has been an interesting aspect of my days and I have known for some time that it is not because of the work itself but because of the people I have the privilege of working with. I have grown especially fond of the brothers who purchased my old business. In conversations over the past week I have discovered the power of creative connection in business. It doesn't seem to matter what form our creativity takes, having a muse or a sense of connection builds momentum in incredible ways. Simple conversations spark renewed interest in long forgotten projects, sweeping change is born within minutes of being seeded in a conversation between creative souls and energy is multiplied exponentially. I can see how isolated I once was in attempting to keep my businesses going, growing and thriving. I didn't have a business partner to connect with. I never lifted my gaze long enough to cultivate a muse or seek a friendship that could fuel my business creatively. In the end, I dried up, lost interest and felt compelled to move on. I don't regret the decision as there were more factors at play. I did however have a moment of "what if?" yesterday as my friend pointed out what incredible potential we would have had to create together had we met at a different point in our business lives. No doubt we will continue to create together but in other ways. I'm happy to play the role of muse, devil's advocate, agitator and cheerleader as they move forward. The role of creativity in business is certainly under rated and yet that is precisely what entrepreneurial life is all about. And entrepreneurs need creative community as much as painter's, sculptor's, writer's and other "artists"!

My own longing for creative community when it comes to writing has taken shape as a near OCD-like affliction for checking and re-checking my favorite blogs! Of course all this clicking means that I'm avoiding taking any action in my own creative life! (I'll be adding this to my growing list of how to avoid writing!!) Like anything, I know that the quality of my creative life is intricately linked with my willingness to just participate. This week I took an unprecedented step of reaching out to a woman who I have admired as a writer and filmmaker. Risking rejection, full of tales about how boring I might seem to someone of such artistic merit I was so thrilled to discover that "yes" she was interested in a conversation. My community has grown by another.

This simply act of reaching out to expand my creative community has already sparked a whole new influx of ideas and we haven't even spoken yet! Participate, engage, connect - no matter how I say it, it all speaks of action that reaches beyond the limits of my own carefully circumscribed process. I pop out into a place I haven't been before and something opens up inside me seeking expression. I'm beginning to see the parallels between my experience in business life and my experience of writing life. This time I'm willing to lift my head, look around and to reach out for creative companionship - not just once but repeatedly.

"Where else", I find myself wondering. Where else am I part of a community that I have yet to recognize as both creative and holding exciting potential. Sitting in my OB's office today, I found out just how many women are thrilled to be a part of a conversation. Every experience I have had in this generally friendly office has been a row of women quietly waiting their turn., interacting only with the nurse and staff and then obediently taking a seat to wait for their name to be called. Today was different - I was different. I made eye contact, I smiled and I spoke and the room opened up. Suddenly there was a a camaraderie born of shared experience and a lightness in the room. My OB commented on how relaxed everyone seemed today and he moved from room to room with a smile on his face rather than the look of concern he usually wears. I'm not trying to claim any responsibility for anyone else, only that my own experience of this morning was infinitely more fun and I'm looking forward to my next follow up and the familiar faces in the waiting room as we mark our weeks until delivery. Creative community redefined yet again in my experience.

So where does that leave me today? With the recognition that perhaps community isn't something out there - its something in here. It doesn't necessarily invite you in but it does invite you take your place in it when you are ready. It is dynamic and takes its shape from who happens to be there, ready and willing to step beyond their own boundaries to merge with another. It goes its separate ways from time to time only to re-emerge in new shapes and forms. My longing for creative community as a writer and entrepreneur has to do with my "nose pressed to the glass" position of late. I've decided to take my place and to reach out to keep extending the community that I chose to be a part of, recognizing that while my creative process is one I do alone, it doesn't mean I have to move around in my world alone.

HUGE!

"You're HUGE!"

Not the greeting a pregnant woman with 7 weeks to go is thrilled to hear at 8:45 in the morning. I was torn between wanting to laugh out loud at the brutal honesty of it, to flush with embarrassment or to feel stung. I suppose it was a bit of all three if I am to be honest.

It did get me thinking though - and thankfully, I have the luxury of some time this morning to come to my blog. As a sidebar, I'm quite relieved to be here. Working as a Physio, even part-time in a supportive setting, is beginning to remind me why I left in the first place. The pace is soul sucking. The process, the worldview, what I would describe as the low expectations that people hold for their health and well-being, becomes very dense and heavy. My energy is beginning to flag at this point in my pregnancy which seems to compound this sense of density.

I do find that creativity flows in different ways when I step into the Physio world. While I struggle to create on the page, I become very creative though my "hands on" interactions with clients. The concept of 'energy flows where attention' goes has never felt more true. After a long absence from daily contact with clients I have realized that an incredible thing happens when I can focus, become still and breathe in the midst of the chaos - and that is that I can "see" with my hands. Not the quite the way I see with my eyes, but more like I can feel through layers of tissue and sense when I have reached the place where the injury lies. I can "see" the physical issue through my fingers and know just how and where to move to next. After learning all the basics, something clicked and I began to make it up as I went along. My friend and colleague, Irene and I have often shared a laugh over how we struggle to reduce what we have just done with a client in a chart - friendly form. Its not impossible it just requires an incredible amount of reductionism - hence the soul sucking! But I digress....

"You're HUGE!"

After flinching inside, feeling betrayed once again by a body that doesn't seem to fit the norm - I realized that yes, in fact, I AM huge. I have never been a delicate creature - at least not in my recollection. I have been fit and fat and everything in between. I am currently enormous with child as my body is taken over by a process that is unstoppable and infinitely creative. Who I will be, what I will look like afterward remains a mystery to me. One thing will remain, however, and that is my hugeness. It may not be physical size but it most definitely will be robustness.

I have a huge spirit. I love life. I'm not likely to disappear in a room - even when I want to! I've spent years and endless amounts of energy trying to disappear. Trying to become smaller than I am by dieting, slouching, treading lightly, speaking softly, laughing quietly. Its just not me ... its me attempting to be someone else and it simply doesn't work because part of the robustness of me will always sneak out somewhere and blow my cover. Even worse, leave others wondering just who I am really based on the paradox of who I am authentically and who I have been acting like.

Which leads me off into another tangent that has been snaking its way through my journal pages and that is my comfort with paradox. Off and on over the past year and half I've been engaged in a conversation about the many paradoxes in my life. For example I know clearly that the over riding intention in my life is to make a difference in the world - and in a public way as a writer or speaker or teacher. The truth of that sits so easily in me that I find it hard to question even when I have no clue about "how". In fact the "how" will take care of itself as long as I keep showing up in my life and participating fully in what has heart and meaning for me. I believe that fully.

Here is the paradox - what has heart and meaning is my life at home. I value my solitude and quiet creative time more than gold. I want to be with my husband and children in the evenings and on the weekends. I love being the person with flexibility in our family who can take care of the details, plan the big stuff and make it all come together. After years of putting my family second and myself last while I juggled the demands of business, I relish this period in my life the way someone who has survived a desert trek relishes water.

Just last week as I drove home from the cottage with a sleeping child and an exhausted doggy, I found myself listening to the conversation in my head (I always do my best writing holding onto a steering wheel rather than a pen or keyboard!). The conversation went something along the lines of this: perhaps paradox is not black and white. Maybe its not even the "grey-area" we've come to call it. Paradox, for me, exists as an infinite range of colour and shades. Different hues and intensities are all part of the range that exists within paradox.

I recall nearly flunking an ethics course in University because I found it very difficult to reduce a written scenario in to two opposing views when I all I could see was the range of possibilities that might exist in between. I could not reduce it to its basic elements because of the human factor. To do so required me to judge someone. It required me to take a stand that declared this person is right and this one is wrong and by god, ethics and human nature are far from that simplistic!

My comfort with paradox is not because I'm unwilling to take a stand or that I'm afraid of making a choice - although there have been many times when I questioned whether this was indeed a factor. No, I believe my comfort with paradox is that fact that I have become quite comfortable with the range of shades in between. It seems to be this space that holds exponential potential if I am willing to wander there. What emerges is often surprising and delightful and larger than the paradoxical situation itself.

This thought was an epiphany. In so many ways I have challenged myself to close the gap, chastised my wishy - washy-ness, pushed myself to hurry up - and all efforts are futile! My intellect might want all of the above because that is what it presumes to be "right" but the rest of me is clearly winning. "I'm going as fast as I want to and I'm enjoying the scenery", is what my muse says and my body chimes in agreement.

So "I AM huge!" and I'll take up as much space and time as I like because anything else is a waste of precious energy. I am big enough to straddle paradox in my life and my intention - holding all the space in between as open for discovery.

PS: If you are out there and reading ... say "hi!" My other ongoing conversation has been about creative community and my longing for connection in this facet of my life ...stay tuned for that entry :)

Happy Mother's Day

It is the early hours of Mother's Day and I have been woken by persistent kicks to the bladder by the wondrous little life in my belly. My other child is sleeping deeply and not likely to wake for a while - oh the irony of motherhood! I am awake and celebrating life and just knowing I could crawl back into bed at my leisure feels luxurious. My gift to myself this morning is to sit with the birds in chorus and spend time at my keyboard. It seems that writing is like breathing and its been too long since I took a deep breath and came to this very special place.

Thank you all for your concerned emails after my last post. After rushing to Barry's Bay to see my Grandmother, I am pleased to say that while she has sustained serious heart damage, she has stabilized. Clearly, she is not done with life yet! This was quite a wake up call about just how fragile life is. It seems that my days since have been filled with stories from others about death and endings. The most poignant being one about a woman I know only through another friend, who has just given birth to her full term child, only to discover that the quietness in her body only days before going into labour foreshadowed this child's arrival as still born. My heart breaks for her -even though I know - and must believe - there is purpose and greater meaning to be found in it all.

I have begun to see that grief is as unique as a our fingerprint. Its just a code word for an experience that is subtly different for us all. This observation reminds me to leave lots of space for others in their own experience of loss and letting go and not to temper my own experience in order to make it "reasonable". I am not them and they are not me. Perhaps grieving happens in stages and perhaps what I am calling grief has more to do with opening myself and releasing something that I could never hold on to in the first place - only then can I appreciate it for what it is and not what I want it so desperately to be.

My experience with my Grandma has also been juxtaposed with an oasis of pampering at Ste. Anne's Spa. Basking in the company of friends in a beautiful and luxurious setting I recalled that during our introductory tour, we were told that many of their clients are terminally ill. They come to Ste. Anne's to reflect and re-energize as best as they can. "Why do we wait?!" - pounded through my veins upon hearing this.

At what point do we choose to live fully; to do what has heart and meaning for us? Why do we wait to pamper ourselves? To travel? To say -"I love you" or "You made a difference". This week the news was filled with the account of a man, who, when given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, walked away from the life he had built and invested his money and energy in travel and experiences to create the life he really wanted for his remaining 3 months - only to discover 3 months later that he had been "mis-diagnosed". While the media focused on his financial devastation in light of his newly discovered health and recently depleted funds - I was left wondering about his discoveries about living on his own terms. Just how much did really "living" have to do with his "mis-diagnosis". How easily will this man slip back into the illusion of his former life and how much has his recent experience shown him about "living"? Those are the questions I would like to ask.

My Grandma's best and possibly final gift to me may well be the discovery of how to live. At times it is frightening to step beyond the thin veneer that I have constructed to keep myself both safe and socially palatable and yet, as long as I remain behind its screen, I'm not fully alive. Over the past few years I have emerged considerably but my skin is quite tender and like a turtle, I am prone to ducking back in at times. This recent situation with my Grandma has reminded me to say the things that I need to say. Feel fully - even when its raw and I would rather retreat to the comfort of illusion. Accept the reality that our time in this life is finite.

As much as I would love to cling to the illusion that life continues uninterrupted - I see now that the reality of life as we currently know it ends a little each day. Sometimes we rush toward completion and at other times we meander slowly. Regardless, each moment moves us forward into the end of something and the beginning of something else.

I don't want to reach the end of my days here or with someone I love, only to discover I have not done, said or been everything I could have. No one does. Why do we procrastinate about living? How tightly do our fears hold us hostage? How numb do we become under the burden of beliefs, duties and uninspiring lives - when change is a choice? Oh yes, I get that it is both a simple and yet complicated choice, and nevertheless, it is ours to make and the courage of those choices reflects the life we get in return.

Thanks, Grandma, for your gift to me - the discovery that I can stand in the full strength of my vulnerability and that, indeed, is where the flow of life is deep, fast and abundant. I can't promise that I won't ever get lulled again by the illusion of infinite and unchanging time, become hostage to my own fears or forget that I have the power of choice- if only for a moment - but I will do my best to embrace life as it comes, trusting that when it is finished 'here' I'll have no regrets and be ready for what awaits elsewhere. Happy Mother's Day!

Endings and Beginnings

My Grandmother is dying. How quickly we don't know as there has been the usual roller coaster of acceleration and deceleration that families ride when a loved one's light starts to flicker. It feels like a life time and for me, its been less than 24 hours.

Last night and this morning as I made my preparations to leave for the long drive home, I have been wondering if I will make it on time to say goodbye. In case I don't...Grandma - this one's for you.

As I write I can feel new life squirming in my belly, anxious to be born into this world and let its light shine. I know that you , too were once that vibrant and ready to burst into flower. Life wasn't easy for you as an orphan so early but you clearly made a great life out it anyway. I'm glad you found some of your siblings later in life. It must have meant so much to discover that they were alive and so also close by. Bittersweet, I imagine.

Most of all, Grandma, I want to thank you for all your gifts to me. Some make me smile like our mutual love of shoes and clothes! Others lie deeply in my heart, like the safe haven you provided just across the street. A place where, through most of my teens I found sanctuary. I know we began a new chapter after Grandpa died and we were both stumbling around in our grief. You filled a big hole in my heart at 13 when I felt anchorless and was filled with loss, lacking the words to describe the depth of emptiness I felt with Grandpa's passing. I'm glad we had all those hours of board games and soap operas.

Thank you for teaching me about sugar cookies, jello fruit salad, jam jams and clover leaf buns. Thank you for sharing what life was like for you as you cared for your ailing adoptive mother and tried to measure up to your mother-in-law's great expectations. I knew you best in those moments.

As the years have gone by and your senses have begun to fail I have watched your world begin to get smaller and smaller so that you could manage. At the same time, my world began to explode with sights and sounds that you had a hard time hearing and seeing. It has been difficult to fit my life into the spaces that we share these days because of this - and I have never stopped feeling love and loved, feeling like you are a very important part of my life. I only wish there had been more common ground to meet in.

As your light flickers, I want you to know that a new one is about to emerge on the scene. I will be sure to share the delights of sugar cookies, jam jams, and jello fruit salad with this child - along with the many more intangible things I learned at your knee about strength, patience, deep love and tolerance.

I love you, Grandma!