Down with consistency!
Consistency is a bitch.
Let’s look at blogging and newsletters. If you’re a business owner in any sense, if you’re a writer, if you’re a coach . . . you’re supposed to ritualistically crank out illuminating advice every week ad infinitum.
You do it, or you’re supposed to hire someone to sound like you and do it and give advice on personal growth. Or astrology. Or Real Estate. Or healthy eating. Or your personal brand or vision. Advice, advice, advice. Insight. Scintillating ah-ha-provoking pieces of literature.
But this is what I see happening instead: Bright stars with amazing messages push out a month or three of amazing blogs or newsletters, then go quiet.
Really quiet.
I know how they’re feeling: They’re wondering if anyone has noticed that they emptied out. They wonder if their precious audience, who read their stories and illuminations, are all scattering to the winds.
Right now, I’m struggling to think up three new fascinating topics for my podcast. And I just can’t. I’m 500 episodes deep. That’s 500+ topics. What more can I say? What haven’t I said dozens of times?
A teacher, a true teacher, does in fact say the same thing 100s of times. We mine our jewels in incredible hardship (often) then we begin to plant them along the road for others to pick up. We plant the same seeds over and over.
Wisdom isn’t cheap. It’s not a weekly marketing email.
We offer our wisdom, then we offer it again. And eventually, we have to stop and wait for more wisdom to incubate itself inside us. Unfortunately, this isn’t how the capitalist world is set up. In that world, there’s always someone peddling a product, or an idea. Keep up.
Self-development is different. Or at least it should be.
I know why I unsubscribe to so many self-growth and business-growth type emails: they become all surfacy. “Buy this and be that.” I can feel how gradually uninspired they are-how the person behind them is reaching to get to some truth, but they don’t give me THEM , the real them.
They want me to buy into them, but they don’t let me see into them.
My peyote healing
We sit in a teepee.
It’s moist and chilly. I had to drive down the mountain from the coast at 4 a.m. this morning so I could meet the elders as they broke for their morning fast.
At 5 a.m., they opened the teepee flap and Native Americans emerged. They all wore jeans and t-shirts (mostly). I felt my preconceptions crack.
I’m at my aunt’s house sipping badly flavored vanilla coffee before dawn and I’ve just been diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer a few days before, and I’m watching a bunch of Indians groggily exit a two-story-tall teepee on the edge of her property. Sur. Real.
It’s only been a week since my doctor called with those words you never want to hear: It’s cancer.
No, really, stop, I’m only 43. This isn’t supposed to happen for another 30 years. I’m right in the middle of shit. I have two kids in grade school. You can’t be serious.
And now, the sun has just woken and I’m entering a tent overfull with men, women, and kids who’ve all been awake all night – healing, connecting, and doing something I can’t put my finger on. Frankly, I’m too aware of myself to see what’s really going on. I’m a foreign intruder with my old aunt, mom, and uncle in tow, all entering someone else’s sacred circle because we own their land. How can it get worse? Which means in my heart, I’m feeling it’s still all about me, although soon it will be all about them and I will just have to catch up to that.
My aunt bought her house on what she discovered was Native American land – traditional land for celebrating and connecting. Years ago, some tribespeople approached her and asked if they could still celebrate on her land. Of course, yes (embarrassed that I own your land). So every month or two, a big teepee and picnic tables and Porta Potties appear, and an all-night ritual commences to connect us to the stars.
My aunt was blessed, right?
She called the tribe when she learned I was diagnosed. They said yes we’ll take your niece. Come before dawn.
How to know what your doctor really thinks of you
I was with my radiation oncologist a few months ago as he examined me.
“Oh,” he says as he flips through some papers. “You’re fine. You’re not like some other people.”
I thought to myself, “Egads, what other people, and what’s wrong with them?!”
And it occurred to me, too, that you don’t really want an oncologist who’s dismissive of you.
Or do you?
I call what happened with Dr. L an “intuitive slip.” I can tell when someone is letting information pass through them. It’s an offhand remark, a casual observation they didn’t know they even spoke aloud. One of my other doctors does it too, and she also doesn’t know she does it. Nor will I ever tell her. (She’d be horrified.)
But this is one of the biggest reasons why I chose them both: they’re in touch with their guidance. It doesn’t matter if they’re traditional medicine or alternative: each follows his or her hunches. I want people like that on my team.
The muse is strong around you, Padawan
As I’m lying on the massage table, the woman who treats my lymphedema each week leans down and whispers to me, “The muse is strong around you right now.”
I immediately think “the Force” and then remind myself I’m not a Jedi.
It’s the writing muse, she tells me. And Susan is pretty good at this. She maneuvers the lymph out of my arm every Thursday, and she slips in whatever else I need to know as I’m lying face down in the hospital room on the papery sticky table.
Sometimes she sings to me while she works. Sometimes she does myofascial release, which basically means she grabs two parts of my skin and stretches it as far as it will go.
I think about why I’m going to see her every week, and part of me knows that, while yeah, I’m keeping my lymph moving and my arm from swelling, I also just want to see what else might happen.
Sometimes she gets an intuitive message for me. Sometimes I get a message for her. We swap hits and guesses. We talk politics, and about family. And then maybe she’ll touch part of me gently and ask if this is the part that’s holding fear.
“Yes,” I gulp. And then we both think about what it would be like if that part of me had no more fear.
Susan is not in your normal demographic. She wears her hair long, straight, and gray, cusses like a sailor, slips around the massage table in her granny pants and tennis shoes, is one of about ten children, and is easily twenty years my senior. She is perfect and right in every way.
She’s perfect because she really doesn’t care if other people get her or not. This is why she’s a soul sister. I don’t need other people to get me either, or at least, not as much as I used to need it.
I’m thinking about just how awesome it is to be freed from What People Think.
We live in boxes – boxes that shape the walls of our houses, and boxes that shape the walls of our minds. The most evil boxes are the ones that shape the walls of our expectations.
Made up words, or snow floating on water
Another sleepless night in 2016 had me up researching the actual 50 words Inuits (Eskimos) use for “snow.”
Such as:
natquik – drifting snow
muruaneq – soft deep snow
And my favorite, qanisqineq – snow floating on water.
I began thinking about new words that have crept in my vocabulary over the last few years, taking up their positions on my head so I can describe a new emotion or way of being that I didn’t have words for before.
There’s “pre-act” (v.) and “pre-action” (n.) as well as “pre-spond” (v.) and “pre-sponse” (n.).
These embody the idea that we can have either a reaction and pre-action at any given time.
A reaction is when you respond to what has already occurred. A pre-action is when you pre-spond to what is yet to occur. In other words, you feel an emotion toward something that has yet to occur.
We manifestors spend a lot of time in pre-action and pre-sponse, since that is what cues us in that we’re in creation mode instead of reaction mode. Pre-acting means we’re actively describing the parameters of what we intend to have happen next to the Universe. These words are embedded in every Flowdreamer’s vocabulary.
Here’s another word; “head scraping.”
I may have coined this unsexy little jobber, but it’s my mother, Venus, who usually actually does the head-scraping. (Nope, it’s not a head rub. She does it with her mind.)
Guilty and gentle
What I should be doing and what I am doing right now are totally different. Right now I’m sitting in an airport hotel in Los Angeles, alone in a huge suite, surfing Amazon for ceramic travel mugs, when I know what I should be doing is hobnobbing downstairs with some of the bigwigs I came here to learn from and hobnob with.
In fact, I’m going to walk outside my room right now, hang off the balcony and snap a pic, and show you just what I’m missing in fancy-hotel-bigwig land.
There, I did it. I’m sticking it at the top of this post.
And now I’m sitting down again and getting into the core of this lack thinking I’m in.
I’ve only realized what a state I’ve gotten myself in because it’s dawned on me that I’m still sitting on the couch in my high platform shoes and conference outfit (you know the look) and it’s been an hour since I came back to my suite. Apparently, some part of me thinks I’m still going back out to Hobnob and Make Great Deals and Connections. And this part of me is also screaming how I suck because I’m such a bad networker that I’d rather be in my room alone searching for travel mugs.
Isn’t this a familiar feeling? “What I should do” vs. “What I am doing.” And the well of guilt and insecurity that lies in between. The well of lack thinking that tells me ”¦ ”Oh Summer, if you’d just put on your big girl pants you wouldn’t miss this opportunity.”
I know we all have this going on inside us. The “what I should do” and “what I am doing” dialog, and how much we suck because we aren’t doing what we should do. We have a big long list of what we should be doing.
And this is when I hear myself in my own ears: “Be gentle with yourself, Summer.”
Be gentle with yourself.
As elusive as a unicorn
Lately I’ve been thinking that our search for balance is right up there with finding a unicorn prancing in our back yard.
We all yak about being in balance as the Holy Grail of personal growth, but most of us never get close to having it. Why is that?
As in: “I’d love for my life to be in balance. Because OMG I’m so stressed out!”
But somehow, finding that balance is as elusive as ever. No Holy Grail. No 4-leaf clover. No unicorns.
This year, I found balance. It was unexpected. And more surprising was what I didn’t have to lose to get it.
Here’s how the conversation about balance goes:
YOU: “I am SO overwhelmed. I just need more balance in my life!!’
ME: “Why don’t you just get your life in balance right now?”
“What, now? I can’t do it now. I have two papers due, my daughter’s school called because they found her with a vape pen if-you-can-believe-that, and if I don’t get some cash flow I’m going, I’m going to max out the credit card I need to pay for some medical bills!”
“OK, so it sounds like you can’t stop for balance or really bad things will happen, right?”
“Yeah that’s about it.”
“So when will you get some balance going?”
“As soon as I get through all this.”
“And when is that?”
“I don’t know.”
The problem is that balance becomes an ideal – something you can’t have until you’ve done all the hard work getting there.
I love myself…but you loving me? That’s more difficult.
Honestly I’ve started and stopped writing this email at least three times. Not only have I not written anything to you in several months (aside from my newsletter last week), but now that I am, it’s incredibly hard to get my thoughts focused.
It’s that “I don’t know where to begin” paralysis.
So how about this: right now, my daughter Lexi is sitting on the bed with me eating chocolate covered strawberries. I’m laying down with bloody drains coming out of my side, trying to take as little pain medication as possible. I just had a mastectomy.
Every day this week, my friends have been bringing my family meals. It’s only the fifth day after surgery and already my refrigerator is stuffed full. My bestie Jen sent the chocolate strawberries. I have bouquets of flowers surrounding my bed and heaps of cards on my table.
And part of me wants to text everyone and tell them to stop sending things and bringing food, because I’m fine goddamit, and then another part of me reminds me that I still need help just putting my clothes on, or brushing my hair.
I know this might be a surprise. People who live a “straight and narrow holy life” aren’t supposed to get things like cancer, are they?
I remember feeling the same way when Wayne Dyer, my radio cohost for many years, got leukemia. And when Debbie Ford, another friend, got cancer. And when Jerry Hicks got cancer.
It doesn’t make sense. Yet of course it does make sense, if we only had the wherewithal to know what was really going on Upstairs.
Nevertheless, I’m going to save the “why I manifested cancer” epistle for another post, because instead I need to explore something more immediate that’s popped up that I’m struggling to understand in terms of Flow, which is how to receive.
Yep, that old bad boy, coming around for yet another round.
What an irony, I think, that I’ve practiced the art of Flowdreaming and manifesting to where I create some truly dazzling things, but even so, here I am rubbing up again against that same ceiling.
You know how I found it this time?
Blessings in disguise
It was a big surprise when my doctor called in July and unceremoniously dropped the “C” word. Cancer. In me. Right now. And not a small tumor, but a nice big one that had sprouted babies in my breast. Flowdreaming has become about way more than just making things happen for me and “attracting” stuff…