Living Like It's Your Last

I don’t know if it’s because I am an avid, fairly serious runner, but the terrible events of Monday in Boston have reached in to my gut and yanked, pulled and jostled me. I am deeply sad.  I am angry. I am consumed with a blankness of incomprehension. Searching through the reason of my intellect I cannot locate anything that makes sense. There is no seeming pay-off for this random act of terror. It stands without any philosophical undergirding or idea that might, even in its terrible wrongness, at the very least, give some sort of explanation to the standing query of “why?”

What happened Monday in Boston is simply and profoundly, ugly. It is meanness at its most sincere; literally ripping apart the lives and bodies of people gathered to run, cheer and challenge. For no apparent reason, life was harshly interrupted.

So yesterday when I received an urgent text from my husband that one of our 10 year old daughters needed me to take her to the doc, that she had had an accident, I reacted from the anger and sadness I felt about the Boston event. I was amped for a sudden, surprising happening that could change our life forever.

It didn’t. She had tripped and fell hard into a tree root that hurt her elbow. She will be fine (exhale). She will run again. She will laugh and she will be whole.

We will never know when those unexpected occurrences that change our life or end it, will be. We don’t know. It is out of our control. In that knowledge is total and complete Full-dom! Fullness of absolute freedom to live with outrageous passion, energy, and full-tilt for this thing we call life.

When my dad was sick and in his final weeks of life, we talked about the idea of living everyday as if it were your last. We laughed a little and scoffed more because we agreed that if we were to actually do that, we would disregard much of what we do and replace it with what we love and enjoy most. “If I were to live like it was my last day,” I had said, “I would never go into work again”.

But wait, maybe it’s not so silly. Looking back to that talk almost two years ago, I had been in a job I disliked that produced heaps of stress in a toxic environment. It was not a place that nurtured the fullness of my professional capacity and worse yet, it depleted me in every way.  If it really was my last day living, no way would I keep working in that awful place. Even more, as I walked confidently out the door, I would have said what I thought without couching it in safe, inoffensive language.  

That is what I ought to have done. It would have been the right, healthy decision. I didn’t do it because I had been caught up in the perceived sense of safety and the idea that my fullness, my good self, was defined by my work and career. I was unwilling to walk away from a position beneath my wisdom and capacity and move instead into my own, good, fully capable self because I was not living full of me. Instead I was filled up with societal expectations and the unstable voices of others who, in their lack of full living, sought to reduce me in mine. 

Living full of yourself is trusting in you. It is taking the risk of listening to your good wisdom and experience, to your gut, your hopes and your needs more than any other.

The question, “If this were my last day, what would I be doing?” can serve as a Full-dom check: Am I living fully into who I honestly am and truly want to be? Am I filled up with my desires, loves and hopes? Am I using my full self to fill up the world with beauty, justice and joy? If the answer is yes, than celebrate! If there are any “no’s” than good, honest reflection is in order.

Knowing that any day could be our last, that life is unexpected and in reality, operates largely outside of our control, is a deep breathe of fresh, healing and invigorating air. It releases us to eschew all that holds us down and back in our lives. Actually, it nearly demands it.

“Stop!” truth says. “Stop spending this precious life being mean to yourself. Stop telling yourself “I can’t, I’m not enough”. Stop allowing voices of others to determine how you think about yourself. Stop giving in to expectations that are limiting to you. Stop yielding and get out there! Fly! Be Free! Stretch those arms wide and reach BIG! Reach for your full, big, unique self and fill up with the beauty of who you are and the truth that this world is here to explore, to love and to mend. Get those legs moving and run! Run into the fullness of possibility and do not take no for an answer.”

Life is yours to command, until it isn’t. And then, my darling lovely dear, it is too late. Now… today… it is not.

Awake and Aware: Guns, Schools and Violence

Conscious living is a choice, albeit one that many people in our culture choose not to make. To live consciously is to live awake and aware. It is to engage with the happenings, events, choices and questions that take us beyond the confines of our own personal crib.

When you intentionally seek information that is not directly about what’s happening in your home, your day-to-day life, your relationships and finances, you are living aware. When you decide that the world is complex, big and filled with nuances, ideas and truths that sometimes contradict one another and require an open mind to digest, then you are living awake.

Living awake and aware is one critical aspect of living full of your good self. First, to choose to live full of yourself is to disregard the traditional teaching that to do so is wrong. I can hear the voices echo in my mind and memories. “You are too full of yourself young lady!”

My great work is to loosen our cultural knee-jerk agreement with this idea: that living full of yourself is somehow bad, wrong, sinful, prideful and arrogant.

No it isn’t.

Living full of yourself is exactly what we ought to be working toward and teaching, empowering and assisting our children to do. It’s what the world needs: more women (and men) who claim and affirm their good, unique, powerful skills, intellect, and insight and who use it to make more space for everyone to flourish.

Conscious-Checks are good for the full-soul and the truth that the world is bigger than what we see and touch each day. Conscious-Checks encourage us to apply the Fullness of all that we are to the betterment of our world, society and community.

Conscious-Check for April 15th (no, not taxes) is an appeal to apply the fullness of your mind, reason and compassion to the issue of guns, education and violence.

My kids love the TV show Glee. Since we do not watch television during the week, it is a ritual to record it and watch it together on Friday or Saturday night. Last Saturday the program began with a warning that this segment would include violence in schools. After checking in with my kids and establishing ground rules (the pause button gets to be pushed whenever someone needs to stop), we proceeded. Most of the show was typical Glee – love, friendship, music and quirky side-stories – until a gun-shot rang through the halls. Until the students clamored for safety and huddled in corners. Until close-ups of terrified faces filled our TV screen. Until one character was shown standing on top of a toilet seat silently crying to herself, alone and afraid.

My kids cried. They hid their eyes. We hit pause. We talked. They shared how afraid they were of that happening in their school, of the truth that the shooting in Connecticut was still on their minds. They didn’t understand why adults loved guns so much. We talked about hunting, about their grandpa who hunted pheasants, about our beloved neighbor who is an avid hunter. “I still hate guns,” one twin stated. “All of them."  “Why do they have to be so easy to get” the other asked?
“Why,” my 13 year old wanted to know, “can’t President Obama protect us from these things?”

Why indeed?

Living in fear of guns in our schools does not create space and opportunity for our children to become full of their good intellect, responsibility and care for the world. Watching the leaders of our nation not negotiate, not discuss and not find ways to eliminate the easy access to assault weapons, is not demonstrating the fullness of what it means to lead for the sake of the whole. 

We can do better. We can help our kids discover their full, good, strong character and express their opinions to their leaders. We can role model the behavior of a fully involved citizen and call our congressperson, senator and the white house to urge passage of strict gun regulation. We can write a telephone script with our kids and help them call too. We can open this discussion up among our peers, colleagues and families. If we can’t pass stricter gun laws, at least we can make sure the issue of gun violence and easily obtainable guns is not allowed to disappear or be ignored. We need to fully keep the conversation going. No matter what.

Is Living Full of Yourself a Sin?

One of my female students asked me yesterday, "Isn't living full our yourself bad? I mean, I was taught not to prideful or arrogant. When I hear "Living Full of Yourself", that's not a positive.

I agree. The idea of being filled up with the good of your own good self has been preached, taught and directed as negative, a sin.

In Greek "sin" is "hamartia", which literally means "to miss the mark". When pleasing God, following God's law and living in a way that meets God's expectations is the mark, anything we do that takes us away from that is considered sinful. I suppose in that sense, if one believe that our whole being, our thinking, feeling, smelling, tasting and touching selves ought to live for one being only, God, then I guess getting filled up with our own good self could be missing the mark.

But wait! If you do believe in God and wish to follow God's ways, it is God who gave you life, right? God who made you who you are, yes? I grew up seeing different versions of the "God don't make no junk" poster around the homes of fellow Christians. If God is your creator, the one who gave you all of your unique blessings, skills, intellect and quirks, than wouldn't God want you to be filled up with them?

If you do not believe in God, or are working your way beyond traditional belief, roadblocks remain. In the habits and traditions of society, we come to understand that women ought to live for everyone else. We are the caretakers, the nurturers, the ones who sacrifice. Society and religion together give women limited roles that define us, telling us who we can and cannot be. To be filled up with our feminine characteristics, sexuality, intellect and power is not the kind of woman our culture promotes and greets.

It's true, even if we don't want it to be. Women, we are often our worst enemy! We judge and poke at other women, especially those who grow into power or seem to be living beyond what a "good woman or girl" are supposed to.

To live full of ourselves means a lot of things. It means first believing in your inherent worth and value. That right now, in this moment of reading these words, you know and claim you are good. Beyond good, you are of value. You are worth being around, listening to, laughing with and learning about. Right now, without any other voice affirming it, without any other entity agreeing, you are amazing.

From there, from that precipice, the juicy, explosive, sweet energy that is uniquely women's, flows out and down from our center, opening up more and more space for love, ideas, problem solving, playfulness, affirming and arousing sex, and ultimately a deep connection with the divine.

Living Full of Ourselves is the opposite of bad, negative arrogance. As my student decided to name it: Women Full of Themselves Positive Pride. And so much more!

Living Full of Ourselves!

When I was little I dreamed big, fat, unruly dreams. Do you remember those? I know you had them too: those wandering fantasies that led us into great adventures and allowed us to dance in the fullness of our hopes. Those dreams where there were no limiting interruptions of “You want to do what?” or whispers that warned of failure and looking silly or insipid. No, when we were young, we were yet undamaged by the conditioning of our culture. We were still pleasantly full of ourselves.

I recall that little girl and your little girl too, and I invite her to be present again. We need her freedom, her complete willingness to believe in the possibility of everything and the way in which she so profoundly believed in all of her! It’s time for women to affirm and be full of ourselves!

When did it happen? When did we learn that being full of ourselves was prideful and bad? That somehow being full of ourselves challenged the idea that we could love, honor, hear and follow the direction of another? That being full of ourselves meant that we had no ability to allow space for another?

How wrong those ideas are. Being full of yourself is the surest way to giving space and freedom to another. Being full of your good core self gives you the confidence to open up to the good core of another and will be the energizing dynamic that assists the flourishing of others. When we are full of ourselves we are honestly able to engage all the good qualities that are unique to who we are, and see those that are particular in another.

Being full of ourselves is the deepest, most profound connection to the divine within you and to the energy of all that is around us. Becoming Full of Ourselves is the way to loving your body, your mind and your spirit. It is the way to connection with your sisters, lovers, mothers and friends. It is the practice of breathing big, expanding arch ways of opportunity that beckon you to adventure, to new ideas, deepening old loves and knowing yourself more lovingly than ever before.

Follow me on this new way and find out how to Become a Woman who is Full of Herself!

Conscious-ness is a Choice

It’s happened to me since I was in high school. At least that’s when I first began to really notice it: the rolling eyes, shaking heads and sometimes, the blatant arm reaching out to turn up the volume, drowning out my words. I care about what’s happening in our community, state, nation and world. I always have and I naively thought that as I grew up, gained in numbers and maturity, advanced into adulthood, that others would too.

How wrong I was. Even when I worked in D.C. in the Clinton Administration, the after-hours conversation was almost always focused on gossip, who was sleeping with whom, how it was benefitting their career and how else we could find our way to the top of the heap. It was pure power and the yearning for it that drove that crowd. I was disgusted and disillusioned.  My quest continued.

“There must be a group of people, an organization, an institution that cares about the world”, I hoped, “about what’s happening to people, the poor, the disenfranchised, the gender inequities.” I turned to my church (the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) and spent 4 years in graduate school earning a Masters of Divinity (ya, I know… 4 years for a Masters! Don’t get me started) and became an ordained pastor.

I reasoned it this way. Having grown up in the church, I had taken a particular interest in Jesus and his focus on justice, equal distribution of wealth and his actions to even things out. I had come to know a radical Jesus, and so, I thought, the church could be the avenue through which consciousness, awareness and action can take place.

Wrong again. Really wrong. Members of the congregations where I was pastor did not want to engage their faith, their music, their pews, church or parking lot with the realities of the world. They did not want to hear Jesus, God, Bible or spirituality connected to what was going on in the newspaper, on the radio or TV in anyway. There were a few exceptions, but overall, the message was strong and clear. “Preach what people want to hear” and “Make me feel good about myself and my life”. Period. End of discussion.

It is work to live conscious. It is critical to live conscious for the benefit of our world, our nation, our communities and for our sons and daughters. Living in a bubble of our own making does not give us the information, challenge or wonder we need to progress, move forward and improve our society and world.  

I stand in the same place I did so long ago in high school. Eyes continue to roll when I speak about what I most care about: women valuing themselves from inside their own good core. Women don’t want to be Conscious about the realities facing women today as much as men want to pretend its all better and everything is fine. I disagree with both approaches. It is more urgent than ever for women to choose to live Conscious.

In an earlier blog I wrote about how we are obsessed with being busy. “Busy-busy-busy” we buzz as we move through the motions of our day. We hum it to confirm that we are living right, good and correct. The busier we are the better we must be doing. What is the saying we love to quote? “Idle hands are the devils tools?” So we buzz from one task to another while patting ourselves on the back.

To pretend that the chores, errands and responsibilities of our daily lives excuse us from interacting with the issues that face our society, particularly those concerning the equity of and opportunities for, women, means to live ostrich-esque; burying our mind deep in the proverbial sand.

We need to wake up. Consciousness is a Choice. It is discipline. It is the willingess to face truths that are ugly, uncomfortable or hard to hear. Like the fact that “According to Pentagon research, a quarter of all women who join the military are sexually assaulted during their careers.” Like the fact that rape remains the number one under-reported crime in America. Like the reality that women still make less than men do for the same work. Like the truth that the majority of our religions are male-centered with a male deity watching over, giving blessings and discerning prayers.

Like, like, like…. Obviously there is much more that could be said. The number of women and girls who struggle with an eating disorder, the studies that continue to find young women are still not raising their hands to ask questions in any sort of equal ratio to boys, and so it goes.

It’s not necessarily fun to be Conscious. When we choose Consciousness, it complicates our lives. It makes it messy. We can feel overwhelmed and impotent.

Wrong. We can make a difference. Simply by choosing to be Conscious, you are making a change in the environment of apathetic complicity. Simply by opening your mind to hear the realities that face women today, you are taking up space in the matter and requiring the truth to be told.

I think the need for Conscious Action is more urgent now than ever before. I believe that for all the progress made on other justice and equality issues, the rights for women and progress toward gender equality has turned backward and lessened over the last two decades. I want to change this. I want to be honest about the truth that we live in a system that does not equate the presence, power, worth and value of women with that of men.

I believe in a new vision; a new way for women to discover and rediscover, reawaken and shake-open their inner good-core, sexy-power and authentic beauty.

I see a movement of feminine energy that is dynamic; that arouses a sense of wonder, intellect and connection beyond our selves.

I see a new way to gather, to connect, network with each other and the world.

I hear words of ritual, appeals for hopes, desires, safety and calm that are feminine centered, gender neutral, said in poetry, music or as daily mantras.

I want to rewrite, reshape and reform the world of spirituality for women, to women and with women.

A Conscious, Feminine Centered Way of Living in Spirit, Mind and Body.

Join Me in the Movement.

Dear Sister,

I know you. I am you. I have lived with you, sat and counseled with you. I have sung next to in choir and encouraged you from outside the dressing room at the clothing store. I have listened to your pain, the stories from childhood that continue to haunt you. I have written prayers for you, appeals to the healing balm of truth that you are good, you are treasured and you are valued. I was with you when the wounds from long past flared; when your dad ignored you and the kid in class called you fat or when that boy told another he wished you were as good looking as your sister. I touched the hurt deep inside and together we took it out, learned from it and found ways to reimage it with love. Self love. Love for you from you. Love of all that you are because you are good. You are a goddess woman.

Our culture, traditions and religion don’t make things easy for girls and women. The idea of male preference, male domination and male superiority leaks from nearly every pour of our institutions, organizations and systems of belief.

Just today I heard a story about a woman serving in the military, raped by a colleague serving in Afghanistan, ignored and re-victimized by the authorities. The perpetrator went unpunished. The report listed many more similar incidents.

Media attention clamors over the group of all male religious leaders who have gathered together in Rome to elect another male leader to the position of highest and holiest, to lead a world-wide community of followers, more than half of whom are women.

In religion or out of it. Claiming the name of feminist or rejecting it. Loving traditional worship and music or wanting alternative options, it doesn’t matter. Women yearn for something more… for a deeper, intimate and consistently loving connection than what we can find in the options our male-driven society offers us.

We need another way. I know. I am one of you. I have been with you, walked, listened, taught and counseled you.

We need another option. A way to add to the religion we love. A different set of poems and prayers to integrate with those from our tradition. An alternative voice offering information, energy, challenge and ideas of truth, beauty, love and life.

In or out of religion, in love with the church or healing from wounds inflicted by it, living by reason or faith – women need an alternative.

Come Circle-Up with other Women and begin the journey. Give me a bit of your time and I will abundantly gift you with beginning steps along the new way, to apply to your daily life and to remind you, always, how good, valued and needed you are.

For Northern California Women! Circle-Up with me and other women next Saturday, March 23rd in Lafayette, 10 – 2pm. You will be received, dear sister, with a gracious welcome, beautiful space, nurturing ritual and inspiring, mind-enriching content. We will be together in safety, self care and celebration of women. For this Saturday, you are my special guests. Please do invite friends and family to come along. Over the next two months, these workshops will give opportunity for filming, interviews and giving voice to the too-long silent desires of women.

Circle up with me individually. Come with me on guided meditations written just for you. Speak openly in a safe, nurturing, one-on-one environment that is totally built for your good core blossoming. Watch your life shift with self-love and respect, clearer desires and hopes and concrete ways to get there.

Circle up with other women and join your beautiful, wildly competent and imaginative minds with theirs. In a MasterImagine group, I create ritual practices especially for the group, its focus, goals and hopes of what needs and wants to be created. Groups can range from parenting, finding a balanced life, self-love and love for others, finding and releasing passion, to professional satisfaction and purpose.

Create your own Circle Up of Women. Use meditations written especially for women gathering together, watch short video blogs of teaching, leading and wondering together and spend time in your own circle reaching further in and discussing. Engage with the ritual practices for a new way of a feminine-spirit life and discover how to integrate them with your traditional religious practices.

Rockin' 47!

Today I am 47 years old. 47 sleep and wake-up cycles. Forty-seven openings to the new day and emerging sun stretching out its long limbs of warmth. Today I celebrate the profound mystery and mess of life lived for 47 years.

Happy Birthday to me!

“Forty-seven” rings in my ears, it reverberates in the womb of my center. I hear it call to me, sometimes shouting and other times whispering. The loud voice declares “You rock” and I wonder from which decade that worn out phrase comes? Was it the 70’s when I was still a young kid with the future stretching endlessly in front of me? When I was adorned in the macramé vest made by my mom, and the shag haircut that replaced my long, thick flowing locks that proved to be the home of too many rats’ nests? “It has to go” my mom had said. I cried too much and too loud for beautiful hair to stay. “We’re going to get that cut,” and off we went to sit in a chair where I emerged an hour later looking like someone I didn’t know. The next morning lining up on the playground at the start of another first-grade day, Ms. Cox didn’t recognize me either. “Oh Amy!” came the exclamation. “Your hair!” Yup. I had changed. It wouldn’t be the last time.

Maybe it was the 80’s, the years of high school, homework and unspoken humiliation. Anyone looking on thought I had it all: cheerleader, popular friends, good grades. Reconnecting with high school colleagues now, none of them agree that I was an outsider with the wrong clothes and ugly body, feeling as if I was missing a vital piece of information. “What was it?” my forty-seven year old voice whispers. If I can pinpoint what I felt I lacked in high school, maybe I can find it now, when I still feel the pressure of living up to, proving my worth, worried about what others think. “Go deep,” my years of wisdom urge, “be honest and clarify your longing so you can give the secret to your children, so they will never feel lost, alone or unwanted.”

Deep. Where is that? Deep in the recesses of my choices, or the way I felt when a boy I like gave me attention? Or when my best friend settled into our friendship the way it feels to slip on that worn, loving sweatshirt? Deep down into the core of my being? To that place where I hid the secret that I was a bad girl, a sinner, a daughter who could never live up to where the eyes of her father hit each time he looked at her? Ah yes, there, that’s the spot.  “Go” my years direct, “to the profound origin of my affirmation, to where I went when I was looking for the answers.”

For decades that was God, Heavenly Father, Him, His and He. I wanted to please, to be good, to make myself in His image, like the Bible says, like I heard in church from the lips of my own father. But I wasn’t in His image and never would be, no matter how hard I tried, how earnestly I prayed or how intently I worked to cover up my womanly curves. Later the two would merge: Dad and Father, Father and Daddy. They became intertwined and soon included other men in my life: Pastor ________, Teacher ___________, Youth Sponsor _____________, Brother ______________ and finally boy ____________, boy _______________, and boy ________________.

“That was not rocking,” I say from my 47 years of knowledge, enlightenment, feminism and courageous acts of power. I have earned the right to state boldly the presence of patriarchy in my family, my church and religion and now, everywhere in my country, culture and world. I no longer wish to live up to anyone’s idea of who I am or ought to be, or what it means to be good, bad or otherwise. When I go down to dig this time, I will bring along a shovel of substance that will, I tell my 47 years, finally unearth the remaining remnants of the patriarchal lies. “I will get them out” I affirm. “Tomorrow, they will be gone.” That is the secret, I understand. “I am good, I am brilliant, I am beautiful – without any God, man or affirmation from another.” I am good because I am me.

“You rock!” must be from the 90’s, when I began this journey away from dependence on the admiration from men and women. It was then I began to allow myself to actually “rock”, to move my body without inhibition or fear of being improper or overly sexed. Learning the truth of the existence of a male-centered religion, culture and world began the to-and-fro that eventually would release me from its grip. “That is no longer you” I hear now from the core of my good self. “Now,” the voice grows in strength, “You rock!”

I do. Today, I rock. I rock hard! I proclaim my good core that I know will direct me where I ought to go, take actions that will create more good and make choices that create life, love and progression of thought. Today I know I am bigger, louder and stand taller than I ever have in my life! Even when I fail.

Today I embrace my stumbles, fall and failures. 47 years of being cautious, careful and worried about what effect a straight-up failure would have on how people see me is enough. Today I commit to not only embrace the letdowns and missteps, but to announce them! “They are mine!” I roar. “It was my good core efforts and belief in all that I can become that helped me risky vulnerability to be seen by women who need what I have to offer! It was my wisdom and skill that gave me the tools to build the ramp up which I have been rising, allowing for a fall at all!” The tone from my 47 years builds in momentum, energy and passion. “I will not be quiet or shushed!” it declares, remembering the endless battle with my strong, loud, charismatic voice.  “No more of that,” I agree with my 47 year old rockin’ self!

I am the Good-Core Goddess! I am loud! I am bold! I am open to all the universe has for me! I am a woman on a mission: a womanpreneur who will risk it all to show myself to the world and give what I have learned and earned throughout these years of work, joy, study and play. I will put my Good Core Goddess self out-there to be received and I will not be shy, afraid or deterred. When I fail, when no one attends, when the room is empty, when my TEDx numbers do not go viral, when my workshops are not full, I will keep moving. I will offer it again. I will speak again. I will write again.

Forty-seven years of knowledge, wisdom, love, sex, tears, agony, loneliness and all the grit and gratitude of life and I have arrived! “Stand tall” my inner Good Core declares, “as high as you can reach, as loud as your voice can go and as bold as you know you are worth. Rock it!”