When Everything is Dark, Stand Bright

Take all of the bad things you have been hearing lately. Think of the sensational headlines, the government briefings, the conversations in the hall at work or if you can’t go to work the conversations in your social networks, take your fears and your worries and your doubts and  bundle them all up, nice and tight. Imagine this tight, dense little stress ball as something you can hold in your hand. Now put it on a shelf, high up and out of your line of sight. 

Look around again. Look at what remains. What do we see? We see canals in Venice that are clean and clear enough for dolphins to swim in. We see an energy grid that is no longer groaning under the weight of our luminous expectations. We see kids and families playing outside in many driveways, on many streets, in many cities. Today I saw a grown man, dad bod and all, skateboarding. I saw people in hammocks and on porches in my own neighborhood that I have never seen before. The air is getting clearer as the pollution rates go down. There are fewer accidents, fewer home invasions. More and more people are turning to nature, or to art, to express connection that we have hidden from ourselves.

Why does everything we’ve ever been told about human nature mislead us into believing the worst of ourselves? Why do the worst qualities that each of us possess become the focal point in a collapsing world? Why, in the apocalypse, are we always portrayed as falling down to our lowest selves, rather than rising up to our highest selves? What drives that? Even in history, the most terrifying and sensational acts of human horridness are the ones that become immortalized. So rarely we lift up the good. Why do we do this to ourselves? What are we missing?

Right now I am feeling fear, and worry, and doubt, and anger resonating through the community. I feel it in me. I am also feeling hope, and peace, and love. I am seeing people that are finding the good in a frightening situation. People who are raising up to love and help their neighbors. People who are reaching deep into themselves to access points of spiritual beauty and growth that was previously inaccessible to them. We know we get caught up in the busy hustle of life. We know we forget to slow down. So now that we are forced to pause, and breathe, what wonders will we find? 

We don’t have to invalidate or discount the worried little stress ball we briefly set aside. But it doesn’t have to hog all of our light, either. Go, be big, be brave. Do the thing you said you wouldn’t. Lean into a forgotten art. Dance. Play. Rest. Be here, be now, because how we come out the other side of this has everything to do with where we put our energies right now. What are you going to choose?

Hidden Hazards of a Tidy Home

Right now keeping a tidy home is all the rage. Between Netflix specials featuring celebrities and clickbait articles cluttering newsfeeds, we are hit over the head with the message that tidy equals good. Tidy is structured. Tidy is organized. Tidy is having it all together. Tidy is not being knocked around by life. Our cultural imaging of the ideal living space doesn’t take into account any of the intricacies of our own unique composition. What works for me won’t work for someone else. My definition of tidy doesn’t always line up with what the “experts” say. I tolerate a different level of mess than my neighbor. 

And given that your home can also be a reflection of your current psychological state, the last thing you need when you are going through a slump is another message about how you can’t measure up. Because believe me, every single one of us has a variation of the belief “I’m not good enough” written somewhere in our core. It is part of the human condition. It the seed of shame. And you don’t need anything else adding to that, you feel it enough. 

But you do yourself a disservice if you buy into the tidy hype without question, and miss opportunities to bear witness to your own heart. One easy way you can manifest your internal dialogues into physical arrangements is in the way you keep your home. Looking deeply into how you arrange your most personal spaces can be an effective way to clue you into those underlying thought patterns. Is it messy or clean or something in between? Do you have clutter? Is there any evidence of being lived in at all, or does it look like a model home? Where do you keep our family heirlooms, if you have them? What is on the walls? What is in the closet? What’s on display? Where do you land on the spectrum of function versus aesthetics?

The universe answers your call. Good thoughts, bad thoughts, hopes, fears, the universe answers them all. And if your internal climate can have so much power over our external realities, it stands to reason that your life can be a reflection of your beliefs. A clue into the things that are at the core of everything, really. This is what you believe about yourself, about people, about the way the world works, about your religion or spirituality. These ingrained narratives have created neural pathways that can be activated in many different ways, through many different experiences. Since you are so subconsciously clued into all the ways they show up in your life, you end up finding more evidence to support the beliefs which then reinforces the neural pathways that have you on alert for the thing in the first place. You create your reality in a consistent feedback loop.

But just because your house is stationary does not mean that it is necessarily constant. You can have all sorts of states. Messy, clean, rearranged, full of people, empty of people, packed with the lives of thriving plants or those that are desperately clinging to their own life. So your home can also be a reflection of your internal state, your moods, your dispositions. When you are messy, what does that say about your thoughts? What does that say about how you are valuing yourself? When you don’t allow it to get messy at all, what does that mean? 

So pay attention to your surroundings. Be open to the possibilities of what you can learn from them. Craft awareness around the markers of your varied emotional states, particularly the ones that linger for a while. Dig into your own core and use your safe spaces as a guide. And be wary of all of the ways the subtle social messaging tries to shame you.

All of that being said, if you are in a funk, a quick clean can be a tangible and easy way to kickstart yourself out of it. Cleaning is manageable, and it is in your control. Don’t catastophize your situation and go down the rabbit hole of the next thing that needs to be cleaned and the next thing that needs to be organized and on and on and on. Or at least, be cautious when you do. Because there will always be something else. But that is the nature of personal growth too. Every step you take brings you to a new vantage point. 

Be Here Now

Life is only today. We can think about yesterday and tomorrow, and what’s happening away from us, but our experiences are grounded in the here and now. So whatever you do today, you could presumably do for the rest of your life. The choices we make, the patterns we lean into, the way we view our experiences of the world today are all shaping what happens in our futures.

This can be a good thing. Because today is manageable. Today I can avoid the sweets on the counter at work. Today I can get up when my alarm goes off. Today I can challenge myself to realistic goals and have a higher chance of succeeding at them. I may not make a million dollars or pay off my house today, but I can make smarter financial decisions.

The disconnect between today and tomorrow can be the difference between a life well lived and one that is filled with regret. By taking each day as it comes we can learn to anchor ourselves to the present moment. It can be so easy to look at achieving the big goal down the line, but we will never get there if we don’t pay attention to the little ones along the way.

So pay attention. Be where you are. And let the choices you make today set the tone for the rest of your life. And if you don’t like how you lived today, no problem. A new dawn will come.

Whole Living

The older I get, the more I feel like I am being divided into pieces. I am my work self, and my family self, and my mother self. Sometimes I am my best self and sometimes I am my worst self. But often I feel pulled in different directions. How do we learn to integrate, rather than divide? How do we practice whole living?

We will never be everything we want to be all the time. That stretches beyond our human capacity. However, we can learn to structure our energy and our lives around the things that are most important to us. The more we wrap ourselves around our values, the less we have to work to integrate them into everything we do. This frees up mental energy and time, as well as offers opportunities to recharge within our every day. But it is important to be able to identify our foundations. What is most important? What matters? How do we want to live? What do we want to be like in our relationships? If we don’t devote conscious energy to these questions, we could easily find ourselves adrift. The things we value most will simply fall off the shelf of our focus until we intentionally refocus on them. 

We can’t structure our lives to align with our values (and our goals) unless we are clear about them. Once we have established what is most important for us now and in the future we can live within our better self while leaning into our best self. But we will never be able to do that if we aren’t conscious about what that means to us. 

So how do we cultivate enough conscious awareness to consistently live out our best lives? Begin by allowing space for regular, daily reflection. Reflect on your goals for the day in the morning. Reflect on your gratitude list. Reflect on your wins and your misses when you wind down in the evening. Reflect again on your gratitudes. Integrate a practice of self-compassion. Forgive yourself when you fall short, and hold yourself accountable to keep going. Identify the slip hazards, the things that are likely to knock you off balance, as well as the things that give you strength. Once these intricacies are interconnected in a conscious way, you will be on track to living as your whole self. Rather than being divided by your commitments, relationships, and endeavors, each of these things will become beautiful, unshakeable additions to your foundation. 

Sustainable Self-Development

How do we continue to grow without burning out?

In the self-help game, how are we to make sustainable change? There is a reason that New Year’s Resolutions often fail. We go all in, gung-ho, committed to the change until we burn out and revert to the easier, pre-established patterns and pathways. It’s the same idea with crash diets. It’s the reason the people selling us get-rich-quick schemes make sure much money. Sometimes we invest in the ourselves under the illusion that sudden, large-scale change is sustainable. 

So why is it so hard to change all of the things in our lives that we want to change at one time? Why isn’t desire and motivation enough? Surely after a few weeks we should have new habits set, right? Almost. While it is true that consistency over time helps to establish new habits, more goes into unwriting the old habits than simply doing something different. It is estimated that approximately 40% of our daily decisions are made exclusively out of habit. What’s more, every time we do the same thing in the same way over again, we are reinforcing that neurological pathway. So it may not be very hard to do something different that we haven’t been doing for very long, it is much more difficult to challenge the habits that have been reinforced over a lifetime. 

We have so many neurological shortcuts from stimulus to reaction for those lifetime habits that we aren’t simply unwriting one pathway when we attempt change, we have to change many. Consider the stories you tell yourself. We all have our personal narratives that often distort our perceptions of our experiences, for good or bad. The deepest, most ingrained, most emotionally connected personal beliefs  often have some variation of “I’’m not good enough.” So imagine how many different experiences can reinforce that idea over time, if we let them.

When it comes to creating change in our life, it is easy to be initially motivated because we can easily envision the desired outcomes. It is much harder to imagine the steps required to get there, particularly in the day to day grind. These are the mundane and monotonous, often unpleasant decisions, that have to be made over and over and over again in order to reinforce the newly established pathway. Let’s take losing weight, as an example. We are forced to consider everything we eat, needing to make difficult decisions throughout the day every day. We fight the neurological impulses to indulge not only because of the instant gratification we get from the food itself, which incites the reward pathways in our brains,  but also because this is what we always do. Which means the path of least resistance, the requiring less effort, is the one we are trying to move away from. And it is exhausting to make that decision over and over again. We have a finite amount of discipline we can harness each day, and, like a muscle, that begins to fatigue. So when we have to be repeatedly disciplined and make the harder choices, all day long, day after day, that fatigue can magnify. 

And that is just for one change. Imagine adding something else on top of that. Now we are adding a whole new set of decisions and variables to our days, compounding our decision fatigue. The greater the change we try to make, the more energy is required to achieve it. 

So how do we create sustainable change in our lives? How do we continue to grow and develop without relegating ourselves to our old patterns? Start small, and add on. Rather than changing all of the eating patterns, tackle one. Rather than changing how we approach relationships, or money, or success, just take on one aspect of it at a time. Once it requires less energy to make the healthier decision, then we can add something else. But we must continuously be in check with our energy stores, and learn when we need to back off, if we are to maintain positive growth. Otherwise we run the risk of not succeeding, or worse, believing we are incapable of success. Which only reinforces the “I’m not good enough” narrative. 

I treat my toddler like a teenager, here's why...

I have worked in the mental health industry for most of my adult life. For a stretch of four years I worked as a mentor field instructor at a wilderness therapy program. Essentially, we worked with at-risk teens whose lives had derailed for one thing or another and help them to get back on track. A lot of times this was motivated by trauma or anxiety. But before we could get to the more vulnerable emotions, we dealt with a ton of defiance, resistance, and opposition. I learned how to skillfully navigate those situations by guiding them toward de-escalation and eventually compliance. I did this by looking at what was underneath and addressing that. These types of behaviors are often motivated by an underlying need that is extremely understandable and relatable. While the behaviors seem outrageous, what’s driving them is not. 

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs approaches explains which needs drive all behavior. Two of the needs that all humans (no matter how small) possess are the need for belonging, and the need for power. If someone feels that those needs aren’t being met they may act out in dramatic ways to fulfill their needs. 

Fast-foward to becoming a mom. I have noticed that my toddler seems to exhibit some of the same patterns and behaviors that the teens did. And it makes sense to me. At both stages of development they are pushing against the boundaries. They need structure, and they need to know they are safely contained. They need to know that no matter how big or wild they get, someone is still going to make sure they safe. Imagine a teen who can effectively get whatever they want. They know intuitively that they aren’t ready to be the boss of their world, even if they can’t consciously articulate it. Imagine how scary that must feel. It is developmentally natural for both toddlers and teens to push boundaries. They are supposed to do this. They need to know what they can safely do, and what they can’t do, if they are going grow out of that to a place where they can effectively provide safety for themselves. 

With toddlers the need for power and control shows up a lot, particularly around feeding time. Parents can decide what and when to feed them, and they decide if and how much they eat. It is one of the only areas of their life that they have complete control over, and they use it if they need to. My son likes me to feed him every bite one night, then throws a fit the next night if I don’t let him do it all by himself. I never quite know what I am going to get at meal time, but I approach with grace and the appreciation that he needs to feel some level of control, and I have found the more I allow that the less he acts out. 

Teenagers often assert this need in their behaviors, particularly the risky ones. They control what happens to their bodies, where they go, what they do, what they ingest. So it is a particularly dangerous time as they are pushing boundaries, and fulfilling basic power needs, and being exposed to risky things. Parents pay attention! Guide them without completely controlling them, because the tighter the leash the bigger the fight for a little lead. This is compounded by the other, perhaps more important need to feel love and belonging. That is why peer connection is so much more powerful and influential than a connection to an authority figure during this time. Toddlers are still interested in feeling connect to the authority figure (you), and will act out to get that attention. Give it! They are making bids for your love and it is okay to respond in kind. Eventually you will notice the cues they give for this need before they act out. 

So when our toddlers (or teens) are talking back, throwing fits, acting out, take a deep breath. Remember that they are supposed to be doing this, it means they are developmentally on track. Separate the outrageous behavior from the individual and look beneath it. What need is driving this? That is the thing to focus on. Let them know it is not okay to behave the way they are behaving, but put your energy toward the underlying need. By understanding that some stages of development are going to naturally come with more opposition and that’s okay, you will become more attuned to your child, which is probably all they are really asking for. 

Whoa, My Left Arm is Jacked (and other musings of a toddler's mom)

It is no surprise that parenthood is full of surprises. It doesn’t matter how many blogs and memes and books there are, they couldn’t possibly cover everything. When I was pregnant I would ask people what parenthood was like, what do I really need to know? And almost invariably I got the same infuriating answer: “Well…..you’ll see.” $%%&@!!#$!  See what?!?! What am I getting myself into? Just tell me.

And now, I understand. Parenting is ineffable. But all parents get it. Because it is a beautiful collection of tiny unpredictable things that make up one of the most relatable experiences of life. 

Let’s compare before and after on a few things.

STANDARDS

Before kids: Clean home, daily showers, healthy, high quality foods

Now: Are cheerios considered a decoration? Meh, dry shampoo is fine. Smooshed bananas and whatever is left on my son’s plate, please.

MOVEMENT

Before kids: There was a time when I could move freely on a whim, quickly pivoting whenever I please without worry

Now: Must be careful so as not to sling the little human clinging to my skirt across the living room when I turn around. Again.

REFLEXES

Before kids: Sometimes I caught things

Now: We would see a whole new world of war and sports if we could bottle the reflexes of a mother whose child is about to do something stupid.

POOR KITTY

Before kids: Happy, lazy, sleepy kitty lounging in a puddle of sun on the living room floor.

Now: Where is kitty??

EMOTIONS

Before kids: I could at least read them on the faces of others.

Now: Are you crying or laughing? What does that face mean? 

Yes, some things are irrevocably different. But I wouldn’t even consider trading it in for the previous model, my life is exactly what it is supposed to be.