Tag Archives: Resistance

Dancing with disappointment and resistance

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A mentor once asked me, if you aren’t disappointing other people, who are you disappointing? It was one of those ah-ha moments when I came face to face (not for the first time) with my lifelong habit of “being good.” I’m so wired for it that it takes an effort to be honest with myself. Which is why writing in my journal brings such relief – it’s a no B.S. zone.

Recently I was asked what advice I would share with my 21-year-old self. She needed plenty of advice! One bit is: don’t be afraid to disappoint others. You’re going to anyway, so you might as well get used to it, rather than trying to avoid it. The freedom I felt from this advice tells me I’ve rarely followed it myself. The upside of having a son moving into his teens is that I’m getting a lot of practice, because I seem to disappoint him several times a day. Continue reading →

Flowing through fear to freedom

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I’m noticing that there’s a feeling of freedom and expansiveness that comes with the choice to say yes to something big, glorious, and challenging. That exhilaration seems to be in direct proportion to the amount of fear that a calling engenders. The greater the fear, if I do say yes to it, the greater the opening into freedom.

My relationship to fear has historically been to avoid it at all costs. Yet by trying to stay safe and avoid scary situations, I wasn’t really living. Not that I have to seek danger in order to feel alive, but when I do have these longings and ignore them or go about it in a partial way that still feels safe (try to have my cake and eat it too), that’s a form of refusal.

As Joseph Campbell teaches us, refusal is the stage of the hero’s journey that comes right after receiving the call to adventure. Continue reading →

Scarcity: It’s What’s for Breakfast

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I am an aspiring author. There, I’ve said it. Four years of architecture school, two-and-a-half years of grad school, five years of internship, six months of daily studying, a week of exams, licensure, some more jobs, five businesses, dozens of projects and – now you say, you want to be a writer? What are you thinking?

What can I say? I got the call. You know, the call that Joseph Campbell talks about that kicks off the “hero’s journey.” D.H. Lawrence, in this poem, named it the “three strange angels” who knock on your door in the middle of the night. You don’t really want to answer, but you know it can’t be avoided. They’ll just keep coming back until you answer. Continue reading →