Diamonds and Trust Nuggets
July 2013 mailing

Harness Your Power of Interpretation
(Sometimes It's the Only Power You've Got)

There's so much we legitimately can't control in life. Weather happens, traffic thickens and clogs, deadlines come at us, sometimes in swift succession. Gravity pulls things from our grasp and makes messes. Time moves us along (ready or not), we fall in and out of love, accidents catch us off-guard and change the course of our lives. Other people fail to do their part or listen to our wise words, and the whole project is lost through no fault of our own. But in any situation where we have little or no agency — no power — there's one thing that's always in reach: that's our power of interpretation.

Very few things in life have inherent meaning. Meaning is assigned. In other words, you're interpreting all the time. If someone doesn't write or call back, you might imagine they don't like you or were annoyed by your message, or you might tell yourself they're busy or have a scary inbox — it's not about you. (Try again if you still want to make contact.) If you're getting no action in the dating realm, you can decide you've lost your appeal and nobody wants you, or you can say you haven't yet met the right one. (So change your strategy in attraction/pursuit or make a joyful project of being single.) If illness strikes and you're down for longer than you ever expected, no one would fault you for thinking life sucks and any speck of God-force you could believe in has withdrawn from the premises. But you could opt to declare you needed extended downtime, it's finally time to practice excellent self-care, something had to teach you to impose on others and ask for help; here's the overhaul your life needed from the inside out. (Now make your whole life about healing — for now.) If you keep hitting dead ends in one attempt after another to get a job on your career path, you can say you're screwed, life has turned against you, you're one more victim of an abysmal economy — or call it a friendly universe giving you the nudge you needed to become the entrepreneur you (perhaps only vaguely) see you could be.

There are countless ways to interpret everything that happens all the time. Stay alert to this fact and craft your interpretations consciously. Catch yourself making bad interpretations and reframe them. You could live a certain set of circumstances and declare yourself to be a loser and a failure; you could as easily take the exact same lot and declare yourself to be in a brilliant process of growth and discovery. The first interpretation will lead to more of the same — nothing new agey about it: you've heard of self-fulfilling prophecy, right? The second will create a joyful, confident, connected way of moving through life.

Having lived both ways, I find I strongly prefer the second. (Don't you love your strong preferences?) But there's no clear line to cross for stepping into the realm of positive interpretations. It's not a once-and-for-all kind of thing. Instead, it happens over and over through a series of choices, now and now and now. If you just can't find a good interpretation, this isn't the moment to interpret. Get some sleep, eat some good food, breathe some fresh air, move your body, talk to someone who loves life and loves you, sniff a farm animal, clear some clutter, and come back to the drawing board refreshed. Refuse to sit around telling yourself that whatever you're facing means they can do it but not you, life's against you, no one will ever really love you, you don't have what it takes, it's too late, it won't work.

When you're not aware of this interpretation thing constantly at play, you won't even recognize your interpretations as such. You'll take your thoughts to be fact. You'll state them as fact. Notice you can always find people to agree with you and confirm these thoughts as facts. It's possible to end up bamboozled by a “reality” that isn't real — not to mention negative and self-defeating.

Someone once said to me, “But I'm afraid I'd just be tricking myself by finding all these positive interpretations.” Well, yeah, exactly. We trick ourselves with our minds all the time. We usually do it in the self-defeating direction, looking at ourselves through the loser lens, or money through the not-enough lens, or life through the it's-so-hard lens. Go ahead and trick yourself. Only do it in the direction of self-empowerment. Err on the side of overstating your power, all you're capable of, how very much support you have, how connected you are no matter how you feel in the moment, how adorable and creative and smart you are. If you're making it all up anyway, make up that you're the winner and that the cards are stacked in your favor and that even if this looks like the next failure in an endless string, it might just be the next glorious lesson or piece of information that's going to get you to where you're trying to go. I've written one book I (rightfully) burned and two more that were (rightfully) unpublished. Does that mean I'm not a writer? Not to me. I love writing more than ever.

Do you know Thomas Edison's famous quote? Apparently, he tried some alarming number of times to crack the code for making a long-lasting, workable light bulb (he didn't actually invent the thing), and people kept telling him to give it up, Buddy — not working. The guy Wikipedia calls “the fourth most prolific inventor in history” is said to have responded, “I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” That's the power of interpretation.

Let's get more modern and groovy. Remember what Ellen Degeneres was up to before she got more famous than ever through her current talk show — which will complete a decade this fall? In 1997, she came out as a lesbian on her old TV sitcom, Ellen, which promptly got shut down. For a while no one would touch her, and the things she touched didn't exactly turn to gold. She had good reason to go for bleak interpretations. She could have decided she was washed up, would never gain sufficient public support to succeed, would meet total humiliation going before the public again. Those wouldn't have been realities — they would've been interpretations. She sure could have made them real. She does talk about this era as being dark, but obviously she didn't destroy herself or give up. (If you want to hear more about this hard-knocks story couched in the funniest possible terms, check out this video of Ellen telling it herself.) I find her an inspiring icon for carrying on even when things look pretty hopeless — and this requires not interpreting evidence and events in ways that stop forward movement.

What's most scary in all of this is that it could stop you from being the loser once and for all. Are you ready for such a thing? Will you claim winner status and be bold enough to interpret anything that happens as evidence you're still on the way to a win? If you refuse to see anything as evidence you're not okay or you're being barred from doing what you most want to do, you can interpret every no and every shut door as guidance, as good information to have: how the light bulb doesn't work, who isn't your mentor or helper, who's not the right partner, where you're not going to work, what program isn't for you, what entrepreneurial project isn't your ultimate calling, what isn't the right color or material or spice, what it's not yet time for. You can keep moving toward your vision any way you see how (just the one next step to take right now), detached from any particular way it must look, eyes wide open and curiosity engaged to find out just how it'll all turn out.

It's an inspired and fun way to live. Sometimes it takes courage; sometimes it takes blind trust — otherwise stated, the willingness to experiment with the possibility it's a friendly universe. In my work, I sit with people trying to get pregnant, start or change relationships, change careers, break patterns of self-sabotage, take on and move through major projects related to art, home, healing, and spirituality, and I listen to their interpretations all the time. They sometimes have major perception shifts just from coming to see that what they're treating as fact is just interpretation, and other ways to frame events are not only possible but truly desirable, even crucial.

I'll throw in another Edison quote for good measure: “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” That would be because they interpreted their results as failure. And here's an example of the interpretation thing from Ellen (speaking about Call Waiting): “You hear the click, they tell you to hold on, you're confident they're going to come back to you. Then they come back and they say, 'I'm gonna take this other call.' You know what that means? They just said to that other person, 'Let me get rid of this other call.' That's what you just became.”

You can always ask yourself, Is there another interpretation here? There is, and you can even make a game of finding it. This is your power of interpretation, and it never runs out. You may have no power over any number of things happening in your life; you can always (by which I mean, every single NOW) harness your power of interpretation.

Love & blessings, Jaya

Michfest!
I'm currently preparing to present at the Michigan Womyn's Festival in early August. I'll be teaching two intensives on the topics Personal Power Surge and Get Over Her! I'm excited about both. I'll also teach both as general workshops, along with another on Powerful Self-Inquiry (The Work of Byron Katie).


Among the wonderful pieces of birthday mail I got last month (thank you, thank you, thank you), someone wrote to say she'd been on the fence about attending Michfest this year and decided to come when she saw I had an intensive on Tuesday. It's so helpful in my journey to get feedback about the impact of my work on real human beings. I so appreciate it when it comes.


Then this testimonial landed in my inbox this week:
During my sessions with you, I remembered that I can find comfort and gentleness within and for myself. I had forgotten that this was possible, and the first time you reminded me, I didn't believe you. But I was so glad to hear what you said that I cried, and decided to come see you for the next six months.

During our time together, while my life situation swirled chaotically at times, your coaching encouraged me--with a mixture of probing honesty and such sweet kindness--to cultivate my inner space. I am very grateful for this and your many, many gifts.




Free Exploration Sessions:
from 60 minutes to 30
For the past three years, I've built my business in part by offering free 60-minute sessions to give people an experience of my work. I also consider it a time tithe, as I offer the session to anyone who wants it, even if they have no intention of coaching with me. I love these sessions and find it deeply gratifying to sit with someone, anyone, and send them away with a new perspective on life, themselves, their circumstances—whatever—so that they can do it differently, connect to all that supports them, come closer to self-love. ...

It's come to this: more people show up wanting these sessions than I can properly make time for in the context of my client load. I've therefore cut them down from 60 to 30. It works! To get the free session, just fill out the contact form on my website.




New Price Point
For people who aren't in a place to create a coaching contract of several months, but want to do more than a single session, I've started offering 4 sessions for $350. This puts everyone paying just below the bottom of my sliding scale on the per-session price.




Fun with Facebook
I made a post in June that was shared twenty times--a new record. I wrote it on a day I was seriously sleep-deprived and sort of baffled by a certain situation. I also felt connected and aware of all that guides and supports me. I felt so grateful that, no matter what's happening, the way I live now, I just love my life. I had no idea what I was going to post when I sat down, and here's what came out of me:

Love your life right now (this very moment) exactly as it is. Even if you're sick, sad, tired, frustrated, overwhelmed; even if things are messy or aren't going your way or are going spectacularly WRONG--love your beautiful life. Love your privilege to be a human being grappling with a human life. Love all you don't know and let that very not-knowing be your entry into possibility, into all you haven't yet figured out. Love the mystery. Love.

Visit my Facebook page anytime for daily inspiration and reminders.