that call you to feel ALIVE I was doing a focus wheel early one morning to get my head space right where I wanted it. (Focus wheels are FUN and you can add color or use different colored pens. TRY IT. No tool is better for pointing yourself properly toward the day or some specific task or event that you notice has anything sticky or heavy in it for you.) Somehow the lightening sky caught my attention through a window and I had the impulse to jump up, step outside, and look up. And then I didn’t want to. It’s getting cold, and I’m not acclimated yet, and I tend to resist cold. And I accused myself of not focusing if I got up. (It’s a weird way we talk ourselves out of following guidance—with some righteous-sounding accusation.) But that place in my side where I got the tug was still doing something, and I’m pretty committed to following those nudges & impulses when I get them. So I got up and went outside. Wow. The air was amazing, if a little cold—then the longer I stayed the more I felt into how fine it was to feel cold. The clouds were kind of blushing just a little bit with the edge of the sunrise (which is mostly blocked where I am, so I LOVE when I step out while the clouds are still reflecting some color). The moon was a skinny sliver, which may be my favorite phase in its cycles—and most certainly is my favorite in the now-moment when I catch it in that phase. And then as I stood there, I happened to look down and over as a rabbit popped out of a hiding place and hop-ran away from my human presence. They may not have been happy to see me, but I was oh so happy to see them. I love a rabbit sighting, and I’d been thinking I hadn’t seen one in a while. And then I looked up at the moon and clouds and sky again and remembered something I love to say to myself: let the morning make its impressions on you. I did that. I loved it. And I felt so alive. Let the morning make its impressions on you. You can place any word you like in the slot morning is taking up in that sentence. However you fill in the blank, the idea here is a call to PRESENCE. Fully take in the thing you’re bringing awareness to. Let it make its impressions on you. Feel it in body and heart. There’s head-center stuff to notice too—like associations, symbology, or even just using what you perceive to consciously tell yourself things: This is a lovely morning. What an amazing way to start the day. This is going to be a great day. This is not a wow or intense story. There’s no car chase. No falling in love, except with the moon, all over again. Nothing extraordinary or even worth writing about. Except I really wanted to write about it because it has huge implications for your connection to your guidance system, and for living the life you want. I want to invite you to follow those impulses that make you feel alive. That’s one way you know it’s a good impulse. (Okay, sure, if you’re an adrenaline addict or if anything that’s really self-harming makes you feel alive while you’re healing something, this does not apply.) For the impulses to do what nourishes your soul and thus your entire being, go. Jump up. Step out. Let some small thing be worth a moment of disturbance, like it’s worth it to drink water, to do a stretch, to gaze at a face you love in the middle of your work day or any activity. Notice your resistance to following those impulses. Don’t worry about it or judge it. Don’t even sit around asking, Why do I resist these things? Do notice. Notice that you’re calibrated to talking yourself out of things that actually align with what you say you want or value or who you want to be or how you want to live. That’s no problem, because we all do this. And we all have a guidance system that’s equipped to move us through and around resistance. We all have resistance. It’s a wacky human thing. Do be aware of it and notice it, and just take a moment to call it what it is: it actually helps to name your resistance. We sometimes especially resist little things. You won’t make or break anyone’s day or ruin their life if you push against an impulse to go look at the moon. But actually, you could change your day more than you suspect in the moment. You will certainly rob yourself of that dance with consciousness in which you’re constantly whisper-called and gently nudged, again and again, so kindly, so gently, to all that you want. And when you practice following those tiny impulses with the little things, you get really good at doing the dance (YOUR DANCE WITH CONSCIOUSNESS) and you can apply it in all things large or small. Most of us talk back to some absurd percentage of the guidance-system impulses that come our way. What if you didn’t? What could your life become if you made it a practice to just respond, now, to all the nudges toward LIFE and feeling alive and taking care of yourself and reaching out to someone and and and … Find easy, tiny ways to just respond to the guidance. It’s actually not inconsequential to let the dawn make its impressions on you. Or to throw into the pot the random spice you just thought of or the vegetable that caught your eye. It does something to get up and brush your teeth when you feel the tug to go do that next. Follow your guidance system. One tiny impulse at a time, it will get your right where you want to be. And one noticing and countering of resistance at a time, you’ll become a well-tuned dance partner to this custom-made guidance system that kind of only has eyes for you—and actually has the good of all concerned forever simultaneously in view. You really can’t go wrong. Wanna make it a practice? Love & blessings, Jaya
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… What decides it? Let me just say a few words about your marvelous guidance system (which you can amend as you like to fit what rings true for you) and then I’d like to look with you at what on earth you would let decide your life for you if not that. Head straight for that bullet list below if you just want to consider what else could lead what you do and don’t do, what you choose, what you do or don’t admit to your experience, your heart, your life. And just after the bullet points is a doozy that needed its own paragraph, so maybe read that too. You have so much freedom to create your life from the inside. You get to notice everything out there that gets your attention and run it by how it makes you feel, whether it feels aligned or off to you, whether it sparks an expansive, excited sense of creating the next thing you want (in all realms of life), or whether it feels defeating or depleting or fraught with obligation, guilt, old stories and decisions made in the past, and so on. You get to keep it fresh if you want to. That’s true even if you can’t instantly change current conditions. You can always change how you feel. You can always change what you say yes or no or how much to right now. And your guidance system is always calling you to what feels better and more aligned. With zero judgment, coercion, or manipulation. Just letting you know. Now and now and now. Your job for living at the highest level you’re capable of RIGHT NOW is to respond to your own guidance system. It’s never out there—it’s inside you. But the out-there stuff is part of your dance with consciousness. It’s full of symbols, signals, suggestions—all kinds of stuff you can respond to. More important, you can notice how you ARE responding—how anything registers for you in body, heart, head. What happens when that comes into your field? Does it make you feel expansive, more on-course, more curious about life, more authentically you? Does it feel full of new possibility, growth, more fun, more freedom, more ease? MORE OF THAT. Does it make you feel bad, like you’re doing it wrong and won’t ever get it right, like you have to bite some bullet or put in a bunch of time where nothing remotely matches what you want and who you know yourself to be (or, if. you’ve gotten away from yourself, from what you suspect and still get glimmers of)? To anything that just feels NOT HOW YOU WANT TO FEEL, please, LESS OF THAT. And if you don’t follow your marvelous guidance system--that originates in you, that comes up from inside you; that has alllll the facts and stats about what’s going on now, what has been, and where you’d actually like to go next; that knows exactly what your obstacles and fears and limited beliefs are, AND IS EQUIPPED TO MOVE YOU THROUGH AND AROUND THOSE—if not that amazing guidance system, then what? I asked a client that question rhetorically the other day, and then all of these answers wanted to pour in. So I wrote them down. You could let yourself choose any one thing and another and another and your whole entire life out of any of the following (instead of in response to your own guidance) (and of course, this is not an exhaustive list, so do open to what else wants to come to you):
To be clear, those things could be choosing your life. And then there’s this crazy thing: what you promised or committed to before. You SAID, so you’re sticking to it. Never mind that by now, life has brought in a whole bunch of new information (and keeps persistently trying to bring it to your notice, because our guidance system NEVER gives up on us), information that you COULD hold up to the old promise in order to take in that it practically begs and screams for you to appropriately renegotiate and/or revise it—but you’re letting your past self and what they knew and decided and said decide today, against what your guidance system is bringing in today. Against the fresh dynamic-NOW wisdom of your own marvelous guidance system, that’s actually tapped in to the evolution, to your becoming, to all that you keep stretching into (or at least would like to, at least at the soul level). But let’s go back to that parenthetical in the above paragraph. Your guidance system is like an adoring dog whose loyalty will not budge. It will not give up on you. It will not punish you for ignoring it or talking back. It will not stop coming up with creative ways to get your attention. And it will not stop using your EMOTIONS to help you really get and viscerally know: this is what I love and what feels good; this is what makes me feel terrible and what I need to adjust and/or move away from. Heart guidance will be the topic of a future mailing. In the meantime, my work here is finished: consider what decides it for you if not your guidance system. And whatever you do or don’t see right now, consider more responding to and flowing with the nudges, tugs, flashes, zingy attention-getters, inspired ideas, impulses to act, random people dropping into your field or mind, dreams, persistent desires, and all the magic, synchronicity, and repeating echoing themes that keep coming in from the outside and bumping into your deep inner knowing and the truth of who you really are. Love & blessings, Jaya 4 Things to remind yourself early & often
(which will connect you to self & to guidance) 1. Bring it to now: Come back from the future (quit predicting what you don't want) and come back from the past (quit accruing towers of one thing stacked on top of another so it's all too much) and don't try to figure it all out. What can you do right now to align with this moment? Notice that you're equipped for this one moment. 2. Come back to the breath: Breathing is a felt, sensory experience, but we typically don't feel it. I love to invite people not to breeaaaaathe or even to take a deep breath, but to simply drop into the breath; follow it; stay with it; feel it. Feel its soothing, its kindness, its calming capacity. Feel how it brings you to the core of your being and brings your whole nervous system down a notch or two. It's powerful to take some moments dropping in with the breath and come back to yourself. 3. You don't have to figure it all out right now: This is a great thing to tell yourself to get out of your head, out of fix-it mode, out of believing you're not okay till you have it all sorted out and see the way forward. Actually, if you don't see it all clearly, then you don't have to figure it out right now. Soothe yourself instead (see Come back to the breath above). 4. You are guided: Life wants to get you where you're going. It wants to feed you, provide for your needs, heal and evolve you, keep bringing you closer to love. When you think you need to know what the future will hold, or insist on a blueprint for getting there (when there isn't one), or--yuck--fault yourself because you must be doing something wrong if you don't see the way forward: STOP. Quit thinking you're all alone and it's all up to you to find your way through the dark. You're guided. Connect to guidance. Love & blessings, Jaya heyyyy. LOOK RIGHT for CORONA SUPPORT label under CATEGORIES. Find posts most likely to support you as you move through the fascinating challenge of a pandemic. You're equipped to meet this, and to meet yourself kindly on this journey! Okay, I know the thing these days is succinct posts with practical bullet points and sound bites. That’s not what I’m doing here. I’m going with
My object here is to invite you to use the holidays for your becoming, not for a habitual replay of old stories and bygone identities. Use this time of festivity, connection, and sacred renewal to honor your healing and evolution. A Story of My Hapless Mother and Holiday Misery In my growing-up story, the woman who played the mother character was both beautiful and flimsy. She had no concept of her own beauty, no solid grasp on her own goodness and inherent worthiness. (Both of these had always been constantly, in clipped comments and spiteful tones, thrown into question by her own mother.) Once, when we lived in France (I was maybe seven), I remember creeping into the living room during a gathering that featured grown-ups speaking French and English with more accents than I could track. My eyes flashing across the room, I captured a live snapshot of my Arkansas mom taking a drag off a cigarette. My mom didn’t smoke! But hey—in 1960-something, just anyone can reach for that prop in a smoky social scene and get away with it. I was struck in that unforgettable moment by her beauty. She could’ve been a movie star, from where I stood in semi-hiding. There were other such moments of brief, dazzling light shone on the subject of my mother, but they never stuck. She would always go back to her fretting self, probably jerked into that known place by the mother an ocean away whom she kept close in her mind, whose worn voice played in shrill loops over anything new my mom might try to tell herself. No certain opinion, no clear creation (she sometimes stripped old furniture and infused it with new life), no authentic laughter startled out of her in an unguarded moment ever ushered in the woman she wanted to be. Nope, she reverted every time to the frazzled mom who could cry for days or scream for hours, because it was all too much for her. Dad’s work called him away, a lot, to spend two and three weeks at a time in Spain, Portugal, Italy—wherever; wherever the women were sexier and stronger than she was. She was stuck in a small Normandy village, alone and adrift among the Frogs, inept in every way, challenged even to ask the grocer a question. She didn’t trust her capacity to hold her husband’s attention, to be a good mother, to put any kind of beauty into the world, despite the fact that she could and often would do all three—or dabble at least, till her insecurities ridiculed her in my grandmom’s voice into getting small again. (If she were really so small, she wouldn’t have felt so trapped and miserable there, but she didn’t have that interpretation at her disposal. She didn’t have tools for moving from her habitual thoughts to something kinder and truer.) Holidays during the years in France actually still glitter in my memory. I believe these were actually fun events, with warmer-than-normal family feelings infusing the festive scenes, and a smattering of gifts wrapped in gold and doused in magic. But then, just before I turned ten, we moved back to the U.S., and that put us in driving distance of my mom’s childhood home, or what she still simply called home (not yet having been able, with all the corporate moves, to truly make her own). This launched years of dreaded and dreadful holiday events. There was no choice, or any concept of possible choice, in the matter of what we were doing for the holidays. That decision was made by cultural expectations upheld with a vengeance by upright human beings: we were going to be with family. This would include predictable church scenes, predictable meal-preparation and meal scenes, predictable gift-opening scenes. Some of these things were just fine on the whole, or seemed to be, but for my mother, it all represented nonstop encounters with her demons. I learned to discern, over the years, the constant subtext in things said by her mother and sister and the increasingly obvious preference given by the one to the other. My mother always paled in comparison to her more glamorous, more confident sister. Once returned to our nuclear-family reality, we then cycled through the predictable scenes of my mother processing the self-esteem trauma reactivated by holiday events. First, she was just pissy, peevish, prone to small explosions. As the pressure built, she started giving my father hell for all he didn’t do for her—and not that she was wrong, especially with Uncle Pill and Aunt Glam so freshly in view. As with the glaring contrast in the love my grandmom doled out between her two daughters, no one could miss how the diamonds and finery Aunt Glam uncovered from her husband's gift boxes put to shame the not-much and not-memorable stuff my mother pulled from hers. From there, she moved to giving her kids hell for all that we thought of her (we thought she was our servant; we thought she should do everything for us that we would never have even an ounce of gratitude for; we thought that she had no right to any happiness of her own—actually, all wrong, and all very confusing to the kids involved, stated as trembling facts, punctuated with slaps). There were predictable scenes of her going silent, crying over slow, morose ironing or tense chopping of onions and slapping together of casseroles. There were the quiet moments she got lost in a book—an activity that allowed her to pretty much disappear and maybe feel only half-bad about it. (I liked the books best, feeling maybe only half-anxious about them.) In the culture my mother grew up in, stepping from ill-favored daughter to hastily taken wife with no transitional time to know herself and choose her path, she certainly had no choice over how to spend the holidays. She had no concept of her guidance system that let her know which way to head through inner tugs, through sensations of contraction versus expansion, through emotions to pay attention to for the information they bring. She knew only rules in a punitive Universe, embodied by a paternal white-bearded God figure that she was not allowed to question, and wouldn’t dare re-envision. I’m so fortunate for where I am in time. I’ve noticed a million times over, throughout my adult life, that I’ve got a wealth of resources my mom didn’t have. I even smoked freely for a brief time and inhabited my own beauty guiltlessly, if not with total comfort. I rejected the religion of my childhood categorically and took years of trial-and-error experimentation to rebuild a belief system that honored the spiritual truth of my being—something I was entirely and effortlessly in touch with as a child. (It helped that the France years meant virtually no religious constraints, as there was no Baptist church in spitting or driving distance, and my parents trusted no other religion.) My Invitallenge to You. If your holidays are miserable and your holiday choices are based in obligation or some lie you tell yourself about having no choice, I want to sweetly ask: what are you doing? This is not 1960-something. Please gauge the evolution. Like me, you have healed and evolved beyond your parents. Would you like to keep evolving? Are you willing to use anything and everything to keep coming closer to your guidance system, holidays included? Will you practice presence anywhere and any time of year, especially since presence is simply about tuning in to what’s here right now, and the here-and-now still exists during the holidays? Reminder that presence allows you to access choice, because your connection to the felt, sensory experience of this moment, as it actually is, allows you to bypass autopilot tendencies; question antiquated assumptions and stories; and reach right now for a choice that actually makes sense (to you). Actionable Bullet Points.
I just talked to a brilliant and beautiful friend who's staying away from family of origin this year during the holidays. It took her years to get to this level of self-permission. I invite you to it. What I invite you to, more specifically, is just the level of permission and boundaries you need. And if you choose to engage with anyone at all who brings up stress for you or in any way makes you question your goodness or well-being, please get lots of supports in place. (Here's a solid holiday support I offer, an audio program with written supplements, priced at $22 for 2019 Holidays.) Why not use this time of festivity, connection, and sacred renewal to honor your healing and evolution? Love & blessings, Jaya Seriously: Check out my Holiday program, Before They Drive You Crazy, TAKE THE WHEEL. It's chock-full of spiritual-meets-practical supports. And here's my free pdf that offers a formula and script for holding your boundaries during hard conversations with difficult people. Get the free pdf lays out the premises for an experiment in conscious dating. ![]() (Would you, could you believe that it’s supposed to be easy?) I just found a little note I wrote for myself with an Abraham-Hicks quote that struck me: “The path of least resistance is also the path of greatest joy, greatest clarity, and the most fun!” Abraham’s path of least resistance is a crazy-simple concept: You watch for and find the easiest, most effortless spot to next place your foot. Don’t see the whole picture? Don’t have a start-to-finish plan? No problem. Find your next step, knowing that’s enough. Take the easiest step you have access to. You can do it tired, scared, confused. Point yourself roughly in the right direction (as I talk about in part 4 of Scooch!) and step forward, wherever your foot can land without some big leap or forceful stomping. You can do it with curiosity instead of dread; you can stay tuned for the guidance rather than fear you’ll get it wrong. You can trust yourself to course-correct as you go. It’s always okay to find you’re in resistance. Watch it dispassionately, compassionately. Then find your point of least resistance, and step there. Rinse and repeat; rinse and repeat. You’ll see and feel the resistance melt away. You’ll find the momentum builds as you go, often surprisingly swiftly. To proceed along the path of least resistance, start by noticing when you’re in resistance. In your body, resistance can feel like
You’re in resistance when you're
It also helps to be clear about the signs that you're on a path of least resistance:
How to follow the path of least resistance: All you need to do is gingerly pick your way along the unknown way, one step at a time, simply finding your next point of least resistance. What’s the easiest way to go that feels like it’s in the right direction? Forget the whole picture. Don’t call this one step a drop in the bucket. Your point of least resistance simply gives you access to movement. One step, and another, and the next, until you’re moving so well, you forget you didn’t know how to do this. You’ll course-correct as you go, so don’t worry about whether you’re heading just the right way. You’re meant to build and ride momentum. Hey, it’s not just that the path of least resistance will get you to where you’re going in the most effortless way. Remember the quote I began with from Abraham-Hicks? “The path of least resistance is also the path of greatest joy, greatest clarity, and the most fun!” So when it feels like that … you’re on it! Love & blessings, Jaya Note that an earlier post on least resistance approaches these concepts from another angle. |
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