Weekly Photo Challenge: Summer

Summer means putting up the trapeze and playing.  Sharing my love with friends and family wherever I may go.  Because summer also means travel to me, new beginnings, a wandering heart and adventure.

A Twisted Tree

Warning.  I don’t do this often.  But, I’m about to get all hippie spiritual on you all.  Seeing as how its all true, I think its worth sharing, but you have been warned.

Monday night I had an actual enlightened experience.  Or a spiritual hallucination.  Or…something.

A little background: Sometimes, when I’m not doing anything else, or if the mood strikes me, I check in with what others probably call energy work.  I don’t know if its something special I can do, or something anyone can do if they’re taught, but this little game started for me when I was a little girl having nightmares.  One of my parents or maybe some combination of my parents told me to ask Jesus to fill me up with the holy spirit to keep bad things away.  In my head this meant light and love.  And when I did it, some crazy stuff happened.  I could feel my body heating up, my self being filled with light, and on good days, I could actually fill my room or the whole house with this energy.  I can feel it, sense it…see it in my mind’s eye.  It helped with nightmares, it helped with energy from bad people.  It was interesting.  It was mainly something I played with when I was upset or bored or whatever.  And whatever place I seemed to be in physically, mentally and spiritually seemed to affect how able I was to fill myself with the energy, much less send it to someone else or fill a room.  That’s all it really was for me.

Until one day in college.  A night drinking and hanging out, some friends professed to being able to read auras.  And aura reading each other became a fun game.  Being me, I decided to secretly do an experiment with this game.  When they decided to read my aura, I closed my eyes, filled myself with the light and love (at this point, I no longer had a Christian interpretation for this energy, it was just pure love) and then slowly started filling the room with the ‘energy and light.’  When I was done, I opened my eyes and one of the aura readers was crying, and the other one was looking at me in total shock and awe…and my boyfriend of the time ran out of the house and later told me he thought I was some kind of freaky celestial being.  Talk about impressionable youth!  But since I’d sort of doubted whether they could actually read auras, much less my specific type of energy, this was very interesting.  It added some aspect of reality and credence to my experience.

But this story is only to give some background to the game.  Which I was playing Monday night when I couldn’t sleep.  I also seemed to have a lot of the energy and light Monday night.  It was exploding out of me (my heart chakra?) so hard I was near tears myself at the beauty.  And that is when the vision started.

It was like the Universe was talking to me in pictures.  But, I’ll translate.

You are a beautiful twisting tree.  You are meant to stretch and grow and always reach for the light of the sun.

Do not waste your time worrying about whether you are doing the right or good thing.

If you are following your true higher bliss, your heart’s truest desire, the good will take care of itself.

For instance, as you grow, your branches may form shade that someone may take shelter under.  But you cannot try to grow in order to make shelter or you will lose the sun and shrivel.

For instance, your branches may be cut off for someone’s use, but if you try to hide from this to avoid the pain, you will not feel the glorious rain and you will dry out.

All you have to worry about is living and growing and following your truest desires and love.  Do not let fear hold you back. 

When you do this, the means and the way will always be clear, and who and what you need will come to you. 

When you worry about how to do this, you will constantly be struggling, looking for something from every encounter with someone else, like a trader or a thief.

Just grow.  And twist.  Move and love.  Seek the light and the joy and worry over nothing else.

Of course, this hardly does the vision justice.  But it was beautiful, and seemed to lift a huge burden off of me.  The biggest part was knowing that if I’m following my heart’s truest desire, it is not selfish.  I am already doing good in the world.  Maybe just by showing others that they can do so too.

sweetandtwisted.wordpress.com

Is Balance Bullsh*t?

So much of my life as a creative individual has been spent seeking one form of balance or another.  I’ve skated between extremes of productivity and laziness, observing and doing, listening and shouting, playing with others and retreating to solitude, partying hard and healing my body, and the ever relevant creating or stagnating.  Always seeking that elusive thing called balance.

I’m toying with a new belief here.  It is:

“Balance doesn’t exist unless you’re doing Acrobatics.”

Because let’s be honest, is it actually something you can attain in the realm of emotions, internal drives, external factors, the path of goal-seeking, etc.?  I’m starting to think that it isn’t.  And even more to the point, that the time spent riding the Ferris Wheel of Life up or down is good no matter which way you’re going.  Because its a different point of view.

You may have just noticed that I used Ferris Wheel instead of Roller Coaster in my analogy.  Because those periods of stagnation and those periods of creativity seem to be longer and more sustained than the abrupt rises and falls of the usual metaphor.  And Ferris Wheels are fun on the way up and the way down!

This week I am going to try on this idea that Balance is a myth and see where it takes me.  At the very least, the guilt in not being able to achieve it will be alleviated.  I strongly believe that if an idea doesn’t serve you, you shouldn’t use it.  And feeling guilty for being who you are definitely falls into that category.

What do you think?  Have you ever really achieved sustainable balance in anything?

telegraph.co.uk

Accomplishment

Its amazing what baby steps can accomplish.  2 years.  Times of giving up, feeling pretty apathetic.  So many battles to find the right materials, rehearsal space, manufacturers, equipment.  2 years.  And I made this.

Photo Credit: http://www.rachaelshane.com/

 

It’s real fire.  Its really me, on my very own invention.  It’s a dream realized.  And the funny thing is, after accomplishing it, it all seems so easy.  Because now I know how to do it.  But it wasn’t easy (really, its still not easy), and it wouldn’t even exist without some pretty amazing people who believed in me, my idea and pushed and picked me up when I was feeling defeated.  People who’s knowledge is also going to keep this project from killing me.  ;)

Big thanks to Darrell O’pry and Miguel Caceres, Circus Warehouse and The Muse for all of your expertise and support.  And big apologies if you follow me everywhere and have seen this announcement and photo plastered on Facebook and Twitter.  I’m like a teenager in first love.  I want to shout it on top of mountains.  :)

The Daily Post: Weekly Photo Challenge: Blue

I’m not sure why this photo seems to have a bluish tinge to it.  It was taken on my archaic nokia cell phone in 2010 when at the very end of 2 months in Peru, my digital camera just stopped working.  That’s right, right in time for Machu Picchu.  But I snapped some photos with the cell and honestly probably wouldn’t have posted or thought much of this one if it wasn’t for this photo challenge.  But now I’m seriously wondering…why is it tinged blue?  It has undergone absolutely no editing.

Self Love?

Tonight’s SMART topic was Unconditional Self Acceptance.  I have to be honest, when I heard what the topic was, I considered leaving the meeting.  After all, I think I have a pretty high self esteem…definitely a lot of self importance going on up in my head.  In fact, I’m probably borderline Narcissistic.  Well, turns out I’m not the only one.  I mean, who isn’t Narcissistic, right?  Buddha?  It also turns out that self esteem isn’t the same as self acceptance and that a high sense of self importance can be equally rewarding or detrimental.  I mean if you’re super important, you have to be super critical of yourself because everything you do and what everyone around you thinks super matters.  In fact, feeling not important may not be the bad thing it sounds like.  But feeling bad or wrong is. Confused yet?  I am.

So, it turns out for all my self-centeredness (or self awareness if we want to put a positive spin on things), I don’t actually love myself much.  This fact keeps seeming to pop up at me as I search for betterment.  I think I’ve done amazing things, I think I’ve done a lot of good things, I think I’m good at a lot of amazing things.  But I don’t really accept me, much less love me.  I do all of those things so that people will love me.  So that I will be love-able.  Its actually hard to admit.  Embarrassing.  Scary.  Because I can feel you judging me as a bad person as I write this, because I can hear myself telling me that I’m a bad person because of this.  What a crazy story, right?

So, how does one develop self love?  Or maybe more specifically, self acceptance?  The answer is, I’m really not sure.  I can love my actions and the results of my positive actions all day long.  But the problem with that is that I have to judge myself just as harshly then for my not so positive choices and actions.  But if I’m not judging myself on my choices and actions, then what is it that makes me me?  And thus, the me that I should accept or love?  Totally flummuxed.  No idea.  Would love you wiser folks’ wisdom right about now.  Because I definitely don’t get it.

But until that wisdom starts pouring in, or until that aha breakthrough happens, what comes back to me are memories of my two first catastrophic heartbreaks.  In both instances, I turned heavily to my Dad for comfort and answers, and the bolstering of my sense of worth and self.  After the second one, I remember talking to him on the phone from my dorm room and asking how I was ever supposed to get over it?  If I’d ever be happy again?  He told me to open a journal and to make a list of 100 things that I liked about myself.  That it would help.  I totally didn’t believe him, but I totally trusted him.  So I did it.  It took days if not weeks to get to 100 and I probably doubled up a few times.  But it did help.  Not immediately, but looking back now, I can see that a lot of my current confidence probably stems from taking the time to make that list.  Which seemed to help me to learn a couple of lessons about what kind of person I wanted to date as well.

Well, the folks in the meeting suggested something similar.  They suggested just taking the time everyday to look in the mirror and tell myself that I accept and love myself just as I currently am.  They said it doesn’t feel much like anything’s happening right away, but that over time, it helps.  So, I think I’m going to try it.  I’m going to revisit my list and concentrate on the things that are just who I am and not my behaviors.  And I’m just going to try telling myself that I love me, everyday.  Hopefully, that won’t spiral me into any crazy form of full on Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but I’ll keep the therapist on speed dial just in case.

Honoring My Work

I can’t believe it.  Seriously, I just blew my own mind.  I am so self-critical and judgemental that I actually get mad at myself for ‘wasting so much time’ working each day.  That’s right, some little voice in my head is yelling at me for taking the time everyday to write, learn, promote and generally keep up with the businesses that I am working on.

In all fairness, I think this voice is screaming at me because it wants to be flying, and conditioning at home (no matter how awesome my body looks) isn’t meeting its needs.  But, if you could hear this voice, you’d think I was just watching TV and drinking mimosas all day.  Not that that’s never happened mind you.  In point of fact, I think that this voice comes from periods in my life when I do little more than watch my Netflix queue, shift from guzzling coffee to wine around 5 and troll Facebook ‘liking’ people’s posts in a lonely attempt to feel connected.  Because that’s what I do when I get depressed.  And depression is a thing for me.  A battle that I’m so glad I have Zoloft to help me fight now.  Zoloft and this blog.  Because sharing my strategies in this battle might hopefully help someone else to win the war too.

So then, this voice is a throw back.  An unheeded warning cry if you will.  Screaming into my psyche that spending too much time on my computer, alone in my apartment, in my comfy bed, means I’m not fulfilling my goals.  But this is kind of the great thing!  I’m not depressed.  I’m actively trying to reach my goals.  I’m showing up to the page each day to write.  I’m researching marketing and internet concepts.  I’m trying things out, failing, and keeping at it.  I’m learning how to create, run and manage my online store.  I’m consolidating my ‘brands.’  I’m working.  And I happen to enjoy the fact that I can do this from my bed before I even put clothes on!  How great is that!  I love it!  I enjoy it so much that the first thing I do in the morning (after pouring coffee) is check out my internet presence to make a plan for the day.  I’m not mindlessly trolling through Facebook like an outsider.  I’m checking up on my community, looking for role models, just writing.  How cool!

But as Lisa Neumann says, that screaming voice (whining teenager, inner critic, child, pessimist, whichever one it is) needs to be heard.  I suspect that its distinctly possible that it is screaming because in past moments of depression it went unheard.  But it is also possible that my body is crying out for my passion, my trapeze.  Because writing and working takes time out of training.  And I’ve had to work more hours at the bar lately, so its hard to find the time to commute to the gym.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m training my butt off at home with some pretty awesome tools, but I don’t yet have my trapeze up, so I miss being in the air 5 days a week.  And I deeply miss my aerial family.  I need to listen to this voice a little bit, reassure it, come up with a plan.  Maybe I really should consider going out of my apartment sometimes to work, or setting ‘official work hours.’  And I do have a super stellar practice scheduled for Wednesday on my fire apparatus!   But I think that I also need to find the voice inside me that honors my very real work.  My cheerleader voice.