My favorite prompt from #Trust30 this week took me back about three years.  My response is an excerpt from a blog post written after leaving the corporate world to become a coach.  #Trust30  is an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself.  You can read more about it here.

Prompt:  Wholly Strange and New by Bridget Pilloud

When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name ~~  the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. ~  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Can you remember a moment in your life when you had life in yourself and it was wholly strange and new? Can you remember the moment when you stopped walking a path of someone else, and started cutting your own? 

Write about that moment. And if you haven’t experienced it yet, let the miracle play out in your mind’s eye and write about that moment in your future.

From June 3, 2009 blog post:
When Your Essential Self Speaks... Don't Freak Out

What if you have followed your intuition, have a wonderful life… and then realize ten days or ten years later that something isn’t right?  What if you hear a calling to do something different than the life you worked so hard to create?

The first step: Don’t freak out. Your lizard might think it’s necessary. It isn’t.

Listen to what your essential self has to say and process the message. (No… Ben & Jerry won’t help you process… put down the spoon.)  Advise your lizard that no action is necessary at this point and thank her for her concern.

The Journal
This is where that journal I found from last year comes in. I really had no socially valid reason to be dissatisfied. However, a little over a year ago, I woke up to the suffocating image that I was trapped in a snow globe.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

April 2008 - Early morning:
Now I have to go to work.
I love my corner office with windows.
In the winter when it snows, it feels like I’m in a snow globe. Right now (if I were sitting at my desk), there’s a dogwood blooming outside the window to my right. If the windows opened, I could touch the blooms. Outside of the window in front of me, a pair of gray and red birds is building a nest. I can’t see the nest because it’s under a branch. But I can see them flying in and out, bringing twigs and other stuff. If I could open that window, I could lean out and see the nest about 5 feet away.

Come to think of it…
A snow globe is a great metaphor.
I can’t open those windows.
I can look out into the beauty of the world… but not touch it.
I suddenly feel trapped, restless and in an environment that is unnatural and unsafe.

I want out of the snow globe.

I want the snow to land on my head and I want to sit under the tree and watch the birds. Today, after a few less than joy-filled meetings… I will start devising my exit plan.

Mid morning:
On the way to work, the emotion of writing about the snow globe effect overwhelmed me and I started to cry. My first reaction was to reach for the Xanex. I stopped, though, realizing that this is an ingrained reaction to dealing with raw emotion and fear. I stuff it down or snuff it out. I don’t want to feel the emotions. This emotion is spawned from the joy of listening to my true self and allowing it to speak. It’s annoyance over having to go to a meeting and pretend like I care. My life is not bad… but I might choose to replace it with something better. I let myself cry and feel the feelings. I did not touch the Xanex bottle.

Early afternoon:
I am now in the meeting. I do care… but I care with a plan to leave this a better place than when I got here 9 ½ years ago. This will have been a better place for me being here. I will leave here at peace with the job I did and with a graceful exit.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What fascinates me the most is how VERY clear the message was at the beginning and end of the day. Slap in the middle, my lizard came out to play. I can hear her now:

“Are you crazy? The snow globe is safe. Take a Xanex and you’ll be calm, rational and able to go work. You’ve worked all your life in this industry. This is who you are and what you do. ”

Thank goodness I didn’t listen to her!

Instead, after sitting through the day of revelation, slight claustrophobic panic, lizard fears, annoyance and sadness, came what appears to have been peace. Peace and a vision to create options. By not freaking out, I was able to hear my way out of the snow globe and count the blessings of my past.

If I had chosen to ignore my intuition, medicate my lizard and shut my essential self up by feeding her, I wouldn’t have been able to think so clearly. The nagging sense of “not right” might have manifested into stress and anxiety over who knows what. It makes me wonder:

How often have I tried to make things right in my social world when my essential self was really in need of attention?

How often is no action the best way to hear what your whole self wants?

Doing nothing is an art upon itself.

In Truth & With Love,

There’s a great paradox with being human.

We’re all innately different, born with God given strengths, talents and little annoying quirks.  We’re tall, short, gay, straight, male, female, over or under weight, have different colors of eyes, hair and skin.  Each one of us has our contribution for the world that is as individual as we are.

Yet we yearn to fit in and are sometimes urged to “conform.”  We often think we have to twist our essential selves to mirror the “societal norm.”  We starve ourselves to be thin, work in a career that we loathe, pretend to be someone we are not.

This instinct, in itself, is normal.  It is a primal urge for us to want to be accepted.  Hundreds of years ago, exclusion from the tribe meant being exiled into the wilderness and possible physical (and definitely emotional) starvation.  Being accepted played a big part in survival.

In today’s world, teenagers move away from their families at will to go to college and people move across the world for their careers.  The primal need to belong, however, remains wired in our brains and drives our self esteem, our actions and our lives just as if our survival depends on it.  In fact, the health of our emotional life does depend on being accepted and being able to mutually give and receive love.

Therefore, being ourselves is sometimes hard. Especially when the truth means that you might seem different than what the rest of your family or friends deem to be acceptable.

It makes it even harder for our kids these days when mean-hearted, misguided bullies taunt and badger those who seem to be the slightest bit different.

I’m a mom and have spent some time this week watching “It Gets Better” videos with my high school daughter.   These videos have been prompted by the saddening rash of suicides among gay teens who have been tormented to the point that life is no longer preferable over death.  Regardless of whether the harassment is over race, gender, clique or sexual preference, we both agree that bullying is simply not cool.

On the other hand, accepting and showing compassion for ourselves and others for the beautiful individuals that we are is extremely cool.

The video below is the one that touched us both to tears.  Please take the time to watch this, talk to your kids about compassion, pass it along to those who need it, and give thanks that people like Joel Burns chose to stay in this world.

In Truth & With Love,

I don’t claim to know much… but this I know for sure:
When I started doing nothing on a daily basis, magic started happening.
This is the story of some magic.

I was noodling on the idea of enrolling in Martha Beck’s life coach training. This wasn’t just partaking in a self improvement class. This was career changing, snow globe escaping consideration. On frequent flier miles and a knee jerk, I signed up for her Steering by Starlight seminar held in Phoenix last May. The idea was to experience her energy in person and let my intuition decide.

One morning prior to this trip, I asked the Universe to give me some clues.
Ask and ye shall receive.

Journal entry: April 30, 2008
Holy cow! I just listened to a recording of Martha coaching and her client might as well have been me. Paraphrased quote from Martha: "Can I see that my ‘job’ and being in that state of perpetual stress will kill me? That is not making a living… it’s making a dying."

The closer the Phoenix trip gets, the more unspoken questions are just “answered.” The answer appears in a magazine, book, MP3, e-mail, through a friend… or from that small voice… like magic. Listening to Martha coach brought me to tears. Not only because she addressed head-on some of my fears, but because it sounds like freedom.

Journal entry: May 2, 2008
* Turned on the radio and Let It Fade was playing: “Let this old life crumble, let it fade…”

* Picked up The Joy Diet and opened to the chapter on “Risks.” The rule is that the risk has to scare the pants off of you.

*Picked up my coffee cup and this was staring at me: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"

* E-mail popped up with this subject line: “It’s Time to Break Free.” The content meant nothing… but the subject line freaked me out.

* Quote on calendar page for the day: “To some will come a time when change itself is beauty, if not heaven.” – Edwin Arlington Robinson

* At work: We were working through a settlement with a tough customer. Last week, in a bit of exasperation I blurted: “If we ever get this done, I’m quitting while I’m ahead.” Today, they paid us an unsolicited lump sum that cleared their entire past due balance. Their explanation is that they are going through a system upgrade and wanted to finalize their balance? Most customers will use this as a reason to NOT pay. Maybe I do need to quit while I’m ahead?

Journal entry: May 7, 2008
Clergy column in our church messenger had this Bob Dylan quote: “You are either busy being born or busy dying.”

Journal entry: May 11, 2008
The song that kicked off our Sunday worship service was entitled “Break Free.”

Journal entry: May 13, 2008
Received an unrelated e-mail from a friend and this was at the bottom:

"Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don't get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow.  God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes."
- Matthew 6:34

I must have stopped journaling at this point… but the magic hasn’t stopped.

The trip to Phoenix brought about dreams that resolved and stopped recurring dreams I’ve had since college. Beautiful and peaceful dreams.

I enrolled in coach training. How could I not? The freakishly synchronistic encounters and events only enhanced my faith that there is a higher power at work in our lives. And that higher power was talking to me loud and clear… especially when I least expected to hear from it… and in my sleep.

By October, the questions revolved around not if, but when, I wanted to become a full time coach. 

• Should I resign from my day job in December and hit the ground running with the New Year?
• Or wait until the spring after I was eligible for certification and had three more weeks of paid vacation in the hopper?
• Was it even wise to leave my steady job when the economy was tanking?

I was pondering all of this while picking up some lunch-to-go and saw the new “Skirt” magazine on the racks. Jokingly, and to divert attention away from my internal bantering, I asked: “OK, Skirt, what do you have to say? Wait for spring or not?”

Here’s what the cover said:

"Have you bloomed lately? ...  Don’t wait for spring to shed the comforter of inertia that keeps you asleep in the bud, the permafrost of habit that keeps you stuck in a no-growth zone. Stop wishing – start working. Quit waiting – start groundbreaking. What’s the story you’re waiting to be, the Super Power you’ve been hiding, the seed you haven’t watered, the calling you’ve put on hold, the forgiveness you’ve withheld, the next step you haven’t taken? There’s a Wild Flower in you waiting to blossom… A stargazer lily with sky-high dreams."

I kid you not. I almost dropped my salad in the parking lot.

Anyone not familiar with Martha Beck’s Steering by Starlight should know that the book is all about finding your path to your own North Star and following it through the eyes of your inner Stargazer.

I did not wait for spring. And then the message of it all became downright freaky.

Two weeks after I resigned from that "safe" job, the "stable" company imploded. It is possible that I would still be employed, collecting money, dealing with liquidation and listening to bankruptcy lawyers. But it would be the antithesis of authentic and certainly not joy filled.

Your intuition can tell you when it’s time to change. Synchronicities and God moments are everywhere if you are open to seeing them. Freedom is having the ability to change on your own terms even when it's hard.

The real bonus lesson:
When Your Essential Self Speaks… Consider She Knows Something You Don’t

Ask the Universe, watch for the synchronicities and trust.
I’d love to hear about your magic.

Following your intuition can only happen if you can hear it.

The journal from the last post was written when I didn’t know whether I wanted to be a life coach, or if I just needed one. I was also reading Martha Beck’s The Joy Diet. Instead of simply reading it, I decided to do something revolutionary. I would actually DO the exercises as suggested.

Chapter One is entitled “Nothing.”

Go ahead. Laugh.

The book I finally decide to DO starts out with a chapter about doing nothing. When you are done laughing, we’ll resume…

Doing nothing for ten to fifteen minutes a day is a life changer.

While some people call this meditation or mindfulness, I called it wasted time at first. I could physically sit still, but my thoughts were like the incessant chatter of a hyper child. This was frustrating until I surrendered my control over the chatter (which, I of course, never really had). I watched my thoughts come and go and compassionately allowed myself to address them later.

When I stopped resisting, I fell asleep. Instead of wasted time, doing nothing became a nap.

Right there was my first lesson. I was over working and under sleeping.

Finally, I got to the point where I could simply sit for fifteen minutes, watching my thoughts until they slowed to the point where I could hear and feel my soul. This is the time when I can hear God most clearly.

This is the place where I realized that I could trust my own internal wisdom.

This is the place where I sensed a true joy and peacefulness behind the war in my brain around food and my weight.

This is the place where I knew that when I figured out how to feel safe standing and acting on my own Ground Truth, I wanted to pay it forward and help others do the same.

This is the place that harbors your own internal wisdom.

Trust in it.

I highly recommend that you do nothing for a while and see.

This is when magic happens and the synchronicities of life will blow you away.

Up next is the last post (for now) in this series:  When Your Essential Self Speaks… Watch for the Magic.

Until then:

What does your essential self have to say when you are still?

Last post we discussed rabbits. This week it’s lizards. Soon we’ll have a zoo.
There was a great question asked in my last post: How do you know if it is your intuition or your lizard speaking to you?

Here’s a quick synopsis of the response:

• The reptilian part of our brain, or our lizard, has one job… to keep us on high alert so we don’t fall prey to a predator or starvation. Our lizard talks through fear to keep us fed and safe.
• An intuitive hunch is a gut reaction, a whisper from God, or a knowing that something is innately right or wrong without reasoning or judgment. Listening to your essential self speak and following your intuition is liberating to the soul.
• I believe our lizard reacts to our intuitive instincts. If your intuition is leading you outside of your comfort zone, lizard fears are almost inevitable.

So… Picking up where we left off with the rabbits: What if you have followed your intuition, have a wonderful life… and then realize ten days or ten years later that something isn’t right? What if you hear a calling to do something different than the life you worked so hard to create?

The first step: Don’t freak out. Your lizard might think it’s necessary. It isn’t.

Listen to what your essential self has to say and process the message. (No… Ben & Jerry won’t help you process… put down the spoon.) Advise your lizard that no action is necessary at this point and thank her for her concern.

The Journal
This is where that journal I found from last year comes in. I really had no socially valid reason to be dissatisfied. However, a little over a year ago, I woke up to the suffocating image that I was trapped in a snow globe.

April 2008 - Early morning: Now I have to go to work. I love my corner office with windows. In the winter when it snows, it feels like I’m in a snow globe. Right now (if I were sitting at my desk), there’s a dogwood blooming outside the window to my right. If the windows opened, I could touch the blooms. Outside of the window in front of me, a pair of gray and red birds is building a nest. I can’t see the nest because it’s under a branch. But I can see them flying in and out, bringing twigs and other stuff. If I could open that window, I could lean out and see the nest about 5 feet away.

Come to think of it…
A snow globe is a great metaphor.
I can’t open those windows.
I can look out into the beauty of the world… but not touch it. I suddenly feel trapped, restless and in an environment that is unnatural and unsafe.

I want out of the snow globe.

I want the snow to land on my head and I want to sit under the tree and watch the birds. Today, after a few less than joy-filled meetings… I will start devising my exit plan.

Mid morning:
On the way to work, the emotion of writing about the snow globe effect overwhelmed me and I started to cry. My first reaction was to reach for the Xanex. I stopped, though, realizing that this is an ingrained reaction to dealing with raw emotion and fear. I stuff it down or snuff it out. I don’t want to feel the emotions. This emotion is spawned from the joy of listening to my true self and allowing it to speak. It’s annoyance over having to go to a meeting and pretend like I care. My life is not bad… but I might choose to replace it with something better. I let myself cry and feel the feelings. I did not touch the Xanex bottle.

Early afternoon:
I am now in the meeting. I do care… but I care with a plan to leave this a better place than when I got here 9 ½ years ago. This will have been a better place for me being here. I will leave here at peace with the job I did and with a graceful exit.

What fascinates me the most is how VERY clear the message was at the beginning and end of the day. Slap in the middle, my lizard came out to play. I can hear her now:

“Are you crazy? The snow globe is safe. Take a Xanex and you’ll be calm, rational and able to go work. You’ve worked all your life in this industry. This is who you are and what you do. ”

Thank goodness I didn’t listen to her!

Instead, after sitting through the day of revelation, slight claustrophobic panic, lizard fears, annoyance and sadness, came what appears to have been peace. Peace and a vision to create options. By not freaking out, I was able to hear my way out of the snow globe and count the blessings of my past.

If I had chosen to ignore my intuition, medicate my lizard and shut my essential self up by feeding her, I wouldn’t have been able to think so clearly. The nagging sense of “not right” might have manifested into stress and anxiety over who knows what. It makes me wonder:

How often have I tried to make things right in my social world when my essential self was really in need of attention?

How often is no action the best way to hear what your whole self wants?

Doing nothing is an art upon itself.

The Next Step (and next post): When Your Essential Self Speaks… Do Nothing.

Until then: If you stumble upon the realization that you’re stuck, don’t let your lizard misguide you. Feel the emotion and write about it. Walk with a friend and talk about it. Leave a comment and let’s compare notes.

Have you ever started to do something and then get distracted? An hour (or three) passes and you can’t remember what you were planning to do in the first place? That just happened. I’ve learned to trust my essential self when she wants to chase rabbits, so I’m getting used to it.

After sitting down to write, I stumbled across some documents off of my old work computer. Instead of writing, I started cleaning them out. Of course, that means I now have no idea what I was going to write about an hour ago, but I found something SO much better! To my surprise, one of the documents is a short journal from last spring. This is surprising for three reasons:

1. I didn’t journal back then.
2. I had completely forgotten about it.
3. I have been trying to come up with the best way to illustrate how following your intuition can change your life. Hello?! I’ve just lived through an epic tale of what happens when you blindly follow embrace intuitive hunches and walk in faith. This journal is from the beginning of that journey.

So, I chased a rabbit… and here is born a new blog series on intuition, synchronicities and life lessons… with some weight loss tips thrown in for good measure. Pieces of the journal will be used to illustrate how a state of stuck can be dislodged by listening to your essential self speak.

When Your Essential Self Speaks…

Intuition is one of the methods your essential self uses to speak. Your brain might not have yet wrapped a logical reason around why you feel icky around a certain person or excited when you walk into a certain place, but your essential self knows. Your intuition can clue you into the things and people that serve you well or that drain you before you get a chance to rationally understand why. It is also your overall guide to the path you were born to follow.

When Your Essential Self Speaks… Chase the Rabbit.

Come to think of it… Chase it with no regret.

Chasing rabbits is a term I’ve used for years in reference to following intuitive hunches. Following your intuition (a real rabbit) is much different than procrastinating or moving toward socially acceptable goals for the sake of fulfilling desires of the ego (a fake rabbit).

The trick is to know which rabbits are real and which ones are just pulling your leg. I will admit that I’ve been in the company of greyhounds chasing fake rabbits on many occasions, but the more I listen to my intuition, the clearer the difference between the real and the stuffed shirt rabbit becomes.

What if you realize the rabbit is a sham mid-chase?

Stop. Pause to soak in the lessons learned and then move on.

Corey Ciocchetti is a professor of business law and ethics at the University of Denver and author of the book Real Rabbits: Chasing An Authentic Life. He wrote a great blog post about Cash, the greyhound, who realized one day that the rabbit he was chasing was fake and, without remorse, stopped racing. He poses a great fundamental question: “Do you chase real rabbits?  If not, what do you chase and why?"

If, upon pondering, you realize one of your rabbits is full of fluff, he makes this great point: “The great thing about life… is that the road to lasting, authentic success contains many on-ramps. Although we have chased fake rabbits in the past, we can move towards authentic success in a split second.”

Notice that neither Corey nor I said to throw a pity party in regret for time and energy wasted and emotionally eat yourself into a stuffed state of numbness. What I believe he is saying (and what I am suggesting) is that you put down the cookie and simply stop the sham. Feel your emotions, count your blessings, and then find a new passion, hobby or career that feels real. Tune in to your intuition and find the next exit.

What if you catch the rabbit, keep it as a pet (job, partner, college major) for a while, then realize ten days or ten years later that it no longer makes you happy?

Like Kenny Rogers says: “You gotta know when to hold ‘em; know when to fold ‘em; know when to walk away; know when to run.”

Your essential self knows the minute when that “used-to-be-perfect” situation no longer serves you well. It knows how, what, why and when… the trick is to trust your gut and listen to the whisper of your intuition. The sooner you look at your desire to change in the eye… the more quickly you can make peace with it, devise an exit strategy and part ways.

Admittedly, this scenario might carry a bit more emotional and literal baggage than realizing the rabbit was fake before you snared it. Therefore, this is where we’ll pick up in the next post… and where the journal comes in:

When Your Essential Self Speaks… Don’t Freak Out

Until then, listen to your intuition. You never know what you’re going to find: A new opportunity, a lost sweater button or a journal that reminds you of how stuck you were and how far you’ve come. One thing is for sure, you will be closer to your essential self than when you started.

What rabbits have you chased lately?