My Story…
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field,, I’ll meet you there.” - Rumi
10 years ago I realized that the everyday hustle to meet unfulfilling expectations left me empty and unhappy. I wanted happiness to take hold and live within me. But instead, it was fleeting and felt like another endless task on my list to accomplish – like laundry!
I wanted to no longer be driven by what I thought I “should” be doing, but instead be rooted in something deeper and more personally meaningful, fueled by my own inner knowing and alignment. I wanted life to be easier and I wanted certainty and security. I simply wanted to be happy. It felt complicated.
I was stuck in the over-doing, over-giving, over-thinking, over-worrying, stretching too thin. Too much, but not nearly enough. I envied the minimalists!
I became a self-help junkie in order to buffer from my circumstances, my struggles, my stories, the overwhelm, self-doubt, fears, and my over-arching feeling of “not-enoughness”- not having enough, doing enough, being enough. I knew in my gut and through all of my searching that the answers I was looking for were not “out there”. I felt like I had tried everything out there that was offered, but because I was not suicidal, nor suffering from depression requiring therapy or treatment, there was no real place for me. I was functioning “fine”, yet I was not so good that I could actually say that I was genuinely happy, the kind of happy, that I longed for me to be and to embody. There seemed to be no place for my level of pain in the real world. I was either pitied, most often self pity, for having something “wrong” with me, or I was belittled by others or most often myself, for not then even being grateful-enough for having “1st world problems”. I wasn’t someone that needed to be “fixed”. I wasn’t a patient with a clinical diagnosis. I was a “normal” ordinary individual who wanted better, more meaning, more depth and I wanted happiness to live within me, without the fear of it leaving at a moment's notice and not knowing how to easily regenerate it. I knew there had to be more….I hoped there was more. I worried there wasn’t. That was my biggest fear, that this is all there is, this is all I am. It wasn’t enough.
Nothing outside of me, no purchase, no luxury, no money, no substance, not even love from others had the ability to do anything beyond providing momentary relief. It was unsustainable insatiable relief and a cheap knockoff version of happiness. So instead of waiting for true happiness to find me or setting out again on another “suck it up and be positive” bottomless search to find it, I knew this next part of my journey was going to be in. It was time for a radical shift in the way I viewed the world, and myself, from the inside out. I poured myself into learning the art of who I am, getting curious about all the facets of me - ALL of it - the good, the bad and the ugly of my brain, my body, my spirit, and my connection to purpose. It was time to think about WHAT I think about and BEcome the one who decides what I think about. Shed old skin. Let go of what no longer served the person I was becoming. It wasn’t so much about changing who I identified myself as, but more of a remembering about who I already am , but didn’t know that I knew. So much of my thinking and behavior was done unconsciously or subconsciosly, almost autonomous from who I am at the core. It was time to raise my awareness behind my thoughts that I think, the bouncer standing guard at the door of my mind, and mesh together my inner knowing of bigger dreams for myself while also having room to allow in the experiences and contrast of life’s struggles and circumstances consciously… and to respond to my desired way of seeing the world from a space of being whole and sourced from within, not from without.
I found what the late Wayne Dyer taught us…that ”If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” I would always choke down hurt and settle with my challenges by saying “it is what it is”. I decided to look at “it” differently – a new lens.
My own Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Health and healing is what inspired me to realign with what fascinates me, our humanness. Struggle is hard wired in all of us. It’s the human condition. Thanks to the latest research in neuroplasticity, we now know that our brains are not hard wired to be a certain way for the rest of our lives. We can literally change the wiring of our brain and how we think, and, our thinking changes EVERYTHING. It changes our energy, and everything is energy. I chose the path of learning the skill of a human being, being human; to no longer live by default of past programming and limiting beliefs, and repressed emotions. My goal is to live a life that I don’t need to take a vacation from. To do this requires that I wake fully up each day with my mind and soul in a symbiotic relationship, to know that I am IN this world here on earth but not OF this world- to have one foot grounded in this dimension where I am actively creating and contributing as a human, but not identified by it, while also having one foot rooted in the truth and certainty of the purpose and power of my being. I do this through transcending the story and transforming it in alignment to who I am, connected to my being. I enjoy this life I get to live, living it fully, embracing it all, while feeling happy, healthy and whole.
I feel most alive when capturing the awe of life’s wisdom through inspirational quotes, life affirming teachers and healers, and being outdoors, witnessing nature unfurl in its divine time, free of the mind, living in presence. I find my peace in honey chamomile tea, meditation, kundalini yoga, and geeking out on self-education. I love learning about the science of the brain, and finding new practices to elevate my mental and emotional IQ.
I am a mother of two extraordinary boys and married to my other whole (not half), John, for 29 years. I love dancing to my favorite songs…. anywhere. My favorite vacations often require white soft sand and turquoise water. I have always lived near water and likely always will. I enjoy car rides in the sun with the windows down and music loud, a crackling campfire, being on Lake Eden VT, and those ah-ha moments when discovering something so cool that it’s unquestionably life-changing.
And freedom. I LOVE freedom – in every sense of the word. Just like the concept of the words love, faith, hope, peace and spirit, I believe that what “freedom” is, is something so distinctly different from the word we call it. It’s an unseen force or feeling in my gut that is beyond our cognitive understanding of the literal word itself. Beyond knowledge, to knowing. It’s an invisible intelligence, an essence, an expression of an energy, or a way of being. One of the biggest awakenings in my life was truly experiencing that many of the things we value in life are things that have two sides of the same coin as Einstein discovered. Just as matter and energy are two rungs on the same ladder, we can have an awareness or knowledge of the thing, such as freedom or rain or love, yet never have interacted with it to really KNOW it. This awakening to the science of matter vs energy, that we are BOTH sides of the same coin and my ability to impact matter through transforming or transfer of energy was mind blowing. I realized in that moment my own power over my happiness despite circumstance. I am so grateful for my freedom- freedom to choose love instead of fear, freedom to step into peace, to have opportunities for faith and hope, and to BE free, be sovereign, autonomous in my thoughts and I boldly know that no matter what circumstances I encounter, that if my mesh IQ is high, nothing can strip me of these self-regenerating invisible superpowers, and my free will to choose differently. I source my own certainty and peace from within, and this makes my life simply happy… less messy and more meshy!
I am stronger than my fears and struggles. This I now know. The dark shadows of fear of uncertainty and change no longer haunt me by robbing my present of joy, from borrowing fear from the future waiting for the other shoe to drop or living in the pain of the past. I am free of being controlled by the need to control everything and can unhook from the temptations to fight or flight in struggle. I cannot even tell you the freedom felt in that!!! Seriously, there are no words. Its the antidote to the anxiety that once was a mainstay weaved within all that I did.
Rather than obstacles being something that took me off my path, I now see them as signs that I am ON path, shaping me, and I embrace these opportunities to grow UP. My relationship with struggle is a healthy one. And I am in right relationship with my mind. From this lens that anchors me to the richness and aliveness of life – the heaven(and hell) that I get to experience as a human on earth, I calibrate UP, become better, more connected to my being. I feel the kind of happiness that is settled, content, rooted, and like a time honored friend, happiness is there through the pain, with it, not displaced, never abandoning me, and not a carrot stick at the end of the pain. Out of the human condition of struggle and separation there is a reuniting to our purpose to transcend the story of struggle and come to fully know our oneness while on the sacred journey of a human being, being human. This births a zest that is imprinted on my soul that lets me welcome life in, ALL of it, again and again.
This is me, and my journey continues.