Glad No Matter What

After many years of resisting change and grieving losses in my life, I embarked on a journey of choosing to be – Glad No Matter What. This choice sprang from how dreadful the alternatives seemed, and also from burrowing into my own psychology for many years, and finding out that weaving the dark and the light together creates a rich, fertile “middle ground” to live in. From this middle ground came my gladness.

So what does it mean to be “Glad No Matter What”?

It does NOT mean feeling glad when you don’t. How annoying.

It means finding the gladnesses in all of your feelings. I still feel all the challenging kinds of feelings; I just don’t spend so much time there. I call this way of living “practical gladness.” With a basis of practical gladness, the cup is both half empty and half full at the same time. Our lives are made of all of the feelings, not just the happy or sad ones.

Most of us were not taught how to hold or have multiple feelings. In the family I grew up in, you could only have one feeling at a time, and you’d better go to your room to have it, and come out feeling “better.” Better was applied liberally to feelings, especially complex ones. So I learned to hide the complexities and present a “happy face.” Beneath this happy face was rage, but everyone else was doing the same thing, so it seemed okay, or at least tolerable. It became intolerable when I tried to actually live that way.

Feelings are always there. I believed I could control, deny, avoid, resist, or just stop them. This belief system persisted for years with some success, until I attempted suicide in my mid-thirties, and I entered psychotherapy to try to understand why. The suicide prevention line person asked me, “Did you really want to die, or did you just want the pain to end?” I realized that I just wanted the pain to end, and this pain was related to my resistance of the feelings I was actually having. So I very reluctantly went to therapy. My reluctance was directly related to having been in family therapy when I was 8 years old, due to being abused by my older brother, although that abuse was not uncovered in the therapy. The therapist let me sit on his lap during the session, and then asked me to step outside so he could talk to my parents. I listened through the door and heard him say, “You have a very seductive little girl, and all the problems in your family are because of her.”

I carried that sentence and the feelings that came with it until I was 35 years old and started having flashbacks of the incest, which lasted for weeks and I couldn’t eat or sleep. That was why I wanted the pain to end.

In therapy I learned to just experience my feelings, and a brand-new world materialized. In the brand-new world, my feelings were important to and acknowledged by me. I created a “family of choice” where it felt safe to express feelings and hear others’ feelings. I also learned to trust my male therapist, and repaired so many of what felt like the broken places inside me. There is a marvelous quote by William Stafford: I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.

That’s how I feel now.

I also feel glad and grateful for all the love and care I did receive in childhood, and have forgiven all involved.

Being Glad No Matter What is both a choice and a commitment. I commit and choose to feel all of my feelings, and alchemize and transform them into being glad more often. In that way, I’ve become a “transformational change agent.” I have invented processes to support this, and talked with hundreds of people about the subjects of loss and change, and what they’ve learned and experienced. After the deaths of my parents, cat, and loss of significant love relationships and dreams, I wrote a book about my experiences and processes of growth.

The book is called Glad No Matter What: Transforming Loss and Change into Gift and Opportunity. Every loss has within it significant gifts, every change has many opportunities. Our losses and changes happen so we can transform, and we have the chance to do our transformational work. And it does involve perspective shifts to allow those transformations to take place. Before my mother died at age 80, I asked her what wisdom she would like to pass along. She said,

“I just wish I hadn’t resisted everything so much.”

As a former all-star resister, I took her words into my being and chose to do it differently going forward. I’ve created a lot of support for doing this, and I’m practicing with all the things I write about in my book.

When my friend Isabel died at age 90, I asked her what wisdom she’d like to share, and she answered,

“Every single change in my whole life, without exception, was always for the better.”

I now experience every change that occurs with a different set of eyes. My eyes see with practical gladness, and I know that whatever has happened, is happening, or will happen, I choose to be glad as often as I possibly can. I choose to feel all of my feelings, all of my life. Which does not make me a mindlessly-positive person who tells people to just “look on the bright side.” Those people annoy me.

Go to http://www.planetsark.com/ to sign up for my free, colorful handwritten eLetter and receive news about my upcoming book: Glad No Matter What: Transforming Loss and Change into Gift and Opportunity, being published by New World Library in Fall 2010.

Do More Things Badly

My inner perfectionist flipped out when I first heard this recommendation from one of my mentors, Rebecca Latimer, who wrote a book called You’re Not Old Until You’re Ninety: Best To Be Prepared, However.

Rebecca said to me: “Oh SARK, when you speak to groups of people, would you please let them know that if they meditate and do it badly, it still works? And that goes for everything else, too. My best recommendation is to do more things badly.”

I knew from experience that my perfectionist ways were inhibiting my joy, so I took her recommendation to heart and began the conscious practice of doing more things badly or imperfectly, relieving myself of my former standards. I discovered that the more I did “badly,” the happier I felt.

I found that my inner perfectionist was exhausted by me and my ideas about how to do things. I’d learned very well from my perfectionist Mother how to do things “the right way,” meaning—basically—HER way, which took me years to figure out.

So that’s when I began doing things like eating a chocolate cake with no silverware, lying down in line at the bank, singing Amazing Grace at the Department of Motor Vehicles, doing a TV interview with the back of my hair soaked in coconut oil from a massage the night before and singing Karaoke—without alcohol! I also experimented with smaller, more mundane things too.

I have since learned that not only is it fun to do things badly, it is a real relief to give up so many of the “rules” I had grown up with and then imposed on myself. I have also learned that I’m a pretty high achiever, and in some cases an overachiever, so on a one-to-ten scale, dialing down from a ten to a five or six is barely noticeable to anyone else!

Still, it was noticeable to me, so I engaged in some practices to support my new freedom.

1. I give myself primary permission to do some things badly, imperfectly, or just differently.

I do this by experimenting, practicing, and noticing the results. For example, I’m usually very quick to do favors for people or fulfill requests. My younger brother had asked me to find out some information for him prior to his wedding, and I simply didn’t do it. When he asked for the information, I confessed that I didn’t have it and hadn’t done it. He was shocked and annoyed with me. I apologized, but I didn’t feel guilty. We processed what had happened and both realized that I was ALWAYS reliable, so rarely faltering that I’d given myself no room at all to just be human. It was really fun to watch him be the responsible one getting things done for his wedding, and I got to experience the role of someone who hadn’t followed through. I am now really learning to consciously give myself that primary permission that I’d always automatically given to other people.

2. I ignore or choose not to notice what others think.

I used to get so scared or worried if someone felt disappointed, annoyed or irritated with me about something I had or hadn’t done. I had been a people pleaser who relied on being filled up from outside sources in order to feel good. Now, through self-love and self-care, I fill myself up first and allow others to experience and take responsibility for their own emotions. I don’t focus on other people’s reactions much at all anymore, and it is such a great relief. I also practice ignoring people when I do unusual things, or I invite them to join in. I got the whole room to sing Amazing Grace with me at the DMV. Several people sat or layed down with me in the bank line, and it was no problem at all to find people to eat cake with me sans silverware!

3. I consistently practice self-love and exquisite self-care.

I practice living as a “full cup of self-love,” ready to share the overflow with the world. I used to live like a half-empty cup, looking for people or substances to fill me. Now that I’ve learned how to care for myself exquisitely, I can respond to the world, instead of reacting. In response, there is a choice, in reaction, there is very little choice. Now I intentionally choose the subject of, and reason for, my response. When I feel less than self-loving or caring, which is often every day, I engage in specific practices and processes to re-center myself. I am then able to extend so much more love to the world.

And of course, in all of the above, I also fail, falter, stumble, flail, flounder and do a lot of things badly—sometimes very badly. I’ve discovered that being truly self-loving is a long term relationship with myself that contains EVERYthing, as every relationship does. The point is not to love myself all the time. The point is to practice loving myself as consistently as I am able, in all sorts of conditions. This means practicing loving the fat, forgetful, resistant parts too. And when I turn away from myself in aversion, I bring myself back as lovingly as I am able. And perhaps an even greater challenge is to love the successful, brilliant and soaring parts of myself; I am sometimes more afraid of my joy than my pain. Pain seems easier to relate to, and joy can feel lonely.

My early abuse experiences taught me that pain lasts, and joy is unreliable. I have since learned to believe more in the opposite: joy is everlasting, and pain cannot always be trusted. And in between those two extremes lie the glorious middle spaces where most of my growth takes place. My explorations in doing more things badly have shown me that there is a lot of joy in the mess and chaos of living as a “splendidly imperfect” human being.

YES to More Self Love for YOU

Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy

How well and often do you love yourself? Are you your own best friend? How kindly and exquisitely do you tend to your own soul? Your answers to these questions may reveal an opportunity to practice more self-love. In my book: Fabulous Friendship Festival; Loving Wildly, Learning Deeply, Living Fully with Our Friends, I write about self-friendship, and have discovered through teaching workshops about it, that about 85% of people do not identify or describe themselves as their own closest friend.

We are taught to love ourselves, from many sources, such as the bible; “Love thy neighbor as thyself” to every metaphysical teaching, yet the actual practice of it is not often or openly discussed. It’s as if we’re just supposed to do it “naturally” and not need support, permission, reminders or examples.

Most of us are practicing being outer focused first, tending to the needs and requests of others before ourselves. Then somehow, it seems that there isn’t enough time left over for ourselves. That’s because we’re doing it backwards. To truly love and be friends with others, we must practice loving ourselves well and fully on a daily basis. If we don’t, we all witness and experience crabby unloved people walking around, living their lives not experiencing self-love (or loving others.)

While in New York City recently, I met a hotel manager who projected absolute radiant positive energy. When I complimented him and told him how much I appreciated it, he enthusiastically said; “I know! I am just so in love with myself!” I felt that love in every cell of my body, and stuck to him like a magnet during my stay at that hotel. When I share this story with groups of people, they laugh because it just sounds so unusual and strange. Yet, when we fall in love with another person, it’s perfectly acceptable and expected to exclaim about our love and everyone cheers and applauds.

We still think that self-love is selfish and narcissistic, forgetting that conscious selfishness is necessary for loving ourselves, and that we cannot truly love others without these experiences of self-loving. We are all selfish-in the best sense of what that means- to care for ourselves first.

I’ve been practicing loving myself more deeply in a number of new ways, beginning and ending my days by hugging myself. It began with a moment or two, and it’s now escalated to 5-10 minutes at a time. I can feel all my endorphins being elevated, and always end up grinning and beaming. I’ve begun saying out loud in certain situations; “I’m just so in love with myself!” and noticing the responses. Most people love it and want to join in. As I expand my experiences of self-love, I’ve observed that I’m more available and loving to friends and family too. It’s as if my own inside well is so full of love, that I just naturally share the overflow.

I think I used to feel a little scared that if I really loved myself, I’d become so self-absorbed that there wouldn’t be room for anyone else. The opposite is truly occurring and I’m steeped in self-love, friendship with myself and exquisite self-care practices that radiate out directly to the world. I keep a daily joy and gratitude journal, and fill pages with wonderful experiences and morsels of goodness. I’m always on the lookout for more, and this draws more of those kinds of experiences to me. Practicing self-friendship and love also means tending to, and being present for the times I don’t feel positive or self-loving at all.

How do we practice self-love during those times too?

It’s easy to love ourselves when we feel good and “things are going our way,” it’s less easy when we experience self-criticism, frustration, negativity or self-abandonment.

How unconditional is your love for your self?

We are all made up of light and shadows, and many of us try to flee the shadows and stay in the light. Wanting to live in the light isn’t the problem, attempting to flee the shadows is. As long as we continue to turn away from the parts of ourselves that we judge as unworthy, unacceptable or unlovable, we will continue to experience separation and lack of love.

In order to more deeply and consistently practice self-love and self-friendship, it is helpful to have resources. Here are some I personally utilize and recommend:

1. Loving What Is by Byron Katie
2. Ask and it Is Given by Jerry & Esther Hicks
3. The Power of Intention by Dr. Wayne Dyer
4. Relax Into Wealth by Alan Cohen
5. Embracing Your Inner Critic by Hal Stone & Sidra Stone
6. Making A Change For Good by Cheri Huber
7. The Art of Extreme Self Care by Cheryl Richardson
8. All the music of Karen Drucker
9. Yourself

Self-healing is available to each one of us, and we forget the power of it, and don’t often include ourselves on such lists. We may be tempted to endow “someone else” with the knowledge or way to go, forgetting that we do the actual work and apply the teachings.

So, become the most marvelous friend to yourself first. Find your broken places and gain strength there too. Practice looking into your shadows (you can use a flashlight) and become aware of how to best care for yourself during those times also, and experience loving yourself unconditionally more often.

Turn your wide heart and loving eyes towards yourself and awaken what you already know:

YOU ARE SEEN

YOU ARE KNOWN

YOU ARE LOVED

By everyone, especially yourself!

CSL and SARK Talk Creativity

CSL: Your tagline says “Succulent Wild Woman”. What does that mean to you and how can women (and men?) find their own succulent wild person within?

Many years ago in San Francisco, I found these words etched into the cement on the sidewalk; Succulence is Powerful. I immediately resonated strongly with those words and shouted; “Yes! And I am a Succulent Wild Woman!” and went home and started a book with that title. A succulent is a plant that is self-nourishing, self-sustaining. It feeds itself water from the inside.

I believe and know that we can be like this too. Right after Succulent Wild Woman came out, I saw that so many men wanted to be involved. So I wrote The Bodacious Book of Succulence, which honored all the Succulent Wild Men that I knew, including my cat Jupiter! Being Succulent & Wild became a phenomenon all over the world, with people forming groups and connecting with each other. I continue to live, explore and create with magnificent succulence, as do countless others.

We all want rich, rare, eccentric, unusual lives, filled with adventure and juiciness. Succulent Wild people feel that every day. To find your own succulence, become aware that you are already succulent, just being human. Then consider reading one of my books or engage in one of my eprograms and “tune your dial” to the succulent channel. As you magnify and expand your experiences of succulence, you will notice yourself changing and growing from the inside out. You can then share that succulence with the world.

CSL: How do you feel creativity is related to mind and body wellness?

We are intrinsically creative and must express that in order to live an abundantly healthy life. Those creative expressions can take endless forms. Raising children is one of the most creative acts we can engage in. Changing your perspective to think of yourself as a creative person, and behaving that way, is tremendously valuable for nourishing your mind and body.

Every challenge there is, is solved by creative solutions. Every joy is expanded by our creativity. There is no end to our creativity!

CSL: Can you give our readers a few strategies they can use to awaken their creative spirit on a daily basis?

Commit to your creative spirit by experiencing creative things- tiny or large

Realize that you ARE creative already- you are born as a creative soul

Engage in practices that fill your soul- then share the overflow with the world

Avoid energies that drain you or drag you down- learn from them and then move on

Try new things all the time- be filled and fulfilled by what you experience

Invest in creativity- read, study, discuss creative things with creative thinking people

Vividness is a “creativity accelerator”- Find some

Energetically shift to a an active creative daily life-you are meant to live this way

CSL: For our readers who may not be familiar with your writing, what is your mission as an author and artist?

When I was ten years old, I declared that I wanted to be “a beacon of hope” for the world. I would now add this: To transparently share my life and gifts so that myself and others can be delighted, illuminated, refreshed and filled. May we all then share our creative abundance with the world.

CSL: Do you have any exciting new projects that you can share with us?

Yes! I am excited by so many upcoming projects. I am simultaneously creating 5 books, utilizing my micromovement method; 2 nonfiction, 2 children’s books and a memoir. One of the nonfiction books will be published in fall 2010 by New World Library. The working title is Glad for the Grief; Transforming Grief and Loss into Gift and Opportunity.

I’m also creating and developing more marvelous new eprograms, in addition to the 4 we’ve recently launched, which will be available at http://www.planetsark.com