I had the privilege of witnessing a father and his young son in the pool swimming the other day. This young boy was in the shallow portion of the pool and his feet could just barely touch the ground. He was also wearing little floaties on his arms to give him some buoyancy as he learned his own way with his weight and balance and body in the water.

I would watch him grow fearful and tell his daddy he can’t. He can’t do something his father was asking him to do; like stand there and feel his feet on the bottom of the pool.

He would say, “I can’t.” His dad would laugh quietly and softly and say to him “You can’t what? The bottom is right there. Yes you can.”  Over and over again for about 15 minutes the little boy would say, I can’t, and his father would so softly say, yes you can.

Before I knew it, this little boy was standing on the bottom, then kicking his feet confidently, and playing in the pool without realizing that his father wasn’t holding him up. He was holding himself up. He knew he could.

This boy is developing a voice inside of him which tells him he can. I can just imagine him as a young man going off on his own, and feeling some fear about something and hearing his father’s voice inside his head telling him he can.

Sometimes we have to develop that voice within ourselves without the gentle, soft confident voice of our parents telling us we can. And you know what? We can.

This boy had the beautiful advantage of a father who could do this with him. Sometimes we don’t have that.

Guess what? We still can.

I am excited, happy, sad, nervous, already feeling left out, already sensing my brother’s and sister’s feelings and anticipations and prejudices and beliefs, and feeling a bit trapped by them.

I find I am shallow breathing. As I sit with all this going on inside of me and my body, I gather some distance so I can look at what is happening within me a little differently.

Already my sister has let me know that she is anxious and wants our cooking together to be a certain way. This “way” is not my way and different than how I usually do things. She wants to cook some of the things I usually cook and that I already bought the ingredients for. I realize that I can step back, breathe, and leave it as her problem, and I can also step back and breathe and see how I can compromise and when I do, check in with myself and see if that feels okay with me. Even with this, I know that she is obviously feeling her own unresolved feelings regarding me and our family. It is those very unresolved feelings that she carries that I feel within me and feel trapped by.

So as I go through this process, I give myself permission to be myself and honor her feelings and still be my full and deep and silly and dramatic and eccentric soulful self.

That feels good.

Now for my brother; as he is arriving, I write to him and hear back from his wife. That is not unusual. He and I don’t communicate well. I also feel lots of judgment and misunderstanding from him to me. As I register this, I also then realize that, to a different degree, I probably do the same to him. I know I don’t really know him. Ok, good, that feels better. Now, as far as the judgment and how that makes me feel; that doesn’t feel good. He views me a certain way and that limits me. There is a place inside of me that wants to be seen accurately and appreciated for who I am in total. I realize that may not and probably won’t happen between the two of us, at least for now. Can I still be my true and full and silly and eccentric and soulful self around him, knowing he will judge me and doesn’t like some of what he sees? If I am truly honest with myself, maybe not in my entirety. It is my sense that he is judging me in things he doesn’t understand that still bother me. I guess I might just have to be with these feelings and see what unfolds. So, I allow myself to have all these feelings as I prepare for the week ahead.

I also am happy and excited about seeing and being with them, because I do love them. I also understand that when my little brother was younger, I often would not accept anything less than truth and full attention, and made sure that I was heard by our parents, often in a loud way. This gave him trouble, and he still looks at me with those same eyes.

And, he is a gentle, funny, intelligent man, and my sister is a gentle, silly, eccentric woman herself who just wants a little acknowledgement for her culinary skills.

I can appreciate them, and see them for who they are, and thank them for being them.

Happy Passover, Happy Easter, and the best to all of you!

Gail

It has been for two days now.

We need the rain, and I love it.

It is grey and dreary and cool and wet outside.

I feel the heaviness of the air surround and invade me.

And then, a flock of birds comes and converges on a tree branch right in front of me.

This is just the way birds do in a formation on they know……they just know, and they all land at the same moment in time.

The synchrony of their movements touches me.

All settles again.

Again I feel heavy tendrils of the air and sky reach into me.

And I wait, and I breathe in the rich water infused air.

I know in the way birds know that this too is life and tomorrow may bring more sun.

All of this is true.

All it took was a change in perspective.

I am now looking out into the most beautiful sunrise, right from my chair.

Purple clouds quietly swarming around ribbons of pin, coral and red as the sun makes its emergence for the day.

All is quiet. Not a bird call in ear sight.

Just a humble herald to the new day.

After all, this happens all the time.

What if we were to take our true colors with us into each day? No fanfare involved.

We each just quietly don our colors and go about our day….day by day.

I am green, bright pink, grey, and purple.

What colors are you?

This year particularly is one where I feel open to learning and to revealing myself. As I watch each cloud float through the blue ocean of sky, I gain more and more confidence to be myself as freely as they are in their true purpose. They are so clear and beautiful and revealing and are so much a part of our earth experience, and here before I existed. I imagine myself leaning into them, gently, and feeling their support and touch as I lie on my back and blow my own bubbles of truth into the world.

Speaking of bubbles of truth…I was working with a client who was in a motor vehicle accident a few weeks ago and is still experiencing neck and back pain and stiffness. This particular day her stomach and mid-back were especially tight, and so I took a moment of time to focus on that part. She also is very sensitive to foods and supplements and to what she puts inside of her. I started talking about how her stomach and back are sort of walled off, and that is a protective mechanism that probably started when she was very little.

I asked her how her life was when she was little. She shared that she was the baby of four girls, and every one doted on her. For her, that felt good in a way, but also, their doting on her was not really about her. She wasn’t the one who was seen. Her siblings used her as a way to help and soothe themselves. Some part of her knew this and so in being so over inundated by others before she knew and developed herself, she then built a protection and wall between herself and others.

Now, that is no longer helpful to her. It keeps her from using the nutrition and nurturing that food can bring instead of protecting her. As we were speaking, she really understood this and what wisdom she had, and how to begin to now use this wisdom in a new way.

To me, it is always amazing what our bodies tell us and how they lead us to answers inside of us.

To your new year, and to new growth inside of each of you.

Gail

I listened to her talk about her calling, and watched her face, and wondered to myself where this passion and calling came from. I find most often our calling in life gives us great information to understand aspects of our past. In her life, her mother lived with her own mother, and her father took her and her sister when she was just about three years old to live with his sister, her husband, and his mother. Her father took them away from their mother and gave them to his sister and husband to raise, basically while he was in and out doing his thing. Her mother stayed in the state in which they were living with her mother in her mother’s house.

When he was little, around three, Dad’s mom had to take care of her ailing husband, his father, and then also her sickly baby, his brother. Dad was left to be raised by his sister who still lived with her mother. She never had her own home as she then later married and raised her brother and his children.

I listened to this story and heard something very important. Both of her parents didn’t have their own home. And, she was taken away from her home, her parents, when she was three years old. Her calling became having a home for veterans who didn’t have any home after returning from serving their country, their motherland.

As I pieced this together in my mind, and then expressed to her what she is doing and that by doing her calling, she totally honors both of her parents who never had their own home, as well as herself.

Isn’t this beautiful? We all do this; find something that has great meaning for us that honors ourselves, our past, and many times, our parents. This is sometimes called “finding our passion.”

As you think of what you are passionate about, what brings you joy and peace, especially during this holiday season, take a look at your family and see how your passion relates to an action or a feeling that honors your family.

Happy Holidays!

I am one with the clouds, the trees, the leaves, the birds flying by my window pane.

I look out through my window and I am in the leaves and the trees as I fly among them.

The birds welcome me with their calls.

We are dramatic, and yet very simple.

I sit and perch on a leaf as I watch, with all the other leaves, the rain drops.

I am just here among the beauty and part of the beauty.From this vantage point we know and see so much.

We carry the knowledge within us.

It doesn’t weigh us down.

It just is.

I choose to fly to another tree and alight on another branch and tune into the yellow leaves next to me.

I am part of the dramatic skyline.

We can choose to be part of the drama around us, or we can choose to be alive and involved, and yet not engage.

My husband likes to say, “Don’t be a part of their cookie.”  Learn, empathize, and have some distance. How can we really help ourselves and others if we are in their cookie? You see, he also loves cookies.

This is true with our families too. Be a part, and yet, be apart. Leave their issues and fate with them; they are theirs, not yours.

Do you ever feel that way?

When you get lost in your thoughts and/or feelings, take a moment, take a breath and, with a quick intention, slow them down. Ask yourself: what am I thinking? What am I feeling? Sometimes the thoughts and feelings happen so quickly they move like the frames of a movie.

In slowing them down, you also gain some control over them. There is something soothing and relaxing in slowing them down.

I am watching the sun pass under the clouds; or the clouds pass over the sun. There are so many clouds in the sky this afternoon that it is a continual kaleidoscope. As I take this in, I also take a moment to slow my thoughts and feel what is going on in my body. As the sun emerges from under the clouds I feel myself smiling and enjoying the warmth and light as it permeates through my being. My stomach is smiling. As the clouds move over the sun, and the sky turns grey, I feel a bit gloomy and edgy in my stomach and have to remind myself to breathe.

I can’t wait to go outside and feel the change in the temperature on my skin as I walk through my neighborhood.

Sometimes as I indulge myself in gloomy thinking, I purposefully slow myself down and redirect my thinking with these thoughts and actions. It feels good.

When you get stuck in gloomy thoughts and feelings, often it is a memory of a past time when you were in a sad or difficult place, and this past time still influences you today. Oftentimes, this memory stays with you and filters through you continually or when something is triggered within you, especially if you had a difficult beginning with your parents.

I think of this as I watch the play of the clouds and the light and the cool and the warm and think how wonderful it would be if we all could know that these patterns are as changeable as the weather.

There was a man I watched on the television show, Dancing with the Stars, who had survived a terrible accident during the Iraq War and forty percent if his skin was burned. He has lost an ear and had thirty three operations. Here he is dancing beautifully on the television show. He was asked how was able to do this and have such a positive attitude. He answered that his mother had a positive attitude and he was influenced by her. Those first years with our parents do color the rest of our lives. And yet, when you can truly accept the mother and father you have, warts and all, you give yourself a tremendous gift and the possibility to love yourself in a whole new way.

I look outside my window, watch the play of the sun and the clouds, and love myself just a little bit more.