• Rain Rain Come Today

    • October 8, 2009 11:03 am

    It’s currently raining in Whitehorse and the temperature is +1 C, which means the rain is very close to being snow and the streets are probably treacherous.

    I could leave the apartment and head out to meet a group of friends for an inspiring lunch-time meeting or I could stay here in my cozies and plug away at my work.

    Staying here sounds good.

    I was never a big fan of rain. I actually used to say that I hated the rain. Imagine!

    I can recall saying those very words to a woman back when I was still living in Montreal. It had been a particularly dreary day and I was feeling inconvenienced by the rain so I was complaining loudly about the drizzle. Her response surprised me.

    “I love the rain,” she cooed, “Rain makes the grass grow, it nourishes plants and animals, it’s life-sustaining and renewing. It’s water falling from the sky for us. What a gift rain is!”

    I remember thinking, “Bleah. I’m soaking wet and it’s grey outside.”

    But her words began to have an impact. Every time it rained I would remember what she said and over time it slowly dawned on me that she was right. Rain is a life force for all.

    She had planted a seed and despite my sour attitude it had grown into a new way of thinking. The negative had become a positive.

    Time to get to that meeting!

    Inspiring Message of the Day: Try looking at something you don’t like in a new way. See the positive aspect and allow yourself to experience the gift it may have to offer you.

    Marry Your Self

    • October 7, 2009 8:56 pm

    I usually blog in the morning but my day was too full so here I am in the evening when the day is done, which makes the “Inspiring Message of the Day” rather redundant.

    I’m back in my hometown of Whitehorse, Yukon after a week in BC and there is snow on the mountains and the promise of winter in the air. It’s getting c-c-cold but the air is fresh and clean. I’m glad to be home.

    I just spoke to a close girlfriend who is getting married in two weeks and I was inspired by how committed she’s been to her own well-being during the long the build-up to the big day.

    “I can spend all my time focusing on the material details like what I’m wearing, the decorations and the food but I’d much rather look at how I’m affected by this huge rite of passage, what it means for me in my life at this time. Deciding to spend my life with someone has changed my whole world and I’ve been paying attention to everything that it’s bringing up.”

    It’s admirable to see a woman being so mindful of her inner process during such a dramatic time in her life. There is so much scrutiny given to how everything is going to look at a wedding and it’s wonderfully refreshing to encounter someone giving thought to how the wedding is making her feel.

    Today was a challenging day. Arriving home after traveling is never easy. I call this time “re-entry” and it usually requires that I be extra gentle with myself because there’s lots of stress and exhaustion. After a day of “to-do”lists and meetings I was uplifted by my friend’s determination to take care of herself in the midst of wedding mania.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: Nurture the inner process. Let it take precedence over all else. We deserve to put our individual well-being first. When we do this, everything else will be first class.

    Time Flies (or Not)

    • October 6, 2009 8:19 am

    I don’t know where I first heard the expression “Time is Elastic” but I use it a lot. I like it. It well describes the phenomenon of what we call time.

    Time can fly and drag equally. Time can be both long and short. It can move quickly or slowly. A minute can feel like a second or an hour. An hour can feel like a minute or a day.

    It’s all about perception.

    I once watched a documentary about a reformed bank robber and he talked at length about “stopping time”. He could actually slow time down to a stand-still in order to get the job done. He manipulated time to work in his favour by being present.

    I’ve worked with an acting coach who talked about “owning time”, which was essentially her way of saying, “be in the moment”. We could empower ourselves, she was saying, by being present.

    Time flies when we’re having fun but it also flies when we’re not really present in our lives. I know that when I’m running around trying to get things done I’m not in my life. I trying to get things over with and I’m missing my life all together.

    When we are present, when we are really here, now, time will not fly. It will barely move.

    As I sit here the clock on the wall ticks away the seconds. If I stop typing and listen to the tick-tick-tick it actually slows down. A watched pot never boils.

    I lived most of my life trying to get it over with. When it was Monday I’d be living for Friday. When it was Friday I’d be living in dread of Monday. I’d be living for Christmas when it was still September or living for July in the bleak mid-winter. I was not in my life. I was in my head, future-tripping.

    It’s taken me years of practice to let go of that way of living and believe me, I don’t do it perfectly. But every new day gives me the opportunity to continue practicing being in my life, being in my day, in my body, with my breath. Present.

    Animals are great inspiration. A couple of summers ago I was in Keno City, an old mining town in the north of the Yukon, and I and a couple of friends were exploring some of the abandoned, run-down buildings where the miners had once lived.

    I found a sunny platform and sat down for a rest. The sun was shining, the fall colours were luminous and the far mountains had fresh snow on their peaks. A Richardson Ground Squirrel (or a gopher to some) popped up from a hole in the decaying floor of what once may have been a kitchen.

    He sat very still, the wind blowing his fur, his eyes blinking in the bright sun. He sat and sat and sat. He did not move. I was mesmerized. Was he thinking? If so, what was he thinking? He wasn’t being busy, cleaning himself or scratching or eating. He was simply being. For ages!

    I often think of that little guy when I’m getting squirrelly. Can I just be? Can I just let go of everything and simply experience what is happening around me without judgment or thought?

    It’s a great challenge and one that brings me a lot of peace. I can slow time down and enjoy my life. What a concept.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: If animals get to simply be all day long, why not us? Maybe we don’t have to DO anything. Maybe we just have to BE.

    Baraka – Thread of Life

    • October 5, 2009 10:02 am

    I’m now in Vancouver staying at my friends’ condo overlooking the marina beside Granville Island. I can see the gorgeous art decoĀ pillars of the Burrard Street bridge and the shiny glass jungle of high-rise condos across the channel.

    It’s fabulous.
    Last night I watched “Baraka”, a film made in the early nineties that has no dialogue, only images and an accompanying soundtrack. If you haven’t seen it, the summary on the DVD reads:
    “Baraka is a transcendent global tour that explores the sights and sounds of the human condition… in 24 countries on six continents.”
    The word “baraka” is from the Sufi language and it translates to “the thread that weaves life together.”
    One of the most memorable shots in the film is of a Balinese monkey sitting in a hot spring in the middle of a snowy mountain range. The camera lingers on him for some time and the viewer is treated to a meditation on who he is, who we are and how we are indubitably connected.
    One of the things I talk about in a speech I give about having a Higher Purpose and living according to a Higher Plan, is coincidence. (You can watch the speech on You Tube — Search “Let Go of Your ‘But'” and my name.)Ā 
    Coincidence means, “a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.”
    The key word for me in this definition is “apparent”. Apparent means, “clearly visible”.
    So when I experience coincidence, the reason is not clearly visible. I have to go deeper. I have to refer to the other word that stands out in that definition, which is “remarkable.”
    Remarkable means “extraordinary”, which itself means “outside the normal course of events.”
    When I arrived in Kamloops this past Friday I took a shuttle from the airport to the hotel. As we drove through the dark I listened to a man tell the woman beside him all about his trip to Germany where his family lives and where he was born and raised. I got to know something about him on that night bus and was inspired by his story.
    When I arrived at the Kamloops airport on the Sunday to fly to out Vancouver, who do you suppose was the Air Canada agent that checked me in?
    Mr. German Shuttle Bus.
    Baraka! This man and I did not speak and I did not tell him that I knew the name of his hometown and favorite drink. Seeing him again simply confirmedĀ that the thread that weaves life together is always being spun.
    Inspiring Message of the Day: Even the most banal coincidence is remarkable because it confirms that we are a part of something Greater that is guiding us in every single moment of our lives.

    In Kamloops I’ll Eat Your Boots

    • October 3, 2009 8:04 am

    I’m in Kamloops, BC, for a conference and being here reminds me of the Dennis Lee poem “In Kamloops”, which contains the line I’ve chosen as the title for today’s blog.

    I didn’t know where Kamloops was when I was a kid and when that poem was read to me by my parents but I imagined it was somewhere in boot country, where everything was made of boots, or looked like boots.

    From what I can see, most of the city is in a valley surrounded by low-rise mountains, which are brown like the desert and look just as dry. But it’s beautiful. I really like the way it looks. It doesn’t have the lush green of the coastal rain forest nor does it have the rocky magic of the mountains but it’s got Dennis Lee and it’s got my vote.

    Kamloops, visually impressive: check.

    For your Inspiring Message of the Day today I’d like you to visit my friend Leanne Coppen’s blog. It’s her one-year anniversary blogging for Chatelaine about her experience living with breast cancer.

    She’s a witty, honest scribe and I love her dearly. Check it out:

    http://blog.en.chatelaine.com/category/living-with-breast-cancer/

    If for some reason the link doesn’t work, Google “Chatelaine”, click on Blogs and choose “Living with Breast Cancer.”

    Look Back in Anger

    • October 2, 2009 7:35 am

    And what of anger?

    I have heard that anger is really fear in disguise. I have heard that depression is unexpressed anger. I have even heard that cancer is rage unreleased.

    For many years I believed it was not “spiritual” to be angry. The truth is, we cannot really be living the Spirit as long as we are denying our anger.

    I was an angry child. I like to say I was in a bad mood for 27 years. For most of my twenties, when I was trying to be spiritual, I repressed my anger, stuffed it, pretended it wasn’t there.

    Ten years ago, when I finally got on the healing path, I had to learn first to admit that I was angry and then how to express it in a healthy way.

    There is a line from the Gus Van Sant film “Milk” starring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, and it keeps coming back to me.

    There is a huge crowd of people in the gay Castro District, where “Milk” is mostly set, and those involved in the protest have just experienced what feels like one more terrible injustice.

    Milk and his compadres fear a riot. He gets on the bull horn and he says, “I know you’re angry…”

    And here we expect him to say, “BUT…”

    “But it’s okay, but don’t worry, but it will be alright.”

    But he doesn’t.

    Harvey Milk says, “I’M ANGRY!”

    And then they walk, together, in anger and in peace, to continue proclaiming their cause.

    It’s an incredibly moving moment.

    I’m writing about anger this morning because I’M ANGRY.

    It was a little thing that made me realize I had some unexpressed anger looking to be extracted from my body, just a little thing that wouldn’t work properly, a thing that was stuck and I was trying to un-stick it, just a small thing.

    The more I tried to make it work, and couldn’t, the more frustrated I got.

    I’M ANGRY.

    Okay, boy, wow. Awareness comes first. Then action: time to do something about that!

    And I will. I will go within, where the answers lie, I will share with someone who has wisdom about such things, and I will find a way to express the anger and get it out of my body.

    Howling in the bush always helps.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: My anger is valid. It needs to be expressed in a healthy way. Identifying it, sharing it and then releasing it will bring me back to peace.

    Courage 101

    • October 1, 2009 6:55 am

    The reason the URL address for this blog is called Cultivate Your Courage and why I lead an Inspiring workshop with the same name is not because I am THE MOST COURAGEOUS WOMAN and I am here to teach all of you how to be courageous.

    It’s because I need to cultivate my own courage everyday to live in this world.

    The CYC workshop was originally called Walk Through Your Fear. (You’d be amazed how many people would rather cultivate their courage than walk through their fear!)

    Name change aside, the idea for the workshop came to me after a prayer/meditation session. I was seeking guidance around how to generate some income outside of my artistic practice using the gifts and the talents that have been given to me.

    What could I do? I could lead a workshop. Okay. What on? What am I a true expert at doing? What do I know well enough that I could teach it?

    There it was: I walk through my fear. Every single day. In every situation. I feel the fear and I do it anyway.

    Despite the fact that I have the spiritual understanding that there is really nothing to fear, my little human form has a harder time grasping that notion.

    Sometimes I wake up in cold, naked fear and I don’t know why. I’ve gone to bed with joy and peace in my heart and when I awaken it’s a whole un-brave new world.

    This morning I woke up with the fear upon me. Lots of things to feed it: traveling tomorrow, taking cat to the kennel today, beginning of a new month, swine flu blah blah blah.

    I did what I always do to cultivate my courage: I prayed.

    I heard somewhere that prayer is not for the Power to whom you are praying. It is for you. I agree. When I pray, it is I that am changed.

    As I expressed my fear and asked for guidance my heart began to ease, the anxiety began to lift and I was returned to a state of well-being, gratitude and relaxation.

    I received the Inner Guidance I needed to live this day fully and passionately, as though it were my last. I remembered that it’s not about me, that I am here to be a worker for the Creator.

    I don’t know how prayer works. I just know it does.

    Inspiring Message for the Day: When I speak what is in my heart to the Power that makes the grass grow, the flowers bloom and the wind blow, I receive the strength I need to move forward with joy and fearlessness.