Tag: inspiration

White Plus Spaghetti Sauce

We have been using our newly remodeled kitchen for less than a week now. And like most new and/or remodeled kitchens, it is 50 shades of white (who knew that white came in so many shades??). And so yesterday, when I was getting my oatmeal down from the cabinet for breakfast, I also unintentionally took down a large jar of Rao’s spaghetti sauce. And that thing splattered. It looked like a horrendous murder scene in our new white kitchen. I don’t think there was any part of the kitchen (and also my bathrobe) that wasn’t covered in glass and red sauce.

Yes, I swore. Yes, I had tears in my eyes. Yes, I went into high gear cleaning mode for fears that the spaghetti sauce would add orange splotchy stains to our new surroundings if I didn’t act fast. Miraculously, despite the thick red sauce being all over the cabinets, the counters, the floors, the backsplash tile, various lines of grout, the oven, the refrigerator, the rubber stuff that seals the refrigerator door, and even a hallway, I was able to get it all out. No one would have ever guessed it happened. I used to watch true crime shows in disbelief. Despite stabbing someone a million times in a heinous jealous rage, the vicious murderer was able to clean up all of the evidence, seemingly without a trace, until some try-hard detective used a blue light to find a “speck” of blood. After yesterday’s experience, I more understood how this could actually happen. Necessity is the mother of invention. When you are in a panicked frenzy, doing a “going against the clock style of cleaning”, it’s amazing what you can achieve. (And yet, when I headed to bed last night, I still found a small piece of spaghetti jar glass in our entryway.)

I am a person who needs to find meaning in everything. I cannot go through anything in life, feeling like it is meaningless. And so I create meaning and lessons for everything that happens to me, every day of my life. What was yesterday’s lesson for me (besides putting spaghetti sauce jars in a new, safe place where they would not fall and splatter all over everything)? It occurred to me, as I was desperate to get my kitchen back to its “back to brand new” state, that we tend to take much better care of the new things in our lives. We are ginger and careful with our new cars, our new furniture, our new clothes, our new engagement rings, our new puppies and kittens, and our new relationships. We are so excited about these things! We treat them with kit gloves. We revel at how wonderful it is to have gotten this special new thing in our lives, and how hard we worked to get it. The real truth is, every new thing in our lives, is often the answer to one of our dreams. How amazing is that? And yet, pretty soon (usually sooner than we would think), these things become “old hat.” We start being less careful. We start taking these now “old things” for granted. We start nitpicking what we don’t like about these things. And before long, we are dreaming about replacing them with something new. The thing hasn’t changed all that much. Yes, it’s gotten use, but isn’t that use what the thing was acquired for, to begin with? The “thing” – the car, the kitchen, the pet, the relationship, hasn’t changed that much. It’s just showing some wear and age from being used and useful. Still, it is our perception of the thing that has really changed more than anything. It is no longer “new” to us. It is no longer “fresh and interesting.” It loses its preciousness to us.

I understand that things get worn out. You can’t keep everything. There is a place for “new” in all of our lives. This quest and desire for new and interesting and different is what keeps humankind growing and progressing and expanding. However, there are some things that are our velveteen rabbits. The velveteen rabbits in our lives, actually become more precious with age and wear. I asked AI this morning what was the true meaning of the story of The Velveteen Rabbit and this was the first line of its answer: “The meaning of The Velveteen Rabbit is that love and deep emotional connection are what make something truly “real,” even if it becomes shabby in the process.”

The velveteen rabbits in our lives, deserve the same care and appreciation, and careful handling that we give to all of the new things. Not all of the new things will evolve to be one of our velveteen rabbits. It’s not possible nor healthy for this to be so. (see the TV show Hoarders) Still, it’s a good reminder that as much care as we give to our newly obtained stuff, we should reserve some of that deepest care and concern and reverence, for the most precious “stuff” that has been with us all along. Perhaps we must remember that as we age, we are our own primary, irreplaceable, shabby, but authentically real “velveteen rabbits” and we should treat ourselves as such – the most precious things that will be with us, throughout our entire lives.

“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.
But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” – Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Monday – Funday

I asked my husband how he was feeling about it being Monday morning. He said that “he was channeling Jerry Maguire’s mentor.” And then he asked me, “What was that guy’s name again?” I didn’t remember. It turns out that the Jerry Maguire movie came out almost 30 years ago. (Ugh, really? Can that be true?) I looked up Jerry Maguire’s mentor clips. Jerry Maguire’s mentor was named Dicky Fox and here he is with some Monday motivation:

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Empty to Full

Empty nest is often portrayed as a grieving process. Empty nest is often a time that one is expected to feel a little lost and afloat at sea. Even the thought of an actual empty nest is such a sad, mental picture – a lifeless little blob of browning grass, slowly turning to dust. But my experience with empty nest (and what I am witnessing my friends’ experiencing) is while definitely being a time of transition and of BIG feelings, entering into the empty nest is anything but lifeless and empty. Empty nest is a time of refilling the empty spots with the rediscovery of yourself and the latent interests that you had long buried. Empty nest is a time of celebrating the family which you created, and successfully delivered to the starting line of their own adult lives, by leaving behind all of the daily duties and worries and time juggling that raising a family entails. Empty nest is the end of a lot of the “make do”. When we are raising our families, we parents often “make do”. Our priorities are our children’s needs. We live in neighborhoods close to good schools, sports facilities and other families. We buy enormous family cars, (which quickly fill with random petrified French fries, food wrappers and stinky cleats) and these battered tanks of cars, often go in opposite directions on the weekends, as we move our broods around to their events and birthday parties and games. We take “family vacations”, with the idea of getting away, but still being able to keep the kids entertained and on a reasonable sleep/food schedule. We typically spend any leftover money (ha!) on ourselves, only after we are sure that our children have all of their needs met. We try to sneak little bits of time for ourselves, only after we have supported everyone else’s needs and activities. And we don’t regret doing any and all of this. Our families are the greatest loves of our lives. Our families are our most enduring creations. Our families are our hearts and our stories, walking around on legs.

My husband and I spent this past weekend with our youngest son and his girlfriend. A couple of weekends ago, we spent the weekend with our middle son. A month ago we hung around NYC with our eldest and his fiancée, after having spent a fun week with our daughter. When you are raising four kids, one-on-one time with any of them is a rarity. You do your best, but time and space is a commodity in a big family. One of the biggest joys I have experienced as an empty nester is getting to experience more focused one-on-one time with each of our children. Getting to know our children better as individuals, instead of just a part of the blob of “the kids”, has been one of my biggest surprise blessings of the empty nest. And of course, getting them all together at times like the holidays, or witnessing our children getting together with each other, makes my heart glow with comfort that they will always have each other to lean on, even when my husband and I are long gone. Remnants of “our family” will always remain in family lore, which I hope will go on and on for generations.

Currently, our kitchen remodel is getting close to being finished. Our home is being transitioned from “make do” to “make a wish come true.” When we bought our home, we were renting it first. It needed a lot of work, but it was big enough and it was in the right zip code, for the right schools. We eventually decided to buy it, mostly so we didn’t have to move again. We filled our home with a hodgepodge of “make do” furniture that we collected along the way of living in three different states. Our home is filled with furniture that shows the wear and tear of teenage boys and their sweaty friends, making good use of it, always with a couple of dogs trying to get in on the action. (with dogs, it’s always “the smellier the better”) I recently tried to donate a couple of our old leather couches to a thrift store. They didn’t want them. Sigh.

Our home always felt “temporary” to me. We moved a few times when the kids were young, so it occurred to me that we may easily move again. We rented our home first. And truthfully, despite its lovely views of a teeming nature preserve, I never felt like I gave my heart fully to our house. In my mind, our home was a “stop gap” until we got the kids all launched. But then suddenly, the kids were launching like rockets. They were plunging off the diving board towards the pool of their own lives, in rapid succession. In the last few years, my husband and I have had to have real conversations, about our own real next steps. And this felt awkward. When you have lived “the family formula” since 1996, it’s hard to fathom coming to the end of the formula. It’s hard to start a new equation that seems simple, 1 + 1 = 2, but is really filled with so many more possibilities than we were ever afforded before (it’s so overwhelming that sometimes the formula seems more like 1 + 1 = infinity). And yet, we eventually came to the conclusion that we weren’t ready to sell our home. We were just ready to give it a refresh and a makeover. We decided to take our home along on the journey, of our own transition into this new stage in life.

When something is empty, it is natural to want to fill it. Empty to full to empty to full to empty to full, is just another cycle of the endless cycles which we experience in life. We experience the mixed feelings of loneliness, quietness, peacefulness, simplicity, that empty brings, and we start filling it again, until the fullness feels too brimming, too cluttered, too overwhelming, too claustrophobic, and so we start the process of emptying again, so we have some space to fill our lives with something new. And this process comes with a lot of feels. It comes with a lot of conflicting feels. As you age, you better understand that “happy/sad” is a real feeling. In fact, in life, “happy/sad” is often the prevailing feeling as you go through the many cycles of filling up the empty spots, and emptying out what is no longer needed. And no matter where you are in the empty/full cycle, you realize that there is always room for feelings. In fact, it is these feelings that are the true guides to the next steps you are meant to take in this journey of the cycles of your life.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Monday’s Musings

+ “An important fact of life is that it’s often difficult to know what will make you happy, but quite easy to identify what will make you miserable.” – Morgan Housel

I took this quote from an excellent article (excerpt from a book) which I read this morning. The article is so good, I sent it unsolicited to my four adult children this morning. The quote is from Morgan Housel’s latest book, The Art of Spending Money. These are listed as the key takeaways of the article:


“Happiness in life can be elusive, but misery often follows clear patterns. 
Chasing status, wealth, or others’ approval with your money almost always undermines independence and contentment. 
Treating money as your identity or a social scorecard also leads to regret, while using it as a tool to create freedom has the opposite effect.”

The author argues that it is much easier to eliminate what is bad for you, or what makes you sick, or what is unhealthy for you (i.e. certain toxic relationships, your detrimental habits, what you eat and drink and consume, etc.) than to come up with a perfect formula of what to do in your every day that will make you happy. In other words, happiness can sometimes more easily come from a process of elimination. See the entire article here (it is well worth the read):

https://bigthink.com/books/how-to-spend-your-money-to-be-miserable/?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email&utm_placement=newsletter&user_id=66c4c2a3600ae15075906bd3

****On an aside, I am a huge proponent of gratitude lists. I do believe that basking in gratitude on a daily basis, is one of the best vehicles to take you towards what makes you happy and peaceful and contented and filled with awe.

+ Like so many people, my breath was taken away a little bit when I heard that the actress Diane Keaton had passed. She was so unique and iconic and it wasn’t a forced, rehearsed pretense to be so. Diane Keaton was just one of those rare birds, who was absolutely authentic, comfortable in her own skin, and true to herself (Brian Philips of The Ringer called her “effortlessly original“) and we all recognized and resonated with that fact. As Ingrid Bergman said, “The world worships an original.” In Diane Keaton’s own words:

“Memories are simply moments that refuse to be ordinary.”

“What is perfection, anyway? It’s the death of creativity, that’s what I think, while change on the other hand, is the cornerstone of new ideas. God knows I want new ideas and new experiences.”

“I never understood the idea that you’re supposed to mellow as you get older. Slowing down isn’t something I relate to at all. The goal is to continue in good and bad, all of it. To continue to express myself, particularly. To feel the world. To explore. To be with people. To take things far. To risk. To love. I just want to know more and see more.”

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Erase, Repeat, Deny

One of my least favorite things in life is just “sweeping everything under the rug.” People love to say, almost righteously in their “kindness”: “I just hate confrontation.” And I think to myself, “Of course you hate confrontation. Almost every healthy person whom I know, with any level of kindness and empathy, hates confrontation. Nobody likes confrontation. It’s uncomfortable. It sparks defensiveness. It’s painful to think someone finds something that’s going on is ‘less than perfect.’ It rouses our own meanest inner critic and insecurities.” But here’s the rub, the relationship starts breaking down, as people try to walk on eggshells, on a bumpy rug, covering a floor of unhealed resentments. When we don’t address situations, the relationship starts being based on our own one-sided idea and thoughts of what is going on, without any earnest communication about what the other person is feeling and thinking. And in the worst situations, toxic controllers use this very human “I just hate confrontation” against us. They can keep the “erase/repeat/deny” cycle going, because we have shown that we are continually willing to just throw things under the rug, again and again.

Now one of my other least favorite things in life is pettiness. If we hold on to every little aggravation and every little annoyance and we make everyone around us miserable and we make their behavior accountable for our own happiness, that just turns us into being one of the toxic controllers. It is best to confront the truly unacceptable things that happen in a relationship or in a situation (the things that if we are honest with ourselves, we know will definitely turn into major bumps under the rug). The other minor things are our own responsibility to work through and to let go. (It’s often occurred to me that all of us would like to have magic wands to turn everyone in our lives into exactly whom we want them to be, without realizing that they too, want to use their own magic wands on us!) It’s not an easy dance. However, if we value truly authentic, real relationships, then healthy, compassionate confrontation is the only way to go. Otherwise, the monsters who have been swept under the rug will have nowhere else to go, and so they will eventually come out with great, indomitable force. And sometimes, these monster resentments have grown so large and so angry and so full of indignation and emotion, that they can cause a final rupture that is irreparable. And these terrible kinds of ruptures make a normal, healthy confrontation look like a sweet little kitten. These ruptures are hurricanes, in comparison to a small storm of confrontation that will pass on by, without any real damage, once it is cleared.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

A Fire is a Fire

I just recently had to have a complicated root canal that involved several dental visits and two hardcore antibiotics. So when I mentioned to my husband that I was now feeling soreness on my bottom left line of molars, he said to me, “Don’t wait until a 5 alarm fire to make the appointment. A fire is a fire, but smaller fires are easier to put out.”

I like to think of myself as the wise, deep thinker of our relationship, but the facts are, my husband is every bit as wise and deep as I am, probably more so. (he just doesn’t pontificate as much as I do) And this fire analogy is one that certainly deserves to be in this thought museum that we call Adulting – Second Half.

We do this to ourselves all of the time, don’t we? (at least I do) We often, deep down know that things are beginning to smolder somewhere – in our bodies, in our relationships, in our homes, in our jobs, in our daily habits, in our finances, etc. but we don’t really want to deal with the little fires. They are annoying. They’re not that big of a deal. Anyway, we don’t have time (nor desire) to deal with them right now. We think that if we just ignore these little bothers and issues, they might just disappear.

When raising my kids and something relatively minor happened with one of them, say a parking ticket, or a bad grade, or sleeping in late, etc., I would always admonish them to take the lesson early. There are small consequences for small mistakes, but if you don’t learn the lesson, the Universe is sure to send you a bigger version of the teaching, until you finally learn the lesson and change direction. I would say, “Consider yourself lucky that the Universe usually sends small hints and experiences to learn from, unless you don’t heed the lesson and you are finally hit over the head with a big ol’ hammer of a lesson for not heeding the breadcrumbs which were being sent to you, all along the way.”

So I heeded my husband’s good reminder about degrees of fires, and I went back to my dentist yesterday. “You again?” the entire office staff teased me, with mixed looks of pity, concern, and empathy. I sat down (once again) in my dentist’s chair and I told him what my husband said about fires. “Well, let’s take a look,” he said kindly. And what the x-ray showed was not decay. My teeth were all healthy. It appeared that my back molars were sore because my bite was “off” from my recently replaced crown. He shaved down a little bit of my back molar, charged me nothing to do it, and sent me on my way – happy, relieved and smiling. Another fire put out!

And now on to a plumbing issue, although this one doesn’t really fit the fire analogy quite as well . . . .

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Tuesday’s Tidbits

+ Today is the last day of September in 2025. Tomorrow marks the last and final quarter of the year. It’s not lost on me that I woke up this morning recalling a strange and terrible dream. In my dream, a serious looking, bearded young man, dressed in black, was standing at our glass doors holding a large gun and a precious baby. I let him in and he sat on the couch and started an unknown conversation with my husband. I proceeded to call 911, but the dispatchers were distracted in their own conversation. They were laughing with each other and they were not taking me seriously. I was watching this young man cautiously, not sure what his next move would be. And then I woke up.

I haven’t sorted out what this dream means to me personally, but I do believe that it speaks to choice. And our choices are ultimately what makes us who we are, right? We can choose destruction or we can choose innocence. We can choose darkness and hate, or we can choose new life. We can choose the hope of new beginnings, or we can choose the despair of a dark ending. And sometimes these are the consequential decisions which we make, even sitting in the living rooms of our own homes.

+ I was introduced this morning to this wonderful new musical “band.” Various musicians play parts of a beautiful song, from all different places in the world. They call it “Playing for Change.” The link above is Playing for Change performing “Soulshine.” The link below is Playing for Change performing “Waiting for the World to Change.”

I am a huge mix of utterly grateful and completely envious of those of you musicians (unfortunately no musical bones appear in my body, sigh.) and all of your wonderful talent. There is no greater connection to the divine on Earth than music. Music is the universal language of the world. Music is how the divine communicates to all of us on Earth, because we all can understand it and we can all feel it and we can all vibrate with it and we all can connect with each other through music. I absolutely adore watching musicians perform, whether on big stages or on street corners. It’s witnessing someone plugged into our universal soul. And it is beautiful. Musicians, thank you for sharing your gifts. Thank you for dedication, passion and vulnerability in sharing. Your gift is our gift. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

+ We were boating over the weekend with our son and one of his friends. His friend was talking about seeing some old family friends in the town that we were in. He said something profound. My son’s friend said, “It’s good to know people who knew me before I knew me.” I thought that was a beautiful thought. It takes a while to “know ourselves” and the people in our lives are often the mirrors to ourselves. They are often the way-showers. Their perceptions of us, and their reactions to us help us to discover and “find ourselves”. The people in our lives help us down the path as to what actually resonates and aligns with whom we really are, deep in our cores. Recently, along these lines, a dear friend asked me to pray for her to get “unstuck.” I told her that instead I would pray that she sees herself, the clear way that I see her, “Beautiful. Kind. Authentic. Accomplished. And not stuck at all.”

+ Finally, here are some new exhibits, in this thought museum which we call, Adulting-Second Half:

“Y’all ever wonder what life would be like if you didn’t overthink everything? I think about it all the time.”

“Anger is an emotion of justice.”

“Some people are so poor, all they have is money.” – Sherrie Campbell

“Your feelings are always valid, but your behavior is not.”

“Blood isn’t always thicker than water, though it is often stickier.”

“You have to be odd to be number one.” – Dr. Seuss

Let’s all meditate a little bit today, before we walk into the final quarter of the year. Let’s meditate on our choices going forward. Let’s feel grateful for musicians and the people who knew us before we knew us. Let’s meditate on what makes our own souls shine and let’s let them shine – brightly. That is how the world will change.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Foundations to Mountains

“Firm up your foundations, and then you can return to moving mountains in the outer world.” -Daily Horoscope

The line above is from my horoscope today. I believe that this line is not just meant for today, but it is an allegory for my life (and probably anyone else’s life). Right now, as we are renovating our kitchen and I am getting needed minor health appointments taken care of, and my family and I are all back to our regular places and our regular schedules, I am “firming up my foundations.” In the earlier part of this year, mixed with a lot of travel, celebrations, reunions, revelations etc. I was moving the mountains, and exploring different horizons, going through “the peaks and valleys” that always come with major endings and beginnings and new adventures. What I love about this constant, reliable cycle in life is how appreciative you are, when the mountain climbing gets exhausting and taxing and you just crave “home” and “comfort” and “routine” and “rest” to crawl into and hole up in. You find yourself basking in your foundations for a little while until you feel centered and aligned and you have taken the time to process everything which you have experienced, and you have integrated all of this into the person who you are, and then you feel healthy and energized and a little antsy and a little curious and a little inspired and then you are ready to excitedly return to the foot of the next mountain which you are eager to explore. Foundations to mountains and back again. It’s a merry-go-round that I like to ride.

“Just like the seasons, life is a continuous cycle of birth, growth, decay, and renewal. Each stage is essential and leads to the next, creating a beautiful and interconnected journey”. – Cess

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Tuesday’s Tidbits

+ My husband read an interesting article the other day about the different stages of retirement. It made a lot of sense. The article said that retirement is actually quite expensive in the beginning (even if your kids have all moved out, and are on their own, and they even have their own cell phone plans). The first stage of retirement is “go-go”, where you are still young and healthy enough to make up for lost time and freedom. This is the stage that people spend a lot of money on travel and hobbies and renovations and going out, etc. People are then often shocked about how expensive this first stage of retirement can be. It can make them panic and wonder if they have saved enough for retirement. The next stage is “slow go” where you have aged some more, and have experienced some more, and now the novelty of “everything that you can do in retirement” is wearing off and you find a more moderate routine in your every day retired life. The final stage of retirement is “no go”, but that’s also the stage that healthcare costs and nursing care costs are at their highest. I found this all to be really interesting because as a 54-year-old woman whose youngest of four children is graduating from college next year, I have found I feel a bit of relief from a lot of the expenses that raising a big family entails. But my husband is not retired yet. We are not living on a fixed income. And in talking to retired family and friends, many have discussed that they find retirement to be more expensive than they thought it would be. I like to think that my husband and I are doing a lot of our “go-go” stage right now (we had our children relatively young) while he is still working, so that when it comes to full retirement we can ease into the “slow go” phase relatively quickly. Time will tell . . . . Readers, what have your experiences been? Any wisdom to share? My husband and I have also noticed that a lot of our friends and contemporaries are delaying retirement. I was at my dear dentist’s office yesterday and he told me that he doesn’t want to retire because he still enjoys what he does, and he doesn’t have an alternate plan. Our dentist told me that his office and his practice feels more like “home” to him than anywhere else. I’m certainly not complaining. Our talented dentist treated our family all the way from baby teeth to wisdom teeth removal. The day that he retires (same goes for my hair stylist) will truly be bittersweet days for me.

+ Yesterday, I got myself into a tizzy because I couldn’t reach my husband. His phone went directly into voicemail (10 times). When I got home, I ran inside where he was nonchalantly cutting up some vegetables and watching some football. I hit him and hugged him at the same time. We compared phones and mine showed me calling him (10 times) and his showed no calls coming in. We still don’t know what happened. This is the hard part of today’s world. We expect to be able to reach our loved ones at all times, and our imaginations go into overdrive when we can’t reach them. When one of these rare times happen that I can’t reach someone whom I love, and as I hyper-ventilate, and as I vacillate between worst, most awful case scenario/girl, please calm your crazy a$$ down, I think to myself, “Wow, I truly love and value these wonderful people in my life. I don’t know what I would do without them.” What I can take out of these annoying experiences of occasional tech failure (and also my annoyance at myself for being so phone dependent) is the reminder of the gratefulness that I have for the beautiful people in my life. When you entertain the idea of losing someone you deeply love, the little things that irk you about them, lose their potency real quick.

+ I bought these gems the other day when I was at a cute seaside store with one of my favorite friends. These quotes seem particularly apropos for times like these:

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Tuesday’s Tidbits

+ I recently mentioned The Five Minute Journal, as a wonderful tool to get started in journaling. There are two questions to answer every day that really make me pause and ponder. The first question is “What would make today great?” This question really brings up “stuff”. Like you find yourself asking, “What’s too much to ask for? Is that just total fantasy? Is that a selfish desire?” or sometimes my line of thinking goes to, “Am I asking for enough from myself and my life? Am I settling?” Sometimes I get really stumped on this question (especially on a “normal” day when there isn’t much planned except the usual routine) and I take this as a good sign. I already live a “great” life. Sometimes what makes a great day is just the peace and comfort of going about my every day experience. And only I can get in the way of “great”, by adding unnecessary worry and rumination. The other question that you are asked to answer every day in this particular journal, is to be answered at the end of the day. The question is, “What did I learn today?” At this middle stage of life, sometimes we get trapped into believing that we already know everything there is to know. “What did I learn today?” is one of those humbling, bring yourself back down to Earth/touch grass questions that tells you, if you can’t answer it, that maybe what you learned, is that adding more self-awareness and curiosity and open-mindedness in your life, may lead to a much fuller experience of living.

+ I’ve recently gotten hooked on listening to the “A Little Bit Culty” podcast as I go about my everyday chores. The founders of the podcast are a married couple who are survivors of the NXVIM cult. They interview survivors of other cults in each episode, in order to help others recognize that they themselves may currently be in a cult, or to help inform people so they do not become susceptible to joining a cult. This is one of those shows/programs that is so easy to go, “What?! How could you ever believe that ridiculousness, or think that this is normal thinking?” But if we are honest with ourselves, many of us probably carry around some beliefs about a variety of topics, that if we truly, openly, and candidly explored these beliefs, we might realize that these beliefs no longer serve us, nor are they in alignment with our deepest core values (this also happens in society – look how much has evolved in civil rights and women’s rights, just in our own lifetimes.) People are most susceptible to join cults when they are young children (they do not have a choice, they are fully dependent on others for their survival), and also in times of big life transitions such as adolescence into adulthood or entering into empty nest. (like so many of us are doing). People often join cults because they are in one of those fearful, existentially lonely times of searching, and they want to believe that someone else has all of the answers. So they give their power away. My biggest takeaway from these cult survivors is to never give your power of reason away, to anybody or anything. Question everything that you do and you think and really ask yourself if that is your own true belief, or is that what has been programmed or conditioned into you, by someone else. You really do have all of the answers inside of yourself. Resonation/intuition is quiet, deep, wise, persistent and knowing. Make listening to yourself, your highest priority before listening to anyone else. Another takeaway I’ve gotten from the show, is that so many of the survivors left their culty experiences without any sense of self. Their whole identity had been stripped away by someone else’s belief systems. Their experiences are a reminder to compassionately give yourself regular time away from your duties, roles, social circles, social media, entertainment choices, etc. in life, to check in with yourself. “What do I like to do? What resonates with me? What feels purposeful and meaningful in my life? What, when doing it, makes me feel fully “in the flow” of creating my own original life? What feels out of alignment in my life? What no longer serves?” One time a very wise person suggested that a good question to constantly ask yourself is not if an experience is “normal”, but is this experience “healthy” for me? Healthy is a much better long-term arbiter of choices in life, than what is considered to be “normal.” I am sure that we could all make long lists right now of what has been, and also what is currently happening, which while considered to be currently “normal” in society, is in no way, actually “healthy.”

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.