Tara Mohr's Blog, page 4

nourishing yourself in pandemic times

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written here, and I’ve missed you! I want to share about where I’ve been, and the lessons I’m taking with me.

June took me out of my normal. It brought a leg injury that put me on crutches for a short stint, followed by a second health issue that knocked me off the crutches – and directly into the bed – for a little while.

Both ailments were, thankfully, wholly tractable (thank you to my awesome doctor for figuring them out, and thank you to all who responded with such kind comments and wishes to my IG post about it). But, both health issues were eventful and unusual and uncomfortable enough to get my attention. And both had stress as a contributing factor.

As I made my way back to feeling like myself again, I started to reflect. I realized that I was four months into living a dramatically different life. Our family has been pretty much at home since early March, and we are very happy and grateful to be able to do so for our own safety and others’.

My new shelter-in-place life has much lower levels of connection, natural light, outdoor air, and casual, frequent functional movement than my prior life had. It also doesn’t have some of the holistic health supports (like acupuncture) that I usually benefit from.

While I had been very committed to exercise during this time – my dedicated hour of the day for dance classes on zoom – I wasn’t getting the kind of regular, short bursts of movement that I used to get walking down the street to the coffee place, or dropping off my kids at a class, or even just walking from one end of the coworking space to the other. Not having those small, regular forms of movement ended up having a genuine impact on my overall health.

I’ve redesigned things now. I’m moving more frequently, and differently. I’m spending more time outside. I’m courting sleep like it’s a dreamy lover – and I’ve let go of a couple habits that aren’t great for a night’s rest, like that second (okay, third) cup of green tea, or those last compulsive looks at the phone late at night. These are changes that weren’t really necessary in month one or two of this new reality, but that are necessary now.

I’m offering up my experience here in the hopes that it can be a prompt to take a pause and revisit your self-care routines.

In your new pandemic day-to-day, especially as that new day-to-day turns into month after month, what needs revision? Reinvention?

What is gradually falling through the cracks that you want to pick up again? What self-care routines or practices were working okay at the beginning of the pandemic but aren’t working so well anymore?

What do you need to care for yourself now? Rest? Stillness? More movement? More light? Time to prepare healthy food? More texts with that friend who makes you laugh? 

It’s important to name here that privilege of all kinds makes it far easier to care for oneself. In fact, I’d say that one of the very definitions of privilege is having the resources and freedom to care for oneself. The amount of trauma we experience day to day, the time or financial resources we can put towards self-care, the safety and serenity of our working and living environments, and myriad other external factors dramatically impact our ability to care for ourselves.

And yet, we can also hold on to a passion for finding ways – large and small, momentary or extended – to bring more peace, nourishment, and rest into our lives. Thinkers and teachers like Adrienne Maree Brown (more here and here) and Octavia Raheem have powerfully articulated why self-care is revolutionary – and essential – for women who are facing, and/or working to transform, oppression and injustice. They help us see the inseparability between self-care, justice work and liberation.

We care for ourselves, I believe, for two equally important reasons. One reason is that we are sacred, glorious, singular expressions of the life force, each of us one-of-a-kind across the universe.

To deny ourselves care, and adoration, and quiet attunement is to denigrate the divine. To care for ourselves – not to feed our egos or take more than we need – but to truly tend to and love ourselves, is to take a stand for the sacredness of life.

Caring for ourselves is a way of showing reverence for creation.

But we also care for ourselves because in doing so we increase the potency and vibrancy of the raw material of us, so that the raw material of us – from our hands to our minds to our spirits – can care for others, create for others, serve others.

Particularly now, we all must give ourselves the nourishments that enable us to be clear-seeing and vocal. We must each discern what self-care allows us to be sourced enough to envision and enact the profound change our world desperately needs.

Your sourcedness is worth it –

worth it to you,

worth it to me,

worth it to all of us.

Love,

Tara

 

Photo by Sapan Patel

What does it mean to be strong?

Listen to this post as an audio version by clicking the player below or you can download an mp3 file here.

Tara Mohr · What It Means To Be Strong

 

This is my working definition of “strength”:

To be strong 

is to summon 

that place of vitality and conviction 

that resides within us, and from it,

take a stand about what will be born 

out of the union between us and our circumstances,

between the events that befall us, and how we meet them.

 

It’s there, in that meeting point between what we can control and what we can’t, in the meeting place between the plot and the protagonist, that we can – sometimes – choose. 

Sometimes our pain is simply too large to leave us any space to choose. Without our even being aware of it, our pain turns into fury, or addiction, or harms repeated across time, all while we are lost in its trance.

But if you find that somehow, there is a space in you through which you can reach around, or over, or under your pain, a space in which you can choose softness instead of hardening, connection instead of separation, peace instead of violence, then, dear one, count yourself as blessed.

And extend a prayer for all those near and far who haven’t yet found a passageway through their pain.

 

Love, 

Tara

Want a reminder of your strength? Grab the printable here or by clicking the image below.

 

 

 

Photo by Paxson Woelber 

The first thing that fear can’t stand…

A few weeks ago, my friend and mentor, Grace Kraaijvanger, founder of The Hivery coworking space & community, shared these musings from her morning journaling on a quiet, shelter-in-place day:

Isn’t that gorgeous? I loved the words themselves, and the reminder that we each can ask for the voice of wisdom to speak to us in our journaling, sharing a calm that our minds don’t typically offer us.

If you are looking for support around an important project right now, a fabulous resource is The Hivery’s Incubator program, led by Grace. It is a coaching and accountability group for people who want to take impactful steps forward, yet don’t want to do it alone. It’s a place where you can reset and think about what’s truly important in your business, book, project, or idea. I’ll be participating as a guest teacher in one of the sessions – and I can’t wait!

One thing I’ve learned from my own journey is that sometimes a little support, community and structure can go a very long way in helping us do just that. There aren’t many resources that provide those things that I know well enough to be able to highly recommend, but one of the few is The Hivery Incubator.

I’ll leave you with these wise and inspiring words from Grace,

“ The first thing that fear really can’t stand…the one superhero that shoves fear into the corner and lets courage step in the ring…is connection. Fear loves loneliness. Fear loves isolation. But fear can’t stand people banding together to support each other’s work. Alone in our thoughts, we can talk ourselves out of the very essence of who we are and what we are here to do. But with connection, the voices around us can support and distract from fear.”

Head over here to learn more about The Hivery Incubator program.

With love,

Tara

 

Photo by Thomas Galler

 

how we talk ourselves out of sharing our work

Today I want to share with you a beautiful post from one of our Playing Big course participants – it’s powerful and has something to teach all of us.

Here’s what Rachel Gildiner posted on social media:

I wrote an article that was published today in EJP. I’m so proud of it and if I have any Torah (teachings) to share in this world, it’s what I share in this article.

And YET, I want to share with this group all the reasons why I almost didn’t write this, in case any of them might resonate.

Why does anyone care what I have to say right now? There are so many more important issues and so many smarter people.
It’s tasteless right now to claim that anyone might know what the “right” thing is right now – don’t be that person who’s adding to the self-promoting noise.
I can’t prioritize this right now, I have so many other more important tasks and things I need to do so I don’t let other people down.
What if everything I believe in and practice isn’t as great as I think it is and I’m exposed as a fraud?
Should I co-author with a male expert to give my voice some gravitas and authority?
What if no one reads it and it’s a failure and I’ve spent time on it?

I’m embarrassed by a lot of these thoughts. And honestly a lot of these are still unanswered. But I know a few things for sure. A lot of men are writing a lot of stuff right now. And I want to see more women’s voices, women’s Torah (teachings), women’s wisdom.

The ninety plus women who commented on this post from Rachel all said some form of, “I can so relate. I have these thoughts all the time.” Or, “I’ve been having them just today about something I was considering doing, saying or writing about.”

Even after all these years doing this work, I still have thoughts like these sometimes. It’s so helpful to see them in print, fleshed out, so we can all look at them clearly.

These are just thoughts, not the truth. They have a lot to do with how we’ve been conditioned since girlhood, and the past painful experiences we’ve had when we’ve shared our work, our ideas, our creations.

And yet the world needs our work, and there’s also a lot of joy and fulfillment waiting for us in the sharing of it.

So let’s keep sharing our voices, and amplify, promote and share the voices of other women – especially those who are most overlooked or silenced.

Sending love to you today,

Tara

 

Image by Aaron Burden

When You Feel Self-Doubt About Your Work



You can listen to this exercise in audio, too. Press play below or download as an MP3 here.



 

Recently, in a workshop, one of the participants asked me, “What if I’m not sure I’m good enough at my work to go for that bigger stage? What if maybe I’m not ready yet?”

These kinds of questions, “What if I’m not good enough?” “Am I good at this particular thing, or that?” “Do I have anything unique to say?” are all of a category. 

They are self-assessment questions – questions in which we try to look at ourselves as if from a distance, and judge how talented, ready, qualified, we are.

What I replied back to her is a principle I’ve arrived at slowly, over years of talking with women about their dreams, longings, and subtle ways of holding back.

We do not need to ask self-assessment questions. 

We do not need them. We can drop them entirely, and then walk right into the open, warm space that is waiting for us, once we’ve put them down.

Self-assessment questions seem to protect us from failure or embarrassment, but they mostly cut us off from possibilities for growth and success.

They masquerade as the kind of questions realistic grownups ask, but they are in fact the kind of questions a frightened ego ruminates upon.

Imagine a young girl – maybe age 4 or 5 – who decides to build a fort. She’s very unlikely to worry that she’s not up to the task, or to fret that no one will like her fort. And yet…and this is so important: she also has a way of assessing and improving her creation.

Along the way in making it, she naturally will periodically ask herself,

“What does it need now? More height? More pillows? A sturdier entrance?” 

Here she’s practicing a creative discernment of editing and adjusting her work.

Sometimes her “what do I want to add?” questions lead her to realize she needs outside help.

“I need mom to get more pillows down from the high shelf in the closet.” “I want my friend to bring over flowers to decorate the fort with.”

Here she’s asking questions of creative discernment that have to do with collaboration, resources, and team.

And of course, from time to time she asks herself,

“Is it done?” 

This is the question of completion that every creator must ask and respond to.

Now, notice the questions she would not ask herself while fort-building (unless some adult or kid had already intervened in her creative life and trained her to do so).

She would not assess whether she was “a good fort-maker” in some absolute sense. It would not even occur to her that there is such a thing.


She would not ask whether she deserved to make forts, to take up the space and hold the creative authority of fort-making.


She would not worry about whether she was prepared enough to make a fort.


She would not ask, or care, whether her fort was going to be “unique” relative to others.
And although she might be excited to share her fort, she would not ruminate about what might happen if other people didn’t like her fort much. She’s focused on how she’s in love with her fort.

Here’s the pattern: She asks questions that help her assess the work – but she is not assessing herself. Here’s that crucial difference:

Can we be more like this girl?

Can we work, create, express ourselves in the vein of her work/play?

Okay, I hear some of you asking,

“But this girl is just doing this for fun. What if this is my work and I’m not getting results – an audience, or a thriving business?”

Even if that’s your situation, I still 100% stand by my recommendation that you drop all self-assessment questions. If you need questions to ask yourself, ask the creative discernment ones instead: Is your work authentic? Are there areas you might need outside help and collaborators? If you aren’t getting traction/audience/business in your work and you want to, you may also need to gather more information from your audience/customers about what’s working for them (and we’ll talk about that in the next post), but you do not need self-assessment questions!

Self-Assessment and Ego 

The ego loves self-assessment. As psychologist Dr. Nicole LePera has written, the ego is “how you see yourself. It is the part of your mind that identifies with traits, beliefs, and habits.” Being in ego is about being focused on our story about ourselves, rather than our more flexible, fluid, felt experience.

The ego is always grasping for a story about the self to help it feel safe and orient in a vast and uncertain world.

That story might be, “I’m a nice person, I’m an American, I’m a hard worker, I’m bad at details,” and a host of other attributes.

Fascinatingly, the ego feels in control whether that story is a self-confident one or a self-critical one. It just likes its familiar story.

The collective ego in our culture has developed workplace, religious and educational systems that help to feed every person an ego story just for them. We learn from these systems, “I’m good at math.” “I’m not an athlete.” “I’m a good person.” “I’m a bad kid.” “I’m a caretaker.” “I’m a provider.” “I’d be good at this kind of job, but not that.”

One problem with ego stories, with self-concepts is that they are usually false and reductive, and therefore limiting and misleading. We are all more complex and changing that our ego stories leave room for.

Here are some of the forces that cause our ego stories to be way out of touch with reality – compelling fictions, but not fact:

Early childhood messages & others’ projections. In our early lives, when we’re most vulnerable to others’ ideas, we receive messages from parents and teachers about what we’re good and bad at, about what kind of life or career we deserve. We might hold the concept of “I’m the smartest girl in the class” because that’s what that high pressure parent told us, or we might hold the idea “I’m not really a leader” because our big brother always took on the leadership roles.
Internalized negative stereotypes. “I’m not good at math.” “My ideas don’t make sense.” “I’m not the academic type.” These self-concepts often feel personal to the individual holding them, but in fact often are internalized versions of gender and racial stereotypes from the culture.
Past painful moments. Have you noticed that a single, hurtful piece of critical feedback still impacts how you see yourself in some regard? Human brains are wired to have what psychologists call a “negativity bias” – we remember and weigh negative experiences more than pleasurable or neutral ones. When we self-assess, we remember any painful experiences (like that one excruciating feedback comment from ten years ago)…even as we ignore all positive feedback on the same quality or skill.
And perhaps most of all, fear. Playing bigger is scary – especially for the part of us that likes familiarity, emotional comfort, and blending in with the crowd. When we ask “Am I ready?” or “Am I good enough?” often, we’re scared and subconsciously looking for a way to retreat back into a comfort zone. Self-assessment questions offer a kind of cloak for fear to hide under.

With early childhood messages, stereotypes, negativity bias and fear each distorting our self-perception, how accurate can our self-assessments be?

So that’s one problem – ego stories are always blind to some truths and incorporating of some falsities. But the deeper problem is that living in our ego story is a very suffering-inducing way to live. It feels constraining, defended, and disconnecting from others, because it is.

Shifting Our Questions

So here’s the thing, and this so surprised me when I first recognized it: when we are obsessing over our lack of qualifications and our possible failures, when we are in self-doubt, we are actually wrapped up in our egos! We are thinking about ourselves, rather than the work itself, or the people we want to serve.

We can see this clearly in the contrast between two questions we might ask ourselves.

Self-Assessment Question: “Who am I to say this?”

vs

Creative Discernment Question: “Is there something bubbling up in me that wants to be said?” 

In the first question, we go into that egoic mode of trying to assess and judge ourselves from the outside. We are thinking about ourselves, our reputation, our potential pain or embarrassment.

In the second question, we are inquiring into our own inward, felt experience. And in the second question, we aren’t so self-focused, so we have room to honor the spirit, the “genius” as Liz Gilbert would put it, of our ideas, of what wants to be expressed.

So today, I want to invite you to notice your self-assessment thoughts, and decide not to follow them. Choose to dismiss your self-assessment questions. Simmer in your creative discernment questions instead.

It’s worth noticing that self-assessment questions are not to be confused with useful, personal reflection questions, in which we check in with ourselves in order to shift or address what needs attention in us. Questions like, “Am I fearful today? Am I resentful? How can I be of service to someone?” are great. Questions like, “Where am I doing harm in my life and how can I change that?” are great. But you’ll notice these questions don’t have us looking at ourselves from the outside as a package and judging how we measure up relative to others, or in some absolute sense. That’s where we get into trouble.

If we want more creativity, joy and freedom in our work and creative lives, this is what we need to move toward, choice by choice: away from ego stories, assessments of ourselves, and back to the landscape of emotions, sensations, ideas, inspirations, conscience – our inner lives.

I’m providing a handy printable for you of the unhelpful self-assessment questions we so often ask, and the more helpful, creative discernment questions to replace them with. You can grab that here so you can keep it handy – and please share with a friend who could use these, too.

xoxo

Tara

 

Top photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi

Marrying Power and Love

To listen to an audio companion to this post, click the player below or you can download an mp3 file here.

Tara Mohr · Marrying Power And Love

 

Over a decade ago, when I began to do this work around women’s voices, there was one quiet, deep desire at the heart of it. 

In those early days, I spent evenings and weekends (the hours outside of my day job) in a little rented office space, working with my first coaching clients. 

Those clients were in their 20’s and 70’s and every age between. Some worked in business, some in the social sector, some the arts. They were mostly women – and a few good men. They came to coaching because they longed for some kind of more – more self-expression, more joy, more impact advancing the causes they cared about.

And here’s the thing: they were all remarkable. They were thoughtful, conscientious human beings. They were the kind of people who could responsibly run our institutions and evolve our society for the better. As I sat across from them, inspired by their visions for change, their very decency, I often thought, “These are the kind of people I wish were in charge.”

That is the desire at the heart of all this work on women’s playing big: may people like them – like you – hold more power to shape our world. 

And yet, people like them are not the ones in charge. The ones in charge mostly have one skin color, and don’t have ovaries. The ones in charge all too frequently aren’t the ones with the best ideas or deepest commitment to service; they’re just the ones who have been the hungriest for power and most strategic in obtaining it. 

It was this gap, this strange disjunct between merit and power, that stirred me. I saw it in the most proximate of contexts – the businesses I worked with and the communities I was a part of – and in the most distant of contexts – the leaders of countries and major institutions around the globe. 

Listening closely in those early coaching conversations, I often thought about how the very same qualities that would have made my clients incredible leaders also made them reticent toward leadership. Their humility. Their awareness of their own weakness. Their consciousness of the great responsibility that comes with power. 

All of these qualities would have made them just the kind of power-holders we want, but those qualities also meant they saw themselves as not up to the task. And, their profound care for people, and fear of not doing right by others, made leadership feel that much more daunting and difficult to them. 

Plus, they had enough inner stability to be satisfied with a relatively quiet life made up of meaningful work and rich relationships. They didn’t want to prioritize the public sphere over the personal one. This too would have made them great leaders – the kind who wouldn’t chase endless title upgrades because of an inner wound. The kind who model work-personal balance, and who would endeavor to help others have the same kind of simple, healthy life that they enjoyed. 

The fact that many visionary, brilliant women cherish their quiet, relatively anonymous lives may very much be an indicator of mental health. But that very same quality of contentment means they often don’t have an inner need to seek out roles of power. 

I’ll tell you something that’s hard to admit, uncomfortable to talk about. When I describe my work in my bio, or a cocktail party, I call it leadership development for women. Because that is what I do, no question. But if you look at the text I use on my website or in the description of my courses, you’ll see that I never use the term leader, or leadership development. 

Why? I learned early on that the women I’m talking to do not respond well to those terms. They – and I too – often feel things related to “leadership” are not for us, not desirable to us. 

I can understand the reasons why. Our notion of “leading” has been tainted by the negative examples of it that we see. We learn in girlhood that raising our hand to say “I can lead” or even worse “I want to lead” can lead to personal attacks and social abandonment or shaming. 

So I don’t blame us, as individuals. But this does leave us with a collective predicament.

A system in which clever, immature people are among the most motivated to seek positions of power.

A system in which those of us who would be most appropriately daunted in the face of the responsibilities of leadership feel too humbled to sign ourselves up for the job.

This gap between power and merit is now visible in stark relief in every headline we read. In this pandemic time, I find that everywhere I look, I see examples of ordinary people acting with extraordinary courage, love, and wisdom – while many of those who hold the most power act out of immaturity, greed and blame. 

I don’t have any easy answers on how to shift who seeks and who is given power. But it’s a question we need to find answers to. The question might inform how we think about political races and the funding of them. It might inform what we teach our kids about what leadership is and what it is for. It might inform what forms of leadership we push ourselves to take on – even if uncomfortable. 

What must change, for us to marry ambition to humility, leadership to service, power to love?

xo

Tara

P.S. More posts related to wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic here.

 

 

Photo by:  Joshua Hanson

resistance to rest

To listen to an audio companion to this post, click the player below or you can download an mp3 file here.

Tara Mohr · Resistance To Rest Blog Post – Tara Mohr

 

For many of us, these weeks have brought a kind of downtime in our work – whether in our beloved side projects or in the jobs that pay the bills. 

For some, the downtime has come because of layoffs, or because customers and clients have dried up. For others, a pause in work has been brought about by increased caregiving demands. And for others, the reason for the pause is simply that the stress and grief of this time has made it – for now – too hard to concentrate. 

For some of us, these slowdowns bring a financial emergency, and let me say up front, that this post does not address that situation, when urgent and pragmatic action is required. 

What I want to speak to here is what we can do when a downtime comes – but we find ourselves struggling internally with giving ourselves permission to slow down or shift our priorities.

As I’ve been talking with women in our community, many have shared with me that they are grappling with what to allow, what to accept, during this downtime. Is it okay not to do much towards their career or creative aims, for a day, or a week, or indefinitely? 

As they make a downshift in tempo, many women are being harassed by a voice in their head that says: “You aren’t doing enough. Look over there at what so and so is doing.” 

And then it goes on to threaten, “Stay in this downtime too long and you might never go back to hard work, to accomplishing anything, to being on track.” 

The cultural conditioning here is fascinating. We’ve been taught to fear that slowing down for a while might somehow mean slowing down forever. And we’ve been taught that slowing down forever would mean never again producing anything of value.

Is that true?

If we rest, listen to our bodies, steep in replenishment and simple pleasures, will we ever contribute anything of value again? Will we create and work hard again? 

Yes. Absolutely.

If we rest, listen to our bodies, steep in replenishment and simple pleasures, will we ever go back to working out of martyrdom, self-betrayal, and over-busyness again? 

Maybe not. 

Tasting something different, we might not ever be willing to work in our old ways again. 

That little voice in our heads warning “rest and you might never get back on track” isn’t just irrational; it is afraid of a real change that might come if we restore, slow down, replenish. We might discover some other way to work, to be – one that gives far less power over to the inner taskmaster. 

Giving less power to the inner taskmaster is no small thing – that taskmaster runs as deep as patriarchy itself, and as deep as the most foundational messages we’ve received about our bodies, our hungers, our selves. 

Perhaps the extent to which our culture aims to keep women from resting is an indicator of how potent our rest would be, how core and tied to our empowerment. 

Listening to women talk about their work pauses this past week, I noticed something. Each one started talking about downtime, but their words naturally meandered into the adjacent spheres of the body, and of pleasure. These are closely connected it seems – how we are with not working, not striving, how we are with our bodies, and how we are with our pleasures. 

Rest is of the body, after all. We listen to our bodies to feel the desire for rest. And we must experience the sensory in some way – the sound of silence, the softness of a pillow, the calming touch of a breeze – to rest. 

The status quo of our culture is threatened whenever women listen to their bodies. From that listening, after all, women start to feel their anger and set new boundaries, say new no’s. Listening to their bodies, women feel more of their joy and start to build lives more around joy than around consumerism and striving. If you want to uphold the status quo in any patriarchal culture, rule #1: Do not get your women listening to their bodies. 

And pleasure? Even more dangerous than rest. 

Talking about their downtimes, each woman started, without even realizing it, to talk about pleasure. They spoke of the replenishments of a great book, or a slow meal, or a long conversation with a good friend. Some spoke of longing for these, others spoke of how they’ve been soaking up those experiences, but feel guilty – or afraid – about continuing to do so, as if their appetites for even the simplest pleasures could open a kind of Pandora’s Box. 

In our conversations, when women share with me those thoughts of “Can I really slow down? What about my work, my goals, my desired contribution?” I have asked them to consult with their inner mentors, their voice of calm and clarity within.

Here’s what one of these moving conversations sounded like. This woman has asked to remain anonymous – let’s call her Ilana here. With the pandemic, she’s been experiencing a downtime in her work – with certain goals having to be put on hold because of market conditions, and a new family reality with kids unexpectedly at home. Here’s the conversation she had with her inner mentor.

 

Ilana: I’m less productive now, which I think it’s not strange given the situation, but I’m going back and forth between enjoying more time for myself, or enjoying doing less. But also feeling like – what if this means that you’re not really going for your company and not really building your company in a way that’s sustainable? And what if this slips into you just freewheeling…  I spent lots of time in academia and in gender research. So that there’s also a lot of voices in me about what I actually should not be doing as a woman – the opposite of what society mostly tells women. What if I’m taking the easy life while other people work really, really hard?

Tara: And where does that voice feel like it’s located? Where are those sentiments in your body or your mind?

Ilana: My heart is pounding fast, so my heart. 

Tara: Let’s check in with your inner mentor. What does she have to say about those concerns?

Ilana: She says, “Just let go.” But what comes up immediately is – of what? Let go of doing this work, building my company? Or is it, let go for now of this fear? I don’t know.

Tara: You can check with her.

Ilana: She says, “Let go of pushing yourself. It’s all right.” And then my mind comes again and says, “Well, if you start to enjoy this so much, how will you get into being really productive and building your company?”

Tara: Yes. And what does she say about that?

Ilana: Something that scares me actually. She says, “Well, if that’s what’s happening, then that is what is meant for you.” That’s really scary if she says that. I’m sort of arguing with her. I want to contribute, and not only here at home for my kids.

Tara: And can you tell her that? What did she say?

Ilana: “You can contribute the most if you follow what you feel right now.” And she says, “There are so many ways to get back on track and you will just pick one.”

That feels like a relief. “You’re not off track, you’re on track,” she says. What also comes up now is, “Joy is not only allowed after hard work. Joy is also allowed… Joy is allowed, period.”

 

As women dive into their deeper knowing, asking not their minds but rather the hum of wisdom in the seat of their bellies, that wisdom always answers back something like this: 

Rest. Rest in the softest chair. Rest again, listening to the rain. Take it slow – slow meals, slow glances out the window, slow growth of your branches into your oak tree self.  

And contribution? Your contribution? Yes, all of this will enrich your contribution. It’s what will make you the most textured you, the more fully-you you, the one who has something steady and genuine to offer up to others. 

Our rest and our pleasure weave into the fabric of what we create. There is no separation between how we replenish and what we then extend outward.

Most of us were raised on the myth that striving is required, day after day, to make a real contribution to the world, to accomplish anything. The thinking goes like this: Want to do something significant? Start by in some way changing yourself, or adding to who you are. Don’t just create now, and certainly don’t just be who you are now or say what you think now. 

Put another way, most of us were taught that good work always comes out of hard work. This idea is so foundational for many of us that we hardly notice it. 

I’m not against hard work of course, but hard work is not always for the good. I see so many brilliant women believing they must work tirelessly to prepare, polish, augment themselves and their creations, when in reality they are ready now, just as they are, to do what they long to do. To lead. To speak. To have tremendous impact. 

They have forgotten entirely (and I still forget all the time too) about the incredible work we create – not out of toil – but out of improvisation, play, and self-trust. 

There is an alternative story about what creates a contribution, one I see all the time in the real unfolding of brilliant and impactful careers: that our natural gifts and talents – that unique set of strengths encoded in each of us – is at the core of our contributions. That what we create out of a spirit of play, more than out of striving, creates value. That our heartfelt, lived experiences can be translated into art or innovations or services that have tremendous impact. 

Yes, our education and training and hard work are garnishes to all of this, vessels for it, and sometimes necessary ones, but they are not the main course. They are not at the core of what truly creates value for others. What is at the core is the gifts we were born with, the way we do our work, or what I sometimes call “the work underneath the work” – what we are really doing, beneath the formal titles and roles. 

This alternative story is very scary to consider because if it’s true, that means a lot of our toil was unnecessary. And even more frightening, it means that it is time to trust ourselves and take vulnerable leaps forward with our work now. 

We can find a whole new way of being a creative, contributing woman in the world – one who contributes not in spite of her rest, downtimes, and body rhythms, but because of them. 

If the culture had imparted to us that our rest and pleasure were the allies to our impact and achievement, it would have raised legions of women who drank up pleasure and breathed in enoughness and who didn’t ever attempt to cut up or cut off any part of themselves. 

But our culture was not ready for women like that. So instead, it guided us to our treadmills. Ready, start, run. 

Are you still on a treadmill?

Maybe now more than ever, it matters that we step away from our treadmills. 

Many of us find ourselves in a downtime we didn’t design or desire. But we can still choose whether to fill it with false busyness, to be run by an inner taskmaster who fears slowing down – or instead to lean into what calls us now: what kind of restoration, what sustenances, what seeds of curiosity? 

Everything is asking now for our deeper consideration, our fewer true words.

And so, if this springtime is really longing to be a winter for you, a time of quiet and finding a hearth right close by, so be it, I say. Let winter shelter you.

Drink everything you are thirsty for, and your cup will soon fill again. 

Love,

Tara

P.S. Share this post with a friend experiencing a downtime or pause.

More posts related to wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic here.

 

 

Photo by:  Stéphane Juban

what’s helping me ground myself now



Journaling Questions 

(use the video above to guide you through these) 

Three peak experiences from my life:
What values of mine were being expressed or honored through these experiences?
Three to five core values: 
How fully am I living each of these values now?
Because of the current circumstances, what has changed about my usual ways of honoring my values? What new ways of living my values could I put into place instead?
What opportunities are there in these circumstances to live my values more boldly, or with even greater depth and meaning?

 

 

 

photo by: Aaron Burden

Putting Down the Brick, for a While

The other day I said to a friend, “I woke up with a brick of fear in my chest.” 

She replied, “Yes, I guess we are all going to be dealing with that brick of fear – putting it down for a while, then picking it up, then putting it down again.”

I loved this sentiment, the twist on the metaphor, the reminder that we aren’t trying to put down the brick once and for all, but for an interval of time, with acceptance that we will very likely pick up the fear brick again, when our thoughts or our circumstances cause us to.

We need to put the fear brick down temporarily to give ourselves – and our nervous systems – breaks. We put it down because, as psychotherapist Andrea Wachter teaches, sometimes fear is coming from a “what if…” thought even as a “what is” moment exists for the savoring, right in front of us. We put the fear brick down because there are people for whom we want to show up with calm and generativity (and one of those people is ourself!). 

So how do we put down the fear for a while? Breaks from news and social media really help. Grounding in the sensory – through cooking or dance or music or a creative pursuit – really helps. 

There is another powerful way to put down the brick I want to talk about today. In 12-Step programs, it is called “turning it over” – turning over a concern, or dilemma, or problem to a power greater than oneself. Hang in there with me, even if this is the kind of idea that inspires eye-rolling or a scoff for you right now. 

That power might be named the Universe, the Intelligence of Life, Mother Earth. Or for some of us that power might be something more secular – the larger power of the scientific community, or your local leaders, or simply the other human beings out there who can carry the worry for a while, while you take a break. Just as you can carry the worry for them when they take a break. When we turn it over we say, “I can’t keep carrying this question/fear/load in this way. I am turning it over to something larger. I am asking for help.” 

I recently heard Jack Kornfield talk about this idea of “turning it over” a little differently, as “putting it on the altar” – putting a fear or concern up on the altar – giving it over, for a while, to a power greater than your limited mind or self. 

Now, let me make something very clear. We don’t want to abnegate our personal responsibility. No spiritual bypass. But there is tremendous relief that comes when we recognize we are each finite, limited, human beings meant to do our powerful work in the world by humbly connecting with the larger force of love and good and letting it infuse and guide our actions. We are meant to stay aware of our limitations, our deep finitude, so that we keep collaborating with other beings and energies greater than ourselves. 

Powerful action starts from deep humility and requests for help – help from what’s tangible and from what is not. 

When the worry or fear gets overwhelming, or the uncertainty feels like too much, you can say, “I’m putting this up on the altar for a while. I’m turning it over to a larger force for help.” We put it up. Then we listen for the inspirations, the leaning, the answers that come in quiet and surprising ways over the hours or days or weeks that follow. 

We put something on the altar not to avoid taking action, but to let a deeper wisdom about what action to take come to us. And that wisdom will come – because we didn’t try to do it all, carry it all, alone. We surrendered. We asked for help. We turned it over. And then we waited to see what life showed us, whispered to us, next.

Love,

Tara

 

Photo by Jude Beck

Let the tears come.

It still happens so often that, in a coaching conversation, when someone starts to cry, they apologize. “I’m so sorry,” they say. Or, “I don’t know why I’m crying.” Or they reach for the tissues in a hurry, and try to swallow to make the tears stop.

We have been so misled about tears. 

Tears are our bodies’ natural system for expressing and moving through emotions – especially grief. They are such a gift. They are one of the most exquisite parts of our design. And they have healing magic.

Crying has nothing to do with weakness. That’s a lie perpetuated by a system that brutalizes us by defining strength as heart-hardening, so that it can keep doing the things only hardened-hearts would tolerate. It’s a system afraid of what we might change, upend, defy, if our hearts were soft. 

Crying is simply one form of healthy processing of emotion. We cry because it helps us release and integrate and reset. We are all different on the other side of a good cry, a new peace in the body, and a new openness to begin again. 

When you need to cry, or when something helps you to cry, let the tears flow – and – not just for a moment, but until you are done. The well of tears has a bottom, and there is something waiting for you there.

Love,

Tara

P.S. Want more? Here’s another post on the value of tears.

And here are a couple recent posts related to COVID-19:

Social/physical distancing 
Staying sustained

 

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon