Allison Vesterfelt's Blog, page 2

10 Reasons to Write Your Story, Even If Nobody Reads It

Did you know creative writing is one of the most powerful tools we have to create change in our lives? There are a lot of creative tools we can use if we’re feeling down, lost, anxious, depressed, or any of these other common daily moods that plague our life. But creative writing has been proven to be one of the most effective.

I know you’re probably thinking, “wait! But you are biased.”

Yes, that is true. I am. Writing is my go-to creative outlet, so of course I’m partial to it. But even if you don’t find yourself with the urge to pick up a pen and journal when you’re feeling down, it’s worth considering the benefits you might receive from giving it a shot.

Here are ten specific things research shows can be improved as we practice creative writing.

Join me LIVE to learn how to leverage the power of writing to bring change to your life. Find out more here.

1. It Improves your mood

I picked up a tool from Julia Cameron years ago called Morning Pages, which is essentially the act of waking up each morning, a little before your alarm goes off, and recording the first 2-3 pages of thoughts that come into your brain. When I first started this practice, I was skeptical.

In fact, for the first few days, I mostly wrote about how worried I was that I was wasting my time.

But what I realized was that, regardless of whether or not my writing actually improved, it improved my mood. I was less likely to feel sluggish, out-of-sorts, self-critical and just generally down during the day. Julia Cameron says the reason for this is that we subconsciously get out the complaining, blaming, judging, and other attitudes that are self-defeating.

It’s like dumping out the garbage that jangles around in our subconscious mind before it has the chance to pollute our attitude that day.

And research confirms my experience.

Dr. James Pennebaker, a professor at University of Texas in Austin, has done a great deal of research trying to pin down the kind of impact creative writing can have on a person’s well-being. He writes about his findings in his book, Writing to Heal.

People who engage in expressive writing report feeling happier and less negative than before writing. Similarly, reports of depressive symptoms, rumination, and general anxiety tend to drop in weeks and months after writing about emotional upheavals.

Did you catch that? Expressive writing can help lift depression and general anxiety. That is worth its weight in gold, if you ask me.

2. It strengthens your relationships.

It makes logical sense that as our moods improve, our relationships improve also. I mean, who wants to be friends with someone who is in a bad mood all the time?

I found this to be true for myself, too.

One of the reasons was that as I worked out some of my negative feelings in my creative writing, I didn’t have to work out those negative feelings in my relationships. I started taking more accountability for my actions and feelings, instead of expecting someone to come along and take care of them for me (as so many of us do).

I found writing to be like an incredibly cheap version of therapy—in that it was an always-present safe space I could retreat to to work through whatever I was thinking or feeling.

Here’s what Pennebaker found when he began to look closely at the impact of writing on our social lives:

…[volunteers] were asked to wear a tape recorder in the days before and after the writing so the researchers could monitor their social lives. Overall, those who wrote about their traumatic experiences talked more with others, laughed more easily and often, and used more words associated with positive emotions in the weeks afterward. Expressive writing seemed to make them more socially comfortable, better listeners, talkers, and indeed, better friends.

Does this make you want to get started with expressive writing?

3. It moves you forward in your career

This is where things really start to get strange. Is it possible that creative writing could have an impact on our careers?

Apparently yes.

Pennebaker hosted an experiment with a group of middle-aged men who had recently been laid off from their technical jobs after fifteen years of working for the same company. They we’re frustrated and depressed. He split the men into two groups—one group wrote about their thoughts and feelings regarding losing their job; the other group wrote about how they managed their time when they were at the office.

Guess which group got new jobs faster?

Eight months after writing, 52 percent of the emotional writing group had new jobs, compared with 20 percent of the time-management participants. Individuals from the two groups went to the same number of job interviews. The only difference was that the expressive writers were offered jobs.

It is more than possible that finding a way to express your feelings through writing could speed up your progress toward your career goals.

4. It improves your physical health

As our moods improve, our health improves. One of the number one factors for health problems in modern life is: stress. So it shouldn’t seem like a stretch that there would be a connection here. Still, I have to say I was floored when I read the actual statistics around this.

Pennebaker writes:

Those in the expressive writing groups made 43 percent fewer doctor visits for illness than the control groups, who wrote only about superficial topics. Most of the visits were for colds, flu, and other upper-respiratory infections. Nevertheless, writing about personal trauma resulted in people visiting doctors for health reasons at half their normal rates.

This might be the cheapest preventative medicine money can buy. Go out and buy a Moleskine notebook and a package of good pens and set aside 30 minutes each morning to record your first thoughts.

5. It helps us make sense of our lives

Sometimes things happen to us that don’t make any sense. We lose someone we love, we are violated in some way, we are forced to let go of a dream we’ve been holding onto for years. Whatever it is, writing can help us sort through the loss and to make sense out of it. When we write, we naturally try to organize ideas, connect them, and make sense of them.

We can capitalize on our brain’s natural tendency to do this when we sit down and try to get words on paper.

As we’re writing, we create spatial relations between the various bits of information we are recording. Spatial tasks are handled by another part of the brain, and the act of linking the verbal information with the spatial relationship seems to filter out the less relevant or important information — Dustin Wax (LifeHack)

Writing naturally prompts us to put into words what happened to us—good or bad—to notice the relationship between those things, to be aware of our attitudes surrounding them, and hopefully to balance our negative thoughts with some more positive ones. At the very least, noticing our negative thoughts makes us more aware of how they’re influencing our lives.

6. To know what we think

People talk about “writers block” all the time. But writer’s block is just LIFE block. In other words, it’s not just that you don’t know how to say what you want to say in an eloquent way, it’s that you don’t know what you want to say. You don’t know what you think yet.

You can get there. But you’re going to have to work it out.

This is the beauty of the act of writing.

Most of the time when we feel blocked in our life, it’s because we feel safer that way. We may not be happy but at least we know what we are—unhappy. Much fear of creativity is the fear of the unknown — Julia Cameron




Writing is a space where we can safely face our fear and work out what we think. What we think helps us know what is really important to us, what to do next, why are we grieving, what the grief means, why what that person said to us was really so hurtful, and how to find our way out of the woods and to the other side.

Writing can be a lifeline—even if you’re sure you suck at it.

7. It makes you a better communicator

Speaking of improving our relationships, one tool I’ve used writing for over the years is to rehearse difficult conversations before I have them.

What I’ll do is actually write out the conversion as I think it might happen. I’ll write what I would say if I could say whatever I was thinking, and what I think the person’s response would be to what I said. This exercise is incredibly enlightening. Sometimes I find that what I really wanted to say was cathartic, but also mean and unhelpful.

Other times I find that what I think the other person will say to me is probably not what they will actually say, and is only a figment of my own inner-critic.

Writing seems to act as a kind of mini-rehearsal for doing… visualizing doing something can “trick” the brain into thinking it’s actually doing it, and writing something down seems to use enough of the brain to trigger this effect. Again, this leads to greater memorization, the same way that visualizing the performance of a new skill can actually improve our skill level — Dustin Wax (LifeHack)

This helps keep me tempered in my conversations, and makes them more productive. It allows me to vent my frustration, and also keeps me humble and kind.

8. It makes us feel less lonely

I’ll never forget sharing my very first blog post with the world. I think three people read it; and two of them were my mom.

Still, there was something exhilarating about putting my thoughts into the world (which were completely rambling and self-centered) to have someone else respond by saying, “me too”. It’s the power of human connection. It makes us feel a little bit less alone in this crazy, lonely, disconnected world.

Additionally—and maybe more importantly—writing teaches us how to be alone with ourselves, with our thoughts, which in a world of Netflix and social media and any number of numbing tactics for our deep-seeded sense of loneliness, is an important skill.

Until we can learn to be okay being alone, we’ll never really be able to connect.

9. It’s a positive outlet for strong emotions

Anger. Skepticism. Cynicism. Grief. There are a lot of ways we can deal with these complicated emotions and not all of them are healthy. Writing, on the other hand, takes something that could have a negative impact and turns it into a positive one.

Anger is fuel. We feel it and we want to do something. Hit someone, break something, throw a fit., smash a first into the world, tell those bastards. But we are nice people what we do with our anger is stuff it, deny it, bury it, block it, hide it, lie about it, medicated it, muffle it, ignore it. We do everything but listen to it. Anger is meant to be listened to. —Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

All of our strong emotions are meant to be listened to. Our intuitions. Our fears. Our doubts. Our sadness.

Writing gives us the space to listen to what our hearts are trying to tell us.

10. It changes the world

It is always good for me to remember that when John Steinbeck sat down to write East of Eden, he didn’t know he was writing the next Great American Novel. In fact, in his book Journal of a Novel—the journal he kept while he was writing East of Eden—he talks about his fears and insecurities as a writer, wondering if the book would ever amount to anything.

Are you writing the next Great American Novel?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But here’s he point: it doesn’t matter.

Something profound happens when we choose to just write, without worrying about what the outcome will be.

Writing helps us discover what we’re passionate about, to explore that thing, and to become the best version of ourselves. It can help us share our passions with other people who are passionate about the same things we are, to serve people, to connect with them, to build a community, and ultimately to bring our unique gifts to the world.

It could change your whole life. It could change the whole world.

You just never know.

For more about how writing can help you in all the above ways, join me for one of my writing workshops.

On Finding Love Again

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about love lately, for a variety of reasons. First of all, it’s that time of year, the time of year when our culture begins to talk about love in a way that I think is mostly unhelpful for most people, in a way that often points us away from love more than it points us toward it.




Secondly, I’ve just finished the manuscript for my next book, which is about love—about finding love, and losing it, and finding it again.

And the more I learn about what it feels like to stay in love, the more surprised I am, and the more I realize why for so long I have been missing it. It doesn’t feel exactly like I thought it would feel. I’m finding it in the strangest places, in the most unexpected ways. It is easier than I ever thought it could be and also harder and softer and stronger and takes more of my heart than anyone ever told me it would.

It is the hardest battle I have ever fought.




It is better than I ever dreamed possible.

Our Craving for Love

A friend of mine got a message the other night on her Instagram account from a stranger who apparently felt the need to share an unsolicited opinion with her. His opinion started off like a compliment—“you are so open, beautiful, inspiring,” that sort of thing—and then quickly turned into an insult. Or at least what he meant to be an insult, which in my opinion didn’t land. It went like this:

You are also desperate for love, he said.

Quit acting like a girl.

My friend immediately texted me and a few other friends, so we could commiserate with her and also so that she would avoid doing what she wanted to do, which was to fire something awful back to him. When I read that message, there were so many things I wanted to say. Just so many things. But the biggest, most important one that rose to the surface went like this:

We are all desperate for love. Every single one of us.

It’s true, isn’t it? 

This is not “being a girl”. This is being a human.

Some of us are more honest with our desperation. Others of us have gotten good at hiding it and stuffing it. Some of us have learned the art of knowing and acknowledging our need for love and finding realistic ways to meet it, without manipulating or cajoling. We’ve learned how to be the love of our own lives, to ask clearly and directly for what we are wanting.

Others of us are constantly performing and manipulating or taking love by force (which is not actually love by the way) because we haven’t yet learned the art of sitting with our own need, with our own desire, the art of going without something we crave. But regardless of where we are in our journey, there is one thing that levels the playing field.

We all crave love. We just do. We are all desperate for it.

Every single one of us.

Which is why I loved what my friend said after that. I just loved this so much I wrote it down and I will keep it close to me for a long time. I felt like it really embodied Love itself and reminded me that we do not have to sit around and wait for love to happen to us. We create Love. We become Love. We are love and we are happening.

She said, “You know, I hope he finds the love he is looking for.”




YES AND AMEN.

I hope that too. I really do.

The love you are looking for.

I was at the beach a few months ago working my latest book, which is all about love. And one night at dinner I sat next to a man who was tall and handsome and seemed interesting at first, and who offered to buy me a glass of wine so I accepted. We talked for twenty minutes or so about sports and business and politics and what I was doing at the beach. The usual.

I told him I was writing a book. 
He asked what the book was about and I told him it was about finding love, and then losing it, and then finding it again.

Then, he said something I was not expecting.

He said, “can I be honest with you about your book?”

I told him he could. And he proceeded to tell me that he thought it was a terrible idea to write a book about love. How I should direct my efforts somewhere else. The look of shock on my face did not seem to deter him. He just kept going, saying that this was meant to be a compliment. That I was smart and interesting and had a lot to say and I should write a book about something more important than love.

More important than love. So interesting.

I wanted to ask him why he was buying a pretty girl a drink on a Saturday night if he wasn’t interested in love, but then I realized that his answer—if he was being honest—would probably have something to do with sex. So instead I just gathered my things and left the restaurant. But as I left I thought about how sad it was that this guy couldn’t admit to himself what he really wanted.

He couldn’t admit his own craving for love. And until we admit our craving for something, it’s pretty unlikely we will ever get it.

Until we admit what we are looking for, we cannot find it. (Tweet that)

So I think about this guy I met at the beach, and the man who sent the message to my friend on Instagram, and about a years-ago version of myself who could not admit how badly she wanted what she didn’t think she could have and I wish for all of us that we can learn it’s okay to want something we don’t know exactly how to cultivate in this moment. In fact, that is all part of the process.

This is all part of how love has its way with us.

The mystery of “finding” love

I think one of the reasons I’ve had such a hard time finding love until now is that I’ve been looking for it “out there” like most of us are. Boyfriends. Girlfriends. Rings on our fingers. A certain level of commitment from a specific person. Nothing could be a better representation of a culture that wants external representation of love than a holiday that says:

Love me? Better buy me a gift to prove it.

And I’m not totally cynical about the holiday. I think that external manifestations of love can be meaningful when they reflect our internal reality. But I also know how empty external gestures can be when we don’t have the first clue about what it means to actually be love, to be in love, to find the love we so desperately want.

We think if only we had a boyfriend or a husband or a different boyfriend or a different husband—then we’d feel more loved.

If only he would get us flowers…

If only he’d pay more attention…

But my friend Sarah always says that love is what happens when we show up in our lives with our whole hearts and this has totally transformed the way I think about love in my life. This means love has very little to do with anyone else and SO MUCH to do with me and how I decide to show up in my own life. In other words, if I am lacking love in my life, I have one person to blame: me.

If I want more love in my life, there is one person who can turn up the volume on love: me. And we do it by speaking our truth, even when we’re worried about being rejected, by holding space for ourselves to feel whatever it is we feel, by learning to reach out for another person without letting go of ourselves, and again, by admitting our own need and craving for love—making space for it to grow in our lives.

Love is less something we find than it is something we practice, less something we uncover than it is a pre-existing reality we become more and more aware of over time, less something we build than it is something we soften to.

We do not have to fight for love or compete for love.

We open to it and find it already exists in us and all around us and we have more if it than we ever dreamed possible.

Love hurts.

What we find when we start to practice this—showing up in our lives with our whole hearts, softening to love, opening to it—is it is foreign and uncomfortable and vulnerable and feels an awful lot like you are on fire. ON FIRE.

Then, suddenly we realize why we’ve been avoiding love all this time. It HURTS.

Like hell.

It just does.

There is no getting around it.

We don’t like this way of thinking because we want to think like our culture thinks about love which goes like, you know, “no man is worth your tears and the only one who is will never make you cry.” We want to believe that, someday, love will stop hurting when we get the right circumstances. The problem is, the more we expect love not to hurt, the most disappointed we become.

And the more we miss all the beauty and power love has to offer.

One of my very favorite writers Rainer Maria Rilke says it like this:

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation… and do not expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside of it.”

Did you catch that?

The most difficult of all tasks.

The ultimate. The last test and proof. The WORK. Love is not easy. It is not all rainbows and sunshine. It hurts. It hurts like hell sometimes.

And yet, when we really do the work of learning to love, of learning to show up in our lives with our whole hearts, it doesn’t stop hurting (“do not expect any understanding”) but it does offer this sort of sweet, protective blessing over us. It’s an inheritance, Rilke says, that stretches so far in front of us, and so far behind us, it covers even the things that have happened back in our past, before we knew what love was, and the things that have not taken place yet in our future.

There is just no possible way we can step ourselves outside of it.

That is how big and beautiful and expansive and protective love is.

How amazing is that?

Two kinds of pain.

Love is painful, but just because something is painful does not make it love. There are really two kinds of pain in the world. None of us get to escape the pain of being alive, but we do get to choose which kind of pain we’d like to endure: the pain of changing or the pain of staying the same.

Love always gives us a choice. (Tweet that)

The pain of love, the pain of change, is not easy but it’s a healthy, good, forward-moving kind of pain. It’s the kind of pain you get during a good workout. It’s just a good, good struggle.

The other kind of pain is a stuck kind of pain. This is an injury pain. A stale pain. Stiff pain. “Something is not right here” kind of pain. This is the kind of pain that feels against your very nature. It screams at you:

Slow down, back off, walk away, take a break, make space.

This pain, though not outside the reach of love, is not the pain of love.

Love will transforms us when we soften to it, but it never forces. Does not manipulate. If you walk away, it will let you go.

Love and letting go.

I’m convinced I’ve gotten love wrong for most of my life because I’m so bad at letting go. For most of my life I’ve though I had to make love work, that I had to muscle it into place, that I needed to white-knuckle it in order to make it happen.

What was love going to do without me?

More and more, though, I’m realizing that love has never needed my help happening. It has been going on long before I got here, and will keep going on long after I’ve gone, and my my wrestling to make love happen has been less about love and more about control and manipulation. These two things are polar opposites, by the way. Mutually exclusive—love and control.

You can either be in control, or be in love but not both. (Tweet that)

I’m not saying love never holds on, or that it never fights. Of course it does. But after fighting to show people how much we care for them, fighting to keep them close, fighting to keep them from doing things that are destructive to them, one day we wake up and realize, nobody feels more love than they did before. Love is no bigger. It’s the same size it’s always been.

One day we wake up and realize the bravest thing we can do is to let go.

The better I get at letting go, the more love I feel in my life. It hurts. It hurts like hell. But that’s what love is. That’s what it does. And as much as love hurts, it hurts mostly, I am finding, because I am not trying to muscle it into place.

I’m just staying with it. I’m letting it happen to me.

I am letting go.

The post On Finding Love Again appeared first on Allison Fallon.

Finding Love with A Broken Heart

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about love lately, for a variety of reasons. First of all, it’s that time of year, the time of year when our culture begins to talk about love in a way that I think is mostly unhelpful for most people, in a way that often points us away from love more than it points us toward it.




Secondly, I’ve just finished the manuscript for my next book, which is about love—about finding love, and losing it, and finding it again.

And the more I learn about what it feels like to stay in love, the more surprised I am, and the more I realize why for so long I have been missing it. It doesn’t feel exactly like I thought it would feel. I’m finding it in the strangest places, in the most unexpected ways. It is easier than I ever thought it could be and also harder and softer and stronger and takes more of my heart than anyone ever told me it would.

It is the hardest battle I have ever fought.




It is better than I ever dreamed possible.

Our Craving for Love

A friend of mine got a message the other night on her Instagram account from a stranger who apparently felt the need to share an unsolicited opinion with her. His opinion started off like a compliment—“you are so open, beautiful, inspiring,” that sort of thing—and then quickly turned into an insult. Or at least what he meant to be an insult, which in my opinion didn’t land. It went like this:

You are also desperate for love, he said.

Quit acting like a girl.

My friend immediately texted me and a few other friends, so we could commiserate with her and also so that she would avoid doing what she wanted to do, which was to fire something awful back to him. When I read that message, there were so many things I wanted to say. Just so many things. But the biggest, most important one that rose to the surface went like this:

We are all desperate for love. Every single one of us.

It’s true, isn’t it? 

This is not “being a girl”. This is being a human.

Some of us are more honest with our desperation. Others of us have gotten good at hiding it and stuffing it. Some of us have learned the art of knowing and acknowledging our need for love and finding realistic ways to meet it, without manipulating or cajoling. We’ve learned how to be the love of our own lives, to ask clearly and directly for what we are wanting.

Others of us are constantly performing and manipulating or taking love by force (which is not actually love by the way) because we haven’t yet learned the art of sitting with our own need, with our own desire, the art of going without something we crave. But regardless of where we are in our journey, there is one thing that levels the playing field.

We all crave love. We just do. We are all desperate for it.

Every single one of us.

Which is why I loved what my friend said after that. I just loved this so much I wrote it down and I will keep it close to me for a long time. I felt like it really embodied Love itself and reminded me that we do not have to sit around and wait for love to happen to us. We create Love. We become Love. We are love and we are happening.

She said, “You know, I hope he finds the love he is looking for.”




YES AND AMEN.

I hope that too. I really do.

The love you are looking for.

I was at the beach a few months ago working my latest book, which is all about love. And one night at dinner I sat next to a man who was tall and handsome and seemed interesting at first, and who offered to buy me a glass of wine so I accepted. We talked for twenty minutes or so about sports and business and politics and what I was doing at the beach. The usual.

I told him I was writing a book. 
He asked what the book was about and I told him it was about finding love, and then losing it, and then finding it again.

Then, he said something I was not expecting.

He said, “can I be honest with you about your book?”

I told him he could. And he proceeded to tell me that he thought it was a terrible idea to write a book about love. How I should direct my efforts somewhere else. The look of shock on my face did not seem to deter him. He just kept going, saying that this was meant to be a compliment. That I was smart and interesting and had a lot to say and I should write a book about something more important than love.

More important than love. So interesting.

I wanted to ask him why he was buying a pretty girl a drink on a Saturday night if he wasn’t interested in love, but then I realized that his answer—if he was being honest—would probably have something to do with sex. So instead I just gathered my things and left the restaurant. But as I left I thought about how sad it was that this guy couldn’t admit to himself what he really wanted.

He couldn’t admit his own craving for love. And until we admit our craving for something, it’s pretty unlikely we will ever get it.

Until we admit what we are looking for, we cannot find it. (Tweet that)

So I think about this guy I met at the beach, and the man who sent the message to my friend on Instagram, and about a years-ago version of myself who could not admit how badly she wanted what she didn’t think she could have and I wish for all of us that we can learn it’s okay to want something we don’t know exactly how to cultivate in this moment. In fact, that is all part of the process.

This is all part of how love has its way with us.

The mystery of “finding” love

I think one of the reasons I’ve had such a hard time finding love until now is that I’ve been looking for it “out there” like most of us are. Boyfriends. Girlfriends. Rings on our fingers. A certain level of commitment from a specific person. Nothing could be a better representation of a culture that wants external representation of love than a holiday that says:

Love me? Better buy me a gift to prove it.

And I’m not totally cynical about the holiday. I think that external manifestations of love can be meaningful when they reflect our internal reality. But I also know how empty external gestures can be when we don’t have the first clue about what it means to actually be love, to be in love, to find the love we so desperately want.

We think if only we had a boyfriend or a husband or a different boyfriend or a different husband—then we’d feel more loved.

If only he would get us flowers…

If only he’d pay more attention…

But my friend Sarah always says that love is what happens when we show up in our lives with our whole hearts and this has totally transformed the way I think about love in my life. This means love has very little to do with anyone else and SO MUCH to do with me and how I decide to show up in my own life. In other words, if I am lacking love in my life, I have one person to blame: me.

If I want more love in my life, there is one person who can turn up the volume on love: me.

Love is less something we find and more something we practice, less something we uncover than it is a pre-existing reality we become more and more aware of over time, less something we build than it is something we soften to.

We do not have to fight for love or compete for love.

We open to it and find it already exists in us and all around us and we have more if it than we ever dreamed possible.

Love hurts.

What we find when we start to practice this—showing up in our lives with our whole hearts, softening to love, opening to it—is it is foreign and uncomfortable and vulnerable and feels an awful lot like you are on fire. ON FIRE.

Then, suddenly we realize why we’ve been avoiding love all this time. It HURTS.

Like hell.

It just does.

There is no getting around it.

We don’t like this way of thinking because we want to think like our culture thinks about love which goes like, you know, “no man is worth your tears and the only one who is will never make you cry.” We want to believe that, someday, love will stop hurting when we get the right circumstances. The problem is, the more we expect love not to hurt, the most disappointed we become.

And the more we miss all the beauty and power love has to offer.

One of my very favorite writers Rainer Maria Rilke says it like this:

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation… and do not expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside of it.”

Did you catch that?

The most difficult of all tasks.

The ultimate. The last test and proof. The WORK. Love is not easy. It is not all rainbows and sunshine. It hurts. It hurts like hell sometimes.

And yet, when we really do the work of learning to love, of learning to show up in our lives with our whole hearts, it doesn’t stop hurting (“do not expect any understanding”) but it does offer this sort of sweet, protective blessing over us. It’s an inheritance, Rilke says, that stretches so far in front of us, and so far behind us, it covers even the things that have happened back in our past, before we knew what love was, and the things that have not taken place yet in our future.

There is just no possible way we can step ourselves outside of it.

That is how big and beautiful and expansive and protective love is.

How amazing is that?

Two kinds of pain.

Love is painful, but just because something is painful does not make it love. There are really two kinds of pain in the world. None of us get to escape the pain of being alive, but we do get to choose which kind of pain we’d like to endure: the pain of changing or the pain of staying the same.

Love always gives us a choice. (Tweet that)

The pain of love, the pain of change, is not easy but it’s a healthy, good, forward-moving kind of pain. It’s the kind of pain you get during a good workout. It’s just a good, good struggle.

The other kind of pain is a stuck kind of pain. This is an injury pain. A stale pain. Stiff pain. “Something is not right here” kind of pain. This is the kind of pain that feels against your very nature. It screams at you:

Slow down, back off, walk away, take a break, make space.

This pain, though not outside the reach of love, is not the pain of love.

Love will transforms us when we soften to it, but it never forces. Does not manipulate. If you walk away, it will let you go.

Love and letting go.

I’m convinced I’ve gotten love wrong for most of my life because I’m so bad at letting go. For most of my life I’ve though I had to make love work, that I had to muscle it into place, that I needed to white-knuckle it in order to make it happen.

What was love going to do without me?

More and more, though, I’m realizing that love has never needed my help happening. It has been going on long before I got here, and will keep going on long after I’ve gone, and my my wrestling to make love happen has been less about love and more about control and manipulation. These two things are polar opposites, by the way. Mutually exclusive—love and control.

You can either be in control, or be in love but not both. (Tweet that)

I’m not saying love never holds on, or that it never fights. Of course it does. But after fighting to show people how much we care for them, fighting to keep them close, fighting to keep them from doing things that are destructive to them, one day we wake up and realize, nobody feels more love than they did before. Love is no bigger. It’s the same size it’s always been.

One day we wake up and realize the bravest thing we can do is to let go.

The better I get at letting go, the more love I feel in my life. It hurts. It hurts like hell. But that’s what love is. That’s what it does. And as much as love hurts, it hurts mostly, I am finding, because I am not trying to muscle it into place.

I’m just staying with it. I’m letting it happen to me.

I am letting go.

The post Finding Love with A Broken Heart appeared first on Allison Fallon.

What I’m Reminding Myself This Morning

I don’t usually do this. Impromptu blog posts. In fact, I can’t name another time in my entire blogging life I have done this. But here I am. Doing it.

I’ll get to this more in a minute, but the fact that I am writing this is made doubly ridiculous by the fact that I have never in my whole life wanted to quit blogging as much as I have in the past few weeks. Just quit everything and sign off the Internet for good. I told a friend on the phone the other day, “I’m not doing it. I’m out. I give up” to which he suggested I should probably go eat dinner and get a good night’s sleep.

But I woke up this morning, and I don’t know, I guess I just felt like I had some things I needed to say.

This is for me. And, well, if it helps you, all the better.

This morning, I’m reminding myself of a few things.

First, I’m reminding myself of what Marianne Williamson says about miracles—that they are sometimes a shift in circumstance, but more often they are a shift in perspective. And that when circumstances don’t turn out exactly how we wish they would, how we think they should, our only option left is to change our perspective.

And look, I am not talking just about politics here. Please, dear Lord, I need a break from talking about politics.

I’m talking about life and the world as it stands. The fact that things don’t always turn out exactly how we wish they would. The devastations, big and small. The fact that people all over the world are struggling and hurting. How it feels to be a woman in a world that is violent toward the softest part of who I am. That’s what I’m talking about.

About how many things feel wrong and how I wish they would change.

But of course it is at exactly at this point—when the things we want to change don’t change—that we discover changing perspective is actually harder, in ways, than changing our circumstance. More miraculous. Sure, curing Cancer or re-routing a wayward lover or restoring a relationship between a mother and a child—that would be miraculous. But choosing joy and peace and hope and gratitude in the face of not getting these things?

Well, that’s just crazy.

It’s a task of epic proportions. One for which we are not prepared. One we do not even really desire to undertake. Everything in our biology resists when we ask ourselves to change, when we ask our minds to change.

It seems absurd and impossible.




And of course, that is why it is called a miracle.

So I reminding myself of that this morning, that when things in my life and in this world are not going the way I wish they would, when I am not getting exactly what I want exactly when I think I should have it, when I can imagine a thousand better outcomes to any situation, a thousand outcomes that would seem more miraculous…

It is time to change my mind.

I change my mind from fear to love. I change my mind from chaos to peace. I do whatever I have to do. Sign off of social media. Pray without ceasing. Repeat mantras to myself over and over. Write them out a hundred times on a white board—like a high school kid in detention, “I am safe and protected in the world, my heart is in perfect harmony, my heart is in perfect harmony, my heart is in perfect harmony, I am safe and protected in the world, I am a force of love and peace, I am a force of love and peace.…”

Whatever I need to do—I just do it. Because if I’m not a miracle-worker in this world, then what am I? If I am an amazing writer, a successful business owner, a brilliant thinker, the most spiritually and physically disciplined of anyone I know, but have not LOVE, what the hell am I? That’s what I am reminding myself of this morning—how we can do all the right stuff, but without love, we are like a clanging symbol.

Just noise without meaning.

Without love, we make no sense and neither does the life we are leading.

So I am focusing on love this morning. Loving the marginalized and forgotten. Loving the arrogant and absurd. Loving the hateful and dishonest and despising. Loving myself, being gentle with this soft hurting creature that I am, loving my own arrogance and bitterness, because love is the only way to heal these wounds, and trusting that somewhere deep inside we are all that same soft hurting creature that I am. We are not alone.

Second, I reminding myself I really have two choices.

My two choices go like this, so simply: to give up or not to give up.

I mentioned earlier that I have wanted to give up on blogging and writing more in the past weeks of my life than ever before. I don’t say that to get sympathy. I’m not asking for compliments or affirmations. I’m only saying it because I think, when we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit we all struggle with this sensation more often than we’d like to admit. The sense that we’re just going through the motions of this life and that nothing we do really matters.

Especially when things don’t turn out how we plan, or when life seems cloudy and dark, this is the time when it’s hardest to get up and keep doing our lives day after day.

And I guess the realization I’m having lately is that we really have two choices about this. The choices are so simple, it’s almost dumb. It’s just this: we can give up or not give up. We can keep going or not keep going. There is no middle ground. I’d like to think that there is a middle ground. That I can just sort of go through the motions of my life until I decide if I really want to be in it 100%.

But the truth is life is asking us this question, every day: are you going to show up—or not? Are you going to keep going, or not?

Are you going bring your whole self to the world, or are you going to hide? 


Are you going to choose the pain of changing, or settle for the pain of staying the same?

The time we need hope the most is when it is most tempting to let it go. Hope is dangerous. It threatens to make fools out of us. It threatens to make a mockery of the life we choose for ourselves. Will anything we’re doing ever matter? Will our circumstances ever change? Well, there is really no way of knowing. So are you going to do it anyway?

That’s hope.

And that’s what life is asking of us today. Are you going to keep hoping, or are you going to quit?

Third, I’m reminding myself that the way up is down.

This is the way Richard Rohr’s says it, and I love that. I’ve been repeating it to myself a dozen times a day lately: the way up is down.

But translated, into my language, it would go like this:

The way to be strong is to be soft. Just so, so soft.

I just recently spent a week at the beach working on a book, and as always, I was struck by how amazing the ocean is. I kept thinking about how water is literally one of the softest things on planet earth. So forgiving. You can fall into it, and it gives way to you. You become weightless when you’re surrounded by it, just so carried by it’s suppleness. If you took a drop of water and put it on the most tender part of your skin, you would hardly feel it.

It’s just so gentle.

Our bodies are made of 85% water. We use water to heal us, to nourish. It is literally our survival.

And yet when you look out at the ocean, there is no question: it is a force to be reckoned with. You can swim out into the ocean, if you want, thinking in all your arrogance, “Look at me! I’m a great swimmer, I’m fine, I’ve got this, I’m in control!” and you might be right… until the rip tide pulls you under and sucks you into itself and you become a part of it.

The ocean will make no apology for this.

It’s whole job is to still your arrogance.

And when you stand there, and realize your place in everything, all the fear and the bitterness and hatred and heaviness… it all just sort of melts away.

How can you stand at the edge of the ocean and not be in awe?

Anyway, I kept thinking about this as I stared out at the ocean—as I watched it do what it does everyday, just in and out, in and out, in and out. I thought about what happens when gentle, soft, healing, holy people come together like an ocean and agree to just move together. I thought about how we might just be able to be a force to be reckoned with. Not a violent force. Not an evil force. But a soft, gentle, consistent, in-and-out, showing up everyday kind of force.

An organism who’s entire existence serves to call people unto itself, to still our hearts and calm our minds and clean out all the arrogance.

Awe. Just so much awe.

I’m thinking so much lately about how to stay soft in the face of disappointments, in the face of fears and uncertainties and injustices—real fears and real uncertainties and real injustices. How on earth do we stay soft in light of all of these things? How on earth are we not suppose to just armor up and try to survive this crazy ride? That is the question I think life is asking us, right now. How?

Are you in? Or out?

Are you going to give up? Or are you going to keep going?

Are you going to keep hoping, even though you don’t know for sure?

Are you going to stay soft, even though it hurts?

I want to keep going. I want to choose hope. I want stay soft. I don’t want to give up. But some mornings, I don’t know how. I just don’t know how I can possibly make that happen. How I can change my mind about these things. How I can stay soft in this world and still survive.

I guess that’s why it’s called miracle.

The post What I’m Reminding Myself This Morning appeared first on Allison Fallon.

Depression, Creativity and the Dangers of Being Constantly Plugged In

I listened to a podcast recently—an episode of On Being—where Krista Tippet interviews the great poet Mary Oliver. If you have read any of Mary Oliver’s poetry, you know she is brilliant and profound. Her words are shaping the world. And when Krista asked Mary what has helped her to become such a prolific writer, she said something I wasn’t expecting to hear.

She said it’s because she spends an inordinate amount of time in the woods.

Literally. She avoids buildings and crowds and smart phones and anything else that crowds out the voice of poetry in her life, because poetry has been one of the only things that has helped her find healing.

Mostly this caught my attention because recently I have started to to notice what a negative impact being constantly “plugged in” is having on me—on my creative spirit, on my relationships, on my health. The constant dinging and ringing and notifications and NOISE is crowding out the things I love most about myself and my life.

I know I’m not alone in this. 44% of American say they couldn’t go a day without their mobile devices and yet deep down we know our phones are invading our bedrooms our relationships and our meals and pretty much every other aspect of our lives.

While most Americans say devices like smartphones, cellphones and personal computers have made their lives better and their jobs easier, some say they have been intrusive, increased their levels of stress and made it difficult to concentrate, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. Younger people are particularly affected: almost 30 percent of those under 45 said the use of these devices made it harder to focus.

—Marjorie Connelly, New York Times

I can’t help but wonder if there is, somehow, a better way.

Are you addicted?

A few months ago I went away for a week-long retreat, away from the Internet. No phone, no computer, no blogs, no email, no snapchat, no Instagram, no Twitter, no Facebook. And there were a few things I noticed about myself during my first few days without my phone.

First of all, I noticed my almost unconscious impulse to reach for the phone anytime I felt uncomfortable or bored. Anytime there was a lag in the conversation, anytime I had a few minutes before I was supposed to be somewhere, anytime I started worrying about something or wondering about someone, my first instinct was to reach for my phone.

The only thing was I would reach for the phone—and it wasn’t there.

Cue: mild panic.

What do I do with my hands without my phone? What do I do with those tiny little moments of free time, the transition from one activity to another? What do I do with those raging and swirling thoughts I find in my head during those tiny moments of down time? And what do I do with the fact that I’m realizing being “plugged in” may be stealing the best of myself from me?

It turns out there is a great explanation for why I felt this way.

When you check your information, when you get a buzz in your pocket, when you get a ring — you get what they call a dopamine squirt. You get a little rush of adrenaline, says [technology journalist Matt Ritchell] Well, guess what happens in its absence? You feel bored. You’re conditioned by a neurological response: Check me check me check me check me —Digital Overload: Your Brain on Gadgets, from NPR’s Fresh Air

Sound like an addiction to me.

That first time feeling.

Do you remember getting your first smart phone?

I remember the actual day I got mine. It was fall and I was living in Portland, OR. I was right in the middle of my graduate studies at George Fox University and although I had carried my own cell phone plan since college, my dad mentioned that if I wanted to join the “family plan”, I could get the new iPhone. The iPhone.

There was such a reverence about it back then.

There is still a sort of reverence about it, I suppose, although it’s morphed a bit from a realization of all the things this phone could make possible to a world where life literally doesn’t feel possible without it. But at the time I was working nearly full-time at a restaurant and taking graduate level classes at night and working on my thesis and barely maintaining some semblance of a social life.

I was commuting to and from work on school on my bike and the MAX train—a very typical way but also time-consuming way to get around in the city—so the thought of being able to SEND EMAILS from MY PHONE on THE TRAIN was like a magic trick I couldn’t possibly imagine.

I had decided the iPhone was going to completely change my life.

I was not wrong about that.

How the iPhone is changing us.

As I started thinking about this and doing some research, I was not surprised to find I’m not alone in wondering if the iPhone—or more accurately this ability to be constantly plugged in—has created more negative change than it has positive change. I was surprised to find, however, how much tangible research there is showing how dangerous this tendency can be for our brains and hearts.

One article from the New York Times, for example, talks about how technology might be actually altering our personalities.




Yes, you read that right. Altering our personalities. Check this out:

Technology may be slowly reshaping your personality. Some experts believe excessive use of the Internet, cellphones and other technologies can cause us to become more impatient, impulsive, forgetful and even more narcissistic.

The author goes on to say…

Typically, the concern about our dependence on technology is that it detracts from our time with family and friends in the real world. But psychologists have become intrigued by a more subtle and insidious effect of our online interactions. It may be that the immediacy of the Internet, the efficiency of the iPhone and the anonymity of the chat room change the core of who we are…

—Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times

I have to say my experience validates this claim. Being away from my phone for a week, I started to feel more in touch with that “inner voice” people so often talk about, the one that is slowly guiding us to the next right thing. I started to hear that voice much more clearly than I had been hearing it before, since it had been crowded out by all the noise.

I started to feel more settled with myself. Those “phantom limb” moments—the ones where I would reach for a phone which wasn’t there—became fewer and further between. Eventually I began to feel like I didn’t really miss the thing.

It’s ironic, isn’t it?

That this thing which was supposed to help us be so much more connected, so much more efficient, might be preventing us from being connected to the person we must be connected to if we’re ever going to connect with anybody else: ourselves.

Is it making you overwhelmed?

As far as efficiency and productivity are concerned, I have to admit, I do doubt my ability to make it through a day of my regular life without my iPhone. Still, all the dinging and ringing and constant buzzing—even just knowing it is in my purse waiting for me when I’m done with a meeting or a writing session—makes me feel a tiny bit on edge.

Thankfully, I’m not alone in feeling that “on edge” feeling.

This is actually how our brains were designed to work:

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, there’s a reason: The processing capacity of the conscious mind is limited. This is a result of how the brain’s attentional system evolved. Our brains have two dominant modes of attention: the task-positive network and the task-negative network (they’re called networks because they comprise distributed networks of neurons, like electrical circuits within the brain). The task-positive network is active when you’re actively engaged in a task, focused on it, and undistracted; neuroscientists have taken to calling it the central executive. The task-negative network is active when your mind is wandering; this is the daydreaming mode. These two attentional networks operate like a seesaw in the brain: when one is active the other is not.

—Here’s Why It’s Important to Unplug


So as far as what Mary Oliver said about spending a lot of time in the woods, she might be onto something that would help all of us to nurture our creative minds, which are the most valuable resource we have—our only hope for solving difficult problems, creating beautiful things and imagining a better world.

Disconnecting from “task positive” so that “task negative” has a chance to work.

Constant connectivity makes it hard to sustain attention on one task at a time. It can make us get all willy-nilly with our focus, giving our attention to whatever is right in front of us, without thinking about whether or not what is in front of us is truly worth our time. As a result, it’s harder to engage in deep thought, critical thought, and creativity.

—Daniel J. Levitin, New York Times

I have to wonder, is being constantly plugged in worth the trade we’re making?

Is it making you depressed?

This is not just something we say to each other in passing—like, “Man, Facebook makes me depressed” or “every time I get on Instagram I start comparing myself to other people.” Research is beginning to show what a profound impact being dialed in to technology is having on our emotion health.

Check out the findings of this study:

The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt the next time we text-messaged them; the more they used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time… On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it.

—Ethan Kross

If the being constantly plugged into the internet is making us so miserable, why do we keep going back to it?

Life with technology

I was having a really hard day a few weeks ago—one of those days where it feels like everything is falling apart and none of your hard work matters and you should just throw your hands up and quit. So I did what Mary Oliver suggested and I went to the woods. I got in my car and drove 30 minutes from my house, and on the way, I plugged my ear phones and called my dad, one of the many people I know I can always call when I’m feeling down.




I spent the next hour walking through the woods, talking and crying to my dad on my iPhone, headphones plugged in, feeling like he was right next to me, despite the fact that he is a few thousand miles away.

We have to admit, for all that technology steals from us, it is also pretty incredible.

“Just as food nourishes us and we need it for life, so too—in the 21st century and the modern age—we need technology. You cannot survive without the communication tools; the productivity tools are essential,” … ”And yet… after 20 years of glorifying technology as if all computers were good and all use of it was good, science is beginning to embrace the idea that some technology is Twinkies and some technology is Brussels sprouts.”

—Digital Overload, from NPR’s Fresh Air

What does it look like to have a more positive relationship with technology in our lives?

Life without technology?

I’ll turn this question to you: what does it look like to have a good relationship with your technology? I don’t have a clear-cut answer to this question and I don’t suspect you do, either, but I’m learning, slowly, and trying to take steps in the right direction.

There are really two things I’m doing.

First, I’m paying attention.

I’m paying attention to the ways I depend on my technology, to my fear of being without it, to my tendency to use it as a way to numb and distract and disengage and to get those little “dopamine hits” I mentioned at the beginning of this article. Then, when I notice myself doing those things, I just sort of smile and try to have grace for the struggling human that I am in this world where technology plays such a big part in our existence.

This—paying attention, becoming aware, having grace, surrendering the need to “fix” or “change” myself—is, always and ironically the first and most crucial step to changing anything, especially an addiction.

Second, I’m learning to disconnect.

This is something that, if I’m honest, causes me a considerable amount of anxiety, but that I know is good for me because every time I do it, I come back feeling more like myself. I’m making it a point to step away from my devices for a few days, or hours, or even just minutes at a time. One day each week. One hour each day. One week each year.

I’m trying to be specific and intentional about this. And again, having grace for myself when it doesn’t go exactly how I plan.

The Internet will survive without you.

There is this strange and embarrassing sense the internet will not survive without us, don’t you think? What will people think when we don’t respond to their text messages, emails and Tweets? It’s ridiculous. And yet it is also the natural product of the world we live in—where it’s very easy for us to feel like we’re the center of our own little ringing and dinging universe.

So I just remind myself that I am, of course, not in charge of the online world or any world at all for that matter, thank goodness, that the Earth will keep on spinning around the sun without my assistance. I can let go and just be.

In fact, that is all I need to do: just be.

This surrender, like most surrenders, feels agonizing—until I do it. Then it feels pretty darn miraculous.

I am feeling like myself again.

Extra Resources:

The Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness, New York Times
How to Stop Constantly Checking Your Email and Still Get Things Done, Business Insider
Here’s Why It’s So Important to Unplug, by Emma Bracy
The Connection Between Social Media and Narcissism
What Really Happens to Your Brain and Body During a Digital Detox, Fast Company
The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brain, Wired

The post Depression, Creativity and the Dangers of Being Constantly Plugged In appeared first on Allison Fallon.

On Being A Woman in the World Today

A group of us sat around a pool.

This was several months ago, so it was still quite warm in Nashville. A few of us had our legs draped in the water. One friend was on a lounge chair close by. Two women were floating on those pink and yellow donut-shaped floaty toys. We were talking about The Stanford Rape Case, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump running for President, and what a terrifying and awesome time in history it is to be a woman.

Brock Turner had just been arrested and convicted and sentenced to three months in prison. Three months. The looks on our faces said everything. How would it be possible to feel safe in a world where Brock Turner has been sentenced to three months in prison for assaulting and raping a woman?

One friend told a story about a time she’d been roofied at a bar here in Nashville.

Another friend talked about being body-shamed by a man on a text message thread he didn’t know she was on. “Huge”. That’s what he called her. She, by the way, is not “huge” by any stretch of the imagination—not that that matters, other than to say how impossible standards have become for women these days.

Turns out if you’re not a size 0, you’re “huge”.

Another friend talked about trying to file a restraining order against an ex of hers, how the detective questioned her story and she felt so embarrassed, she left and never filed. She talked about what it was like to fall asleep in her own house, terrified—not of a stranger showing up in the middle of the night, but of someone she once loved.

When you get women talking, you realize the stories from the news are not just stories, they are not overblown media strategies to get good ratings. This is not women overreacting or playing the victim. We’re just finally garnering the courage to talk about what’s been happening in our lives and in this world all along.

What a terrifying and amazing time to be a woman.

I was speaking at an event not long ago, and true to form, spent a long time preparing my content and a good bit of time obsessing over what I was going to wear. I chided myself for that second part, as I usually do, telling myself:

Nobody cares about what you’re wearing. They’re here to hear what you have to say.

But of course even as I told this to myself, I didn’t believe it. It wasn’t 100% true. In an ideal world, sure, nobody would care what I was wearing. But in the real world—this world, the one we live in—people do judge women by what they wear.

This is the reality of the world we live in.

Sure enough, after I stepped off stage, a young man approached me. He introduced himself and thanked me. Then he said it. “Next time, if you could not wear such tight pants, the guys in the audience might be able to pay more attention. It is really distracting.”

I was dumbstruck. Embarrassed.

Wanted to get out of that room as quickly as possible.

That’s shame, by the way. That heat rising up inside of you. That desperation to disappear. To hide. I drank nearly an entire bottle of wine that night, in a hotel room by myself, not because I have a problem with alcohol but because I have I have a problem with figuring out how to be a woman in the world today—a world that tells me to be sexy and beautiful but not to be too sexy or beautiful because then you’re a slut.

A world that tells me to be thin but not too thin or people will think you’re anorexic, to have passions and dreams but not to get too carried away with them or you’ll never be a good wife or mother, to speak your mind but to do it gently otherwise you’re a bitch, that you can be anything you want to be—but you’re somehow second-best without a husband.

I have to be honest. As a woman in this world, sometimes it feels like you can’t win.

Men, women and underwear lines.

While I sat in my hotel room that night, I thought about another event I had attended. This time I’d been on side-stage, standing in the wings, cheering on a friend. We all whispered and leaned in and paid close attention. I thought about how incredible it was to see a my friend fully realizing her potential and actualizing her gifts, getting to share her great beauty with the world.

At one point, a man came up and stood beside me. I didn’t know who he was, but we nodded at each other to be polite. A few minutes later he whispered casually, nodding toward my friend, “someone should tell her you can see her underwear line.”

Then he turned and walked away.

I looked closer, instinctively. The thing was, it wasn’t her underwear line. It was a little camisole tank top she’d put on under her shirt, in an attempt to get some extra coverage. But by then, he was gone and my face was all scrunched up. I wondered why he had been looking at her underwear in the first place and tried to think of a time when anyone EVER had looked at a man on stage and said ANYTHING about his underwear line.

I couldn’t think of one.

What a strange and confusing world to live in as a woman. (Tweet that)

What the shaking is about

More and more lately I’m staring to see a sort of holy stirring about these things, about things we’ve all stayed silent about for years, things women have not had a space or place to say, things we’ve written off as “locker room talk,” as guys just being guys, as just “the way things are”. There is a shift, a fissure, a break in the old way of doing things.

Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.

That’s just the way it is.

We are in a strange in-between time.

Let’s not forget that women now outnumber men in undergraduate programs in the US, that women are earning more and more degrees in business and science. Let’s not forget how a woman is running for US President—a woman who is likely to win. Regardless of politics, you have to admit how truly remarkable it is that our daughters will grow up in a world where a woman in leadership does not seem like an anomaly.

Where women leading is the norm.

Remember women like Katty Kay and Claire Shipman are addressing women and confidence and how women everywhere who are taking them at their word, stepping outside of their usual paradigms and sharing their gifts and voices. Remember the women YOU KNOW, in YOUR LIFE, who are contributing as artists, authors, songwriters, poets, performers, mentors, teachers, mothers.

Remember women are speaking up—finally—about rape and abuse and anorexia and bulimia and the years of injustice they’ve suffered. Remember how they won’t shut up until they start to see real change. My life wouldn’t be the same without these women. Neither would yours.

But also do not forget there is more work to be done.

You and me—if we aren’t the ones to do that work—who will?

What happens when you cage someone

I met a women several years ago while volunteering for an organization I love, that I’ll leave unnamed to protect her identity. She had been addicted to drugs for years—more of her life than she’d been sober—and ended up in this program after a short stint in prison. One day, after a few weeks of knowing her, I built up the courage to ask her what she had done to earn her sentence.

She told me, with some hesitation, that she’d killed her long-time boyfriend.

Shot him.

We were focused on a task, so our hands were busy and I wasn’t looking at her. She went on. Apparently he had handcuffed her to the bed, night after night, beating her with a one of those fire pokers. “You know the ones” she said. Neither she nor I could remember the name. She explained how one night he’d held a gun to her head, and another night he’d broken a beer bottle, shoved the broken end into her wrist and twisted.

She showed me the scars.




Then she told me, one night, he’d left the gun within arm’s reach, and she was high, and so tired of being his punching bag, so she just… pulled the trigger. She admitted how terrified she’d been to share that information wth me. She was afraid I would think of her differently, that I would be scared of her.

“Strangely enough,” I said calmly, “I think I would have done the same thing.”

I shocked myself saying that. But the truth is, I actually found her quite remarkable. You can cage a person for awhile—destroy her body and keep her small—but there is only so long her soul will let her stay there. Drugs help. Alcohol helps. But eventually the soul comes rising up like a fury, like a flood, and no matter what the circumstances are trying to stop her, her soul does not care.

Souls are like that. Indestructible. Unstoppable. Like fire.

Their job is to survive.


What is your soul saying to you? Perhaps its time we begin listening.

Are you in an abusive relationship?

The truth is most of us will never be in a relationship that is as overtly abusive as this one was. But many of us—most of us, perhaps—have been in relationships that are more subtly abusive, and yet equally as destructive, especially when we don’t realize they’re happening.

We are in these relationships with partners, spouses, boyfriends, bosses.

I’ll never forget someone asking me this question several years ago—“Are you in an abusive relationship?” At the time I found her question horribly offensive and off-putting. Condescending even. I talked with my partner at the time about how rude it had been for her to even suggest such a thing, and he assured me she wasn’t a safe person and that we should keep our distance.

It was until years later—YEARS—that I looked back and realized who the unsafe person had been in that circumstance. It’s strange how this can happen. How we can be so DEEP into something that we can’t see it clearly for ourselves. It’s like asking a fish, “how does the water feel?” He’s like: water?

He didn’t even know he was in water. It’s just all he’s ever known.

So this holy stirring… it is a great gift to us. It is waking us up to what has been all along. To what we have been feeling, under the surface, to the struggle we have been fighting without even knowing it. It is whispering to us that we are not crazy, we are not wrong, that we can trust our perception of things. We’ve been living in the water, without even realizing it, gasping for breath, without even knowing.

We’ve been going about our business, drinking bottles of wine alone in hotel rooms.

This is our soul’s way of surviving.

But there has to be a better way.

Good men and strong women.

For the most part, my life is filled with men who are supportive and receptive to women in all different capacities, celebrating their beauty and making way for them to actualize their potential. Men I know are fighting for women and advocating for them and making space where there has not been space before. Men I know are setting aside their way of doing things, their way of thinking about things, to listen to women.

This might not be happening everywhere, but it is happening under my nose.

I know it. I live it. I experience it everyday.

That is not to say I haven’t come across my fair share of jerks and bullies in my lifetime. I have. I’ve known them, been friends with them, bumped into them at concerts and bars and parties and even been romantically involved with a few. But it is to say that men who do not respect women are becoming extinct, I’m convinced. The old way is disappearing.

Men who don’t get on the ship are going to be left stranded.

But no matter what men do or don’t do, the most important thing a woman can do is to stand in her beauty and power and value. This is what shuts up bullies the fastest. It cuts them off at their source. A man has a hard time taking advantage of a woman who knows she’s too good to be taken advantage of.

Have you read the letter Brock Turner’s victim wrote and read in his court hearing? I wouldn’t wish her suffering on my worst enemy—and Brock’s sentencing was a terrible and horrifying reflection of a culture that protects men at the expense of women. Still, her words are more powerful than any prison sentence he could have suffered.

Here’s what she says to women everywhere:

And finally, to girls everywhere, I am with you. On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt you or dismiss you, I am with you. I fought everyday for you. So never stop fighting, I believe you. As the author Anne Lamott once wrote, “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.” Although I can’t save every boat, I hope that by speaking today, you absorbed a small amount of light, a small knowing that you can’t be silenced, a small satisfaction that justice was served, a small assurance that we are getting somewhere, and a big, big knowing that you are important, unquestionably, you are untouchable, you are beautiful, you are to be valued, respected, undeniably, every minute of every day, you are powerful and nobody can take that away from you. To girls everywhere, I am with you. Thank you.

This world is a hard place to be a woman, if we’re being honest. It’s a hard place to be a human. To show up in all our brokenness, all our vulnerability, all our humanity, to share our truth, to let our souls come alive, to shine bright. That doesn’t mean we should stop fighting to do it.

In fact, quit the opposite.

Now, more than ever—in this strange and crazy world—we keep up the good fight.

Extra Resources:

The Infuriating Truth About Why Women Drink
A Woman’s Worth by Marianne Williamson
Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker
Empowering Women by Louise Hay
Women and Desire by Polly Young-Eisendrath

The post On Being A Woman in the World Today appeared first on Allison Fallon.

The Way You Are (A Poem)

Every Thursday I share with you a poem I love or one I’ve written. Today’s poem is called The Way You Are and is about people who are hiding under layers of bravado and narcissism. I hope you like it.

The Way You Are

You say this is just the way

you are—to which I say no,

no way

the way you are

brings chaos

and destruction

and forces

people into

tears of dread

and regret, no way

the way you are

needs silence

to survive, no way

that is

how this works

who you are

is

hiding.

Strip off

the layers, strip down

to nothing, wear

what you wore before

you knew

how it felt to strip

someone else

of dignity, of power

of clothes, of

her innocence,

before you were told

the way

to come into your power

was to take it

from another

back to

when you

knew

the only way to be

the way you are is to

go home, to strip

yourself

down to nothing,

down to your roots

down under your boots

of bravado, your belt of

fury, your tightly-tied tie

of feigned

innocence

quit pretending to be

so dense

quit wearing your pants half-zipped

go all the way, take

off all your clothes

and there—see! STOP—that

you, that naked and shaking

you—that is who

you are,

so small, so unassuming,

so human, the big, amazing

oz… not

so much but

that is where you’ve

been hiding.

The post The Way You Are (A Poem) appeared first on Allison Fallon.

Why You’re Always Falling in Love With the Wrong Person

I wish I would have been sitting down when she said it. I wasn’t. I was standing in the doorway of a coffee shop, saying goodbye with keys in my hand—so ready to leave—and that was before she even opened her mouth.

“You and me,” she said, “always falling for the wrong guys.”

I laughed—a sort of nervous laugh, even though I did not think it was funny.

The statement felt like a punch in gut. Or rather, like someone ran across the back of my knees with a curtain rod. I could have just crumbled to the floor. I’m learning to pay more attention to these cues—my body cues. Not to brush them off as “not a big deal” as I so often do, but to know that if my knees felt like crumbling when I hear words, there is probably a reason.

I stayed calm, knowing she didn’t know what she was saying. This is just one of those things we say—you know?—without thinking about it. Without considering how powerful our words are, how they are like a lifeline back to our thoughts, and our beliefs, which are slowly dictating our life, like a small rudder on a big boat.

But when I got home, I sat on the couch and gathered myself and took a few deep breaths and thought about why this whole thing felt so unsettling to me.

Why we fall for certain people

A few days before this I had been sitting with a friend, drinking wine on her couch, telling her how the men I’ve been drawn to in my life, for as different as they have been, have had some things in common. They are all powerful men—kind, loving, brilliant, creative men—who are also blocked in some way. They’re addicts with anger problems, or bored and self-pitying. Both trees come from these same root.

Blocked power.

What do you think this is about? I asked her.

She looked at me. She didn’t have to say anything. She just raised an eyebrow. Because what we both know to be true, but which is hard to admit at times, is that the people we’re attracted to in this world—the people we’re drawn to like magnets—are like mirrors to us, reflecting us back to ourselves. This is their great gift to us, part of the incredibly healing power of relationships.

When I look at the people I’m drawn to, I see myself.

Blocked power. That’s what I see when I look in the mirror. Wow.

What do you see when you look in the mirror?

Relationship like mirrors.

The minute we begin to see relationships as mirrors in our life—and not just our romantic relationship but our friendships, too—is one of the most humbling and also the most healing moments of our lives, because for the first time we can TURN ON THE LIGHTS to ourselves. It’s like coming home after camping and looking at yourself in the mirror for the first time in a week. You were so FREE out there in nature, and now you can see everything.

You look nothing like you thought you did.

But this is also where love begins. We cannot truly love ourselves until we begin to see ourselves clearly.

Love is all-inclusive. We cannot love if we only see partway. (Tweet that)

I have a friend who is always falling for women he claims are “too good” for him. Out of his league. That’s the phrase he uses. He complains that he is attracted to these women, asks them out, they agree, but eventually he realizes he has nothing to offer to them that they don’t already have by themselves, and he loses interest. He is, by the way, one of the most powerful and self-defeating people I know.

This is probably why I like him so much—he is my mirror.

I tried to explain to him that the fact he’s drawing these beautiful, successful, intelligent, competent women into his world is because they are a reflection of the qualities he already has inside of him. But it’s virtually impossible for him to see this. All he can see is how much “better” these women are than he is.

See, even with the good qualities in our relationships, it’s easy to get SO focused on the image we’re seeing in the mirror, trying to correct and change and fix and analyze, that we miss what the image was trying to show us int the first place—ourselves.

It’s hard to look in the mirror.

This idea—that relationships are mirrors—is a hard pill to swallow, especially if we have already swallowed the pill that we’re “always attracted to the wrong people.” It’s easier to think our problems are really about someone else—that if only we could find a new person or a new relationship, all those issues would fade into the distance.

It helps us avoid taking responsibility.

To ask for another relationship, or another job, is not particularly helpful if we’re going to show up in the new situation exactly as we showed up in the last one.

—Marianne Williamson

I’ll never forget being asked by a therapist, after a break-up, to make a list of the qualities in my former partner that I felt were the reasons for the relationship ending. I wrote down words like, “dishonest, angry, abusive.” And when I took the list back to my therapist, I told her I didn’t think the mirror principal was working in this case, because I didn’t identify with any of these qualities in my life.

This is always the great temptation, by the way—to think, “oh, this doesn’t apply to me.”

But assuming the mirror principal doesn’t apply to your situation is like taking an actual mirror back to Target and telling the woman at the counter, “This mirror doesn’t seem to be working the way I want it to. I don’t like the way I look in it. May I please get my money back?”

My therapist looked at me and said:

“What about dishonesty with yourself? What about all of your suppressed anger? What about your tendency toward self-abuse?” Blocked power.

Ouch. It’s so very hard to look in the mirror.




It is easy to get stuck on the image of the other person—what they’re doing or not doing, saying or not saying, how they’re acting or not acting the way you wish they were. This is like thinking the mirror is broken. Because we’re not getting the image we wish we were getting. But no, the mirror is not broken. It never has been. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do all along. It’s working just great.

Always falling for the “wrong” person? No way.

The people I attract into my life are my great healing. Love is my only way home.

I hate you, you’re ugly, you loser.

When I say love is the only way home, what I mean is the only way out of this mess we have found ourselves in—the pain we feel over relationships that don’t turn out the way we expect—is to learn to love what we are seeing in the mirror. To love the people who have disappointed us, betrayed us, hurt us, left us hanging—this is how we learn to love ourselves. To love the whole world. We soften around these disappointments, rather than hardening.

This is what love is and always has been trying to teach us.

Love is our true nature, so until we surrender to it, we won’t feel any peace in our hearts. Relationships that bring unrest into our lives are life’s great gift to us. They are showing us where we are failing to let love in.

This is part of why that comment about “always falling for the wrong men” felt so hard for me to stomach. Because when you really begin to break this down, an insult to any man I’ve loved is also an insult to myself. There was a time in my life when this would have felt perfectly normal to me—sitting around and talking crap about myself, or about someone I once loved, saying terrible things about either of them.

I hate you, you’re ugly, you loser.

But sitting around talking to my girlfriends about what an asshole he is, or standing in front of my mirror, picking at every little flaw, every little detail, grimacing and wishing it were all different—it’s like a scene from Mean Girls.

These days, as I’m growing in love, the whole thing feels less and less normal to me, and more and more like a small taste of hell here on earth. It’s all too easy.

It’s a terrible and brilliant distraction from love.

Love and letting go

What I don’t mean by all this talk about love being the only way home is that we should stay in relationships where abuse or violence or dishonesty or betrayal are present and even normal. In fact, sometimes the most loving thing we can do is to walk away from places where love seems blocked. Powerful, blocked people won’t realized they’re blocked until they stop getting what they want with their tactics of manipulation and control.

Sometimes it takes space for all of us to figure that out.

It takes allowing ourselves to feel lonely for awhile.

It takes surrendering what we think we want.

Sometimes it takes a season of darkness or confusion and an admission that we are not in control. Love thrives when we stop trying to pretend like we’re in control. Control tries to get what it wants. Love receives freely and gives freely of itself.

If love is the water, we’re the facet. Our whole job is to keep love flowing.

So if you are in a relationship where love is blocked, maybe it’s time to remove yourself from the situation for now. Maybe forever. Sometimes we have to create space and distance in a relationship so that love can have permission to flow again. Maybe someone you wish would come close has created space and distance from YOU. Perhaps the space is a good thing. Perhaps it is room for love to flow.

It’s time we get better at loving from a distance. At letting our love change form.

We get better at love as we get better at letting go.

The biggest problem.

I’m beginning to feel like our biggest problem with relationships is we are expecting them not to not hurt. So of course, when they hurt, we feel like we’re doing something wrong. We start to wonder why people are such jerks and idiots, or why we are such jerks and idiots, or why we are always trusting the “wrong people,” or why we can’t be more content being alone.

But I love what Richard Rohr says about relationships.

He says that, from a spiritual perspective, they are actually our great saving—quite literally what Christians would call SALVATION.

I would name salvation as simply the readiness, the capacity, and the willingness to stay in the relationship. As long as you show up with some degree of vulnerability, the Spirit can keep working. Self-sufficiency makes God experience impossible. Please trust me on that… Naked vulnerability means I’m going to let you influence me; I’m going to allow you to change me…we really were made for love. Outside of it we die very quickly.” —Richard Rohr

No wonder we’re so concerned with our relationships. What could possibly be more concerning?

The fact that you feel lonely when you are out of relationship with the people you love most makes perfect sense. The fact that the people you love the most have the greatest ability to hurt you is a testament to the great LOVE you feel for them.

It doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong.

It means you’re doing something RIGHT.

See if you can soften around those areas, rather than hardening. See if you can stay with yourself. See if you can let it hurt. When I can do that—when I can look in the mirror and instead of picking and plucking and turning up my nose I can just tilt my head a little and say, “you precious human… I’m so sorry I’ve tried to make you perfect. I am going to love you just the way you are.”

Then, like a sort of melting—a cracking of things—all the bitterness and anger toward these men I’ve loved, all of that begins to melt away.

Like looking in the mirror. I love myself.

What’s left is grief. Sadness, sure. Pain. YES. Holy crap, so much pain. But pain is part of what teaches us to have grace for ourselves. Because we are not invincible. We are not indestructible.

We are only human and love is all that is saving us.

Love will bring us all home.

Love is our greatest power.

When we embrace this truth of relationships as our mirrors, every interaction with a person we love becomes heartbreaking in the BEST way, because suddenly we begin to see ourselves so very clearly. When I’m furious with you for being critical with me, what is really happening? Chances are I’m furious with myself for being so critical of myself. Or I’m devastated at the way I’ve been silently, secretly critical of others and how this has destroyed my ability to connect.

I am so lonely, so lost inside my own criticism. Yes, that’s it. So now, instead of being critical of your criticism, I am WITH you, in it.

We are there together, so broken, so human, so hiding.

Marianne Williamson says that a change in perspective is literally where miracles are born. What could be more miraculous than loving our flawed, imperfect, broken, hurting selves? What could be more miraculous than learning to love those who have hurt us most? We think our greatest source of power is control. We want to muscle things into place. But LOVE is the opposite of control. Follow the current of Love, and there isn’t anything that is impossible.

Love is the greatest, most powerful force in the world.

Love is our only way home.

Extra Resources:

Learning to love does not mean suppressing or denying anger. I love this great book by Chipp Dodd called Voice of the Heart that talks about the importance of allowing yourself to feel anger, as well as the other essential emotions.
Do you feel like you are constantly attracting jerks and bullies into your life? Before you get too hard on yourself, read this great perspective on why this happens from Danielle Laporte.
If you are in an abusive relationship, please don’t allow the “mirror principal” to be the reason you stay. Read this post I wrote about why people stay in abusive relationships.
For an even more scientific perspective on why we stay in abusive relationships, read this book called How to Avoid Falling in Love with A Jerk (no joke, that’s the name of the book and it’s well-researched and worth the read).
If you haven’t already, you have to read A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson. This book has helped me to find peace, even in the midst of painful or tumultuous relationships.

The post Why You’re Always Falling in Love With the Wrong Person appeared first on Allison Fallon.

Are You Always Falling for The Wrong Person?

I wish I would have been sitting down when she said it. I wasn’t. I was standing in the doorway of a coffee shop, saying goodbye with keys in my hand—so ready to leave—and that was before she even opened her mouth.

“You and me,” she said, “always falling for the wrong men.”

I laughed—a sort of nervous laugh, even though I did not think it was funny.

The statement felt like a punch in gut. Or rather, like someone ran across the back of my knees with a curtain rod. I could have just crumbled to the floor. I’m learning to pay more attention to these cues—my body cues. Not to brush them off as “not a big deal” as I so often do, but to know that if my knees felt like crumbling when I hear words, there is probably a reason.

I stayed calm, knowing she didn’t know what she was saying. This is just one of those things we say—you know?—without thinking about it. Without considering how powerful our words are, how they are like a lifeline back to our thoughts, and our beliefs, which are slowly dictating our life, like a small rudder on a big boat.

But when I got home, I sat on the couch and gathered myself and took a few deep breaths and thought about why this whole thing felt so unsettling to me.

Why we fall for certain people

A few days before this I had been sitting with a friend, drinking wine on her couch, telling her how the men I’ve been drawn to in my life, for as different as they have been, have had some things in common. They are all powerful men—kind, loving, brilliant, creative men—who are also blocked in some way. They’re addicts with anger problems, or bored and self-pitying. Both trees come from these same root.

Blocked power.

What do you think this is about? I asked her.

She looked at me. She didn’t have to say anything. She just raised an eyebrow. Because what we both know to be true, but which is hard to admit at times, is that the people we’re attracted to in this world—the people we’re drawn to like magnets—are like mirrors to us, reflecting us back to ourselves. This is their great gift to us, part of the incredibly healing power of relationships.

When I look at the people I’m attracted to, I see myself.

Blocked power. That’s what I see when I look in the mirror. Wow.

What do you see when you look in the mirror?

Relationship like mirrors.

The minute we begin to see relationships as mirrors in our life is one of the most humbling and also the most healing moments of our lives, because for the first time we can TURN ON THE LIGHTS to ourselves. It’s painful to see ourselves clearly—all our flaws and faults. It’s like coming home after camping and looking at yourself in the mirror for the first time in a week. You were so FREE out there in nature, and now you can see everything.

You look nothing like you thought you did.

But this is also where love begins. We cannot truly love ourselves until we begin to see ourselves clearly.

Love is all-inclusive. We cannot love if we only see partway. (Tweet that)

I have a friend who is always falling for women he claims are “too good” for him. Out of his league. That’s the phrase he uses. He complains that he is attracted to these women, asks them out, they agree, but eventually he realizes he has nothing to offer to them that they don’t already have by themselves, and he loses interest. He is, by the way, one of the most powerful and self-defeating people I know.

This is probably why I like him so much—he is my mirror.

I tried to explain to him that the fact he’s drawing these beautiful, successful, intelligent, competent women into his world is because they are a reflection of the qualities he already has inside of him. But it’s virtually impossible for him to see this. All he can see is how much “better” these women are than he is.

See, even with the good qualities in our relationships, it’s easy to get SO focused on the image we’re seeing in the mirror, trying to correct and change and fix and analyze, that we miss what the image was trying to show us int the first place—ourselves.

It’s hard to look in the mirror.

This idea—that relationships are mirrors—is a hard pill to swallow, especially if we have already swallowed the pill that we’re “always attracted to the wrong people.” It’s easier to think our problems are really about someone else—that if only we could find a new person or a new relationship, all those issues would fade into the distance.

It helps us avoid taking responsibility.

To ask for another relationship, or another job, is not particularly helpful if we’re going to show up in the new situation exactly as we showed up in the last one.

—Marianne Williamson

I’ll never forget being asked by a therapist, after a break-up, to make a list of the qualities in my former partner that I felt were the reasons for the relationship ending. I wrote down words like, “dishonest, angry, abusive.” And when I took the list back to my therapist, I told her I didn’t think the mirror principal was working in this case, because I didn’t identify with any of these qualities in my life.

This is always the great temptation, by the way—to think, “oh, this doesn’t apply to me.”

But assuming the mirror principal doesn’t apply to your situation is like taking an actual mirror back to Target and telling the woman at the counter, “This mirror doesn’t seem to be working the way I want it to. I don’t like the way I look in it. May I please get my money back?”

My therapist looked at me and said:

“What about dishonesty with yourself? What about all of your suppressed anger? What about your tendency toward self-abuse?” Blocked power.

Ouch. It’s so very hard to look in the mirror.




It is easy to get stuck on the image of the other person—what they’re doing or not doing, saying or not saying, how they’re acting or not acting the way you wish they were. This is like thinking the mirror is broken. Because we’re not getting the image we wish we were getting. But no, the mirror is not broken. It never has been. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do all along. It’s working just great.

Always falling for the “wrong” person? No way.

The people I attract into my life are my great healing. Love is my only way home.

I hate you, you’re ugly, you loser.

When I say love is the only way home, what I mean is the only way out of this mess we have found ourselves in—the pain we feel over relationships that don’t turn out the way we expect—is to learn to love what we are seeing in the mirror. To love the people who have disappointed us, betrayed us, hurt us, left us hanging—this is how we learn to love ourselves. To love the whole world. We soften around these disappointments, rather than hardening.

This is what love is and always has been trying to teach us.

Love is our true nature, so until we surrender to it, we won’t feel any peace in our hearts. Relationships that bring unrest into our lives are life’s great gift to us. They are showing us where we are failing to let love in.

This is part of why that comment about “always falling for the wrong men” felt so hard for me to stomach. Because when you really begin to break this down, an insult to any man I’ve loved is also an insult to myself. There was a time in my life when this would have felt perfectly normal to me—sitting around and talking crap about myself, or about someone I once loved, saying terrible things about either of them.

I hate you, you’re ugly, you loser.

But sitting around talking to my girlfriends about what an asshole he is, or standing in front of my mirror, picking at every little flaw, every little detail, grimacing and wishing it were all different—it’s like a scene from Mean Girls.

These days, as I’m growing in love, the whole thing feels less and less normal to me, and more and more like a small taste of hell here on earth. It’s all too easy.

It’s a terrible and brilliant distraction from love.

Love and letting go

What I don’t mean by all this talk about love being the only way home is that we should stay in relationships where abuse or violence or dishonesty or betrayal are present and even normal. In fact, sometimes the most loving thing we can do is to walk away from places where love seems blocked. Powerful, blocked people won’t realized they’re blocked until they stop getting what they want with their tactics of manipulation and control.

Sometimes it takes space for all of us to figure that out.

It takes allowing ourselves to feel lonely for awhile.

It takes surrendering what we think we want.

Sometimes it takes a season of darkness or confusion and an admission that we are not in control. Love thrives when we stop trying to pretend like we’re in control. Control tries to get what it wants. Love receives freely and gives freely of itself.

If love is the water, we’re the facet. Our whole job is to keep love flowing.

So if you are in a relationship where love is blocked, maybe it’s time to remove yourself from the situation for now. Maybe forever. Sometimes we have to create space and distance in a relationship so that love can have permission to flow again. Maybe someone you wish would come close has created space and distance from YOU. Perhaps the space is a good thing. Perhaps it is room for love to flow.

It’s time we get better at loving from a distance. At letting our love change form.

We get better at love as we get better at letting go.

The biggest problem.

I’m beginning to feel like our biggest problem with relationships is we are expecting them not to not hurt. So of course, when they hurt, we feel like we’re doing something wrong. We start to wonder why people are such jerks and idiots, or why we are such jerks and idiots, or why we are always trusting the “wrong people,” or why we can’t be more content being alone.

But I love what Richard Rohr says about relationships.

He says that, from a spiritual perspective, they are actually our great saving—quite literally what Christians would call SALVATION.

I would name salvation as simply the readiness, the capacity, and the willingness to stay in the relationship. As long as you show up with some degree of vulnerability, the Spirit can keep working. Self-sufficiency makes God experience impossible. Please trust me on that… Naked vulnerability means I’m going to let you influence me; I’m going to allow you to change me…we really were made for love. Outside of it we die very quickly.” —Richard Rohr

No wonder we’re so concerned with our relationships. What could possibly be more concerning?

The fact that you feel lonely when you are out of relationship with the people you love most makes perfect sense. The fact that the people you love the most have the greatest ability to hurt you is a testament to the great LOVE you feel for them.

It doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong.

It means you’re doing something RIGHT.

See if you can soften around those areas, rather than hardening. See if you can stay with yourself. See if you can let it hurt. When I can do that—when I can look in the mirror and instead of picking and plucking and turning up my nose I can just tilt my head a little and say, “you precious human… I’m so sorry I’ve tried to make you perfect. I am going to love you just the way you are.”

Then, like a sort of melting—a cracking of things—all the bitterness and anger toward these men I’ve loved, all of that begins to melt away.

Like looking in the mirror. I love myself.

What’s left is grief. Sadness, sure. Pain. YES. Holy crap, so much pain. But pain is part of what teaches us to have grace for ourselves. Because we are not invincible. We are not indestructible.

We are only human and love is all that is saving us.

Love will bring us all home.

Love is our greatest power.

When we embrace this truth of relationships as our mirrors, every interaction with a person we love becomes heartbreaking in the BEST way, because suddenly we begin to see ourselves so very clearly. When I’m furious with you for being critical with me, what is really happening? Chances are I’m furious with myself for being so critical of myself. Or I’m devastated at the way I’ve been silently, secretly critical of others and how this has destroyed my ability to connect.

I am so lonely, so lost inside my own criticism. Yes, that’s it. So now, instead of being critical of your criticism, I am WITH you, in it.

We are there together, so broken, so human, so hiding.

Marianne Williamson says that a change in perspective is literally where miracles are born. What could be more miraculous than loving our flawed, imperfect, broken, hurting selves? What could be more miraculous than learning to love those who have hurt us most? We think our greatest source of power is control. We want to muscle things into place. But LOVE is the opposite of control. Follow the current of Love, and there isn’t anything that is impossible.

Love is the greatest, most powerful force in the world.

Love is our only way home.

Extra Resources:

Learning to love does not mean suppressing or denying anger. I love this great book by Chipp Dodd called Voice of the Heart that talks about the importance of allowing yourself to feel anger, as well as the other essential emotions.
Do you feel like you are constantly attracting jerks and bullies into your life? Before you get too hard on yourself, read this great perspective on why this happens from Danielle Laporte.
If you are in an abusive relationship, please don’t allow the “mirror principal” to be the reason you stay. Read this post I wrote about why people stay in abusive relationships.
For an even more scientific perspective on why we stay in abusive relationships, read this book called How to Avoid Falling in Love with A Jerk (no joke, that’s the name of the book and it’s well-researched and worth the read).
If you haven’t already, you have to read A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson. This book has helped me to find peace, even in the midst of painful or tumultuous relationships.

The post Are You Always Falling for The Wrong Person? appeared first on Allison Fallon.

A Different Kind of Attention (a Poem)

Every Thursday I share a poem with you that I love, or one I’ve written. This is one I wrote for a friend recently who mentioned he felt like a failure. It’s called A Different Kind of Attention. I hope you enjoy.

A Different Kind of Attention

When you wake up one morning and

everything you have ever loved

has left you.

When there are sirens shrieking

outside and no one lying

next to you

to say goodnight.

When all you can do is spin and swirl

another glass of whiskey,

or wine. When the

light on your phone

is yet another message

from home—

what have you

done wrong

this time?

Then.

Pay a different kind of attention.

Still your heart.

Calm your mind.

Take one deep breath in

and then out, and then in

again.

Do that

five hundred

times.

Until all you hear

is…

Come alive, my love

to what is infinite

within you, to

what you saw that night

when you held my hand

and looked into my eyes.

That light

shining back to you

from your dark past, from

your bright future.

Do you remember?

It is not that

you can achieve world peace or

make everyone happy

or even

bring your love back

home.

You can’t. We can

both stop

trying

so hard

but somewhere, there

is a bright light

to bend this dim path.

Somewhere.

Not far. Not out there

in the distance, but

close. So close.

I saw it in you.

I held your chin.

I wiped your eyes.

I told you

to look up.

Unearth that treasure,

my love. Unbind it.

Unfurl it.

What a precious,

hidden and beautiful

gift

you have been hiding all this time.

The post A Different Kind of Attention (a Poem) appeared first on Allison Fallon.