More than a year ago I wrote an article on writing out conversations between myself and the wiser part of me – “Conversations Between Me and U.” The tool of having dialogues with myself has been so useful, and in such surprising ways, that I want to tell you how it’s evolved.
While exploring Lora Sasiela’s Financially Smitten website, I found her “Money Dialogue Exercise” (which she adapted from Olivia Mellan’s Money Harmony). Sasiela suggests:
“Start by imagining that your Money is a person with whom you are having a relationship. Imagine having a conversation with your Money about how the relationship is going.”
I tried it and discovered that My Money has the voice of a swank benevolent dictator with a B.S. meter fine-tuned at the atomic level. After only one extremely intense, handwritten dialogue with My Money, everything – and I really mean everything – shifted for me. Since then: growth spurts on multiple fronts, including financial.
Next, I started the Unravelling e-course offered by Susannah Conway and, one day, while checking out the books she recommends on her website, I found The New Diary, by Tristine Rainer (a pal of Anaïs Nin’s). How have I never come across this book before? It was published in 1978 and is chock-full of journaling ideas that shift the Earth on its axis.
One of the “Seven Special Techniques” Rainer covers is dialogue. Does your leg hurt? Write out a conversation with it and find out what’s going on. Have you been wondering where your sexuality has gone? Find out, simply by daring to invite it into a dialogue. Converse with friends and family members in your journal, or chat with your garden or with your aching heart. My most recent conversation was between me and My Gifts, and produced a wonderful shocker of a result. The possibilities are endless.
Rather than promoting an unhealthy splitting of internal aspects of ourselves, Rainier says these dialogues divide the self in order to “bring it together again in greater harmony.” And that’s been exactly my experience. The more I experiment with this technique, the more sharply and quickly my world comes into focus (with lights flashing to clearly mark my now-obvious path forward) and the more I feel both like myself and wise beyond myself.
Related reading: Hidden Lives Revealed, Revise the Story
Flickr photo: The Softest Light, by chaps1
5 Comments
Dear Grace:
Thanks, as always for the wonderful references. I really enjoy the approach that Lora Sasiela uses for her Financially Smitten website. What a wonderful way to approach the relationship with money!
I have worked with money and studied about money and this is the first person that I have seen use such a refreshing and fun perspective. Such a lovely gift. Thank you.
Continued good luck with your journey!
Some time ago, I decided to make friends with my inner selves, rather than trying to integrate them and subsum them into one whole. It’s working quite wonderfully! My Inner Seamstress, my Inner Children/Inner Teen, my Inner Gardener, my Inner CPA, and the newest “member” of the club: The Gatekeeper who stands guard that trespassers do not enter, and no one climbs into my boat. Each idea/comment offered is answered with “thank you”, and I’ve found as I acknowledge those selves, I feel, perhaps perversely, more integrated. Certainly more helped, don’t feel as if I’m in this alone, LOL! But hadn’t thought of writing out conversations with them. I must do this! And check out the sites as well. Thanks Grace!
I so love this, Grace! I talk to everything: my menstrual cramps, my hungers and fears, my grouchiness, my inspirations… Believing that EVERYthing has wisdom — or at least insights — to share adds so much dimension and texture to all of life. I especially like the voice of trees, bodies of water, night skies, and wild animals.
But money?
What a floodgate you/Lora/Olivia have just opened for me! THANK YOU, dam-opener
P.S. Several months ago, I allowed myself to talk directly to creative projects that want to be birthed. Some interesting dialogue prompts surfaced:
http://lifeblazing.com/2009/10/22/how-to-remove-creative-blocks-by-talking-directly-to-the-thing-youre-creating/
Grace, thanks so much for mentioning my site and I loved reading about your experience with the Money Dialogue. It’s a very powerful exercise.
And Dorothy, thanks for the wonderful feedback on the site!
Hey, Erika! I’m glad to find out that you’re an old hand at talking to things and gaining from it. It’s a wonderful new world.
You talking about the voices of natural things makes me remember a great tip from someone (I don’t remember who), who suggests that, when troubled, go out and find a tree and really have a conversation with it. Trees know things. They’re accustomed to and accomplished at being both very stable (rooted) and very flexible (in blowing in the wind). Who says all our friends have to be our own species? We let dogs and cats and hampsters capture and hold our hearts. Why not also trees and moss and the night sky? Actually, now that I think of it, I do have a pretty important relationship with beach finds — pebbles and rocks and rusty metal pieces.
Sigh. Great stuff, Erika and all of you. Thanks for your thoughts here.