Most of this year has been spent musing in various ways about my trajectory and what I’d like it to be. The new website is one of the results — and a way to offer encouragment about living a life that matters on a deep level.

I hope to see you there. I’ve missed you.

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

What’s it like to wear a bespoke suit, a suit custom-made to fit me and only me? I want a life like that. I want a plan, a pattern, a path that takes into consideration all the weird, unruly, shocking, steadfast little and big things that combine to shape me. But how?

“The word bespoke itself is derived from the verb to bespeak, to ‘speak for something,’ in the specialized meaning ‘to give order for it to be made.’”
~ Wikipedia entry for Bespoke

What plan speaks for me? Cookie-cutter solutions need not apply. If I can’t make it fit me, if I can’t make it mine, all mine, then forget it. I’ve scoured office supply stores, art supply stores, read books and websites by goal gurus and earnest cheerleaders of every stripe and found only an elite few who make the cut, including these two…

For the past two weeks I’ve been pulling together a strategic planner for 2010, guided by what artist and business school graduate (a combination that thrills me) Lisa Sonora Beam does for herself every year. Although I’m still creating my plan, the power inherent in the thoroughly self-customized system has already taken me so far further along my way than I’d imagined possible that I’m almost scared to continue. The zoom is palpable. For more about this intensely customizable system, see Lisa Sonora Beam’s “Goal Setting for Creatives: My 2010 Strategic Planner.”

One of the zoomy surprises to burst forth from my 2010 Strategic Planner process is that a friend offered to sponsor my fees for an e-course that seems perfectly designed to help me further custom-make my life: Susannah Conway’s Unravelling: Ways of Seeing My Self, which combines photography, journaling, comrades, Susannah’s strong heart, and the promise of deep self-connection.

The primary goal of both systems is to put me in touch with myself in a way that encourages invention, supports forgiveness and acceptance, and fills the silence with my voice, even if I choose to be quiet. What could be more fittingly comfortable than that?

Related reading: Book | The Creative Entrepreneur, by Lisa Sonora Beam

Flickr photo: (untitled), by bird_flew

It’s easy to fall into step behind someone else’s vision of success.

The lifting strut of the popular mayor as he chats his way through his kingdom. The long line-up in front of the restaurant where the five-star chef concocts her masterpieces. The buzz. The fame. The crowds. The face on the billboard.

If I’m honest with myself, if I close my eyes and focus on my own vision of success, I see something so different I have to stretch my arms out into empty space to claim it.

I’m not the big-name singer at the front of the stage, belting it out to the waving hands. Or the production company or the agent or even the top-of-the-line guitar. I’m the photograph snapped in the moment a man in the crowd stumbled and a woman passing by dropped her drink to help him. I’m that photo, stared at all night, held in the hands of the woman, 65 years later, the day after the man from the crowd, her husband, died.

I’m not the candy shop or the movie theatre or the big, new mall. I’m the nice lady sitting on a cushion in front of a low table in her overgrown backyard, cutting pictures out of magazines. I’m what a rejected kid from down the street sees as he clears the thicket of bushes at the back of the lot, sits down next to me, and tells me all about it. I lean into his skinny shoulder with my own and hand him a pair of scissors, a magazine, and a chocolate truffle. Or I show him the big wooden box that holds my postcard collection. Mainly, I sit beside him. We sit together. We listen to the birds. That’s all. That’s enough.

I’m not the great, millennial concept that saves humanity from self-destruction. I’m the indentation in an otherwise smooth surface, the dent that fits the pivot point as one person swivels to a new perspective.

I’m a time-release friend. I’m a resting place. I’m the deviance that allows the pivot. Where in the world can I go with these visions of success? I don’t yet know. I only know that I’ll never find out if I start with someone else’s idea of glory.

When you close your eyes, what visions of success do you see?

Related reading: Pep Talk | Grope, Joy Detective, Curious Curators

Flickr photo: Yellow leaved boy, by lepiaf.geo

While doing online research for upcoming posts in my 5 Senses series, I came across The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences (TASTE).

Created by Charles T. Tart, one of the founders of Transpersonal Psychology, TASTE provides sceintists with a way to give voice to their unusual experiences with the transcendent in a way that preserves their anonymity, if they desire, and collects the data for research purposes.

I’ve always loved the combination of science and art and the places where they find common ground. TASTE seems like such a place. Browsing through its archives relaxes me and makes me think there’s hope for the world, for finding ways to bridge the perceived gaps between science and spirit.

For another hit of science-meets-spirit, and if you’re up for a wild intellectual ride, see Gary Zukov’s book The Dancing Wu Li Masters.

Flickr photo: Spock/Monroe, by laverrue

Related reading: Charles T. Tart’s blog, 5 Senses | Sound | Julian Treasure

My copy of Warren Berger’s book bristles with Post-It Notes. Its full title is Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, Your Business, and Maybe Even the World and it features the visionary ideas of Bruce Mau, along with other designers and thinkers on the topic. I’m forcing myself to stop at page 50 and recommend it to you right now. It’s important.

I have a new theory: highly sensitive people (HSPs) are perfectly suited for being designers. I’m so convinced that we’re extremely valuable precisely because of our various traits, and this book supports that idea in many different ways.

The innate curiosity, complex thinking abilities, and long-viewing we’re capable of as HSPs puts us within sight of visions that are out there, but that might actually work.

What if we saw ourselves as capable and effective at designing the world we want to live in? What if we start with the assumption that we’re built to press our faces up against the outer edge of the envelope and look beyond, to reach out and grasp what didn’t exist until we thought to touch it?

By relying on “abductive reasoning,” or the ability to think about and picture what might be, designers can glimpse possibilities that lie on the other side of the fence.
~ Warren Berger, Glimmer

Designers “live in an expansive world where they believe the only thing limiting us is the stuff we haven’t figured out yet. And they’re excited about it. You’ll hear them say things like, ‘I’m working on this really cool problem that has no answer!’ That’s what they live for.”
~ Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, as quoted in Glimmer

We need you. We need you. We need you. Your valuable ideas, your whacky imaginings, your unpolished, half-formed, rough, barely describable flights of fancy contain miracles with the leverage to change the trajectory of the planet.

What we’ve found is, if someone has an enthusiasm or curiosity about many different disciplines, then they can be more flexible, more empathetic, and more engaged with the world.
~ Tim Brown, IDEO’s Chief Executive, as quoted in Glimmer

Find some way to pursue what intrigues you. Never mind if no one else is intrigued. That’s the point. Be first. Be brave. Be so curious you drench yourself in questions and come out cleansed, a gift cradled in your hands.

Feeling lost on a project can be the first step toward finding an original solution.
~ Warren Berger, Glimmer

Related reading: Bruce Mau Design’s Manifesto for Growth, Creativity Prompts Compendium

We think we can’t see. We think we are blind. We think we are looking at something tiny and limiting and there’s nothing there.

But the world is chock full of tricks. The eye, the mind, the spirit, expand and contract depending on how we look and where we look and what we want to see.

Before you dash off to another place, thinking you’ve got it wrong yet again, stay where you are for a moment more. Inhale the dim light of this place. You had your reasons. You followed a trail to right here. Now, even from the tight space in which you find yourself, focus into the distance.

You will find open doors. Shadows will lift. Perspective will grab you and pull you, intact and filling fast, through the keyhole. Into a world big enough for the new you.

* * *

Flickr photo: Look!, by AnnaKika

Related reading: Pep Talk | Zero In, Looking Up

Dolly Hopkins, Creative Architect, started a great series on her site called “Woman of the Week.” I’m grateful and honoured to have been asked to participate.

Reading about the women she’s put the spotlight on makes me feel doubly honoured — they’re a varied bunch who take lots of different approaches to creativity and get up to some whacky things.

Dolly also has a Man of the Month series.

For more about Dolly, see Successfully Sensitive | Dolly Hopkins.

Thanks, Dolly!

Photo from Dolly’s website.

Over the past months I’ve come across several immensely helpful free broadcast services that offer healing wisdom via phone and Internet:

Healing With the Masters – Teleseminar intensives with a hot line-up of speakers, presented by Jennifer McLean. I recently listened to this series’ interview of Alison Armstrong – nationally known teacher and expert on understanding men – and my life with my husband has already veered alarmingly into positive new dimensions. Once you sign up, you get access to the live broadcasts and to recordings, which are available for 48 hours after the original broadcast.

World Puja Network – “The global leader in empowerment radio.” Their archives astound and there’s always more coming. This is a membership site. You must sign up to explore and listen, but membership is free.

Jo Dunning – Jo created and delivers broadcasts for her Abundance Project, which provides wisdom and energy work, including clearing, on the topic of allowing abundance. She’s extremely knowledgeable and up-to-date regarding the places where science meets the esoteric and spiritual. Her voice soothes and she’s fascinating to listen to. (Don’t judge her by her somewhat cheesy YouTube video.) She does a couple of monthly broadcasts via The World Puja Network, but she also does her own broadcasts, which are only available live (they’re not recorded) and are accessible by signing up, for free, via her website.

If you crave a dimly lit room and a closed door, you can still move mountains as you listen and grow.

Flickr photo: Old Bakelit phone, by aussiegal

Related reading: Successfully Sensitive | Saskia Röell, Quantum Physics and the Art of Manifestation

Instances of glory. Weather. Lists of insects sighted. A history of card games. Meals loved. Strong feelings. Sketches of faces. Trials and errors. Books read. The current crush as it comes and goes. Music played and heard. Patterns. Poems. Personalities.

If you’re tuned in to it, if you love and want to possess it, if you care to mark the progressions and changes, it’s fair game. Define your journal solely by your own needs and let yourself be pulled into a game of tracking that yields insights over time, that plays with you as you play.

Make marks. Claim your desire. Invite a response.

Flickr photo: The Journal Canteen…, by surrealiste

Related reading: Curious Curators, The Creative Entrepreneur