I sat in a women’s Reflection Circle last night led by the insightful Paige Appel of Riverbank in conjunction with the SAINT Collective and was able to pay forward what was so poignantly said to me the week prior by a wise woman when I was in a big, dark feelings place.
“No mud, no Lotus.”
While what this means is acutely obvious, the idea of sitting in thick wet dirt while waiting to become a pink, succulent, splendid flower can be a disconnect when you are deep in the spin out of your own private life chaos.
When she said it to me, I passed it off at first as one of those statements you say to a woman who can’t see through the clouds on the horizon, but when I stated it to the women in this circle, it was the favorite takeaway for the night. In fact, we are now dubbed “Lotuses,” a term I will take to heart.
Let me add on to this proverb. How do we end up in the mud in the first place? Well, there are a variety of reasons, but I find left to my own personal choice of how I want to live my life, I am on the regular in my “lotus-ness” but then another less aligned person decides to put their unrealized shit onto my sunshine. Thus, the neutrality of my life is affected (because I allowed it to be.) This very concept was illuminated by our brilliant facilitator Paige.
“Everything we do is neutral until someone puts a perspective on it…” What??!! Oh crap. And how many times do we do that to our own kids, friends, lovers, co-workers? For example. We are not sad, and we are moving on, but someone says “Oh you must be very sad…” Then we think, should we still be sad? And then the guilt creeps in when we are in fact pretty damn happy, but now we are feeling like maybe we are stuffing feelings and the self-analysis creeps in. Gone is the day of wonder and curiosity filled with eating home baked cookies and sun bathing in a tiny bikini, and we are back to when we would sob in our car. For fuck’s sake! Why do people want to put their shit on our feelings instead of asking, “How do you feel?” Or listen to what people say.
So if someone says they are happy, well fuck all, accept it. Don’t dig to change the perspective. It’s their job to tell you otherwise. And stop trying to prove they are not happy.
I say this a lot but we have limited time on this earth. Really short. People are gone in the blink of an eye. People take their own lives because they are done. If you are not done, then be here. Be in it. Focus on yourself. Stop trying to tell people who or what they are. Let them tell you. And if they don’t, then they can drink their martinis and talk about their accolades until they are blue in the face, but that’s their problem.
We want outcomes, but in order to have the biggest juiciest surprises in life, we need to surrender to what that would look like. Surrender our outcomes? I have been practicing this art for the last ten years since I got sober and it is a continual work in progress. Seems antithetical in a world of accomplishment, and being uber positive all the time. How can we be positive if we are surrendering and we don’t know? But why should we be negative? How about we be neutral until we know, and then we can decide how we feel? In a world where everything needs to be decided so we can keep on our mask and protect ourselves, suggesting we wander around in a place of unknown sounds like we just jumped into a bed of poisonous snakes. I assure you, trying to know everything and projecting on to people is human poison in its own right.
Before I went to the Reflection Circle, earlier in the day, I was lobbing emails out to potential clients doing my due diligence in the world of coaching and sales but it felt wrong. I didn’t feel aligned with the outreach. Yet the masculine left brain was forcing me to “do what was right and what was responsible” instead of trusting my intuition to take a walk in the park and re-align to my faith. If I walked away and chose to not inquire of these people’s intentions of working with me, was I a slacker? A hapless dreamer? Leaning too much into the woo? Putting my financial life (and of course rabbit hole - the lives of my children) - in peril? For ONE WALK AROUND THE PARK? I finally said screw this, and closed my lap top. I found such peace talking to my friend as I moved my body around the path adorned with flowers and abundant with hummingbirds.
My neutrality had been affected by the perspective of a lifetime of cause and effect, and I had stopped listening to what felt good for me.
It won’t surprise you that all the people I contacted rejected me in some way. Either “I wasn’t the right book coach,” or “They went with a different coach.” My book clients, all of them, never came from this space. I never outreached to them in a sales mode. They all found me through an organic conversation, message and shared desire to create together. I would be bold if I said I could tell the people who are not aligned with me from the first five minutes of our interaction, but in the neutrality I DO know. But then I think I can change them, or alter the course of time or save myself financially on any given Tuesday. So I let their rejections roll off me, and I stayed in the place that they were allowed to feel how they did, and have their perspective, and I could have mine.
When I write this column, I get to feel into my experiences, but I hopefully get to inspire you to do some writing too.
How to work with me:
I will be facilitating a local Los Angeles writing event - Rewriting Your Narrative - through the SAINT Collective at RiverBank on September 9th from 4-6. Go to https://www.thesaintcollective.com/workshops/p/september-9-rewriting-your-narrative-led-by-kim-ohara to enroll!
Limited to only 15 women! You can also email the founder at hello@thesaintcollective.com.
I will be hosting Writing The Book That Demands Your Attention through the International Coaching Federation on Zoom on September 13th at 11AM PST. Sign up here. https://www.icfla.org/event/book-writing-sig-september-2023/