Dig deep.
Sit still.
Root Down.
Open. Accept. Surrender.
Discover Grace.
It is from this space
that everything flows.
i am rooted, but i flow
Dig deep.
Marie Forleo’s B-School: Confessions of A Complete Half-Asser
If you spin in certain online circles right now, you’ve heard plenty about B-School. If your particular orbit has not put you in the path of the bright star that is Marie Forleo, and her fantabulastic B-School program, hold tight for a minute. I’m gonna tell you all about it.
But first I must confess. I am a particularly hard-core half asser. I am notorious for not quite going the whole way. It’s a personality quirk, a personal flaw, and a frustrating habit. A lackadaisical attitude is great for keeping things relatively chill – not so for getting things done (ask the mountain of laundry that has been on my living room couch for a week. I started folding it. I swear). It’s also not that helpful when you run your own business.
To those who know me it will come as no surprise that, although I signed up for B-School last year with a whole lot of enthusiasm and determination, in the end I half-assed it. There are both good reasons and pathetic excuses, but I have to admit with complete honesty; I did not complete the program.
But I still believe in it. And not just a half-assed belief either. All the way. That’s right. And yes, I’m going to tell you why.
Because the content is killer.
By the very first exercise in the very first module I could tell that this was no poorly conceived e-course (and I’ve taken some poorly conceived e-courses). Marie Forleo is no half-asser. When an exercise on finding your ideal client makes you cry in a coffee shop – you know you’re going deep and getting true with what you really want to create in the world. It’s beautifully designed, well-delivered and created for maximum impact. It’s not dusty textbooks and professors who learned business in another age – this is the stuff you need to know to up-level your game in this world, right now.
Because once you’re in, you are in for life.
For a half-assed among us, this is brilliant. It means that I can take B-school again. Over and over, each and every year. It means that when I decided to stop playing small and making excuses for myself, B-school was ready and waiting for me to dive in. It means I can always take advantage of the new content and new resources. It means I get the benefit of networking with a whole new class of enrollees every year. It means I can up my game, over and over again.
Because the community is truly unparalleled.
Truth: I’d pay the entire enrollment fee again, just for the community. I am not exaggerating. So many B-school graduates come back every year. Mega successful entrepreneurs with book deals and speaking gigs and bazillions of hits per day. Women who have gone through the program with spectacular results, and who come back for more, and to mentor those who are still working their way up the ladder. In the B-School community there is not a question that does not have an answer – and the spirit of that energy and support is infectious.
Because I saw results
Even with my lackluster efforts. Even though I barely dipped a toe in the resources and exercises and knowledge base available to me as a B-School enrollee. Despite my lack of commitment and follow through. I am still a very tiny molehill in the company of some very big mountains, this is true. But because of the B-School lessons I did implement and the momentum I’ve gained through the content and the community, I actually began to see big changes around here.
Since June 2012 – when B-School began:
- My blog readership and facebook likes have climbed by 260%.
- My email list has grown by 682%.
- I have a regular column on the incredible Rebelle Society, where my second post alone has been shared over 5000 times and the average monthly unique views approaches 100,000.
- My work has been published in the August issue of Cosmo Magazine, the latest issue of Amulet and in the upcoming March issue of Emma Magazine. I have begun working with private writing clients helping them tell their stories and find their voice. I have an incredible project in production with the most amazing co-collaborator. I am also in the initial phases of creating a course based on Go Now, And Live. I am creating packages and planning a travel schedule that will take me around the US, and abroad helping women show their true faces and voices to the world.
- I’ve added new products and, just last week, a whole range of colors to my Go Now and Live Fine Art Prints. The words are licensed in the UK for production by a graphic company. Sales from this site continue to build each and every month.
- The game has changed, entirely.
Because I believe in my art, in my creative purpose, in my words and in my images.
Because I know I am here to do this. Because before B-school I was flailing and lost and confused. Because now I not only know I CAN do this, I have the resources and tools to teach me HOW to do it, and do it well. Because I used to shy away from the hustle, from the work required to make a living with art. Because Marie, and the B-school community have shown me what beautiful thing that hustle can be when it’s embraced with soul and purpose and an open heart. Because I don’t want to support my family by working in a cubical – and because I know I don’t have to.
I have never felt moved to become an affiliate for anything before. Not a single product or course or promotion. I have never believed in a program enough to attach my name and my own reputation to it. I believe in B-school. With all my heart, all my creative spirit and every last ounce of my inborn hustle (and 100% of my ass).
And so, my pretties, I have a bonus for you. If you register for B-School through the {peace.love.free} link you will receive:
- 3 hours of one-on-one mentorship or coaching. Want to work on finding your voice? Giving birth to the poet within? Tightening up your writing style? Bringing your truth into the world? Starting your own blog? Improving your photography? Working with natural light? Finally mastering Lightroom to streamline your photography editing? Your call, your choice. Just me and you, nothing held back. I promise I’ll even fold my laundry ahead of time. (Value: $150/hour = $450)
- 12×12 Go Now and Live Fine Art Print + One Package of Notecards: Choose your favorite color, I’ll print it with love, sign the back and send it your way to grace your home with the wild, crazy and free spirit that lives at the heart of the print. (Value: $70)
- A reserved spot in the upcoming ‘Go Now and Live’ Course (anticipated release date: June 2013). A bold, colorful, dynamic dive deep into the heart of you, with weekly modules, a vibrant community and a creative spirit aimed and helping you find your voice and your inner badass and all that is beautifully and authentically you. (Value: Priceless)
Note: You must not already be enrolled in B-School and you MUST click the button below to receive your enrollment gifts.
If you are still not sure, and have any questions feel free to contact me and I will be happy to provide you with any answers or information. Not totally convinced – sign up for the free video series that Marie is offering until Monday.
Enrollment for B-School 2013 ends this upcoming Monday, March 4th at 3pm Eastern. Can’t wait to see you there!
Uncommon Sense: Romance your own mystical soul
I want to leave. Run to her. I am obsessed. It is the only thing I can think of. The only thing I know. It is my truth…
I am holding my hands open to you now, palms up. Place your hands in mine. Feel the pulse of shared experience. Trust me when I say that I know this story.
This is a story we all know. We reside in one space and desire pulls us to another. Yes. It is brutally human, breathtakingly real. We often look for what we don’t have along roads we never meant to tread. The things we find there shake us to the core. We are seen and known and witnessed in ways we have never been.
Of course, if she is the catalyst for you leaving, then she is the catalyst for you leaving. Nothing can rewrite that part of the story. Not your word choice. Not the way you paint it for others. Not the justifications or the rationalizations or the things you wish were true. Deep down, you know what is true.
She feels like home, like breath. Like something I have always known and always wanted but never claimed. She is like memory and holy water and the intermingling of lives not lived.
This love that feels like home. Yes. I know this. Know it well. I understand the love that is memory. Lust that is holy. Desire that overwhelms and teaches and heals.
I know, from the inside out, the power of life changing love. The force of it. The sweet inevitability. The longing to run headlong and offer yourself as sacrifice to what feels like salvation. I know how the body quakes and soul expands and spirit explodes in one blissful realization.
But I also know the other side.
I know it is difficult, this leaving of one thing to dive headfirst into another. I know that the new relationship often struggles to hold the weight of being the undoing of the first. I know that after being defined for so long as a part of a partnership that is vitally important to define yourself for yourself.
And so I would say this, love. Even though it may not be what you want to hear. Even though it might be wrong. Even though you are not me and my experience is fundamentally mine and not at all yours. Even with all of this, there are things I want to say.
Hold some space around you as you go through this. Be cautious of the urge to dive into another life. Another love. Another partnership. Take the time first to learn where your edges and center live. To learn the blessings of your solitary heart. To learn your solid ground.
You need some room to go through the grief that will come. The guilt. The ache of the teardown. And yes, you’ll need to be held and heard and carried. Your body and heart and mind and soul will need to be loved and loved hard and good and long. But there are going to be interminable lonely nights that you will walk through alone. That you must walk through alone.
And diving into that free fall, blissful though it is, is sometimes a way to avoid rooting into yourself. Instead, imagine what could happen if you decided to build a shrine to your own divinity. Become solid with the ways and hows and whys of your existence in this world. Learn how you breathe and eat and sleep and dream when you are not intermingled with another.
This does not mean deny what is. This does not mean closing yourself to love. Not this love, or any other. It does not mean following grief with grief. No, not that.
It means loving yourself first. It means romancing your own mystical soul. It means taking yourself on a date and buying the good wine. It means getting comfortable with Saturday morning solitude and mowing your own lawn. It means long walks in warm rain, and catching eyes with a stranger in a coffee shop and smiling and looking away, and then looking back – knowing you are fully free to do so. It means sharing body and heart and soul on your terms and your timeline and with gratitude and reverence.
It means trusting yourself to know what is true, even if it is exactly the opposite of what I’ve said here. My advice may be right or it may be wrong. But in the end, there is nobody who can live this life but you. It is all yours. In the leaving or the staying. In the yes and the no. In the heat and the heart and the lonely and the grief. All yours, and only yours. And you will live it exactly as you should.
You will do it with a beauty and grace and fierce wisdom that will amaze even you.
And it will be perfectly, exactly right.
take me to the sea
Take me to the wild sea
Bring me to where
waves mark time
where salt meets skin
where I greet the depths
Take me to the wild sea
Take me home
back to where
I belong.
~~~~
Where do you belong today? Where would you go if you could?
A crush is all hello….
{Today I went looking for a finished post that would work for Valentine’s day. I thought I’d find a love poem, or a post written to women on the hard side of heartbreak. Instead I found this. Written ages and ages ago, and just waiting for a day like today. Here’s to the crushes, the mad, crazy, weak in the knees moments that make us all believe in possibility. Happy Valentines Day, everyone}
~~~~
That moment? The 56th time you check your phone for texts on an ordinary Tuesday? You know you are really only looking for one name…
I really like that moment.
That butterflies before a coffee date moment. That c’mere, ‘cause right now I want to melt myself into your bones moment. That you just turned toward the window and the light hit your face and for a second my heart actually, seriously stopped but I can’t tell you that yet moment.
No matter how many times you’ve had to walk away, a crush is all hello. All drawn out contact and pleasepleaseplease. It’s a longing for things that make you blush. And want. And tremor deep inside. It’s slow slide anticipation. Tender possibility wrapped in the most bliss-filled ache.
Maybe you don’t write your first name with his last name the way you did back then. You don’t have a pink flowered journal where you daydream names for your one-day children. You’re not so sure about the feminist ramifications of changing your name for love, and besides, your children already have their names.
But you’ve daydreamed the sound of his yes, and the feel of his arms and that tiny smirk of a smile. You know just how it would feel to twist one of those curls around your finger as you leaned closer. Exactly how the rasp of his five o’clock shadow would brush against your cheek. When he hugged you and your shirt held onto the remnant of his cologne – you knew that week there would be no rush to do laundry.
You’ve imagined what the way her lips would press against yours in that first electric moment. Tried to conjure the sounds she might make as you as you lower her down onto cool white sheets. Predicted what she would look like first thing in the morning, when the remnants of night visions still linger in her eyes. You can remember with exacting detail what her pianist fingers look like wrapped around her coffee cup the day you met to talk about feminist theory, even if you don’t fully understand why this particular memory makes a shiver rise along your spine.
It’s the sweet angst of ‘if I asked would she say yes?’ and the second guessing of ‘damn, I wonder what he meant by that?’ and ‘I think-I hope-he might-I mean maybe….’. And will she be there? And what should I wear? And oh, my…there he is. There she is.
And here you are.
Oh. My. Yes. I like that moment.
{enjoy the {crushable} soundtrack on spotify. as always, feel free to add your favorite falling in love-lust-longing songs to the mix}
The Audacity Is In The Living, Not In The Choosing…
“There is no right thing, you know. And no wrong thing, either. There is just the thing that you do.
And so you do it. You close your eyes and leap and you try to do it the best you can. And given how fucked up and crazy and brilliant and lovely and impossible it all is; the best you can is no small thing.
And eventually you’ll come out of it. With all the things you thought you did right and every last thing you worried you’ve done wrong. They’ll just be done and they’ll have worked their alchemy on your soul and you’ll be in a different place.
Trust me. I know.”
The Core Of Your Strength
they say you are soft?
so be soft.
you have nothing to
prove.
nothing to
gain
from a forced
toughening of
your wild soul.
be soft
because you
can
because you
are
because you
know
that it is
life that has
softened
you
that has taught
you
that hard is
for brick
and wood
and cement
not for heart
and soul
not for you
you bend
and sway
you welcome
you enclose
you buoy
you float
you adapt
and you do it soft
watercolour edges
blending with the earth
and sky and sea
so be soft
sometimes
it’s the very best
way
to survive.
it is time to remember
The first time he knew that he missed her, he didn’t even really know her. He just knew that the ache inside him could be called by only one name. Missing. Feeling the loss of something he had not yet had; this was foreign. It is uncharted territory to call familiar one who has never been known. It is tender and vulnerable to dance around the entitlement of such a proclamation. To feel with such solidity as if he had tasted and touched and lived within the space between their bodies, when really, none of this was true. They had no shared history, by any way of measurement. But yet he missed her. And In the center of his soul there were two words that pulsed in repetition.
I remember. I remember. I remember.
~~~
It is true, perhaps, that we have always known. But even remembering is a process.
It is possible to miss what you have never known. For the strange to feel familiar and for the untouched lover to call you home. There are moments in life, fragments and slivers of time or touch or experience, when everything spirals into itself. All else fades. There is only what there is, and nothing more.
In those moments, our memory is returned to us, and we are awakened to what we have always known.
Perhaps it is simply this: That all of life is not a learning, but a remembering. Remembering that knowledge built into our bones, the wisdom spliced into our genes. Recognizing lovers from past lives, rediscovering truths long ago experienced, recalling lessons learned and learned and learned.
If we were born with the collective wisdom of the cosmos implanted in our being, our task is only this: to live and seek and love until we’ve removed barriers that unlock it all.
The most painful of this remembering is in the moment of unlearning. Rejecting false truth. Releasing embedded dogma. Clearing the things that do not serve. It’s a harsh awakening to reject limitations long accepted as certainty. But only then can we hold to the light what we have deeply, always known. Only then can we inhale this knowing deep into our consciousness. Only then can we call home what has always been ours.
Only then can we remember.
~~~
She knew then. As if she had always known. Although everything in her life until then had told her otherwise. Although the path ahead would be difficult and pain was inevitable. But there it was in front of her. The memory of her own divinity. Her one true thing. She knew it as if she had always known. As if her entire purpose in life had been to find her way back to this space. There was fire ahead. A burning down and a rising from the ashes. There would be collateral damage, guaranteed. But she was ready. She remembered how to spread her wings. She had rediscovered a long missing part of her heart. She answered the call of her memory. Nothing could ever be the same again.
~~~
We live by accumulation. Stockpiling lessons and truths and relationships and labels. We gather them tightly and hold them possessively, give them the responsibility for our continued safe passage. As if what has already been can guarantee safety and stability for what is to come. As if protection is found in what is owned and completed and understood. We ground ourselves in limitations and say thank you to all that keeps us locked in our patterns of forgetting the truths of our birth and our beings.
How often we are wrong.
How often we only meet ourselves in the midst of a great storm. When the wind has ripped us from the moorings of all that has been. When we are stumbling and ungraceful and foolishly unknowing. It’s in the center of the worst that we come to the root of what is. To the place where things can become. To the spaces and people who can deliver us back to our memories.
It takes a long, hard fall to find the solid ground that will support our inevitable rise.
But rising requires memory, and it is memory we find when all else is stripped away. It is memory that exists when the logical mind has been silenced. It is memory to which we are delivered most often when life has brought us to our knees.
Listen. Do you hear that? It is the song of your spirit. It is the howl of your wild. It is the truth of your bones, wisdom born in you. It is the words that have been waiting to be spoken aloud. It is the fire burning in your gut. It is the lover you have not yet met, but have always somehow known, calling you home.
It is your memory. It has been with you always, and will never leave. You carry it nestled deep, safe at the very molten core of you.
Be still now, love. Find a quiet place, and let the universe blanket you with peace. Turn your palms up in welcome, raise your face to the sun. Say thank you to all that has brought you to this place.
It is time to remember.
~~~~~
And then, finally, they were together. And in the space of their first meeting lived the energy of a thousand years and lives and loves too numerous to count. This memory pulsed in the air between them; a living, breathing entity that demanded reverence. It floated in the air, tingled on the surface of their skin, burned low in the center of their longing. If you had been there, a silent witness to this moment, you would have seen not just two people. Instead, you would have seen how such a love had cracked open a collective memory, and released the love of a thousands souls who had gone before, and a thousand more who had yet to become. And in their first kiss they were flooded with all of this, and with a holy gratitude. They had remembered.
