SISTER WISDOM

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{personal success} get over the past 1

Filed under self
Written by Annie on 27th Jun -11

windy miller
Creative Commons License photo credit: squacco

“If you want to, you can let go of any feelings of resentment, of regret, of anger. You can accept that you are a fabulous human being because of all the bad things that have happened to you, not in spite of them.” -Richard Templar

Get Unstuck

Staying stuck in the past limits you to the boundaries of the past. The labels, personality, influences, abuses, habits, enabling, or hurtful effects of the past will keep extended control into the present as long as you hold on to them.

But I don’t want to hold on to them, you’re thinking. I just can’t get rid of them. They’re part of who I am.

You choose your inheritance:

by which I mean this:

You can’t choose what they give, but you can choose what you take.

Maybe those past events are part of who you are; but they don’t have to be a negative part of who you are. Whatever lesson or legacy you carry away from the past depends on how you choose to reference the past.

Be Bound Only by Choice

The emotional or mental trauma you might have endured isn’t time-bound, it’s choice-bound. You can continue being as much a victim today as you were when the trauma-inducing event happened. Or you can separate yourself.

You can step forward. You can accept, first, that the past happened. It did. You don’t have a perfect past. You can’t change that. It sucks; that’s life.

Set Your Own Frame of Reference

Then you can choose to reference the past as 1) OVER and 2) something you have chosen to derive value from, however impossible that may seem at first glance.

But once I accepted that what was done was done, and that I could choose to forgive and get on with life, things improved enormously. -Templar

What’s in your past that’s hanging on to you? Maybe it’s something so horrible you can’t see how there can be any value.

  • Maybe you were raped. Molested. Abused.
  • Maybe you were abandoned.
  • Maybe you abandoned someone else.
  • Maybe you were betrayed, or you chose to betray.
  • Maybe you broke a heart. Maybe your heart was broken.
  • Maybe you lost everyone you loved.
  • Maybe you were a victim of daily degradation, scorn, taunting, ridicule.
  • Maybe you committed a crime.
  • Maybe you got into financial ruin.
  • Maybe you ruined your reputation. Maybe someone else did.
  • Maybe you were just mean, or lazy, or careless, and the smallness of your past makes you think it doesn’t matter, but you can’t let go.

Maybe maybe maybe: I’m not saying that what happened in the past isn’t bad.
I am saying that no matter how bad it was (or how small it was), you can still get value from it. That can be your take-away.

Pack Your Own Take-Away Box

Don’t believe me?
Here’s a challenge: No matter what the past was for you, you can learn the lesson of forgiveness from it.

If you were wronged, no matter how deeply, you can learn to forgive.

If you were the one who did the wrong, no matter how heinous, you can learn to seek forgiveness. You can learn to receive forgiveness. And you can learn to forgive yourself. (By the way, no one benefits from your refusal to forgive yourself.)

Recognize Your Own Ability

Moving forward means moving away from the circumstances, identities, and experiences of your past. It means you take what you want with you, but you don’t stagnate. You accept that there is a reality back there behind you, but it doesn’t have to be your reality now or your reality in the future.

One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal. – St. Paul

Recognize the ability you have to limit or extend your past. It’s up to you.

Make Your Own Choices Over the Past

You can choose:

  • stay in the same cycles of behavior, or get help and break out
  • repeat the same thought patterns, or think new thoughts
  • believe what you’ve always heard, or start asking questions and seeking the real answers
  • accept the identity you wear from the past, or take it off and define yourself in the present
  • repeat the past blindly, or recognize the past when it appears in your present, and limit it as you decide
  • frame yourself as a victim, or see both the negative and positive influences in the past and carry the positive with you
  • keep looking back over your shoulder, or picture clearly the person you want to be in your future
  • believe in what’s over (no one can control the past) or believe in what you can do about the future
  • focus on what’s already happened (no one can control the past) or take action to build a life you want to live
  • drown in guilt or shame or sorrow (no one can control the past) or forgive and be forgiven (forgiveness is a daily choice)

Your call.

If you accept what’s done is done, you are left with yourself exactly as you are. You can’t go back and change anything, so you’ve got to work with what you’ve got. -Templar

10 ways to be more creative everyday Comments Off

Filed under take ten
Written by Annie on 18th Jun -11

you.
Creative Commons License photo credit: piermario

One of my soapboxes is creativity, and how we (mis)define it.
Creativity has become one of those words associated with certain activities: crafty things, artsy things. If you paint a picture, sew a dress, take a photograph, you’re being creative. And it’s true: those activities all require creativity, a whole sparkly heap of it (more than I have, apparently).

But the “artistic endeavors” are just a single piece of the pie that is creativity.

  • It’s creative to write a novel… or a really good email or thank-you note.
  • It’s creative to write a poem… or a press release.
  • It’s creative to paint a picture… or to come up with a stellar business proposal.
  • It’s creative to sew a dress… or to say no to some socially expected thing because you realize it’s not you and it’s not necessary.
  • It’s creative to take a photograph… or to take a child on a hike that helps them to love the world and adventures in it.

Creativity is less about what you do and more about how you do it.

And now I’m going to climb down from the soap box so I can share my 10-list of ways you can be more creative – everyday – no matter what you’re doing.

1. Limit the information being shoved at your brain in tiny bits and pieces.

I love text messaging, talk radio, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, magazines, quotes, news: all those “tidbit” info/communication sources that give you little tasty morsels without really nourishing anything lasting or internal. But I see a huge :: HUGE :: difference in how I work and how creative I am when I

start spending less time with those tidbits.

Why? I guess your brain (or at least mine) starts thinking in tiny pieces when that’s all it gets fed.. and creativity is a process that needs broader sweeps of thought, because creativity involves connecting seemingly unrelated things.

“Creativity is the ability to connect disparate ideas in new and useful ways,” says Sara C. Mednick, PhD, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego in this article.

(See? I told you.)

If your brain is only willing to munch on one tidbit at a time,

you’ll find it nearly impossible to see the hidden connections and pull them out.
So try limiting those tiny information sources and give your mind time to get back in the habit of thinking bigger thoughts.

2. Find time for bigger stories.

Look for meals instead of munchies. Read a whole book. Have a long conversation. Get out, for more than five minutes and without staring at your phone the whole time, in that gigantic ongoing story we call nature. Give yourself some solitude and reconnect with your own story. Take time to think, really, just sit and think…

3. Hang out with creative people

First, creative people are just funny and far more entertaining than, well, other people…
And second, you’ll start picking up on their strange, abnormal, creative ways.

4. Expand your idea of what creativity is.

Read my long soapbox of an intro above, in case you missed it… Or check out 27 ways you are a creative person.

5. Be more silly, unafraid, juvenile, child-like.

Kids are the ultimate in unabashed creativity. Imitate the best. Hang out with kids to get really good at this. If you don’t have any, you can borrow a couple of mine…

6. Reject the first five ideas/solutions/answers you come up with for any given need/problem/question.

Forcing yourself beyond the quick-and-easy gets your creative self working.

7. Give yourself limits:

  • a $50/week grocery budget [money limit]
  • 15 minutes to cook dinner [time limit]
  • use your non-dominant hand to write or draw [ability limit]
  • find a decent outfit at the thrift store [resource limit]
I’m sure you can think of other types of limits too, if you get… you know… creative with it.

8. Get around different cultures, different people, different ways of life.

We get to boxed into our own version of normal, and when that’s all we see, we forget that normal is an arbitrary thing, defined differently by different people in different places and different times. Even in the same place and time, you can find all sorts of differences of normal when you venture into different subcultures. Are you a Christian? Hang out with some atheists. Are you from the city? Spend a weekend with a family of farmers; it’s a whole new normal. From the North? Go down South.

9. Fire your critic.

Your critic leans heavily upon a particular definition of “good” and it usually is established in our childhood, based on our childish understanding and interpretation of life, and, often, is closer to demanding something unattainable like perfection than setting realistic standards of good work accomplished.
Let go of the critic. You can always rehire later.

10. Get into unfamiliar, uncomfortable, strange, new, unnerving situations.

Try new things. Break your routine. Eat food you don’t like. Read books you don’t understand. Watch movies in languages you don’t speak. Go to places where you don’t know the acceptable social codes and just stumble your way through it. Ask questions. Admit to not knowing. Talk to strangers. Climb trees. Sit quietly. Do something too easy for you and something too difficult for you. Try the thing that scares you. Say yes. Be spontaneous. Don’t hesitate.

how I learned to quit feeling guilty (or at least quit caring about it) Comments Off

Filed under self
Written by Annie on 15th Mar -11

Guilt is, apparently, a problem for a lot of people. Especially people of the female variety.

But overall, regardless of children’s age or marital status, women reported both more guilt and distress over work intrusions into the home. - USAToday

Women in both the adolescent age group and the 25-33 age group reported a higher level of expected guilt than the men. - NY Daily News

There have been studies that show that “problems in interpersonal relationships tend to evoke guilt (interpersonal guilt) and moral dilemmas more often in women.” This is labeled as “interpersonal sensitivity.” -  FYI Living

We could spend some time talking about where the guilt comes from, why women have more of it, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
Whatever.

We know without analyzing further that guilt is counter-productive, a waste of time, an unnecessary burden.

Oh wait: do we know that?

If we really did know that guilt helps no one, wouldn’t we quit allowing it to influence us?

Here’s my point of learning, and maybe it will help you:
Took me some 27 years, but I finally realized that

guilt and conviction are not the same thing.

Let me ‘splain.
  • Guilt is a vague, overwhelming, horrible, nasty, burdensome beast of cruelty that can never, ever, no matter how very very very hard you try, be appeased.
  • Conviction, on the other hand, is a specific, definite, action-oriented, encouraging, motivating thought that tells you how to make your life better.
We often avoid conviction because it is spurring us to action, and action is difficult. Instead, we wallow in guilt, on the premise that simply by feeling so bad about so much we’re paying our dues, making our life better, or at least justifying all the things that are wrong.
What an enormous waste of time.

May I pose a suggestion, peoplings of the women variety?

Do something about that latent conviction you have. Take action on something specific you want to improve.
And tell guilt to beat it like a Michael Jackson song.

Try it.

For reals. Let me know. Work for you? (You can tell me if it doesn’t, but, um, I’m not going to feel guilty about it.)

How to Climb a Mountain Comments Off

Filed under self
Written by Annie on 2nd Jan -11

“Men of great faith have always called us to wake up to great expectations, and the prudent have always laughed at them and said that these did not belong in reality. But the poet in man knows that reality is a creation, and human reality has to be called forth from its obscure depth by man’s faith which is creative.” -Rabindranath Tagore

Climbing a Mountain is difficult work. You won’t succeed if you’re unfit (disabled by bad habits, bad character, emotional obstacles). You won’t succeed alone. Or without a vision. Or without the necessary skills. Or with the load of a pack mule strapped to your back.

How to Climb (or Not) a Mountain


You’ve got to be

  • fit (able)
  • supported (not alone)
  • able (skilled)
  • motivated (filled with a vision)
  • free (no burdens not your own).

    • Otherwise you’re doomed and they’ll make one of those movies about your death on the mountain, all terror and snow and avalanche and frostbite. You as a snowball, rolling back down to land in, yep, the ditch. Where, most likely, you’ll decide you should just stay.

    You’ll tell yourself you don’t want no stinkin’ Mountain.

    You’ll face the other way.You’ll build a little hut in the ditch, and you’ll fill your brain with numbing distractions and comparisons. You’ll pretend to be happy. You’ll try to forget there ever was a Mountain.

    “We stand before this great world. The truth of our life depends upon our attitude of mind towards it – an attitude which is formed by our habit of dealing with it…” -Rabindranath Tagore

    For me, getting out of the ditch and up the mountain means one thing right now: simplify. Simplify everything. I need to quit trying to be Superwoman (because I’m not) and accept my own limits (because they are real) and live in them wholly, find room for the things that matter and eliminate the things that are only clutter. Life-clutter. Life-sized dust bunnies filling up all the space, sucking out all the energy.

    Time to up and murder some dust bunnies ’round here.

    (This is all kind of figurative… you get that, right? I mean, I will kill literal dust bunnies as well, but I’m talking about something a little bigger…)

    Simplify.

    Simplify, simplify, simplify in every way possible. Quit doing what doesn’t really matter. Quit saying yes just because of the instant gratification of having pleased someone by saying yes (at the very real, extended detriment of then being obligated to put my time, energy, effort, space, resources, and very self into fulfilling that Yes).

    I have managed to get myself so busy doing stuff, unimportant stuff, detail stuff, good stuff, stuff I voluntarily agreed to do. And all this stuff I do is at my own expense, at the cost of things that are important to me.

    NOT anyone else’s fault. (Nobody ever held a gun to my head.)
    It’s on me.

    “For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but whoever listens to me [Wisdom] will dwell secure and will be at ease, without dread of disaster.” Proverbs 1:32-33

    Photos by Kevin Dooley,   Jesse Hull, yacht_boy, and coda.

    New Year’s, Resolved: Don’t Stay in the Ditch Comments Off

    Filed under self
    Written by Annie on 1st Jan -11

    For the new year, my resolution is simple:

    Quit. Quit a lot of things that don’t matter.

    I’m dropping more and more. I’m cleaning out the house. I’m letting go of obligations. I’m saying no. I’m not taking on any new writing jobs. The money is always great to have, but I’m out of time. Which is more important?

    Time.

    The word for me in 2011 is to simplify, cut back, cut down, cut out, reduce reduce reduce. No adding until I am working, moving, progressing daily toward the (deepest) goals I have as a wife, mom, writer, worshiper. More room for the real, the deep, the creative. More cutting out of the superfluous, the busy work, the obligations.

    I always think the key is Discipline, and that’s part of it I know. But there are other elements too, elements that drive discipline forward.

    Things like Desire. Dreams. Doing.

    Be a DOER. Less talking, excusing, imagining, procrastinating, fearing, wishing, distracting myself. More do. Sit and write. Stand and work. Be a doer.

    Those words – how I need those words. How I need a row of sketchbooks and a jar of the best pens. How I am rapidly rabidly rambunctiously going to declutter this house and my life. How I am realizing that I am not naturally good at things I thought I could easily conquer. That’s okay; it’s kind of a relief to know I have to work at it. Like, hey, that would explain why I have to work at this so much…

    So much dead weight.

    So much stuff – tangible and intangible – that I carry around each day. It weighs me down, slows me down, drags me down and makes even the things I love to do difficult, slow, painful, irritating, hurtful, unpleasant, unlovely.
    Enough of that mess. (Say that emphatically.)

    But all that dead weight – that’s why I become so deeply confused, so uncertain about who I am, what I love, where I’m going, why I’m breathing, what my purpose is in this life. Sometimes it’s just a big painful unpleasant business, trudging through life.

    That’s what life becomes with so much dead weight: a trudge, a crawl in stinking, hostile, dry rocky thorny places, another fall into the ditch and…

    I lay there.

    I stay there, wondering why I’m trying to gather up the strength to crawl back out again. Easier to just lay there. Less painful to still myself in the muddy water, accept this place, surrender. Give up. Sleep in and crawl wearily out of bed at the last minute. Quit training, disciplining, trying – just threaten, repeat, ignore, complain. Don’t write. Get mad, blame people, and feel victimized by circumstances. Live in the ditch.

    My ditch may be better, nicer, cleaner than someone else’s – no drugs or abuse or adultery here – but it’s still a ditch.

    I am meant to live on the mountain.

    But the way is, well, up a mountain. My hands and feet and knees ache, bleed on the climb. I forget: why am I climbing? Where am I going? What am I doing here?
    The dead weight I carry is too much. I’ve no energy lefty for the climb, no strength to hold on, no mind or time for the vision, to way to renew it, see it, grab onto it, and remind myself why, where, what.

    This is the point of life: don’t stay in the ditch.

    Photos by Atli Haroarson.

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