Monthly Archives: May 2007

There are days when I wake up feeling like the world is truly my oyster. These are days when my mood starts out at good and just gets better, when all the colors of my life look brighter, when all the flowers smell sweeter, and I am noticing one compelling piece of evidence after another of the magic of being alive on this planet.

And then there are days when I seem to start out wanting to pull the covers over my head and it just goes uphill from there. I notice only the things I don’t like. I struggle and strain against the conditions or circumstances of my experience and I feel afraid or sad or worried or frustrated. I conclude that my life is a mess. I feel like I’ve been left behind or like I’m stuck where I am when I want so much to be somewhere else. And worst of all—I am royally pissed at myself for feeling that way. Nothing I want seems to be coming fast enough and so I start to worry about what will happen if it never comes? What if this is it?

And so in the midst of all this fretful me-bashing, I ask the Shower Team: “Why am so afraid of nothing changing? How can I be at peace where I am when I so don’t want my life to stay the way it is?”

To begin, there are some questions in response to your question. What conditions would you need in order to feel safe? What conditions would you need in order to feel comfort? Or joy? What needs to be, in order for you to look at you and feel good? Feel at home? Who or what decides your worth? What are your criteria for judging yourself a success or for judging your life a successful or happy life? How will you know when you have achieved this worthy, happy, successful, joyful life you want?

You continue to believe that you need this or that to change in order to feel complete or to feel that you’ve accomplished the level of success or fulfillment or abundance or connection that meets whatever standard you are accepting as the one that applies to you. You are believing that you must prove yourself. You are believing that there is a panel of judges or one supreme judge somewhere evaluating your progress and that you will be rewarded or punished in one way or another for the extent to which you carry out some task or mission or even to the extent to which you manifest some dream.

What you are doing is practicing conditional love. You are saying to yourself . . . I will love you, contingent upon your satisfactory progress toward the determined goals. I will grant you temporary approval or temporary affection, provided you are moving forward at an acceptable pace, provided there is sufficient evidence of your following through and making an appropriate level of progress. But understand, that this approval or affection or acceptance that has been granted to you can be suspended without notice at any time if your performance begins to suffer in any discernible way.

This is the kind of ‘love’ that you are offering to yourself. And this is the reason why your relationship to yourself so often feels so shaky and so unstable and so insecure. You are constantly looking over your own shoulder, constantly keeping score, constantly tracking and monitoring yourself—and constantly ready to take disciplinary action when you judge yourself to be falling down on the job or not meeting any of your established performance standards.

What we so want to encourage you to do instead, is to see and to find your way to the belief that you cannot fail. You cannot screw up this life you’re living here . . . because no matter where you find yourself, no matter what conditions you may be observing or experiencing, the You that sees and knows you from a broader perspective, can ONLY feel unconditional love and approval and acceptance for you. There are Universal forces continually offering you such an expansive and powerful stream of adoration and approval and appreciation that you can’t even imagine it.

The You that is always connected to that stream always approves, always offers love and support, and always waits for the you that is here banging around in all this variety of experience to somehow remember that you cannot get it wrong, that no one who is connected to All That Is is judging you, that there is nothing you must do . . . nothing you must accomplish . . . nothing you must prove . . . in order to receive the love that is yours to feel, whenever you can stop holding yourself back from it.

Unconditional love is perhaps the most difficult thing for you to grasp from your physical perspective because so much and so many conspire to persuade you that love only comes as a result of your lovable actions. What you seldom truly understand is that the “love” you are believing comes to you as a result of lovable action is not really love at all. It is payment for services rendered. It is an exchange—you do this for me and I will reward you with my approval or affection. That is as far removed from real, genuine, unconditional love as it gets. You do not require your children, fresh from the womb, to behave lovably in order for you to hold them in your affectionate, appreciative embrace. You love your pets even when they behave badly. And yet you still hold this belief that you are only as lovable as your behavior or your progress or your attitude.

The Universe offers you truly, eternally unconditional love. The You who is connected to All That Is offers you truly, eternally unconditional love. You see yourself as flawed and lacking and needing to be better. The Universe sees you as perfect just the way you are. You see yourself on a mission to prove your value and to push yourself to achieve some arbitrary standard of excellence or to reach some imagined next rung on the evolutionary ladder. The Universe sees you as a divinely complete being having a joyously expansive experience that is yours to create in whatever way you choose. When you understand this, when you begin to remember and to receive this knowledge and to feel it flowing into your awareness, then you can begin to release the fears you have about this condition or that condition changing or not changing, about this connection or that connection needing to be or to be different.

When you understand how unconditionally loved you are, then you can begin to live your life from a truly perfect place of peace and you can begin to create your experience with the kind of joy and anticipation and expectation of fulfillment that is your true legacy as the blessed, beloved children of God, of Source. of the Universe that you all are, no matter what kind of magic—or mess—you think you are making.

Is it just me, or is it taking longer and longer responses for me to really get it? It never ceases to amaze me the lengths that often seem necessary for me to hear—and believe—the message that I am fine just the way I am. The skepticism and/or amnesia around that topic is truly astounding. But in those moments when I manage to remember it or hear it—and if I’m really lucky—feel it and believe it . . . what a sweet sweet gift it is. It’s a gift that keeps on giving . . . and that gives me the blessed relief of feeling—for the moment—unconditionally complete.

My sister has never been an early riser. When she was in junior high and high school, she had a particularly tough time of it getting herself out of bed in the mornings to get ready for school. Now and then when my mother would go to her room to wake her up, my sister would complain that she wasn’t feeling well and thought she should stay home.

Mom’s response was almost always the same: “Well, get up and take your shower and then see how you’re feeling.” Call it mother’s intuition or whatever but she knew that more often than not once my sister got up and showered she would feel miraculously better and she would find the energy needed to start her day.

I was reminded about this recently as I was giving some thought to what picks me up when I’m dragging or feeling down physically or emotionally—and specifically, to the idea of there being routines or rituals or actions I can take that reliably lift my spirits or help to restore some sense of balance when I’ve been feeling a little off my game . . . so I asked the Shower Team about the idea of tricks or gimmicks that somehow work as triggers. Do we have switches that we can learn to throw that can reliably and effectively snap us out of our doldrums?

Your mother’s accurate understanding of how to respond to your sister in that situation was based as much or more on attentive observation as it was on any special intuition. She did with your sister what many of you do too little of with yourselves and that is, pay attention to what gets energy flowing and then apply that knowledge in a deliberate way. It was a thoughtful response based on repeated observation rather than a knee jerk reaction. She could have taken your sister at her word and called in a physician to examine her. She could have searched for symptoms and probably would have found something that qualified and immediately prescribed some remedy. She could have ignored your sister’s complaints or dismissed them out right but instead of any of those responses, she offered one that invited your sister to move into a place of releasing resistance and allowing her own energy to resume its flow, even if it was done somewhat begrudgingly.

It’s a simple example of a profound truth about the way that any of you can at any time utilize what you’ve observed about yourselves in order to get your own energy flowing and to allow yourselves to begin to feel a little better relative to any topic. If you pay attention to yourselves over even a fairly short period of time you will easily come to see “what works” for you in terms of actions, either external or internal, that in effect, recharge your battery or give you a much needed boost of morale or offer you a bridge to a better feeling train of thought.

What you are essentially doing in any of those cases is clearing or cleaning up your own vibration . . . as though you were literally standing under a cleansing shower and letting the thoughts or patterns of thought clinging to you that weigh you down, rinse off, and leaving you feeling lighter, and cleaner and more easily able to see yourself and your circumstances from a fresher and more energized perspective. When you succeed at this, you’re allowing yourself to be reminded of what you always know on some level—that all is well. You’re actually allowing yourself to once again be the remarkably resilient and innately optimistic and buoyant beings that you are.

These ‘tricks or gimmicks” are as varied and diverse as you are. It can be any game you like to play. Any music you love hearing. Any scene or vista you love looking at. Any uplifting book you like to read. Any physical exertion that increases your pulse and in the process, pumps vitalizing blood through your veins. It can be a fragrance that reminds you of something or someone you cherish. It can be a connection with someone who stimulates or soothes you. Or in your case (and your sister’s) . . . some time in the shower . . .

It doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is that you notice. What’s important in this as in so many other things you want, is to pay attention to what brings the feelings you want closer to you . . . When are you happy? When are you content? When are you
satisfied? When are you stimulated? When are you feeling alive and eager and optimistic? What are the conditions that lend themselves to these feelings for you? When you notice the transition from down in the dumps to feeling on track again . . . also observe and make note of what helped facilitate that shift.

The key is to pay attention to how you feel and to what moves you in one direction or the other. When you understand better what facilitates those shifts for you then you begin to have the tools—the tricks, if you will—to more consciously and more deliberately orchestrate or engineer those shifts for yourself, just as reliably and effectively as your mother managed to get your sister up and out the door to school on those days when she could just have easily stayed in bed.

So apparently tricks aren’t just for kids who don’t feel like going to school in the morning. And apparently it’s never too late to learn something else from one’s mother. Clearly my sister wasn’t the only one getting the message that jumping in the shower could be good for the old attitude. Nevertheless, I think I’ll start trying to expand my list of tried and true triggers. In the process, perhaps I’ll manage to remind myself more often that all is well, and that I am, in or out of the shower, one very capable and fresh-scrubbed trickster who is, for the moment, buoyantly complete.