(via House of Turquoise)

How to get it?

1. Slow your breathing. Your tongue should rest on the bottom of your mouth (it opens up your airway and allows more air to get through). Just five minutes of this and you should be breathing slower without any effort.

2. Stop multitasking. Turn off the music in the car, turn off your phone and quit texting, ignore your email inbox, turn away from your computer monitor and look at something else. Think about the next one thing you really want to do or really should do. And do it only.

3. Remind yourself that you’re okay. I do this audibly or inaudibly, depending on my circumstances. Give yourself permission to be okay. We often wait for others to tell us this. We can tell ourselves!

4. Slow the tempo of your music or turn down audible noise. The thump, thump, thump of a hip-hop song makes you want to get up and be active (at least it does for me) while the blare of overly loud commercials makes me want to run screaming from the room; when I want to be calm, I put on something achingly gorgeous and revel in the audio beauty.

5. Sip hot tea. They have tea called calming, you know. It does something to us to slowly sip a cup of tea (not a caffeine-induced tea or coffee), something natural that is soothing. Try it.

And that’s how to get to calm.

(photo by Ashlee Raubach)

I’ve been doing a lot of creative work lately. The only way I got through all of it was to make time for creative rest.

This isn’t me thinking per se about being creative, but allowing the universe to bring things to me in the most creative act of synchronicity.

What has come?

Editors asking me for book ideas.

Agents finding me opportunities that I would have never applied for myself.

Friends who know the right people that suddenly turns into something amazing.

Things I wish for showing up unbidden.

Peace showing up in the midst of chaos.

From the empty middle freeway lane I dove into yesterday to avoid causing/being part of a 50-car pile up to a book that I wanted to read appearing at the library on hold for me (I don’t remember requesting it) to sending off multiple book pitches last week(!) to trying to find room next spring to speak at multiple conferences.

I realize I don’t have to push so much to make this happen. It just happens.

It’s creative rest.

When I let go, I relinquish control, but not creativity. I realize that God has many creative ideas to share and I won’t miss out if I rest.

We intend to juggle as much as possible and then beat ourselves up when we drop a few. Perhaps God has us drop a few on purpose so we can catch something else.

Today I’m catching rain blurring my picture window, Fedex delivering a dream come true, hubby working from home with me, and nowhere to be until tomorrow.

What can I catch next?

What can you catch next?

Hold out your hand.

(via House of Turquoise)

Don’t let go of creativity.

You keep hold of it like a waking dream that disappears as soon as you open your eyes, turning over the images left in your mind like smooth stones in your palm.

You refuse to let go. Exhausted or not, you’re already plotting your next grand caper.

You turn on the soundtrack from Glee and start to dance at midnight. You rearrange the furniture in the middle of the afternoon. You eat milk and cookies for breakfast.

Hang on to the creative force, even when you’re tired.

Even now, exhausted as I am at this minute, the idea of creativity makes me smile. It is a gift and the reason we live.

So, take some rest. And while you are resting, consider what you could do next.

The opposite of quick fix is the actual fix.

When we’re stressed, we don’t want to waste any more time thinking about being stressed. We want to move forward through the stress and do it as fast as possible.

The last thing we want to do is to slow down and give ourselves rest.

Resistance knows the second you decide to improve your inner life. It won’t help you out.

There is no rest without taking the time.

I had to slow down in the midst of one of my busiest days this week to chop potatoes, carrots, and onions for beef stew. I was not happy at that moment; lots of stress, lots of busy, busy, and I faced a very tactile experience that I was resisting like it was the plague.

It was completed with a lot of kvetching over my cutting board, muttering under my breath, mad because I only had a can of cream of mushroom soup and not tomato, which is what the recipe called for.

Talk about Resistance!

I was frustrated watching the clock and then remember that I could make the experience more enjoyable. I could savor the opportunity to make a hearty meal for my husband. I could let myself be Julia Child for thirty minutes and just have fun.

I took the time. I let go and rested. I threw everything into the crockpot and had to leave the kitchen a disaster to get back to my work.

It was something really simple, but I took the time.

And it did wonders for my attitude.

Action Tip: What can you take the time for today?

(photo by House of Turquoise)

We feel a lot of emotions in our lives. We have a lot of thoughts that scatter on the surface of our brains and while that’s great, it won’t do for the long haul.

I’m talking about an emotional upgrade.

My default self-talk is DIRECTLY related to what I am feeling. What if, too bad I never, woulda, coulda, shoulda. I feel guilt that probably isn’t even there. I feel pain that I’ve brought back onboard myself. I feel joy, but it’s because the sunshine came out.

How do we deeply stir the emotions underneath the surface? How do we begin to regulate them?

I think it’s meditation. Not in the sense of emptying one’s brain of all thought, but emptying one’s brain of all surface emotions. Tossing out the worries and the pain and the fleeting feelings of joy in order to feel something else. Something that you’ve cleared the way for.

I’m just learning this again. I think I may keep learning this every day of my life. But I forget so quickly.

I get caught up in worrying about tomorrow. I get caught up in fretting about yesterday. I worry about two hours from now, what will happen. I worry about two hours ago, what already happened.

This is not meditation, this is mental torture.

Someone wise told me this week that living in the moment is seeing the detail. My stomach rumbles for breakfast, my feet warm in a patch of sunlight on the rug, my computer chimes telling me another email arrived. I see dust clinging to the dark wood of my coffee table, I hear the wheels on the neighbor’s bicycle winding around our culdesac.

This moment.

Meditation varies for different people. For some, it may be a form of worship or prayer, silent conversation or telling of your heart. For others it is repetition of prayers or affirmations, for others it’s more of an emptying, creating a vacuous space for new things to come into. I’m not here to dictate what is or is not meditation. I know what it is for me and I know what it is for many readers of this blog.

This is not a religious community, this blog. It’s not a place where I tell you how to find God or peace or whatever. This blog is me talking about how I’m finding God and peace. Some of you may use my ways; some may not.

Action Tip: Meditate on what you need to focus on right now. It could be God or peace or your blessings or your dreams. Whatever YOU need today, think on it. Think deeply. Stir under the surface and really ponder what your life looks like this minute.

Been thinking a lot about forgiveness today.

This past weekend marked the 65th anniversary of the bombs on Japan to end World War II. And I watched a documentary about Auschwitz surivors used by Dr. Mengele (the purported angel of death) in medical experiments. The key thing is that they were children, all twins.

Their entire family had already been murdered and if one twin died during the experiments, the other twin would be murdered as well. Eva Moses Kor and her twin sister, Miriam, both survived; they were just ten years old. They are picured in liberation photographs at the head of the group during the Soviets’ opening of the camp being led out of the barbed wire.

Miriam died in 1993 in Israel from kidney failure as a direct result of the experimental drugs given to both of them in Auschwitz. It became Eva’s quest to find as many answers as she could about those experiments, which led her to the only SS doctor acquitted after the war because he had saved so many Jewish lives while at Auschwitz.

Dr. Munch joined Eva at Auschwitz in 1994 in order to heal (his own post-war nightmares were just as terrifying) and Eva took the step of publicly forgiving him for his part in the horror. She remarked that she had never thought that a Nazi would have nightmares about those events. Dr. Munch also went on public record as a witness to the Auschwitz gas chambers as a member of the SS medical team.

The thing that moved me about this documentary was Eva. At ten years old she decided to prove Dr. Mengele wrong and live, even after he told her she would die in two weeks’ time. She had been injected with some poisonous bacteria just like her twin. She decided at ten years old to keep her sister alive if at all possible. And 50 years later, she decided to forgive not only Dr. Munch, but Dr. Mengele himself.

This woman is a force of nature; in her walk, in her talk, in her determination to survive and to not let anything destroy her. She knows who she is and where she’s been. And the best part, she knows where she’s going–to freedom from Auschwitz, from persecution, from the memories. During the documentary, other twins who survived Mengele’s experiments remark that they cannot forgive because it is too painful. They even lash out in anger at Eva for forgiving when the rest of them cannot. I have nothing to say. Until I’ve lived through the same thing, how could I judge anyone for refusing to forgive?

I just found myself remembering how I have taken hold of some hurtful thing in my life (so much less hurtful than Auschwitz; trust me, I realize this) and refused to let go of it. I remember how much bondage and limited movement I had while I carried all that around on my shoulders like a smelly carcass.

How in the world can we forgive when we are hurt? Because to not do it is to continue to torture ourselves. I am not saying this lightly. I have been hurt, manipulated, lied to, emotionally abused by so-called “spiritual advisors” until I thought I had nothing left to live for. I could not let go of it for a very long time.

Perhaps time is the answer. Eva worked through her memories for 50 years after all. But what if we could imagine a life free of the hatred and bondage, a life of creative strength? She says to the camera at one point, “Getting even never did anybody any good.”

Eva Moses Kor is a strong woman. But it’s not her physical appearance or even her voice or eyes; there is something from her very core and her heart that exudes strength. I felt awed by her presence on a television screen. She will not let anything stand in her way ever again.

Trust me that I don’t mean forget. No.

We must not forget, but we must forgive. How much creative strength are we losing by hanging on to things that (while pale in comparison to medical experimentation at Auschwitz) still are only hurting us, wounding us, limiting us. I don’t know the answer and I don’t know how to wave a wand and grant everyone the ability to forgive.

Can we forgive the little things just as Eva Moses Kor forgave the big things? Is a fear of letting go of those hurts holding us back from what we were put here to do? Kor defines forgiveness as letting go of something painful so that it no longer has power over you. Something worth thinking about.

Right now, creative artists are really inspiring me. Of all stripes and spots. A few include Kelly Rae Roberts, Joni Webb, Ali Edwards, Erika Powell, Brooke and Steve Giannetti, and Jen Lemen.

What is it that makes them so successful?

They don’t worry about the how; they deal with the what.

What is the what? (I’ve been dying to type this in a blog post for years! Ha!)

Fear.

It’s a creative conundrum. We desire to create beautiful things and to feel our passions and then we shut down because of the fear. Most of the world is shut down by fear. Most of us can’t move forward because of fear.

Instead of naming it straight up for what it is, though, we’re obsessing that we don’t know HOW to do what we want to do. We’re not good enough writers. We can’t quit being so symmetrical in our interior design. We stare at an empty canvas and feel overwhelmed. We think the craft is going to take us decades.

It very well might.

That’s not the problem. We’re so afraid of how in the world we’ll figure it all out and learn it and apply it and do it right (fear of criticism) that we shut down and never do it. We don’t try. We give up. We stop.

We’re cold turkeys.

I say we forget about the craft for one minute and name the fear that is bogging us down. That is what we should be dealing with first.

But how does one get a win when they haven’t yet learned a craft? Well, it’s like me learning to play the piano again. My brain remembers all those years spent on a piano bench. My fingers are not so fortunate. They fumble, they have lost their piano playing muscles. So I start with scales. I run scales. This is something I can do today to push away the fear. It’s what I did as a 12-year-old when I was in training before I really knew what fear was (it seems to creep up on us more and more as we get older; and I am older today.)

You do as much as you can to get that win and then you build on it. You put your heart and soul into it. You refuse to take no for an answer. Sure, you also do the laundry, go to work, and weed the yard, but in the off times, when you could just flip on the tv to waste an hour, you don’t. You go practice those scales. Or you paint something or you write something or whatever.

We need to quit obsessing about HOW we’ll be creative and learn to conquer WHAT is blocking us from being creative. And I’m talking to myself too.

My worst moment is when I lift my laptop lid and begin to write something that I have no idea what it will be, that I have no idea what I will feel, and no idea what people will say. But as soon as I get over the WHAT and just do it anyway, suddenly the HOW takes care of itself. My imagination kicks in (as does my wordiness, yes) and pretty soon, there’s 1,000 words, and then 2,000 words and then I’m on such a roll, I get irritated when the phone rings to make me stop. About an hour before, I was praying for that phone to ring to keep me from it!

Yeah, the WHAT blocking your path is not HOW, but fear.

Kick it to the curb. Just do it!

Action Tip: Whatcha got going today that is freaking your WHAT out? Is it disguised as HOW? Name it for what it is and tackle that sucker.

You can’t look good on the outside and really be healing on the inside.

Sometimes going sane looks like you are going insane.

Sometimes you won’t be doing well, but you’ll be well.

It’s all about perspective, isn’t it? We think it’s all about the outside: the right house, the right car, the right clothes and haircut. But most of the time, it’s what’s on the inside that really matters. You can look great on the outside, but you are a robot. You can enjoy hearing people say how well things appear to be going for you; in reality, nothing is going for you.

Sometimes, it’s the days when everything looks wrong to someone on the outside looking in; it is those days that give bountiful blessings.

On those days, my heart soars so much I fear it’s going to bust out of my rib cage. My heart swells with joy and I think I might collapse from gratefulness. Anyone who peeked inside my windows would see nothing that special, nothing that amazing, just a crazy wild-haired girl whooping and hollering around her office, barefoot and dressed in flannel pajama pants with a mismatched sweatshirt.

But those moments are proof that I’m okay. There is grace abounding. I will make it.

I will also look slightly insane. I will have things going badly. I will not be in control of anything.

That’s the key.

We are so sure that being IN control means we’re okay. We’re so confident that our outward is really who we are. We’re positive that if folks look at us and think we’re okay, we’re okay.

These are the lies we tell ourselves.

The truth is we are not sometimes. We break down, we fall, we act really badly to friends or family, and the guilt takes us to our knees. We can’t figure out how we can be both Jekyll and Hyde in the same day. We can’t figure out why our kids think we’re mean when everyone in our neighborhood thinks we’re so awesome. We can’t figure out why folks think that our smiles are always real, especially those ultra-bright fake ones we plaster on when we are ready to throw in the towel.

We’ve got to believe that we may be healing in those awful moments. That things go awry for a very good reason. Grace catches us so much on those days. Perhaps it’s to show us it’s still there.

When things go well, we tend to forget about what we have been given. We get cocky, sure of ourselves. We think we don’t need any help from anyone.  But it’s the days when things go haywire that we start to shake our fists at the sky. Resist the urge, please! The grace holding us on the bad days is the same as on the good days. When everything fails, when everything is lost, we are just as okay as we are dressed to the nines and looking all put together.

We are held when the sky falls down in our lives, when the rivers flood, when the mountains collapse, when nothing makes sense, when grief overwhelms our hearts, when nothing looks like it will ever be right again. I promise you, we are held tight.

Don’t be the fool who throws out what you are given. Don’t get caught up thinking that you may look crazy by luxuriating in the secret, hidden things. It’s not really us anyway; it’s healing.

Action Tip: If you don’t have it together today, you’re not alone. No one else does either! Know this to be true!

We’re in an instant society. We get whatever we want as soon as we think we might want it.

This does not bode well for our creativity.

I am not a huge fan of suffering, but I am very big fan of percolating. FYI, just because we can’t have it right away doesn’t mean we are suffering.

It may be the preparation time. Good coffee has to brew. Good ideas have to turn into great ideas. Plants have to grow.

Sometimes we rip our still-growing ideas right out of the ground and force them to do what they weren’t meant to do. Sometimes we force our creativity to deliver results it never could. Sometimes we punish our creativity because it seems it’s not going fast enough.

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.  — Baruch Spinoza

I think we’ve learned bad habits. It’s one thing for others to force you to be creative against your better judgment, but it’s quite another to force yourself. I think most of us do the latter. We can’t handle that OUR creativity is taking longer than our neighbors. We can’t deal with the idea that our ideas are not ready to be put forth. We just launch anyway, caring nothing about our own creative recovery.

The point of all this is to heal old wounds—not open up new ones. We need to give ourselves a break. Life is not a sprint race; it’s a marathon. It’s easy to shoot out of the gate thinking you’re going to have a better race than ever and about a quarter through falter because you burned up all that energy trying to best yourself.

Perhaps we are our worst enemies. Why the push? Why the pressure? Why torture ourselves like this?

We may not know exactly WHAT we are creating right at this moment, but we know it needs time. We can feel it in our soul. We need rest. We need to wander in a rose garden and smell the perfume. We need to sit and gaze out at waves crashing on a beach. We need to listen to the birds in the early morning, watching the sun rise from the shadows. We need to wash dishes by hand in the sunshine. We need to watch a three-year-old wash rocks, marveling at how little pressure she puts on herself. How much she gives to herself, without care or worry. Without haste or hurry. This is where life and creativity meet. It is where busyness and instant gratification rob us blind.

Sometimes you run out of juice and need to stop. I think I am getting the hang of it. I’m learning to not become my own worst enemy. Of course, love and care of others is important, but when you have nothing left and you still give, what exactly are you giving?

Action Tip: Cross one thing off your to-do list today and give yourself some time with your creativity. What is one creative thing you need to spend time on? Do you need to simply think, to stop and ponder, to rest, or are you still pushing for instant gratification?

(photo by Saint1604)

Today, all should be quiet.

I am grappling with life and how quickly things you depend on change. I am weeping at the loss of a dear friend. I am in awe of the design of our lives. There is no such thing as chance. God does not play dice with the universe.

But today, I will heed the call of the quiet.

Heaven’s doors opened wide this week. And in that presence, there is nothing to say.

Be at peace. All is well.