Vulnerability : The Path Back To Authenticity

“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.”

- Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

For the most part, I've been a rather successful human being.  I was brought up in a family whose strength was integrity.  My grandmother was one of the most amazing people I have ever known, always filling me with a sense that magic was a living thing.  I've managed to have a career filled with so many rich rewards, they could never be captured in just a few lines.  My two dearest treasures, my children, have had a profound influence upon the direction of my life.  They bring with them, their loving and wise partners, each so full of grace and humor, I am often left speechless.  Of course, my friends over a lifetime, have opened my heart to the sublime frequently enough that I expect nothing less in my encounters with others.  Yes, my beauty and my weakness is that I am naive. 

We each have a very well developed platform for approaching life.  Ours' is a mixture of Certainty, Uncertainty, Significance, Connection, Growth, and Contribution.  Saddled up along side this platform are a series of recipe cards that help us achieve our goals.  My recipe card, titled My Will Be Damned, has been in place for about two years. It stops me dead in my tracks, while opening my heart to new friends, new love, and new perspectives.

The first five months of living in the Yucatan, my platform reconfigured the percentages of the cocktail.  Stressed in an unfamiliar setting, without adequate knowledge of Spanish, and no Connections, I was mostly out of balance.  I felt it physically, as my shoulders would either be hunched or pushed up around my ears.  Nothing was Certain, and everything was Uncertain.  I can't tell you how many times I considered packing up my car and heading back to Texas.  Without a job, a garden, and a studio, I questioned my own Significance and my ability to Contribute.  Uncertain of how my new community functioned, I didn't know who I could trust, nor what I might do to create a stronger presence in my new country.  Tethered to Texas and to Mexico, I was in survival mode.  No Growth was truly possible.

When some seriously bizarre and disturbing incidents took place, I turned the question, "Why the hell did I move here," into "What can I learn here?"   The first thing I realized is that I had brought the disturbance to myself.  I already knew everything I needed to know about a particular person, and I just opened the door anyway.  I allowed myself to sit with gossips, to not take a stand against the bullying, and it brought the backdoor within inches of my own behind.  Me, remember?  I'm the person who has been teaching others how to disarm bullying!  

While I was doing many things out of character, I was also doing many more that saved me from myself.  I had to make my business public, that is, I had to gossip about myself to get my situation corrected.  I had to take responsibility, suck it up, and ask for help.  Where I would have designated time to cry at the end of a hard day back in Texas, never taking full advantage of solitude, I now just cry.  Anything can prompt a tear - a new friend wearing my cousins' face, or when I realized that I loved my rescue dog after she had been lost for nine hours.  

Slowly, I have regrouped and struck a new balance.  Trusting new friends to care for me, trusting myself to know when I need to rest, and trusting that the Universe knows what I need, has freed me to just be!

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Love Letter From A Broad : Shout it out Loud Sisters!

"As a woman I have no country.  

As a woman my country is the whole world." 

 - Virginia Woolf

No one walks alone.  Our lives are handmade by the many.  Last week, the air smelled just like springtime in Austin, Texas, my home for over twenty years.  I wanted to get into the car and drive home, but there is no more home for me there.  The clubhouse my son and his grandfather built together, where my son played for hours with neighborhood friends, where my daughter later held tea parties, and where I eventually stored my gardening tools, is being used by a cute four year old named Grant, the son of the new owners.  

My raised beds, filled with the most sublime soil that anyone has every touched, were filled with tomatoes, squash, corn, radishes, and carrots, that I planted before I listed my home for sale. Enthusiastic to learn the ways of farming, the new owners asked me for advise.  A neighbor tells me that the dirt is barren, no blossoms and no bees are happily using those beds.  My flowers are still thriving, and that is a credit to a higher power, the one who designed particular plants for particular lands.  The dry creek bed, that serves as the walk to the once upon time this was my house front door, receives footsteps regularly.  The new owners are hipsters wanting to return to the land - a corner suburban lot turned into a certified nature habitat - where the smell of pot fills the air more readily than the perfume of compost!  Life is an amazing ride!


I miss my home, the smell of my children, the color of the Austin skyline after a storm, and I miss having gardens.  My love of nature, inherited from my father, must wait a season longer, as I must wait for my new home in Mexico to be remodeled.  In the meantime, I am grateful for the loving friend who gave me four earthy pots so that I can plant herbs, and for my village dump, though an eyesore, for not burying a wonderfully worn giant pot.  I am grateful to the friend that wanted to explore this new life with me, for being fearless in our adventures, it brought us to a nestled nursery where I unearthed another ancient pot.  I am blessed by a new neighbor, whose father raised Yucatan stingless honeybees, and her willingness to share what has been hers alone for eighty years. 

This is your opportunity to acknowledge the women and men  who have inspired you to dream, had you laughing so hard that your wine was coming out your nose, and taught you that love could be boundless. 

What This Broad Loves About You

Views From A Broad

E-mail Address: *

* Send it to yourself or the one you love.  This is not an attempt to collect information.

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The Power of Words : Affirming Intention & Context : Part 2 of 3

::When you're drowning you don't think, I would be incredibly pleased if someone would notice I'm drowning and come and rescue me. You just scream.::
- John Lennon



A few years back, I had the pleasure of working with a team of counselors who went into middle and high schools to conduct groups with young women and men who either had been involved in a violent dating relationship or were at risk for being involved in this type of relationship.  Most outside agencies offering direct services to students have difficulty arranging space, coordinating time with students, and gaining the respect of teachers/administrators.  Having a contract with the school district means little outside of having permission to be on the campus.  To sidestep some of the issues associated with student attendance, one of our counselors had their attendees put the time for the next meeting into their cell phone calendars. I thought this was brilliant!  As our team had been looking at all the various ways our students used technology, with us of course attempting to figure out how we could tap into their teen brains, I realized that one of the more prevalent issues teens face, in fact, that we all face when we are in stressful situations, is a form of forgetfulness.  The knowledge that we have an arsenal of resiliency skills at our disposal seems to fly out the window.  

My experiment began with using the calendar in my own cell phone to send myself daily reminders of my own strengths.  Hopeful that this might aide my students and clients, as well as myself, I placed what I began to call, Secret Messages of Love™,  into that calendar.  The experiment was to last for one year.  My message was simply, "I trust myself."  I had the message timed to open at the beginning of my work day, but quickly realized I needed an earlier reminder.  To set my intention for how I would approach my life on those days, I had my Secret Messages of Love™ with my first cup of coffee.  Another thing I changed was the number of times I would receive the message throughout the week.  I moved from once a week to three times a week.  Over the course of a year, I found myself feeling pleasantly surprised each time my phone offered its' special ring for my Secret Messages of Love™ reminder, increasingly thinking of the deeper power behind the simplicity of  words, and knowing that after a year of washing my own brain in self-love,  this would be a powerful tool in the hands of my clients!

Inevitably, as I passed along this tool to my colleagues, there arose the concern of using this approach with clients that didn't have cell phones.  As many of my elementary students didn't have cell phones, I sent them home with a note to their parent, outlining the project.  If the note came back signed, giving the student permission to participate, the student went home with a Sharpie marker to use on a bathroom mirror or a window.  The next concern was how would a client come up with their Secret Messages of Love™.   Remember the Love Day : Write A Poem post?  That was one way to direct the process.  Yet, what I discovered, is that my clients knew what needed to be remembered.  A tiny level 5 tornado of love, a fiery first grader I worked with in an alternative elementary school, wrote, "I need my family to have money so we can always buy us some food!" on his bathroom mirror.  One group of middle school students, after having a discussion around the rate of suicide prompted by prolonged bullying, decided their Secret Messages of Love™ experiment would include "I will offer loving words to my friends."  My high school students, gathered for an all-school rally during Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month, sent out over 1,000  loving text messages to their friends.  The sound from all those cell phones going off at once was a thunder clap of BIG LOVE!  One of the most endearing messages came from a mother.  Just before going to bed, her message read, "I love MY SELF and MY CHILDREN.  ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!  

Sit back, close your eyes, and make your "I" statement.  Send it out to the Universe!  Put it in your cell phone!  Write it on your bathroom mirror!  And watch your world change!

Create the life you want!
The Broad
 

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LOVE DAY : Write a Poem

LOVE IS

(a fill in the blank poem)


Love looks like __________________
Love taste like ___________________
Love smells like __________________
Love sounds like _________________
Love feels like ___________________Pin It Now!