How many times do you think in a day, “I wish my life was different?” A wish that your baby's colic would go away. A wish that you had a job that you actually liked. A wish that your thighs were smaller, your boobs bigger, or your tummy flatter.  

I wish that my hands didn't hurt. As a massage therapist with aching hands, I'm in good company. Most massage therapists don't last more than eight years in the field and the most common reason for leaving the profession is physical pain. I've had my share of physical discomfort over the course of my career.  I once saw my doctor when I was dealing with lower back pain and she told me to avoid activities where I was on my feet for long periods of time and bending forward. More recently, when my neck was hurting, she said to not to look down so much.  And with my hands, her advice was to eliminate strenuous use and get a brace to wear as close to 24/7 as possible. I have to remind my doctor what I do for a living. I stand. I lean forward. I look down. My hands have been my career for 14 years.

I have wished daily for my hands to feel better.  By focusing on the pain in my hands, I avoided the greater pain of the eventual loss of my massage therapy practice and the fear of not knowing what comes next.  By making my situation about my physical pain, I didn’t have to acknowledge my feelings of loss, regret, and fear.

Don’t we all do this? Focus on the little pain - like the way our bodies look or how much we want to stay at home instead of going to work - as a way of burying the other pain that feels too big to manage.  Our attention on our little pain keeps us from having to make real change.

When we’re on the wall, our thoughts can sound something like this:

I can't look at that, it's too big.
If I understand how I truly feel, it will overwhelm me.
If I feel the depth of my emotions, I'll fall apart and won't be able to put myself back together again.

We believe that falling into our big pain will leave us in irreparable pieces, a broken mess, like Humpty Dumpty, apres fall.   But when we focus on the little pain so that we can avoid feeling the big pain - which is always there whether we acknowledge it or not -  we spend our lives sitting on a very narrow wall, uncomfortable with the way things are but too afraid, too resistant, or too unsure to move.

The purpose of life is to fall. To let go of our clenched grip on the wall.  To accept the discomfort of not knowing what comes next.  To take a chance.  To stop wishing and make the deliberate decision to start doing. To float into the loveliness of what comes next, which will never ever come if we are sitting on the wall.

Falling for me now means accepting that my career as a massage therapist has ended.  Massage felt like a calling for me; it’s not easy to leave.  My work as a massage therapist connected me to a deep well of healing.  I helped people feel better in their bodies and created a safe place for acceptance and peace to unfold.  I like to think that I brought a connection to Love (with a capital L) through my work.

But wishing for my hands to stop hurting kept me on that narrow, uncomfortable, and unyielding wall.  For a long time, it felt like letting go would feel like breaking.  I was breaking a commitment that I had made with my clients to continue to help them.  I felt broken in my body because it was no longer doing what I needed it to do for me.  

I eventually realized that what felt truly broken was the wish that my situation was different.  Not accepting my circumstances was like Humpty with a bottle of Elmer’s glue, a futile attempt to keep all of my parts and pieces from coming apart.

And so I fell.  I accepted that I can no longer provide massage.  I accepted that letting go of my massage therapy practice calls forth negative thoughts that I’m slowly working through with my intuitive, genuine, and nurturing life coach Christy Miller of Point Be Coaching.  I accepted that I’m not really sure what comes next, which is a fact of life because none of us ever really do, no matter how diligently we plan.

“I think the ‘seeker's path’ is about arriving at a place, a bottom, where will and ego aren't big enough to serve the thing that you are after, which is truth,” says Tom Jay in Art As A Way Of Life by Roderick MacIver. “So you have to give up trying to control things. You attend to them. The difference is major. The path is about a larger, more mysterious context, which makes things scarier and more confusing, but it also makes beauty possible. Truth, like beauty, is not ultimately in your power, it is larger.”

I know that I will continue to attend to my mommy mentoring and life coaching practice and to my writing.  I know that I have a very grateful husband who is overjoyed that I’m dusting off my administrative, human resources, and marketing skills to attend to our baby sign language business.  I’m beginning to trust that something bigger than me has something big in mind for me.

Geneen Roth writes in her book Women, Food and God: “When you evoke curiosity and openness with a lack of judgment, you align yourself with beauty and delight and love - for their own sake.  You become the benevolence of God in action.”

That’s the plan.


Kathleen Harper is a certified life coach and mommy mentor.  She helps moms see the loveliness that is present in their own lives with intuitive coaching, practical tools and ongoing support and care.  Contact Kathleen to set up a free session to discover how she can help you fall in love with your very own life.

My kids’ summer is so short.  Start to finish, it’s a little over four weeks.  Before the summer break starts, I make a list on the white board in our kitchen of events, activities, family trips, and other ideas of what we can do together during our four precious weeks.  I adjust my work schedule so that I’m seeing fewer clients and block off Wednesdays and Thursdays so that I only see clients in the evenings and can spend those days enjoying time with my boys.

We had a pretty good summer this year.  We visited the Exploratorium and the Rosicrucian Museum, camped with friends twice and then once in the backyard, swam in Uncle Chris’ pool, and saw a handful of movies, among other activities.  But now it’s back to school time, I feel what I can only describe as guilt.  Guilt because the list of what we did over the summer is kind of average, nothing spectacular.  And guilt because I worked very little during the month of July.  My creative, business-building work piled up during the month of July because I only looked at my business in small chunks of time, and each leftover crumb felt like it was stolen it from my kids.

When I’m with my children, I’m thinking about all of my work that isn’t getting done.  When I’m working, I feel guilty, like I haven’t given my children a good enough summer.

Author Brigid Schulte, who wrote the book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has The Time, calls this mental pollution “contaminated time.”  Contaminated time is when you’re doing one thing (like spending “quality time” with your kids) but at the same time, you’re thinking of all of the tasks that are still undone.  This toxic thinking not only catapults stress hormones throughout your body, but also makes it impossible to enjoy what you’re doing at that moment.  

Contaminated time sullies everything around me.  I don’t enjoying the time that I spend with my kids, they certainly aren’t enjoying their time with me, and my stress strips away my creativity and motivation when it’s time for me to get down to work.  Contaminated time makes me Miss Cranky Pants.

To help find my way out of my funk, I talked with my life coach, the brilliant Christy Miller of Point Be Coaching.  She gently reminded me that thoughts create our feelings and feelings create our circumstances.  She helped me to identify the thoughts that were tarnishing my time with my family and at work.  We did our own coastal clean up of my mental landscape and you can, too.  Here’s my plan for moving forward - I call it my 3C’s.

• COMPASSION  If you are at a beautiful park, pushing your beautiful child on the swing set, but thinking ugly thoughts which create guilt, unhappiness, and stress, take a moment to notice your thoughts and be kind to yourself.  This is not the time to add insult to injury by creating even more of the “uglies” by telling yourself that you’re somehow a bad mom because you’re thinking about chores when you’re supposed to be enjoying your time with your child.  When you become aware of your thoughts but not caught up in them you become what author and life coach Martha Beck calls the Watcher, a state of mind in which you are loving and accepting towards all of your thoughts, even the ugly ones.  Deliberately going to the Watcher state of mind can help to retrain your brain.  “It’s a place of great inner peace,” writes Martha Beck in her book The Four-Day Win. “…according to some medical psychologists, it’s psychologically impossible for your mind to stay locked in a war of control when you’re engaging its ability to generate compassion and appreciation.”

•  CLEAN UP Changing your thoughts cleans up your inner toxic dump.  One way to change your thoughts is to replace dirty words that contaminate your time, like should, supposed to, and have to, with clean words of empowerment like want to, choose to, and will.  Then create turnarounds that are kind and accepting of yourself.

Contaminated: I should be finishing up the laundry instead of playing with my child.
Clean:  I choose to spend this special time with my child and allow the chores to wait.

Contaminated:  I have to problem-solve this work project right away.
Clean:  I will work on this project when I get to work later today.

•  COMMIT Put playtime, joy, and delight on your to do list and make the time to do the things that create happiness.  Your joy doesn’t have to be a whole day of self-care or even an hour of quiet time.  Think sound bites not sonatas.  Joy might come while standing barefoot on the slightly browned, crunchy California’s-in-a-drought grass at the park while holding your sleepy baby.  Delight might be splurging on deliciously-scented hand soap so that each time you wash your hands (and how many times a day do you do that?) you take a tiny trip to a lavender field. 

When my children were little, I couldn’t remember what used to bring me joy, and if I did, there was no way that I could fit those BC (before children) happy activities into my AC (after children) life.  Running for miles and miles, reading, and lounging in bed on Sunday mornings no longer fit the mommy lifestyle (go figure.)  I had to create new ways to find joy within the parameters of motherhood.  In the beginning, finding a place to nap was at the top of the list. (FYI: The security guard at Hillsdale Mall will make you leave if you try to sleep in your car in a quiet corner of the parking garage.)  

Not sure what to commit to?  Here’s your homework: Start a Happy Basket.  Put a medium-sized basket, bag, or bucket in a conspicuous place in your home.  When you experience a happy moment - whether it’s an activity, person, place, or thing - drop an item in the bucket as a reminder.  For example, if your solo Saturday morning walk created a joyful peace that lasted for a good 20 minutes after you returned home, put your walking shoes in the bucket.  If you felt calm while finger painting with your child, add your artistic creation to the basket.  And if you connected with another mom at your toddler’s playdate, write her name on a slip of paper and drop it in the bag.  At the end of the week, make a list of what ended up in your Happy Basket.  Then, put one item from your list on your calendar for this week and do your darndest to make it happen - especially if it's a Happy Nap.

Need some help figuring out how to prioritize your happiness today despite your exhaustion and overwhelm?  Complete this form to schedule a free 30-minute Planning Session with me. We’ll figure out the key areas where you’re feeling stuck and work together to create your path for moving forward.  I mentor moms in person at my San Mateo office, over the phone, via Skype, and at my monthly Saturday Sanctuary mini-retreats so there are all sorts of ways that we can work together.  I have five Planning Session spots open in the next two weeks.  Apply for your free session now.

My niece and nephew weren’t happy with each other and it showed. I was at a family function years ago with my first son, still a toddler, and my sister’s children were fighting.  One child ended up scratching the other, on purpose, and they both ran crying to their mom.  As I sat next to my sister on the couch in my parents’ house, holding my toddler son on my lap, I asked my sister why she didn’t just set a rule for her kids of no violence.  

Looking back, I am amazed that my sister didn’t haul off and hit me.

I’ve learned something important since that family dinner more than 10 years ago: There are no rules when it comes to parenting.  

This, at times, can be exciting.  You can’t make a mistake if there are no rules.  There’s not just one way to diaper your baby, toilet train your toddler, or discipline your tween.  

But no rules can be no fun, especially if you’re like me and you happen to like rules.  As my parents would attest (along with my husband and anyone else who knows me), I do not like other people’s rules.  This is why I’m happily self-employed.  The rules that I’m referring to are the ones I’ve created, the ones that I’ve developed over a lifetime of accumulating self knowledge, discovering step-by-step what works best for me.  In my BC (before children) life, my personal rules added up to comforting cause and effect equations, like these:  

• When I get seven hours of solid sleep, I am productive and happy.
• When I spend quality time with my husband, our relationship feels deep and meaningful.
• When I see my girlfriends and family regularly, I feel connected.
• When I work on art projects regularly where I can dip into flow consciousness, then I feel peaceful, creative, and inspired.
• When I give myself lots of time to lose myself in a good book, I feel relaxed.

The moment that my first son was born, my cause and effect rules vanished in a bittersweet second.  I no longer got seven hours of sleep, even including the times I fell asleep by accident, like while nursing my son or riding in the car.  I had no quality time with my husband, family or friends.  Art projects?  Flow? Reading? Instead of enjoying my comfortable and predictable cause and effect life, I was faced with endless hypotheses that required regular testing.

When we put the baby down at 8:00 at night, he will sleep until 4:00.
Data does not support this hypothesis.  

When we put the baby down at 8:00 and dreamfeed at 11:00, he will sleep until 3:00.
Data does not support this hypothesis either.

When we put the baby down at 11:00 and dreamfeed at 1:00, then he’ll sleep until 3:00, be awake for at least an hour, go back to sleep at 4:00, wake at 6:00 and be done with sleep until he falls asleep for his nap, which will happen just before it’s time to leave the house for the co-op nursery school class that we’ve missed twice in the last month.
Sigh.

And on it goes.  Creating hypotheses, testing them, retesting.  Adjusting.  Testing some more.  And just when you think you’ve settled on a nice, predictable routine, the parameters change - teething starts, you go on vacation to visit family, your in-laws come to stay for a few weeks and the guest room is the baby’s room so the baby is back in bed with you and your husband - and you start all over from scratch.

A quote from Pema Chodron recently posted on Facebook states, “We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved.  They come together and they fall apart.  Then they come together again and fall apart again.  It’s just like that.  The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”  

Jill Bolte Taylor, author of My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, and a Harvard trained scientist, retrained her brain after a massive stroke at age 37.  She describes the chemical process of how our emotions rise and fall like a wave which lasts 90 seconds.  If we allow ourselves to truly notice, experience, and sink into what we really feel, the emotions go over us like a wave that crests and then recedes.  Sometimes the emotion rises again for another 90 seconds, allowing us to truly feel the hurt, disappointment, and pain before the emotion disappears.   Clean pain - the pain that comes from whatever it is that has hurt us - dissipates, leaving us feeling lighter and less burdened than before.

“We can all learn that we can take full responsibility for what thoughts we are thinking and what emotional circuitry we are feeling,” writes Taylor.  “Knowing this and acting on this can lead us into feeling a wonderful sense of well-being and peacefulness. Whether it is my fear circuitry or my anger circuitry or even my joy circuitry – it is really hard to hold a good belly laugh for more than 90 seconds naturally.  The 90-second rule is totally empowering. That means for 90 seconds, I can watch this happen, I can feel this happen and I can watch it go away. After that, if I continue to feel that fear or feel that anger, I need to look at the thoughts I am thinking that are re-stimulating that circuitry that is resulting in me having this physiology over and over again.”

What keeps us in the pit of despair, in the same room with resentment, and holding hands with unhappiness, are the stories that we make up about our emotions.  For example, feeling frustrated, you tell yourself that everyone else’s child is sleeping more than yours and convince yourself that you’re doing something wrong.  The stories we tell ourselves create dirty pain that stays with us.  If we can let go of our stories and get comfortable with our emotional discomfort - which rises and falls within us like a perfect wave - the way to peace becomes a lot more clear.

A dear mentoring client wrote me a brief but beautiful email this morning:

“My daughter woke up at 5:30 this morning and I settled her and immediately started getting worked up about how I wouldn't fall back asleep and I would be grumpy and the kids would be whiny and it would be a miserable day. I realized that I was telling myself a story and thought let’s just relax and see what happens. I went back to sleep for 45 minutes. Then today I washed the windows, did laundry, vacuumed the garage, had a friend of my daughter’s over for a play date and made dinner. I had a lot more energy than I usually do and just felt very motivated to be doing the things I was doing, not thinking too much about the next ten things on the list.  Not a bad day at all.”

So how do you shift from drowning in your storytelling to riding the 90-second wave?  Here are a few suggestions:

Grieve your clean pain.  Sometimes it’s not enough to replace a thought that’s not working for you with a more positive one.  That can be like slapping a happy face band-aid on a deep wound if you still have more grieving to do.  Can you identify loss that you haven’t been able to fully express?  It can be anything from the death of a beloved friend to the loss of your independence once you became a mother.

Soften your expectations of yourself.  You might have the thought that you shouldn’t be unhappy because you have everything you’ve ever wished for or the belief that feeling resentment towards your children means that you’re a bad mom.  Try to let go of these self judgments so that you can fully experience your deeper emotions.

Choose one unresolved clean pain situation and give yourself time to experience the wave of your emotions.  Your emotions may feel overwhelming and that’s okay.  Allow them to pass over you like a wave, give in, and watch the anger, grief, or fear recede.

Become aware of any dirty pain story that you are creating which will prolong your discomfort.   Dirty pain can show up in thoughts like, “I’m such a bad mom,”  “I’m never going to get another job,” or “It’s going to be this exhausting forever.”  Notice that what you’re telling yourself is just a story and step away from it.

Our brains are constantly searching for evidence to support our thoughts.  Try it.  If your thought is that the world sucks, I’m sure you can come up with a dozen or more examples of how that thought is completely true.  In the same way, if your thought is more positive and supportive, you can gather ample evidence to back up that belief, too.  For example, if your thought is “My life is blessed,” what comes up?  For me, it’s healthy kids, a roof over our heads that only sometimes leaks, grandparents who are excited about taking the kids for a couple of overnights this month, to name just a few.  Happy or sad?  Peaceful or pissed?  Really, the choice is yours.

Come join me for Saturday Sanctuary for Moms on July 12th. Together we'll find ways to let go of the thoughts that are creating dirty pain and find 90-second windows that will open the way to peace. Spend a few hours with me and head home happier.

At a family day-trip to a local lake over the weekend, I listened in on a mom's conversation with her four year old daughter. The mom was admiring the girl's flat, smooth tummy and the girl asked, "Do you have a pretty tummy too, Mommy?" And in the heartbeat of the moment between the girl's question and the mother's joking but negative answer, my heart broke a little. Because I could predict what the mom's answer would be.  We probably all know the mom's answer because - if we were raised in this culture - it's most likely how we feel about our own bodies.

I do not like the way my body looks. What I see in the mirror doesn't live up to my expectations. Saggy belly. Lumpy, veiny legs. Skin that makes me sigh sadly.  And each time I evaluate my physical self against a standard set by a culture that does not love women's bodies (how can it when the standard of beauty is one that even most 17 year olds can't achieve?) I push away the part of me that holds my intuitive power.

I like to think of my intuition as an inner guide that helps me navigate my way to a happy, love-filled life.  When I make a wrong step - like working on a self-imposed deadline when I want to be enjoying time with my family - my inner guide lets me know with subtle clues: my throat gets tight and feels funny and my shoulders ache.  Your very own inner guide nudges you back on the right path in its special way, maybe with tummy aches, headaches, or tension in various muscles throughout your body.

Most of the time, your inner wisdom uses a kind of sign language, communicating through sensations and physical responses and even discomfort. If you're really lucky, sometimes you'll hear the quiet, "inside voice" of your inner guide as she quietly says, "Take this class," and during the first hour you meet your best friend for life. You feel an irrational excitement to look at one more listing online and there you find the home of your dreams. You notice the hair rising on the back of your neck and scurry through the dark parking garage to the safety of your car.  You're inexplicably drawn out of bed in the middle of the night to check on your child and he's flushed with fever.  Your inner guide leads to you what's truly important to your essential self: health, happiness, safety, love.

During the winter and spring, I hear my intuition much more clearly because I'm all buttoned up and layered up, enjoying my body for what it does and not for how it looks.  But once the weather starts getting warmer, it gets more difficult to tune into my intuition's subtle cues because I'm critiquing, criticizing, and disliking my body, the place my inner guide calls home.

You can't have both. You can't live in a body that you deny and despair over and still be able to tune in fully to the wisdom of your inner guide. And in that disconnect between what you want and what is, between your body and your soul, between your inner critic and your inner guide, the deep communication from your intuition is lost.

For most of us most of the time, the voice that we hear isn't the gentle inner guide, but the critical, harsh voice of our outer social self, the one that constantly compares how we're doing and how we look against the rest of the world.  Our critic lets us know in no uncertain terms that we're somehow falling short.

It's time to transform the hours that we spend dieting and disparaging and denying our bodies into a quiet, personal revolution. It's time to take back our bodies and begin to listen again to the cues that guide us on our winding path towards joy. The joy that comes when you take off your shoes and play in the grass with your kids. The joy that you feel when you give yourself an extra moment before dinner to be grateful for the health of your family. The delicious joy that you experience in your body when you stand and stretch and your inner guide says, "Yes. Welcome home."

Come join me for my first Saturday Sanctuary for Moms on June 14. Together we'll begin our own personal revolution by creating an intimate community with other moms and by learning ways to start listening again to that deep inner wisdom that will guide you to joy, and peace, and satisfaction. Come spend a few hours with me and head home happier.

I'm probably one of the last moms to read Glennon Doyle Melton's book, Carry On Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life.  Around the book’s first birthday, I finally picked it up.  Glennon writes with wit, wisdom, and honesty about parenting, relationships, and family.  But what I noticed when I immersed myself into her words is that her worldview is very different than my own.  Throughout her writing, she gives examples of how life is hard and “brutiful,” her word that describes a messy link between brutal and beautiful.

If we go looking for hard and brutiful examples in life, we’ll have no trouble finding them.  This culture values difficult.  We’re rewarded for working long hours.  We one-up each other on how little sleep we’re getting.  The evening news and the internet are filled with horror stories. There’s even a dinner party game where each person tells their worst story of hardship and despair and the one with the saddest story gets a free meal, sort of like a modern day equivalent of Queen for a Day.  We’re suspicious of easy, like it’s cheating by taking the shortcut to the finish line.

I know that life presents us with many challenges.  It can suck us down into a dark rabbit hole where we feel lost, alone, and clueless of how to find our way back into the light.  I know this because I’ve been there.

My Friend, Not My Enemy
When my son was three and a half, he started having temper tantrums.  At the time, the book Raising Your Spirited Child was my bible.  In the book, author Mary Sheedy Kurcinka writes that spirited children have difficulty self soothing.  And so, when my boy would begin a tantrum, I'd pick him up, go to the bedroom, close the door, and sit on the floor with my back against the door, to be present to help him calm down.  I tried to stay peaceful and relaxed with my son, but my inner reality was far, far away from that place.  The tantrums left me feeling angry, resentful, and trapped.

I read a lot of books - because this is what I do when I don’t know what to do -  and I bookmarked a list in Louise Bates Ames, PhD’s book Your Three Year Old: Friend or Enemy about what to do/not do with your three and a half year old.  My favorite suggestion was ...

                       Avoid the feeling that routines should always go smoothly if only
                        you do the right thing.  There may be much daily conflict.

I took this as permission from Louise Bates Ames, PhD, to surrender.  I still sat on the floor, against the door, in the room with my son.  But I sat there by choice not because I believed I was supposed to.  I stopped trying to control the situation.  Nothing else looked different on the outside but I felt very different on the inside.  I felt patient, loving, unwavering.  I created a safe place for my son to work through his emotions the only way that his three and a half year old self knew how.  

In surrendering, I gave myself permission to let it be easy.

And my son collapsed against me, safe, soggy, and tired and ready to move on.

Manifesting Easy
This is what is at the heart of my coaching for moms: Letting it be easy.  To let go of trying to satisfy your insatiable, unrealistic, and unachievable expectations of yourself.  To figure out how to stop trying to please everybody - it’s impossible, believe me, I’ve tried.  I help you find the signed permission slip that lets you say “No, thank you” in the nicest possible way to the extracurricular activities that don’t serve your soul.  I give you ideas, advice, and proven ways to stop the roller coaster and head home to the peace that lives within the madness and miracles of motherhood.  

If you believe that life is hard, it will be.  And if you believe that it’s easy, that’s what you’ll get.  I’m not saying you won’t have a care in the world.  But you will discover the energy and room in your life to say yes to what you want and then make the map to get there.  This is the journey to Easy Street, my life coaching program for moms.  The door’s open. You getting in? 

Start your journey at www.touchbluesky.com/easy-street.html

It's my last dance with my 40's tonight; I turn 50 years old in just a few hours.  Coincidentally, today was Flashback Friday in dance class with the talented Patti Stetson Michelsen playing tunes from the 1970's.  In the mix was a song that I did a dance routine to back in 1978.  As I danced to the song today, I realized that I really don't feel all that different than I did 36 years ago (well, a little more jiggly in places and a bit more wise.)  That curious, awkward, eager girl, she's still here.

As a treat for you, here's the song that I danced to at 14 and again today.  Play it full blast and see if your inner 14 year old will dance along.

I was a little late to Cardio Dance Aerobics class on Friday. I hit every red light getting there from my coffee date with Bill and then ugh ... I had to pee. When I finally arrived, put my bag and water bottle down along the wall, someone had claimed my regular spot where I usually dance. On the side, next to the wall.  It's not my official spot but people in the class choose where they feel most comfortable and their place stays pretty much the same week to week.  There was nowhere else to go but to the middle of the room.

I like being on the fringes. It's easier to blend in when I'm on the periphery.  I feel most comfortable tucked ever so slightly out of sight.

On Friday I wasn't in my comfort zone. Having to dance right in the middle of everyone is a tough place for me. I had to be a lot more aware of what I was doing, of how much space there was around me, of where the other women were moving. I felt more obvious, every little mistake magnified. I couldn't disappear.

But halfway through class, I noticed that I had a lot more energy than usual. The women on either side of me and in front of me were working hard and so I pushed myself just a little bit more to keep up. I was much more in the present moment than usual because of my heightened awareness of where I was dancing in relationship to the people around me. I couldn't disappear into my thoughts like I normally do during class when I'm problem-solving whatever dilemma is at the forefront of my mind. Despite starting off where I didn't want to be, I enjoyed the best workout that I ever had in this class.

During cool down, instructor Patti Stetson-Michaelson played the song We Ride by Missy Higgins, a slow, pretty song we've been ending the class with for weeks. We Ride begins with the lyrics "Suddenly I feel anything is possible" and Patti played the song all the way through and then a second time, commenting, "This is how we should start every morning, telling ourselves that anything is possible. Right, Kathleen?"

I was called out in the middle of the room, in the middle of an epiphany: Anything is possible as long as you are in the middle of it all.  But standing safe and unchallenged on the sidelines, I miss out.  I don’t push myself.  I get lost in my thoughts a lot of the time.  I'm unaware of the energy of the people around me.  I make sure to stay out of the way.

Missy Higgins sings:
We are sparkles in the desert, we're rainbows in the night.
We are ever-changing shadows who've just been set alight.

To sparkle and shine, I can't play small along the edge of my life anymore. I must be big and brave - and undeniably present - in the very center of my life.  To be in the middle of my day-to-day life means sharing instead of disappearing.  Sharing my small successes on Facebook instead of keeping the news safe and private.  Requesting advice from a favorite mentor who I haven’t seen in a while.  Volunteering my expertise generously and unabashedly.  Asking again for testimonials from coaching clients.  Confiding my own messy challenges with motherhood when I’m giving presentations to other moms.  Having the courage to let go of the outer shell of perfectionism for the tender authenticity underneath.  None of these changes may seem big and brave to you, but they are giant steps for me after a lifetime of playing small on the sidelines.  

Missy Higgins’ song reminded me of a barely remembered quote from Clarissa Pinkola-Estes and so I went searching to find it:

                     “One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a
                    stormy world is to stand up and show your soul.  Soul on deck shines like gold
                    in dark times.  The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds
                    signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire.  To display the lanterns of soul
                    in shadowy times like these - to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both,
                    are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.  Struggling souls catch light
                    from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.  If you would help to calm
                    the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.”

I'm not going to shy away from standing in the middle of it all anymore.  I will show my soul.  For coaching clients.  In massage sessions.  For my family and friends.  With strangers.  In dance class. 

A new semester of my Classic Cardio Dance class begins the week of March 16th.  It's an hour long, easy to follow, booty shaking workout led by dancer Patti Stetson-Michelsen that incorporates hip hop, jazz dance, and a little bit of whatever else inspires Patti to dance. Patti teaches Classic Cardio Dance at 10:05 on Mondays and Fridays at the Beresford Rec Center in San Mateo.  Childcare is available, too, for a small additional fee.  Go here and enter class code 61168 for Monday's class and code 61169 for the class on Fridays. 

If you join the Friday class, find me to say hello. I'll be the one in the middle.


Kathleen Harper is a life coach for mommies.  She helps moms find what makes them shine so that they can illuminate their lives with more ease, more joy, and more fun.  For details, visit touchbluesky.com/life-coaching, send an email to [email protected], or call 650-222-6538.  Find Kathleen on Facebook.