God's Gym

In graduate school I had the space to write, read, and to fall in love.  Love came fast and furiously with Junot Diaz's Drown, his debut offering of short stories that gave me permission to write the rhythms of my neighborhoods in Los Angeles that were not all lush, honey-colored beaches and swaying in the breeze palm trees.  I rekindled an affair with Toni Morrison,  J.D. Salinger, and AndreDubus, Jr.  It was a time of quiet reflection and a shifting into something unknown until I met John Edgar Wideman's ducking and jabbing Mama from his collection of short stories, God's Gym.  In Wideman's story titled Weight, this Mama rocked my quiet world of contemplation and continues to do so.  The family Wideman's Mama inherited needs prayer, love, and understanding, but most of all, they need the woman at the helm to be in fighting-ready condition to deal with the life she has been given. Wideman writes:

 "My mother is a weightlifter.... Not barbells or dumbbells ... The weights she lifts are burdens−her children's, her neighbors, yours." 

Before I found Wideman's fierce and ready to deal mother, I tended to only don my spiritual armor in times of trouble but mostly came up short because my spiritual body was weak and out of shape.  No matter how much thoughtful contemplation I give my trials, no matter how many pleas I made to the Universe, I still felt defeated and unsure.  

The practice of love, forgiveness, faith, and patience is just that− a practice.  The day-to-day stretching and pumping of spiritual iron makes it easier to step into the ring with our wounds, doubts, feelings of unworthiness, victimhood, and fear.  The practice of hitting God's gym daily, hourly, and especially when times are good and the going is easy, builds the muscles needed to look uncertainty square in the face.

On my bathroom mirror is a bright, yellow post-it with the words "Choose Love" written with a thick, black Sharpie.  I wanted it to stand out because I need to be reminded that love is a practice.  Each in-the-moment decision to choose love strengthens my love muscles.  Prayer and time spent on my meditation pillow is time well spent in my spiritual gym, but it is not enough.  I then have to build on that practice by offering up a parking space in the Wawa parking lot when I see a hurried somebody eager to cut me off, and practice patience when my beautiful eleven year old boy rolls his eyes because I tell him to brush his teeth. 

The minute-by-minute practice of consciously choosing within the thousands of choices presented to me each day strengthens my ability to choose love, faith, forgiveness, and patience in both times of trouble and when the going is as easy as the palm trees of my childhood swaying softly in the warmth of a California breeze.    

Have a Dream? Let Your Body Lead the Way

Photo by A.Edmonds

As a life coach, I am privileged to be in a position to hear the dreams of others.  I am privy to the most inspiring, bright and beautiful places men and women want to move in their lives.  I also often hear this phrase, "I don't know what's blocking me." 

In some cases I hear clients tell me that they know they are supposed to be doing something more meaningful, but they are not sure what form that meaning should take in their lives.   

How can we move from sensing into fully knowing?  What prevents us from being able to move our dreams from the body into the light of the world?  In short, how do we get clear, get unstuck, and get moving?

The answer to these questions is simple but not easy.  The body holds the answers.  Our emotions and bodily discomforts give us clues to why those dreams lay dormant. 

When I was in my early 20s, I spent 30 days in the hospital for an eating disorder.  I was diagnosed with anorexia and bulimia, a deadly combination that threatened my life.  While I learned tools to deal with my disorder, it wasn't until I was pregnant with my first child did the lessons my body was trying to teach me through the gift of that dis-order come into view. 

Because of the love I had for the growing child in my body, I gave myself the space to examine my actions when I wanted to restrict myself from eating, or when I had the impulse to overeat and then use exercise to purge.  What I discovered was that I had developed those behaviors when I was a child in order to protect myself.  I turned to food when I was frightened as a little girl.  Toasted bread with butter protected me when Daddy was hurting Mommy.  I, in turn, began to purge when my appearance was not pleasing to my mother.  I ran and ran and ran to make the food inside of me go away.  I did this in my marriage as well.  I ran and ran and ran when I felt I was unpleasing to my husband, when I felt him stray from our marriage.  That scared and wanting to please eight year old was still controlling my life.  Every time I was frightened or felt unloved, I returned to my little girl way of coping.  One simple question shifted my behavior.

What is the most loving thing that the adult Stephanie can do in this moment? 

That questions shifted me away from solving problems as a child into the clarity, wisdom and mature love of the adult woman I had become.  It also opened me up to my dreams.  I sometimes had to comfort that little girl inside of me.  "It's okay," I told her when I felt resistance to a new way of confronting problems.  I could now take that little girl by the hand and guide her right into my deepest dreams and desires without fear because the adult Stephanie was now leading the way.

It takes practice to catch ourselves when old behaviors arise.   The practice of placing our attention on the body, to notice any discomfort, pain or emotion will open us to an awareness of the wisdom of our emotional landscape.  When we ask ourselves, "What is this emotion, behavior or pain teaching me?" the answer can liberate us to move forward.

This work is not new.  Many mental health practitioners use inner child work in their practices, which harkens to Carl Jung's Divine Child Archetype.  The work of  Dr. Doris E. Cohen has informed my coaching practice and deepened my own healing.  Her book Repetition holds valuable exercises to help us heal our childhood hurts, empower our adult selves, and with clarity, take the actions necessary to boldly and fearlessly step into our dreams. 

The Practice of Forgiving

 My father and I circa 1966

"Your daddy's grandmother was a full blooded Indian." 

This is what my beautiful great-aunt, a woman I had not seen in 30 years, told me when I visited her in Mississippi two years ago.  It was a homecoming of sorts and the bittersweet end to my journey to find my father.  My mother, two sisters, and I escaped his alcoholic terror when I was 12 years old.  At the time, I was relieved.  At the time, I never thought I would leave my own family to scour the streets of an unknown state and city to find a man who caused me such pain.  

After my great-aunt and I cried, embraced and got reacquainted, she shared the pictures that she, on arthritic knees, had climbed into her attic to find.  I saw myself as a girl, I saw myself as a baby being loved my father, and I saw my great grandmother. When I looked at the petite, red clay skinned women with dark flowing hair, I felt her strength, resilience and hope.  I have been exploring my Native American roots since that visit.  The Choctaw Nation is on both my mother's side, and resides within my paternal great-grandmother.  

In the Native American tradition of old, a woman determines if a man stays in the home, even if that man built the physical house.  A woman decides whether a man is worthy to be in her company and in the company of their children.  A man expelled from the home must provide a daily offering of food until he is either invited back, or another man takes his place.  This tradition of graciously and generously yielding to a woman's wishes did not reside within my father even though Native American blood flowed through him.  It did not reside within my ex-husband either.  

I forgave my father, but I could not fully forgive my ex-husband.  While I had wonderful moments of forgiving and healing during the first year of our divorce, I still continue to struggle.  Holding on to my anger and feelings of betrayal, I noticed that I began to feel drained, powerless, and victimized.  Just as I had chosen to forgive my father, I chose to continue the forgiving process with my ex-husband.  With the help of Debbie Ford's seminal book, Spiritual Divorce, I continue to forgive and to heal.  I repeated the exercise from Debbie's book and like magic, my ill-feelings clear.  You can do it, too:

• Write down your version of the events fully with all the hurt and emotion present.  Don't hold back or try to be kind or understanding.  Let your raw emotions flow.

• Write down the other person's version.  Imagine all of their hurt and emotion.  Let yourself indulge in their feelings by fully stepping into their shoes.

• Write down a neutral version with just the facts. 

When you are done, you can create a ritual of release.  You can burn the three versions, bury them, or shred them into confetti and release them into the wind.  Choose something that is meaningful to you to achieve a full sense of letting go.

Taking the time to do this ritual again helped me to discover that forgiving is continuous.  It is a daily practice like any other in my life.  When I wake, I can choose to forgive myself and others for any acts that I may have deemed harmful.  What I also discovered, as I wear the spirit of my great-grandmother, is that I, too, can practice as my ancestors did.  I can stand in the power that I get to decide who comes into my physical, spiritual and emotional house.

Waiting to Exhale

Angela Bassett

Remember the scene from the movie Waiting to Exhale when one of the characters, played by Angela Bassett, ceremoniously burned all of her soon-to-be ex-husband's processions? That iconic moment gave women a reason to cheer.  Angela Bassett's character in the movie, based on Terry McMillan's popular book of the same name, was reclaiming her power.  However dramatic, within that moment she snatched back what she had willingly given away.

The radical and perhaps uncomfortable truth is that when people treat us poorly, we are co-creators of that poor treatment.  Eleanor Roosevelt famously said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."  Our consenting to giving our power away general starts in childhood when we adapt to the constructs of the authority figures in our lives.  As children, it is natural and often necessary to adhere to the rules of love and punishment our authority figures, in their own best way, structured for us.  If we were loved for being smart, we strove to get all As.  If we were loved for being of service, we served irregardless of our individual needs.  If we were loved for controlling our emotions, we trained ourselves never to visit our emotional landscapes.  Many of us continue to carry these ideals of love and punishment into adulthood even though those ideals no longer serve us.  Absent the physical authority figure, we often re-create the same standards of love from our childhood and even punish ourselves through toxic relationships, drink, drug, food, sex, shopping, people-pleasing and a host of other ways when we fall short. 

Being a former woman waiting to exhale, I now understand that giving my power away to another in order to receive love no longer serves me.  Missing in our culture is the simple study of loving the self.  I tell my youngest son when he makes a "mistake" to forgive himself, love himself and to be grateful for whatever lesson that "mistake" taught him.  What we may call "mistakes" or "failures" can be re-framed as gifts and learning opportunities if we train our minds to view them as such.  


When we love the self, we can finally let go of our childhood beliefs about receiving love because we understand that the true source of love is within us.  That spark of the Divine that resides in each of us is a wellspring that we often fail to tap.  

If you do find yourself standing in that place of giving your power away, know that you can forgive yourself, love yourself, and have gratitude for the lesson learned.  What is even more powerful, you don't have to burn the car.  More on forgiving others as a means of empowering ourselves in the next post.