A Heart Full of February

Fellow Travelers,

My personal February project is wearing hearts every day. Yesterday I decided that’d be fun.
It’s already becoming more than fun. The jewelry I wear acts as a talisman for what’s meaningful to me and being constantly reminded of my heart, your heart, the heart of the matter, the heart of the world, is connecting me with more.

I need reminders that LIFE is ever so much more than I have the power to understand or see and that, if I am to live at peace and, one day, leave my body at peace, I must remember that:

I might be wrong.
I don’t know much. Much of what I thought I knew has turned out to be tunnel vision.
I can’t change anyone else. It’s not my job to do that.
Shaming others destroys their spirit — and mine.
Listening, being a witness to another, changes the speaker and the listener.
And
A heart-broken open won’t kill me.
A hardened heart will.

Let’s all go in love, just today.

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More on NO

That’s a sentence.

I post on this topic often and there’s a reason for that. It’s because the problem is persistent and pervasive. Consider with me, one more time, the NO struggle:

It is NOT rude to say no when asked or expected to do something. Not rude to say it to the kids, the grand kids, friends, family, or any of your social and familial connections.

If your “no” is ignored, it is not rude if you keep right on your merry way and let the people who wouldn’t hear your “no” live with THEIR consequences of ignoring your word. They are the rude ones. The consequences are theirs.

If you give in to their pressure, accept that they will never hear you or take you seriously. It’ll never happen. Trust me on this. (That pressure is subtle bullying, by the way. Really, it is.)

If you are too often doing things you didn’t plan to do, things you don’t even want to do, because someone taught you that you had to please everybody or you might hurt somebody’s feelings if you told them “no” then YOU, my friend, are the one who’s ignoring your “no.”

You are ignoring you.

Your Life, this one precious Life you get, is being lived by others.

Not by you.

And it’s happening with your permission.

Are you okay with that?

True Abundance

True abundance isn’t a substance that can be banked; there is nothing of “grabbing and snatching and stashing” that relates to Life’s wealth.

Nope, real abundance is experiential; it is fully experiencing one’s own Life, however it happens to unfold. It is active. It is born of allowing ourselves to stay with what is showing up: the expansive moments and the tight emotional spaces that are claustrophobic, the exhilaration and the sorrow, the generous and the miserly gestures, the tension and the release.

Abundance is waking up with the realization that an intention has become tangible with substance as solid as the mountain that has finally been tunneled through. It’s knowing that a decision has arrived under its own steam, driven by forces we can’t touch but can sense in ourselves and others, decisions not determined on the game board of LIFE with only winners or losers.

Abundance is hearing the train leaving the station and getting on board with a ticket stamped “Trust the process.”

Let’s ride.

~~~jaylenewhitehurst

“I’m here. I’m listening.” That’s enough.

Dear Hearts,

If you reply with “Yes, but…” or “But, at least…” when a friend brings a slice of her precious Life to you, you’re not listening.

No. No, you’re not.

You may be trying to help, which you’re also not, by the way. You may be uncomfortable with where your friend is and so you offer distraction. You may have been taught (directly or indirectly) that it’s your job to remind others of what YOU see as their reality or to encourage them or to relieve their roiling emotions—as if you could even be that powerful. As if there’s something wrong with their feelings. As if there is something wrong with them.

Notice. All of that is about YOU. Good ole well-meaning YOU, with the desire to help so hard-wired into your system that you spring into action like a rescue dog after a drowning soul, before you even realize what you’re doing. Good ole well-meaning YOU, who wonders why the eyes of your friends glaze over when what you’ve said was meant to be nothing but helpful. Good ole well-meaning YOU, who wonders why people sometimes pull back from you when they’re hurting.

It might not be their hurt that’s distancing them. It just might be YOUR inability to let them hurt and simply be present as a witness to their wounds.

What looks like a breaking down to you may well be your friend breaking open.

I can get away with all this finger-pointing “YOU” language because I am YOU, too. Thanks to the hard work I have done over the long haul in psychotherapy and study and making of art, my role of being too helpful is manageable, compared to what it was decades ago, and still the doggone thing pops up. And Dear Hearts, I’ve been at this for decades.

It’s a stubborn role and it doesn’t go down easily.

I know that role of trying so hard to help, pointing out what seemed obvious to me, that I cut people off.

I couldn’t hear the groaning of the hearts of others, so deeply uncomfortable was I with the groaning of my own heart.

If I take the risk and allow myself to shut up and lean into the pain of another person and listen, heart to heart, I am going to hear my own honest emotions, along with those of the other, and I won’t be able to deny any of it.

It’ll be out in the open and I’ll have to decide what to do with it. Oh, mercy. I’ll have to take responsibility for managing those emotions and some of them will feel like a tsunami headed straight for me!

I can’t tell you how to do that responsibility thing with your emotions. Your path is yours and it won’t look like mine, nor should it.

The one thing that’s worth passing along is that it took actively wanting to respond differently to others, and I very much did want that. I longed for relationships that were at least lake-deep, instead of the puddle-deep things I’d had.

As I set my heart on having relationships of depth, the healing path with kindred hearts and opportunities opened before me. No farther than I could see in the moment, but it was there and it was enough.

It has led me to ocean-deep relationships, where saying, “I’m here. I’m listening,” is more than enough and it all started with actively wanting more and recognizing that “Yes, but…” was a cut-off to honest connection with others.

 

~~~jaylenewhitehurst

The Ragged Phoenix

Do not tell me what you believe.

Do not tell me about what you believe.
Show me what you’ve experienced
And if you can let go of what you thought you knew
Without beating up yourself or others.
Can you can untether your doctrines and creeds
And risk bloody knees and scraped knuckles
When you see the Light flickering between the trees
Across the distance?
Are you ready to
Strike out in the dim twilight,
Knowing that solid night lies ahead
Under a new moon?
Will you stay with the darkness long enough to emerge into the Light
And meet me there?
~~~jaylene whitehurst

A very few words on staying in trouble…

 

Misery is trying to please everybody.

This is my shortest blog ever, but there’s nothing else to say:

Trying to please everybody will endear you to nobody and keep you in trouble with somebody all the time.

Either you’ll be miserable most of the time or you’ll create misery in the lives of those you love, or —more likely—both.

Misery all around. Is that really what you wanted?

~~~jaylene

The Way Out

Dear Ones,
Are you paying for someone else’s Life dilemma with your own precious dreams?
It is their bill. You can give up every dream you have and it still will not be enough to bail them out. It is their work to do. You are not loving them by taking their work away from them. You are only giving yourself the illusion of relief, but it’s a relief that won’t last. It’ll dig a deeper debt, generation upon generation.
Get on with your Life. Invest in your deepest passion. Pour your energy into what is meaningful to you.
Do it not to show them how it’s done (though that might happen) but in trust that what you offer to the world matters to others, too. Someone else out there connects with what you bring to a hurting world.
Who knows? As you follow the path of your dreams, you might accidentally show someone else the way out, too.
Walk with Light,
~~~jmw

ASK

 

I have learned that what I ask for never shows up in the way I think it should.
I have learned not to let that minor point keep me from asking.

~~~jaylene
The Ragged Phoenix

Merry Mandala!!!!

May we live the cycle of embracing the darkness and being pulled toward the light.

The celebration of Christmas isn’t over for me. There’ve been years I feel a let down on the 26th, but not the past few years. Rather than the end, this feels like a beginning. Every Christmas, every Winter Solstice, every turning of the dark season toward the light, is more an opening to continue expressing the light than an ending of anything. I no longer rush to take down my little tree. It is no longer a chore but an unfolding, a changing of the environment gradually.
It is a relief to let it be beautiful a while longer. To know it will be tucked away when the time is right for me. To know it is all a process of Love.
Whatever, however, you celebrate this season, may you linger in the warmth.
May we carry it forth. May we be changed.

Abundancing!

True abundance isn’t a substance that can be banked; there is nothing of “grabbing and snatching and stashing” that relates to Life’s wealth.
Nope, real abundance is experiential; it is fully experiencing one’s own Life; it is active.
Right now I’m inventing the term “abundance” as a verb.
I abundance.
You abundance.
He, she, it abundances.
It is born of allowing ourselves to stay with what is showing up: The expansive moments and the tight emotional spaces that are claustrophobic, the exhilaration and the sorrow, the generous and the miserly gestures, the tension and the release.
Abundancing is waking up with the realization that an intention has become tangible with substance as solid as the mountain that has finally been tunneled through. It’s knowing that a decision has arrived under it’s own steam rather than been determined by analysis, as if Life were a game and decisions toted up in won/loss columns.
Abundancing is hearing the train leaving the station and getting on board with a ticket stamped “Trust the process.”
Let’s ride.
Let the abundancing commence.

Sometimes it feels like a mess. Sometimes it feels glorious. Trust the process.