Introverts and Holidays

   This year I got three invitations to Thanksgiving dinner. Although I turned down two of them, I got a good dose of warm fuzzies over being a wanted guest at three tables. The invitation I accepted was to a small gathering.  A couple days later, the friend who was hosting dinner called to let me know she’d invited a couple more people. This caused me to rethink whether or not I was going to attend. When I told to my friend how I was feeling about the extra humans, she responded with “Well it’s the holidays.”

     Yes, the holidays tend to be a very social couple months. While social gatherings do tend to be seasonal, being an introvert is not. Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve is filled with group dinners, parties and large social gatherings. This is enough to make any introvert cringe a bit. (If I was in charge, starting January 1 I’d give all the introverts a week off to recover.)

     I often refer to myself as socially disabled. Now it’s a joke rooted in my acceptance of myself as an introvert. A few years ago it more self-deprecation based on feeling my social awkwardness was a flaw. Then I read The Introvert Advantage. That book enabled me to begin shifting my relationship with my introversion.  

    From The Introvert Advantage, I learned that introversion and extroversion have a physiological basis. It’s something we’re born with, not something we chose. When I viewed my social ineptness as a flaw, I went into social gathering with an inner dialogue about needing to be outgoing. Rather than understanding and paying attention to my needs, I was trying to make myself into an extrovert. It didn’t work. What I really needed was to become a more conscious introvert.

   The Introvert Advantage gave me the tools begin doing that. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that being a more conscious introvert allows me to develop better extrovert skills. The book also has some great information on how extroverts function and what they need. That was an eye opener for me too. Before reading it, I didn’t understand why my extrovert friends needed to be so busy all the time. Now I get it.

    The brains of introverts and extrovert process and respond to stimuli differently. Extroverts are energized by external stimuli. They need social gatherings filled with people, noise and activity to recharge. In an extrovert’s brain, the stimuli spread out. So the brain is shallowly stimulated across a broad area.

    Introverts feel energized by interacting with their internal world. They need quiet and alone time to recharge. In an introvert’s brain, external stimuli activate smaller areas at a deeper level.

      In large social gatherings with lots of stimuli, introverts go into overload. What seems like a small dinner party to an extrovert can feel huge to an introvert. Extroverts can easily handle lots of people. For an introvert any group larger two can feel big.

   Because of the way their brains process stimuli, extroverts can comfortably navigate group conversations or parties with multiple discussions going on at the same time. For an introvert this situation is like trying to run an obstacle course in a packed sports arena during an NBA game. It’s not instinctive, obvious or easy. (Actually if the introvert went on instinct, she’d run out the door!)

   For years I’d wondered why social situations made me tired. Even if I had a great time, I’d come home exhausted. From The Introvert Advantage, I learned that interaction is draining for introverts. Understanding that social interaction is draining for an introvert allowed me to start planning in the recovery time I needed afterwards. When I know what I need to recharge, it’s easier to say “yes” to group activities. It’s also easier for me to recognize when I’ve reached my social limit and say “no.”

   During the holiday season when the social gatherings are more frequent, my taking care of me skills get challenged. The ideal for me is one social thing a week, at most, with lots of time to write, draw and not interact. That’s not always possible. So I have to get more creative to stay out of that grumpy place where I don’t want to talk to anyone, no matter how much I like them. If I can’t get a day to myself, I can usually get an hour or two to read or play a game on the computer. If that doesn’t work, I grab my ear buds, close my eyes and listen to music for half an hour. Some other things I use to recharge include watching a movie, taking a walk, daydreaming and doing absolutely nothing.

   When I don’t have time to completely recharge between social occasions, I find myself getting overloaded more easily. Feeling overloaded means I need to start taking breaks. Even at a dinner party I can step away from interacting. I can help do the dishes, step outside or just observe. Giving myself permission to just be quiet helps enormously.

    In group conversations I usually find myself still thinking about what someone said after the discussion has moved on to another topic. Other people seem to have an innate sense of how to follow those ongoing shifts. The timing baffles me. When I have something to say, I’m often not sure how to join the discussion because there doesn’t seem to be any opening. If I give myself permission to be quiet, I can watch and enjoy what’s happening without the pressure to interact.

     Another strategy I picked up from The Introvert Advantage is to find the other introvert in the room and start a conversation with him or her. At parties I look for the person who seems as baffled as I feel, is sitting alone quietly or playing with the cat. Actually if I can’t find another introvert, I’m likely to be the one playing with the cat.

    Starting conversations a stranger isn’t comfortable for me, but I’m pretty good with people one-on-one. That’s typical for introverts. I often start the conversation with something like, “Tough room for introverts, huh?” It’s a great way for me to learn how other introverts deal with parties.

     I’m getting on a plane in a couple days to go visit my family on North Captiva Island for the holidays. I’m looking forward to seeing my family. Since I know I’m in for a very social week, I’m packing things I need to make little introvert breaks for myself:  books, sketchbook and my IPod. I’ve got a beach to walk on too. It’s good for me to push my introvert comfort zone and practice my extrovert skills.  

   I also know I’ll come home feeling done with interacting. I’m giving myself at least a couple days to just be at home…the two friends who invited me to a New Year’s Eve parties got a “maybe.”

Demystifying "psychic"

     One of the most common questions people ask when they first meet someone is “What do you do?” For me those conversations usually go something like this:

            “So what do you do?”

            “I’m a shamanic healer.”

            Pause.

            “Oh.”

     The meaning of “oh” varies according to the length of the pause and the tone of voice. It usually conveys disbelief, curiosity, recognition or awe. Curiosity and recognition are fun. They can lead to some great conversations.

    The disbelief/incredulous “oh” usually follows an awkward pause. Two minutes ago I seemed like an intelligent, rational woman. Now I’ve become something else. No one reasonable believes in that “woo-woo” stuff so I must be crazy or full of crap.

   I am most uncomfortable with the awe filled “oh.” With that one little word, I’ve gone from being just another person to being mysterious, extra spiritual and maybe a little intimidating. I’m not any of those things.  I don’t want to be anybody’s guru. I’m not magic. I’m not an oracle. I’m just me. A question that often accompanies this “oh” is whether or not I’m psychic. My standard reply is, “Yes and so are you.”

    The meaning of the word psychic has been obscured by overuse, miss use and projections fueled by misunderstanding. Many people associate psychic with fortune telling and the ability to see the future. A person who can see future possibilities is a clairvoyant. Clairvoyants are a type of psychic, the same way your bicep is a type of muscle.

    Dictionary.com defines psychic as:       

            1. of or pertaining to the human soul or mind; mental (opposed to physical ).

2. Psychology . pertaining to or noting mental phenomena.

3. outside of natural or scientific knowledge; spiritual.

4. of or pertaining to some apparently nonphysical force or agency: psychic research; psychic 

    phenomena.

5. sensitive to influences or forces of a nonphysical or supernatural nature.

     Nothing in those five definitions is mysterious or applicable only to certain people. We interact with nonphysical forces every day. To varying degrees, we are sensitive to those forces. The most basic example of a nonphysical force is emotion. Our sensitivity to our own feelings and the emotions of others is the basis of our capacity for compassion.

    We’re all born with both physical and non-physical senses. We all have intuition. Being psychic is as much as part of being human as being able to smell bread baking, hear music or see the color blue. As with any other innate ability, people’s gifts vary in degree and the way they manifest. However, intuition and being psychic is not some mysterious thing that only certain people have.

     The most basic way we experience our intuition is through gut feelings. This experience is so common the U.S. military has dubbed it the “spidey sense.” The U.S. Office of Naval Research is interested in learning more about both how it works and how it can be taught to soldiers.

     Gut feelings can be difficult for you to identify if you have a strong bias toward being logical and/or rational. Your brain responds to the gut feeling before you are even aware of what you're feeling and leaps in to logically substantiate the intuitive nudge. By the time you take action, you’re sure you've made a decision based solely on logic and reason.

     We live in the information age. Many of us are raised in societies enamored with technology and the scientific method. We are largely socialized and educated to believe the proof of whether or not something is “real” lies in the scientific method.

    The predisposition toward logic, science and technology influences how we’re educated. In school we’re taught to identify colors, what sound a cow makes and how to read. We’re not taught about non-physical senses, gut feelings or intuition. Few of us learn that at home either.

    In school we’re also taught the basics of math and science. Although most of us don’t really understand how a nuclear reactor works, we know enough of the basics to see it as technology and not magic. However, without any basic understanding of intuition and non-physical senses those things do seem like magic….and magic isn’t real.

     There is also a degree of normalization that occurs when something is talked about enough to become common knowledge. The existence of healers, mediums and other types of psychics is common knowledge. But what that means and how those people work is not. We as human beings have a long history of reacting with fear, suspicion or awe when confronted with something we don’t understand.

    I’ve often found when people react that way to finding out what I do they’re responding to a societal bias and/or the way mass media portrays psychics rather than any actual experience. The popularity of television shows like Ghosthunters and Ghost Adventures hasn’t helped any. The fear based reactions of the ghost hunters only serve to reinforce the belief that this piece of unknown is either a hoax or something to be feared and revered.

   If you’re interested in a realistic portrayal of a psychic, watch some reruns of Medium. You’ll see the way Allison’s intuition works. You’ll also see her struggle with raising children, running out of milk and being late for work. Sound familiar? Yep, she does the same stuff we all do.

    There are healers who employ theatrics to reinforce the belief that what they do is mysterious and beyond the realm of normal people. Neither I, nor the healers I count as friends and colleagues see it that way. The being mysterious and beyond normal people is a belief that’s projected on to us. It’s not one we internalize or intentionally foster.  

    I can’t take any credit for my gifts, my curly hair or being able to draw. It’s just what I was born with.  While many people experience their intuition as a gut feeling they can either acknowledge or ignore, mine was more persistent. From age five on, my experience was more like a musician who can’t stop hearing the music in her head. None of my gifts came with an instruction manual. Unlike the musician, there wasn’t anyone I could go to for lessons on how to use my gifts. I made the choice to listen to my intuition. The more I was willing to listen and follow, the stronger my intuition spoke. The rest was, and still is,  a ton of trial and error. The Universe blessed me with people who could help me figure things out and teach me to ask the right questions.

    I’m good at what I do, not because I’m magic but because I practice. I work at it, the same way a musician practices her instrument. If I’d been born with a feel for wood, I might have become a carpenter. I work as a healer because that’s what I was given.

   The ability to see others more clearly than we see ourselves is part of being human. Working as a healer doesn’t make that different. I rarely get previews for my own life. I'm often surprised by things. I still put on my jeans on leg at time and forget when I put my cell phone.  

Which YOU is Creating Your Reality?

      Periodically Pam and I host short programs to introduce people to our work. During these info nights we talk about what we do, guide participants through an exercise to help them experience energy and answer questions. A few years ago a man who attended one of our info nights asked if we could help him manifest a sports car.

   This was a tilt moment for me. I wasn’t sure if he was serious. He was. Then I scrambled to find a way to answer his question. One of us told him “no” and that we’d talk to him after the program. It turned out his question came from having recently watched The Secret. A few other clients referenced the film in their sessions, so Pam and I decided to watch it.

    While the film doesn’t completely say you can have anything you want if you’re clear enough with your intention, it comes pretty close. I can see how someone would come away from the film believing the Universe is a cosmic vending machine. The web site for The Secret still reinforces this idea by declaring, “Everything is possible; nothing is impossible.”

   Yes, anything is possible. Yes, it is possible for me to use the law of attraction to manifest something I want. But possible doesn’t make it probable.

   It’s possible to build a working vehicle from spare parts lying around in a garage. I can’t do that. It’s possible for a tropical storm to become a hurricane. I can’t make that happen either.

   Just because something is possible, doesn’t mean I can make it happen. I do believe in the law of attraction. I’ve experienced it; seen it work. I’ve also seen it fail.

    How does that happen? Aren’t I creating my own reality?

    Sure, but which part of me is doing the creating? The missing link is not the principles behind the law of attraction and The Secret, but the way we interpret them. When we leap from possible to “I can”, we’ve taken a vast universal principle and filtered it through the tiny lens of personality.

   Your life is an ongoing co-creation process between your personality, your higher self/soul and the Universe. Although your personality is the most likely of the three to fill your brain with wants; it’s not in charge of what happens.

    Almost every day you experience something that doesn’t go according to the plan your personality laid out. We’ve all had days that got completely rearranged by events that we would not and did not consciously chose to create.

   When you consciously use the law of attraction, you are engaging on a level that’s mostly personality. Even when you focus on an intention to fulfill a deep soul longing, the specifics of that intention are filtered through your personality. Your higher self and the Universe have a vast view of your life. Personality is pretty myopic.

    In my most expanded state, I can see maybe a quarter of what’s possible. If my life was limited to what I could consciously create, I’d miss out enormously. I’d miss out on unexpected gifts, random bits of wonderful and detours that take me to places I love, but didn’t know I wanted to visit. If I had enough control to wake up in the morning and create my day, what room would the Universe and my higher self have to work in my life?

     I have used the law of attraction to co-create, to bring things into my life that I really wanted. That only works for me when a) the want comes from my gut and heart, not my head, b) I leave the how and results open ended and c) what I consciously want aligns with the Universe and my higher self.

   The Secret’s web site talks about the need to be specific when manifesting. I’ve read the same thing in numerous other places. I’ve found I have to be exact about what I want and vague about the results.

     Getting specific about what I want means sitting with the want for long enough to weed out what my personality has attached to it. I have to know what the want is really about. However, if I get too precise about how that should happen or how the results should look, I am getting in the way of the Universe and my higher self.

    A few years ago I had a longing for a writing community. Writing is pretty solitary pursuit. I’d reached a point where I wanted to be a better poet. I wanted some feedback and interaction. I spent some time focusing on why I wanted a writing community. I sat with how it would feel to have that. I put it out the Universe. Two years later I got what I wanted via a chain of events that I couldn’t have put together.

    While taking the trash out one morning I ran into a woman who taught an amazing poetry class that I’d taken years ago at UNM. I hadn’t seen her since the class. She was out walking her dog. As we talked I found out that she lived up the street from me and was teaching poetry workshops out of her house. A few months later I went to one of her workshops and loved it. I had an “ah-hah” moment about me as an introvert and being in community. I wrote lots. I met some other wonderful poets and a couple of us started a weekly poetry group. I got more than I knew I wanted.

     I’ve met people who are adept at manifesting small things. I’m not one of them. I know a woman with an uncanny ability to manifest parking spaces. However, she’s struggled for years with why she can’t seem to manifest her deeper wants.

    So what about the times when the law of attraction fails? The Universe is not a cosmic vending machine. There is no perfect combination of intention and focus that will produce a guaranteed result.

   When you decide you want to attract something into your life, you don’t do that in an open playing field. You’re working in a space with a few billion other people who have things they want to manifest. Collisions happen.

   Conflicts of intention also arise when your personality gets fixated on a want and your higher self has other ideas. Say you decide you want to be a millionaire. However, before you incarnated you decided to experience poverty or a life of modest means. Your higher self still remembers that choice, even if you personality has forgotten. Chances are you’re not going to become a millionaire. If you do, it’ll happen at a high cost to yourself.

    Bottom line – you are creating your reality, but the “you” that’s doing most of the creating isn’t the little personality you.

   But wait, where does the Universe come in? Isn’t the Universe a mirror? Sure, but what kind of mirror?  When you hear “mirror” you see the flat piece of glass on the wall over your bathroom sink. If you’ve ever been in a funhouse, you know that mirrors come in many shapes. Some can make you look impossibly tall and thin. Others reflect a short, fat version of you….and some can make you look like your head is on sideways.

Gratitude for Mixed Blessings

   With Thanksgiving being tomorrow, I’ve been thinking about gratitude. I’ve overheard many snippets of conversation recently about gratitude for things that are easy to be grateful for: warm place to live, car that works, etc. Gratitude is easy when we feel grateful. It’s easy to feel grateful for things we’ve decided are “good.”

    But what about the times when you don’t feel grateful? Where does gratitude come in when you’re confronted with a mixed blessing or a small disaster?

    Really, there is no such thing as an unmixed blessing. We live on a dualistic planet.  Everything here has at least two sides. Every blessing comes with a shadow.  

    Sometimes we don’t see the shadow in the blessing. Other times we don’t see the blessing in the shadow. And sometimes the blessing is the shadow. These moments, when I least likely to feel grateful, are the ones where I most need to dredge up some gratitude.

    Fortunately gratitude is much more than an emotion. The experience of feeling grateful is fleeting. Like any other emotion, it passes. The feeling is often triggered by an external event. It’s not something I can reliably create or control.

    The practice of gratitude is both sustainable and a choice I have the power to make. Practicing gratitude doesn’t necessarily make me feel grateful. Often it doesn’t change how I feel at all. It does create a space for me to decide who I want to be.

    On a personality level, we don’t have much choice about a lot of what happens in our lives. It’s a big world. Shit happens. We can choose who we want to be in relation to what’s happening.

    Even in the “this sucks” moments, I have that choice. Shifting who I am in relation to what’s happening begins with dredging up some gratitude. This practice doesn’t magically create a new emotion I can use to squash the pain and/or fear I’m feeling.  It does give me a bit of balance.

    When I’m in that “this sucks” place, my mind spins with “what ifs” fueled by my inability to see how the situation could possibly come out okay. The catastrophe factory in my head starts working overtime. I can go from this moment to being homeless and pushing a shopping cart down the street talking to myself in three seconds.

    Practicing gratitude interrupts this cycle by interjecting a new possibility. It reminds me that something else is possible. Whether or not I can tangibly identify that something is irrelevant. Remembering that something else is possible lets me move out of giving all my energy to the catastrophe factory.

    The tool I use most often to dredge up some gratitude is making a gratitude list. I have to dig to make the list. Grabbing the obvious stuff, like “I’m grateful I’m alive”, doesn’t work. I have to find something that engages me and demands presence. I have to find gratitude for mixed blessings and open myself to possibility that what looks like a disaster might be a blessing. Here are a few mixed blessings that I've put on my gratitude list recently: 

1. I am grateful the world is not as black and white as I sometimes wish it was. 
2. I am grateful the Universe is smarter than I am. 
3. I am grateful for knowing how to sit still and be present when I'm uncomfortable. 
4. I am grateful that what things look like right now is not necessarily how they'll look tomorrow. 

    Another gratitude practice I engage in regularly is saying "thank you." It's a small action that helps me not take things for granted. I thank grocery store clerks, wait staff and the barrista at my favorite coffee shop. Yes, they're just doing their jobs and I appreciate it. I thank my friends. I thank strangers. When I'm not sure who to thank, I thank the Universe. The challenge comes in remembering say "thank you" for the opportunities that show up looking like big messes.
 

Redefining Peace

      I spent several years, from my mid-teens to my late twenties, protesting. I walked in the Nuclear Freeze in Chicago in 1984. I helped build and lived in a shanty town as part of the Free South Africa Coalition. A friend and I snuck a banner into the IU law school commencement address to protest William Rhenquists appointment to the Supreme Court. That one almost got me kicked out of college. I've hung fliers, handed out leaflets, made speeches and had a near miss with being arrested.
    I don't do any of those things anymore. It's not that I don't care, but I don't like what being a part of that creates in me. The more deeply involved I get with a cause the more I lose the ability to understand how anyone else could believe differently and the more upset I feel at what's going on.....and I become just as intolerant and angry as the people who hold whatever belief I'm protesting.
      Raging for peace does not work for me...neither does looking outside myself for things that are an inside job. I cannot expect the world to hold a peace that I often struggle to create in myself.
    I have seen my snarl on the faces of others holding peace signs. I have heard my anger in the voices of friends and strangers when they talk about current wars and their desire for peace. But what do they really mean by "peace"?
   Many of them seem to be talking about an idyllic world where no one fights about anything, there is no violence and all aggression has been supplanted by love. It's a beautiful fantasy, but not one I'm willing to give much energy to even though I understand how we got here. We are living in world that seems filled with violence, anger, aggression and power over. The human tendency is to go from one extreme to the other in order to find the middle. So many of us respond to the violence we see in the world by fleeing into a comforting daydream of peace.
   But isn't this the same old either/or dichotomy that created the lack of peace in the first place? When we put two things in an either/or model, we set them against each other and they are in conflict. Peace vs. war sets up a conflict where peace is at war with war.
  When I hear people talk about a peace that involves purging ourselves of every aggressive impulse two things jump out at me: a) if we get there, we'll be extinct and b) we've lost touch with how we came into this world.
    If our ancestors had succeeded in purging themselves of aggression they wouldn't have survived. They needed aggression to kill the predators who wanted to eat them and to hunt for food. We may not be living in a situation where we need those instincts to surface in the same way. However every time we stand up for ourselves and set boundaries, we are relying on a different aspect of the same instinct.
     Aggression, violence and anger are as innately a part of the human species as love, joy and compassion. Our entrance into this world comes in an explosion of beauty and violence. Even if your mother birthed you surrounded by loving family and friends, she was probably yelling and swearing because birth is not gentle. And after spending nine months breathing water in a protected environment, you were ejected into a world of rampant noise expected to breathe something different right now or die. 
     If a world at peace is a world devoid of all internal and external conflicts, what happens to our creativity? What happens to music, art and poetry? Art that touches us deeply is birthed from conflict. It is an offering made from dancing with tension, from wrestling the core of conflict until it is made visible.
     What would happen to us in that idyllic world?  Physiologically, stress pushes us to step out of our comfort zone and make changes. Without the stress of internal conflict, what impetus would we have to evolve and grow?
    For human beings, recognition is based on differences. We know the water in the shower is hot because we’ve felt cold water.  We know what feeling peaceful is because we’ve experienced conflict.  If peace was the only experience we had, we’d cease to recognize it and it would lose any meaning for us.
    The idyllic descriptions I’ve heard of a peaceful world remind me of what I was taught about heaven in Sunday school. Heaven was all lounging around in bliss, harps and holy beings. Even as a kid, I thought heaven sounded boring. I still think I’d be terminally bored in a completely peaceful world.
     I’m not sure what my personal definition of peace is. I know it’s an inside job that can radiate out into the larger world.  I do believe peace is inclusive; doesn’t depend on repression or wiping anything out. It is expansive enough to include aggression and conflict and moving through them both to a temporary still point, which will unravel again.  I have a hard time imagining nations at war if those nations were filled with people who made space for the movement of their own aggression rather than externalizing it.




  

The Art of Falling Apart

I've lost count of the number of people I've talked to recently who are unsettled, restless, not sleeping and vaguely uneasy in a way they can't pinpoint. Yes, yes, yes! We are living in strange times of intense transition, both personally and transpersonally. There is an enormous wrestling match, combative dance, tug-of-war going on between the old paradigm and the new.
   The old paradigm is ruled based, hierarchical, all about survival of the fittest and invested in "fact" and what can be proved. The new paradigm is more about consensus, shared welfare, intuition and how each of our unique strengths make a more fluid and stronger whole when they are allowed to flourish.
   We see this clash in the news every day. In the same week several states chose to acknowledge same sex marriage while others work to pass archaic abortion laws. Microcosm - macrocosm. While this struggle plays out in the world around us, it also plays out in us. We are ALL, collectively and individually, in transition. Old pockets of internal conflict and the places where we are incongruent with ourselves are coming to the surface...and demanding attention.
    The old paradigm says there are rules to fall back on. Confusion is a form of weakness. We just need to make a decision and get on with it. The new paradigm invites us to stay with the process and questions the relationship between push and allow.
    Initially I looked at what is surfacing in my life as individual issues that I needed to work on. But from one day to the next, the issue seemed to change. One day my restlessness was connected to one thing. The next day I my uneasiness seemed tied to something else entirely. So what do I focus on? To add to the confusion, these shifts weren't connected to any external event.  They were fueled by some change in my internal landscape.
   I had a vague sense that these individual issues were all pieces of something larger, but what? One of my responses to feeling unsettled and confused was the desire to exert control over small things just because I could. Okay. Normal human response to chaos. Not a big deal unless I find myself trying to force outcomes on a bigger scale.
Then one night I watched an amazing documentary called Wake Up. At the end of the film, in reference to the main characters struggle, someone remarks that  he'll be okay because he falls apart well. Oh.....
   The disconnect isn't about wanting to control the small stuff. It's about wanting to use the illusion of control to avoid the unknown. We are all in transition. Transition involves rebuilding and recreating but that can only happen after coming apart. The individual issues that are surfacing are asking us to pay attention to the unknown, to stay with the falling apart.
   If we give in to the urge to control or "fix" something just because we can, we risk building on the foundation of the old that is still coming unwound. We risk cementing something that really doesn't serve us anymore just because it's more comfortable to have some solidity.
   Until I watched that documentary, it hadn't occurred to me that falling apart was a skill.  In this time of intense transition, we are being invited to hone our skills at coming unwound....to live the art of falling apart.