Did you know that the word discipline and the word disciple derive from the same Latin roots?  Discipulus = pupil and discere = to learn.  Whereas we associate the word discipline with structure, order, and control, we think of discipleship as being a student or follower of a certain faith or doctrine.  And while some level of discipline (physical, mental, emotional, and/or spiritual) is often inherent in being a disciple, the desire and passion to learn and master a new skill or level of understanding often override any discomfort or inconvenience that the requisite “discipline” imposes on our lives.

When we’re trying to make changes, we often start with some vision, inspiration, a resolution and promise to ourselves.  And while we are operating on the high of this new version of us, the associated alterations in our lifestyles don’t seem so hard.   But over time, frequently our excitement fades and commitment wanes.  We find ourselves “cheating,” making excuses, or altogether giving up on our hoped-for transformation.  This is when discipline becomes tough as we force ourselves through the motions, preferring comfort and our old habits instead.

In these moments, what might happen if we were to recall the true meaning of discipline and become the students rather than the jailers of our lives?  What if we stopped to inquire, to discover what unfolds naturally from within, to remember and realign with our reasons for change and our passions for living?  What if we approached evolution with curiosity and wonder versus demands and expectations?

Perhaps the most important discipline is to remember to be kind and generous, with ourselves and with each other.  To hold space with an open heart and witness the continuous mystery of the miracle of life unfolding, as with a child or a flower.

Perhaps in this way, we become students–or disciples–of our own sacred calling.

Hi Friends – I just received this wonderful link and I want to share it with all of you.  2 1/2  minutes of exquisite beauty unfolding.  It put such a big smile on my face.  Enjoy!

http://player.vimeo.com/video/27920977?title=0&%3bbyline=0&%3bportrait=0href=

Happy Spring!

Susan

In honor of this day of celebrating love, I want to acknowledge just how much love there is in the world.  And I’d like to share it.

So I’ve got a question for you:

What do you LOVE about your life?

Leave a comment below and share the love!  I’ll start…

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Hello Friends – I hope you are well and enjoying the approach of winter.  It’s getting cold here and we’ve even had snow (seems early for us)!  I do love the holiday season – the lights, the music, the decorations, the goodies, the cheer… and out in the woods – the silence, the crackle of frozen branches under my feet, the gentle contours of hills as revealed by now-bare trees…  I hope you are finding magical and heart-warming ways to celebrate this season.

I have some exciting news I’d like to share with you. In the New Year, I will be offering a coaching program called “Living As If Our Lives Depend On It” (yes, like my blog)!  In a nutshell, this three-month course is designed to help others navigate their life journeys with and through cancer, and more specifically, to help current and former oncology patients create lives that they deeply love and enjoy.

Even if you are not dealing with cancer directly, I encourage you to read and share the program offering; I’ve heard from several like this who have responded, “I want to play!”

Here is the link to the web page:  http://livingasifourlivesdependonit.com/class/

And, for those of you who would prefer to download and print a pdf, here is this option:  http://livingasifourlivesdependonit.com/class/LivingAsIfOurLivesDependOnIt.pdf

Please feel free to share this announcement with your friends and colleagues.  Thank you so much for your help in spreading the word.

Wishing you holidays filled with wonder and a very Happy New Year.

Susan

In my recent post, “Permission,” I made the statement that cancer is a chronic illness.  It has been called to my attention that this statement is inaccurate due to its incompleteness and could as such cause unnecessary concern, especially for cancer patients.  In regards to cancer and chronicity, what would be more precise (and empowering) to say is that for many oncology patients, cancer is a one-time occurrence, and therefore obviously not “chronic.”  For others, because of advances in modern medicine (both conventional and complementary), recurrence is no longer necessarily considered terminal.  Thus, what was once perceived as a “death sentence” can now be considered and treated as a chronic condition, recurrences effectively managed by appropriate and timely health interventions.

In regards to my blog post entitled “Permission,” I deleted the sentence about chronicity altogether as it was ultimately unnecessary within the text.

Hi Folks – The following piece, “Permission,” is an essay from my forthcoming book about my reflections on my experience with cancer.  I’m including it here because it seems applicable beyond the realm of oncology.  One could substitute many words or situations for “cancer:”  it’s really about our modus operandi and not so much about the particulars.  It’s about our choice to ratchet down into rigidity or live into the mysterious beauty of a life in the midst of transforming.

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Our culture has a very yang (hard, aggressive, masculine) approach to cancer.  We go to war; we fight.  We blast the enemy with our most advanced surgical and chemical weapons.  We rally.  We hate.  We crush our fear, or try to.

Acute crises often respond well to the heroics of modern medicine.  And frequently, the shock of diagnosis feels acute when suddenly our perception of ourselves and our lives shifts instantaneously; more often than not, we respond via crisis mode, physically, mentally and certainly emotionally.  Once our fear gets triggered (usually when we equate cancer with death), we flip into warrior mode and in our desire to “beat this thing,” forge ahead doing our damnedest to keep our spirits strong, our bodies functional, and our lives recognizable.  We do all this even (perhaps especially) while undergoing the most brutal and exhausting of treatment regimes.  We want to prove to the world and to ourselves that we’re bigger than this “inconvenience.”  We want to get on with our lives.  We want this thing behind us.  And often, in our full-steam-ahead mode, we forget to pause and listen—to our bodies, to our minds, to our hearts.

So it’s easy to miss those days when we just need permission.  Permission to step back from the battle, to take a breather, to quit being so brave and acknowledge that we just feel like crap and that, heaven forbid, we’re scared.  In our desire to retain “normalcy,” we complain when we can’t get anything done, overlooking the fact that we’re simultaneously hosting serious chemical warfare and in fact our cells, both the healthy and diseased ones, are fighting for their lives.  We’re so accustomed to muscling our way through pain and difficulty.  In our lopsidedly extroverted culture, rather than pausing to reflect on the magnificent play of darkness and light occurring within our bodies and minds, we prefer to bulldoze wide sunny swathes through every shadow of uncertainty and fear.  As if by doing so we could eliminate ignorance and mystery forever.

What might happen if we allowed ourselves to rest, allowed the unknown to hold us for awhile?  In our terror, we assume that “giving up the fight” essentially equates to giving up our lives.  It’s not true, at least not unequivocally.  Yes, sometimes when we cease resisting it, death ensues.  (How we can appreciate this course of events as part of healing as opposed to failure is the topic for another essay.)  Yet it’s equally possible that when we quit clutching our conception of how life should be and merely acknowledge what is, our life force returns.  Minus our demands and judgment, previously hidden possibilities emerge.  Creativity blossoms.  Shift happens.  Healing arrives.

These movements can arise in small, subtle steps and sometimes in big dramatic turns.  This is not miraculous but rather the way that life naturally (minus egoic interference) unfolds:  the yin—soft, yielding, feminine—in balance with the yang.  This is Tao in action, the rhythm of the universe, breathing in and breathing out.  Watch a child who bangs his knee run for solace to his mother; upon receiving her undivided and tender attention, he is back out on the playground within thirty seconds building a fort, completely oblivious to his recent bruise.  Wrack your brain for the solution to a problem and then letting go (out of frustration and/or exhaustion), observe the answer appear “magically” as if out of nowhere.  Hang with a cancer patient who feels completely victimized and in loving silence, together hold the magnitude of her journey; it won’t be long before the next impulse toward healing arises and your friend takes a proactive step toward living.  When we surrender, when we truly yield, power rushes in organically to fill the welcoming void.  Even after the toughest of days, once we finally allow ourselves permission to relax and be fully human, tears will dry and smiles, even laughter, reemerge.

It’s counterintuitive, it’s countercultural, and it can feel like anathema.  But relinquishing our need for around-the-clock control and allowing ourselves to be carried by the generous and ubiquitous flow of the universe is powerful medicine.  Rest is good.  Permission to be just how you are—without having to change a thing—is radical.

In my wellness coaching group, we’ve been discussing the habit of self check-ins.  The practice involves asking, “How present am I in this moment?” or “What’s happening in my body right now?” or some similar question to assess how grounded and centered one remains throughout a day.  I suggested to the students that they make a simple chart to track their discoveries.

Occasionally I receive emails from the group members saying, “Today I’m a 7!” or, “Going between a 5 and an 8…”  It’s fun and a great reminder for me, too.  The other day, one woman mentioned that she had shared her chart with her grandson whose innocent and immediate response was, “But Grandma, why isn’t every day a 10?”

Out of the mouths of babes…

Indeed, why isn’t every day a 10?

And what would that look like, anyway?

As children, tens are the days we get everything we want for Christmas, Mom or Dad makes our favorite dinner, we get accepted into the “cool” group at school.  But what constitutes a 10 for an adult?  And have we really grown up?  Because for many, although the booty may look different (a raise at work, the corner office, a nice house, all the requisite toys to maximize our fun, exotic vacations, great health, flowers or baubles from our lover, hell – a partner at all), the pattern is the same:  measuring our happiness and satisfaction with the same ruler that we used as kids.

That can be a problem.  Not necessarily (or so obviously) on the days when life hums along and we’re walking on air, but on those other days when gravity slams us back down onto hard ground.  Could be anything—our spouse departs (with the kids), the market crashes, the doctor delivers unthinkable news, our job evaporates, friends ditch us, the recently repaired basement leaks, again…  How are we supposed to feel like a 10 when the manure has just splattered floor to ceiling?

I am not promoting a Pollyanna approach to life where everything comes sunny side up (conveniently forgetting that if there is an up there is also a down).  This kind of denial also plays itself out in “spiritual bypassing,” wherein “spiritual” beliefs and practices are used to avoid addressing emotional pain or unresolved wounds and developmental issues.  Even the current “happiness” trend, while offering valuable insights gleaned from ancient spiritual traditions and the more recent fields of positive psychology and psychoneuroimmunology, in the hands of entrepreneurial hucksters tips over into yet another version of “materialism.”  Beneath all the glitz, however, still seethes the relentless pursuit of more—fueled by thoughts of never having, or more fundamentally, of never being—enough.

So when I ask, “What does it take to make this moment, and every moment, a 10?” I’m not asking any of us to gloss over anything that life throws in our faces, or to bypass the rich difficulties (read opportunities) that being in a body on the planet at this time hands us.  Nor am I suggesting a psychologically vicious quest for perfection.  Not at all.

I’m asking for depth.

What if, for instance, our answers to the following (and other similar) questions were what determined our “score” for the day?

How many moments were you real?  How often did you genuinely connect with yourself and with others?  How successfully were you able to turn towards your pain and embrace it, rather than seeking escape through the habit of your favorite distraction?  When did you feel gratitude and joy, not because life was “perfect” (i.e., unfolding according to your demands and expectations), but because you’ve learned how to feel happy no matter what?  When did you know that enough was exactly what was laid out right before your eyes?

It’s a tricky line to walk, this balancing act between being, where everything is perfect as is, and becoming, where we strive for betterment and change.  Excess in one direction leads to complacency and stasis; leaning too far the other way shifts the scales toward chronic dissatisfaction and ultimately exhaustion.

And then one might very reasonably ask: but why are we measuring at all?  Isn’t that act in itself part of the problem, that we’re gauging our satisfaction or lack of it on some objectified ranking?  Well, in part, assessing is what we do.  We calculate, we evaluate, we discern; that’s how we make decisions and move forward in the world.  But perhaps I need to clarify my position here.  Just because we’re quantifying doesn’t mean we need to cave to learned assumptions or media messages about what any of those numbers signify (e.g., if I’m having a bad day or if my life doesn’t feel stellar at the moment, then that makes me wrong, less than, a failure, etc.)  Ironically, the consciousness that can transform every moment into a 10 does not need circumstances to line up according to personal desires.  In other words, experiencing a 10 doesn’t require that we win the lottery.  We could be at a 5, recognize we’re at a 5, release all our judgments about being at a 5, and as we relax, our 5 instantly becomes a 10.  Nothing’s changed except our perception.  Our focus shifts from what we’re getting and accumulating to how we’re growing, what we’re learning, why we’re connecting, that we’re feeling.  It just so happens that when we make this internal switch, life often feels easier and opportunities appear where we didn’t notice them before.  Magic?  Possibly.  Or just a retraining of the heart-mind.

Why is it important that we get this?  Well, life enjoyment is one good reason.  Personal and planetary sustainability are others.  The incessant drive for perfection, for personal gratification, and for more, more, more—whether physical, emotional or spiritual—exhausts a body and mind and also our global resources.  Fulfillment doesn’t equate to flawlessness.  Happiness depends on really very little.  What makes every day a 10 isn’t anything we can see or taste or touch or do.  Rather, as we engage the willingness to release our overt or subtle superficiality/expectations and instead embrace whole-heartedly each and every moment (the 3s as well as the 10s), we may find that life is indeed delivering more than we could ever ask for.

Through my own internal process and through my work with others, I have concluded that the questions we ask ourselves when confronted with a diagnosis of cancer may be not all that different than the questions we ask in our everyday lives.  Questions about meaning, purpose, priorities; countless opportunities for learning to love more deeply (ourselves and others) and for discovering how to best share our gifts with the world.  Granted, when the heat is unexpectedly turned up with such an inescapable reminder of our humanity, these questions and the lessons they impart assume an import that grabs us differently than were we just sitting at Starbucks contemplating the nature of the universe over latte.  Trust me, when you’re about to have a PET scan to determine if the months of chemo you’ve just endured have been effective, questions of who you are and what you want out of life press a little more urgently on your synapses than they would during your typical Wednesday morning commute.

Some people say that cancer (or whatever calamity has befallen them) is the best thing that ever happened to them.  I don’t expect to ever claim that.  As ably as I’ve managed the events of diagnosis, treatment, and recovery (still in process), I could have done without the disease!  Nevertheless, I do appreciate it as an instigator of the next and fiercest (to date) phase of my evolution.  Integral to my gratitude is the conscious choice to unwrap and learn from the gifts that this experience so generously lays at my feet.  Occasions for growth are not always easy to unpack.  Yet deep inquiry is a part of my life, personally and professionally.  The same questions that I ask my clients, for years I have turned over within myself, refining them with every revolution.  Cancer has just yielded the latest, greatest spin.

So now I ask:  what does it mean to “live as if our lives depend on it?”  I’m not going to say that if we think and do “right,” nothing bad will ever happen, e.g., that we give ourselves cancer by the way we think or behave.  That would be short-sighted, ignorant, and self-destructive.  There are just too many influencing factors to take on that kind of unnecessary and deluded responsibility.  Yet even with mind-body science in its relative infancy, we know that every thought affects our neurochemistry and every behavior impacts our physiology.  We know that emotion impinges on immunity. But what if we didn’t have any lab data to go on?  Could we not trust our own felt sense and notice how anger, joy, fear and gratitude influence our bodies’ feeling and function?  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or a psychoneuroimmunologist).  It just takes paying attention.

Why do we live as though these things weren’t true and take our precious lives for granted?  Why do we cave to ignorance, fear and habit?  For every time we say yes when we mean no (or no when we mean yes), every time we cling to the past or hole up in the future and thereby elude the present, every time we avoid the truth of our scary, messy feelings and opt instead for aseptic rationalization, every time we elect isolation over simple and sincere connection, every time we choose what we “should” do over that which truly calls us, every time we say “I would, but…,” something in us wavers.  And if this happens long and often enough, this faltering can solidify and soon we freeze into forms that we defend with phrases like, “That’s just the way I am.”  And with these self-generating justifications, we can eventually lose the capacity to feel and know who we really are.  We can also lose a lot of time.

When I ask clients, “When would be a good time to start living your life?” I often first hear silence.  Then, some choice expletive.  Occasionally followed by an “I hate you.”  (Incidentally, I always take this as a great validation of my coaching.  It usually means I’ve asked a question that cannot be sidestepped.)  The unspoken but inevitable conclusion?  Now would be a very good time.

We could wait.  We could stand by and pray to stay adequately comfortable while our hidden dreams fizzle, our relationships pale, our bodies decay, and the world goes bust.  We could wait till science proves that deeply loving who we are radically shifts our physiologies and ripples out into the world in positive, healing ways.  We could wait till we are on our deathbeds, individually and as a species.  Or we could find the guts (and it does take guts) to stop any charade we’ve now got going and unwrap the gems that life hands to us, no matter how grizzly or glorious. We could use each and every occasion to true our course and walk in congruence with our greatest joy and well being.  Whether the impetus for change arises from a deadly diagnosis or just a desire to live a more meaningful life, matters not.  What matters is our willingness to show up and play full out, come what may.

Welcome, folks!  Thanks for checking out my new blog.  This entry will serve as an announcement and introduction; the first essay post will be next Monday.  I hope you will become a regular reader and share the dialog with your friends.

Over the past year, many of you enthusiastically followed my email updates that accompanied my journey through cancer diagnosis and treatment.  Thank you.  I received a lot of positive feedback and encouragement to share my writing with a larger audience through a blog, articles, a book, etc.  Several times you requested to forward my emails on to your friends.  Thanks so much for your support and enthusiasm for my process and my work.  Now, well into recovery, I continue to write daily, adding more chapters and creating what I intend to become a book.

Certainly, some of my upcoming blog posts will draw from these essays and my recent experience as an oncology patient.  But more than that, I plan to use the events of the last year as a springboard for continuing the exploration into what it means to live a life of depth, meaning, and integrity.  This is the work that I’ve been doing my entire adult life, decades before any diagnosis of malignancy.  And although my focus as of late has necessarily been toward addressing a certain condition, ultimately it’s not about cancer for me.   It’s about life and how we can manifest our best possible ones.

So here we go.  No matter how much we think we’ve prepared, there comes that moment when we just have to let go of the rope!  One, Two, Three…

Woohoo!

Come on in – the water’s fine!