Diane’s Blog

For most of my life I had a fickle relationship with practicality.  Or at least with my beliefs about its meaning to me.  I wasn’t conscious of this and so I got into a lot of trouble along the way, blaming everyone else for my unhappiness and misfortunes. I remember being expected to choose a major for college and being stumped.  If I had allowed myself to believe in following the desires of the heart, I would have chosen theater or dance.  Instead I chose home economics — I hear you snickering out there — in the 60’s this was still considered a viable choice for “young ladies.” 

Within a year it was the “Summer of Love” — 1967 — and my world was flipped on its head.  The rebellious impulses on which I had begun to act rather meekly in my freshman year went into overdrive and my grades suffered accordingly.  I dropped out halfway through my senior year.  Hey — I didn’t need that piece of paper, man!  I was so Mary Tyler Moore meets Janis Joplin — a truly half-assed, reluctant hippie who still had not a clue about who she really was — but now I felt empowered in my cluelessness.  Wasn’t I part of a movement? In other words, I still had a very unhealthy relationship with practicality.  The only difference was that now, instead of completely buying into my parent’s notion of what’s practical I completely rejected that same notion. 

 Hello!  I couldn’t see that I wasn’t following my own blueprint — or rejecting it.  I was rebelling against an image of myself that had been projected onto me by people who thought they knew who I was–or should be.  No one, least of all me, realized how far off we all were. I was 40 years old before I began to suspect that my life was little more then a continual allergic reaction to other people’s vision of me, particularly what was “practical” for me.  How can we make smart choices for ourselves if we aren’t on intimate terms with our own deepest needs?  With our true intentions?  Yet I talk to people every day who never seem to check in with their own gut feeling — or, having checked in, refuse to honor it.  Why?  It always seems to be a variation on “Not practical.”

If we truly are at least as much Spirit as we are matter, can we afford to live our lives as though these vital impulses of our heart are anything less than practical?  If they aren’t, then who IS driving our car?  Have you ever suddenly just KNOWN something is wrong but you ignored that knowing and persisted in acting on what your head told you to do, only to later regret that betrayal of your own inner wisdom?  (Yes–my first marriage, but that’s another story…)

I have a feeling that if we each decided to expand our definition of “practical” to include our gut reactions, within a year we would have successfully steered this planet in a much healthier direction.  I know, I know — that would require a leap of faith because most of us still accept the consensus reality that the ego voice is the ultimate authority.  What if it turns out to be the other way around?  What if our own personal inner guidance system, driven by our intuitive voice is actually the smarter CEO?  What do you think?  Isn’t it time we try something different?

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Q:  “What are the lessons I am meant to learn from what seems to be a deepening rift between my parents and I?”

A:  You are indeed going through a difficult time, feeling the loss of the two people you believed would somehow always be there — regardless of the bad feelings which seemed more and more frequent between you.  You can see this as a new chapter — a new beginning in your life – one that you needed in order to become the person you planned to be so long ago.  Without this dark night of the soul in your life at this time, you would not be as likely to find in yourself the qualities you needed to develop in order to be that loving, lovable, wise, yet saddened person who will always remember the illusions of her childhood with some pain — although in time it will be more of a memory than a feeling.

You are now aligning with your heart in a healthy way, and allowing it to lead a little more often rather than refusing to hear its pleas above the din of the ego — the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” and “musts” and all the requirements placed on yourself to be a “good person.”  You are now at the beginning of the new chapter in which you will come to recognize that the only road toward happiness and peace of mind and becoming the person you have always hoped to be, both in your eyes and those of others, is to allow your heart to lead — not the ego voice that will always pronounce loudly the need for doing things perfectly and in the correct way at the proper time.

Your spirit is big, and it is only waiting to be heard by you on a daily basis so that it can begin to lead you toward the life that you have always dreamed of, but had thought unattainable.  You can obtain it by focusing on being with yourself daily in a more forgiving, allowing way with no instructions, no rules.  These are no longer helpful to you — they are the outdated beliefs of your childhood — the structure you clung to when everything around you looked like it would sink and fall away at any moment.  You imposed rigid structure on your life long ago to protect yourself from the chaos you felt inside growing up in your parents’ home.  You were sensitive and knew there was something wrong always in the home — yet often turned it inward blaming yourself and taking on too much responsibility for your age.  This helped you to cope with your fears.

Now you are just beginning to examine some of these self-imposed limitations and you will need to spend time with your self just observing and wondering which beliefs about yourself and about how life “should” be at any given moment are still worth hanging on to.  Which can you now safely allow to fall away?

As you begin to do so, and that is the major reason for this lesson in your life, you will begin to feel a new freedom, a lightness you have never known, and you will for the first time see that you are so much more than you ever gave yourself credit for being.  So much more important to the universe in terms of just allowing yourself to be the person you planned to be in this life so many, many years ago.

Love your self always, my dear.  That is the way as well as the goal.

My parents expected to age as their parents did — retire, find a hobby to help you kill whatever time you have left until your health takes a nose dive; then you croak.  The main difference being that their generation had the new, improved version of aging — it lasts longer — so now you find yourself raising puttering and dawdling to an art form, while stoically avoiding any mention of the “D” word.

For a while there, my parents played out their expectations with a certain flair, if not gusto.  My father, true to his own hermit-like inclination, spent the first 20 years of his early retirement hanging around the house.  He did manage to go outdoors long enough to take my mom on a few vacations, which turned out to be a plus, since it gave her a chance to visit non–Ohio parts of the country before she died in 1994.

My dad entered a difficult period of grieving, but then a strange thing happened: He noticed that he was single.  He decided to take advantage of this unexpected turn of events.  He was only 70, and still youthful.  Waitresses everywhere flirted with him.  And so he stepped off the path that had been laid out for him so long ago by HIS parents.  He started to reclaim some of the adolescent verve that had been left on a closet shelf to fade and die. 

He placed an ad in the “personals” of his local newspaper (shaving a few years from his age.)  He jumped into the dating ritual that he had largely missed in his youth and found a couple of agreeable companions along the way.

That was 12 years ago.  At 83, my father has now re-evaluated the beliefs and attitudes of a lifetime and thrown out much of what he now sees wasn’t healthy for him or anyone around him.  In this he has joined me in breaking away from the “Hausler heritage” of holding on to all your grudges for, well — forever.  At any given moment, fully half of the Hausler clan (not my mom’s side — they were all Finnish immigrants whose days were filled with heroic attempts to utter at least every other word of their “English” recognizably) would have banished the offending “others,” and sides tended to shift and morph in ways that confounded logic and left me scrambling for the nearest exit.

Frankly, I am still amazed and downright giddy at the thought of what he accomplished.  My father was a verbal abuser, controller,  and rage-aholic throughout my formative years.  Our relationship had always been strained — a few times even broken.  In the last few years, that rift has healed.  Now we talk and laugh and even forgive each other for the pain we inflicted over the last half-century.

How could he have the beat such odds?  My theory is that sometimes it takes a disaster of gigantic proportions to shake a person free from the private hell they constructed long ago to keep them “safe.”  My mother’s death was that freeing disaster.  Suddenly everything was up for grabs.  And if that wasn’t enough, the Universe threw in a little prostate cancer and an angioplasty for good measure in recent years.

We will all experience losses as we age.  I am so grateful to have a living role model for not only surviving those losses, but transcending them.  Thanks, Dad.  I love you.  You have been my greatest teacher.

This is a subject I intend to return to again and again, in many different guises: We have to begin to trust our own inner knowing/gut feeling/guidance/inner voice/intuition — whatever words feel most comfortable to you — above all else.  We tend to allow much of our personal power to be sucked up by others.

Yesterday I started thinking about an article I read recently by a doctor of naturopathy.  At first her advice seemed reasonable, since it was about homeopathic medicine.  Then she apparently was nudged by her ego voice which told her to go for it — and she did.  She commenced to wax pedantic on all manner of topics, from healthful foods to sleep habits.  Specifically, how many ounces of broccoli to eat how many times a week, all the way to what time we should go to bed every night, and for how many hours.  There seemed to be no exceptions allowed.

I know this is the information age, but some of us seem to get carried away.  Do adults really need to be lectured on when to go to bed and how often we should experience “evacuation of the colon?”  And who is doing the lecturing?  Isn’t every fourth person you meet an “expert” on something these days?  Personally, as soon as I hear someone being introduced as an “expert” I head for the hills.

How do we discern where the expertise ends and personal opinion begins?  I had an intuitive reading by phone a number of years ago from someone whose work I admired.  About the fourth time I listened to the audiotape of this session, however, I got a funny feeling.  Although 75% of the information was obviously received from Spirit, the rest seemed to be his personal opinion.  Ordinarily I have no quarrel with people stating their opinions.  But it is incumbent upon a healer to differentiate for the public between information or conclusions arrived at from a higher source and that which rests solely on the say-so of the ego mind.  This healer — and a few others I’ve run across — didn’t do so.

As with any other position where people seek you out — politician, doctor, Minister – one has to guard vigilantly against loving the platform more than the truth.  Isn’t this happening everywhere today?  Everyone’s a pundit.  I hear increasingly nutty opinions every day by all sorts of folks who take themselves way too seriously.  And there’s always an audience.

I got pulled into this power matrix briefly myself when I began teaching adult classes about our inner wisdom, and here’s why — Reason #1: A lot of people treated me like a guru.  I was shocked.  They couldn’t divest themselves of their own common sense and wisdom fast enough, so eager were they to hear a “definitive” truth.  Reason #2: I was insecure about Diane’s worthiness.  It feels safer to hand out information as though it is 100% guaranteed certainty than to couch your knowledge in terms of degrees.  “This is fact” rolls off the tongue with a satisfying smoothness that “At least in my experience, here’s what works” never could.

I believe that the human race will not continue to evolve unless they get this issue straightened out.  It’s that basic to the fulfillment of our potential.

I still accept too much information as “fact”, but I’ve trained myself to notice more of my behaviors.  More and more I catch myself in my old habit of throwing away what really feels right to me in favor of someone else’s “right.”  I ask myself, “Does what they are saying really apply to my life, or do I need to check that out by getting quiet and sitting with it for awhile?”  Or alternately just acknowledging the cognitive dissonance I feel.  That’s guidance too.

 We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bath water.  If we pick and choose what really seems right for us from the constant onslaught of wall-to-wall opinion, we can only become our truest self.

If any of this doesn’t fit who you are in this moment, please set it aside.  You’ll be that much closer to your own truth.

I have a high school reunion coming up in October, and I’m shocked at how eager I am to attend.  It’s not as though I haven’t seen these people since graduation; I went to both the 10th and 20th gatherings.  They decided to hold a 25th, but at the time I was too fragile, having just left my first husband a month earlier.  Did they even hold a 30th?  If so, someone left my name off the list, and I think I know who (just kidding–no I’m not).  And now — it can’t be — but it is: the 40-year reunion of Lakewood High in Lakewood, Ohio, where I was born and grew up. I remember being surprised at all the people who flocked in from all over the country at those earlier reunions; now I’ll be one, having moved to Asheville in 2000. 

The reunion committee sent me a list of events and a questionnaire.  I’m sorry to report that I won’t be attending the Friday night informal get-together at a local bar, although I love the concept; it feels so surreal, like a David Lynch movie: An increasingly snockered and rowdy bunch of 58-year-old pre-retirees finally getting up the nerve to vent all that button-down, savage emotion that until now had been semi-successfully repressed.  Spotty-faced, hormone-driven angst erupting intact from the the aging lips of somebody’s grandparent:  “I always hated you, Susie!”   ”You were so hot, Kenny, and I bet you didn’t even know it!”  Spouses backing out of the place to get some air…

Okay, I admit, part of the reason I am not going to expose myself thus is that I could all too easily be one of those characters, verbalizing what I’ve only fantasized I’d say if I had the nerve.  I already know how that turns out, thank you, having made what turned out to be the stupendously unwise choice of calling a high school boyfriend after my divorce–way too soon after my divorce.  Do you know how these things go from personal experience?  Well, perhaps your attempt at re-ignition went well.  Mine, sad to say, went very, very badly.  Not immediately, mind you, although there were signs early on, such as the fact that he went into a sort of hellfire and brimstone rant in the middle of the pizza parlor on our first, er, “date.” Should I have read my inability to get out of bed most of the next day from exhaustion as a clue?

No, I’ll save my one-night-only appearance for Saturday night — the actual reunion “dinner/dance.”  I finally unearthed the origin of my desire to show up this time: two reasons, apparently.  One — I can think of three people to whom I owe apologies.  Suddenly, at this point in my life, such things carry weight.  Thirty years ago, when another boyfriend asked at our 10th reunion, “Why did you take so-and-so to the dance during prom week instead of me?”  I had nothing.  Nothing but some flippant, dismissive excuse.  They say what goes around comes around, and so I experienced real déjà vu when I found myself asking of the “brimstone” ex-boyfriend years later, “Why did you cheat on me senior year?”  I received the same type of response I had given when asked at that 10th reunion. 

I know now that even though we grow up and move on the old wounds don’t necessarily heal completely.  And so I plan to revise my original answer this time, and apologize to two other classmates as well.  It doesn’t even matter if they brush it off — it’s something I have to do so that I can feel a little lighter. Sometimes personal growth means we do what’s necessary to ease our conscience — and we do it more for ourselves than for anyone else.  That’s not selfish, it’s part of bringing our life back into harmony.  Calling back parts of our lesser-evolved self from whereever we let them stray, and forgiving them, because we now know they did the best they could at the time.

The second reason I’m attending this hoedown is curiosity.  It strikes me as very telling that I went to those earlier reunions to see certain people, but largely to be seen.  “How do I look now?” was my refrain, which I now understand stemmed from my low opinion of who Diane was. The questionnaire says, “What have you been doing with your life?”  Tell me instead, “Where has life taken you?” and “Where have you gone that you didn’t expect to go?”  These are the questions I would ask anyone who has lived for one half a century.  and did ask, often, when I was a social worker specializing in gerontology.  Every last one of us is on a unique journey, no matter how mundane it may look from the outside.  It’s always a journey of the soul.  And, as I have elsewhere quoted Pierre Tielhard de Chardin as saying, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.  We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Come back for Part Two sometime in October, after the reunion.  I can hardly wait to see what scenic routes some of those souls have traversed.  I know this–it won’t be boring.

Earlier this week, during a visit with my friend Ken and his twenty-something daughter, the two of them recounted the blow-up that finally ended his second marriage.  Back then he had not yet developed the degree of self-respect needed to end an abusive relationship early on.  His wife had always been verbally abusive, but this time she crossed the line and grabbed her stepdaughter by the throat.  Ken had to separate them; it got uglier; Ken and his daughter walked out for good.

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