Diane’s Blog

I’ve been spending some time considering what my deepest desires are lately.  Have you done this?  It seems to be a very effective way of paring away the superficial in life from what really brings us joy.  At least it is for me.  This is partly a function of aging — hell, I know that.  I turned 58 in November after all. 

But there’s also more to it.  It seems to me more and more that in this consumer-driven society it has become increasingly difficult to separate MY desires from those that are created artificially and funneled into my home via a television,, the Internet, etc.  Perhaps you’ve worked your way past these manufactured “needs”.  There’s still one more hurdle to jump, and that’s the trickiest one – the ego. 

It’s my understanding that one of the main reasons we are here is to learn to recognize and follow our inner voice over that of the ego, and for most of us this is a lifetime’s work.  In other words, you will probably receive one list of desires from someone to whom you ask, “What are your true desires?” 

That list will look quite different if you ask them to spend a week holding the question lightly in the back of their mind, letting it drift in and out, especially before they fall to sleep at night, and then allowing the answers to bubble up  from the heart in their own time.  If you are at all interested in following your spirit’s lead, this exercise is an effective measure of how far you’ve come. 

I’m not saying that your deepest desires have to evolve to the point where they are all non-material — please, spare me that.  As long as we have bodies it’s probably better to stay in them.  I would simply say that if after 20 years of telling yourself that you are working on your personal baggage your list of desires is still heavily weighted on the material goal side, you may need to go deeper. 

 I’ve noticed that over the last 10 years or so, my list of heart’s desires has become more and more weighted toward nature — I seem to need ever-increasing amounts of time spent walking through forests and observing the birds’ behaviors.  Having this information available to me on a conscious level has made it easier to act on.  And harder for others to convince me that something else is more important.

Well, it’s good to be home.  Especially since I just learned that the Great Lakes area, which I visited last week, received a very early snowfall — just four days after I left!

Before I go on to talk about the reunion I attended, an announcement: I will be presenting a class or two in Asheville next month.  I have yet to decide on the main focus, but the top contender at this time is Relationships.  Check back here next week for more information. 

Okay, now for the disappointing news — my 40th class reunion was a bust!  Out of 600 classmates, only 70 attended.  70!  And I didn’t even know the majority of them.  Only two female friends were there, which was something; not one male.  In thinking this over since then, I’ve decided that the best explanation is that a lot of folks attended either the 25th or 35th reunion, found it dull, and vowed to never return — as I did last Saturday night.  The question remains — why did I want to go to this thing anyway? 

After the fact, the answer was different than what I had thought.  Well, sort of different.  It’s still true that I was curious to see where life had led so many of the people I had known, and I wanted to apologize to a few of them, whether or not they knew what the heck I was talking about.  But I also had to admit that I wanted to be seen.  And admired, perhaps. 

I noticed that in general the women looked much better — healthier, younger, more well-preserved — than the men in attendance.  There is still a part of me that can’t seem to get past that superficial need for the kind of attention that being attractive brings with it.  I guess it was unrealistic of me to think I had left that behind entirely, when so much of my earlier life seemed to depend on it for defining who I was. 

This seems to be tied in to the false spiritual understanding that as you evolve spiritually in your life, you get to a point where appearances mean nothing.  Perhaps that will happen some day — I’m not there yet.  And that’s OK.  I’m learning that it’s just as easy to beat yourself up over spiritual success (or lack of it) as any other kind.  I see this all the time in healers around me, and I’m no exception. 

Another revelation was that my desire to see and talk to my high school friends was for the most part sentimental.  And therefore it may have been for the best that I didn’t see them.  The truth about these friends is that they fell away long ago, largely because I let them do so.  Not having a clue as to who I really was back then, I tried to fit in, and found a group of simpatico girls –my “group.”  Around the time of our junior year in college, things started to feel uncomfortable to me — largely due to the fact that I was going in a different direction both socially and politically than these people. 

They were on one side of the Vietnam war debate; I was on the other.  They were on career tracks; I was on the hippie track.  Although we stayed in touch for the next few years and I even roomed with one of them, it became more and more painfully clear that we had very little in common.  We drifted apart and I never looked back.  Well maybe a little.  Again, for sentimental reasons. 

You really can’t go home again, and that’s the truth. Too often we let what we think “ought to be” guide us.  That never works in the long run.  Childhood and adolescence are a time of seismic change, and we will never feel again the way we did then.  Some wish they could go back — there is no back — it no longer exists.  I don’t want to go back — perhaps I had hoped to glean a little more understanding of those tumultuous years, when Diane was such an unknown element.  Fortunately I don’t have a “need” to do that.  Right now feels better and better to me.

Last week I finally read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.  I’d heard about it for years, but never got around to reading it.  As you may know, it involves a re-telling of human history with a different storyline then we have been taught.  The interesting thing to me is how drastically this history is changed by simply telling the story from a different point of view. 

 I started to think about how we are bombarded every day with “facts” about our health, our opportunities for advancement, and our safety, to name a few.  Then there’s the whole realm of political persuasion, in which every elected official and pundit assures us they speak the “truth” with their “facts.”  Isn’t it funny — a large percentage of our U.S. population believes the “facts” spouted by one political party, while an equal or greater percentage sucks up the “truths” of the other. 

 What’s going on here?  Can that many people be wrong?  How do we separate fact from opinion and truth from “truthiness”  before the next generation of history books are written?  I’ve noticed that we are now being lied to.  By everyone.  All the time.  I’m no longer referring to politics alone.  Oh, no.  Apparently the rules changed without fanfare a while ago while we as a nation were collectively napping. 

 Suddenly it’s not just OK — it’s a “strategy” — to lie about the free trip to Florida  you’ve just won but didn’t really; the “natural” ingredients in that jar of peanut butter; how much weight you can realistically expect to lose on the latest 98% caffeine diet pill; how you, too, can qualify for this shiny new house (car, boat, whatever) even with that basement-level credit score. 

 All this has got me wondering — who determines where we go next as the most advanced brainstems on this planet?  Telemarketers?  Political operatives?  Fortune 500 corporations?  In other words, who will we, as sovereign individuals, allow to not only determine the course we take from here on in, but also interpret the story of that course for future generations — if there are any. 

 I keep coming back to the lowest common denominator — personal truth, the kind you can only gain by experience and observation.  We tend to reject personal experience out of hand in our society — it can’t be measured in a lab, so it’s fairly worthless stuff.  If that’s ”true,” I ask myself, then why does my life keep improving and feeling increasingly authentic and “safe” the longer I do all my own testing in the laboratory of Diane’s daily life? 

 Each of us has to make a decision based on the following question: ”Do I need to look to others for “truth” and hope that I follow the “ right” authorities, or is there an innate wisdom within me that I can tap into and allow to guide me safely through life?”  Once we know the answer to that question we can make one of the following our conscious decision:  “I will put the future of this planet into the hands of those whose agendas I cannot know” or “I am now ready to take responsibility for my role in determining the success or failure of the human experiment.” 

I asked for guidance recently about marketing my web site.  The answer I received made me say “Duh!”  Guidance is often like that, in that what it really does is tell us what we already know but haven’t yet brought into sharp focus.  (Often because we don’t want to) 

 So this answer seemed obvious:  “You are an unconventional person — why would you choose to pursue conventional marketing advice?  It won’t work for you.  You will need to allow your creativity to flow freely; then you will find the methods that “work” for you.”

This inspired me to take another look at my life: sure enough, I have almost always been different.  But that square peg-ness was extremely painful in my first, oh, 40 years or so.  I feel compassion now for the Diane who so desperately kept trying to fit into a world that didn’t accommodate her uniqueness.  The thing is, if you haven’t looked within in a serious way over time, how can you know what your needs really are?  Most of us think we know, but we don’t. 

Here’s a test: How many times have you agreed with someone in the last week without digging deeper to take stock of how you really feel?  Then look at your life and ask, “How often have the important events and turning points in my life been governed by “shoulds”?  For example, I married my first husband because I was 37 years old and held the belief that if not now, when?  There’s a “should” for you. 

 Or going back further, I went to college right after high school even though I hadn’t a clue about who I was or what I wanted in life.  All my friends were going, and it was assumed by all that I would, too.  “Here’s the application; pick a major.  Well, put SOMETHING down.  You can always change it.”  Only since my early 40s have I really celebrated my different-ness, and that was pretty wobbly until more recently. 

 Now I realize that the very qualities I once felt I had to hide are the ones that comprise my gift to this world; it is always so.  If there is one pearl of wisdom I could give, it would be this: Choose to dig deeper and find your own different-ness, because within it lies the key to your greatness.  Okay, two pearls: If something isn’t working for you — look more closely.  Maybe it isn’t meant to, if it doesn’t fit who you really are.

On Monday of this week Jim and I visited his daughter Kara, who lives about 45 minutes from us.  She is a lovely, complicated, endearing 22 year old who I am delighted to have in my life, never having had children of my own (that I know of).  We get along famously, but every now and then I suddenly feel like I’m 85 years old, for God’s sake.  Don’t get me wrong — she never intends this response, but there it is, all the same.  What’s the demon that rears its ugly head? 

Technology — plain and simple.  This is the dividing line between generations now, as I see it.  When I was her age it was the “generation gap”; code for our rebellion against the old guard’s societal attitudes.  Now I ARE the old guard, and I will not go quietly.  Here’s the latest of numerous incidents: I just realized this sounds a little disgusting, so try not to get grossed out.  I was sitting in Kara’s living room, talking and idly running my hand over the nape of my neck when I felt a bump at my hairline.  “Hey — look at this — does this look like something?”  I asked Jim and Kara.  Well, her first impulse was not to run over and look, but to pick up her digital camera.  “Here, I’ll take a picture of it!”  She said.  I’m sitting there thinking, “What good is that?  What’s she going to do — mail it to me?  By then it’ll either be gone or I’ll be dead.” 

What I actually said was more like, “Huh?”  She grabbed the camera and stood up, saying “You know — I’ll take a picture of it, then we can zoom in on it!”  I forgot — Digital.  No waiting.  Zooming in AFTER you shoot.  Egad.  So that’s what we did, and it looked harmless in close-up; at least I’m not in a coma yet. 

I heard a segment on National Public Radio the other day about how this is the first generation that knows more than their parents about everything technological.  And with every new advance, we lose ground.  I don’t doubt the truth of this for a minute.  But the question is — does this mean we have nothing to offer these children of the post-information age?  Should we just throw up our hands and wheel ourselves off into the Sunset Retirement Home? 

Happily, I do know the answer to that one.  Hell, no!  There is something which is at the same time the most valuable gift my generation has to offer and also among the least valued by this society.  If you said “advice”, you’re close.  Personally, I have finally learned this about advice — nobody wants it; they just say they do.  So it’s not that.  What they do want is answers about life’s challenges, e.g. “How do I get out of THIS one?” “Why do I get so depressed about things?” 

Life experience is the only way for young people to feel that they are okay, but they don’t have nearly enough of it yet, and the world they live in is so much more demanding and fast-paced and cynical than the one we knew.  We can share our experience with them.  But there’s a catch — you can’t provide helpful examples of how you got through something unless you gain some perspective over the years, because chances are you screwed up at their age, too.  I know I did. 

So it’s only now — now that I have a sensitive young woman in my life who is so like me at her age it’s uncanny — that I realize how far I’ve come.  15 years ago I was still struggling with my own identity.  In the interim I looked within and worked at letting go of my need to judge, my inability to forgive, and my mistaken identification with the ego’s idea of who Diane is rather than with my heart’s knowledge. 

Now I’m able to say to Kara, “Well, sweetie, I did the same thing when I was your age.  I got into trouble for it, and I lost some friends.  I finally learned that I’m okay just as I am, and I don’t have to pretend to like what everybody else does just to keep their friendship.”  Or whatever the topic is — you get the idea.  I’ve also learned to add something my parents rarely, if ever, gave me — unsolicited cheerleading.  Maybe it’s BECAUSE I didn’t receive it that I value it so now, but whenever I can I add, “You are such a fabulous person.  I know you don’t see it that way yet, but you will.  Some day you’ll look back on these days and wonder how you could possibly have underestimated yourself so.” 

Don’t we all need to hear that more than we need to know how to use an MP3 player?  Interesting, isn’t it, that we still choose, as a culture, to place the public “achievement” (almost always in terms of dollars) above personal triumph over old, dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors?

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?

(more…)

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.