Diane’s Blog

As you’ve probably noticed by now, these entries are getting farther and farther apart.  When I first started this blog, I thought it would consist of my jotting down some random thoughts weekly — that turned out to be unrealistic on my part.  It turns out that what wants to come out of me are short essays, and that takes more time and effort on my part than I am willing or able to give on a weekly basis. 

Thus, the once-in-a while blog is born!  At some point I guess I’ll have to have my web designer remove the “Weekly” from the top of this page, so as to not confuse.  Quality over quantity, people…

I’d like to share with you a little epiphany I had last weekend.  I started having an off-and-on pain in the upper left quadrant of my stomach — after 24 hours it had not changed.  So I did what I’ve been practicing for a couple of months now — I told my body that I’m sorry, I’m here, and I’m listening.  Having had an adversarial relationship with my body for practically my whole life, I finally got it that this needs to change in order for me to create not only better health for myself, but the sense of well-being that I want to experience at all times. 

When I receive messages via my intuition, they appear as just another thought, but I’ve learned to distinguish them from the messages that my ego sends me, which are almost always directive, often negative, forcing, and urgent.   Therefore, I knew I had a “hit” when I suddenly heard the words “Lighten Up” spoken gently. 

Well, that’s it, I thought.  Of course.  Even though I’ve tried to tell myself that I’m pretty relaxed these days, a deeper part of me knew that this wasn’t so.  I immediately began to remind myself periodically throughout the day to lighten up.  This helped a little, and indeed, the pain was gone by the next morning. 

Because I felt I needed to know more details about what was going on, I sat quietly the next afternoon and asked for guidance.  Because I am connected to my inner guidance system, and because this is what I do, I always receive an in-depth answer.  It turns out that a great deal of my anxieties about not being somehow “good enough” are still with me, and the pain that manifested did so as a reminder that this is so. 

It’s true — when I thought about it, I realized that I still have the fear that I am somehow inadequate to do the work that I am here to do.  Here’s where it gets complicated for all of us — I know intellectually that I am more than prepared and skilled.  Emotionally, however, part of me is constantly sabotaging this knowing.  This particular fear is rooted in my childhood — I am quite familiar with its origins. 

It was a reality check for me to be reminded that it is still active in my life, even though much of the time I may be unaware of it consciously.  My guidance suggested that I notice daily when I start to feed myself any sort of negative thoughts about my abilities or about how much I am “doing” since part of this fear manifests as forceful messages from my ego self that I should be doing more to prove my worth. 

The bottom line is “Stop The Should-ing!”  It’s always humbling to receive a reality check like this.  Especially because there are times when I receive the opposite message from the ego — the one that says “I am more evolved than (fill in the blank).  Our egos are funny that way — they like to keep us on quite an emotional roller coaster by informing us that we are at either one end of the spectrum or the other. 

What we seek of course, is balance — the middle point between better than and not good enough.  The process of waking up is now in full swing on this planet, and as I’m still being reminded, noticing and changing the thought patterns that no longer support us is our basic spiritual practice.

In my weekly talk with my dad last Sunday, a topic came up that I had hoped would not raise its ugly little head again.  First, let me remind you that my past relationship with my father was always rocky at best — there were times when we did not speak, and in some ways that was a great relief for me. 

 The verbal abuse I experienced from him growing up was something that I carried around with me for many years; it manifested as anger and the need to control others in order to experience what felt to me like safety.  Obviously, this created dysfunctional relationships, and until I hit 40, I blamed others for what I later realized I had created myself. 

 Over the last few years, and to the surprise and delight of both of us, my relationship with my father has healed to the extent that we can actually talk for extended periods of time without getting defensive and/or judging and even attacking the other person in some way.  However, my dad still seems to have the need to reminisce about how “nasty” I was to him in this or that conversation that occurred years ago — the implication being that I had been a very unlikable person until recently, when I somehow “changed my attitude” and turned into nice Diane. 

I have let this go over and over, as I know now that it simply does no good to rehash one’s perceived childhood pain with the aging parent who was involved.  Oh, I tried this a number of times years ago, and was shocked to discover that my father (and mother for that matter) had no memory of any transgression on their part. 

I guess I was in a sort of prickly mood this time, because I found myself resenting being placed in a position of apologizing for something not only dug up from the past, but in this case, a conversation I know did not go as my father describes it.  I suddenly heard myself say, “Well, you know, ours was the only relationship in the last 15 years that was problematic.  Yes, I know I was not particularly nice to you and at times even hung up the phone on you, but there were reasons for that.  You do remember that when I was growing up you did a lot of yelling. I was afraid of you and as I got older, I felt anger towards you for that.  You would call me “stupid” or tell me I needed to see a psychiatrist if I disagreed with you.” 

Needless to say, my father was shocked and horrified.  He has no recollection of any of this, apparently having always believed he was a wonderful father.  I could tell that he was grappling with it; that it could only cause him pain if he were to accept it.  We both fumbled around for a minute or two, until we agreed that the past truly no longer exists.  Since it doesn’t exist, why go there?  We both agreed that we are very very happy with the relationship that we have forged, that we each forgave the other some time ago, and that we don’t want to jeopardize it now. 

The ex-mental health professional as well as the hurt child within has always wanted to force my father to look at what he did and take responsibility for its role  in undermining not only our relationship, but all of mine until the time that I took things into my own hands.  Over a number of years, I successfully managed to exorcise all the old demons.  It took a great deal of time, effort and inner work, and required brutal honesty on my part. 

I know now that I can’t expect a parent to do the same — it’s just not reasonable.  And after all, if we can take it upon ourselves to meet each new moment with acceptance of someone, no matter what our history with them, won’t we be able to see them more clearly than we ever could through the lens of historical pain?  (End of post–please ignore below)

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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 was watching Oprah yesterday, and although the topic was the widening rift between the “haves” and “have-not’s” in this country, what really got my attention was something else.  Near the end of the show Robert Reich, who was talking about the imbalance of wealth in our country, said that “luck” was an important factor in achieving what we like to call The American Dream. 

Oprah said that she had to disagree; she does not believe in luck.  She said that she sees it instead as the place where intent meets opportunity.  Mr. Reich fumbled around with this for a minute, but couldn’t seem to get away from the “luck” concept.

 I used to believe in luck, but that belief began to fade as the realization of a new truth entered my life: we create our own reality.  It seems that these two concepts cannot share the same space within us.  What does this mean?  In other words, it’s the old debate — there is meaning and organization, versus randomness, chaos, and by inference, luck. 

I now see that where you fall in terms of these two concepts determines not only your worldview but how you actually experience life.  For example, when I believed that circumstances in my life were conspiring against me, I was unhappy and resentful.  Bad things “happened” to me — surely I wasn’t creating them — who would want to?  I was at the mercy of factors I couldn’t control and therefore I was a victim. 

Then I began to open to the universal truth that made its way into human consciousness in the 1960s — we create our own reality.  As I did so, not only did I cease to feel that I was a victim of happenstance, but I began to see that my intention in any given circumstance had more power over the outcome than I ever would have thought possible. 

 Luck is in the category of  human beliefs that we cling to in order to keep from becoming fully conscious.  It gets you off the hook, doesn’t it?  But it also prevents us from becoming the immensely powerful beings we really are, because belief in luck says that you still think the real power is outside of you somehow.

So how do you improve your life if luck isn’t involved?  In the realm of social class in this society, certainly there are long-standing institutional factors and pervasive beliefs and practices that conspire to keep all of us in the same class into which we were born.  Do exceptions like Oprah transcend these factors due to luck, or is it that notion of intent meeting opportunity? 

 This is one of those areas where most people come down 100% on one side or the other; there are no shades of gray here.  How do you see it?  Earlier this week my husband and I received an offer from a friend to live rent-free in a beautiful home in the country not far from here in exchange for being the caretakers for the main house, which is occupied by a lawyer from Washington, DC only a few months out of the year.  As it turns out, this opportunity couldn’t be more well-timed, for reasons I won’t go into here. 

But the question I asked myself was, “How did I create this?”  And I knew the answer immediately — our intention, bolstered by our belief that anything is possible and that we deserve all the abundance that life has to offer, met with a wonderful opportunity.  The same holds true when circumstances are not so favorable. 

 I ask the same question, but I’ve learned, more and more, to stay away from the voice — the ego — that wants to blame Diane and make her guilty for having created something that she will most likely experience as painful.  I’m learning that part of the journey of becoming “conscious” in this life is to stop seeing chaos as an enemy.  What if the meaning behind the chaos is simply our cue to look at everything from a greater perspective than we normally do?  I don’t know about you, but making that choice helps me to stay sane when so much in our world appears to be madness.

Last week I talked about my concern that we tend to not get worked up enough about the state of the world.  Funny how you can step around a corner and Bang!– you’re looking at the other side.  My father sent me a newspaper article this week from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  Although at first glance it seems to provide useful information — graphs, statistics on medical care for retirees — a closer look had me jumping back like I’d stuck my nose into a funky garbage can.  After checking out my response with that of my husband Jim, I tossed the thing into a file drawer.

 Why, you ask, did I flip out?  Well, I’d be pleased as punch to answer: I no longer conspire with worry-mongers.  My dad, on the other hand, is a full-out black-belt, proselytizing worrier.  I can remember hearing his voice back in my teen years, responding on many occasions to my innocent statement that I wasn’t worried about whatever it was.  “Well,” his deep voice would boom, “You SHOULD worry!”  And so I did.  I learned to be a champion worrier.  Hell, I’d worry if I even suspected that I might run out of toilet paper before my next scheduled trip to the grocery store.  Did you notice the word “scheduled?”  Yep — I was also a world-class control freak.  More on that another time.

 But as I began to look at my life in a new light in my 40s I realized there is a hidden hand guiding everything we do (not necessarily “God” — but a greater intelligence.)  And then I understood that a soul that is lovingly, purposefully guided and supported every step of the way is wasting absurd amounts of energy by worrying.  As James Redfield, author of The Celestine Prophecy stated in an interview, “Worry is negative prayer.”  Oops!  That really hit home for me.  The last thing I want to do is send more negative energy out into an already gasping world.

The aforementioned article on the growing cost of medical care for baby boomers meant well, but its whole point of view was to scare the shit out of us about how “unsafe” retiring at any age now is, unless you’re Bill Gates.  Worry because of scarce resources is big in the media these days. While I agree that there will be people going under financially, and who knows, I could be among them, I know that worrying is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Especially harmful is dwelling on “statistics” and anything quoted from “experts.”  Please.  Who can be more expert than me about how I choose to create my life? 

 Interestingly, large numbers of people (also sheep) are quite easily directed if someone yells “Fire!”  and then points to the door they want said sheeple to pass through. So I hope you’re not in “worrier” mode.  Here’s an interesting fact: You can’t worry and be fully present at the same time.  It’s not possible — our conscious mind can’t achieve that particular multi-tasking challenge.  Try it out if you haven’t already. 

 Whenever I’m tempted to worry, I ask myself — “Is everything okay in THIS moment?”  The answer can only be “yes” unless you just expired. (Now THERE’S a whole other topic)  Then I remind myself that the future is just a string of “this-moments.”  So the chances are really good that they’ll be fine, too.

I’m feeling a little snarkey this week.  I snapped at my husband this morning.  I’ve had zero patience with myself.  I didn’t even feel like “blogging,” to tell you the truth.  It’s been one of those weeks that you can only describe this way: “It’s been one of those weeks.”  I can’t quite put my finger on any one thing.  Hmmm — My hair made me a cinch for the “Kramer” look-a-like contest, if they ever hold one.  I’ve felt tired all week — low energy, nothing serious.  Oh, and every time I turned on the TV or radio or went online, I heard horror stories of innocent people dying and rumors of World War III.

   Oh.  That could be it. These are turbulent times we are living in, people.  Or as my elderly ex-client Doris from Pittsburgh used to say, “Turrible, turrible.”  How are you affected by all the global gnashing?  Do you tune it out?  Does it make you feel impotent?  Resentful?  Angry?  Have you ever just cried for the hatred and greed that are playing out on a world-wide level? Or do you feel nothing at all? 

 When I heard the author and mystic Andrew Harvey speak here in Ashevile almost 2 years ago he said the reason we aren’t outraged 23 hours a day is simple: “We’re in a Coca-coma.”  This is a consumer society, after all.  Consumerism is the national religion.  And if it does nothing else, our religion helps us to go numb just when the appropriate response for any normal human would be, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”  Or perhaps, “It didn’t have to be this way,” if we are one of the more forgiving, compassionate ones.

The beauty of this religion is that you don’t even have to get high and alter your consciousness to zone out.  Hell, that would be redundant — we are all zoned out.  All the time.  If you doubt it, ask yourself, “How horrible would things have to get for how many living beings on this planet for me to break down and sob?”  I don’t know about you, but I think of myself as a fairly empathetic person who gets upset if an animal is mistreated.  But I can focus my eyes and ears on stories about thousands of innocent people dying in Darfur or Iraq and eat my dinner at the same time.  Isn’t that denial, folks?  Yeah, I know — we all need a little denial just to get us through the day.  It’s one of the holy sacraments of consumerism. 

 But I’m beginning to suspect we’re in it up to our necks.  Otherwise we would be marching and protesting and banding together to make our voices heard.  We wouldn’t sit there and say, “Oh, that’s awful.  Is American Idol on yet?”  At least I’d like to think we wouldn’t. So what does it take to respond, if not with anger, which is useless anyway, then with compassion and with a resolve to do SOMETHING to improve the lot of humans?  It seems to me that we’ve sedated ourselves so successfully for so long that we now have whole generations growing up thinking that reality TV beats the real thing.  Their parents can’t really help them sort things out because they’re too tired from working overtime to make the mortgage payment and hopefully avoid losing their good credit rating.  What is THAT about?

I know this — everyone I meet is too distracted almost all the time to focus on the one thing that counts — the quality of life on Earth.  It’s no longer possible to act as though what happens in equatorial Africa doesn’t affect us here in the U.S. On the level of Spirit, All is One.  So that even if we don’t necessarily know what’s bothering us, on the inner planes we are all suffering from the damage we are inflicting on each other as an interconnected part of the collective mind of this planet.

 Sometimes we just have to turn our focus to those areas of our lives that make us feel good about who we are.  I’m now finding that it no longer seems possible for me to separate the quality of my life from that of the other 6 billion souls.  Maybe that’s a good thing — if you choose to see it as an indication that we all are, indeed, one.   

Okay I know that for those of you of a certain age that song title is incredibly vapid, but “Subterranean Homesick Blues” just doesn’t describe this week’s musings; Ms. Spears’ pop hit does.  What I did again is listen to my ego voice as though it was my truth.  It isn’t, of course; Spirit is the voice that carries our deepest truths.  But I got sucked in by the ego’s thoughts and didn’t recognize them; they can be so darn convincing.

I decided to share this week’s process with you because it’s what we all have to go through over and over if we choose to evolve.  (I’m talking spiritual evolution here — this dimension apparently escaped Darwin)  I had always been confident that this web site would do well — meaning people would take advantage of the personal guidance I offer.  That confidence seemed to flip over on its head about a month after publication of The Soul Garage.  I found myself suddenly entertaining thoughts like, “Nobody will even FIND this *!&# web site, forget about requesting guidance!”  And more recently, “Oh, who cares, anyway.  It really makes no difference to me.”  Wha ’sup wit dat?

Within three weeks my vision for my work went down the toilet, and along with it went my sense of moving in a certain direction; suddenly I was lost.  I finally did what I learned to do back in 1992 when I first began receiving answers to my life questions in written form from higher guidance — I sat down with pen and paper, aligned myself with Spirit, and asked.  Because much of what I received in response is universal, I will now share with you excerpts you may find useful:

 ”Your dilemma is this: You haven’t a clue when your work will take off and this is driving the ego crazy.  Its response was first — “Oh, it’s just a matter of time” which quickly has degenerated to, Nobody will EVER come to me for help –fuck ‘em!”  Does this sound familiar?  It should, as it is a long-time response system set up by your ego many years ago to protect you from outside disappointments.  This is not your truth.

 Your truth is that you are now offering to the world grace in the form of your answers to individuals’ most pressing problems, and you know you are the real thing.  Your truth is also that whatever happens, Diane will continue to evolve.  The timetable is set only by the ego, which wants Diane to feel guilty for not DOING more at this time — does that sound familiar? In order to feel the motivation you want you will need to discern the ego voice when such thoughts arise and do so vigilantly.  Right now you are accepting that voice as your truth and are becoming lost in it.  Your work WILL be found — never fear. 

 Allow yourself to have “negative” thoughts and feelings without judging yourself, Dear One.  The thoughts in themselves are harmless, and you only give them power by dwelling on or by immediately pushing them away.  Acknowledge them, thank them, then move on.”

 So you see, I did it again.  I gave more authority to the external world than my internal wisdom.  Although I don’t do this nearly as often as I used to, obviously there is still work to be done. So for all of you who are choosing to reach for the life you really want, please know three things:

1) Notice your thought processes, especially when they become negative and/or you find yourself feeling guilty about not being good enough in some way 2) Go with Spirit’s guidance, whether on your own or through someone like myself, and 3) Forgive yourself, no matter how many times you catch yourself buying into egoic thoughts as “truth.”  What matters is walking through this corrective process — how often is irrelevant. 

 Each time we choose to align with Spirit we are learning to carry more authentic power.  That’s the kind of power that brings both inner and planetary peace; until we understand this as a species we will continue to flail against “enemies” and feel impotent, no matter how successful we are as currently defined by our society.

Please feel free to contact me here at The Soul Garage if any of this is confusing to you.  I’d be glad to answer any of your questions.

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.

Hi, people!  Welcome to my web log.  When I first thought of creating a web site to offer the spiritual guidance I’ve been providing for years, I felt very excited.  Then the fearful part of Diane’s mind rose up in horror: “Why would I choose to expose myself globally when what I do is still so misunderstood, not to mention so little known that there isn’t even a name for it?  Why would anyone want to do such a thing for that matter?  No, I’ll stay safe and just keep offering my services here in Asheville where my work is accepted.”

This inner dialogue ebbed and flowed over the next few days until suddenly I thought of Ethel and asked myself, “What would Ethel do?”  I knew the answer before I finished asking the question.  Allow me to back up and introduce you to Ethel.  In 1992 she changed my life and will always be a touchstone for me.  That October I was a recently divorced, fortyish social worker just beginning to reawaken my long dormant creative powers.  There was a Halloween party coming up at my workplace.  I knew this was my chance to break out.  I didn’t want to go as someone famous — anyone can do that.  Perhaps a twist on that theme; an unknown, barely talented but ambitious relative of some celebrity.  I kicked this around for awhile.

A couple of weeks before the party it came to me in a dream: Madonna’s cousin!  Oh yeah.  Over the next few days this character unfolded and Ethel walked — no, strutted — into my life.  Ethel Ciccone, Madonna’s cousin from the Bronx (with appropriate dialect): a part-time, freelance dental hygienist whose real talents (according to her) lay on the Broadway stage, although so far her talent had eluded anyone casting anything.  I’ll let Ethel take over: “I am aw-bviously the more talented one in the family.  I wasn’t named afta my idol, Ethel Merman, for nuttin’.  Madonna’s all twalk!”  We now watch as Ethel yanks open her lace jacket to reveal a black bustier (French corset) à la Madonna, and belts out the first verse of “Like A Virgin” with a Merman-esque delivery that knocks ‘em dead every time.

The afternoon of that office party I was, for the (very) first time (oooh!) the life of the party.  I had acted in children’s theater and knew I was a performer at heart, but as sometimes happens to young girls, I became too self-conscious by adolescense to follow it.  The next day my boss, who was a New Yorker, accosted me in the hallway.
“Doi-ane,” she said loudly, unwittingly  reminding me who had actually inspired Ethel’s accent and style.  “Do you think Ethel would be available to sing at my reti-ya-ment pah-ty next week?”  “Yes,” I said.  “I believe she would.”  And so she did.  Before 60 people, Ethel, in g and full regalia, sang “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” Ethel Merman’s signature tune from “Gypsy.”  After a little initial nervousness, she was a sensation.

What does this have to do with you, dear friends?  In the ensuing weeks I began asking, “What would Ethel do?”  Whenever I felt intimidated or shy, she was always there, being who she is in a big way, with no apologies.  We each have an Ethel within us, urging us to play big instead of staying small and safe.  Ethel gave me permission to allow the boisterous, life-embracing part of Diane (who had learned early on to stuff her anger and please others) to come out and announce “I’m here!” to the back of the auditorium.

Acceptance of the entire cast of characters we each call our own plants both our feet firmly on the road to wholeness and fulfillment.  Who is your Ethel?  She may have something very different than mine to show you about yourself, but chances are you’ll find her in a dark corner where you may have left her long ago, out of fear that was real to you.  You and the world need to hear from her.

“Now’s your inning
Stand the world on its ear.
You’re gonna set it spinning
That’ll be just the beginning…”
              –from “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim