Ready for Something to Change

Determined to be Queen shares...

Change, as we all know, is inevitable. Sometimes we avoid it. Sometimes we wonder when it will happen again. Sometimes we just live every moment like that's all there is and we never have to stop and label what we're doing as change. We just DO it.

Blogging sometimes feels like labelling changes. Changes in perception. Changes in activities. Changes in relationships. Changes inside what feels like my soul.

I say "feels like" because, of course, the Soul is constant. I'm not so sure we can "grow" the soul at all really. Instead, I think what happens when we grow spiritually is that we allow more of our soul to show...or flow...through us.

The more we resist our soul's true nature, the more miserable we are: in body, mind, and spirit. We block the Source of our Being with our negative attitudes; our addictive or abusive behaviors; our daily intake of empty calories, and various other substances we could probably live without; heck, even with gossipping, telling white lies, or driving aggressively. You name it—we are experts at blocking the Love.

As amazing as the human organism is, or can be if we allow it to be, the Soul is much more amazing. And truly, how we treat our Soul—whether we block it's light and love, or whether we allow those things to flow unhindered—reflects through our bodies, our personalities, and everything else that we can call a part of the Self.

So the Self is really just an expression of the Soul—the Divine Inspiration within us.

I bring this up today because I've been blocking the light and love of my Soul in certain areas. We all do this to some extent. (Obviously, otherwise we'd be angels and archangels or some such radiant Being, I imagine!) We're all great at one area of personal development and usually at the expense of another area. I'll use myself as an example.

Lately I've been expressing my creativitity and I've been exercising my body and feeding it much better than I had previously (i.e. no fast food whatsoever), I've made lots of new friends, AND, I even quit smoking—that awful, awfully-mean-to-myself habit. Sounds great in writing, right? Absolutely. What that brings to light, however, are the other areas that need to come along for the joy ride.

I'll let you in on a little secret. Most of my blogs are peppy and positive, right? To the point that some of you might start thinking either, "Man, she's got it goin' on!" -OR- "Does this woman EVER have a problem?" Well why would I write about the tough stuff? It's much more satisfying to write of the triumph of overcoming the tough stuff. Why wallow around in the muddy parts in writing?

I started thinking it may not seem realistic to have all the happy, happy, joy, joy blogs with none of the major challenges. Plus, the major challenges ganged up on me once I started having so much fun. (But that's an entirely different story.)

So here's the secret. When I'm not writing, I'm dealing with challenges. See how much empty space there is on my blog lately? Uh-huh. Challenges, thank you very much. And I say challenges now because I know better. It's all part of the changes that happen incessantly in a life being lived. What I'm still working on, a little bit, (ok, a lot), is a quicker recognition of the positive value of the challenges that really go for my gusto, if you know what I mean!

We all have those special little issues that seem to lay us out flat faster than we can say, "Halleluiah," right? I call them sticking points. You know, those things that seem to happen just when you think you've got it all under control (uh-oh! time for a lesson in letting go and letting God!). It's like emotional fly paper and you just struggle and struggle and you never can seem to get free of it, right?

Of course we all have those things, or maybe just that one thing, that throw us for a loop and remind us we are human, fallible, imperfect....well, you get the idea.

But maybe you don't have that feeling any more because you're an expert at "letting go and letting God." I salute you my friend. I would really like to choose the path of peace for myself too, but as of yet, I keep choosing the fly paper from time to time!

BUT. There's always a but. You know that!

Make no mistake. It's a choice. One of my greatest friends has reminded me for the past ten years that happiness is a choice, and I seem to have short-term memory loss in that part of my brain. And I'll tell ya, sometimes, when I am in the throes of my self-loathing and my Eeyore mentality, I really kinda resent hearing that it's a choice. (Yes, yes, all you Tom Cruise haters out there, sometimes medication is necessary, but mostly we make ourselves sick.) I just want to blame it on anything but me. Don't you? Sometimes it's way too tough to admit responsibility for my own happiness or lack thereof. Like it or not, though, it's true. I always have the choice.

So sometimes when I feel all cranky like that, I allow myself a day of sulking and say, "Tomorrow, after you rest, you'll pick yourself up and dust yourself off and get going!" It really helps to give myself permission to sulk, but to put a time limit on it. And really, sometimes it is really just resting. We live in a way-too-busy world, and sometimes we just need a break. I imagine Patrick Swayze as "Johnny" sticking up for me to that smarmy, slave-driving, rich-kid boss, saying, "She's taking a break Neil. She needs a BREAK!" That makes me feel a little better right away actually.

So hey, if you're like me and the holidays are as depressing as they are joyful and you feel like you don't know which way is up, imagine Patrick Swayze telling your family and friends that you need a break and then TAKE one. A REAL break. And give yourself a time limit. It might only be a two hour nap. It might be a two-week vacation. Listen to your heart. It knows what you need. And struggling through with a fake grin on your face is just another way that you block the true love and light that is always in your soul, waiting for you to let it flow.

When we are in alignment with our spirit, our soul, everything else takes care of itself. Are you ready for something to change? Are you ready to choose light and love? To choose happiness and peace?

Once you do*, you'll always have enough Self to share with others.

Happy Holidays Y'all!
Love, Nicole

*Warning: This is not a one-time choice. It is recurring. Daily is a good start, but, more often, it's moment to moment. The choice is always yours and there are always choices! :)

© Nicole J. Williams, 2007, all rights reserved.

Love, or Something Like It*

Determined to be Queen shares...

Karen Carpenter’s lyrics poked at yet another of my sore spots on Monday.

During the bridge, Carpenter says that when she gets these blues—the ones when she wants to quit because “nothing ever seems to fit”—she runs to “find the one who loves” her. But more than that, she suggests that she needs someone else to make her feel better. She can’t seem to console herself. This is a classic sign of the relationship addict. I, too, have found that the chemicals of love can be just as effective as anything in food, alcohol, or drugs. The highs and lows, the mood swings, the delusions of either grandeur or insignificance are one and the same.

Hello, my name is Nicole Williams, and I am a love-aholic.

It hasn’t been very long at all since I tried to control my love interest or felt personally out of control where my emotions are concerned. But the first step is in realizing that I have a problem, and that I am NOT in control. In addition, what I’m learning this year is that I’m just not the victim I think I am.

I’ve been in relationships that might be termed “toxic,” on some level at least, for the past 20 years. I learned early on that “like attracts like,” but it took one failed marriage to really see what that means. It’s like the three finger rule—on crack! (see my blog on Feb. 8th for an explanation of the three finger rule!)

It took a couple years, after the divorce, to realize that I shared in 50% of the responsibility of that relationship. It was easier to point fingers at the behaviors of my partner because they were obviously “bad” ones. Only later did I realize that my bad behavior was just in stealth mode. Not because I intended to hide anything, but because that was the nature of my part of the problem. I had been involved with persons who had extroverted their anger, making it look like I introverted mine.

But I didn’t know this until the Universe served me up another mirroring soul, one more like me. I looked like the feeling extrovert in comparison this time. That’s when the light dawned and I saw myself in a whole new way. I had to take responsibility for my role in the relationship, and I worked on that for a good long time.

Deep below the surface of all of these relationship lessons I was learning, though, there was another current to be reckoned with. What about ME? All the years that most of us spend “finding” ourselves were spent finding group answers. With very few answers about who I was as an individual. Wife and mother were always at the top of the daily to-do list, but that put me below dirty dishes and folding laundry. Needless to say, I was exhausted by the time I got that far, so I kept postponing those me-centered pursuits.

Motherhood tends to have this effect, or so I’ve heard! And it’s true that wives often feel that they compromise more often than the husbands. So what’s “wrong” with that? Nothing at all. And that’s exactly what I held onto for all these years that I’ve been a wife and a mother. But something clicked along the way and I saw that I have, oftener than not, used my dedication to avoid probing my own depths.

In other words, whenever it starts to look like I might have to make my own way and express myself as an individual, I slink back into the comfort zone of my relationships…especially partner love. For me, loving a man is the perfect thrill ride for my insecurity, self-doubt, and fear of failure to set in motion, hoping to keep the focus on things outside the self. Do you love me? Do you need me? Do you want me? Does your world revolve around me?

Ok, right now, this seems pretty serious. But hey, don’t we all do this at one time or another? I bet we all do! But there’s a subtle difference between any substance use and abuse. Use and ab-use. Engagement v. Compulsion. Even good things like exercise and a career and, yes, love relationships can be ab-used. It’s the spirit behind the emphasis.

For me, I just happened to notice that I’ve spent a lot of time using the slings and arrows of insecurity and blame and focusing on the motes in my partners’ eyes to avoid myself. Keeping the instability going and feeling like a victim has created a world of fear that I’ve lived in because it gave me something to fight with or flee from. It’s like a constant state of war. Of death and destruction. Living like that isn’t really living at all.

So now it’s time to create and connect. To take responsibility for myself. To live from the inside out. To be free and fully alive.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.


© Nicole J. Williams, 2007, all rights reserved.

*I just found out today that this is the title of a Kenny Rogers song. I think the spirit of the refrain fits my idea about addiction to love: “Something's got a hold on me/It's cheap but it ain' free/Love or somethin’ like it's got a hold on me.”

Hurricanes of the Heart

Determined to be Queen shares…

The first line of a poem came to me again when I sat down to write this blog, so I thought I would share it with you. I present to you, John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God”:

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor even chaste, except you ravish me.

One of my final courses in graduate school was a 17th Century poetry course, taught by the chair of the English Department at the University of Houston, and John Donne was one of about 10 poets whose work I came to know more intimately. The poets of that time were very much concerned with the nature of the Christian God; they needed to understand, as many of us still do, the relationship between God and “Man”…humans…persons. God, in this poem is “three-personed,” which I find very comforting…God with us…a God like us. But more interesting is the relationship between that God and us—and how apt this poem is in the 21st Century…in my life…in relation to my journey.

In the poem, the human spirit struggles between a love for God and a natural tendency to turn away from that saving Grace. “Reason,” the faculty which reigns in God’s stead in the human mind, is “captived, and proves weak or untrue.” The idea of freedom here is the freedom from temptation…the freedom from the weakness of the human condition…freedom from imperfection in love. The speaker of the poem asks that God storm the human castle and take the soul captive, in order to truly free it from a sinister bondage—that Earthly curse requiring the pain of repeated error and incompetence in things spiritual, loving, and good.

The professor who taught this course is a paragon of intellectualism…known as a GPA “buster.” I took the course, frankly, because it was the only available offering that fit with the final course requirement I needed to graduate. I knew I liked Donne and Herbert and Wroth, off the top of my head, and I love poetry, but the course itself didn’t sound too exciting—it was listed as 17th Century Non-Dramatic Literature—and, as I mentioned, the man had a reputation, and I was determined to beat my undergraduate GPA. (I missed a 4.0 by the equivalent of one course—a story for another day!). Let’s just say that I regretted that I had missed the pinnacle by so small a margin, and so each successive "perfect" semester compounded my secret longing into an ever-increasing goal to surpass that mild disappointment.

And so, I took the course, and it turned out to be one of the best courses of all those I took during my three year stint at the University. It was a small seminar of five women, plus the instructor. Finally, I was able to speak!!! In seminars of 18-22 students who were seasoned and much more talkative than I, my opportunities for contribution had been severely limited. Here, I felt like a graduate student. And I worked harder in this course than in any other. Perhaps I could have done more, but I had two other courses that semester, and I was graduating, and I did the best that I could at the time. In any case, I earned the dreaded
A-minus.

I know, I know. But all of you perfectionists out there are groaning with me …I know you are. So, did I mind? Sure, it’s still a thorn in my paw sometimes…that feeling that I JUST MISSED out on something really exceptional. And a wry expression comes over my face when I think about how my GPA’s match. In fact, if I’m really in a self-flagellating mood, I will think that it just goes to show I’m not quite good enough, or that it's part of the Universe's plan to keep me humble or wanting more. (I told you those little mean voices are nasty!) So what does this have to do with my journey now? Well, that brings us back to the first line of the poem, inspired by recent events, meteorological and otherwise.

Previously, I likened the Queenly awakening to being “born again,” and just as the newly converted are often quickly tempted by the old lifestyle, habits, or “wicked ways,” the newly crowned Queen is quite vulnerable to the slings and arrows from those around her who are threatened by her changing attitudes and behaviors. A new Queen, when she discovers her dream, must make decisions about her life: What will she do? Where will she go? Who will be in her court? The natural consequence of decision is change, and change can be unnerving, to say the least. So, I made a “First Things First” kind of decision of seismic proportions, with long-lasting repercussions, and as the devastating weather stormed into the Gulf Coast shores, my heart was being battered by a hurricane of its own creation.

I apologize for being vague here, but the last thing I want is for my journey blog to sound like a soap opera. Suffice to say that I listened hard to the voices of my dreams and stepped out into the fury that I had avoided for so long. I realized, as the waves came crashing over the levees around my heart, that I had, on a fairly regular basis, “protected” myself out of a life of my own creation. I think that’s where the line from the poem emerged. A friend had told me that life was falling into a pattern of “the same old, same old.” I responded with news of my decision and wrote:

It’s brought up all kinds of things. I think it’s been part of the relentless ache in my heart all these years, but I was unable to recognize it as such because I’d mentally convinced myself that things were “better this way.” And, still, in some ways they were. Now, it is merely the right time.

So…not really the same old same old over here. More tumultuous than the weather really. Hurricanes of the heart.

After writing those last two lines, I started hearing the refrain of “Batter my heart, three-personed God” run through my mind. Now, in this particular case, I am not struggling with my religion—although I know that it is on "the list" of things to address on my journey—but the essence of the poem that I hear right now, in this situation, is that in order to be truly “free,” we must allow that love and passion to overcome us. We have to be willing to be stormed like an enemy castle, or battered as by a storm. We have to weather the transition from the realm of fear and indecision into the Promised Land of strength, conviction, love, and plenty.

Those evolutionary storms of passage may be large, small, or merely imagined, but succumbing to the paralyzing threat is far worse than choosing to live through the turbulent paradigm
shift(s) in our lives. And I promise you—once you find the true path, you will move out of the damaging winds and heavy rains and into that dead quiet center where nothing can touch you. When your “eye” and your “I” align, you can see the future, and the fear will leave you. Each true decision you make will show you the way.

Welcome the storm that leads to the peace of understanding…or, if you will, the peace that passes understanding…but don’t let it devastate you. Rather, let it refine your senses and clarify your thoughts, ideas, and dreams. Let the winds blow, the rains plummet, the hail pelt, the lightning flash, and the thunder roar, but stand in the calm center of your being and dare to dream in the face of it all.

Stay tuned for more on the journey to the Queendom...


Note: My heart goes out to everyone affected by Katrina—this storm of Nature completely surpasses the gravity of any hurricane of the heart I might be living through right now.


© Nicole J. Williams, 2005, all rights reserved

http://www.queenpower.com/
Disclaimer