On Monday, I went to a cafe and sat outside in the stellar Mill Valley weather, everything shiny and sparkly.  I must have been a sight to behold, an adult woman with her box of 96 Crayola crayons, coloring.  A man in his 60s approached me, looking at me like something was all mixed up.  Although I am tres petite, under 5 feet tall without shoes, the little lines around my eyes often outdo my childlike laughter, betraying my true age.  This confused soul asked me, earnestly, "Are you in kindergarten?"

"No."  my simple reply. 

But is it so simple?  Why do I rebel against being a kindergartener?  I notice how hard it is to be all that I want to be, because, logically, the parts don’t quite fit so nicely.  I am no longer a management consultant, with a job that sucks up all of my life energy.  But neither am I a flighty artiste, one who lazes around until noon and then decides to paint a few strokes, sighs, and repeats the same process 48 hours later. 

Of course, those two are the extremes.  And that’s what I’m shaking up.  I’ve felt caught…I can be "academic" and "organized" as I write my dissertation, or help a client revise a resume.  I can also be playful and silly and free as a writer or a dancer even a Crayola maven.  But can I be both?  Do I need to know what this melange of identities looks like? 

I discover that I am not working on assembling a pre-formed jigsaw puzzle.  Mine is more like a collage, one that emerges piece by piece, without too much planning.  A little bit of academic energy, perhaps blue and square.  A little bit of dancer energy, round and pink.  A dash of writer energy, a swirly swoosh of magenta.  Over time, I collect images of who I want to be.  I fill in the details of my personal picture more slowly, organically.  I’ll find a piece that feels just right, with just the right energy, hue, shape, and then it can take its place. 

One day, hopefully in the next 6-9 months, I’ll finish my doctoral studies.  Then, I’ll be "Dr. Bernstein."  What if I am a scholar of the body, and also a dance diva as well as a coloring queen, and they all mix into one?  I am listening to my own inner rhythm, trying out my own beat, playing my own music.  Sure, sure, the temptation is there to fall into someone else’s beat.  A company’s.  A political party’s.  A friend’s.  A lover’s.  But, no, it needs to be my own.  I can play my music alongside the bouncy beat of many others. 

Join me!  Find your own rhythm and let’s all make beautiful music together, from our inner heartbeats. 

I’ve included — in this posting — one the pieces I made during my coloring expedition.  Damn, I am a kindergartener at heart!  And prouder and prouder of that, every day!

Whew!

One of my dreams is really building up steam, momentum, excitement.  I want to share it with the world!

Last night, I facilitated the first of what I hope to be many workshops, perhaps a series, called "Set Your Dreams in Motion." 

Over the past five years, I’ve learned to tap the power of my dreams and desires by integrating body, mind, and spirit in a meaningful yet playful way. I’ve transformed a lot of my self-doubts into creative expression, and learned to feel trust instead of fear. Oh, I have a ways to go. But I had been wanting to share an integration of practices, which I am calling "Set Your Dreams In Motion," that has made my life soooo much better. 

I believe our bodies are so vital, and yet in the Western world, we tend to worship the mind and make the body into an object – we think we’re supposed to look like supermodels, so we live on the Stairmaster and eat a diet of rice cakes.  No, no, no!  Life is supposed to be savored, and the place where savoring happens is not just in the mind, but in the senses.  But I was trapped in my head, always looking externally for answers, my eyes straining to find the so-called "right way," trying to fit into a neat and tidy box, no messes, please. 

I was regularly reciting the neurotic Jewish mantra "Worry, worry, worry."  Oy, bubbe, my stomach ached, my shoulders ached, and no masseuse could penetrate deep enough to unlock the tension  I explored and explored and found a different direction.  Through a blend of mind-body-spirit practices, I am choosing to express my desires and allow them to transform into fulfilled wishes.

It’s really about discovering how to "take the elevator down" from my chattering mind to the inner power of my heart and my gut, the belly brain. Am I perfect at doing this? No. But I know that what I have discovered is important enough to share. 

Scary as that is, I decided to offer a pilot workshop of "Set Your Dreams in Motion," my own original synthesis of tools and processes and perspectives from many of my teachers in somatic psychology, 5Rhythms, Authentic Movement, The Abraham Teachings, and other practices designed to connect movement to intention, to literally take visions and set them into cellular memory, so that new neural pathways could be created, magnetizing desire into reality. 

I was honestly amazed that people actually showed up.  And, wow, it was really personal.  People really did move their bodies, really did talk about their dreams, really did get insights.  Holy moly, frijole! 

I think everyone walked away with a little something.  What that was for each person was different.  An insight.  A new way of seeing themselves.  A suggestion.  A next step.  All that in 2 1/2 hours?  All that when the sound system was really amateur?  All that when I scrapped most of the agenda and just "went with the flow"? 

Self doubts still knock at the door, but I know I don’t have to open it.  I can look to what worked, to what I loved, to what felt right.  And, really, it was an honor to give a group of people a chance to feel supported in their dreams.  All too often, we hear the naysayers.  I want to support people with the YEAH-sayers!  And supporting people in their YEAH is so much easier when you come from your heart, from your belly, from your full-bodied expression. 

Thank you to all the participants.  You’ve helped me set my dreams in motion.  May yours be set in motion, too!

In my last posting, I talked about how I am starting to write, daily, without knowing where the journey will take me.  Writing is totally pleasureable for me, especially free-writing, like this.  And somehow, I feel guided to keep writing, but without trying to create some specific outcome.  Writing for the sake of writing.  No goal, just the experience. 

Write without knowing if it’s a novel or a how-to book or doesn’t have a purpose at all?  That’s a totally foreign concept, but one I’m learning to embrace, partly with the support of reading Marianne Williamson’s "A Return to Love," which is her interpretation of "A Course in Miracles." 

By reading the book, I feel redeemed to find support for the idea of embracing that all is well if I just trust myself, trust the forces of nature.  By contrast, I used to be so intensely goal-driven.  Always pushing, pushing, pushing for what I wanted, often winding up exhausted.  Believe me, I still have a lot of that energy inside of me.  Having grown up in the business world, and crafting corporate strategies, I know that it’s possible to make a 20-year plan.  But to live it?  Things don’t go neatly according to plan.  So, what is one to do?

I am discovering that there’s something different that happens when I follow my impulses.  I get a sense within me that what I am doing fits, feels right.  A warmth in my chest, a relaxation in my shoulders, an ease in my belly that says, "Yes, that’s it."

When I’m doing something that is really right for me, really my next signature move in the world, It’s not like getting a mental "check off" that says, "Yep, that measures up."  No, it’s an inner awareness.  Logic can support it, but logic is the assistant, not the master.  I’m not trying to convince myself of something and then get behind it with my heart.  It’s the other way around.

But trusting my impulses?  Trusting that the Universe — God, The Higher Power, whatever you want to call those forces — is guiding me, holding me?  When I allow myself to believe it, I feel so at ease, I am filled with inner peace and I want to spread it outside myself.  When I don’t feel it, I get worried.  I don’t know what to do minute-to-minute.  I question myself.  Self-doubt mounts quickly. 

I had been feeling an overflow, an abundance of inner trust for a few weeks.  It was intensely "chill", feeling deep inner peace, and the underlying tone was "something big and wonderful is happening to you — you are on your path, all is well."   

And, of course, I fell from grace.  I’ve had a few days of panic, depression, sadness.  I feel like I’m coming out of it.  I want to grasp for the inner peace, but as I write that, I realize that grabbing is the antithesis of this energy I desire.  I need to allow, as it suggested in "A Return to Love."  But what is this change from Was it hormonal?  Heck, I don’t know.  But when I listen within, I am guided to write.  So, here I am…

I will be sharing some of my writing on these pages (uh, in this blog, the virtual pages).  Perhaps one of the things I will be doing, in that honesty, is conveying to others the journey from the planful, methodical, push-push-push life, to one where you work from within. 

If you’re passionate about something — collecting stamps, carving wood, baking bundt cakes — should you immediately transform your hobby or passion into a business venture?

According to the article From Passion to Profession, BusinessWeek Online offers some cautions:

Step back:  Make sure you check out your ability to make money with this — is this profitable?

Forget undercutting:  Just because you can sell your idea at a lower cost, it may not bring customers running to you.

Keep the spark:  Give yourself 2-3 years to achieve profitability.  Growing a business takes time. 

Honestly, as I read the article, I was afraid that they’d say, "Oh, forget it, most people don’t make it as entrepreneurs."  Whew, that’s not what they said.

In fact, choosing to follow your passion does mean listening to your heart — and to your logic.  Only you will know if you can handle the uncertainties of offering your goods or services to the market.  When your profitability depends on customers, rather than on an employer, that can be scary.  But it’s all a great learning opportunity –  even a so-called "failed" venture.  From my perspective, "success" or "failure" is all relative…it depends on your frame of mind.

I have my own moments where my faith in what I am creating is strong — and other times where it seems to whither away.  In those latter moments, friends and family buoy me.  I’ve also discovered that it’s helpful to continue to imagine the positive future I desire — reaching out to lots of people and helping them learn to trust their instincts, their intuition, their inner knowing — in their working lives. 

What about you?  What passions do you want to turn into business ventures?  What will it take for you to create a living from your passions?  What holds you back from doing that? 

Amazing how inspirations come…

Today, I was at the Haas School of Business.  I am an adjunct career advisor there.  Students in the Masters in Financial Engineering program drop in to see me for interview practice sessions and job networking advice. 

The Haas Recruiting Coordinator, Jocelyn, an ultra-friendly, ultra red-head, asked if I had seen a particular column on SFGate.com.  She read this phrase, which jolted me much more than the double-decaf latte that was igniting my caffeine-wimpy veins:

"Work really extra super hard and do nothing else but work and ignore your family and spend 14 hours a day at the office and make 300 grand a year that you never have time to spend, sublimate your soul to the corporate machine and enjoy a profound drinking problem and sporadic impotence and a nice 8BR mini-mansion you never spend any time in, and you and your shiny BMW 740i will get into heaven."

Geez, that was something like my old life.  Minus the impo…whatever.  Plus some phenomenal migraines. 

In his July 8, 2005 article, Why Do You Work So Hard?, columnist Mark Morford goes on to ask if it is time to quit your safe job and follow your path?  I love that he shares my view that our society has little, if any place, for having a ‘creative break.’  Excuse me, are we really meant to be at our desks all day, staring at computer screens, answering phones?  What are we chasing after?  Where did the energy go?  The passion?

For some of us, the passion turns itself on, and becomes hard to ignore.  For others, a certain restlessness or dissatisfaction sends us on a search.  Morford goes on to tell three stories, of his sister, his S.O., and a CEO, all of whom quit their jobs, ostensibly to do something more meaningful.  To them, I tip my hat and applaud their courage. 

People do make changes in order to experience a more energized, meaningful life.  It happens. 

And, yes, from personal experience, I know it can be scary.  But, it can also be a pure rush of adrenaline.  An opening to freedom of expression that liberates the mind — and of course body and spirit, if you allow yourself to open to those. 

I love that Morford mentions the spiritual angle!  Talking about making changes, he writes "…the truth is, God, the divine true spirit loves nothing more than to see you unhinge and take risk and invite regular, messy, dangerous upheaval."

Yes, as I see it, our spirit is involved.  If spirit is an uncomfortable term for you (it used to be for me), try thinking of it as ‘energy’.  Have you ever been moved by an energy?  Perhaps that’s your spirit! 

But, before we begin to both feel AND trust our spirit, I think we can run around in a state of fear about virtually everything, especially work.  When we try to live without fear, I think we strive too low, for comfort.  Personally, I find comfort highly over-rated. 

When ‘comfort’ is our measure of success, at some point, stagnation sets in.  We lose our flexibility, figuratively and literally.  I know that when I was in management consulting, I thought, for a while, like I was a ‘Mistress of the Universe’, with my laptop, power suits, and ever-expanding bank of frequent flier miles (which I had no time to use).  But, with the headaches, and a wake-up call from a car accident, I started to feel like I was selling my life away.  No fun.  I began to make changes.   I’m still making changes, allowing myself to experience what energizes me, especially around work.

I see life as a constant process of waking up.  Of feeling, literally.  Of being grateful for what I have, not just the physical possess…in fact, mostly not the physical possessions.  For the deep connections with others, the creativity, the ability to express myself, to do my dance on this earth.

Thanks, Mark, for your column, and for waking people up.  I hope a few of them get inspired to follow their life energy and infuse their lives with meaning. 

PS:  No offense to one of my dear friends in LA who just bought herself a green BMW 740i.  Used.  With over 60K miles on it.  About 1/10 its original sticker price, too.  Great car for a place like LA, where traffic is the norm.  Smart shopper, she is!

PPS: As I see it, material possessions aren’t intrinsically bad.  They can just keep our attention off matters of heart and spirit that can open us to amazing life experiences.