Hand-built clay sculpture, 21" tall, Wind, by Tammy Vitale of Tams Originals.
Life is evanescent. Things are made to disappear. Blogs, when typed – thoughtful, thought-provoking, carefully tended, disappear when you hit the wrong button. The only thing to do is to try, try again (after getting a cup of coffee, saying a few unprintable words, and sitting down with determination that I will NOT be detered from this I don’t care how frustrated I feel.).
Yesterday was a day of miscues. I had the day all planned out only to find that I was anticipating the wrong day. I was a day ahead of myself. I keep a calendar but nonetheless there I was ahead of myself and so a bit skewed in the way the day went. I was also tired as I was up late Monday, the evening before, and up early Tuesday morning (anticipating the day that wasn’t happening until today, Wednesday morning). Do you ever do that?
Nevertheless the day was a good one. I wound up meeting with Mary Bowen, founder of my women’s network, Women in Harmony, and we had a talk about free press that ranged far and wide. For you can’t write press unless you know what you want. And if we aren’t on top of where we are, we don’t know what we want. And much of where we are is based on stories that we tell ourselves – many times stories that have out lived their usefulness.
So from a meeting that was to be about press, we ranged into being able to see where we are holding ourselves back or believing things that aren’t helpful. Mary does a lot of energy work professionally, and as we talked I realized how closely what she does parallels with doing community-based organizing (which I did for 20 years). Each of us holds a space for another or others to step into, should they so desire, to safely look at how they might want to change one of their own stories which is no longer helpful. We wound up talking about why some people want to change, to move into their own power and some people don’t want to move beyond right where they are because they understand it and thus are comfortable.
When you work with abused persons (as in domestic violence) or communities (as in people who are oppressed because of their race, income level, age, gender, etc), often you are working with people who have a story of helplessness. Helplessness may not be any fun, but at least it is understood. The role is defined. You have no power, therefore what happens to you isn’t your fault. It comes from outside. Moving from helplessness into one’s own power (I am capable of action, what happens to me may come from outside but I have a choice what I do with it) does not happen overnight and is not easy. The movement is painful and scarey. And very often, if you are the one working with that person or community, once they realize that they could have moved all along into a place of not being helpless, they become angry. And attack what gave them that realization: you. And sometimes they then choose to go back where they were before. But sometimes they don’t.
All this from meeting on how to write a Press Release!
It was a good conversation and reminded me, with reference to my art, how I can sabotage myself by telling myself stories about artists, how only a few make it, how I’m being unrealistic in believing I can support myself as an artist. Stories are powerful things. We inheret many stories from our parents (how many want their kids to be artists?), from the culture ("starving artists"), from our schools (success is how much money you make), from our peers (my house is bigger than your house).
Stories are based on perception. We tell others and ourselves what we "see." But what we see is not necessarily what is. According to Theo Skolnik writing for The Gestalt Journal (1994) in an article Paradigms, Beliefs, and Causality, "We know from our understanding of how paradigms operate in such places as science and business that the paradigm is a set of filters. The scientist already ‘knows’ from his/her received theory [i.e.story] what there is to be seen. The paradigm enables their perception and hinders perception of what is outside the paradigm." (emphasis mine)
There you have it folks, we see what we expect to see. What we expect to see is based on the stories we tell ourselves. The stories we tell ourselves are more often than not handed down from somewhere other than our own experience.
Great story: Every year a woman cooked potroast for the holidays because her mom and grandmom had. She neatly cut the ends off the roast and placed it in the oven to cook. One day her daughter asked her why she cut the ends off the roast. Well, she said, because my Mom and Grandmom used to. Why did they? asked her daughter. I don’t know she said. And so,she asked her own mom, who said: because my mom always did it. Luckily, her Grandmom was still alive and so she asked her Grandmom why she cut the ends off her roast before she cooked it. Well, said her Grandmom, because my cooking pan was always too small for the whole roast to fit!
thought for the day: what are your stories? What assumptions are you making that you don’t know you are making? What stories do you have to change to move into your own power? Are you interested in being all that you can be (moving into your own power) or in being comfortable? Can you do both at the same time? What are your stories?
postscript: since this turned out completely different from my original blog, I will tell myself the story that the original blog wasn’t what the Universe needs for the day, and therefore the Pixies erased it. Not my fault. =]
