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There’s something that’s been bothering me lately: hearing, again and again, from clients, friends, colleagues, “I don’t have enough time.”

I have a thing about this phrase. It gets to me. It bothers me because I think we use it when we mean something else, when we mean “I don’t want to.” “That’s not compelling to me.” “That doesn’t appeal to me because…” We time-lie.

It bothers me because it makes us glorious, powerful human beings—beings with agency and the power to shape our lives—into victims of time. It makes 24-hours-in-a-day a constraint instead of an obscenely-over-the-top gift.

Time Lying To Ourselves

“But I am busy!” you say. “I have no time! There is so much I would do if I had the time.”

Maybe. Maybe there is more you would do. But in my coaching practice, I see again and again that underneath “I don’t have enough time” or “I’m too busy for that” is always some other block, some other source of resistance. It could be fear (quite often it’s fear of failure or simply of the unknown), inertia to stay with the status quo, or simply “not wanting to,” and feeling that “I don’t want to” isn’t an acceptable reason that stands on it’s own.

So we time-lie to ourselves. We convince ourselves the reason we aren’t doing x is that we don’t have enough time, when the real reason is fear or a “not wanting to” that we feel guilty about.

I can’t tell you how often in coaching sessions this happens: right after a client has shared how a particular passion makes their heart rise and their spirit blissful and the world feel magical comes the line, “But I don’t have time to do that.” It would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

We convince ourselves (conveniently) that we need hours upon hours to do the things we love. It’s my job as coach to say, “Really? 15 minutes, twice a week, is plenty to start. How important is this to you?”  After we dispense with the next round of excuses (“I don’t have the equipment,” “I don’t have the right space in my house,” etc.) we usually get to the kernel of pure fear. And then we face it.

Whatever the truth is, let’s own it. Let’s tell ourselves the truth. Instead of repeating to ourselves over and over again that we are victims of too few hours in the day, let’s use words that empower us and reflect the power we each have, like “I’ve chosen to prioritize other things right now” or “It’s not compelling enough for me right now.” No more of this “I don’t have enough time.”

Time Lying to Others

Sometimes we lie about “not enough time” to others. We don’t want to ruffle feathers, or disappoint. We don’t have the courage to say, “I don’t want to,” “that’s not important to me,” or, as Danielle LaPorte has written about, “it just doesn’t feel right.” We use the bland, socially acceptable substitute, “I just don’t have enough time.”

I do this. I do it all the time. I find it scary to say no simply because I don’t want to, because I’m not interested, because I have issues with such and such aspect of what’s being proposed…whatever. I want to be nice. To not be the one to cause conflict or make a mess. I don’t want to offend or leave you feeling rejected.

I’ll grant you (and me) this: perhaps there are rare instances when a graceful exit is sorely needed, when dealing with someone who doesn’t hear difficult truths well, someone you can’t afford to upset. Perhaps there are times like these when it’s reasonable to use the cop out, “not enough time” line.

But most of the time, we can do better. We can tell the truth, for the sake of deepening our relationships by doing so, and for the sake of honoring and owning what’s true.

Photo by Massay

 
Even in the struggle, you are loved.

You are being loved not in spite of the hardship, but through it.

The thing you see as wrenching, intolerable, life’s attack on you,

is an expression of love.

There is the part of us that fears and protects and defends and expects,

and has a story of the way it’s supposed to turn out.

That part clenches in fear, feels abandoned and cursed.

There is another part, resting at the floor of the well within, that understands:

this is how I am being graced, called, refined, by fire.
 

The secret is, it’s all love.

It’s all doorways to truth.

It’s all opportunity to merge with what is.
 

Most of us don’t step through the doorframe.

We stay on the known side.

We fight the door, we fight the frame, we scream and hang on.
 

On the other side, you are one with the earth, like the mountain.

You hum with life, like the moss.

On the other side, you are more beautiful:

wholeness in your bones, wisdom in your gaze,

the sage-self and the surrendered heart alive.

Photo by Per Ola Wiberg

You never know what you are really writing about.

On Monday, I wrote a post called “Just A Feeling: Dealing with Difficult Emotions.” I thought I was writing about the freedom that comes from knowing that a difficult feeling is “just a feeling” – temporary, often arbitrary, not necessarily a call to do anything.

On the way to making that point, however, I told a story about craving connection with others during a solitary week. I thought I was just giving an example of a difficult feeling.

Your responses said something different. What spoke to so many of you was the experience of longing for connection. You could relate.

Thank you for sharing so honestly and bravely in the comments and in emails.

When I read your words, I felt ambivalent about mine. Did I really want to suggest that human beings longing for one closeness with one another should recognize that’s just a feeling, and leave it at that?

Or did I want to say, when it comes to this feeling: Honor that longing. Take it seriously. Pick up the phone, go down to the soup kitchen to extend your heart, write that long overdue email to an old friend.

This is, of course, a bigger question. When should we take action to change a difficult feeling? When should we just be with the feeling as is?

I don’t know. What I do know is this: it’s always helpful to know that a feeling is “just a feeling.” When I know that, the rational, mature, happy Tara is back in charge. I’m now longer being whirled through the storm like Dorothy in the twister.

I’m not desperate to escape an uncomfortable experience, because I know it’s not permanent and not that important. I know lots of feelings come and go. Feelings and action to change feelings shrink back down to their proper place.

From this place, I’m at choice: I can take action or not. I can lean into the discomfort or I can make some choices that are likely to change my mood. I’m not caught in a wild chase of good feelings or a frantic rush to avoid bad ones.

But on loneliness in particular, I want to say this: yes, know that what you are feeling is just a feeling. Know it will pass.

But use your feeling of loneliness, your longing for connection, to get to know your true nature.

Examine your loneliness. Not all your ego’s thoughts about it, but the feeling itself. Hold it up to the light and look at it. See what’s at the kernel of it.

Use it to investigate: What is your true nature? What kind of connection makes that nature happy, in balance? What kind of relationship to people makes it unhappy, out of balance?

Who are you deep down, underneath it all?

I know that for me, the answer is love. When my life reflects that, I’m at peace. When it doesn’t, a war begins to rumble inside.

Love,

Tara

Photo by Sol Young

A remarkable thing happened to me on Friday. One of those graced moments when the light bulb goes on, when the click clicks.

I had a solitary week. I had aimed to clear a lot of time for writing, but I cleared too much.

Around 4pm on Friday, I started to crave people, bigtime. Social connection. Community. Belonging. Friends. Interaction.

We had no real weekend plans. Often we don’t. I’m not sure what I’ll be in the mood for so I plan nothing, and then I get stuck in a kind of resentful loneliness.

As I wrapped up my work, I started to worry. What would we do tonight? Many of our friends were out of town. Others were already booked.

We live in a big city. There’s no Cheers-type bar we can walk into where everybody knows our names. We don’t go to a church, or synagogue, or roller rink. There’s no way we can access insta-community.

I was walking home, full of longing for connection, frustrated and worried about our lack of plans. This is usually the moment where my train of thought launches way out into space, like a rocket ship, visiting pseudo-relevant subjects like these: Why don’t we belong to a spiritual community of some sort? What will we do about that? Why didn’t I make plans earlier? Why don’t I know more people? What will we ever do about the fact that my husband is an introvert and I’m an extrovert? Those are the kind of helpful places my mind goes.

Today, something different happened. Just like a split hair, as one train of thought started to go into that painful litany of questions and complaints, another train went somewhere else. It said, “Oh well, this (craving to see people) is just a feeling. It will pass. Maybe it will be satisfied tonight or maybe not, but it will pass. And you’ve lived through many a feeling not being satisfied before.”

Just a feeling? I had read that phrase in Zen books here and there, but I had never spontaneously thought the thought before. Certainly not in a moment of emotional difficulty. This “just a feeling” consciousness was relaxing, it came from somewhere in my spine, not from my head. It was felt, not abstract.

I was free, I realized. I could work to address the feeling or not, but I wasn’t all caught up in it. I wasn’t identified with it. I didn’t think it was anything bigger than a feeling. I could see it was temporary, unpredictable, rather arbitrary and, get this– kind of unimportant – not because it was about weekend plans, but because it was just a feeling. One more like or dislike, one more desire or aversion, in the grand, life-long parade.

As I walked home, exploring my new discovery, I thought, this is why I read the spiritual books. The ideas go into us, in their own way and in their own time, and they make a difference. They really do.

It’s just a feeling. You are so much bigger, more still, more vast than that. There is the wind, and  there is sail, and  there is the ocean floor.

Love,

Tara

*****

Please share in the comments -

Have you had your own “just a feeling” moments?

Are you up for trying out “just a feeling” consciousness this week?

In this way, the world is perfectly balanced: The sum of global pain is equal to our collective capacity for love. The deficit of goodness in the external world is equal to the power we hold within to create good.

Every need can be met. Every wound can be healed. Every pain can be soothed, but only if each of us uses our capacity for good fully.

In practical terms, of course, each of us can’t work on every issue. We can’t even learn about every issue. But we can begin to use our capacity for good more fully. Here are six ways to begin:

1. Let the pain in. Open your heart to the pain of the world. We all have an instinct in us to avoid it, to turn away from the disturbing news, to shield ourselves from feeling tragedy. Instead, open your heart to the pain. Breathe it in. Feel it. Be present to it – not to get caught in drama or sadness, but to fuel action.
2. Do small acts with great love, every day. Create a daily giving practice. Give something every day: money, time, assistance, or a heartfelt thank you or compliment. Keep a journal where you record your act of giving at the end of the day. Writing it down (and realizing when you’ve forgotten to do the practice) will help you integrate this habit into your life.
3. Pick a cause to pour your time, money and energies to, over the long-term. Select something that moves you, something that you sense is the work you are called to do in the world.
4. Be a light at work. As a coach, I often speak with clients who feel their work because is meaningless because they work at a company that’s “just about the money.” But as business scandal after business scandal shows us, these environments need ethical, service-focused, loving human beings desperately—perhaps more than anywhere else. If you work in one of those places, you have the opportunity to make a tremendous difference. Decide to be a light at work, through your kindness to coworkers and customers, by refraining from gossip, by helping to build bridges or resolve conflict when needed. Watch the ripple effects, and notice how it makes work more interesting and energizing for you, too.
5. See what love-assignments life gives you. Life brings us little love-assignments in the form of the suffering that show up in our midst. Is there a need in your neighborhood, at your school, in your workplace, that is touching a place within your heart? You don’t have to solve the problem, but you can make a tremendous difference by offering your support, love, solidarity, skills, time, companionship, or a material gift. Notice what assignments life is giving you, and step up.

Yes, the world is full of suffering. Full of it. And we are full of the medicine that heals it.

Are you meeting the world with your full capacity for love?

Love,

Tara

When you heart speaks, how do you listen? How do you speak back to it?

When your heart moves, what kind of landscape have you created for it to move in?

We can’t always control what happens to our hearts in this life, but we do have full power over how we hold our own hearts, how we relate to them.

If we don’t treat our own hearts gently, with love, what kind of contentment can we ever feel? How can the world ever be a safe place–if our own bodies aren’t even a safe place for our hearts to be?

More on this, on the outer heart, in my post over at Regina Perata’s blog, Restoring Power. While you are there, read a little of Regina too. Her insights suprised and moved me.

If you hold your heart with love and care and lightness and space today, what’s different?

Tara

I realize that may sound like crazy California-speak. What do I mean, “I leave myself”? Where do I go?  Am I referring to one of those “floating up above my body” experiences?

Not exactly. I mean something more subtle, something that is hard to put in words.

I’ll tell you how I know it. I know it when I go out of my way to say something that will I think will please the person I’m with, instead of saying what’s true for me. I think what Joe just said is very boring, yet I nod empathetically and say, “hmmm, tell me more.”

I know it when I stop feeling able to share what I want, and instead become a kind of sliding, slippery goo that flows with whatever others want. I’ll be asking you whether you want to go for a walk or meet for tea, when I in fact would like to have tea with you, at 10am, in my neighborhood, this Sunday.

We all leave ourselves in different ways, in different situations. Take a moment and consider: when is it difficult for you to stay with yourself?

One clue most of us get that we’re leaving ourselves is the urge to reach outside ourselves for something. Reaching for another person’s attention or agreement. Reaching for new shoes. Reaching for a grande decaf sugar-free vanilla latte. Reaching for the blackberry.

Next time you feel that urge to reach outside of yourself, see what happens if you press the pause button, come back to yourself, and simply get present.

What does it mean to come back to yourself and get present? It is so simple that in our culture we often overlook it. We assume something so basic couldn’t have much power.

Simply notice where you are at, what’s happening in the universe called you. What’s the current weather? What’s happening on the landscape?

Here are three different ways to tune into that:

1. Become aware of your body. Spend a few moments breathing, feeling your breath, and scanning your awareness across your body. Simply notice what’s happening there – notice any areas of tension or pain, notice which areas feel loose and spacious, notice whatever sensations are happening.  Do this for a few minutes until you refreshed, reconnected to the present moment and to yourself.
2. Become aware of your feelings. Pause. Breathe, and check in with what’s happening emotionally. What are you feeling? You may be very surprised about what you find – upset about something that happened this morning, anxiety about something coming up. You don’t have to get caught up in any drama around those feelings, or solve the “problems” they may be about, but for your own wellbeing, you do need to give them a space to be. Bring compassion and non-judgmental awareness as your response.
3. Write. Take out a pen and jot down an inventory of what’s present for you. This can be a stream-of-consciousness, disorganized, zig-zagging list. This is not beautiful writing, not even prose. This is just for you. For example, it might sound like this:

Resentful about having to go to three a clock meeting. Excited about trip. Miss Richard. Feeling self-conscious about body but optimistic about personal training. Really excited about positive response to my project pitch. Overwhelmed by feelings about visit back to hometown. Happy to be up and writing this. Grateful to here.

You might write a page or two or just a few lines. Write until you feel like you’ve connected with what’s important and what’s present for you in the moment. Notice how your state of being changes, even during the writing.

You don’t have to wait till you feel disconnected to do these practices. You can make a routine of doing them, of having short “check-ins” with yourself.

Why Does It Matter?

I think that’s a really good question. What happens when we don’t slow down and connect with ourselves? A lot of pain. We miss out on our own inner wisdom. We don’t notice the hurts and frustrations and disappointments that need our attention and healing. We don’t get to feel the hopes and dreams underneath those hurts – and those hopes and dreams are actually the roadmap from which we are meant to design our lives.

We get really, really lonely. We are actually lonely for ourselves. We can’t give to others, because, paradoxically, by going “over there” toward them, we’ve left an emptiness in our own chair – leaving the person with whom we are interacting without a solid, separate, whole person to connect with.

See the costs?

This week, I invite you take these three steps

1. Start a practice of noticing. When do you leave yourself? What does it feel like for you? What are the symptoms.
2. Experiment with the three tools here to reconnect to yourself in those moments: becoming aware of your body, becoming aware of your breath, and writing an inventory. See what impact that has.
3. See where you get resistant to slowing down and reconnecting with yourself, and get curious about the source of that resistance.

Let me know what you learn.

Love,

Tara

I’m so happy to welcome new visitors and readers who read yesterday’s guest post at Kind Over Matter.

I love the spirit, community, and vision of Kind Over Matter. I love the idea that through the work I do I just might be able to support creative young women (which much of the Kind Over Matter community is) to create more beauty in the world and experience the inexplicable happiness that comes from creating.

For my friends that have been her for a while, please visit my post over there. I hope you’ll reframe your thinking from growth to blossoming. More about that at the post. But think about, really, what would happen if you put less focus on “growth” and more on “blossoming”?

Tomorrow I’m getting on a plane to NYC to be with friends. Yes, I did just get home from Hawaii and Boulder on Friday. This weekend I took walks and caught up on Oprah and saw the beloved people in my life and learned that if you get Lacinto Kale you can eat it raw as salad greens. It’s quite tasty with olive oil, salt and pepper, and if you have the time and energy, with diced shallots and ricotta salata too.

By all of that I mean to say, travelling is lovely but if we design our lives with a sense of possibility, with a leaning toward who we really are, I think can be that an average day at home can be better, sweeter, more nourishing than a getaway in an exotic land.

Love,

Tara

Ideas show up when I’m writing and often they are as new to me as they are to you when you read them. This piece was that way for me. It provoked my thinking. It introduced the new idea of Loving Reality into my life.

It speaks to where I am right now. I wrote last week about how I’m more and more leaning into the present. I’m actually savoring quiet. I’m choosing to meditate, because I am actually enjoying it. Whoa. I’m taking time to enjoy things, to be in the moment without any ambition or urgency about getting to the next task.

Just like the weatherman will sometimes say, “we haven’t had a storm like this in 15 years” I’m reporting, “I haven’t had a calm like this in 15 years.” Truly.

Calm is only possible when we make peace with reality. And if we can love it, trust it – find a way in the midst of pain and tragedy and oil spills — if we can, paradoxically, love reality– then life opens up its secrets to us. We open ourselves to receive its everflowing gifts.

Loving Reality

In our culture, when we talk about love, we typically talk about loving another person: I love Sonia. I love my grandfather. I love Louie.

What do we mean by that?

When we love others, we treat them with compassion, kindness, and patience.

We perceive their gifts and beauties and power. We champion and affirm what is best in them.

We support and nurture and care for them.

We forgive them, and we do so regularly.

We give up the false idea that there is wrong with the people in our lives, and liberate them to be exactly as they are.

When we love ourselves, we do the same.

We treat ourselves with compassion, kindness, and patience.

We perceive the gifts and beauties and power in ourselves.

We support and nurture and care for ourselves.

We forgive ourselves, and we do so regularly.

We give up the false idea that there is something wrong with the truth of ourselves, and we liberate ourselves to be exactly as we are.

Less frequently in our culture, we speak of loving a particular thing, activity, or creative expression in the world.

When we speak of that, we usually mean that we deeply enjoy it, we draw great pleasure from it.

As a result, we want to experience it, to be near it.

We perceive its gifts, beauties, and power.

We have a mysterious and inexplicable special connection to that thing.

Let’s take everything we know about what it means to love a person, an activity, thing in the world, and ask ourselves, what would it mean then, to love reality itself? To love the way things are, they way they happen, the way they will happen?

To love reality itself. That would mean….

Treating reality with compassion, kindness and patience.

Perceiving the gifts, beauties and powers of reality and championing and affirming them.

Somehow supporting, nuturing and caring for reality.

Forgiving reality and forgiving it regularly.

Giving up the false idea that there is something wrong with reality, and liberating it to be exactly as it is.

Deeply enjoying reality, and as a result, wanting to experience reality, to be near it.

Possessing a mysterious and inexplicable special connection to reality itself.

For this lifetime, reality is our home. You can experience your home as a small tent on a violent battlefield, or you can experience your home as a soft sun-streamed ocean full of myriad delights. You can experience your home as rocky and dangerous shore where at every moment sharp cliffs, strong waves, or hungry predators threaten your life. You can experience your home as a playground, created for your delight. You can experience your home as a warm embrace, knowing that you are carried by the universe as you were carried by a loved on in the first few days of life.

Most of us live our lives trying to shield ourselves from the dangerous parts of reality, working to game the system, control the outcomes. We have all kinds of expectations about how reality should be. We believe that we have to struggle to get what we want and fight to prevent what we hope to avoid. We live in a rather adversarial, fearful relationship to reality. You could say that underneath it all, the real sources of stress in our lives are our underlying beliefs about reality itself.

What if we lived in a entirely different kind of relationship to reality? A relationship without that sense of needing to control, without fear? What if were able, somehow, to lean into reality, to trust it fully? What about taking a stance of curiosity to reality- an interest in following it, studying it, to see how it unfolds? What about loving reality?

An essential part of living a juicier, more fulfilling lives in relating to reality in this more open, pliant, trusting way, because reality is our guide on the journey. If we are open and willing, reality will provide the perfect curriculum for us to grow, and create a life of greater joy. It will supply all the sustenance and aid needed to get us through each step on the journey.