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show up, writing

365 Days of Showing Up

July 28, 2018

 

In my last post I shared with you how I started writing every day and what I head learned from that. But I didn’t tell you about what I learned about the other 1/2 of my Guide’s message.

If you remember, when I asked my Guide for help in understanding what was wrong with me, the response was: “Stop fucking around and show up.” Not only that, but for the next 24 hours, it wasn’t the words, ‘show up’ that I saw or heard four more times, it was, ‘stop fucking around.’

I thought that showing up was my problem. I thought that there was something wrong with me. What writing every day has taught me is that the messages found in the not showing up are actually one of my greatest teachers. Not showing up is actually not a problem at all.

writing 333

I don’t know who or what my Guide is. I don’t know if it’s just my higher self, or if it’s an angel or something else entirely or what, but I do know that whoever it is, their perspective is one of divinity. From their perch, all of this human stuff must be puzzling: if we are in any way divine, why do we let ourselves get caught up in our fears and our foibles? Why can’t we just show up and do what is best for us? To them it must look like we are just (to use their words), fucking around.

It shows that we must be more, because we ask ourselves those same questions: What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just…” We can see the possibilities, but we get stuck in the ordinary muck.

One morning as I wrote ‘what’s wrong with me’ (for the thousandth time) the words, where you stopped is a message’ came into my head. That made me stop writing.

 


Where you stopped is a message.


 

This felt important, so I started paying attention. When I really had to force myself to show up, I would stop and look at what was going on. Often it would be in a week where I was writing similar stuff over and over again. So I would ask myself: what am I avoiding? And if I persevered, I’d often find a fear hiding under all of that repetition. Then, instead of allowing that fear to stop me, I would take it to my writing.

As I practiced looking the stop in my writing, I also began to look more widely. I would see a book that I had started reading and then never went back to, wonder where I stopped, and open it again, only to see that it was talking about something that challenged me. Instead of putting the bookmark back in, I took that challenge to my writing.

Alongside writing this year, I have been on a journey with Magical Eating, so I tried taking this idea with me into my relationship with food. Every time I realized that I had stopped focusing on that journey, I would check in and see where I had stopped. Almost every time I could trace that stop to a fear. Once I saw that fear for what it was I would take that to my daily writing.

Every time I stopped to ponder the stop, there was a message for me. And every time it was a message about something I was afraid of. Every single time it was an opportunity for healing.

What if every time we stop doing something that we think we want to do, there is a reason for the stop? What if there’s nothing actually wrong with us at all and it’s actually an opportunity to learn more about ourselves and to heal one of our fears? What if the places we stop out of fear are just opportunities to stop fucking around – to clear up some of the human stuff and re-engage with our divinity? What if they are just an opportunity to clean up the stuff we don’t actually need anymore?

I’ve discovered that showing up no matter what is kind of like Marie Kondo-ing your life. You get to look at things, hold them up to the light and say, ‘do I really need or want this anymore?’ instead of just stuffing them back into your junk drawer. (Or sometimes I still just put things back in that drawer for awhile. We aren’t always ready to heal everything, and I really think that’s okay. Seeing it as a fear is still a big step.)

 

365 writing
(Here they are: 365 days of writing in 7 ultra-glamorous notebooks.)

 

So here I am, still showing up. Still writing. Still wondering. Still healing. Still struggling with it. Still hoping that I don’t screw up. Still hoping that I will keep showing up. Still wishing that I had it in me for this to be easy. Still dragging myself out of bed at 11:30 because I forgot to write before then. Still enjoying how wonderful it feels sometimes, and worrying about how hard it is others.

I showed up today as clearly as I could. I listened. I wrote. I wondered.

I showed up today. Today is all that matters. 

(And yes, I am celebrating a whole year today too! All of the todays added up to a whole year. Yay, me! I am proud of me, and excited to show up again tomorrow.)

What about you? How did you show up for yourself today? Today is all that matters.

With so much love,

Meghan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

show up, writing

Showing Up

July 17, 2018

 

Just over a year ago, I sat down to start my daily writing practice – again. Over the years I have started and not finished hundreds of different programs. Way way back I tried to do Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for 12 weeks. After starting again at Day One over and over and over again, I finally gave up. Her book still sits on my shelf waiting for me to have the gumption to start again. I followed her with many other books that promised 30 days to… or 40 days to… or 28 days too… and didn’t finish a single one.

So there I was on the 27th of July, 2017, wondering for the millionth time what was wrong with me and why I couldn’t just do what I set out to do. All I wanted to do was show up for another 30 day writing practice that one of my books told me would change my life but I couldn’t. Other people seem to be able to show up and to do things over and over again, why not me?

Not getting any answers from my own muddled psyche, I decided to take this question to my Guides. (I have to tell you that I rarely do this and when I do I rarely get an answer. I am not someone who sees her Guides or can visualize, so I must have been desperate to try.) I sat down and did one of my own guided meditations and actually had the sense of sitting at the feet of one of my Guides! Desperate, I asked them what was wrong with me?

My answer? “Stop fucking around and show up.”

I guess I asked for it! And they meant it, because over the next 24 hours, I saw or heard or read the first three words four more times. “Stop fucking around…”

The next morning I counted up and discovered that it was then 90 days until my birthday, so I told myself to show up at the page for those 90 days. And it did it. I did it. I didn’t even Instagram Day One. Inexplicably, I showed up every single day for 90 days. I just did it.

When I got to 90 days, I discovered that I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to keep going to see where else I could go, so I kept writing. And kept writing. And kept writing.

One morning I woke up to my heart racing and I realized that I wasn’t positive that I had written the day before. I leaped out of bed to check and even reading the previous days’ pages, I couldn’t figure it out. I felt sick. The question loomed: should I go back and count every day? Did I have to start again?

Historically this would have knocked me and I would have given up, eventually starting on Day One again, this time carrying a bit more shame and a bit more weight. But I looked at myself in the mirror and I decided that I could either focus on the one questionable day, or I could focus on the hundreds of days when I had shown up. I chose to just pick up my pen and keep going.

People have asked me what I do, and the answer is quite simple: I show up and write three pages. Over the first month, the pages changed from just writing to being a letter to my Guides, to being a letter to God. I have also written to the Mystery, the Magic, the Universe, Source, but after that first month or so, God stuck. I figured I’d just go to the top.

What do I do? I show up. I have written in airports and in hotels; written during my retreat, on moving day, on Christmas morning, and by candlelight during power outages. I have written when I was sick, when I was well, when I was busy. I have written at 4:00am because I knew I wasn’t going to have any other time that day, and I have written at 11:30pm because I hauled myself out of bed when I remembered that I hadn’t done it yet.

I show up. I show up even when I don’t fee like it. I show up when I don’t want to. I show up when I bore myself by writing the same thing every day for a week. I show up when I want to throw the book across the room. I show up, ready or not.

Over the course of this year I have discovered one thing: the practice isn’t the writing. The practice isn’t the 90 days or the 250 days or the 300 days. The practice isn’t hitting 365 or even 1000.

The practice is showing up, pen in hand, today. Showing up today is the only thing that matters.

It’s this lesson that has changed my life.

What can you do for yourself today? How can you show up for yourself today?

The other thing that I have learned is from the ‘stop fucking around’ part of the message, but this email has gotten very long, so I’ll post that on day 365.

What can you do for yourself today? How can you show up for yourself today? Just today.

Today is all that matters.

with so much love,

Meghan

Alignment

Creating Moments

June 24, 2018

“Life is not made up of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years, but of moments. You must experience each one before you can appreciate it.” 
~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

 

For the past few weeks I have been thinking a lot about moments. For me, June has always been a month to get through so that I could enjoy July. I’ve always been a planner. When I was teaching, I had a big calendar on the wall of my classroom and each day I’d mark a big black ‘x’ through the days, counting down until the next break. I had a countdown to summer stuck up in my locker all through high school.Some of the wonder of shifting my life into a place of magic is that I have stopped doing so many countdowns and started enjoying more moments.

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I watched that glorious video of Courtney Hadwin, the little girl who wowed the judges on America’s Got Talent. (If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.) As we watched her face at the end, we wondered about her life from that moment on and wished for her that this would be just the beginning of a lifetime of magical moments.

Interestingly on the same day I saw Courtney, I was sent a video of Dorothy Williams having the same moment on the same stage. (If you haven’t seen it, watch it to the end!) In the interview at the beginning she tells Nick Cannon that even though she’d been on stage all of her life, she’d never been the star, so she was showing up to try to have her moment. In sharing that with him and by showing up, Dorothy got to be a star.

Once my tears had dried, both of these videos made me think a lot. What moment do I need? When I am 90 years old and looking back on my life, what moment will I wish I had had? What wonderful, golden, precious, glorious thing do I most want to happen? And how can I make it happen in the best and most magical way?

I think that if you ask yourself this one question, you will learn more about yourself than you will using many self-help books and courses: What moment do I need in my life?

You may have an answer to this question come right away, or you might need to ponder it a bit, but either way, listen. Listen to the whisperings of your soul. It might be something that you think could never happen. Make it happen anyway. Be inspired by Dorothy: what do you need? Boil it down to the essential ingredients and start to invite it in. Moments are precious, and often they are surprising and magical, but they still need your participation. You have to be out there. You have to show up.

What moment would you like to have in your life? How can you begin to make that happen?

xo