Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

I love the way the word “Liar!” said very loudly and with much gusto feels in my mouth. As a matter of fact, I decided several years ago that when I am a guest on The Actor’s Studio and James Lipton asks me that question from Bernard Pivot’s questionnaire, “What is your favorite word?” that I will yell out and savor the word as it exits my mouth, “LIAR!” Not only is it truly my favorite word, but it will be a great way to get a laugh.

However, since last Sunday’s incident of being on the receiving end of yet another big fat lie, I started to reconsider my love of the word. Then I thought about our son, put two and two together and BAM! It was back in my consciousness.

My son lies to me and to his father…all the time…about everything great and small.

It’s second nature to him. There are small ones, and there are plenty of big fat ones. He is/was in the habit of telling me exactly what he thinks I want to hear. What the hell???

Why is he lying, like, ALL the time? How? When did it become okay to lie? Well, it clearly has come from his father. (And if you don’t believe me, read my post from the 21st).

His father has lied to me about many things…great and small.

He put it in the field. It is his fault. Now it all makes perfect sense. What more could I expect than ‘like father like son,‘ or ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’ This isn’t about me at all.

Blah, blah, blah.

When I finally got over myself, I took a peek at my own behavior and asked myself if the liar energy was in my field, in my environment. My first reaction was a knee-jerked “No!” I reminded myself how I have always made it a practice to be as truthful as I could with my son. And how proud I am of myself that I had never ever knowingly told him a falsehood. Discussion closed.

Then it exited loudly and with much gusto from my mouth. “LIAR!”

I have lied by omission. I have lied to my son by pretending to be “in” my marriage to his father when I had emotionally exited the relationship years before. I have lied to my son by telling him how much I trust him and then controlling every aspect of his life. I have lied by telling him I am fine when I am exhausted or emotionally spent or upset, or just too damn tired to care.

Yes, his father has put the energy of the lie out in the field, but I did too. I lied to myself…all the time…about everything I did not want to face…great and small

Is It Just Me???

Or do song lyrics go through your head when you are experiencing something emotionally traumatic and devastating? Right now the Bee Gees are serenading me with “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?’ Remember that one??? From 1970 something? Good song.

It’s in my head because I received some news this morning that someone I love very much has been lying to me (again)…not little white lies…BIG ones (again). I am heartbroken (again).

It’s funny (weird not ha ha), but I was going to post today about something else really great that happened this morning and in a strange convoluted kind of way, I am.

I wanted to post that I had had a very interesting and deep meditation that brought me a couple of amazing (okay, and scary) awarenesses: I am not birthing anything; I am the one being birthed. All of that happy swimming about I mentioned two days ago was in the protection provided by my own amniotic fluid.

So, in meditation this morning, Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (you know, the one in my closet) appeared at the end of the couch. I was afraid. I kept thinking: I’m not supposed to put that on. Am I? I'm not ready; it’s too big for me; I am so NOT that woman. I sat and sat and sat some more where I was next to the window. All of a sudden the sun came pouring through the window onto me, and a Voice said, "You have come as far as you can go. It is time to put on the Coat." And the Dreamcoat gently wrapped itself around my body. It felt so warm and inviting and cocoon-y that I just let myself be embraced by it. It wasn’t too heavy or too big. Yes, of course, there is room to grow into it, but I am certainly not “swimming in it” (as my mother used to say when clothes were too big for me). I felt like Goldilocks in a red wig. WOW. This Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat of mine is just the right temperature. And, now it's MEB's Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Thanks, Joseph!

I realized YES. It is time to surface, emerge from my protective womb and interact with the world in my Dreamcoated Self. It is time to own and be that diversely patterned, vibrantly colored, multi-textured and uniquely constructed woman. So, in the spirit of all that, I asked for persons and events to enter my life to help me own, learn from and celebrate this uplift of me.

Not five minutes later did I receive the email about the lies…the really BIG ones.

Hey! Universe! Thanks for listening, but couldn’t I have started with something a little easier?

Apparently not.

I was born into my Dreamcoat and given an opportunity to christen it a short five minutes later. I am ready to handle this grief in a whole new way.

And that’s how I plan to mend my broken heart.

A Fish Out Of Water

The past seven months I have been on a deep sea diving expedition within myself. I would even dare to say I have reached the ocean floor of me. It has been wondrous, indescribably delicious, painful, new, exciting, and life altering.

My Mastery program gave me the necessary equipment to plumb the fathoms of the 70% of me that is water. I have been swimming in a school of like-minded women, and, because of them, I have traveled deeper and farther than I ever dreamed imaginable. Their discoveries have been mine and mine, theirs.

I have transformed into a species whose once unfamiliar habitat is now where I feel most at home. I doffed my diving suit and diving helmet, unbuckled my weight belt, and released the air hose back to the surface. I grew gills. My fingers and toes webbed themselves, and my eyes generated a protective membrane. I have marveled at the life that exists below my surface. I have spelunkered underwater caves that were previously inaccessible to me. I have encountered myself as whale and minnow, clownfish and shark. I have explored it all.

Look at me at the bottom of me! I am all wavy, flow-y, and curvy; an intricate part of the dance created by my fish sisters and me in the early morning tide! How perfectly fluid, open and expansive am I?

I am indigenous to myself! My work is done!

Except for one teeny tiny thing…My impulse is telling me it is time to bring all I have discovered to the surface of my life.

But will I get to the surface, hoist myself onto the boat only to flop around helplessly and then expire for lack of air? How am I going to exist without feeling like a fish out of water? I worry that I have forgotten how to breathe in sync with someone else or that I will shy away from revealing my miraculous webbed appendages, membraned eyes, or my beautiful life-sustaining gills. How can I remain wavy, flow-y, curvy without the tide’s gentle movement to calm the sometimes turbulent waves of being in relationship?

There are practical things I can do. I can ascend at a bends-free pace, so I give myself and my body time to readjust. I can also look around and notice that my Mastery sisters are with me. I am not alone.

Finally, I can recognize the truth that was revealed while living in the underwater me. While I am indigenous to me, I am endogenous to the world. I learned I can adapt to my outer environment by growing what I need from within.

I am officially bi-coastal: at home both on and under the surface of me.

Now all I need to do is find the right earrings to show-off my gills.

Whose Line Is It, Anyway?

Something I have been feeling in my body for some time came into my consciousness; I no longer feel I can trust the established, traditional structures of the world. I also realized that one of the big reasons for my train making start-up noises a few days ago is because I have been (without telling myself) slowly and methodically deconstructing the cultural, gender-based, Irish Catholic structures I was born into.

Let me just say that I love the idea of structure. It makes me feel safe. Within the confines of structures at work, with my friends, in society, I can be extremely spontaneous (and, I must admit, pretty funny). I have been a member of society long enough to know my status in the pack (and how to work it) in almost any situation and to know the rules of decorum so I can choose to break them and make them into something else (usually with hilarious results). Just let me get my bearings and size it all up first. Then I am more than willing to pull out my side-splitting acrobatics and entertain you for as long as you want me to. All that being said, I did make a commitment to evolve myself, so I was cautiously okay with letting some of my old structures go (at my own turtle pace).

Then, I began an Improvisation class, and it all went to hell in a high speed DSL hand basket. While the class has been a warp speed stripper of all things structured, it has also revealed to me how unwaveringly devoted to and invested I have been in the illusion of structure.

Now, improvisation does have structure, but a lot of it comes from within. In my head I get it, but my body hasn't integrated it yet. Once I am up there in front of everyone, it’s as if I had materialized fully costumed but totally unrehearsed on the set of Cirque de Soleil, accidentally stepped backward onto the low end of their adult-sized see-saw, suddenly flipped end-over-end through space, and aerodynamically delivered to my partner (who must be in the exact right spot at the exact right time in the exact right position to save me from probable injury and possible death).

Fun for someone who thrives on structure and control? No.

Death-defying insanity? Yes.

But so many totally unexpected, humorous, touching, and gut-busting funny moments have come out of this class by following improv's commandments: say “Yes” to whatever comes my way (without argument), trust that who I am right now is enough to move the scene forward, trust in others to be there for me, generate moment-by-moment real and connected reciprocal relationships without agenda, make it all about the other person, and be available and responsible to be there to save every other person on stage with me.

It’s Cirque de Soleil without the nets.

And, I've discovered, life lived from the inside out.

Whoops! There It Is!

I was literally jolted awake this morning by the smell of diesel fuel and a very familiar, internal, unsettling rumbling from my throat to just beneath my ribs. I now recognize it immediately. It’s my train. Its engine is struggling to turn over very much like starting a car in New England in the middle of February after it has lain dormant for a few weeks.

I immediately start searching through my interactions from yesterday. Who disappointed me? Who pissed me off? Who insulted me with a sideways glance, a word, a gesture??? Who the hell made an innocent remark that I somehow saw as a threat?

Whoops! There it is!

No one.

That’s not good.

At least if I can recall the person, the moment, the “reason,” I can focus myself to contain it and to let it go. So if that person does happen to cross my tracks today, I can stop well ahead of time. Impact avoided.

But, as often happens with me, there is nothing specific. I just want to get everyone the hell out of my way today.

It’s that somatic. I can anticipate the taste of it with the kind of “Yes!!!” as if I had satisfied a month long craving for The Newport Creamery’s double hot fudge sundae (with extra peanuts please). Every cell of my body is colluding to convince me to just let it happen. Something in me crosses my heart, hopes to die, hopes to stick a pin in my eye and promises that it will never ask again. It is, honest to God, the last time. Please, one more time let’s ride that feeling of speed and impact. Please, please, please!

Do me a favor and re-read that last paragraph with me.

Whoops! There it is!

How old IS that somatic craving??? I’m thinking somewhere around 9?? Do I really want to indulge this desire by giving the throttle to a 9 year old?? I know my parents did, but do I want to do that to her, to me, to the people on the tracks? And if I give her permission now, what kind of woman, mother, guide am I?

I’m going to go now and have a heart-to-heart with her. Listen to and acknowledge her feelings and reassure her that I will not perpetuate the role she was put in at a very young age for which she was totally ill-equipped. I will take my place as her safe haven, protector and guide. Dealing with the world is my job. She can go play.

And then this afternoon we’ll get a double hot fudge sundae with extra peanuts please.

There it is.

The Last Trimester

I am coming up to the end of the nine month transformational program I have been involved in since July. Katherine and Claire (my teachers) very cleverly set up the New Feminine Power Mastery program to culminate in April. I have to admit they were very clear about the gestational parallel with pregnancy, and since I have had a baby…..

… I knew what to expect going in.

I was smitten from the get-go. It was love at first sight. I went into Mastery completely in love with the idea of birthing a new, unrecognizable Self. I opened myself with abandon and invited the world to mix fluids with me. Even in the most intimate moments, my eyes remained wide open to take it all in. My metaphorical legs were poised in unprotected surrender. This was not whoops!, a mistake, an unexpected meeting of my egg and the seminal fluid of the universe. This was Planned Parenthood at its best.

The past seven months, I have reveled in the organic changes, the miracle of life that has taken place in me. I have sat in awe and amazement that I was beginning to show. My burgeoning growth was becoming evident to colleagues, friends, the women in my Mastery. Frankly, it has been kind of nice being noticed for my “glow.” I smile and strangers smile back (in a good way!); people give up their seats on the subway and offer to hold the door open for me.

Like most women pregnant with life, I have been single mindedly focused on nurturing this embryo to its fullest growth and development. Oh yeah, I have had my bouts with morning sickness, gaining a new kind of weight, and outgrowing the old ways of being that have become too small for my ever-expanding Self. So I expelled what my body refused to absorb and bought stretch pants and big blousy tops because I got so much attention in return. Totally worth it.

However, all along, a small voice has been whispering to me….

… “You knew what to expect going in.”

A few days ago, like any woman in her last trimester, I was jolted into reality as if I had watched my first LaMaze video.

I actually have to give birth.

A Constant State of Emergence-cy

As I was sitting in my living room this morning, I heard an ambulance go by several blocks away.

When I was a little girl, anytime I heard an ambulance (or as my mother used to call it “the Emergency Wagon”), I ran home as if my curly red head were on fire. Everything about the sound of the siren terrified me. It screamed Disaster with a capital D. As I ran, I could feel its hot, fetid breath on my neck; its decaying bony hands trying to snatch me up to deliver me to chaos, further injury, and death. Once that siren began, I needed to get home, now, to safety. As I opened our home’s oak double dutch front door, I knew. Some other little girl (or little boy, or mom or nana) was grabbed, and it was only a matter of time before I or someone in my family wouldn’t run quite fast enough.

This morning in recalling that, I thought about how a whisper of the word “emergency” can still send shivers down my spine. Emergency meeting, emergency room, emergency landing …poor word…it has such a negative connotation (at least for me).

But it was then that I realized that in order to live a dynamic and full life, I had to be in a constant state of emergency: like Waldo who suddenly emerges from a picture after hours of searching for him, a rose stem that emerges through the soil after a long winter, or a baby who emerges from the protective womb of its mother after nine months of preparation.

Emergence-cy, the state of emerging, can be magical and life-giving and life-affirming. It is often treated as crisis because it’s scary to bring something (that had been overlooked) into clear view, or to watch as what we know to be solid ground is pushed aside to make room for new growth, or to stretch beyond the body’s established physical and emotional limits to welcome life into the world (while shedding precious blood, amniotic fluid, and tears). Frankly, it can be quite a mess.

But if I am not in the process of emerging, what am I doing except finding my safety in remaining hidden, staying underground, refusing to be birthed?

I think that for the rest of my life, I will shudder a little when I hear that wail of the Emergency Wagon. However, I am also going to make a friend of being in a constant state of emergency: no more hiding in the crowd, staying underground, struggling against my universal push to birth something new into the world.

It’s just what I have to do. Well, that and bubble baths.

Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat…

…is hanging in my closet. I just noticed it this morning.

I must admit that I have seen it before (and I’m not talking about watching the stage production).

Except that the last few times I saw it, another woman was wearing it. It was hard to tell who she was because she was very far away. I did notice she had red hair (which kind of piqued my interest).

The times I envisioned her in it, the power of the Dreamcoat radiated through space to me where I stood. The glow, the magnificence of the colors and the patterns and the fabric and the style met me as I stood and received it like a 5’2” wave at Easton’s Beach. It literally washed over me. I thought to myself, “That’s one powerful coat, and she’s gotta be one amazing woman.” At the same time it was, honestly, frightening. I was glad she was wearing it and not me.

I forgot all about it.

Then I found it in my closet this morning right there in front of me next to my grey wool pants.

My first thought was “What is that coat doing here?” My second thought was, “What took me so long to see it?”

I feel surprisingly comforted knowing that the Dreamcoat is this close to me. It has entered my sphere of possibility, and I revel in thinking about it while I am at work. It’s waiting patiently (as it always has) for me to decide to put it on.

I know that once it is on my body, a part of my fashion-forward life, I will merge with its power, its beauty, its radiance, its joy. The colors I have so longed to know about myself will embody me, connect, and reunite with something very deep in me. And the Dreamcoat and I will be one; a perfect fit.

I will be visible. I will be IN my life. I will once again experience the divine lightness of my Being.

Maybe I will try it on when I get home from work, just for fun. Or maybe tomorrow. Or maybe the next time I am with my sisters. I am not in a hurry. It is all colorfully and uniquely mine. Ready to wear. No alterations required.

I know when I am ready, it will fly off the rack to me like one of those great finds at Filene’s Basement. And I will hear my mom say (like she used to), ” Beautiful. It was meant for you.”

Oh, and tomorrow morning when you are in your closet look right there, in front of you, next to your grey wool pants.