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p.s. totally gave up smoking ; )
Try – #Reverb10
Posted: December 23, 2010 in #reverb10, letting goTags: challenge, giving up, motivation, smoking
December 18 – Try. What do you want to try next year? Is there something you wanted to try in 2010? What happened when you did / didn’t go for it?
I tried giving up smoking.
I don’t look like a smoker. Everyone’s always rather surprised. I come across as all mother-earth-loving and wholesome (well, kind of…) and then they find me shivering outside the pub sucking on a fag. It is actually gross.
I did try to give up. I knew I probably should, but you can hear in that sentence alone that there was a distinct lack of conviction. I managed a few weeks I think and then slowly slipped back into it.
I just can’t convince myself that it is doing any sinificant damage. I know people’s eyes will be popping out in outrage. I’ve seen the pictures of lung cancer, I know people die of it. A lot. But my great grandmother lived until she was 98 and smoked twenty a day from the age of 14. She was pretty wrinkled, but by the time you’re 98 who’s caring, certainly not her. So not everyone dies early from smoking.
I’m not saying that it’s not doing me damage. I’m sure it is, but I’m just not aware of it and so the motivation to stop isn’t there. It’s like when I wanted to lose weight when I was younger and plumper, but just couldn’t kick the cookies.
Trouble is I don’t want to get to 55 and get lung cancer and be like ‘shit, I totally f***ed up and now I’m going to die and I was really enjoying life (because I do, I love it)’. Now, it might not happen, but do I want to do something that could risk it happening?
See, even that doesn’t motivate me.
Now, while I was writing this post I got talking to the guy behind ‘GoodFuckingIdea’ and said I was writing a post on why I couldn’t give up smoking. I kind of knew it would piss him off. He suggested I needed to find a way to harness my motivation.
And then he pushed my button.
He said ‘Well, maybe you’ll never be able to shake it. It’s your destiny.’
My hair bristled. Screw him, are you kidding me? What, you think I can’t do it? Think I can’t handle that kind of challenge. Think I can’t win this battle? Watch me. *
Motivation harnessed.
Good Fucking Idea.
* anyone with any tips on how I really do give up smoking this time…please send. ta.
Prompt: Lesson learned. What was the best thing you learned about yourself this past year? And how will you apply that lesson going forward?
I learnt how to be a demon-slayer. It wasn’t something I set out to do. Trust me. It was more out of necessity. And the reality of it is not nearly as cool and sexy as Buffy.
When you’re dealing with people that are stuck in a rut and your job is to help them out of it you have to learn to see their truth and the demons that are at play – the beliefs they’ve got trapped in and the emotional demons that they won’t face – the anger and rage that they’ve put a lid on rather than face. But to really help someone you have to help them take that lid off and let it come out.
I had to learn on the job. Literally. I would first sense it as a kind of crackling in my head. My intial reaction would be fear and I’d want to run and I’d have to try and keep my cool while I sat cradling my coffee, trying to not look terrified. Those angry demons are the worst, you can feel them wanting to attack, wanting you to f*** off and it takes a lot of strength to stand there and not budge because that’s the only way to do it. To stand in the firing line and hold a mirror up so that finallly they can see that all they are fighting, all they are running from, is themselves and their pain, because once upon a time they got hurt and with that came a promise to themselves to never let it happen again and a fortress to keep the pain out. A fortress which actually keeps them seperate and lonely from the rest of the world. And while it’s scarey to at first let that fortress dissolve, it’s the only route to living your dreams and feeling connected and alive again.
The hardest part when I’m facing someone’s demon is to not fight or flight, no matter how terrifying. Instead I have to fight my own demons that are wanting to attack back and defend me. I’ve got to tame them so that they don’t try and jump in. Because the only way you can slay a demon is with love.
I’m not going to pretend I enjoy it. It is exhausting, but I’m trusting that with practice it’ll become easier and that I’ll learn to stand calmly and firmly in the storm and let the arrows deflect, never budging from a space of calm and love which is what the person needs. At the moment some of the arrows still manage to hit, but a shaman put a shield on my arm, and whether you think that’s bonkers, it does seem to have helped. I don’t feel like I’m going crazy anymore when it starts to happen. So that’s good.
The hardest lesson of all that I’ve had to learn is that you can only help when asked, when given permission. If you’re not, then there is nothing you can do. Holding that mirror up when they’re not ready to see it, when they don’t see the castle they’re trapped in, only aggravates the situation and does nothing to help. It feels like they’re under attack.
And so I’ve had to learn to hold my tongue, to let it go and to recognise that we all have our demons and I can’t go around like some trigger happy knight in shining armour trying to slay them all, because now is not always the right time. And if you jump in before they’re ready you’re going to make a mess. And so I’m learning to just let the demons be, to make space for them and understand why they’re there in the first place and not do what I always want to do which is poke at them until they’re ready to fight.
Prompt: Healing. What healed you this year? Was it sudden, or a drip-by-drip evolution? How would you like to be healed in 2011?
The moment I saw this prompt I bristled, backed away, flicked down to the next email. I had drawn a blank but more than that…I HATE HEALING. I mean I don’t hate it obviously, to be healed is wonderful, but the actual process of healing – ugh.
I find the healing more painful than being injured. When I’m injured it hits me out of the blue. Before I know it, wham, the knife goes in, finds my soft spot, ducks under my ribs and into my heart, my belly, my chest. The damage is done and I stand there stunned and numb.
Trouble is I like to think I am strong, invincible. I like to be the one helping others heal, I don’t need healing. Honestly I’m fine. And that becomes my mantra until that numb comfort blanket starts to thaw and my heart opens up to reveal a big sobbing wound, which has opened the door to other wounds that had been lying untouched and unhealed for years.
It’s a nightmare. It’s like thinking you’ve tidied your house only to open up a cupboard that is full to the brim of mess that you know is going to take hours to sort out.
Healing requires energy, it requires commitment, it requires letting go. There’s always a piece of armour we have to reluctantly take off, wrapped round us by a fierce need for protection that sprang up after the damage had been done, vowing to never let it happen again.
The trouble with that kind of iron-clad protection is that, while it manages to keep out the hurt from happening again, it also keeps out everything else. And so there we are trapped in a castle of our own making. Again.
And that’s where I find myself today. Peering out from a window high up in a castle, knowing that I’m going to have to bust myself out of there and it’s going to require effort. And either I start that today, or I dive under the duvet, bury my head and deal with it tomorrow.
But I know I’ve already started by the very fact that I didn’t skip past this post, something in my drew me back to the question and made me face it. It got me to start writing and is always my first step to healing…
Prompt: Action. When it comes to aspirations, its not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen. What’s your next step?
This is what I’m all about: action. Not just having ideas, but making them happen. Not just having dreams, but living them. This is where our magic lies.
We wouldn’t have dreams and ideas if we didn’t have the tools to make them happen and the magic wand that turns dreams into reality is straight forward, no nonsesnse, feel the fear and do it anyway, action.
This is what I preach and teach and so when I cook up an idea, one that really makes me tingle with excitement and seems to come straight from the heart, I have to do it. No matter how hair-brained and ridiculous it seems. I have to practice what I preach.
So for me, in 2011, the big idea I’m making happen is to pack my life down into a camper van, pop my business in a bag and hit the roads of the UK. I want to explore Britain and really dig deep beneath the surface, I want to be outdoors, connected with my surroundings. I want to go on journies and adventures, discover new places, feel what it’s like to live nomadically, limiting myself to just 100 possessions and taking different friends on different adventures, taking photos, blogging about the experiences and lapping up life.
It all kicks off into action after the new year – buying the camper van, getting it ready, stripping my life down into 100 possessions and planning the first few adventures. I want each journey to have a purpose – a question to explore, a challenge to be set. And I’ll be taking people I love with me to share in the adventure.
What I love about making this idea happen is how it seems to excite and inspire other people – it gets them talking about living life creatively, doing what you love, living your dreams, reconnecting with nature and exploring the weird and wonderful traditions of old english cultures, keeping our pagan roots alive.
With each conversation, the idea grows, develops and takes shape. And that is what I want to do throughout my journey. Invite people to offer up ideas for places to go to, things to do, people to meet. I’ll take those ideas and make them happen. The weirder and more wonderful the ideas and challenges, the better.
What better way to show people what is possible and what fun can be had when you take your ideas off the page and bring them to life.
Appreciate: What’s the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year? How do you express gratitude for it?
Silence…
I’ve come to appreciate many things in the past year, but the latest and perhaps the most surprising has been silence. I’m a big talker. I talk and listen for a living as a coach and love the transformative power of words and conversation. I love the nurturing talk with close friends, talking about ideas, talking through problems, but it was in the latter part of this year when I went through a lot of change and excitement, had fallen in love and taken a new turn in life, that I really discovered the restorative power of silence.
I had gone to see my homeopath – my body was reacting to all the change I was going through, my identity was struggling to cope with the fact that I’d found the kind of love that I had stopped believing I was destined for. I was supposed to be happy and yet I was exhausted and anxious and my body was communicating my anxiety in all manner of symptoms. I was desperately trying to understand it all, talk through it to process what was going on and find the explanations that would put my mind at rest.
As well as her usual wise words and a remedy to take, she prescribed me silence. No words. Silence. To switch my mind off and allow myself to gently and naturally adjust to the change in my life.
I now prescribe it whenever I can sense that one of us is struggling to adjust to a new level that our relationship has got to. It feels counter intuitive. I like to talk things through, but sometimes talking does nothing more than ruffle things up into more confusion and scratch away at the problem turning it into a bigger sore than it ever needed to be.
In that space and silence problems aren’t solved, they are often dissolved.
11 Things. What are 11 things your life doesn’t need in 2011? How will you go about eliminating them? How will getting rid of these 11 things change your life?
In April 2011 I’m moving my life into a camper van, leaving London, popping my business into a bag and hitting the road. That means stripping my world of possessions down to the bare essentials, to fit into a van and that includes a bed and a kitchen sink.
I can’t wait – ah the relief and freedom of having just a handful of possessions, but at the same time it throws up a huge dilemma, because while I’m a minimalist, I’m a funny kind of minimalist.
I’m a hoarding minimalist. And a messy, hoarding minimalist. A minimalist with a house full of clutter. Mess everywhere. I buy very little but seem to amass a huge amount of STUFF. Usually stuff that has been disgarded that I can’t bare to see go to waste, that I find on the street, or a festival field, or being chucked out by a friend. So I give it a home. My bedroom is a home to orphaned hats, fairy wings, leaflets, two fluffy toy unicorns, beads, empty photo frames, a mosquito net, two ukeleles and a fondu set, to name but a few. Most of this stuff I never use. But I feel secure in the fact that it is there, because you never know when you might need it… It’s like a distorted sense of having all the tools that I need to survive in the world.
Well I’m going to be stripping away that false comfort blanket of bits and bobs over the next 3 months, sifting through my bric-a-brac of a bedroom to eliminate and strip away my possessions right down to just a handful of essentials. So rather than eliminating just 11 things in 2011, the question I’ll be asking myself is what 11 things will I keep in 2011?
Straight off the bat…
1. iphone
2. Clothes
3. notepad and pen
4. laptop
5. fairylights
6. cooking utensils
7. duvet
8. bicycle
9. books
10. camera
11. make up
This whole process I think will be fascinating – choosing what I list as my bare essentials, including happiness-inducing objects (hence the fairy lights). My mind boggles with how I’m actually going to do this, but I relish a challenge that tests my perceptions and gets me thinking and acting in new ways. I’m also excited about the difference it will make to have a life free of ‘stuff’. Quality, not quantity really appeals. True minimalism rather than confused version which I currently live by.
In fact I might make it a challenge to strip my life down to exactly 100 objects. Watch this space…#playproject
December 8 – Beautifully Different. Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different – you’ll find they’re what make you beautiful. (Author: Karen Walrond)
I struggle with this. I know I shouldn’t, but I still do. Even after all these years of steadfastly playing to my own roles, creating a world that suits my shape, embracing my differences, while inspiring and supporting others to do the same.
Daring to be different still requires courage and there is still part of me that wants to turn back to a plain vanilla flavour and blend in with the rest. I think that part of me will always be there. What I must remember is that I was brought up in a world where different is dangerous, different is odd, werid, viewed with suspicion, the black sheep of the family. Different must be stamped out, a phase to be got through until different learns to be the same again. And so it will always take courage to be different and embrace it for its beauty.
Now lighting people up – that I can do. I do it for a living. And until this question I had never considered that I have learnt to light people up by daring to be different. Ooooh, ok. That does make sense – my gift for lighting people up and bringing them to life so that they start to create the world they want, grows stronger the more I let my weird and wonderful insides out. The tattoo I got this year was a life-commitment to continue to do that.
Ok, so I’m beating round the bush aren’t I? What makes me different, what do I do that lights people up?
I’m like an ass-kicking cheerleader. I never give up on the people. I love them unconditionally. I have an energy and a love for people that makes them feel alive and brilliant. I give people hope, make them see that what they dream of isn’t just possible but really quite easy.
I stand in the storm of a person’s demons and let them play it out, never waivering, just loving until the demon loses strength and whatever sorrow, sadness or hurt lies beneath comes pouring out. It sets people free.
I play the fool so that I can get in close and see what lies at the heart then hold it up for the owner of that heart to see.
I’m strong and bold, ridiculous and cheesey too. I have an innocent face and a mischievous glint in my eye, I smile like an angel and swear like a sailor.
I don’t just have ridiculous ideas, I live them.
I’m a gypsy-hearted road tripper, a student curandera, photographer, tree-hugging hippy and an expert at living life in perpetual play.
My family thinks I’m bonkers, they don’t get me, when I got the tattoo they said part of me had died to them, but I refuse to not belong and so bit by bit they are learning to love that I am different, that it’s not a phase and that I’m not going anywhere.
Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?
Ok, so just check out what I posted on December 1st – ‘Finding my tribe’.
About an hour later I stumbled on #Reverb10…sweet jesus I LOVE it when life throws you a golden bone like this. A whole community of people living life creatively, to their own rules, doing the things they love, in play, with passion, writing, sharing, learning together, making things happen. Reflecting and manifesting together and inspiring the hell out of me.
I’m not even much of a writer, but I’ve been devouring each of these prompts with relish and feeding up on the thoughts and musings of a whole community of people that I’ve discovered out there that join the dots up like I do. Delicious feeling.
And in 2011? More of this please. Thank you #reverb10 team.
As for me, I’ll be creating a playground for a community of players and helping to lead and inspire that tribe…watch this space and see the play revolution come to life…www.screwworkletsplay.com
Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?
Slop. I’m not kidding. Last thing I made was slop. In fact last three things I made were slop. My housemates have even started calling it ‘Selina’s Slop’. I couldn’t tell you exactly what goes in there and it’s hard to decipher by the end, but lentils are nearly always involved.
I think I added Nando’s peri-peri sauce last time.
I’d like to make a treehouse, a book, several books actually, presents for everyone this christmas, a sweater with ‘tattoos and firemen’ stitched into it, frames for my photos, a camper van conversion. But the problem is I think I’d really rather come up with the ideas and someone else do the making.
Unless it’s slop, I do like making slop.
Made in the moment 
