Have The Relationship You Want

I mess-up all the time. Sometimes it’s just not leaving enough time to do something, or faulty prioritizing, or forgetting something at the market. Sometimes I actually hurt someone’s feelings. Sometimes I’m oblivious to what’s going on, and sometimes I just put my foot in it.

So what’s the message when my foot’s in my mouth?

I think everything that shows up in our lives is either a mirror or a message, and there’s always a lesson, and there’s always a take-away.

Most of the time these days, I’ve noticed the message coming in loud and clear: Pay attention! Be aware! Look around! Be here now!

Unfortunately, once my foot is in my mouth, or I’m sprawled on the pavement, or my husband is staring at me as though I’ve just committed murder, it’s a little late to process the message. A little late to undo the error. Oh, for do-overs.

So what, exactly, is a mistake, and what is a fair price to pay for making one?

I’ve come to think of a mistake as thinking a little bit too hard about me.

Sometimes what’s a mistake to one person is a boon to another, and some mistakes turn out to be lucky intuition, like the artist of any medium who forges a new road from his soul by mistakenly taking the wrong turn.

I can think of every man in my life until my lovely husband as a mistake. I can think of every man in my life as some kind of lesson. As a stepping-stone, a passage. Or I can see that every man in my life was exactly right for me at any given moment, and all I needed to do was see his message.

The message might have been Alright. Thank you for attending. Now you can move on. Or it might have been, I’m not supposed to go any further, please proceed without me. Or This is a very nice place to be, so sorry you’re not ready yet. I must have come across many men I couldn’t have, not because they wouldn’t want me, but because they knew I didn’t want me.

How to tell the difference between the mistake, the mirror and the message?

The mirror shows you where you are, the mistake shows you where you’ve been, and the message invites you to go where you want to be. I listen to them all, but I look for messages. Sometimes I can’t see them or hear them or feel them, because I’m too absorbed in the mirror, or too despondent over the mistake.

The thing about messages is, in order to see them, you have to be still.

In order to hear them, you have to be quiet.

And in order to feel them, you have to be in your body.

Mistakes are a loss of attention. They throw us off the gameboard into the sand trap. They’re us trying to take charge of the brave and thoughtful horse we’re riding, the horse who really knows the way, and steering him off course into the woods because we thought we saw a turn back there we missed.

The fastest way out of a mistake is to fight. Going dead inside and numb and depressed gets us deeper into the quagmire. Fighting is recovering our self- esteem by topping accusing ourselves - How could I have done that? or denying responsibility - It wasn’t my fault! or taking on responsibility that isn’t ours - It was all my fault…or lying to others - I didn’t do that! or lying to ourselves - I don’t care!

Fighting is saying Oh….. and then going down into that Soup of yuck and dread and pain and misery, and guilt, and everything we feel, until we touch love.

Touching love feels like oh, I did that, and I feel love for that person, that thing, or myself, and I feel sad for the pain I caused them, or me, and I’m still a good person, and I still absolutely, completely, deeply and profoundly love and accept myself. Touching love is all of a sudden stopping the resistance of that knot in your belly, and just feeling what you feel.

It’s stopping smiling, blaming, counting, imagining, justifying, excusing, making up stuff, wishing, hoping, and everything else and just feeling the weight of not feeling good. For maybe a good solid moment. And then, getting back on the horse, and riding it out of the sand and onto the road. The moment you turn to the horse and say, I’ve made a mistake and I can still ride like the wind, time starts again, the weather starts again, and the message signs all around start blinking.

A Message is another chance to pay attention. Another chance to dance with what shows up. Another chance to enjoy the moment. Another chance to catch another Message. And the message always is: There will always be mistakes, and mirrors and messages, because our lives are always moving, and we will never learn everything there is to learn.

Sometimes the Mistake IS the Message.

Love, Rori

Laughing Goddess wrote us a comment here that brought up one of my favorite books, Ask And It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks. And without going too deep into it…it focuses on the idea of “raising your vibration” — which has sung to several of my clients and healed their entire lives.

One of the things in the book, though, I’ve totally changed for my own work….and it’s the piece that Laughing Goddess brought up…so I thought I’d talk about it a bit…

It’s the idea of our emotions on a scale, from lowest to highest. Hanging around the bottom are feelings like despair, hopelessness, anger…and at the top are bliss, joy…all the good stuff.

What I love about this scale is that it has anger above depression - and that alone is worth the price of admission.

This is why anger is so much better than being in a funk - it gets your blood going, it gets you out of bed, it gets you up and writing an angry letter or calling a friend and venting on her shoulder (if you’re lucky enough to have such a good friend).

But here’s the problem with that scale: if you’re hovering somewhere at the bottom of that scale right at this minute, and looking longingly upward at the happier parts of the scale…it’s simply not possible to not “judge” where you’re actually at at this moment. If you want to go “higher” on the scale, but are at “anger” or “frustration,” or “hopelessness” - then you’ll WANT to move UP — and that can really get in your way.

If you’re like me, you tend to put a “brave face” on things when you’re low and pretend to be “okay.” Then you get back home, feel exhausted, unheard, disconnected, inauthentic and totally worse than before.

That’s why I prefer the image of the “Soup” — where it’s all in there together. All the emotions floating in the same soup at the same time, touching each other, dancing and spinning and calling to you…

If you sink down into the soup - and you can allow yourself to touch one emotion, really touch it, you can touch them all…and if you can’t touch one…you can’t really touch any of them.

This way - the way of the Soup - the emotions aren’t “rated.” They aren’t even “labeled” good or bad. The only thing that counts is how they feel to you — and THAT you can feel them fully.

For me…the prime directive is to FEEL what you feel…and for me…just like how I believe that standard “affirmations” don’t work — if you see these things on a “scale” - it’s going to make you instinctively give where you ARE short shrift. I want you to give where you are your FULL ATTENTION. Sink into it. (Another reason I love the image of the Soup…you can sink into it.)

The only scale I like - the one I made up - is the “happiness” level one I put in my Reconnect Your Relationship program…where you find your “normal” and then find yourself at a “new normal” without effort..without having worked to climb up at all. For me…that just increases your motivation to keep sinking…since you can’t “climb.” You just sort of “show up” at a higher happiness set-point - it’s not something you can “work” to achieve.

What I love about the Abraham scale, though, is that it agrees with me on how these feelings are rated - how some are at the bottom and some are at the top - and that’s this: they’re rated by how GOOD or how BAD they FEEL to you.

And as you work your way up the scale, you find your way simply by following what FEELS GOOD.

But still, I object to the “accomplishment” quality of a scale. I know that I - as an overachiever — can easily put my feelings aside and just aim for the higher rungs of the scale!

And I don’t want you to do that. I want you to know that you have to be able to fully touch and feel grief and guilt and envy and terror in your Soup in order to have the capacity and the fearlessness to touch joy and bliss. It’s all in there anyway. It’s just where you HANG OUT that counts!!!

Usually, we hang out near the emotions we’re most AFRAID of. We swim around in the Soup and are so captivated by the lure of “ugly” feelings like guilt and fear and panic and despair and anger, especially…but can’t really go INTO them. We just hang around them, inspecting them, peeking at them, mostly immersed in our fear of them. We can’t let go of them, because we’re afraid of what would happen if we weren’t keeping an eye on them all the time.

We end up being vigilant around the feelings we don’t want to feel. We pretty much cut ourselves off from all the great emotions by cutting ourselves off from all the crappy-feeling emotions we want nothing to do with. We want to scamper up that scale…and skip the rungs we don’t like.

But it doesn’t work that way.

Once you’ve fully touched and experienced and made peace with the worst-feeling feelings…then you can skip around all you want to! You can hang out with the good-feeling feelings forever!

Because you’ll be done feeling afraid of the icky ones. You’ll be done feeling afraid of what out there in the world might trigger those icky feelings. You’ll start to trust yourself and your nose for the good feelings.

So…let me know what works for you…and here’s to feeling the good stuff!

Love, Rori