Bringing Ideas Into Reality

Fall of last year, my husband and I were having our Sunday adventure at the beautiful Huntington Gardens here in Los Angeles, an outing that has become a beloved go-to date excursion with all that it has to offer… landscapes from different regions around the globe that whisk you away and satisfy both the need to be bathed in nature as well as scratch the wanderlust itch; architecture, artifacts, sculptures and art that make you stare at every detail, soaking in the intention and energy it was created with (I can’t ever pass up a visit to the famous piece entitled “Blue Boy” that my late grandpa was endeared to. A piece that likely wouldn’t typically make me emotional, but even now, I can see my grandpa being in awe of every stroke with his nose inches away from the canvas, which brings the warmest feeling and my eyes a bit misty).

I digress!

While we were enjoying our visit, it occurred to me out of the blue that I would love to visit London again soon to see my friends. Immediately after that, it occurred to me that I would love to work while I was there. I’ve worked with my one on one clients there, but that wasn’t the feeling that came with it - I knew it meant working in a bigger capacity, like running a group.

This made me nervous!

Why? Well for context, I have spent the last six and a half years wondering when I would have the desire to run my own weekend retreat but every time I would dip into my wisdom, the quiet knowing inside, and ask myself if it was time to do so, it never felt alive inside of me. I’ve worked with groups in companies and universities, but I get to show up and share in those capacities, running my own group was a different ball game altogether. It sounded like hard work, a big risk and frankly, I just didn’t want to. I used to struggle with the fact that it never sounded like a good idea because I knew how wonderful of an experience I could create and how ideal it would be to help more people at once. But again, it didn’t feel right, which meant it wasn’t right… back then.

So as you can imagine, when it occurred to me that it was time to put something together in this bigger way, of course it gave me a fright! I was being called by my internal guidance that it was time. I was being stretched. The penny had dropped.

*breathe in, breathe out, you don’t have to do anything with this information immediately, Jessie*

I allowed a bit of time to pass and every once in a while I’d ask myself, what would that look like? Would I want to co-teach with anyone? (Another idea that always looked fun but didn’t make me want to do it). I’d let myself ponder and again, remind myself that I didn’t need to do anything about it immediately.

Then one day on my morning walk, a colleague of mine named Wyn Morgan, who I had never met formally but we knew of each other through our practitioner community, popped in my mind.

“Really?” I thought, “I don’t even know him! But he IS in London. And you do love his vibe and how he articulates the understanding… why not?” I let Wyn’s name come to mind a few more times before I finally decided, what’s the harm in emailing him to see if he’d be interested? And as life typically unfolds when we listen to the inner nudges, he emailed me back within an hour saying he’d love to jump on a zoom to explore the idea, and within 20 minutes of said zoom call, we knew we wanted to move forward!!

As a reminder, all of this started to transpire in the fall of 2023, we were a *go* by December and here we are, the first week of March, 2024 and I am headed to London in a few days to teach a weekend retreat all around dissolving stress on March 16th and 17th in central London.

Why am I sharing this with you? Well, I think we can get caught up inside of ourselves (me, too) when it comes to our ideas around growth, expansion, doing new things, wanting to make changes, etc etc. We may have a desire, or a nudge, or a lifelong dream that comes to mind over and over again but instead of staying open, allowing curiosity to lead without looking for answers, allowing time to bake the idea before it’s ready to come out of the oven… we instead start to focus on it, assess if it’s possible for us, get vigilant of our feelings then wonder what the feelings mean - all the while giving us evidence of why it’s not a good idea because we’re sitting there scaring ourselves with our imagination.

So I hope in sharing this little vignette from my latest experience of bringing an idea into reality has helped you see with a little more clarity that doing so, doesn’t have to be done with all of the hutzpah that we’ve been fed by society… “Feel the fear and do it anyway!”, “Go big or go home!”, “Live your life with no regrets!”, “What are you waiting for?! No one is going to give you permission but yourself!” All of these phrases are a nice idea but they riddle us with a sense of urgency and therefore shame if we don’t feel the courage to leap immediately when we’re getting a nudge for something. And frankly, when we’re feeling a sense of urgency, all that feeling is telling us is that our mind is sped up and that is NOT a good state of mind to be creating from.

Also, final note, as Maya Angelou said, “God speaks in whispers until she slaps you across the face” - I’m sure a few of you out there have had some slaps across the face happening for some time and reading this may make you think, “I’ve had the nudge for a while now to _____”, but that doesn’t mean you have to make fast moves to make up for lost time. No way. Again, a sense of urgency is not sturdy. But, can you start to get curious about that whisper/slap/nudge? Can you start to get curious and follow the breadcrumbs of ideas that come to mind? Absolutely.

Softly, gently, slowly, sturdily - you’ll be surprised by how life begins to show up to support you and how the waves of natural momentum will become the wind at your back.

Sending love in all directions,

Jess

PS~ If you are reading this before March 16th + 17th, 2024 and are interested in the two day retreat all around dissolving stress in London, please reach out to me for more information. The cost for the two days is £495 and we’d be so thrilled to have you. What we’ll explore together can be life-changing and the insights you can have as a result of being with us will be sustainable in all aspects of your life.

The Hidden World Inside Of You

After recording our episode for the podcast, my wonderful mom Sherrill Douglass and I kept chatting for a bit around the notion of how helpful it is to remember to stay curious to understand. We talked about it in terms of relationships throughout the episode, but my mom said off the cuff to me later…

“We all have a hidden world inside of us to discover”

When she said it, I felt such a beautiful feeling come over me - why? Well let me ask you, dear readers, what are the implications of knowing this? What are the implications of knowing that every single one of us has a hidden world inside of us that has yet to be discovered? On one hand, it immediately gives me a feeling of hope for my own personal experience… that there is always more to come, more to learn about myself that will be revealed. No matter my age, no matter my circumstances, the hidden world inside of me will continue to show me more of what makes me feel alive - I feel this when I look at art or read poetry or listen to new music. When I’m discovering new cultures or working through the punches that life throws at me… that’s a real big one. Every time I walk through a big humdinger in life, such as my health, the health of my family, death, you know the events that shake you to your core - every time I walk through those I learn a hell of a lot more about my own needs, what’s important to me and what isn’t - those are the fast track events that help us discover more about our hidden world, but we don’t have to wait for the “bad stuff” to see this fact. And it makes life so rich to consider it. Our minds are so fickle with wanting to keep us identifying with the same beliefs about ourselves, then we adapt to these ideas of who we are and we become bored and wonder why. The same goes with the people in our lives - our minds take the liberty to slap labels on folks and then we wonder why we get bored in our relationships. There is so much more to be had!! There is so much more, forever and always, to discover about yourself and about the folks all around you. You can truly never know everything there is to know about someone. And the more you see this, the more room you’ll have, the more bandwidth you’ll experience inside of yourself to stay curious about your hidden world and the hidden world inside of others to then understand how you and they, click!

If by chance you happen to be reading this and it feels like a scary idea to go spelunking in the hidden world inside of yourself - I’d like to offer you the perspective that by nature, learning more about who you are at your core, is an incredibly freeing and natural experience. Any ideas you may have of it being terrifying is purely your mind giving you an unhelpful opinion. Many folks I work with have admitted that they haven’t looked in that direction before because they believed there were parts of themselves that they didn’t like and they had spent years trying to stuff them away or trying to avoid them. But every single time, with a little bit of understanding about how we filter our present moment through memories of the past, folks tend to see that those ideas of getting to know themselves being scary, stems from past experiences of feeling shame around who they are. And again, in this moment, if you want to, you can give yourself the permission to begin to discover the beautiful hidden world inside of you despite the opinions of the past that are loud in your brain. You can be gentle with yourself, take your time, you have your whole life ahead of you to play in that sandbox. There’s no rush. Because YOU aren’t going anywhere… your mind may go a million different ways, but YOU, are untouchable and just a gem cave waiting to be mined. And the more you discover your hidden gems and make those known to the world, the more you’ll find success in your relationships, your career and your peace of mind, because more and more you’ll make your outsides match your insides. In my mind, the very definition of living authentically.

And the more you stay open and curious about discovering the gems inside those around you, the more deep connection and love you’ll find in everyone you meet.

Sending love in all directions,

Jess

What Is It You Really Want?

When was the last time you checked in with yourself to ask yourself what it is that you really want? I think if you’re like any other human being, you could give me an answer right away because we humans tend to have ourselves on our mind a lot of the time. But for the sake of this moment of reflection, I’m not interested in what you don’t want and I’m not especially interested in what you think you want or need. I’m interested in you giving yourself the time to sink into the quiet inside of you and see what bubbles up from your curiosity.

What is it that you really want?

Is it a deeper connection to yourself? A deeper connection to your partner or your friends? Would you like to trust yourself more? Would you like to not worry so much? Are you tired of the same old fears coming up and rueing the day?

It’s not often that we allow ourselves the time to reflect on these deeper needs because we’re so good at adapting to our ever-changing circumstances and tolerating things inside of ourselves not realizing that we actually have choice.

Oof. Tolerations.

Are there parts of yourself or beliefs that you have that you tolerate the consequences of? If you’re not sure right in this moment, that’s OK. It’s a deep question. As a dear client of mine recently said when I pointed out some behavior of hers that she’s learned to tolerate, she so honestly replied with, “It’s taken me a while to even get here to talk about it because I was so used to my old behaviors towards myself, that I couldn’t tell you that it was behaviors that I was tolerating. I thought they were just... me.”

Did that make you nod your head? I did when she said it because it is so true about the human condition. We get so used to our ways of doing things. We get so used to our habits of thought. We get locked in to ideas of what we think we want out of life or a career or ourselves that we stay focused on the idea as opposed to being present with what’s changing inside of us. As Teddy mentioned in the interview this week, it wasn’t until he realized that keeping up with the celebrity scene wasn’t getting him out of bed in the morning so to speak, that he assessed what he was doing with his life and started his journey inward to start asking himself these deeper questions I’m posing to you today.

I want to circle back to what I said earlier about not being especially interested in what you think you want or need. I want to clarify what I mean. We tend to have thoughts about things that we think we want or need outside of us because we innocently believe we need those things for our well being. And it’s a trick of the mind because you have your well being right now. You don’t need anything else to obtain it. It’s a judgement or an assessment if you will, from constantly looking outside of ourselves and believing we won’t be OK without x, y and z. It’s deeply important for me to share that with you because I recently woke up to some demons that have been living rent-free in my head that I thought I had cut out like the cancer they are, years ago. And that’s money fears. I’ve woken up to them before and I’ve seen how they were fears that didn’t belong to me, they were other people’s fears that I had absorbed. But they’d been rearing their ugly ahead again in the recent past and when I was kind of shocked to be feeling what I thought was an old thought system I had cut out, I had realized in hindsight that yes, my initial realization of my money fears had definitely changed my relationship to money, but because of those initial realizations, I hadn’t noticed that I was actually still tolerating a bunch of thinking around money.

For example, when I was really busy in my practice, I would entertain thoughts that it could all go away. And when it was quieter, because that’s the ebb and flow of business, I would entertain thoughts that I may not get more clients. All of them rooted in fear, none of them rooted in truth. It wasn’t until I realized I was tired of the dog and pony show inside my mind, and as I asked YOU earlier, I asked myself what is it that I really wanted? (Answer: to be free of the grip of these money stories), then I was reminded that I am the one in charge of my experience and I have the choice to stop identifying with them. It has been an incredible journey since for me, because I feel a deep peace.. but I will warn you from experience - when you’re done with old habits in your brain, and you begin to choose to not get caught up in them and stay in your peace instead? They will rear their ugly head... louder and louder. Almost as if they want you to believe you need them in order to avoid the fearful story they’ve created. The ultimate gaslighter. But what’s fabulous? Is when you know this, when you remember this conversation we’ve had today, you’ll see through it. All I ask is for you to have patience while you practice staying in your peace while you allow the noise to pass.

As Father Greg said last week, practice makes permanent, boy oh boy is that right on the money.

So, dear ones, what is it that you really want? What is it that you want to be free of? What are you tolerating that you can be done with? I so want your heart to be given the opportunity to rest, and you are absolutely capable of experiencing that.

Sending love in all directions and I’ll see you next week...

Jess

Presence While Being Present

I’ve had an awareness rolling around my mind, probably because it has come up with multiple clients as of late, so it feels important to share.

So many of us are missing out on real, heart-felt, fulfilling connection with our loved ones - even while we are in the same room - because we’re spending all of our energy on our thoughts about them as opposed to being present with them. For example, it happens a lot between parent and child, so innocently. The parent is filled up from constantly thinking about the kids - worrying about this or that, strategizing for the following day, planning the future or feeling guilty about the past, and because they feel so filled up on their children from thinking about them all of the time, they don’t realize how empty the connection to their child in present time has been.

Is this making sense? Does it feel familiar?

It’s nothing to start having judgement around, it happens to all of us, all the time. We’re absent minded A LOT, why do you think I’m so passionate about sharing these things? It’s something we’re often not aware of because it’s such a trick of the mind when we think we’re present and then we have issues and confusion when the loved one in question feels distant or disconnected. The hat trick the mind is pulling on you is the fact that you haven’t been absent minded in your head - you’re thinking of them all the time! But you’re absent minded to the present moment, where real, deep connection is cultivated and exists.

How does this trick of the mind play out in real time?

In children, you may experience them having more tantrums, crying in a way that seems misguided, acting out - in adults, you may experience them having more tantrums, crying in a way that seems misguided, acting out. Forgive my tongue in cheek delivery, but truly, kiddos are mini adults with just a much bigger and louder expression of their insides since they don’t have words for what they’re experiencing. Nevertheless, in ALL of us, when there’s a void due to a longing for connection, it’s important to check our own state of mind. Where have we been? Just noticing this, starting to become aware of our presence when we’re present, is not only enriching for our relationships, but for our own experience of life as well.

So will you join me in checking in with yourself from time to time? When your child has a full meltdown because the bananas are ON the pancakes instead of IN the pancakes, instead of thinking they’re ridiculous, maybe check in with yourself on where you’ve been? It might not be the whole shabangy, but I can guarantee you that it isn’t something a little deep connection can’t fix.

As my mom has shared with me before, when I was a little one, I had a very easy time of asking for what I needed. The memory she’s shared is from when I was really little and I had been missing her so she asked me what I needed and I said, “I need to sit on your lap and put my hands on your face while you talk to me.” Oh man, heart. melted. It’s a testament to my parents that I always felt safe to put my heart out into the world and ask for what I needed. I remember asking if I could sleep in the middle of their bed from time to time, or being a very lanky teenager and asking if I could sit in the middle of them and hold their hands while we watched TV (pretty sure this was just before I moved out at 18). It’s a skill that I’ve taken for granted because it was something I never questioned in myself. But knowing the results of those asks always led to me feeling better - feeling safe and comforted and whole - I can see now how that was me listening to a deep part of myself that each and every one of us has when we listen. When we aren’t absent minded.

When we’re present in our presence.

Sending all the love in the world to you,

Jessie