Be gentle with yourself, they have said.

Remember you are a fragile soul, I have read.

Even the kindest words can be poison.

Because I have only listened to those words when fear or grief has caused me pain.

And instead of making me healthier, they caused a kind of paralysis.

Because sometimes we need to be gentle with ourselves, and sometimes we need permission to play small.

But now that we are grown-up, most times we need know that we are strong and capable and that we have what it takes to take the next step.

Most times the best course of action is not to stay fragile.

Most times the best course of action is to put on our big girl pants or our invisible crown and prove to ourselves that we have got this.

It’s our internal Supernanny that we need, not our fairy godmother.

Take the chance. Make the leap. Sit on the naughty step. Get off your ass. Clean your house. Eat your greens. Play bigger. Get dressed. Make the call. Move your body. Do the math. Book the ticket. Take responsibility.

You’ve got this.

xo

Retreat happened this weekend; re-entry is happening now.  What can you say after spending three days with a group of irreverent, sacred, sassy, gentle, fierce, wise, silly, gorgeous, talented, creative, sensitive, remarkable women?

Sas, Penny, Susannah, Lisa, Emma, Leonie, Jo (and the Fox):

Thank you -

For being you.

For seeing me.

For nourishment.

For laughter.

For everything.

RrrOoooooAAaaaaRRrrrrrr.

xo

Photos by Penny McKinley-Rodgers

Dear Ms. Graham,

Quickening is bloody uncomfortable.  My body is full of equal parts excitement, terror and motion sickness.  My tried-and-true neural pathways are disagreeing with you and reading this feeling as fear rather than vitality.

“Eat!”  My ego is screaming.

“Self Medicate!”

“You can’t handle this. It is too big. Food will numb you. Grab a spoon and eat Nutella straight out of the jar. Don’t even move away from the open cupboard door. The faster you can get it in the sooner this feeling of terror/ possibility will pass.”

“Who are you to think about getting bigger?”

“Who are you to think about being capable of more?”

“The way things are is easier.”

“Why does it matter anyway? You aren’t special. What you have to say doesn’t matter.”

“Tomorrow is soon enough. There is plenty of time to do it then.”

“Go ahead, watch that re-run. You’re tired. You’ve earned a rest.”

But there is another tiny voice there that has been getting stronger and stronger. It wants me to listen to the quickening. It wants me to ride the feeling through to the end. It is telling me that I can handle it.  In fact, it thinks I have the potential to Rock It.

“There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.” - Martha Graham

Dear Ms. Graham,

I hear you, and I will.

love megg.

ox

I need to warn you that this post is going to be more traditionally spiritual than normal.  Although I have been working with the sacred for years now, I have kept away from talking about religion and God partly because some of the blogs that I have read that discuss their views on religion have put me way off reading them again, partly because it was really UNcool to talk about God when I was younger and that is a hard habit to break, and partly because I am still working on what I believe.

But paying attention has its benefits and lately the whispers to my soul have been focusing on prayer.  I, of course, have been largely ignoring them, but while poking through Google Reader today, I read Danielle’s latest post and her words felt like they had disco glitter on top and a hallelujah chorus behind them:

“I feel like I am in a constant state of prayer.”

Now that makes sense to me. That feels holy and real and right and just a little dangerous. That is a practice I can get behind. Prayer as a conversation; as constant as breathing and as close as gratitude.  Sacred as everyday.  By holding space for prayer, we take space away from fear.

And who wants to sit beside fear?

In Your Sacred Self Wayne Dyer writes: “Keep uppermost in your mind that there is a place within you where there is perfect peace and where nothing is impossible. If you give yourself the right to pray regularly, you will get to that place. Peace is yours for the asking.”

Beginning now -

deep breath.

gratitude.

yes.

xo

PHOTO CREDIT: Speaking of gratitude, this photo was taken by my Dad. He blogs too!

]]> http://creatingwings.com/2012/01/03/an-invitation-to-a-conversation/feed/ 3 http://creatingwings.com/2012/01/02/inside-all-of-us-is-a-wild-thing/ http://creatingwings.com/2012/01/02/inside-all-of-us-is-a-wild-thing/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:26:08 +0000 megg http://creatingwings.com/?p=1319 “These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” – Audre Lorde

Have you met yours yet?

xo

(P.S. Once again, I don’t know who did this – if you know who I can credit, please let me know!)

The powerful shifts of 2012 began this morning before I had even gotten out of my pyjamas.

My cells feel scrambled and the world looks different than it did 20 minutes ago.

I started the day listening to the last Circe’s Tribe call recording. In the opening meditation, Jamie had us visualise something that included a colour and an emotion associated with it.  The colour that I saw was pink, and when she said emotion, I thought that I felt panic.  I have been feeling that feeling off an on for a few months now and I have been swallowing that feeling down, giving myself heartache in the process.

I almost stopped listening, but then a question came into my head: “Is that actually panic that I am feeling? Is it really fear or could it be another energy? Could it be power? Excitement? Passion? The colour was pink after all?!”

The question stopped me cold.  In that moment I realised that I have the same reaction to all of the great big strong emotions. Afraid of their bigness, I call them all the same thing: fear. Being afraid of them meant that I stopped knowing what they really were.

That realisation brought on the most incredible feeling of expansion.

Then anxiousness.

Then excitement.

Big excitement.

And then I wrote this in my journal:

I commit to meeting my emotions, naming and allowing them; letting them be as big as they need to be and expanding myself so that I am big enough and brave enough to hold them.”

There’s that feeling again, but I am going to walk over and meet it face-to-face.

yes.

“Are you still writing?”

I hadn’t spoken to him in 10 years, but in the 3 minutes we spent on the phone, he asked if I was still writing.

“A little,” I said.

A little?

I still can’t do it. I still feel apologetic when I talk about writing.

Then someone I love asked me if I actually wanted to be a writer… after all, I don’t act like one.

Do I?  Do I want to be a writer? Do I love writing?  No. I love words. I love words that when strung together have the power to create inspiration and connection.  I love what is possible when you write.

The truth will be evident to anyone who really knows me or who reads this blog occasionally.

The truth is that writing scares me, but it is actually bigger than that:

I scare me.

I can’t just sit down and write for the sake of writing. I could never paint for the sake of painting or cook for the sake of cooking or tidy for the sake of tidying, or exercise for the sake of simply moving my body. In the past, everything with me has had to be a production, the creation of something wonderful or be in some way A BIG DEAL.

So it is no surprise that I just stopped trying. Grown-up life just didn’t have the fireworks that I craved, and feeling that electric every day with no return just creates disappointment. Then, forgetting that I had given up shooting for the moon, I went through hell trying to figure out what was wrong with me and why I wasn’t living up to my own perceived potential.

That’s where 2012 comes in.

Marianne Williamson said: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”

It is my light that most frightens me, but I have spent years focusing instead on the darkness.

2012 is about focusing on the light.  Period.  But instead of giving myself more pressure to be, do and feel all at once, 2012 is about emerging.

Emerge for me is traveling the distance between the dark and the light, choosing to step closer to one and farther away from the other.  It’s made up of one choice, one step, one feeling at a time and being patient if those movements take a little while.

I am capable of miracles. I am capable of magic.

…and blinking, I step closer to the light.

xo

Image and Sculpture by Paige Bradley

A blogger I admire once wrote a post about her cupboards being bare.  I didn’t really understand her until this month.  My own cupboards have been incredibly bare for the past few weeks.  Writing of any kind has felt foreign and impossible.  My inbox is full and unanswered. My journal is gathering dust. I have neither read nor written a word since my last post. Just when I was getting to the point of re-vamping my blog and getting on with all kinds of exciting writing, ‘real life’ intruded rudely and I retreated.

I wonder how other people do it. How do you work full time, have a juicy marriage and family life, keep up with friends and have a creative life? I have begun to find simply the wanting of those things exhausting.

So when health and work slid, so did my writing.  For a long, long time.

But there is the delightful and – if I am honest – stressful thing about our creative wild souls:  they will not be silenced for long.  I finally sat down this week to finish the vision/ dream board that I started on my 37th birthday in October and felt myself relaxing deeply.  There I was.  Finally.

My vision for this year does not have anything on it that resembles the tense, dry, sick, sad soul who has been inhabiting my body for the last month.  No, that vision is rich and lush and wild and whimsical and strange and sacred. In fact, it is deeper and more connected than any of my boards in the past.  Just looking at it makes me excited for the year to come.

In the spirit of fallow times and cocooning, I am taking a short break from my blog. We are going on holiday until just before Christmas and then my live-in tech-guy will help me make a few changes to my site so that I am ready to greet you again just before the new year.  What will be here then will be as chock full o’ sacred, feminine, powerful wild writing as I can possibly get in. I promise.

I hope you’ll come back then.

In the meantime I wish you and yours a happy, healthy, delicious festive season.

Take care of you!

with love,

P.S. I am temporarily turning my comments off because I get so much comment spam, but I’d love to hear from you if you want to connect. Please contact me here.

]]> http://creatingwings.com/2011/11/29/regroup-regenerate-time-out/feed/ 0 http://creatingwings.com/2011/10/31/which-is-sweeter/ http://creatingwings.com/2011/10/31/which-is-sweeter/#comments Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:03:43 +0000 megg http://creatingwings.com/?p=1281 “Drugs that are abused by only a few (such as heroin) get outlawed, while drugs that are abused by everyone (such as caffeine and sugar) receive legal immunity. It’s mob rule. And the mob is addicted to sugar.” – Mike Adams (NaturalNews.com)

I don’t talk about food on here very much because although it is a real interest of mine, I am not a nutritionist or a chef and there are plenty of those people writing blogs.  But I have been on a food adventure for the past couple of months and I really wanted to share it with you – because it has been life changing. I promise that this has not and will not become a food blog!

Three years ago I was diagnosed with Celiac (Coeliac) Disease, and after both of us eating gluten-free for three weeks and then going to a friend’s for pizza and beer we discovered the hard way that my husband also couldn’t eat gluten.

Cutting something as pervasive as gluten out of your diet requires constant attention. I read every single label and question every single waiter, so I was well prepared for my latest adventure: cutting out sugar for three months.  I decided to try it out because Kris Carr and Dr. Mark Hyman both talked me into it, and the best part about changing your diet is that if it doesn’t work, you can easily change it back.

It’s not easy.  It’s actually easier to cut out gluten than it is to cut out sugar. Gluten-free is gluten-free and that is all there is to it. Sugar-free gives manufacturers license to put in all kinds of other crap.  Yes, I said crap. Sweeteners, while being lovely and sweet, still make me and my body want sugar. So I skipped the question of what is and isn’t a healthy sweetener and I cut out the lot. I mean no maple syrup or honey or aspartame (the devil) or even stevia. I wanted to stop my body from wanting sugar so why would I eat that stuff and give my mouth mixed signals?

Hard? Yes.

Worth it? Absolutely.

Within a month I lost 17lbs without even trying.  Now I am not being smug because I didn’t get all virtuous over night. I did largely replace sugar with salt, but still the weight fell off.

The eczema which has always plagued my hands? Gone in the first three days.

Weirdly, where my eyebrows had been sparse before, they grew in.

But the very best part of all is the way that my mind and body feel.  I feel like I have stepped off of the crazy train.  I feel stronger, clearer, healthier, saner, and more rational.  I can stand back from the dessert menu and know that I will feel sick and fuzzy and tired if I eat anything on it.  I have been so much more productive and steady and focused that I feel like a different person. I feel like I have my power back.

So the question is which is sweeter: a mouthful of something with sugar in it or the feeling of having a clear, powerful head on my shoulders?

Easy.  I choose me.

“…get off the sugar and save your brain.” – Dr. Mark Hyman The Ultramind Solution

Last week I flew home for 5 days, turned 37 while still in the air on the way back, and had surgery requiring general anesthetic.

Anyone who knows anything about energy and change would now tell me to be still and let all of that integrate into my cells.  My body feels sore and strange, but my brain is straining to write and create and get on with the process of a whole new year of my life.

I’ve decided to spend today gently working on a dream board and a gentle plan for my year ahead.

In the most recent Circe’s Tribe call (I highly recommend Circe’s Circle!) Jamie asked about the conditions that we need to flourish. This is a perfect question for me today as I feel like I am well placed to begin my fresh new year.

In the past, making vision boards always made me irritated and disillusioned because the things weren’t showing up and I got depressed when I tried to be positive and bad things still happened over and over and over.  I read and meditated a lot about this and I have finally realized that instead of being specific on my vision boards about things I wanted, I should focus on my ultimate goal because I know that the Universe/ God/ Goddess/ the Divine (whatever feels right to you) actually has bigger better plans than I can possibly imagine.

What if me putting big things on my vision board was actually limiting the amazingness that could be??!

So I think that in order for me to flourish what I really need is the ability to get out of my own way.  When I set my compass and my vision for happiness and joy and connection (which is what all of the things I want actually represent) and I try to make decisions that will bring me closer to those things rather than push them farther away, and I have faith that what is coming is better than what I could imagine, I feel a lot better.

Following Jamie’s lead and calling it a Dream Board rather than a Vision Board has helped too – it’s not about what I want, it’s about how I want to be.

What else do I need to flourish?

• Beauty. I need it like I need water and sleep!
• Sleep/ water/ nourishing food. – I’ve been eating no sugar for the past 2.5 months and I feel 100% clearer and gentler on myself. It has been life-changing. (I’ll post about that later this week.)
• For me I also need an element of the sacred in my life. It’s the bit I didn’t realize/ didn’t allow/ didn’t embrace for years and years, so I am stretching myself and letting that really growl and stretch and grow within me. I don’t have a template or a mentor to show me my way – nobody I know of is doing what feels right for me – so I am trying to embrace and integrate what is showing up for me and let it come out.

Here at the beginning of my 38^th year, I have finally accepted that flourishing is such a personal state that it isn’t until we allow ourselves to embrace all of ourselves and accept it and let our freak flag fly that we can move into that flow. The only resistance we have to it is our own.

What do you need to flourish?

(Can anybody tell me who to give credit for this picture?)