(For you delightful Gen Ys and Millennials when I was growing up the word “woman” was  considered a pejorative term for females that just wasn’t used in polite society.  Women were called ladies and were expected to behave as such.  Period.)

This lady lion tamer was a living, breathing actual wonder woman for me.  She shattered my young notions of possibilities for women.  More than a decade before the modern feminist movement roared into our shared consciousness this one woman I experienced for very brief time nudged me along a life time path.

No, I’m not a circus performer nor am I all that into whips.  I do love to hang out with wild animals, though.  And I’m devoted to being in the company of wild women.  Actually I’m devoted to bringing out the sparkly, bold, courageous, wild power of women.

Wild as in connected with instinctive and intuitive knowing, breathing freely, able to roam with awareness through inner and outer territories, capable of using innate talents. Wild as is not overly domesticated, not focused on outer approval at the expense of personal truth.  Wild as in authentic, sure of self, daring and not so eager to trade comfort for freedom.  Wild as in aware of our power-from-within.

We absolutely need access to our wild and wise power-from-within right now because we are all facing snarling and snapping dangers in our lives.  Weird as it may sound, I don’t think the danger is in what we’re facing.  It’s not the lion or the job or the relationship or the checkbook.  It’s in how we want to face what’s before us.  Because it is really, really dangerous to be in this world without a great deal of inner power.

Today I’m standing in front of a beastie of a to-do list and a full spectrum of delicious distractions.  It will definitely take my power-from-within to keep my focus, to stay clear and aware and moving in the direction I know is best for me, to not be defined or confined by limiting thinking.  Good thing I’ve got my whip, high boots and sparkly regalia.

How about you?  What wild women in your lives have inspired you to step into your inner power?

Maybe being mortal humans in a dangerous world means there will always be some form of background drumming or strumming that keeps us on our toes, ready to fight or flee.  And maybe how noticeable that scary music is depends on our own inner rhythm.  It still seems to me that the background music to much of our shared experience resembles the suspense building, adrenaline pumping, terror inducing soundtrack of horror movie.  We all are on our toes, really quick to take a swing or run away or go completely, frozenly numb.

(Or maybe this is just me, because, as my friend Lynne says, for each of us “it’s always all about me”.)

Whether about the little me or the bigger me that includes many more of us, I’ve decided that I want to become more aware of when I am acting from fear and how I can do that more consciously.  I want to become aware of the background music and decide for myself how I want to dance to it.  I want to get past numb and knee jerk fear so that I can clearly tune into my inner knowing, my inner rhythm, my inner awareness of the best steps for me to take no matter what tune others are dancing to.  I want to know what I really need to be afraid of and how to best respond to that fear.

I was inspired by something I read in Robert Moss’s book, The Three “Only” Things, tapping the power of dreams, coincidence & imagination (highly recommended!). At one point he writes about the indigenous people of the Andaman Islands off of the coast of India. They somehow knew about the December 2004 tsunami and fled to the highlands before it wiped out their coastal village.  I write this again – a group of what we might describe as primitive people knew ahead of time that there was a real danger they needed to act upon and they did so.  They survived because they listen to the messages in their dreams.  According to Moss, “By tradition, the fierce Andaman islanders are group dreamers who gather at night in their community ‘big houses’ to dream the means of survival and progress for the whole community.”  And they listen to the wind and the animals, letting their deep connection with nature inform them.  They trust their inner knowing and are not afraid to act on it.  They trust their dreams for their survival – and it works!

That’s what I want – the ability to get the messages from my dreams and on the wind and through the songs of the birds and the courage to act on this knowing.  When I think of the Andaman Islanders I am in awe of their ability to simply walk away. It seems to me that this is the hardest part about trusting our intuition – we have to be willing to walk away from, to completely drop, anything else we are attached to.  How many of us could simply walk away from our homes and possessions? How many of us can just drop a closely held set of expectations?  How many of us might respond to an urgent intuitive message with something like “I can’t do that now because I have to meet this deadline”, or “I have to quickly answer this email”, or “I have to stay on the course already set for myself right now”?

I want to feel the fear that comes from my inner knowing and pushes me to act in possibly outrageous ways, if necessary, for the sake of my long term survival and thrival (my invented word for thriving).  I don’t want the fear that is the distracting background music, part of the group mind that keeps me agitated but unaware of actions to take that are right for me. That background music of fear is keeping me from hearing the wind, noticing my dreams, trusting my own choices.

Hmmmm…. How do I get what I want?  (Because it’s all about me getting what I want.)

I’m thinking a first step is to stay aware of the background music, really aware, so that I am able to sort out what’s out there and what’s within me. A next step is to pay attention to my dreams and the messages on the wind which means taking time for the subtle, for the ephemeral, for being in nature.  After that maybe it’s to look at what I’m holding onto so tightly it might be holding me back from acting on my inner knowing (I’m guessing that’s a big hunk of stuff to sort through.) And I’m pretty sure I need to be ready to trust myself even if it seems foolish or out of step with the popular beat.  I sure do wish I had a community to dream with each night.

At first this cracked me up.  The term buffet anxiety stuck with me, though, and now I’ve come to see that we all – or at least all of the people I know – have some form of this  tragically funny dis-ease.  Most of us are at the feast of life.  An entire banquet of intriguing and potentially delicious delights are laid out in front of us.  We have so very many choices of people to be with, ways to connect with them, recreational activities to divert us (even if there are 57 channels and nothing on), books to read, classes to take, food to eat, amounts of food to eat, information to collect, blogs to read and even jobs to explore.  Yep, we are at a feast alright, a buffet teaming with possibilities.  Even if it feels like we have few choices for the vast majority of us in the industrialized world we have a very, very full buffet before us.

We are ill-equipped to handle this vast and virtually unimaginable feast of choices.  Think of it.  Think about how many fewer choices our grandparents had.  Our grandparents and ancestors before them had way fewer personal choices to make (due to cultural limits) and many fewer consumer choices to make (due to products available) and way less people to connect with (due to communication and transportation technologies and a smaller population).  Yes, they may still have been at the feast of life, but our feast is over the top compared to theirs.  So, no, we aren’t all weak or crazy.  This is a very big adaptation for us to make as a species.  It’s perfectly understandable that as individuals we haven’t figured it out yet – or grown another stomach so we can digest it all.

With this unprecedented array of possibilities before us we are all like my colleague’s husband – we are suffering from varying amounts of buffet anxiety.  We can agonize over our choices, we can gobble everything in sight so as not to miss anything good, we can completely forget what we were hungry for, we can make ourselves sick eating it all, we can starve ourselves out of fear of making a wrong choice, we can become intoxicated with the joy of all the experiences.  We can completely lose our sense of direction and attention to what we really want when plates of dark chocolate covered strawberries catch our eye.  Seriously, mountains of dark chocolate!  Who could pass that by?

Those of us who have a hard time saying “no” to anything know what I’m talking about here.  We are so far beyond some idea of boundaries.  We are in way over our heads, drowning at the feast.  I see the impact of buffet anxiety on my clients all the time. Many people come to life coaching because they want some balance in their lives.  Or they want to finally reach that one elusive goal. Or they don’t even know what they really want because they’ve been overwhelmed for so long.  All of these are feast related. The depth and breath of the choices before us and the resulting challenges so many choices present are way more than “just say no” or “make a list and do it” strategies can address.  How we want to be while enjoying the feast of life is one of the big classes that each of us will take (and probably retake multiple times) at our individual Mystery School of Life (You know – that esoteric school we’re all attending as we figure out who we are, why we’re here, and what we need to learn in order to thrive and give our gifts).

There are many ways to approach buffet anxiety from a life coaching perspective.  You’ll read more about my strategies over time here because I am intimately experienced with the challenges of abundance (for which I am very, very thankful).  In fact, that’s one of my first steps – gratitude.  When overwhelmed with choices, when plates of dark chocolate (in any number of forms) are waved before me, if I can pause long enough to simply be profoundly grateful for all the possibilities, something in me shifts.  Gratitude some how brings me, even briefly, back to myself. It creates a momentary gap in the anxiety and frenzy of the experience.  In this gap I can breathe and remember.  I can regroup and reconnect with what has meaning for me.  And out of that meaning I have a little more of a solid place to stand while I gaze at the feast.  Being thankful doesn’t guarantee I’ll pass up that dark chocolate.  It does give me some awareness and that’s one of the best starting place I know.

What do you notice about how you approach the feast of life?  How are you with making choices, keeping your balance, knowing what satisfies you, saying yes and no to requests and possibilities?  Passing up plates of dark chocolate?  Or not?

At the very same time I ache with the pain of loss for two missing young women from my community – one now known dead, one vanished completely a world away.  I cry warm tears for them and their families.  I ache for the water and animals and people drenched in unimaginably huge amounts of oil.  As I witness my brave and beloved friend help her son heal from a drug overdose, as I support my awesome clients – many of whom are facing enormous personal and professional challenges, as I walk with so very many loved ones who are experiencing their own bone deep sorrow my heart seeks to entrain with theirs.

How do I hold such joy and sorrow at the same time?

It seems like the intensity of both of these feelings has increased in me over time, perhaps in sync with my personal and spiritual growth.  It is my intention to be aware of the wonder of the world as well as the suffering within it.  It is my desire to be with what is, not to flinch or deny or run away.  Being with the wonder comes pretty easily.  Being with the pain at first is not so difficult because we are an empathic people.  Being with  suffering and not having any ability to end it is almost unbearable.

Once in meditation I got that to surrender without my will is to be a martyr or a door mat.  And to hold on to the full force of my will without surrender is to be brittle, to need to control or forcefully exert power-over.  To fluidly and deeply live my personal power I need to hold will and surrender simultaneously.  I need to stand straight and clear, sure of my intention and desire without hesitation or doubt and at the very same time to dissolve into surrendering to the moment, being open to what is unfolding around me. With my thinking mind this is almost impossible to understand, just as it is almost, but not quite, impossible for my heart to hold so much joy and sorrow at the same time.

I’ve found that to really know the truth of something we need to be able to hold the polarities of it.  We need to be able to stand in the apparent paradoxes, the wide poles of the situation.  We have to be able to live in both/and rather than either/or – because we live in a both/and universe.  Light is wave and particle.  There is always life and death, joy and sorrow, endings and beginnings.  We are loved exactly as we are and at the same time we are evolving.  We can be in absolute gratitude for our many blessings and still want something more or different.  We can be giddy with delight and desperate with sorrow.  And maybe the agony of the stretch of mind and heart are part of our becoming even more than we thought possible.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.  -Marcel Proust

I’ve always been a dreamer.  Night dreams, day dreams, free flowing dreams, self directed dreams – I love them all.  Even my nightmares have been dear to me. All of those entertaining, mystifying, illuminating, amusing and puzzling visions have touched me.  Some have cracked me wide open, others have delighted me, a few have tormented me.  All have made me feel alive.

For many years I retreated a bit from my dreaming life, focusing more on the “real world” of work, family, and living well.  I did what I needed and wanted to do to take care of my self and my family and to live up to the expectations of my clan. (My logical mind works just as well as my dreaming one and it certainly gets more recognition for its achievements.)  Navigating our collective idea of what is real and therefore worthy of attention – consensus reality – shouldn’t be all that difficult if you get your head out of the clouds and pay attention, if you narrow your focus to what’s in front of you.

Eventually, though, the narrowing of my focus led me into a constricted box canyon.  My body was first to sound the alarm, the first to let me know that the way I was going wasn’t leading me to where I wanted to be.  Long sleepless nights and trips to the emergency room with my heart racing off the charts woke me up from the illusion I was living.  The truth for me is this: I can’t live without dreaming.  We can’t live well without dreaming. Daily life without dreaming diminishes us, separates us from a vast source of power and can lead us very far from where we want to be.

We are all doing the best we can to navigate the very challenging territory of consensus reality.  The only way for me to make my way in the real world is with my dreaming intact.  Because with my dreaming eyes I can see the bigger picture – the hawk view – as well as the next step in front of me.  My dreaming mind keeps my real world choices fed from a deep well of meaning.  My dreaming body knows its way to my truth, to my true north.  My dreaming self married to my grounded, mundane self gives me a much better sense of direction and capacity to face the obstacles along the way.

So I invite you to tilt your head a bit and shift you focus ever so slightly so that you, too, can see through the dull and deadening illusions of daily life. We are all so very much more than the job description, than the consensus reality based, limited sense of our selves.  We are all on heroic journeys of mythical proportions. We are all facing enormous challenges that demand our full capacity and super powers just to stay alive.  And it takes considerable dreaming and daring to make our way.