Category Archives: Authenticity

Full Buck Moon Dreamboard


There’s been a great time of shifting just this side of the Full Buck Moon, as evidenced by my last post.. which launched a thousand remedies and inspired new satisfactions. No, I haven’t “figured it all out yet.” If I had, I’d retire from the world as we know it.

But I will say this: my commitment to my Year of Self-Love has been renewed, with new revelations.

First off, theĀ Year of Self-Love sounds pretty self-sufficient, doesn’t it? It doesn’t imply that it involves anyone else. I fell for that delusion myself, until it dawned on me, that my greatest acts of Self-Love this year have involved asking others for help. My greatest delusion in self-sufficiency was that I didn’t recognize, independent though I might be, that it is okay to need assistance, okay to need people. I do need people!

I’ve hired new doctors, a naturopath and a therapist all in the past year, and I’ve gotten better at asking others for assistance. It still takes a bit of swallowing my pride in some instances, and in others, it takes realizing the other person is probably NOT going to be horrified by my request, and that, if they are, they can say no. I’m learning we need not feel guilty for the martyrdom of another — that’s on their heads. Can you tell my mother was Catholic?

And I renewed my commitment to The Joy Diet. I didn’t in fact do fifteen minutes of nothing every day, so much as I did it when it occurred to me. And it made an astonishing difference. I went from someone who seethed and filled my cynical bank account with all the unexpressed reasons the world was out to get me, to someone who recognized a moment of trespass when it occurred and took steps to set it aright, ASAP. No seething. No stories of how this indicates, on every level, that I am meant to be in total misery. Just a step back and then a gentle inquiry as to how something upsetting can be resolved. And it was, and that was it. Cowabunga.

As I continue The Joy Diet, and Rock Star Intuition with Fabeku and Bridget, I look towards more connection with nature this month, especially as I embark on the journey of becoming vegan in August. Hence there’s a lot of the word “organic” on my Dream Board, but it’s not just organic in the food sense.. one of the definitions of organic is: developing in a manner analogous to the natural growth and evolution characteristic of living organisms; arising as a natural outgrowth. This smacks somehow of authenticity, to me. So I go on with my Year of Self-Love, curious as to what the next stage in my own natural growth and evolution will bring.

Committed


Dream a little dream of me
Originally uploaded by Honey Pie!.

I dreamt last night that my apartment had new doors in all sorts of strange places, and yet none of them held, none of them had proper locks, few even had working hinges! I felt very betrayed, it was a very frightening dream. And it’s a variation of a recurring dream for me. In it, one or two very painful things often happen: one is that sometimes in the dream, my space is violated by a person with ill intent. The second, somehow more heartwrenching, is that my cats escape and do not return of their own volition. (Odd side note: I also often wind up with strange cats in theĀ house… cats I did not let in on purpose. I’m sure this is a vital point, as well..)

To me, this is all about boundaries, not properly protecting them through avoidance and neglect. My cats are clearly the love I am afraid to lose, or that I am afraid isn’t really mine to begin with. Depite knowing the meaning, I am not terribly sure of the message. I may need to ask myself tough questions. About nurturing the love of self to a point where I do not fear it does not belong to me or that I do not deserve it. About where in my life, right now, am I avoiding setting proper boundaries*? What things am I faced with daily that leave me feeling disempowered, often without my being fully consciously aware of it? How can I turn it around? As for the cats that don’t belong in my home yet get through the door, am I letting fears/worries and/or people into my life that simply have no business being there? Am I allowing people other than myself to internally dictate what I say or do on a daily basis? Am I allowing myself to be too vulnerable in inappropriate situations? A lot of good questions my dreams ask me, when I’m willing to listen. I am committing here to listening more consciously and heeding the messages that arise.

*two answers drift up, one in my finances, and one in my health care as I suffer ill effects from a med my naturopath placed me on — gratefully, we’ve discussed this today and I’m to go off the med for a week as a test and go from there.

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There is a wonderful post on Crazy Sexy Life about dream interpretation with Judith Orloff, MD.

A Good Messiah Turns You Toward Yourself

As I begin working with my Word of the Year, Self-Love, I find my vocabulary expanding. If you read my declaration post, you’ll know that authenticity was a fierce and courting runner up to my chosen word, and I felt quite certain that it was an element that I’d be working with, encompassed under the umbrella of Self-Love. Turns out I was right, authenticity isn’t going away. So today I begin a series of posts on authenticity as I explore steering my life with the compass of Self-Love.

This particular post comes from a former blog, and was written on August 13, 2006.
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When I was 17, I was “saved” in a near-religious sense by a cassette tape with a redhead in a box with tiny piano on the cover. It could not have come at a more important time in my life. Tori’s Little Earthquakes was a shout-out to authenticity and to staying true to who you are. Who needs that more than a seventeen year old girl, on the verge of selling out and selling herself short in all sorts of different ways?

Over the years I collected friends who felt the same as I did about Tori, hanging on every word she said. Then my friends began to leave their jobs, sell their cars, ditch their families for the opportunity to follow Tori on a tour, for the opportunity for a Tori hug in this city or that city at one of her famously generous meet-and-greets. Well.. I was jealous. I did not have the resources or even the guts. And another part of me said: “Sara… Tori is not telling you to give up your life for her. She is telling you to take your life in your own hands and live it.” I looked around me and saw all these people who had twisted Tori’s message and made her messiah, a reluctant red-headed spitfire messiah.

I began having a hard time keeping up with her B-side releases, bootlegs and television appearances. The worshipers were so far ahead, and here I was struggling to keep up. And it felt bad. So I stopped trying. I still loved Tori as much as they did, I just found that parting with my hard earned cash and spending all my time scouring for this video tape and this title and pouring over Goldmines well, difficult and not in the least bit rewarding. The fun had gone out of it.

I still arrived at the record stores on the first day of any Tori Amos release. They began to be slightly less relevant to me personally with each passing record, but I still loved her music and I still loved her. Now I can say I am behind: I don’t own every Tori record and I have two dvds on my list of hers still to obtain. I will, eventually. Because I still love her. I read her bio, Piece by Piece, early this year. I sought out clips of her on YouTube and her fiery red hair set my heart aflutter, again. She is as real as it gets to me. I know not everyone feels the same way, but even if you don’t, surely there is something or someone in your life that made you feel that way, that made every difficult or painful time in your life somehow worthwhile, every emotion validated and understood. By someone you never even met or hugged at a meet-and-greet in a parking lot in Detroit or Tucson.

Some may say I’m not a true fan of Tori since I don’t keep up like everyone else seems to. I’d disagree and say I got Tori’s message early on:

She crawls
Clutching her faded photograph
My image under her thumb
Yes, with a message for my heart
Yes, with a message for my heart
She’s been everybody else’s girl
Maybe one day she’ll be her own

I’m still working on it, Tori, but I’m pretty sure I’m on my way.