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About a year ago, I had a dream (yes, I channeled MLK for a moment) that I bought a guitar. The next day, I decided to go and check out 5th Century Music. The guys there are quite awesome by the way!! That day, I bought a simple acoustic guitar and signed up for guitar lessons as well. At that moment, I never knew I would soon develop one of the greatest love/hate relationships of my life, and with an inanimate object to boot. You see, this little piece of wood with some strings on it has managed to do something that nothing else in my life has been able to accomplish – it forced me to be with my feelings. As much as I loved the guitar, loved the lessons, loved singing and being oh so cool because I “played” now – I still fought actually doing it as much as I should have. The pattern I developed looked a bit like this: I would have a lesson with my fab instructor, love every minute of it, leave determine to do my homework, would get home distract myself by watching some Youtube videos, cleaning out the link trap in the dryer, etc, etc. As you might be able to deduce, this pattern did little to move me along in my efforts. I’ll save you some time and energy, unfortunately you cannot learn to play guitar by exclusively holding it and watching videos about it. To learn, I just actually had to practice consistently. Which led me to the realization of my biggest issue with it - oh so many times when I was alone and trying to practice I would avoid it like the plague. And why, you might ask? Because strumming those strings, feeling the music I was creating, made me feel what I’ve avoided for so long. It made me feel the things I wasn’t even aware of, the heartache, the hurt, the pain, the suffering. But there was one small issue, I wanted to play so very badly. Some very deep part of me that has been begging to come out, has been begging to be felt and expressed kept me pushing forward. So here I was in this standoff, night after night with this object that I couldn’t control, couldn’t manipulate, couldn’t force to do my bidding and it pissed me off to no end. All I could do was just sit there with it, while it mocked me and reminded me of all my failures as a person. My second beef with this poor, cute, little guitar is that unbeknownst to me, during some point in my life I had developed this perfectionism disease. It was buried so deeply into my heart and soul that I didn’t even recognize it until I sat down with this carrier of misery (ok, I’m exaggerating a bit). Every time I strummed the wrong string, hit the wrong fret, it was like the guitar was telling me what an utter screw up I was. I hadn’t realized until these moments that my entire life I thought that if I could do enough, was perfect enough – that I would be ok, that I would be loveable. I just had to be perfect and then I would be enough. Because, that’s what it boiled down to for me, I had this very deep belief that I was not “ok”. I wasn’t enough for someone to really accept me and love me for who I was. There was something inherently wrong with me, that once someone got close enough to me, they would see just how screwed up I was. My only worth was in providing value to my loved ones. So, I tried through my actions to garner love, to gain acceptance from outside of myself. Who knows, maybe on some level I knew that I could never be “perfect”, so this pattern kept me on this circle where I never had to face this coping mechanism I had developed. It allowed me to give my power away, to always look for that validation from outside of myself. Almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy – I’m not doing enough, I’m not enough – so that’s why no one gets me or loves me the way I want to be loved. That’s why “everyone” leaves me, not because of their own issues, but because I’m just jacked up. I think the reason I didn’t notice the perfectionism bone for quite some time is because I had two categories of things in my life. Category #1) School and work – Even though I busted my butt to put myself through school and to do well at work, on some level excelling in those areas was a bit inherent for me. Category #2) Hobbies - Typically, if I wasn’t immediately good at something, I would just quit before I even started. Somehow, I had bought into this huge lie that people are just good at things right off the bat. I tried to mirror my strengths in all areas of my life and when I didn’t live up to my ginormous expectations, I would quit. And here we go, it worked perfectly to my advantage, it would just provide me further confirmation that I wasn’t “normal” or “ok” like everyone else was, because I had failed. But alas, I was able to dig deep and realize (with the help of my awesome instructor), God did give me my stubbornness for a reason!!!!! And, this time I decided to use my stubbornness for good! I vowed that I was gonna push forward and keep trying, no matter how much it triggered the crap out of me. So, here I am, a little over a year later, getting ready to do open mic night soon. And I’ll share with you a little secret – I am terrified. I’m terrified I’ll suck, that I’ll completely blow it, that I’ll have tomatoes thrown at me, that people will heckle me, or perhaps worse, be completely indifferent to me. Can you tell I’m really good at catastrophizing things? 😊 But good news, my bestie and I figured out that tomatoes are too expensive for people to throw at me. And also, so what if I suck or people laugh at me or ignore me, I’m not gonna die or implode (I hope, I’ll confirm this later for you). So kids, what’s the moral of the story? I guess, sometimes in life, you just gotta do it, do the thing that scares you the most. Allow yourself to feel the emotions you're most terrified of (if even just for a moment), have the conversation that needs to be had, start the hobby you’ve been putting off, write that book, take dance lessons, tell that certain someone how you feel, do the thing that calls to your heart and soul – I’m not a doctor, but I'm almost certain you’ll survive it. This life is short, and it’s meant to be enjoyed, even in spite of yourself.

I went to my neighborhood’s park the other day and laid on the field as I often do. There was a father and son on the field practicing lacrosse. I was immediately triggered by the father’s relentless “help” he was providing to his son. In every word, every facial expression, every movement, it seemed to me, he was telling his son how displeased he was by his performance. This reminded me so much of my own childhood and subsequent relationships, where I was told over and over that nothing I did was right. In fact, this reminded me so much of my past, that I almost had to leave because I didn’t want to hear it. However, something told me to stay. I sat there and just tried to be present with my feelings. I sat there with my discomfort and the feelings this encounter brought up; feelings of not being good enough, not doing anything right. I wanted to scream at the father – “You jackass!!!!! He’s doing the best he can.” Then I realized. So was the dad. Here was this father, on a Saturday night helping his son (I’m assuming with some lacrosse moves the son was finding difficult). Instead of focusing on the “negative”, I suddenly saw the positive. He had made room in his life for some one-on-one time with his son to help him with his challenges. It really made me think, if we can choose to see the love in situations, how much it changes our perspective. It also acted to bring to my awareness, that so much of my current negative self-talk was carried over from my past. Things I didn’t do to someone else’s standards. Things that I was insecure about; not being coordinated, being clumsy, making mistakes. I used to think I was inept in almost every way. Listening to my dad’s constant criticism fostered this belief. The funny thing is that my largest issue with most activities (and life in general) was my anxiety. So, no matter how much my dad tried to help me, his way of helping just inhibited me even more. I couldn’t be present with myself long enough to focus on anything and his attention just brought me more angst. However, I had never really viewed it from his point of view before this moment on the lacrosse field. What if my dad was doing those things because he wanted me to be the best I could be? What if he was doing them because he loved me? What if he did them because he didn’t want me to make the same mistakes he had? For those of you reading this saying, “Oh, that’s horse shit – what your dad did was emotional abuse.” And guess what? You may be right. But the truth is, there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it at this point. And, I’m not my dad and I wasn’t in his shoes, so I have no idea why he did the things he did. But I do know one thing, negative self-talk had been holding me back from so many things. And at this point in my life, I do have control over it. I have control over the thoughts I think. I have control over the way I treat myself now. If I continue to think that my dad did and said those things because he was an evil person, is that doing anything positive for me? The resounding answer is no. So, what if I tried to find compassion and understanding for my dad? What if I flipped the script and decided to look at those things as love? Perhaps, even though my dad was struggling with his own anxiety and fear, he still took the time to care enough to try to help me in the only way he knew. You see, none of us are doing things to hurt each other. We are all just doing the best we can, with the skills that were passed along to us. Albeit some shitty skills, but sometimes you gotta work with what you have until you learn something better. That’s what this journey is all about. Doing the best with what you have at the moment, until the time comes that you learn a healthier way of doing things. When we become aware of our habits, then we can take little steps to change them. Our biggest challenge is that in our society of instant gratification, we give up on anything before we can see the results. We all get so bogged down by thinking that little things aren’t going to make a difference, but that’s exactly how we change isn’t it?! We take these little baby steps every day until we reach our goals. What if I made a conscious effort to just love myself and to guide my thoughts in a more positive direction? So, I’m also gonna challenge you to look for love in your life. Pick one small thing you’d like to work on in your life and focus on that for the next 30 days. It can be something that at first glance, you consider insignificant: being nicer to yourself, not drinking as much coffee, smiling (genuinely) at that person who really rubs you the wrong way, making your bed, (committing and actually doing 😊) 10 minutes of mediation or yoga, or reading a few pages of a self-help book every night. Whatever it is, pick something and do it consistently, what’s the worst thing that could happen? I know one thing for sure - If you don’t start, you’ll never finish.

I’ve always been sort of a walking lie detector. I never knew how I knew the things I knew, I just knew them somewhere in my gut. However, this gift did not always serve me well in the first part of my life. During that stage, I just couldn’t stand it when someone lied to me or if people were being fake. It’s like it was some personal affront to me. And when people close to me did it, it hurt so deeply I just couldn’t fathom it. It irritated every fiber of my being and I felt like it was my personal responsibility to get the truth from them. (You can see how this might create some issues.) Until I learned I was an empath, I had no idea why things like this bothered me to my core. Like why, if someone I care about was in emotion pain, I would bend over backwards trying to make things right for them because it pained me to see them suffering. Which can really come in handy for someone else to be around me if I choose to take on their shit for them. As usual, I really excelled at this in the romantic arena. You see, on top of being an empath, I also learned the good ole fashioned boundaries of a co-dependent. For those of you who don’t know what that looks like – I was an amoeba, or in layman’s terms, I had zero boundaries. I honestly didn’t know where that person’s shit ended and mine began. It was like a f**king free for all, and I was the WINNER!!!!!!! Yes!!! Come one, come all!! Please bring me your dysfunction, I’ll fix it!!! What I’ve learned the second half of my life, is that most people lie without even knowing they do it, because on a very deep level they are also lying to themselves. Lying to themselves about who they are, what their motives are, what they want, how they feel. In a romantic relationship, when your energy is so intertwined with another’s, this was almost unbearable for me to endure. As the resident fixer, I felt the need to rectify the situation and bring world order. One really awesome tool that my amazing counselor recommended for me was the Codependent No More app by Melody Beattie. She also has a book by the same name that I read a minute ago, but I really enjoyed the daily messages the app had. Through learning about co-dependency and how it relates to our sense of security in our second or Sacral chakra, I’ve become aware of these patterns. Recognizing that when our second chakra is out of balance it can create feelings of insecurity, jealousy and fear in relationships. It has really helped me along the way to discern what is mine and what isn’t, so it can be lovingly returned to the other person to deal with. In the past, I often mistook my unhealthy boundaries as being loving and caring, which I am extremely so to those I love. Again, not a bad thing until it gets out of hand. Because then, guess what happens??? Good ole resentment comes walking through the door. Resentment in a situation is your inner guidance system telling you that something is off and out of balance. But instead of heeding my inner guidance system, and either setting boundaries or leaving the situation, I would get angry at the other person expecting them to change and start being normal. My plans always seem so good in my head, if everyone would just get the memo and follow along. In society, somewhere along the way, we have forgotten that resentment and anger are really a gift to us, they are an inner warning that something is not right. But for us women especially, we are taught that it’s not lady like to be angry or upset. So instead, we get in this super unhealthy cycle of feeling angry, doing the bitch mode, feeling bad about it, becoming the doormat again and then repeating the cycle when we start to hear the warning bells again. When we start to love ourselves enough to set healthy boundaries, we begin to say no to things that don’t serve our highest good. In the beginning, this may seem unloving and we will probably get push back from some people. Spoiler alert – these are the people who are getting the most out of our crummy boundaries. At some point, these healthy boundaries just become part of the new us. And honestly, it’s so ironic - the thing that we fear would push people away, is what actually allows them to come closer. When we are balanced and healthy in the second chakra and with our boundaries, we start to love and respect ourselves more, which allows us to respect and love others more. We learn to love ourselves exactly where we are, exactly as we are, which naturally flows to our loved ones allowing us to be in balance.

My heart has been leading me to talk about forgiveness for quite some time. But I think if I would have done it before, I would have missed this important tidbit I learned just last week. Even after we have forgiven someone when we continue to say, “that person cheated on me” or we say, “that person left me” we are not letting that person off the hook. Although those may both be accurate descriptions of what happened, we need to get to a place of peace about the situation. As long as we hold onto that feeling of resentment in our hearts, we are blocking love from coming in. And I’m not just talking about romantic love. According to a Course in Miracles, and my own personal beliefs as well – the only real thing that exists is love. Everything else is just an illusion of this 3d world we live in. But don’t get me wrong – even if it’s part of the illusion we’ve created, it’s still a mother to do. I literally spent two years forgiving a particular person. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to or didn’t try with all my might but that is how deep my suffering was. You see, the people we need to forgive the most, the ones that will benefit us the most – are the ones who stabbed our hearts with the deepest knife. They are the ones who left us feeling like we might never recover from the heartache. So, I would say the first step is just realizing that you need to forgive that person. And if you’re thinking right now, “screw you Robin, it’s not gonna happen.” Then I will let you know that you will endure a lifetime of suffering. We are all irrevocably connected. So although you may not realize it, there is some thread of forgiveness that has to happen to yourself as well. As long as you have anger in your heart towards that person, you will never be truly free. The Course in Miracles (pg 13) says, “You who want peace can find it only by complete forgiveness.” However, you can always know that this acceptance of the situation and your need to forgive doesn’t negate the fact that you most likely have unprocessed feelings that need to be felt and released. So go ahead, cry, scream, sob – get that shit out. Then begin down the road to forgiveness. Since it took me a while to work through this, I tried many various methods to peel back the layers. I’ve listed some of my tools below: 1) Radical Forgiveness - One of my dear friends, who was a life coach helped me to do the initial processing via a Radical Forgiveness sheet. You can find them online at https://www.radicalforgiveness.com/ Radical forgiveness helps you to really see the situation in a more objective manner. This is also where you really start to see that withholding forgiveness from someone else is actually withholding forgiveness from yourself. You see, we can only extend to others what we hold inside of ourselves. We begin to see that forgiveness requires that we let ourselves off the hook as well. 2) Journaling – Getting things out of my head is also a big processing technique for me. It’s almost like it stops the flow of pain and thoughts that I can get trapped in and really allows me to process the situation from a more objective place. In this particular situation when I felt bombarded by the thoughts and feelings on a continual basis, journaling really allowed me to get some of it out of me in a healthy manner. 3) Walk and talk or walk therapy – two friends of mine have helped me to find the power of walking and talking about things. I’m not sure why it works, but it totally does. You can do this with a friend or even out loud by yourself. Yes, I talk out loud to myself a lot. You might be asking yourself at this point , “do I care if people see me and think I’ve lost it?” – no I do not. 4) Say it like you mean it - A friend of mine suggest that every time this person came up that I should pray for them. I also read along the way that I should say out loud that I forgive this person. Then I would immediately follow it with forgiveness to myself. I would kind of combine the prayer and the forgiveness and pray that God help me to forgive this person and myself. When I started doing this, the thing that really fucking amazed me is how often we have these hurtful thoughts. Now, this isn’t to say that I was wishing harm to this person. But I did learn that any time we have thoughts that aren’t from a place of compassionate love, we are also filtering those feelings through our own body first. Since we are all connected, this unresolved relationship causes many ripples in the universal consciousness. No wonder as a society we are sad, upset and anxious most of the time. 5) The Book of Forgiving exercise - my counselor told me about a book that I didn’t read but she gave me an exercise from it. The abridged version of the exercise is 1) Tell my story – when was the last time I felt that way? Tell my story to at least one other person. Again, the power of talking about our feelings is pretty profound here. 2) Name your pain – Put a title or description to the pain you felt from the situation. 3) Forgiveness – Accept that we all have the capacity to hurt others and have done so at many times, even if unwittingly. I love this quote by Maya Angelou that embodies that truth, “I am human, there is nothing human that’s alien to me.” 4) Renew or release – You get to decide: Do I extend forgiveness to this person or do I renew the ties that bind. 6) The Power of Your Subconscious Mind – In his book, Joseph Murphy provides a simple but effective exercise. Find yourself in a quiet, safe location and simply offer a mental and spiritual release to the person in question. You then wish love, peace and joy to that person. 7) Creative activities – Drawing, painting, doodling, singing, playing my guitar; anything that got me out of my head a bit really helped. Although, I will warn you that if you’re anything like me music heals by bringing all the shit up, so be prepared. 8) Various exercises and meditations online – As much as technology can annoy the shit out of me sometimes, it does come in handy quite a bit for finding helpful tools we can use to heal ourselves. Just search for “forgiveness”, you’ll be pretty amazed at the variety of stuff that comes up. I’d like to tell you it’s a quick fix, but I’ve never been a bullshiter before, I’m not gonna start now. But if you think about it, it’s really quite amazing that we’ll spend years of wasted time being upset with someone but the thought of actually releasing and forgiving that person for a hot minute seems so daunting. At times, it can be a slow arduous process that takes a lot of compassion, faith and help from the Big Guy. But it is so worth it. I was actually quite amazed with a revelation I had as some point along this forgiving journey – there was truly nothing to forgive. Some of you may want to punch me in the face at this statement, but we all act in accordance with the divine plan which is laid out for us. We act out the parts we were meant to – triggering the wounds that need to be healed in the other. We also begin to really know and feel that everyone is doing the best they can with the information they have at the time. The compassion and love we begin to feel towards others provides a means to extend that same compassion and love towards ourselves.

I had a conversation with my best friend Mary recently regarding her status of being awake. She said, “I just want to be awakened already”. Ha! Wise sage I am at this point, I was able to pass along a message I heard many times during the beginning of my journey, in essence – she is awake, the rest is relative. Meaning, that being awake or aware is the beginning of the journey, and our journey is our entire life. But I could totally commiserate with her, because at one point, I really, honestly thought with all of my heart that I would come to be healed and “perfect”. Yes, I know, I’m cute. Being awakened simply means that we start to become aware of our deep-seated patterns, beliefs and habits. This awareness is what actually provides us the ability to change and adapt into a healthier mode of being. Unhealthy patterns have been programmed into our subconscious minds from a very young age and been reinforced through repetition. If we could all be blatantly honest with ourselves, we know exactly what these patterns are. However, the avoidance of pain keeps us from ever truly addressing and moving on from these wounds. The Universe works in a sort of mirroring effect and gives us externally that which is a vibrational match to our internal standing. This means our external circumstances will constantly provide opportunities for our healing. So, for example if my deep seeded belief is that I am unlovable, and everyone leaves me, I will subconsciously attract men (people) who reflect this belief. Until I heal this part of my shadow side or subconscious, I will unwittingly find myself chasing after men who want nothing to do with me. And yes, I speak from personal experience. I wasn’t forced to address these habits until I was brought to my knees by such pain that I literally thought I wouldn’t survive it. Pain that forced me to look at myself, to really see myself and the part I played in these tragedies. And to be quite honest, I didn’t like what I saw many times. I will warn you, that looking at yourself is not for the faint of heart. And as if this isn’t hard enough, after we become aware, we also become accountable. Accountability means I acknowledge and accept the fact that I also played a part in my own pain, we can no longer push blame solely onto another party. We must then make changes in our lives if we want to move forward. In my case, if I had valued and loved myself in the past, these situations wouldn’t have even been allowed to enter my awareness. Grasping for a status or progress on our spiritual journey is also something that happens in the “real world”. Our ego desires for us to be somewhere, at some point we have deemed okay along this path. It’s our ego’s way of keeping us from being the present moment. To be in the present moment, we see ourselves exactly as we are, and love and accept ourselves anyway. We acknowledge the need and desire for change without crucifying ourselves. We give ourselves space to transition to a new way of being. And let me warn you – it is process. This shit goes down in layers, so it also comes up in layers. I can’t tell you how many times I thought I was over something to only be re-triggered over and over again. This has really been a time in my life where my stubbornness comes in handy. My desire to be free of the suffering I was enduring, kept me pushing forward towards complete forgiveness and compassion. Being in the present moment is the only thing which actually provides us with true freedom. When we are in the present moment, we are not harping on the past or hoping for the future – we just ARE. Accepting and loving ourselves as we are in this moment, perfectly imperfect.

As human beings, we spend most of our lives looking at people, places, and things through our own lenses of perception or understanding. We see everything through this lens and then we deem it to be right or wrong. For the first part of my life, I did not see or recognize this. For the first 36 years, I lived from the perception that things are always black and white, right or wrong. And for the most part, I liked to find myself on the “right” side of the issue. Then I realized that everyone lives in this manner. We all see things based on the perception that we are right, our story is right, our perception is the only one to be seen as valid. Which might be fine if we lived in a bubble- but enter the relationship. And we all know from experience, this is where the shit hits the fan. For example, let’s take a situation with someone where I have deemed that person to be the bad guy, and I am the good guy……. most likely, they see it in exactly the opposite manner. To them – I am the bad guy and they are the good and just parties. And guess what??? We may both be correct in some manner. There are probably aspects of both of our stances which are right or ok. The issue in human relationships is created when we only see our point of view to the complete denial or rejection of the other. In a situation where I have been deeply hurt this can be a ridiculous pill to swallow. You know the kind- like one of those honking horse pills. When we find ourselves in stressful or painful situations, we resort back to basic survival instincts and act out in one of four manners: fight, flight, freeze or fix. Since we no longer have woolly mammoths chasing us, one such painful situation in this day and age many of us find ourselves in is heartbreak. In my life it should have come as no surprise, that overachiever that I am – I was a fixer. I thought if I just fixed everything, sacrificed my own feelings and wants, that everything would be perfect. There is one ginormous flaw with this rationale, who’s standard will I “fix” something to? Maybe the other party doesn’t want the same thing I do, maybe (and this one was really hard for me to get) it’s just not meant to be. This mode of thinking and living got me into a hot mess of my life. I had all these warning signs that I just chose to ignore time and time again. Warning signs that I was not happy with my current state of affairs, warnings that I was being treated in a manner that I didn’t like. But because I loved these people, and I thought I knew what was best, I chose to push on anyway. On some level, I really felt like things would be “fixed” and everything would be hunky dory. Since I am super stubborn 😊 this lesson took me quite a while to sink in. Dare I say, this may be one of my life-long lessons. Learning to trust that God or the Universe is in control has been a difficult but utterly fulfilling lesson for me. If I stop struggling against my life and the situations that are presented to me (ultimately for my highest good), I begin to find the joy and happiness in every moment. I get to embrace and know the life of acceptance. Acceptance is the antitheses of the 4 f’s mentioned above and the method we are all meant to live in. So maybe even just once a day, start by thanking that difficult person or situation. Start by remembering that ALL things are brought into your life for you. If this sounds especially difficult for you, you don't even have to really like it or feel it in the beginning, just fake it til you make it. I promise - it really does work wonders!