Three Understandings for Navigating Self-Doubt

Self-doubt is essential to any creative process. Every accomplished artist experiences it, as does anyone who dares to chart a new course in their life, in any form. It takes courage, because when you create art, or create realities, you enter the unknown. If the process of creation were seven steps, self-doubt would be number four, the most determined. If you cannot move through self-doubt, you won’t be able to proceed to the last three steps, and you’ll likely start over again and again, or just give up. Conversely, if you try to skip over that step, you will be hard-pressed to reach the goal line without massive struggle, or find fulfillment even if you do manage to get there.

Humorous but revelatory look at the creative process

Here are three understandings to help you navigate your self-doubt:

1st understanding: Self-doubt is not self-punishment or self-flagellation (humorous diagram aside). This is an important distinction. If you’re beating yourself up and calling it self-doubt, know that this is self-destructive behavior, and at best, fake humility. Pride and humility need to be in balance. Always move toward being your own best friend. Engage in the practice of loving self, which includes forgiving yourself when you screw up. Without self-forgiveness, you’ll repeat your mistakes and won’t change.

2nd understanding: There are layers to responsibility in the creation of anything new in your life. The “rah-rah—it’s all good” or “it’s all shit” mantras will disconnect you from your soul and spirit. Don’t let the light blind you to the presence of self-doubt, or the dark keep you mired in it. Always seek to balance between the light (spirit) and the substance (soul).

3rd understanding: Creativity waxes and wanes, and sometimes it can get lost, which can trigger heavy doses of self-doubt. When this happens, you need to push in the clutch and change it up. Pause is essential to retrieve lost creativity. If you’re too busy to pause, that’s when you need it the most. Time is an illusion. It does not have to be your slave master. Use meditation to step out of space-time. Take your self-doubt into your meditation, ask for help in lifting it. Controlling it doesn’t work. Trying to be perfect absolutely doesn’t work. Perfection is brittle and static, and leaves no room for creativity.

A final caveat—your negative ego:

Your negative ego can have a field day with your self-doubt. One thing you can count on: it always lies. So, don’t give it to your ego. Whether you acknowledge your self-doubt, or ignore it, one of the most destructive games your negative ego will play is delusions of grandeur, and delusions of insignificance. Both are a lie, and both will take you down. Your positive ego is supposed to just deliver information from your physical reality. But we, somewhere in our growing up years, shamed it into taking over interpretation of our reality. Make sure you are the one in charge. Harness your negative ego and give it a back seat.

p.s. Do you think I had any self-doubt in the writing of this post? You bet!

Shitstorm

Day 78. Throughout this pandemic—adding to it our current crisis, the murder of a black man by a smug-faced white policeman, followed by riots and curfews that suppress peaceful protests (which is the right of every American citizen), disrupted by opportunistic thugs—and a president who has provoked violence and hatred, who doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself, I’ve been doing what I can on a personal level to heal, to work magic with crystals, to pray and meditate, help my clients navigate their pain, owning my own crap—my rage, my entitlement–accepting and forgiving.

And every day, during this whole shitstorm—me not sleeping, too much histamine in my system, breakouts of eczema, 100,00+ people dying, my cat in a health crisis, waking up at noon, up all night, house clothes worn out, an album release on hold because it just costs too much, helicopters overhead, sirens passing by—every day…  Every day I ask myself the same question: “What can I do?” And the voices of my soul and higher self always reply with the same answer: “Work on your novel.”

Today, with the curfew now set at 5pm in Los Angeles, I stayed home and completed Chapter Twenty-Eight. The boys from Vietnam made me cry—it’s a pivotal moment in my novel, which is a healing journey through the crosswinds of space-time, and a story I can’t get enough of. I love my characters. They are real. And they love me back by revealing who they are. If I’m strong enough to listen, to get out of the way, they tell me how to mine their story. Despite the unending research required to write a character that is not only a Vietnam vet, but also half Ojibwe Indian, during a time (1978) when Americans had pretty much discarded the horrors of that war and moved on to other things, I feel up to the task. The piecing together of the last part of the novel during this pandemic is what I do to help, a way I can love my country.

Interestingly enough, much of the story takes place in southern Minnesota, including references to the VA Hospital in Minneapolis. The photo I’m posting is where an important scene takes place in Chapter Twenty-Eight, near Cannon Falls, MN. To find out a little more about my novel, you can visit wildcoyotes.com/Totality.html

Grasshopper Medicine for Magicians

All week I’ve been working to accept seven truths (responsibilities) as part of a seven-day process (taken from the Lazaris Material). Each day I accept and then receive one of the seven responsibilities of being a Magician. Each day I take one truth and make it mine. But Day 6 kicked my ass, and sent me headlong into a wall of resistance. And it was a little grasshopper that helped me jump over the wall.

Day 1’s responsibility was to accept that I am powerful and strong enough to be gentle and vulnerable. In many ways I’ve been living that truth, especially in my work as an intuitive counselor and medium.(www.empathicmedium.com). So, not a lot of resistance, just letting it sink deeper.

The second responsibility (Day 2) has to do with passion and compassion, and being empathic without being swallowed up in pity or sympathy. That truth was also an easier one to accept. I have come to understand that pity and sympathy have a very short shelf life before they can turn into feelings of “better than.” (“I feel so sorry for them, look at that reality they created.”) Yes, but their pain is in your reality, too. You are witness. How present with their pain do you want to be? What energy do you want to contribute?

Day 3 was a little more challenging. The responsibility to accept was: that I am flexible and fluid enough to transmute and transform anything I want, whether changing a reality I have already created into a more positive one, or changing a reality that has not yet been born into something I want. As I typed these words I felt some resistance, triggered by the cogent messages in childhood around suffering and self sacrifice as a mark of love. If you do things for yourself, you are being selfish, and not a true servant of God.

That’s a whole other subject that I will simply condense into a one sentence response, because the resistance to this truth has permeated my spiritual growth. The measure of our self love is the measure of how much love we are able to give, and in turn, receive.

Day 4 responsibility was an easier challenge to accept, perhaps because the desire of it has been a theme in my life: I accept that it is important to always seek freedom and self determination. It’s about reaching for your human dignity, your character, vision and vitality, because that’s where you’ll find that freedom and self determination, that self reliance. I love this truth.

Day 5 responsibility: To accept that I am humble enough to transcend anything I want. It’s based on the humility that just because something has been, does not mean it will be again. It can always change, whether it has been consisitently good, or not good. With humility you approach each situation with an openness and responsibility.

Which brings me to Day 6, and the little grasshopper that waited for me on my recently purchased Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen dieselgate car. I was in a hurry, heading back to the bookstore where I give readings part-time. I had signed out early and come home after a very frustrating day, knowing I needed to process some not-so nicety-nice feelings, to relieve the pressure of my outrage around some issues at the store.

You might assume that Day 6’s acceptance would be one of grave responsibility, but it’s the brightest truth of the seven, and probably the reason why it gave me the most resistance. I needed to accept that I can create light, hope, dreams, visions, and the opportunity and means to allow them to be, that I do already love enough to dream, and that I’ve got enough courage to let those dreams come true. I can inspire and uplift, and create the means to allow that light, hope, dreams and vision to manifest. “There is never a darkness that doesn’t also have light, for it is light that defines the boundary of darkness.” —Lazaris

I really need to let it in that I never dream a dream without also creating the opportunity and means to allow that dream to come true. This is how the grasshopper helped me.

Grasshopper medicine is about aspiration, and taking a leap of faith. Aspiration is part of spirit, which is filled with the breath of life, and with the inspiration (and aspiration) to live that life elegantly and gloriously. In other words, to live that life in alignment with your Higher Self and Soul. Within spirit is also a dynamic aliveness and compassion that can work miracles, and a vibrancy and vitality that can awaken destiny. And there is a responsibility that can generate breath-catching change.

According to trustedpsychicmediums.com “the grasshopper spirit animal chooses those who want to move ahead in life with their innovative thinking and progressive approach. When you are inspired by the grasshopper totem, jump forward and get past whatever is trying to keep you or hold you back.”

In the grasshopper symbolism there is an ongoing dance of balance between having your feet on the ground and having your thoughts in flights of dreams, your head in the clouds. Grasshopper encourages you to dream and to put your dreams into action.

Words connected to grasshopper medicine: Dream World, Creative Manifestation, Balance, Freedom, Song, Sun, Wind, Earth, Discipline.

I need to be more courageous, and take that leap of faith, knowing I can create that light, hope, dream and vision. And to realize I can create the means to allow those dreams and visions to manifest. I will work on my limited beliefs around it, ask my subconscious to help me reprogram where, out of an old sense of safety, I might’ve instructed it not to open that door. Because I want to aspire, and inspire more dreams—for me, for those I love, and for the world.

Day 7 responsibility to accept? Stay tuned.

References:
lazaris.com (Initiations of Magic)
trustedpsychicmediums.com (grasshopper spirit animal)
universeofsymbolism.com (grasshopper symbolism)

 

Path of Totality – my long-lost novel

Inside the umbrage of the August 21, 2017 solar eclipse, I would like to point out that America’s last great eclipse was thirty-eight years ago, its path crossing the Pacific Northwest on February 26, 1979. That event is the catalyst for an extraordinary and otherworldly reunion that occurs in my novel—under a Montana sky at the moment of totality. Thus why I titled the novel “Path of Totality.” Twenty-one chapters written, maybe fifteen to go. I think it might be time to work on it again, even though I’m about to take songs into the studio to make a singer-songwriter album. Everything seems to be happening at once.

As part of my celebration of this astronomical ecliptic event, I am including a short blurb about my novel and posting the first 3-1/2 pages to introduce my main character, and bring him back into the light.

Short synopsis: In 1978 a soul-wounded Vietnam Vet—who’s half Ojibwe Indian—is mysteriously reunited with a childhood friend, a Caucasian girl he’d known for eight days in the summer of 1962. Their reunion ignites an adventure through the crosswinds of space-time with the help of two unearthly women developing and teleporting photographs from the girl’s long lost camera.

PART I
The Boy in the Photograph

Chapter One

Sunday, August 13, 1978

*In preparation for publication, author removed content* – with a clarification to this old post: Boy, was I wrong with the 15 more chapters to go. Now, in April of 2022, I’m finishing chapter fifty-seven, with three chapters to go. Good thing I didn’t know then what I know now.

Why Did You Leave Me All Alone?

(From The Story Surrounding the Song series)

The song was written in 1980. I have rerecorded this demo of it in 2015:

Below is a partial chapter taken from my memoir about life on the road as a female rock keyboardist, singer, songwriter.

WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME ALL ALONE?
(chapter excerpt from “What A Fool Believes” – a rock-n-roll memoir)

August 1980

I sat at the kitchen table under the yellow wall phone, waiting for Sandy to answer. The overhead fluorescent light spilled colorless halos over the tile floor, flickering morse code warnings.

“Sandy?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m leaving him, packing everything and getting the hell out of here.”

“Okay,” she said. I could tell she was trying to sit up in bed. “Are you sure? It’s one o’clock in the morning.”

“I can’t stay here another minute. He’s not home yet, and I don’t have a clue as to when he’s gonna show up.”

I had been thinking about it all evening, sitting there, taking bites from my macaroni and cheese dinner, being taunted by a mouse who peered at me from under the stove. As if I should get up and do something about it. I was fighting myself, turning it over and over in my head what had happened last weekend, when he left me waiting all night, waiting for him to come home from his gig.

It had been one of the cooler nights last week, providing relief against the daytime summer broil, which stubbornly refused to exit the wood-frame house we just moved into. I sat out on the front porch, with a view of the soap factory across the street. I smoked cigarettes to alleviate the scent of perfumey soap scum, which permeated my “off the road” existence.

The old Blue Max band was gone. Him and me were all that was left. He just started doing a single act because our duo tour had fried itself to a crisp. The last gig we played, in Cleveland, was at the Harley Hotel. During those six weeks I managed to skim enough money off the overhead to abet my own escape, because even then I was having really bad feelings.

Last Friday night out on the porch, smelling soap, had been the crowning glory. I ended up writing a really great song. Maybe I could get a record deal. That very thought was how I had kept myself from going crazy, pouring all my insanity into music and lyrics.

It wasn’t until 5 A.M. that I finally heard the prattle of his Volkswagen fade into the misty silence before it zoomed around the corner. What kind of a fool does he take me for, telling me he got drunk and passed out in his car? Yeah, passed out with his pants down. I pictured the whole thing with a vividness, like thirty-five millimeters feeding through a film projector. And now, one week later, the images were stuck in my head as this night began rolling into the wee hours.

When I hung up the phone with Sandy, I moved like a ricocheting pinball through the house, pulling the rest of my clothes from drawers and the laundry baskets, gathering my music books and songwriting journals, kitchenware, anything I considered to be mine. My body electric fueled a roaring bonfire of fury. I couldn’t get my own song out of my head. It had become the culmination of two years on the road working with him. I should’ve never broken the cardinal rule of touring rock-n-roll bands, especially when I was the only female musician.

The song was my refuge, my way out. It was worthy of itself, because it told the truth. It was a hard-driving Abba-like rock-n-roll freight train of anger. There’s a line in it that basically summed up my weak existence: I didn’t have the nerve for losing you.

It flowed out in one of those endless streams of creativity, amidst a freak out, sitting on that rickety porch with my guitar, pumping out lyrics: I waited all night, burned the porch light, but you kept me in the dark. I had kept myself in the dark for too long. I needed to shine a light on the situation. My light. My song. My coping mechanism.

I threw my bulging suitcase into the trunk of my 1970 Plymouth Valiant. I squeezed as much of my equipment into the back seat as I could, but I had to leave my Rhodes piano and speakers behind. He would have to ship them to me. I wasn’t going to wait up for him one more night. I was out of here. And I wasn’t coming back. Not this time. Not like the other times.

I was high. Not on weed, just on adrenalin. I was being lifted out of hell. I scooted into the driver’s seat, took one last dreary look at the pale green porch, and slammed the passenger door. I was tightly wedged between the door handle and the mountainous stack of books and clothing on the front seat.

“Fuck you,” I railed out loud, flipping the bird to the house, then at the soap factory. I lit a cigarette and drove away, leaving Ohio for good.

Star Struck (a touring musician UFO story)

* Author removed story, reworking for publication

Did I Really Need This Much Adventure?

Its’ been so long since I’ve blogged that I’m not sure where to begin. So, I start by marking time:

Apr 26, 2011 – My ex-husband takes off for Mexico, while I begin the journey of building a new life. I wanted to be single… and so, there I was.

Three months later – I empty my savings account and hire movers. I drive myself and our two cats (of which I now have custody) in my VW Jetta, with crystals and other essentials for safe transport across the country to Cincinnati. I wasn’t making ends meet in California with two part-time music jobs.

Why Cincinnati? Because it was a place where I had lived briefly with my boyfriend in 1972 after I ran away from home. There was something I needed to retrieve of myself, a very wounded adolescent. I was going back to get her. After that, I had no idea where I was going.

Aug 29, 2011 – My first encounter with a departed spirit in French Park. She was a young slave girl who was murdered in those woods during the 1840s. French Park was my personal refuge from healing, and now I was being called to be the healer.

DAY 1 at the hidden bench, journal entry:
Wonder why this bench is here? It scared me at first, the remoteness of it, but I’m starting to settle into the energy. It’s possible that there may be a negative imprint here – seems like a lot of activity, nonetheless. We’re working together.

What?

In my last post, I recused myself from blog duty because I wasn’t in California anymore… and inside that shotgun-shell of a decree was a loaded statement.

I’m now busy writing about the past five months, about the move to Cincinnati, my soul retrieval work, reuniting with a younger me who had not been along for the ride in 39 years. So when that inner adolescent finally woke up after my constant urging, not only did she come back to life, she also told me she wanted to go home. How could I say no? It’s my home, too.

So back to California I/we drove, an elegant trip until the last day, when I entered California during some of the worst wind conditions to ever hit the desert. Suffice it to say, I made it in one piece despite my brake failure coming down the Mojave Freeway into Los Angeles.

I had to be towed in.

So… I’m writing the story for publication… and not as a big-ass blog post.

And… I’m not in Ohio anymore.

This was my Christmas gift, a hike in Topanga State Park:

Happy New Year… may it be enchanting.

A Writer Gone Missing

This time I have a good excuse for the extended eight-month sabbatical from blog duty. A lifetime has passed, and I’m not in California anymore.
(With me, change seems to happen fast… which will soon make my previous statement about not being in California untrue… to be updated…) 

Thanks to twitter I was able to at least tweet every now and then to keep my throngs of readers apprised of my so-declared writing life with its unforeseen curveballs that strike me out repeatedly despite my dreams to lob moon-like trajectories into left field. I illuminated flash-blurbs that told whole stories from Motel 6’s while driving across the country in the middle of a freak-out because I was responsible for the lives of my two cats during the August dead heat to destiny. Tweets like: Day 2 – Grants, NM; Day 3 – Amarillo, TX; Day 4 – about to leave for Tulsa, OK. Saw gun warehouse just off expressway yesterday. Only in TX.Having a gun ain’t gonna do me any good unless I decide to rob a bank. I was running out of money fast, because somewhere on that highway there was also a shiny new semi truck devouring dollars as it rolled oodles of my stuff—which included a 52-inch upright piano—on down the road. C-notes were being burned as fuel to haul my gypsy-ass caravan back to Ohio.

I could’ve stayed in California and continued working two music jobs that didn’t cover my expenses—and look for a third job to the tune of never getting a chance to write again—but instead I emptied my savings account (no turning back) and moved myself and new dreams to Cincinnati, a city that I had never lived in before, within a state that was, however, very familiar.

Since leaving the west coast on August 4^th, a rumbling question has taunted me with a certain regularity amid my daily enterprises. It became especially outspoken upon my arrival in Cincinnati to complete-and-utter unknown. WHAT WAS I THINKING? It isn’t logical. No way in hell is it logical. From heaven to the murky depths, I just listened to a few whispers and let the voice guide me twenty-two hundred miles east.

Now, after two months in Cincy, I’m starting to recognize and acknowledge just how courageous I am, especially in light of… well… Let’s just say I’m in the same situation as Kevin Costner in the movie Field of Dreams when Timothy Busfield admonishes him by saying, “It’s time to put away your little fantasies and come down to earth,” which led to an argument about whether the baseball men were real, and then another reality check for Costner’s character, who needed to sell his farm because he had no money, and a “stack of bills to choke a pig.” Well, that’s where I am right now. What am I going to do? Am I going to face facts and get real?… Or…

Am I going to keep building it? And who’s coming? Is it crazy of me to want to be invited out there beyond that field, so I’ll be able to write about it?

And whose pain am I healing?

Mine. It’s what I came here to do. There’s an adolescent girl inside me who has needed to come home for a long time. And I need her as much as she needs me. She’s the bridge between the eternal dreams of my youth, and the timeless dreams of my future. Somehow I know, though I don’t fully understand the mystery of it, these dreams restore each other, especially when I infuse a revitalized hope along their avenue of connection. I’ve figured out that this is a big key to living a passion-filled life.

A dream did come true for me since my arrival to the Queen City. In fact, it was a dream that I originally voiced in my online media resume at mediabistro.com. The questionnaire section asked to describe my dream assignment. This was my answer: Similar to Carrie Bradshaw’s view on the world from her New York apartment: writing about women and sex (including older and married women), and infusing my column with the mysterious, the metaphysical, and the serendipitous effects of New York.

Well, I’m not in New York yet, but I’m now writing a Sex and the City-type column for Ms. Cincinnati magazine, its premiere issue to be in the stands by end of November, just in time for the holiday season. I’m the magazine’s new Sex and Cincy columnist.

This idea of eternal dreams can be so inspiring, and empowering. Don’t we need that unbridled energy of our youth, without trying to go back and relive it? This is a paradox I will be exploring in my column in future issues, because it’s an important subject. Maturing women have the capacity to feel their passion more than ever. Wisdom and the rebirth of innocence give the sensuous life a dimension that as a younger woman I would’ve never imagined possible.

So, with that said, I am saving further discussion about this subject for my column. Cincinnati has been my womb of healing, and I am grateful to her for taking me in.

Moving Into Total Autonomy: Personal Belonging

I wrote the first ramblings of this post in the middle of the night, in the blank pages of a 2009 appointment calendar I retrieved from the trash can of a former employer. I couldn’t just let an unused spiral-bound go to waste, not when I could scribble my cindery words upon its clean pages, as I burned the midnight oil.

I’ve got to start exercising that muscle again: forced wake-ups from somnambulistic states. So I can write stuff down when words momentarily waft through my brain—those incoherent thoughts I would rather dismiss than disturb my sleep over, thoughts that tempt me to rationalize as unintelligible, as if I were still smoking pot, like during the time when I was on the road and writing songs at four in the morning, songs that in the light-of-a-sobering-day seemed a little scattered. In my twenties, I had no other way to access my creative recesses, and I knew I wouldn’t survive without the access. But since it’s been over two decades since I‘ve tasted weed, with one exception I will fail to mention, I think permanent brain fog is not the issue here. And I need these transcendental interjections from the other side.

A lot has been going on. Following my three-month affair with Santa Barbara, trying to stay financially afloat in a sea of diamonds, I moved back to Thousand Oaks, back into the apartment I once shared with now my soon-to-be-ex-husband, Dale, to my considerable relief, and gratitude for my soul-level friend. Two weeks later I landed a part-time job as choir director/accompanist for a Unitarian church just four miles away. The apartment becomes mine in April when Dale leaves his day gig, moves out, and takes his true work to Mexico.

Even during the interviewing process, I could hardly believe what a good match this new job seemed to be: my strengths as a musician and their particular needs in a musical director. And, I had no idea how much fun “a job” could be.

All that’s happening seems to whisper that maybe I’m on the right track, and that the course correction via Santa Barbara was just another step in putting the pieces together of personal belonging—where I fit, inside of me. I initiated this spiritual work in Santa Barbara, where my survival was threatened for the first time in many years. It seemed I didn’t belong anywhere… except while hiking the secret Montecito trail, up to the bench that had been waiting for me that very first day. You need a place to journal, to process the fear? Here it is:

I took my last hike up the trail on January 14th, two days before I moved out of Santa Barbara. Despite not having any outward signs of a journey well-travelled in the confines of an old dream (See Dreams, Interrupted, Part I), something truly magical happened each time I hiked the secret trail. On this last day, a new hawk appeared on a bare branch atop an old oak tree. I tried to find her with my camera, but she was practically invisible. I thought maybe she was calling from the other realm. But I did catch a glimpse of her, a smaller-sized hawk. She was in the midst of disappearing the moment I clicked the shutter button.

Once I reached the top of the trail, I sat on the stone bench overlooking the Padaro Lane coastal waters. I realized I possessed a whole different perspective than all the other times I had sat here. In two days, the Santa Barbara adventure would be coming to an end, and my energy was already withdrawing. Except here in this place, where I needed to say goodbye. I felt so much at peace, even passive, and reflective. I lay on the bench and went to sleep, basking in the sun. And something happened in the midst of a dream.

There’s much more significance to the view from this SB hilltop that shall remain personal, and mysterious, but some of it is being incorporated into a superhero story I’ve been brewing over the past year. I’ve been recording my thoughts, jotting down plot ideas, story concepts, and biographical information about the main character, Bird Woman, and her arch enemy, Cro-man.

But Bird Woman has another enemy, the United States government. This 100-word sketch depicts a climactic scene in the story:

She stepped to the edge of the precipice, remembering the last words her mother had said to her before government scientists took her away: “Don’t ever show the humans your feathers.” But now they were coming after her. It was fly or die, and maybe she would die anyway. She needed to be brave. She heard the voices of the detachment. Her body responded. She leapt from the cliff and spread her arms. The wind pushed against her, embraced her, until her wings unfurled. She soared below the cliffs and moved into the protective shadows of the great stone monoliths.

Back to reality. I have two months to get myself “financially viable” (a term borrowed from the movie Falling Down starring Michael Douglas), meaning able to fully support myself. I’m in pursuit of a second part-time job, and it’s been a frickin’ education (to be included in the sequel). If it were up to the dreams I dream, I’d find a way to get paid for finishing my novel. But…

How do I round out this blog post?

To be continued as…

Moving Into Total Autonomy: Power & Responsibility