empowerment Archives - Must Love Crows

In my earlier years, I was heavily committed to wanting things to go my way.

I lived guided by the illusion, that trying to control what I experienced was the way to go, in order to get things to be the way I wanted them to be.

It was a very mind-centric way of living. It was also really dumb. But it was what I learned and what I knew.

It created a lot of suffering because, obviously, things don’t always go your way. I felt like I was fighting with my reality a lot.

Err, OK – all the time. The more I tried to control, the more out of control things became. It created a very, “life sucks and then you die” kind of vibe. Which was, well, gruesome for my spirit.

Putting a lot on emphasis on the brain needing to be in a position of power goes along with a core, learned, and primal, yet irrational, belief. Which is this:

We believe our brains are so advanced, and that we as humans are somehow so advanced that we are in a position to be the almighty knowers of THE WAY things need to unfold for us.

Our own spiritual, mental and emotional demise is born of believe that THE WAY is the way we prefer.

Important to acknowledge how ludicrous this is. Also important to remember you can and will fall asleep to how insane it is, over and over.

Thankfully life delivers endless opportunities for us to wake up again.

Life experiences can teach you that the path leading you where you’re destined to go is often completely different than what you want to do or how you want to feel.

Just yesterday, as I thought to myself, “I’m going to put away the lights I use for auditioning because they’re in the way and I won’t need them for a long time,” I received an email from a casting agent:

“Please submit this monologue by Sunday.”

Some actors would freak with excitement over this. And I was excited to some degree but I was heavily focused on the plan I had crafted, and this wasn’t part of it.

My plan was to focus on readings and other healing work I was doing. In fact, I had recently stated to the hubby, “I’m going to wait until later fall or the new year to focus on acting since the industry isn’t really booming for actors with my experience level at the moment.”

Seemed logical; felt logical. But then came the email, and out the rainy window went my plans (west coast rain is here today). And after realizing my next 3 days were now going to entail doing the opposite of what I had planned to do, I laughed.

I laughed at the aspect of myself that thought my plans were the only way things could or should go. Like a slightly sedated hyena.

SO MUCH EGO. You have to laugh at these displays of shadow! Scratch that – you don’t have to laugh. But speaking from experience (IE, NOT laughing about it) your day to day life experience is infinitely more frustrating if you decide to let your ego consume you with thoughts like, “This isn’t what I wanted.”

The example du resistance:

Last spring as the pandemic began to rev up, my husband and I came to the conclusion that it was entirely unwise to take our vacation.

Even though there was a lot of gratitude (we were alive, we could reschedule, we weren’t stuck in an airport) there were rumblings of sadness about the cancellation.

We had planned it for a year. And it had been an intense period emotionally over the past 6 months, and the place we were hoping to go felt very healing to us.

But we dug into the positives and decided to use the 2 weeks off at home to get stuff done. I had my plans: obsess over astrology. And he had his: to focus on making music.

My husband has been studying electronic music production and engineering for the past 8 years. It’s something he’s incredibly passionate about, and his dream is to do it for a living. So into his cave he happily went, creating for a couple of glorious, sweat pant wearing weeks.

Somewhere along the 2 week period in which we had originally planned to spend on the beach, he got signed to a record label.

Synchronistic events unfolded that never would have happened if our plans hadn’t been thwarted.

Instead of SPF, he applied for a joint bank account with his production partner; Instead of chatting with tourists on the beach he had conference calls with record label managers.

Let us get back to the fact that we were bummed about not being able to go on our vacation. Having to cancel our plans was not part of our plan.

This is important to take note of because humans don’t like their carefully laid out plans being messed with. We take that shit personally.

We put a lot of energy into our anger over something messing with our efforts to get life to go the way we think it needs to go.

We can be ungrateful and irrational and because of our negativity bias, bypass the positives that can come of our forced pivot.

The hubby and I could have spent a lot of time arguing with the reality of our experience – of things not going our way. And we did spend some time doing that because we’re human and that’s what we do.

We felt a bit sad, frustrated and annoyed. And also a little freaked out because the pandemic was a wild unscheduled-to-us ride through the fear zone.

But when we gave up and submitted to the reality of what we could not control, things rolled in a direction we could never have perceived them rolling.

When we said, “OK, I succumb to my current experience,” a hard and fast and amazing pivot occurred in the form of something my husband had wished for his entire adult life, coming true.

All that said, today is the day his first song is released on Itunes and Spotify.

It’s also our 10 year anniversary. I’m happy to share the date with his milestone, and I trust there is some deeper meaning to it all because I choose to believe in the synchronicities 🌀

Click here to check out my hubby’s first release on YouTube.

Love to all and thanks for reading, listening and supporting. And a reminder:

Celebrate the pivots – You never know where they will take you!

xoxo

Order a Reading

Many times I’ve chatted with friends who have disclosed how uncomfortable a comment someone left on their social media post made them feel, only to see them turn around and show approval for the comment by liking it.

I have immense love and respect for every single one of my friends, and also for you, the beautiful human reading this post, which is why I feel the need to let you know how important it is to acknowledge the detrimental habit of offering immediate approval of shitty comments left on your social feeds.

You might be thinking, whatever, who cares, it’s social media, turn it off or ignore it. To that I say social media is the prime source of connection and collaboration these days. It’s a place where we come together and create new empowering views – where we learn and evolve as human beings, together as a community. Which is why it’s a powerful place to set boundaries and standards for how we wish to be treated.

Forgoing the need to please people who leave passive aggressive or inappropriate comments on your personal posts is hella important.

Even more so is not letting your desire to be liked by everyone come before calling out people when they belittle, minimize, or generally just act like ego maniacs on social media.

I’m not asking you to get busy figuring out a way to school a person who left a shitty comment. I mean ideally, a conversation would be great, so that you could set a boundary and let them know you’re not OK with what they’re up to. But that often leads to us putting a lot of effort into trying to communicate with people who just want to argue all the ways in which you’re irrational when you assert yourself. That’s exhausting and unproductive work. Who needs that?

Suffice it to say, some folks aren’t up for turning a conversation into a chance to grow, which is why I say, sometimes it’s best to not communicate with them and just stick to not pressing the like button.

The best way to get people to question their unnecessary and unsupportive comments on your posts is to stop liking their comments.

You don’t need to put out the effort to ensure everyone who contributes their opinion to your social media feed is comfortable having done so. You don’t need to try to make something denigrating acceptable. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes speaks of in her book, Women Who Run with the Wolves,

“This early training to “be nice” causes women to override their intuitions.”

We need to unlearn our training. If someone posts something unsupportive or rude or misogynistic, let them be responsible for it.

Let them wonder why you liked the comments that showed support, but not theirs;

Let them get confused over why you deleted their comment or sent them a message letting them know it was appropriate;

Let the commenters question their choices and live with their feelings that stem from the inquiry process.

Until you’re ready to insta-delete comments posted to serve the commenter and minimize you, or confront the instigator (’cause let’s be real, that’s what they’re doing: instigating) stop using the like button so much, ok?

I’m specifically talking to the ladies.

We do this all the time, and we are contributing to pervasive ignorance and the diminishment of our wellbeing when we do it. Therefore, we are contributing to the denigration of society. Therefore, we need to stop.

I care about you and want you to be empowered. When you stop showing support for unsupportive comments, you not only empower yourself, you empower others women, too.

So make a conscious effort to put an end to normalizing the acceptance of shitty online behavior, OK?

Let’s commit to doing better, here and now, so we can do better later and in other departments of our lives.

Because acts of empowerment enable more acts of empowerment.

Summary: If someone leaves a shitty comment, keep your fingers away from the like button. And don’t be shy about using the delete button, either. 😳

You are loved. Happy weekend. That is all.