RELEASING SUPPOSED TO

See with the wild eyes of your heart, the ones that know no end. Seeing beyond the critic, the rules and the habitat. They know life, they understand love and they feel home. They will lead you to freedom.

Somebody recently said to me, “It must be hard for you here, seeing everyone as if they have a perfect place in the Universe, seeing it as if everyone should be happy and full and held and loved.”

They pretty much nailed it in a nutshell.

I do feel like everyone has a perfect place, and deserves water when they are thirsty, and love when their hearts feel empty and confused. I know this to be true. So when our darker side: our separatist society, our busy culture, our young know-it-all country, our tired family values, or our limited thinking strategize us away from the ease of this, force-feeding us “supposed to’s,” my spiritual gag reflex comes up. Mostly because these are all parts of me, and I have subjected my own gorgeous, loud, vivacious spirit, (the one that believes everything is possible, and all dreams are coming true) to this squashing squishing thinking more times than I can count. I forget what’s inside. I forget how real life is when I am aligned. I forget my support and I forget where the juice is. “Supposed to” takes us far away from feeling fed, nurtured and loved. It starves our truth; it puts our possibilities in a vice and our vision in handcuffs.

So we are called to get OUT of the way with our giant cardboard “supposed to” signs, because we’re actually blocking traffic, blocking our flow, and we look like angry toddlers having fits. We are wasting energy complaining to the wrong department. We need to see the manager, the boss, the well, and we will be re-aligned by our light, quieting the obligatory “supposed to”. Supposed to does not come from the well, our light. It originates somewhere outside of us and it is a dangerous architect to employ.

“You call yourself a free spirit, a “wild thing,” and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.” Truman Capote

When you ask, “What am I supposed to do?” There is NO answer. You are not “supposed to” do anything. There is no such thing as “supposed to”. Please lift this shabby old suit off of your spirit body. And don’t donate this sucker, burn it. It has no value. It only limits your light. You are a gorgeous replication of the Divine. Divine light is not meant to be put in a mason jar and stared at until it shrivels up and burns out. You are meant to live in wild Technicolor. HD baby. So maybe you need your Towanda moment, maybe you need to release. Whatever it takes to start living un-f#$%ing-afraid. And I mean this in the very nicest way possible. Don’t let anyone tell you how you are supposed to do your life or be in your life. Take what resonates and leave the rest.

Catch and shift…
Catch your “supposed to’s” and shift them to “called to’s”

I’m supposed to ________________
-Be married by now
-Be heterosexual
-Do it the right way
-Save this money
-Get a job
-Feel full in this limited expression
-Be happy

I feel called to _________________
-Spend time alone and clear out
-Explore my sexuality
-Do it a messy way, co-creating with the Divine
-Spend this money courageously
-Volunteer to help people
-Break free and employ my voice
-Be where I am

Please watch the documentary SLOMO for a little inspiration in this direction.

I am working on ditching my own “supposed to’s”. For instance if you witnessed my writing process, you would think I was schizophrenic. I start with an open document and I start typing. I save it to my desktop (all okay so far). Then insight hits me when I am eating dinner and I tear a corner of a cocktail napkin and urgently write on it in tiny scribbles and stick it in my purse. I grab business cards, brochures, junk mail, and write notes on them, wrappers, anything. I found a veterinary hospital receipt in my purse the other day with a really inspiring note on it. When I sit down to type again, I dump my purse out and there are gum wrappers with notes everywhere, in addition to everything else in my Mary Poppins bag, and I type some more. The thing is, I carry a perfect little Moleskine notebook in my purse with me always, (my prepared perfectionist put it there) but for some reason that isn’t the go-to place to write when I am franticly inspired. More text lands on the open page, and it is not linear or congruent, it is a patchy ragamuffin document. Before it is anywhere close to anything that makes a shred of sense, I impatiently copy and paste it into a WordPress “new post” and there is a light switch in me, a borderline Pavlovian light switch, that says “Okay, the magic happens now.” And the thing gets collaged in a way that I don’t understand; somehow it navigates into flow and lots of words get cut, and others added and then sent to you.

I have learned to be a very good rule follower. I am careful. If I want to write though, and create from a real place, I have to be willing to be messy and do it differently than I was taught. Maybe that is why this left-handed girl writes up the page instead of across it. I am learning to carry this willingness into all of what I do to create my life, the life of my dreams, the one that is born from light.

I know that we are made of light, and that my place is to help little ones hold onto their light and you and I remember it, to help us know it well, and to trust it.

I know that HOW (the plan) we get to our highest expression is not our job; it is the work of the Divine, of the spirit of life. It is the grand agenda, not our own and it will bless us in ways we never thought possible.

We lean on what we know and we often suffer because it is comfortable. We hide behind supposed to. We know it. We were taught it. And it is old, we already know how to conform, it has gotten boring. So blister up. And be brave enough to pop, because the healing, expression, fullness and freedom come next. Don’t numb out. That perpetuates suffering. It hides and shames your light. Band-Aids are not what we are looking for. We don’t need patches. We need exposure and vulnerability. And we need to be held by the Divine through this.

Two quick offerings:
Heart Open: Close your eyes and sit with your palms face up. Then put them down. Then back up. Now go to your heart. Feel it with them face up, then face down. Can you feel how connected your heart is to the willingness to receive? Open palms = open heart. Closed palms = closed heart.
Held by the Divine: after your shower or bath, wrap yourself in a towel around your shoulders, hold the corners of the towel around you crossing your arms and pull tight, like a hug, close your eyes. Feel held.

Be kind to your truth. Honor your wisdom and intuition. Release “supposed to,” because all it knows is where it has been and what may have worked for the old you, it doesn’t have a clue about where you’re going, what you’re made of or how you will bless the world with your magic and light. To your freedom…