“The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself.” ~Michel de Montaigne

Most of us are plagued with some degree of unworthiness. Even after close to 250 days of active work at creating a positive life, I still find the tendrils of connection to a belief that seems to be part of my genetic code. It equates my pain in life to something wrong with me. I know I am not alone in this most fundamental experience we have of abandoning ourselves. I have found a Buddhist teacher, Tara Brach who addresses this issue in her book Radical Acceptance.

She equates our belief in our unworthiness as a trance-like belief in a false self that is inherently separate and on some deep level not worthy. Her teaching on radical acceptance encourages not only an honest acknowledgment of what is going on inside, but also a courageous willingness to be with life as it is in the moment. She writes: “There is an increasingly well-known adage that says “What you resist, persists.” Your identity gets hitched to whatever you are not accepting. And the more you push something away or run from something, the more your sense of self is linked with that experience.”

The leap comes from giving yourself the opportunity to accept an experience without having to like it. It is the combination of acceptance without resistance that gives freedom. Often it is hard to tease out the pain from the resistance which is usually some form of judgment we make about ourselves or the situation we are in. The layers melt together and what gets lost most immediately is our ability to hold onto ourselves. Exchanging our judgments for a devotion to mindful attention opens our ability to relate to our own pain. Our sense of being becomes larger than the feelings that felt too big to hold; suddenly it becomes manageable. Freedom is not escape from painful feelings, it is having the room to experience it and move through it.

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“My imperfections and failures are as much a blessing from God as my successes and my talents and I lay them both at his feet.” Mahatma Gandhi

The other day on a visit to our family doctor, I asked him to remove a couple of small warts that have popped up on my fingers. I don’t think anyone noticed them but me as they were very small. He obliged with a quick freezing treatment of liquid nitrogen and now I have a huge raised black blister that is so awful to look at, not to mention painful, that I have to keep it covered with a Band Aid.

It is easy to get stuck on our imperfections and focus so much energy on eradicating them that without knowing it, we often turn minor issues into problems. Consider the number of businesses that have been built on TV infomercials alone to correct our physical imperfections. As overwhelming as this is for our physical bodies, our preoccupation with our mental and emotional faults can come to dominate a life.

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“If I have the belief that I can do it, I will surely acquire the capacity to do it, even if I may not have it at the beginning.” -Mahatma Gandhi

I have been thinking of making a vision board all summer since first reading Martha Beck’s article in June’s issue of Oprah at the doctor’s office. The idea of collecting images and words from magazine pages and cutting them up into a collage isn’t new for most of us. Many middle school projects start this way and for many of us, putting together a collage of what and who we loved was wall décor. The whole topic came up this weekend as I finally cleared out years of old magazine titles that I have been saving next to my bed for a couple of years.

As I went through them, I knew I couldn’t part with them all without taking something that had made me hold onto it. When I shared the idea with Emma, my 12-year-old daughter, she was on board.  She cut as I continued to clean and before long we had a huge pile of images and words that felt like us.  Martha Beck said,  “When you start assembling pictures that appeal to your deepest self, you unleash one of the most powerful forces on our planet: human imagination,…Virtually everything humans use, do, or make up exists because someone thought it up.”

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“Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories” -Polybius (Greek statesman, 200-118 BC)

For a long time I believed that winning and losing were opposites. In the past few months since the biggest win in my career, I have come to see how, like a yin yang symbol, they live not only side by side but within each other. Sometimes losing takes incredible courage and grace to go on and try again. Sometimes the distinction between winning and losing is incomprehensible; like in the recent tennis match that went for 10 hours and, in the final analysis, was a two game difference. Sometimes winning requires you to give up the game you knew before, because you have reached a new level.

I am suffering an odd sense of loss since winning a recent investment conference. In winning the investment, I also won a seasoned and talented CEO. In addition to him, or maybe because of him, there are more gifted and intelligent people than ever committed to the success of Good Clean Love and our collective success feels within reach. Still, ceding the responsibilities and roles that have gotten me to this point is more difficult than I imagined. Long a follower of identifying myself through what I do, it is requiring a new way to think.

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“The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth.”  ~Chinese Proverb

I visited the grave of a dear family friend today with my sons.  The anniversary of his death, already two- years- old just recently passed and the flowers on his grave were dried and dead in a tipped over vase. We sat and talked about our friend and his neighbors, each with a name and the dates of the beginning and end of life. The whole of  life and all the wonders and emotions that made up their lives is represented only with a hyphen.  In 1827, two brothers, Augustus and Julius Hare wrote, “Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit…”  which pretty well sums it up.

As we lay in the grass, looking up at the sky, missing him and thinking of what he would say if he could have commented on the day, made me realize again how much of the small essential things in life I so often take for granted. Lost in the myriad details of the days, taking the time to fix what breaks, overcome with frustrations or anguish about things that won’t last or even matter in a few days, I forget to pay attention to the small things at the heart of life.

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“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” -Buddha

One of the mantras of my life that has continuously proven more true all the time is the idea that what we focus on multiplies. This is true on every plane of existence, whether it is the mental, physical, spiritual or emotional internal states or the many ways we interact with the world. This is in fact one of the primary laws of the positivity quest and is backed up by every scientific study that has been done on positive psychology.

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“By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.”  — Lao Tzu

A good friend told me an important truth about all the trying I have been doing to let go of how things have been at Good Clean Love.  She said, “It is interesting that when you are trying, even when you are 99% of the way there it is really hard, but just 1% more, it gets really easy.” Trying to let go is a way of holding on,  it is the grieving for all the pieces of a situation that you never identified as valuable until they are leaving your grasp.

Havelock Ellis said, “All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”  Figuring out how to hold onto yourself while things change and slip out of your control is an art.  Holding on with compassion and forgiveness for the love that you shared with someone when you are letting go of  a significant relationship is the art of cultivating a courageous and loving heart to take you through life. Neither of these situations respond to trying,  it is a head first dive into the surrender that allows you to step into the future.

Easy for me to sit here and encourage the leap of faith as I wallow in my own trying to let my business grow beyond me. Good Clean Love has served as both the vehicle to finding myself and my voice, as well as  an identity as something bigger than myself.  I got what I wished for and now am realizing what needs to be set free in its wake. Hence, the warning to be careful for what you wish for- you might get it.

Often as we envision the future, it is rarely a full picture of what is coming that we hold.  We have to be willing to let go of our own version of the life we planned in order to accept the life that is waiting for us.  Looking for the courage to walk out on my history and see what I might become.  I imagine when I get there I will wonder what all this kicking and screaming out the door was about.  Most things are hard until they are easy, but none so much as the grace of letting go.

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”  -Buddha

I was at a marketing lunch today discussing the plans to build the distribution and sales of Good Clean Love products.  The conversation turned to my writing, as it often does. My writing has been my voice that has driven the message of sustainable love that, in my mind, is the raison d’etre of my product company. Although I have long regretted my lack of skills in sales expansion,  I also know in my heart that my real work has never been about selling products, but rather about giving people access to more love in their lives. Often this work would lead to selling healthy love products, but for me that wasn’t really the goal.

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“Progress, of the best kind, is comparatively slow. Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step.” -Samuel Smiles

Today included  a satisfying set of small steps that I have been working toward for weeks. For some reason, progress seems to happen like that. Our effort to move in a certain direction, to accomplish something gets stalled in details, endless negotiations, communication hang ups, unforeseen natural events.  Patience is not only a virtue, it is the only choice as we attempt to shape the world to our vision.  Then suddenly, there is a breakthrough.  Negotiations completed, raw materials arrive, storms pass and we are back on track.

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“I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” -Walt Whitman

I have been reflecting on half a year of positivity questing this week. Trying to organize what I have learned in this time and trying to marshal it to step up when, even now I can forget how to be positive. Happily because I talk about it so much, when I can’t quite get there, I have many reliable reflectors in my family to remind me where to look

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