BlissQuest: The Only Sabotage is Self Sabotage

My poor, underused Olivetti Valentine (1969).

Listening to: Some diva for all our divas!

Bliss: Emma over at Treehouse JukeBox updated her Etsy store and all the proceeds are going to help a family with unexpected medical bills. If you can help her to help them, many karma points would be awaiting you, I'm sure! :)

This post is in response to secret six in our 12 Secret's book club.

(NOTE: I may seem to be making fun here, but remember that my primary target is ME.)

Wednesday was my last day at the library. From Wednesday afternoon forward, my time is my own. I am home to work on my and my partner's creative projects.

What!?

Yesterday -- one day, 24 small hours after my last day at the library -- I had a mild freak out.

Every ugly, doubtful, cruel diva that comprises my own internal opera got on stage and sang as loud as she could. Which is loud. All my divas have giant lungs.

And why did this happen? Because of what Marianne Williamson says:

Our deepest fear is not that we
are inadequate. Our deep fear
is that we are powerful
beyond measure.

Yep, that's me -- full of fear about my own power. And now I am committed; I'm done for; I have no more excuses left. I have the time, the space, the tools...the music, the comfortable chair...you know -- that list of "stuff" that we think will make us more creative? I have that list and each item has a little check next to it.

So what was going on, really, during that freak out? Here's what I think...

We do yoga or we go to a church to pray or we sit on a mat and meditate or we do all of those things. We read books like The Secret and You Can Heal Your Life. We watch movies like What the Bleep Do We Know.

And we claim to believe.

We claim to believe that our worlds, our lives, our experiences are all our own creations; we claim to believe that all of life is energy and we are energy and our thoughts are energy; we claim to believe that we hold the power.

But we certainly don’t act that way, do we?

Instead, most of us, much of the time, spend our days handing over our power to just about anything outside of us, so that we don’t have to take responsibility.

We hand over our power to the weather and tell ourselves that we feel badly because of the clouds. (I did this one for so many years, until I realized that whether or not it was true, it wasn't getting me anywhere.)

We hand over our power to governments and tell ourselves that the world is in such a state because of the actions of one man. (As if we are not culpable for wars based in overuse of resource.)

We hand over our power to just the right (wrong) person who will say just the right (wrong) things to us about our new, still in diapers creative project, and we stand back and watch while they, like some demon mythical cats, sit on those projects' chests until they are out of breath.

We hand over our power to the past, to the voices in our heads, to the voices outside our heads, to the smallest minded people we can find, to bad teachers, to the cultural critics, to our ideas of who and what we should be.

And then we stand back, and we point to all of these things and label them saboteurs.

But we should only and always be standing in front of a mirror when we point because there is only and always one saboteur -- ourselves.

If you don’t believe me, fine, but then stop it with the yoga and the meditation and the books and the movies; stop it with all the posing. I mean, really, what is the point?

We may as well just sit on the couch, grab the chips, and watch TV until our minds are mush like everyone else's.

Or we can start acting in ways that match our stated beliefs.