I deliver a workshop entitled, “High Impact Conversations ~ Peace & Productivity in the Workplace” with a gifted communications coach, Fran Liautaud.

In it, during an early exercise, we ask participants to answer this question:

What is the most important conversation you are NOT having?

We ask participants to post their responses in this format, avoiding confidential information:

With ______ About _______.

I am not at all surprised to learn that many people when responding are avoiding a conversation with themselves.

Having the often-avoided and oh, so important conversation with ourselves is the primary focus of today’s blog.

A Good Talking To

The poet and speaker David Whyte suggests that as adults, we need to give ourselves a “good talking to” from time to time. Perhaps it is because no one else has the guts to do it now that we’re all grown up. I do not know whether he insists the “conversation” goes on out loud. I do know from my own experience, that verbalizing those bald truths makes it impossible for me to ignore them.

It has been dawning on me these last two years, that somewhere, somehow along my journey, Discipline lost its way. I recall in earlier years a mentor telling me that he wished he had my discipline, so “I had it, I know I did!” I hear myself say encouragingly.

Last January I took stock of my difficult truths:

1) I had allowed the excuse of a slow healing knee to keep me from exercising – something I had always done – you guessed it – in a disciplined way. As a consequence, I had gained a dozen pounds and was in the worst shape of my life.

2) I had allowed red meat and fried foods to slowly infiltrate my eating habits. I went from eating red meat once or twice a year to once or twice a week. I went from “No fried foods” to filching my husband’s fries – or even ordering fried clams from The Ramp (the absolute BEST place for “healthy” fried food – or any gourmet comfort food for that matter!)

3) Increasingly, my love affair with wine was becoming a concern. Two or three glasses each time were a thoughtless necessity rather than a once-in-a-while choice.

Perhaps those things don’t sound too bad to you. Perhaps they sound horrifying. Each of us has our own struggles that feel smaller or greater by comparison. To me, it was evidence that I needed to reacquaint myself with Discipline.

This slippage in behavior happened so slowly that it was hard to detect rationally. It was as if all of the sudden I woke up to a new series of consequences in my life and wondered where I had gotten off track. Beware the moment by moment choices that, as Annie Dillard once wrote become, “how we spend our lives.”

Reacquainting with Discipline

It would be nice to describe the intentional way I made specific and planned changes in my life. I imagine the story: How I created a Ceremony of Commitment for myself, involved friends and family and chronicled the whole process. Not so! It was and is much more organic than that. Funny thing though, as I look back at my journaling, I signaled a readiness to change in my entry on Tuesday January 20, 2009, Inauguration Day for President Obama, our 45^th President of the United States. I wrote:

“To inaugurate means to begin. Today I am witness to what I hope will be a new chapter in America — and in my life.”

I set in motion some things, intentional or not.

I have Daryl Conant, owner of the Fitness Nuthouse to thank for providing the inspiration, information and personal challenge to me in physical fitness (he calls it FAT LOSS) as well as in nutrition. The results? In many of the metrics that count, I now range from ideal to average: Resting Heart Rate, % Body Fat, Blood Pressure, Cholesteral, Triglycerides, and Body Mass Index.

And I always have my thoughtful, generous and warm-hearted husband to thank for EVERYTHING that brings me joy.

It’s not easy, this vigilance of responsibility. There is an appeal to the looseness of living more carefree – or perhaps I should say less intentionally, more thoughtlessly. However, today I am laughing more. I am not plagued with guilt. I feel as though an omnipresent heaviness had lifted. I feel ready for a new challenge.

So I ask you:

What is the most important conversation you want to have with yourself?

Is it about wellness? Or about work? It is about your relationship with yourself? Or with others?

What part of your best self do you wish to be re-acquainted with?

Set your intention and watch what appears!

Life and death,

a twisted vine sharing a single root

A water bright green

stretching to top a twisted yellow

only to wither itself

as another green unfolds overhead

One leaf atop another

yet under the next,

a vibrant tapestry of arcs and falls

all in the act of becoming.

Death is the passing of life.

And life

is the stringing together of so many little

passings.   ~ Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro

We watch September skies become a deeper blue, and feel a new edge in the wind. We are keenly aware that Summer’s party is nearing an end. The gradual and beautiful decline of our full-leafed trees keeps our eyes ever upward, taking in the vibrancy of color.

Autumn. Such a symbolic time. Everything in nature is dying, only to return again next Spring. Rejuvenated and yet, not quite the same.

This is the time to contemplate what is “dying” inside of us. For some, what is dying is unplanned and undesired. My friend, Rob, for example, has just been notified that he has lost his job as Executive Director of an organization he was devoted to heart and soul. Another friend, B.J., is recovering from the loss of what to many women is the essence of her femininity with the radical removal of a cancer-filled breast.

For these friends and many like them, there is little choice in the situation. Only how best to deal with it. And they deal — perhaps bravely or with hand-wringing, with faith or fists raised, alone or through the help of friends.

For the rest of us, we have a choice in this season: We can choose to intentionally “die” to the thing that no longer serves us, in the act of becoming.

What no longer serves you? What do you know deeply in your heart that you must walk away from?

We ALL know our own opportunities — the mind chatter of our 2AM restlessness reveals them to us.

Is it medicating away our stress (call it fears) through the happy haze of martinis or beer?

Is it hanging on to a relationship that only drains us and turns us bitter?

Is it neglecting our holy bodies in sessions of binge eating?

Is it as simple as telling ourselves small lies so as not to stand up for what we believe?

What is nudging you for resolution?

The Importance of Ritual

If you feel the readiness to surrender that thing that no longer serves you, congratulations! This is a courageous act. One that begs for ritual to signify its importance.

I use rituals all the time. They help to solidify my intent. For example, when I realize I am in a work-related funk (of whatever sort or cause); I leave my office for the kitchen, and make myself a cup of Sweeten the Mind tea.  [It happens to be the byline on the Vanilla Almond flavor made by The Republic of Tea.] In this small act, I am filled with intent — to shift and reframe my mood to one of calmness and sweetness. And no surprise the power of intent — it works!

I invite you to consider a form of ritual to honor and solidify your letting go process.

Exercise:

Carve out some time for yourself and simply stop the doing of things. Just be still in contemplating what it is you wish to let go of. Be in an appreciative space in thinking about the behavior, issue or situation. Think about how it has helped you learn and grow. Now take a walk outside. Sometimes the splendor of nature can help us in our letting go process. My friend, Anne Fitzgerald would say, “when you feel heavy, give your heaviness to the rocks because they can carry that heaviness.” Find something that can be symbolic of your letting go (examples: a decaying leaf or twig). Blow into it what you want to let go of. Journey to a stream, the ocean, or even a high place without water. Release your symbolic object — with silence or a word or chants or screams — whatever feels right to you.

As the beautiful poem by Rabbi Shapiro suggests, “life is the stringing together of so many little passings.”  This season of decay and dying, as colorful as it is, a will result in a stark landscape of grays and browns. Dying is necessary in order for the cycle of rebirth to continue in spring. Dying is necessary in order to make space for something new. Something better. More aligned with who you are now, or who you are becoming.