My mind is not always my friend. In the moments of feeling visceral triggers of fear and terror that let me know that, 'Shit, I've fucked up again', anger follows not far behind. In these moments, I hear the voices of my 'young-me' teachers, echoing forward through decades of history to where I stand now, 'Sheila, you are your own worst critic'. 

Funny, now, I realize that, in that context, I always heard 'worst' as 'best', yet never quite believed either. I felt mortified to own 'worst' yet couldn't allow myself to own 'best', so scary was the feeling of being vulnerable. 

I wore this chagrin as a badge of honour. Can any of you relate? The harder I was on myself served to fuel my hope that I'd become better. My punishment would be my reward. Congers up pictures of self-flagellation, doesn't it? Do enough penance and you'll be good enough, don't you know? Hope ultimately became the never-to-be-surrendered driver for my life, fed by and camouflaged in my own deep despair that I'd never, ever get my life 'right'.

I am in the process of writing a book about bankruptcy... and  what it really means as a state of being, a state of mind. I have well concluded over the years I have lived on this planet that bankruptcy, as we have come to think about it in both environmental and financial terms, is the evidential trail of personal dissolution, insolvency, overdraft and the absence of flow in our lives, at much higher orders of thinking. We would not ever consciously intend to live bankrupt lives, yet that is how most of us, the world over, are living. We choose to turn away from the evidence of our choices, so indoctrinated have we become to not that... anything but that. Shame and the fear of shame will keep us in denial, in avoidance, in hiding and feeling inauthentic. We are the frauds we loath. Truth is, by the time a bankrupt person chooses to declare and own the lie she has been living ad nauseam, that she might save her sanity and finally own the clarity of her own thinking, the truth of the lie has been present for a very long time. Modelling is our greatest teacher. I learned by example to turn away from the obvious; self-distraction was key.

Truth, owned and claimed, inhaled and exhaled, invites comfort's expansion into more of itself and discomfort's release of itself. Hey, 'discomfort', you are now free to leave your what you thought was your entitlement, your real estate, behind. Whose original opinion did you choose to rely upon, anyway? Was it ever naturally yours?

Truth, denied and avoided, sees breathing shortened, curtailed and, ultimately, stopped; When we chose, heels dug into the earth for dear life, to die to be right... well, we invite discomfort to always, in all ways, find it's traction, there. Ultimately, that traction, can dissolve into quick sand.

So, what does an opinion have to do with any of this?  Well, here are some questions to ask:

How do I authentically feel, inside, about what I am hearing? What gets triggered in my body? Am I breathing? When I own the truth of my feelings about it all, do i insist on adding extra locks to an area, where there is no door in site? Alternatively, can I allow myself to see that a door does exist... and that it can open to reveal another possibility? 

In summary, the one thing I know is that no one can be 'right' for me about what I hold as 'right' and true for myself. In the same way, neither can I be 'right' for another about what she holds as 'right' and true for herself. My reality is MY reality. Yours is YOURS. In my experience, most of us have metaphorically died, time and time again, to be 'right' about others, so they cannot be 'right' for themselves. We live polarized lives. It is exhausting and it is sad. Still, dying to be 'right' about 'it' all, we still go there, attempting to bring some order to that which we do not understand. So, I ask you, What is there to understand? 

How could our lives be different, if we were to simply take a breath, let go and let god? Your willing choice to become your own next moment for the big exhale in/of your life, will become your next expansive inspiration, oxygenating an an already emerging future; it can't not be that way; metaphorically - and, indeed, in the most literal of terms - THAT, biochemically, is how we breathe ourselves; the exhale invites the next inhale. THAT is how we create our personal realities.  

On one of our regular road trips in the last couple of years, a friend presented me with this hypothesis (as we were entertaining Siri’s back roads travel advice, yet overriding this form of artificial intelligence by organic impulse/intuition): Sheila, if you had found yourself with amnesia and had had to set out to re-create your life, how would it have been different and what would you have created? I said to her, That’s a hard one; I have no reference points for that. And, she reminded me that THAT was the point. Amnesia has no reference points. And so, I knew immediately, what my life would have looked like. 

No reference points. Like the back roads we were travelling on, we had no historical reference points to guide our choices for where we were driving; what we knew in each moment, however, was an intention. We were taking an unknown - yet intuitively known - route and choosing the turns, by feel and by deep and internal knowing… leaving Siri scrambling to catch up to us.