I loved – loved – putting together Picking Up the Pieces: thoughts on grief and growth, sending it out into the world and hearing how people’s lives are being positively impacted by it.

And I wanted to take it a step further.

I loved – loved – hosting the Picking Up the Pieces Retreat in September of 2011. Those were four of the most incredible, powerful, amazing days of my (almost) 40 years on the planet. I have been awed and humbled by the impact it continues to have on the lives of those who attended.

And I realize a retreat is a huge time and financial commitment.

I’ve been dreaming of a way to do the work I’m passionate about in a format that’s more affordable for people in terms of both money and time. I’ve been dreaming of another way to support us all in finding the gold in our challenges. I’ve been dreaming of an expanding community of people who are able to sit with each other, in person, on the phone or virtually, when life hands us those moments where all we can do is fall apart. This community exists (you might even already be a part of it) and it wants to grow – it needs to grow.

In service of those dreams, I am ridiculously excited to announce the:

Picking Up the Pieces Tele-Retreat: 5 weeks of emotional alchemy for those experiencing sorrow, sadness, stuckness or grief.

Because it’s the first time I’m offering it, and it’s a new format for me to work in, I’ve made it incredibly affordable. And there’s an extra-special time-limited offer as my birthday gift to you.

Find out more here. Share it with a friend. Sign up yourself.

I can’t wait to support you in finding your gold.

This past weekend I’d planned to start a “40 Days of Giving” adventure leading up to my 40th birthday on March 15th. Then I realized that even though I loved the idea of it, adding it to my daily life at this point felt terrible. I let it go, with only a twinge of disappointment. At one point I was planning to organize an Empty Bowls event here in Ventura as a way of celebrating my birthday. Again, I loved the idea of it – building community, raising money and awareness about food insecurity, having the opportunity to plan a fun, meaningful event. But when I listened deeply to my body, the thought of it made me physically exhausted. I filed it away for another day and decided to go low-key for my birthday. After all, if I wasn’t going to make some grand gesture of giving, I probably shouldn’t do much at all. I invited three couples that I adore to a small dinner party, which sounded lovely and made me incredibly sad.

I want a party. I want to celebrate. Not only is it my word for the year but I’m excited to be turning 40 and I want to begin this decade in the style I hope will carry me through. Celebration. Abundance. Play. Community. I want a new dress to show off the body that is 60 pounds lighter and feels great. I want to be surrounded by people I love to spend time with, talking and laughing and watching the sun set over the ocean. I want to feel full and happy and like my cup is overflowing.

Right there is the key.

I’d heard the expression Serve from the overflow and could pay it lip service, but I didn’t fully get it. One day when I was pregnant with Ben, during those miraculous two months when I wasn’t bleeding and thought I’d make it through the pregnancy in one piece, I listened to an interview with Lisa Nichols. I could sense her energy vibrating over the phone line and I finally understood, on a visceral level, what was meant. Taking it from a mental concept to something I could feel in my body was a radical move. Then Ben died, life upended and I was adrift. Somehow in my grief process, I allowed myself to fill my cup more than I ever had as an adult, learning slowly and painfully, that to take care of myself was also taking care of others, particularly my family.

Despite my new-found skills, something hasn’t felt quite right recently and I’ve been struggling to figure it out. The other day, in a flash of insight, I understood. I saw an image of a cup and saucer, white with simple curved lines, the liquid inside beginning to drip and splash over the edges. As I looked more closely, I saw that it was splashing unevenly and when I glanced in, there was a yawning white space at the back. My liquid was lopsided.

“But…but…” I sputtered to myself, “I meditate every day and I do yoga and I hike and have wonderful friends and I sit by the ocean when I need to and I’m trying to get to bed earlier…”

“Yes, this is true,” I heard my wise, intuitive voice answer, “but you’ve been wanting to paint, and you haven’t. You’ve been needing a massage and you haven’t scheduled one. Your self-care is out of balance and you still don’t feel totally worthy of receiving what you deserve.”

Worthy of receiving. I wonder how many of us struggle with that?

I made a list of all the ways I can take care of myself, no matter how impractical or expensive or small. It’s long –  more than three pages in my journal. A lot of it I incorporate into my life already but there are a few key areas where I see, very clearly, that I am not honoring my needs. Those areas are the hole in my cup. They are also the places where I still feel shame, where I continue to play small. My friend Christa wrote a beautiful post the other day about the shift in her life and her creativity, about not giving up, about creating space for ourselves. It is then, when we’ve breathed life into our dreams, when we’ve said I am important enough to…, that our cups really fill. It seems to me that it’s when we are able to give ourselves what we need to feel alive, to feel good more often than we are in pain, that we begin to recognize our inherent worthiness.

Every now and then when I’m feeling sad, Ada will do a little song and dance in an attempt to cheer me up. While she never fails to make me smile, I always let her know that it is not her job to take care of me. It’s not her daddy’s job to take care of me. It’s my job and mine alone. My hope is that it won’t take her half a lifetime to learn that lesson. I want to model self-care in such a way that it becomes as natural to her as breathing. I don’t do it perfectly, I don’t always do it gracefully, but I am learning to be the caretaker of my own soul.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a birthday party to plan.

The last few years, in addition to choosing a word that encapsulates my intention for the year, I’ve written a little manifesto for myself. Things I want to hold at the forefront of my mind. Words I want to look at, and live by, every day. Last year I shared what I’d written and was overwhelmed by the feedback. When I wrote 2012’s, I meant for it to stay private. Then I read it out loud to a circle of friends and strangers at the year’s first full moon and realized that as is it is my wish for myself, it’s my wish for all of us. (One of these days I’ll make it pretty and downloadable.)

Celebrate

Let joy flow into and through you. Celebrate everything. Pause in the midst of life and breathe in the beauty and the muck. Dig deep and find the gold. Explore celebration. Live celebration. Let your life be a dance with joy.

Full Permission

You have full permission to be your brilliant, messy, gorgeous, imperfect self. All day. Every day. Don’t ask anymore. Take it in both hands and run. Be yourself with wild abandon, even in your quietest moments. Love yourself with your whole heart.

Focus

Find your priorities and focus. Let everything else go. Follow the joy. Follow the passion. Narrower, go deeper. Fill your mind, heart and belly with what sustains you. Learn to say no, with love.

Shine

This is the year of letting your light blaze into the world. Be your own sun, moon and stars. Be the map to your inner night sky. Be the map you live by. Play big. Play with integrity. Dance by the light of your inner fire and SHINE.

Embody Love

This is your life’s work. You are love, now live it. Breathe it in, and out. Fill your cells. Fill the world. Walk, as love, into your life, so that everyone who enters your orbit knows that they too are loved, and are Love.

Last week we were at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. It’s a small museum and very kid-friendly. They have a little planetarium, an outdoor play space with a stream, pumps and buckets for kids to play with, bamboo poles to build creative shelters. Out front they have a 72-foot skeleton of a blue whale. The bones are from three young male whales, one that was beached in 1980 and two others that washed ashore in 2007. A friend of ours helped butcher one of the latter. He was asked because he’s had no sense of smell since being hit by a truck on his motorcycle years ago and having almost his entire body rebuilt. It is incredible to stand in the belly of that whale and marvel at its size.

The museum has a number of raptors that have been wounded and can’t be released back into the wild. They are out in the sun every afternoon for visitors to get close to and ask questions about. We’d seen several of them on prior visits but this time there was a young falcon that caught my eye. She was stunning. The young man taking care of her told us her story – she’d been shot in the wing in Los Angeles, rescued, cared for and then she found a permanent home at the museum. Every few minutes she would spread her wings in an attempt to fly. My heart ached as I watched her. With a deep sadness in his eyes, her keeper said that most of the birds quickly give up and no longer reach for flight, but not her. She kept trying, refusing to accept the loop on her leg as permanent.

I’ve thought often about that beautiful bird with the intelligent eyes in the last week, about her attempts to break free from her situation, about the long years she can live in captivity and if there will ever come a day when she too gives up the dream. I thought of the human spirit. Of how we can be shot, beaten, raped, imprisoned and still, our spirits can soar. I read recently about a group of women in Congo who have lived through incomprehensible horror and are working to create positive change in their country. The world is full of such stories (if you’re not familiar with any, I recommend reading Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn). The world is also full of people who feel broken, beaten down, defeated, people who are so deeply wounded they only know how to wound others, people who have given up. I believe it is still possible for those people to fly. I believe we are all meant to be beacons of light, though perhaps not in this lifetime.

My friend who was hit by the truck essentially died after the accident and was brought back to life. He describes the experience as akin to taking off a lead jacket and soaring. He had young children at the time and wasn’t ready to go, but he says it was so beautiful that he came back with no fear of death. He will often seek out people who’ve lost loved ones in tragic ways and share his experience with them if they are open to hearing it. He, and others with similar experiences offer us the hope that if the brilliance of our spirits cannot prevail here in our physical bodies, it will shine again when we leave.

It seems to me though, that the goal of this life is to be our unique, luminous selves. To be ourselves, with full awareness and acceptance of our quirks and challenges, our imperfections, and at the same time to hold the vision of living as the best version of who we dream we can be. That might mean a resolution to not lose our temper for a year. It might mean embracing our Nerd Thug Swagger while vowing to speak our truth more often. It might mean creating a beautiful space to honor our creative souls or a site that aims to support and empower women entrepreneurs who are finding their way on the web. It might mean simply getting through the day in one piece with a life that has been completely altered by the ravages of cancer. The goal is not comparison (I am here, I should be there), nor is it perfection (impossible). It is to turn our faces in the direction of trust and take baby steps toward the belief that we are where we are meant to be, that we are who we are meant to be and that we are worthy of our own love.

Wondering how to do that? I’ll be exploring that in a subsequent post. A simple question to ask yourself in any moment is, What would Trust (or Love) do in this situation? Even if you find yourself unable to act on the answer, or if no answer comes, the act of asking the question will help take you out of your habitual patterns.