Tag Archives: trust

sentimentality

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8254174933_dd536912a2_bI try not to get bogged down in being sentimental.

I read this book years ago Conscious Femininity – Interviews with Marion Woodman and this passage stuck with me.

On how sentimentality robs us of our feeling:
Woodman: To me sentimentality is not genuine feeling. Sentimental people tend to ignore their own shadow, their own darkness. They cover up real suffering with self-pity, for example, and stultify their own growth. Or they may focus their energy on another person who is trying to deal with genuine feeling, perhaps genuine evil, and because they’re unable to face that in themselves they say, “Poor thing.” They take a condescending attitude toward people who are fighting for their lives trying to get to their integrity. Sentimental people refuse to suffer. Real anger or real grief are put into cotton wool that smothers any possibility of transformation because they cannot stand the fire, and real feeling is tempered in fire.  Real feeling moves into the conflict and hold the opposition until the new is born. Sentimentality fears the heat of passion. It takes a holier-than-thou attitude and pretends it knows no evil, feels sorry for anyone trapped in compulsive behavior. Nazis were sentimental. Children are not.

Today, I’m being sentimental about my life and feeling sad for myself and at the same time taking pause for where I’ve been, what I’ve learned and where I’m going.  In a way maybe it  is not actual sentimentality, but a remembering, an honoring of days gone by. Not wishing them different, not passing them off, but feeling them the way they come through to me.

Sometimes, okay most times, when I hear a Christmas song, it brings a lump to my throat or I see a family in front of a Thanksgiving table, it turns me to tears. I used to push that aside and not deal with it at all, thinking it was because of the wonder of the season, the magic, the miracle of it all, but it’s not.  It’s grief for what I missed. What I’ve lost – my mother, my father, my two brothers and all the other things – we all have things that make us sentimental.

So, while I’m feeling sad, I remind myself – I’m no “Poor thing.” I fought life for my integrity, my authenticity and I can be okay just grieving – what might take a thousand more days to grieve, but I know if I keep  letting it come in, come through – things will change. I’ve seen it. Instead of avoiding what’s going on, I ask – what am I avoiding? Am I being sentimental or am I willing to really feel what’s going on? and then letting whatever that is in, without sentimentality, might change your life.

Sentimental:
Marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or emotional idealism
Dig into sentiment when you need to, DON’T forget to dig your way back out.
What are you avoiding? What’s asking you to suffer? What makes you sentimental?

For_the_PLAN_of_NOTPLANNING

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I’ve been networking the past few weeks.  Usually the first question from the other person is – what’s your plan? what’s next?
I pause – how do I go about saying – I’m planning not to plan.

We’re supposed to have a plan right? The world wants a plan. The world wants to know when you are getting up, and out, and after it.  The world
wants to know you are safe from being out on the streets and then the world wants to walk away and think…she’s going to be fine. I don’t need to worry about her. DONE

What the world doesn’t realize is that things are changing and not everyone needs to be all getting out there and getting after it all the time.  Finding meaning and our own individual path is becoming collectively important.

With that in mind, my plan is not to plan, but to follow my intuition with an open heart and mind.  To be open to possibility and to what’s next. Grasping, planning, searching all feel wrong right now.  The wrong direction.

Poet David Whyte says, of the time he told everyone he was moving toward becoming a full-time poet – I had an intuition that when you really annunciate what you want in the world you will always be greeted, in the first place, with some species of silence. If the goal is intensely personal, as it should be, others naturally should not be able to understand it the first time it finds its own voice.  It means in a way, in a very difficult way, that you are on to something. 

David Whyte, is in fact, now, a full-time poet and speaker.

Right now – WRITING – is all that feels right to me.  So I’m writing in my own authentic voice. I’m on to something.

Whenever I am in a place like this – the path is not yet laid.  I’ve been here before and tried to plan my escape – afterward it never looked anything like the plan I started with.

I do not know which way to go, because I haven’t done it before.

I can look at what others have done, but that was their path. I can and will take what resonates with me from their experiences. For anyone else it will be different.

I’m willing to let intuition lead on all fronts.

And in the process of not planning while writing this morning I was thinking – I have four or five sessions I could post, which one do I choose? This quote from Joe Campbell came up on my Facebook feed – Joe wins, always.

‎”Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s footsteps. Each of us has to find his own way, and this is what gives our Occidental world its initiative and creative quality. Nobody can give you a mythology. The images that mean something to you, you’ll find in your dreams, in your visions, in your actions – and you’ll find out what they are after you’ve passed them.” Joseph Campbell

Be true to yourself – listen to your intuition – it is speaking to you.

What’s your plan to not plan? What’s your intuition telling you?