Hello you beautiful people. It’s time to dive in on our topic for June!
This month is all about your relationship with your stories. *ahem* Let’s take a deep breath before we even begin, shall we?
Take a moment.
Get still.
Sit up a bit.
Give space to the back of your neck.
Let your lungs fill more deeply as you breathe slowly.
Let your exhale be twice as long as your inhale.
Feel that swirl of tingly energy move about your body in response to the focus you’re bringing to it.
Thank your body for its communication and connection.
Take another deep breath.
Feel yourself notice the space between the inhale and the exhale.
Sit in gratitude for a moment.
One more good, deep breath.
Wiggle your toes, your fingers, your nose.
Hug yourself and say thank you.
This moment is connection.
Okay.
There’s a lot going on. This is *always* true in some regard, but it’s acutely evident right now and there’s no version of me that can charge right into our next topic as though it’s happening in the world we lived in even a few days ago.
In many ways, our work here in Expansive Capacity is uniquely aligned with handling exactly this sort of thing. It is *because* we take a deeper look at things that otherwise could easily trip us up as we navigate our storytelling lives that we find ourselves equipped — as much as anyone CAN be equipped — to have the hard conversations right now.
WITHOUT letting those hard convos turn into our own spin-out, more pain than exists in the convos themselves, or new blocks to overcome later.
THAT is huge.
I want to be sure that everyone here knows we — your facilitators — are ready for the hard conversations. We may not get it right, but we will be here for dialogue. There is no one in our world who should ever be made to feel unseen. Please be sure to reach out if you feel there’s a way we could support you better. Again, we may not get it right, but we will commit to try.
And of course, as always, we can have those convos right here in the dojo… specifically, this — Expansive Capacity — is the perfect place, as we lead the new Hollywood with this work.
So.
Let’s talk about your relationship with your stories.
We’re born with two stories. They’re in our DNA. Those stories are commands in our nervous system that say, “Don’t die,” and the stories are “If I am not fed, I will die,” and, “If I am dropped, I will die.”
Every other story — EVERY other story — is learned from that point forward. And those stories that we continue to feed with a loop of, “This is true. This is true. This is true,” become the makeup of our daily reality.
We have the ability to rewrite our stories approximately 60,000 times a day. (Okay, sure, we *could* be at the lower end of the research, here — around 12,000 thoughts per day. But I believe creatives are probably at the high end of the spectrum… especially while we’re trying to SLEEP, right?!? 😉 Ha ha!) Approximately 95% of the thoughts we have in a day are identical to the thoughts we had the day before.
Again, this ties into that whole “anything more than 10% different, the brain rejects outright” thing we’ve been working on, here.
And the way we begin making things that are more than 10% different (like holding up something gold and shiny, living in our dream house, being in the healthiest relationship of our wildest fantasies, having ponies-for-everyone money, or anything else that feels out of reach) feel attainable (not just NOT REJECTED by the brain) is by using that itty-bitty 5% of those 60,000 daily thoughts to specifically focus on the stories we want to tell.
Whoa, right?
We’re trying to use a TINY window to create a massive change, in some cases.
Good news! We can! 🙂
Want some science to back that up? Listen to this brilliance from Dr. Bruce Lipton (be ready to take lots of notes, replay multiple times, and hit pause to give your brain a break — this shit is DENSE, y’all).
Sure, sometimes our own early life experiences are in the mix. Of course! But when we consider how many life experiences we’ve had SINCE “early life” and how much of our pattern-tracking comes from actively seeking out reinforcement of what we already believe (our family’s stories, generally), it’s a miracle we’re ever able to wedge groundbreaking things into our worldview.
(It’s also no surprise how many Questioners and Rebels seem to gather in our world, here. OF COURSE y’all would be more aligned with the work we’re doing here… excavating enoughness, pushing against “the done thing,” and really questioning what we’re *required* to believe is true about ourselves and the world.)
So, as creatives, we already have a better position from which to create our own stories — the way we want them to be.
Please remind yourself this truth when you feel yourself replaying a story that may not even be yours.
The work of this month is simple: Question your stories. Take a breath. Take a beat. Take a moment to actually ask yourself, “Why do I like seasoning my food this way? Is this even my choice, based on taste? Or is it a story about how much salt or pepper must be used, reinforced by decades of momentum?” And I started with something really banal like food seasoning because as you know, we work ourselves UP to what we believe about the bigger, grizzlier, more impact-filled things after building a muscle for the new habit of BEING CURIOUS with the little things first.
A note from Keith you may have missed in the comments in an earlier month’s Expansive Capacity work: “Your problems are stories. Once you’re okay sharing those stories, you’ve experienced healing.” My addition to that: “Instead of categorizing your failures, outline your stories. Emotions are just neurological reactions to attachments.”
So… whether your story is “I have ADD” or “Obesity runs in my family” or even “It’s hard out here for a pimp,” I’d love it if you would take a moment to really examine where the story comes from. Whose it is. Whether you even want to bring it with you into tomorrow (or an hour from now) because the only reason the story persists is because YOU keep telling it *and* you keep tolerating it when others keep telling it about you. (Revisit your relationship with boundaries if you need to tighten that part of this work right up!)
I have a long-standing story that goes, “I burn water.” It’s the jokey way I make it okay that I never learned to cook. I never learned to cook because when I was at the age which my mother would’ve brought me into the kitchen to share in the experience, she and I were suddenly on our own, scraping by on $8000 a year, basically on spin-out mode… and I learned how to make rice cakes with peanut butter and raisins for lunch, not how to replicate her fucking epic cast-iron skillet cornbread.
As I got older and her astrology business flourished, I had no interest in joining her in the kitchen. By then I was a busy hand model, and I am also left-handed which means everything I do looks “backwards” to most of the world… so every time I would use a knife in front of my mother, she would scream in fear that I was going to cut myself. (BTW, I still to this day have to do a little meditative breathing before I use a sharp knife. I have done the work enough to know I no longer need to say what I used to say — which was: “I have a fear of knives.” Because whose story do you bet that was anyway?)
One of the many books I have still in me is actually titled I Burn Water (and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves) because I learned four years ago doing Whole30 that I’m actually exceptionally skilled — if not slow — in the kitchen when I want to be. (I generally do not want to be, though. Other people are far better at it and I can afford to pay them to be better at it for me, so I do.)
But back to the story of never learning how to cook with my mother’s guidance… there’s pain there. There’s loss there. There’s a she-died-when-I-was-30-and-there’s-no-going-back there. I will never learn to cook “that way” and the way I survive the pain of that seemingly innocuous story is by joking that I burn water. This does not make the story feel good; it just protects me from having to go deep about where the story really lives.
This is true for every one of us. We have a story that seems simple and wee… but it’s something that could actually stand to have a little untangling.
Step One: Itemizing our stories. I mean, full-on grabbing a notebook and writing ’em down. Everything from “the Earth is round” to “Santa Claus isn’t real” to “I can’t eat gluten” to “The struggle is real” to “It takes money to make money” to “I have a slow metabolism” to “I’m a stress monster” and anything you can think of that feels true.
By having them inventoried, we can examine them to be sure they’re even ours (much less whether they’re even real).
Step Two: Note your suspicions about some of these stories. Like, right in the margin of your notebook, stuff like “This feels like Mom’s” and “Daddy always said that” and “My brothers are sure of this… I’m not, but I do keep saying it” and so on. You may end up journaling some bigger things at this point and that’s fine, but start from a place of good ol’ dispassionate labeling.
Step Three: (And this is the fun part!) Decide to believe differently about one of the more basic stories on your list. Call this an experiment. You’re just looking for data! As you feel yourself wanting to choose the grizzliest, remember that I want you to select something small at first. Something there’s no consequence to you believing differently.
Here’s an example: “Socks belong in the bottom drawer.” This was a story my mother repeated so much that I thought it was mine… until one day in my early 20s, I decided to put my socks in the top drawer. I remember my mother’s story: Order your dresser from head to toe! and that’s adorable logic I can’t really argue with being a decent system… but here I am in my first adult apartment of my own, and no one else is gonna ever need to open any of my drawers, much less have an opinion about where things go… so I’ve put my socks in the top drawer.
One day, my mother visits me up at college and for some reason, she’s in my top drawer. GASPING. “Bonnie! Socks don’t go in the top drawer! What is going on here?!?”
She’s partially kidding and being silly… but she’s also very serious. Later, when we talked about this day, she said it’s when she knew that I was my own person and I was making my own rules. (Personally, I think there were many far larger examples of this way earlier in my life, but this one felt big TO HER and that’s why I remember it so clearly.)
So, for this work’s starting place, I want you using something as little as where you put things in your home or why you take the route you take to get somewhere you regularly travel. Just observe how much of what you make true in your life is done so out of momentum and what is done so out of (your) choice.
Get curious about what you can choose differently.
Share below some of the stories — yes, even the more grizzly ones — you’d like to consider telling yourself differently. Perhaps together we can start up some momentum for changing them. As always, see it as an experiment. The brain doesn’t reject it as much that way!
Aligned Hustle Calendar
At some point in June, pretty much EVERYTHING will be in retrograde. Shocker, huh? Retrograde is always time for the RE’s: revisit, reassess, reflect… and with Mars being direct at this time, we’ll be really hankering for forward motion and starting things. Resist the urge. Too much in retrograde for this war-fire-masculine energy to push against. LUCKILY Mars is in Pisces, so it’s calmer about what it wants to start up than it could be in other signs.
For your full moon in Sagittarius (complete with a lunar eclipse) on the 5th, amp up the gratitude, enjoy that confidence, try to soothe that anxiety, and release attachment to anything that keeps you from feeling free. Remember that eclipses intensify everything and a full moon is already in need of release. Because it’s in Sag, that’s fiery and yearning for exploration. Try to keep the focus on internal processes if at all possible. In the end, we only ever control our own reaction to things anyway. Remind yourself that, here.
Well hello again, Mercury retrograde! I see you coming up on the 17th of June! As always, with Mercury retrograde, you know the drill. Don’t start no shit; don’t sign no shit. Edit your old work instead of creating new work. Take a meeting about a stalled-out project that you may be able to rekindle. Don’t be surprised when your ex shows up in your DMs. It’s a time for communication to reconnect with previously-ignited sparks rather than initiating anything.
If you MUST sign a contract, upgrade your technology, or start a new endeavor, double-check EVERYTHING and don’t be surprised to have missed something. People will be running late, traffic will hit snags, and communication will be muddy through July 12th.
Meanwhile, we’ve got a lovely new moon in Cancer on the 20th, RIGHT as the sun has moved into Cancer too. This all happens quite fast that late Saturday night and there’s a solar eclipse for us here too! Plant some seeds about family, nurturing, self-care, and other yummy Cancer type things. Remember that we’re planting seeds for six months out, so really think about how you best feel cared for and put intentions together around that!
Remember how I said at some point pretty much everything is retrograde this month? Welcome Neptune to the retro posse on the 22nd! This means we’ve got Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, and now Neptune *all* retrograde at once. We will have a much clearer view of a harsh reality while Neptune is in retrograde. Anything we mistakenly thought was working will reveal its truth to us now. Hoo, boy!
But we have some good news on the 24th when Venus leaves its retrograde illusion and gets back going in a direction that makes our ability to correctly see beauty, value, and love way more in focus! Yay!
Mars moves from Pisces to Aries on the 27th. Remember what I said above about the calmness of that combo? Yeah… now? Not so much. Fire in fire and it’s still in the minority with all the retrograde elsewhere so the kick you’ll start feeling by month’s end could be a really exciting or stressful time, depending on how you’ve been prepping yourself for launching things and initiating things these past few months.
Definitely use that energy on the 27th especially to promote your work out in the world! Speaking of GSD days, let’s lay ’em out for June, shall we?
My first favorite we hit is on the 4th, and I’m crazy about the energy on the 7th. The 9th is yummy for group work and the 13th is divine for having a lot of fun after a long morning void moon! GSD is a little tempered on the 14th and 15th, thanks to the numerology of those days, but it’s still firing you up in meaningful ways if you need it until the moon goes void in the late afternoon on the 15th. The 16th is great for doing big-picture things with larger, long-ranging impact. On the 18th, you’ll get a boost of Gemini energy in the afternoon and could use it to do some good communicating (but remember, Mercury has JUST gone retrograde, so double-check EVERYthing).
The new moon on the 20th is also super creative, thanks to that 3 numerology, so maybe even create a vision board for the energy! You’ll want to make stuff happen on the 21st and 22nd, but you may be feeling a bit emotional about it all. Depends on how Cancer moon affects you (it picks up *everyone’s* feelings; damn that empathy!). Still, the 22nd is generally a good GSD day, and you know I love the Leo moon on the 23rd, even though the numerology is a 6 (domestic).
We have the longest void moon I have *ever* seen on the 24th. Technically, it starts on the night of the 23rd and goes through the morning of the 25th. WHAT?!? I know. It’s like 35-hours long! So much for all the strutting we’d normally do on a Leo moon. (Remember my guide for what NOT to do during a void moon, based on the sign it’s heading INTO.) Once we’re out of that void moon and fully into Virgo on the 25th, we have amazing GSD energy through the weekend, actually. Hooray! Just remember that Mars energy bucking and super eager. Try to keep it in check.
Finally, the 30th could be a good GSD day thanks to the 4 numerology and a full week of Venus now moving forward… but that Scorpio moon gets intense so be prepared to be feeling all the things. And that means NOT JUST YOUR stuff.
As always, for those of you in our Aligned Advantage membership, we’ll go deeper with all of this and I’ll share some of what I’m learning in my new astrology classes of course! If any of you would like to book a reading with me, I am now doing that (almost for real… getting braver) and it’s super fun!
Please give yourself lots of space to feel your feelings — especially as we head into Cancer season in a few weeks. More deep breaths. More self-hugs. More count-to-ten before reacting. Good advice always, but especially now.
I’m so excited to hear about your stories and how you wish to rewrite them for the best possible endings!
All my ninja love,
Wanna join us for our monthly LIVE interactive mastermind meeting? Register here ASAP! This month’s meeting will take place via Zoom on Thursday, June 18th, at 12:30pm PDT. Translate that to your time zone here.
After you register, you will receive an email with information on how to connect. You are welcome to go on camera for this mastermind session, or simply unmute yourself to participate live audio-only. Yes, we will be recording the meeting and putting its replay here for you to consume. Hooray!
Please post questions *here* (even though the robot email from Zoom includes an email address for questions). Thank you. 😉
If you’ve never Zoomed before, we recommend you get all set up *before* our meeting. Zoom is free, and there’s info on how to get going here.
And of course, any questions for us, pop ’em in below, along with your awesome workout! This continues to be where the magic IN YOU happens outwardly. Thank you for sharing your gifts with us… and the whole damn world! They’re important and so are you, babe. I cannot WAIT to learn all about your stories this month (and beyond)!
Here is the replay of our June 18, 2020 gathering, in which we got into the origins of our stories, the crucial ages at which they were adopted, and the work of dismantling them should we so choose. Treating everything as an experiment is SUCH a fabulous way to go about this, y’all. Let’s dive in on the goodness, shall we?
Your amazing, support-filled, groundbreakingly beautiful chat is here. Keep this support flowing in the comments below.
Here is some homework, as we round out our focus on Your Relationship with Your Stories. Remember, next month we’ll head into Your Relationship with Permission. When we work through giving ourselves PERMISSION next month to rewrite some of these stories, this work we’re doing today will help us be ready to be ready to be ready to take full advantage of this restructuring!
~ Decide that rewriting your stories is an experiment you’re willing to conduct. You needn’t go in hot with the biggest, baddest, scariest, deepest-rooted story of your life here. Just decide it’s safe to experiment with telling a new story in some low-impact place, and ideally start with a story that is NOT showing up on multiple lists.
~ “What lists?” you ask? Ah… lovely. Make a list of GUILT, SHAME, FRUSTRATION, RESENTMENT, and JOY. List off the stories that live on each of those pages in your journal or notebook or Google doc. What themes are you noticing? At what age(s) do you feel some of these stories became planted for you? Whose stories are they REALLY? And are you open to the experiment of telling a slightly different story — remember that pinky toe outside the bubble of tolerance for where this story currently lives — about it now?
~ Check out this TED Talk from Dr. Becky Bailey: Wiring the Brain for Success. Really play with when it was that certain stories became real for you and consider exploring what parts of your brain may love to have a little updating and rewiring right now. The time is SO RIGHT for revolutionizing everything in our world! It’s ALL feeling so big… might as well use this ripe time for restructuring the foundation of how we believe what we believe, right?
~ Create a Care and Feeding Instructions document for your soul, your spirit, your heart, your YOUness. What are the requirements for keeping this baby alive and happy… and how can you start meeting those requirements more of the time? And how can you begin setting guidelines for convos you need to have with people in your life about the harder subject that come up? This is the foundation for fighting for growth and change vs. fighting to tear each other down.
~ Ask yourself if it’s safe to rewrite stories from your life without making the person who planted them there WRONG for having done so? It may not be! And that’s okay. But knowing this — getting this data — allows for room to start the work. Remember, data is a story! You’ve got this. And we’ve got you! 🙂
Let’s continue to jam about this below and as always, I’ll remind y’all that I truly love you all so much. As always, as creatives, our work is to make real so much of what others label as pain too great to even fathom. But also JOY. Keep building these muscles using your most creative talents. And remember to take extreme care of your empath storytelling soul. This is a lot and we’re just at the beginning of it all. We have important work to do. I love you!
I am *finally* coming back to this work! I’ve missed you all.
I’m going to probably post a bunch of times over the course of the month as new stories are excavated and examined, but I’d like to start with a story I successfully rewrote:
I had a story that I cradled and nurtured for many years: I’m crazy, I’m evil and the world would be better off without me.
Woof, right?
This story drove the car of my life. It wasn’t in the driver’s seat, but it was always in the rear view mirror. And as I began to dig deeper through our work here and therapy, it began to fight back.
I was hospitalized a year ago for a suicide attempt. It would be the first of countless over 2019. Why? Because that story was getting SCARED. It knew it’s days were numbered. I had uncovered so much shit covering this ancient story, and it knew it was time for it to go, too. So it fought back harder. And, truly, I believed I was broken fundamentally as a person, that I was born without any actual desire to live. I just believed that. I fully believed my story and felt like all the therapy and mindset work in the world wouldn’t be enough to fix me. I believed, fully and deeply, that I was a ticking time bomb. I knew I didn’t have long for this earth, because my story was too loud.
One genius care provider suggested I might have something known as Seratonin Deficiency Disorder. All SDD means is you have a brain that hungrily absorbs ALL seratonin, leaving nothing left. She suggested I give an SSRI a try to see if my day to day experience would change.
I resisted like hell. I had all kinds of anxiety spirals that drove me to more spirals with google searches of why SSRIs are bad. I considered leaving this care provider’s practice. I fought, tooth and nail, until I saw how my relationship with my best friend had deteriorated. It was exhausting to be friends with someone who believed they were a ticking time bomb, after all. And suddenly, for all my initial story protecting, I did NOT want the story “Sheila is a self-absorbed asshole” to take root in my life. My friend was too important to me.
So, I tried the medicine.
And DAMN it knocked me off my feet. I had half a baby dose the first day and I couldn’t drive because of what was happening to my brain chemistry; a friend had to pick me up and take me home. Over the next few days, I changed. I settled. For the first time in my life, I felt PEACE. I had literally NEVER felt that sensation before. Often it made me feel claustrophobic because it was such a foreign sensation.
I’ve been on an SSRI for half a year now, and it has completely changed my life. It helped me change my story. I’m experiencing joy, peace, the feeling of being loved. I am HAPPY. I feel radically enough, and I love it. And while my story likes to try to creep up occasionally (because do they ever really leave us?), I know in my heart of hearts that I am not broken. I deserve to be here as much as anyone. I’m not a failure of a human being. I’m not a mistake. I love life and I love every second my lungs fill with air. I love myself and I love, love these new stories.
This work is SO important. I’m looking forward to getting to continue to excavate stories that no longer serve me. I’m always here if anyone is experiencing similar stories like the one I shared above and needs a sounding board. Hugs to you all!!
Okay, so first off, {{{hugs}}}. I love you. Welcome back here. Thank you for sharing this. Can’t wait for more.
Next, YES on the fears, stories, etc., getting LOUDER when they know they’re about to be put out of a job. That is their survival mode kicking in, desperate to get to stay. It’s Steven Pressfield’s dragon we have to slay. It will do everything it can to keep us from our life’s work. And when our stories are about our lack of worth in the world, you betcha they’re doing everything they can to get us to just end it all. Right the fuck ON! And well spotted.
Well spotted for your therapist too! And bless your friend and your caring enough for them to at least be open to trying the SSRI. I have been on SSRIs here and there in my life (mostly in my 20s) and for SURE the brain is just a vat of chemicals and chemical reactions and there are times we need an assist for all the rerouting we’re trying to do. ESPECIALLY if something has gotten stuck on repeat in a neighborhood we can’t use our own chemistry to get out of. We wouldn’t judge someone with menstrual cramps for popping a Midol. I see this as no different and I’m glad you had the option and took it. And that it’s working. You may find you need to stay on it forever; you may find you can come off it now and then; you may find you can come off it forever. It’s all just a game of checking in, recalibrating, doing the EMOTIONAL work of it as well as the chemical, and staying super kind to yourself for being exactly where you are, ever.
This is a phenomenal post to read and I am thrilled you’re loving filling your lungs with air. As someone who attempted suicide herself, I see you and I’m glad we both had spirits with other plans for when it was that we were gonna check out. I love you.
Vulnerable, brave, and beautiful. I’m so glad you shared!
Welcome back, Sheila! Thank you for sharing this. Sending you so much light!
((((((Hug))))) Sheila. Thank you for sharing this. I am so proud of you! I will never forget sitting next to you in the desert, feeling such a kinship with you at the SMFA Escape. You are brave. You are fabulous. You are vital. You are fierce! Thank you for being here and for sharing your evolution.
I’m working through that “I am a mistake” story too. My parents told me that constantly when I was a kid and I’ve been rewiring that message ever since I woke up in my 20s. I’m 50 and that message still has pain, so I’m very thankful to Bon and this month’s goal of choosing different stories.
One of my favorite quotes is “There are no mistakes.”
I am a divine miracle. I belong here. And I celebrate that in you too, Sheila.
Thank you for taking care of yourself, Sheila.
As Oprah says, “We are radiant spiritual beings in human bodies.” I love that message. I love you. And I love me. Sharing the love!
I love us! This is all so beautiful!
So I wrote down about 20 stories to start, mostly of the larger variety. I’m grateful that even in the writing I had a sense of where they came from.
But the one I want to mention today popped up as a result of Bon having me recalibrate a comment I’d posted in Dana Middleton’s group. That reminder POPPED a story that I immediately wanted to re-tell. So here it is.
When I was a kid I auditioned for Evita at the Kennedy Center in DC. And I got a callback! It was SO thrilling! I had to sing, I think it was happy birthday in that big hall in front of the other kids and the chaperones and producers etc. With big lights. It felt so good! We went home and I overheard my babysitter telling my mom that when it was my turn I started to sing and the woman running the callbacks was about to stop me. Apparently I threw her this look and she let me finish.
In my mind, it felt just awful. The only reason I even got to finish was because of, I don’t know, pity or politeness or something. But not because of my talent. So I’ve carried that story with me. People are pitying me or placating or patronizing, condescending, choose your own painfully negative word and that was the story.
So the other day when I came up with this great recalibration for the phrase I’d used on facebook. My brain thought “well if you’re SO good at reframing stories, do that one!” And immediately popped in “You are so powerful that when you were only 7 you silenced an adult with just a LOOK” Damn. Now it’s a new reframe so I can feel my body working to get comfortable with it. But it’s really cool! 🙂
Good LORD that’s delicious. Well done, Alex! YESSSSSSSSS!! So so so good!
❤️ ❤️ ❤️
YES! 😀
❤️❤️
That is freakin BRILLIANT, Alex! Bravo!
Oh thanks Laura!!
OMG the WILDEST thing happened and I have to share!!
I was thinking about that 5% of our day we can dedicate to new stories and how I really wanted to own it. So, every time I remembered, I was walking around my life in the energy of the story “I’m a sci-fi star” and it was GLORIOUS.
What happens? I fucking kid you not, I was cleaning out my folks’ house and found Carrie Fisher’s hat!!! I didn’t even know we had her hat. So you better believe it’s at the center of my manifestation altar. This work is MAGIC
WHAT?!?
This is EVERYTHING!!
OMG, I can actually see you telling this story on the latenight talkshow sofa!! OMG OMG OMG
love it!
Holy mother of all intensities, Batman! Mercury was just having a grand old time in the 12th HOUSE when I was born! I mean. Goodness gracious there’s a lot in that 12th house!!
And I already think I screwed up ha! I think it’s closer to the 11th house (I was looking at the Taurus symbol, not the mercury symbol…) Reading up again…
Mercury is in your 11th house! 🙂 Saturn is the only thing in your 12th.
I haven’t had a chance to itemize my stories yet, though I have a purple notebook just waiting for me to do this. I have been ticking them off in my head though. And Bonnie, I know you said to go small, but the biggies are coming up for me.
Astoundingly “Acting is hard,” which I’ve NEVER thought in my life recently came up, and I think that’s my fear trying to keep me safe, so I flipped it to “Acting is easy,” and that felt better instantly.
“You have to be thin and young to be a leading lady.” Fuck that. I see Melissa McCarthy, Judi Dench, and Viola Davis, among others, flip that shit on its head! So: “I AM PERFECT AS I AM RIGHT NOW AND I AM A SUCCESSFUL LEADING LADY AT EVERY AGE” is my new mantra. I AM ENOUGH.
The big one which surprised me was “You have to have a stable job in order to support your acting career.” That’s my Dad, and as much as I thought I rebelled against him, somehow this got into my consciousness. It came up twice for me this month, and I know that any time a message appears twice, it’s a sign that the Universe is like, “Hello, Laura! Pay attention!”
I realize that deciding to believe differently about this story is utterly essential, not only to my creative career, but to my happiness and well being, because I’ve been carrying this load of “I need to do This in order to do That” since I was a kid. I was in Advanced Placement EVERYTHING just so I could have my parents’ ok to do drama, choir and band. And this was after I’d already been paid as a child actor. My parents didn’t trust it, and so this message was drilled into my head and drilled into my head: “Get a real job!”
It wasn’t til I caught myself this month, thinking, “I have to do this support job in order to do my acting” that I realized I was operating under old programming.
So how do I flip this?
“You have to have a stable job in order to support your acting career.”
Becomes
“My acting career is financially stable enough to support me.”
I’ve really struggled with accepting how much I love acting. I’ve kept trying to hide from it during this challenging time, yet some of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had during this quarantine have been doing my own show, editing, telling a story with the footage I’m cobbling together. And maybe that’s not acting. Maybe that’s showrunning. But I love being big and bold and bubbly, and I love sharing stories with people, stories that lift each other up.
I finally watched Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette,” and I’m kind of tripping out on the power of storytelling paralleling with this month of deconstructing the stories we tell ourselves. There are the stories we NEED to tell and then there are the stories we need to break.
“There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”
And maybe that’s how it all intertwines. I need to break the story of being “the good girl,” “the perfect little miss,” and go balls to the wall, allowing my full and utter fabulous fierceness to come out, owning and loving myself every step of the way.
Ah… this workout is glorious, Laura. SO GOOD! Just really wonderful!
Okay, so I think let’s get rid of the word ACTING and the word ACTOR all together. Like, instead of this work being about the messages you got about acting, it’s just STORYTELLING now or CREATING or however you’d like to label it that gets it OUT of the way it was labeled in your childhood and teenhood. Let’s see if that relieves the pressure from what it is you love doing AND if it helps segregate what you’re doing now from all those messages you got growing up about whether any of it was safe. Can you try that?
I think everyone needs to watch Nanette multiple times. It’s such a mastery of storytelling and format and presentation and vulnerability and authenticity and power. I just loooooooove it and this reminds me I need to watch it again (it’s been two years since I last saw it) because — like you said — anytime I see something twice… sure enough, a masterminder talked about having watched it on Friday. So, here we go! 😉
Oh YEAH, Bonnie! “Storytelling” (vs Acting) creates an immediate sense of ease. Funny. 🙂
And I want to revisit Nanette as well. Did you see Douglas? It was also utterly brilliant, but her focus on trauma in the Nanette completely resonated with me. And how she tore down her own story of that one event at the bus stop, going from the joke version to the REAL version, was completely transformative.
No! I haven’t seen Douglas. Thank you. Will be sure to add it to my list. So glad “storytelling” sits in a different place in your brain and heart. That’s awesome. Good work, darlin’!
Wow! That Superpower Sunday. BAM! So needed! And also I don’t remember if it was Bonne but as a result of our last live session I’ve been giving myself so much permission to sleep and it’s caused me to realize HOW DEFIICIENT I am! I have been focusing on no one else’s stories (no tv, no books, 1% social media for classes) and last night I crawled in bed at 7:30 and stayed in bed until 7:30. And that was after naps yesterday and I’ve had more naps today. Wow! I haven’t written my lists yet but the conscious awareness of when stories come into my world is exciting to catch.
There are a couple reframes that take longer to work through (trying to release those for now and look for easier ones).
But the relief of giving myself a break. That’s, well, that’s everything isn’t it?
So much love to this amazing powerful crew!
Fabulous! YES, work on those easier, lower-friction ones first. Build up the muscle for getting better at it. Then tackle the biggies. 🙂 Good job!
I actually wrote about this deficiency here. It’s one of 5 (always 5 with me). See what else you can give yourself so you’re operating at your highest/best.
Great work, hon! Enjoy the new moon/eclipse intention-setting!
❤️ ❤️ Thank you! been working on that as well, yay!
I just clocked a deeply seated story, that took root about 11 years ago.
I’ve been very inspired lately in relation to acting and filmmaking, unpacking theories and my relationship to art. I started to get some very big ideas, ideas that will require immense research, and even got me excited about the potential of formal study again. And then this little voice came up being like, “delusions of grandeur”. I was able to take note, and ask where that came from. I remembered visiting my sister at university when I was 16. I attended a Psych class with her, and they were briefly covering Manic Depression (now referred to as Bipolar Disorder), where that day’s focus was Mania. I had no indication of any real mental health issues at that point, but due to the nature of high school and never feeling like I quite fit in, I did have this hum of “what is it that’s wrong with me?” It was like a moment of hypochondria for my psyche, and I immediately became wary that I had all the symptoms, in particular delusions of grandeur. This is the component that has stuck with me. For YEARS I have used this against myself for any big dreams. I’d been doubting the ambitious dreams I had because I was wary of deluding myself into believing I am capable of grand things. Not only is this a pretty far reach for this story, but it’s also wrong about what delusions of grandeur is to begin with.
I’m forgiving myself for how this little seed got planted and what this story thought it was protecting me from. I’m grateful to have labelled it, recognized that it’s at play, and I can’t wait to tell my therapist 😉
Wow! Emily, this is a biggie!! I am so glad you’ve rooted this one up, labeled it, and can start to heal the space it has taken up in your stories for so long. Wow wow wow! THANK YOU for sharing this. I’m sending you so much love as you rewrite this story in so many ways!!
<3 <3 <3