Give a Party with Meaning

Two of my clients have recently had surgery for cancer - one for third-stage ovarian cancer and the other for metastatic breast cancer. Both these women are intelligent, resourceful, creative and courageous. Both are working with traditional and alternative healing approaches. Cancer has inspired both to find deeper self-awareness, ask profound spiritual questions, and to live more consciously. They both respect and are grateful for the challenges and gifts having cancer has brought to their psycho-spiritual journey through life.


Both are aware that many of their friends and family aren’t comfortable including the big “C” in their conversations or expressing their big “C” caring and concerns. I am blessed as my role as counselor means I must be authentic in my listening and my speaking around all kinds of “big” and awkward subjects. The context of my relationship with both of these clients gives me permission to ask real questions and offer my perspectives and support.

I care deeply about my clients and in meeting their needs for a counseling friendship and serving their personal development, I always learn and grow and heal. In addressing a particular situation, I often experience an inspired truth or creative possibility that has benefit to all of us, not just my client.

In conversation with one of these women around the dilemma and burden of the “unspoken” thoughts and feelings in their friends and family, a new opportunity appeared that I want to share with all of you. It is not just about cancer, its about so many aspects of our life journeys and our loving communities.

Have a party! Not just gathering people together for food, drink and chatter. Add a deeper dimension of a shared expressions of meaning and love that’s fun and profound.

The party can be hosted by the “center of attention” or by someone who loves her or him. The party can be any size but 4 to 16 is a great size for comfortable expression.

This is a love feast - a party with love as the reason for showing up and being present.

After the initial food, drink and conversation, ask everyone to gather in one room and let the meaning begin. Everyone is asked to express their love, feelings and wishes for the center of attention, the one sitting in the “love seat”.

Here are several suggestions for a creative and liberating process of expression.

An Image of Love

Have large sheets of drawing paper, lots of crayons, markers, colored pencils, magazines and glue sticks. For 30 minutes or more let everyone create a work of personal imagination about their feelings around the cancer (or whatever crisis is being experienced like divorce, loss of a job, etc), their friendship and their offer of love and wishes for the future. Assure everyone that this is not about artistic skill but about love and meaning. Ask everyone to share their “work of Love” and describe the meaning behind each image, color or form and what they were feeling while they were working on it. Give them permission to express their truth (which includes, saying they need to pass on the sharing).

A Card of Inspiration

Get a set of angel cards or any other set of inspirational cards. Have everybody choose a card. Go around the room and share what the particular card expresses about their feelings in regard to the cancer, their friend and their shared relationship. They can also share what the card inspires in them.

The Index Card

This is probably the least threatening exercise for those who aren't used to expressing feeling in pubic. Give each person an index card or a sheet of paper and a pen. Ask them to write down their feeling and wishes. Have them fold it up and place it in a basket or bowl. Then ask one person to read them all out loud. You can bring in humor with this exercise by asking people to add something funny about the “center of attention” - I’ve even suggested they make up something wild and crazy.


The relaxed and warm feeling of a party and the permission, encouragement and creative means to express love will give a memorable, liberating and healing experience for everyone, especially one in the love seat.

Yes, giving and attending a party of meaning can be a moving experience, so have a box of tissues for all the tears of love. It is so special.

On Completion and Hope

Spring is a time of beginnings. I love beginnings. I love the creative potential living in beginnings.

And, I have a certain uneasiness, maybe sometimes a terror, of completion. This is probably because I confuse completion with ending, death, nevermore, impossible to alter or evolve, ultimate separation.

So I feel I am overwhelmed with incompletions. Paradoxically, this is hardly true as my life is full of completions. I get things done and done well. Yet, I seem to avoid looking at and recognizing the completions and closures that abound in my life.

I am going to use this post as a way to explore my feelings. From my experience as a counselor I am aware many people have similar issues. If you are one of those lucky individuals with a clear sense of process – of beginning, middle and end – I would ask you to post your words of wisdom to share with the rest of us.


What is a way I can reframe “completion” so that I feel safe and alive?


I just looked up the definition and the etymological root of completion. I could write a book on each of the definitions.

From the Latin root I get the picture of “fulfill.”

The dictionary offers several definitions:

• Collected together – ordered.
• Run its course – finished, done.
• Entire, full, to the greatest extent.
• Successfully throw to a receiver – boy, this is important for me as I am a message maker and need to get the message to my audience. If I have difficulty completing I will never fulfill my life’s purpose.
• Make whole or perfect – I am so stuck with not feeling whole or loveable/perfect that I project it on to my life and my work.

Hope never lets me complete!

There is an insight forming in my soul as I write. It is about hope. Hope keeps me from being aware of all my "completions." Hope keeps me focused on the future. Completion is a focus on what has been done in the past.

My painful childhood developed in me such a strong sense of hope and an strong identity with hope. Hope was my survival. To survive I needed to endure and hope. I hoped for rescue. I did not plan an escape. Rescue is wishful and passive. Escape is intentional and active. I did not have a plan! I did not have benchmarks of accomplishment. I had hope.

Like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, I thought sleep (even with all the nightmares) was the way to pass the time until the rescuing kiss touched my lips. Hope kept telling me all I had to do was go to sleep and dream. I did not need to have a plan of action with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

My identification with hope as the path to fulfillment was so powerful that all that I was actually doing to shape my life (when I wasn’t just hoping) seemed like a vague disembodied dream. I couldn’t experience process or completion. I only felt real and my life only felt real when I was hoping.

Hope can be addictive. From a neurochemical perspective, hope triggers the release of dopamine, the pleasure reward neurotransmitter that is the root of addiction. We call addictive, dopamine-producing drugs, dope. My dope has been hope.

How can I give up hope? Hope has been such a good friend. I could whisper to hope all my dreams. Hope just listens and smiles. Yes, the smiles gave me comfort, but what I really needed was courage and a plan. Hope doesn’t change things and doesn’t complete things. Hope does not get things done. Hope just produces more hope or fades and sends me crashing into despair. Hope is my dope.


Now I need to face hope withdrawal. I need to be conscious of process and completion. I need to no longer look at completion as death mere evidence that “my dreams have come true, my wishes have been fulfilled.” Damn! Dreams and wishes just call forth hope. Now I must set intentions for results, take action and live without hope. I can have a life of completions or I can have a life of hope. This should not be a hard choice, but hope feels so good and so familiar, can I really live without it. Yes!!!

My life going forward is shaped by completion consciousness. Each day is filled with getting things done and building more and more awareness of what was completed, what benchmarks were met, what I did. Noting how I move toward completion is an accounting system. I manage my will/intention/completion accounts each day.

Now I understand why taking a course on Conscious Bookkeeping included homework on completion. (I took this teleseminar in February) I wanted to give up hoping I would have enough money and learn how to keep a complete accounting of my financial life so I would know how much money I had. The warmth, sensitivity, and practical wisdom of Bari Tessler-Linden, who designed Conscious Bookkeeping, and the rest of the group on the teleseminar, created an opportunity for me to begin look at my financial challenges from a new perspective – my relationship to completion. Working with completion in this post has led me to the key obstacle to my sense of my daily accomplishments, my addiction to hope.

I am giving up hope and becoming accountable for past, present and future. Learning the art and science of accounting is clearly changing my approach, not just to money, but to counting up and counting on my completions in life.

All the books I have read and all the coaching I have received on being productive and living the life I want, ever included guidance on giving up hope. No wonder I never got results.

I just found this quote from the writer, Rita Mae Brown:

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts.

And never hope more than you work.

If you are addicted to hope, please write a comment about your addiction and the possibility of giving up hope.

I am so excited by being hopeless, I am going to give complimentary 40 minute consultations to the first five people who email me.

Inspiration

Garr's blog and his questions started me expoloring and expressing my thoughts on inspiration. I've posted them for you. Please share you musings on inspiration, moments, moods, circumstances, whatever makes inspiration happen for you.

Just yesterday, I attended an inspired and inspiring workshop. I woke up this morning flooding with insights for my Inner Lent programs tonight and tomorrow. I was also inspired to share my thoughts on inspiration.

Questions that don't have definitive answers and place me in the blessed state of wonder, fill me inspiration. They set me free from all the givens, prejudices and conventions.

Resistance from anything that says "no, not this way!"

The stillness in my heart- in those rare moments of inner silence when I let myself feel the tranquility, inspiration appears like a whispered "Hush!" asking for deeper quiet.

The fire in my dreams - in those rare moments of courage when I can be alone in the fierce heat of my destiny, I find inspiration.

In the depths of my suffering, when all the lights go out, all boundaries disappear and I find myself falling into the abyss of nothingness, inspiration rises up as a light or a warmth that floats me back to myself.

Inspiration is not a sentimental feeling that generates more sentiment, it is a spiritual feeling that enthuses our thoughts and our deeds. It does not appear as merely awe, but awakens true devotion.

Witnessing inspiration in others inspires hope that I, too, may be inspired and inspire others. In fact, if I am not inspiring others, I have not been inspired. The inspired always inspire. Pass it on.

And remember... inspiration is never familiar or safe.