If you’re reading via email or rss feed, I hope you’ll click over to see the new design! I’ve worked to make it crisp, clean, and artful, as well as user-friendly. I’m hoping that the resources (posts, pages, videos, etc.) that previously got buried and unfindable as new posts accumulated will be navigable now. Check the Free Stuff page for all of that.

And with time, I hope to shift my shop from Etsy to be housed here. But one thing at a time!

Since this site is Trust Tending, I figure why not tend some trust on this reopening day?

Specifically, I feel aware of my tendency to react to site redesigns with a mix of feelings.

• I feel mild discomfort with what I was used to changing – like a friend unexpectedly became more of stranger.
• I feel mildly afraid that increased slickness or professionalism in a site’s appearance will be harbinger of the author becoming less and less like me – more cool or unreachable.
• I feel worried that there’s a Progress Train that everyone else is on (hyberbolic language starts to ring so true!), and I’m somehow stuck miles away from the track. Or worse yet, standing close by, but locked behind a gate that I don’t know how to open.
• My Compulsion, Comparison, and Overwhelm critters get really, really loud (that link is to an ebook in which I talk about these critters).

Ultimately, I wind up smelling a big bouquet of Resentment, Discouragement, and It’s-Time-To-Buy-More-Chocolate.

Hopefully you’re having none of these reactions to what’s happened here. My guess is many of you aren’t.

But for those of you who are, I wonder whether it might be helpful to hear a few things.

Like:

Hi! I’m still very much me! And my personal practice of tending trust is as important to me as ever. So far the trajectory of that practice has been an opening of my heart and a quieting of my ego, and I have every reason to believe that trajectory won’t change.

There isn’t one Progress Train that everyone is on. Or even a handful of them. There’s only our perception that there is. In reality, we are all moving, always – all accumulating experiences, learning and unlearning patterns, stepping forward, shrinking back. All we can do is be in our lives, in all of their particulars, and seek to trust that there’s no where else we can be. That in fact, there’s no where else better to be.

Once we move in the direction of that trust, the sweetness and the beauty that’s inherent in every life and every story is freed to our awareness. We become more and more able to see it.

I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad for your company on this sometimes smooth, sometimes rocky road of being human together. And I can’t wait to tend more trust alongside of you!

With love,

P.S. I’m hoping to launch Deep Listening sessions next week (you’ll see the link in the navigation bar and a sign if you click there that says “Coming Soon”). Essentially those sessions will be phone calls with me, during which I listen deeply to your places of fear or growing trust, and after which I create downloadable pieces of art for you in response to what I’ve heard. I’m looking so forward to connecting with some of you this way!

I could list so many examples, from job offers that were rescinded to schools that seemed perfect for my kids and then turned out not to be to friendships unexpectedly shifting or souring to holidays filled with hospital visits rather than play. The list goes on and on. And on. Surely your list is long, too.

My most current list item has been having way less time to work than I anticipated and the realization that the schedule I kept through 2011′s entirety isn’t one I’m capable of repeating: staying up late, getting up early, rinsing, repeating. I feel my body digging in at the thought of trying and my psyche shaking her head slowly. “Don’t do that this year. You can’t.”

Which is so disappointing from a certain point of view.

But see, I’m chuckling right now. Because this is so life. This. All of it. The longing, the disappointment, the wonder, the joy. The hurts and the heartaches. Missed expectations. The shifts where we thought we stood on solid ground.

And I’m noticing that even though I can’t be peaceful and content in all things, and even though I can’t always feel the hope or the goodness of this next thought: in ALL things, in every last one of them, there is the possibility of learning to trust.

And trust is what’s changing me in all the ways I want. Trust is what’s taking the roughest edges off my life’s game. Trust is what’s helping me recover so much faster from hurts and disappointments and punches in the gut than I ever could a year or five or twenty ago. Trust is opening me up to love, softening my cynical heart, helping me exhale more deeply and breathe in more fully and shift fear out of my driver’s seat so much more of the time.

So if trust can get grown and strengthened and fed and learned in all things… Well then.

Life? Dear shifting, untamed and untameable Life?

Bring it on!

I don’t even feel ready most of the time, but in this moment of what feels like lucidity, I say it with all my heart.

Bring it on.

Bring on the chances to learn how to trust.

______________________________

P.S. I just put the image above in my shop. If you’re interested, you can find it here.

P.P.S. I’m hard at work this month on a redesign of my site. I can’t wait to show it to you, likely early next week…if Life and I aren’t dancing some other direction. :)

It’s all about our egos, and how they’re like the Wizard of Oz. Only instead of a powerless guy behind the scary facade, there’s something vast and spacious. Something that feels like floating on clouds and being utterly safe and fearing nothing at all. Dropping the facade terrifies the facade itself, and that terror drives all of us to do everything in our power to keep it up at all times.

But those glimpses beyond it? Those unexpected moments when we step to the side of it and feel our whole chest open up and the knots that are ALWAYS in our guts release and that cloud of chatter and worry and questioning quiet in a strength that feels more spacious and profound than anything we could ever hope to shore up or protect? Oh dear lord. Please, give me more.

I’m thinking a lot about spirituality these days, and about life paths (whether they be spiritual, relational, vocational, etc) that have turned out so differently from how we might have wished or expected that they would. And about how hard it can be to admit to ourselves that we aren’t on that path we used to be…or expected to be…walking, but are instead on the one that we’re on. That’s such a huge move, truly, to admit where we actually are.

But then there’s the move to admit that to other people, which can be hard enough on it’s own, depending on the audience. But all the more difficult when doing so has implications for choices and commitments we’ve already made. What if you’re a pastor and you admit that your concept of God cannot be integrously molded into anything your church could warm to? What if you’re engaged and you know deep down this person isn’t who you want to marry? What if you jumped through more hoops than you can count to reach a dream – sacrificed lots and gave years of your life to the work – and you realize once you’ve reached it that the dream was actually empty, or at least is empty for you?

The Wizard of each of our Oz’s shakes. It quakes. And tries to scare us into doing WHATEVER it takes to avoid the truth that we deep down know. To avoid the awful, awkward conversations required by it. The gut-wrenching choices that’ll have to be made. The fissures in relationships and chasms that’ll surely form in some of them.

“Doom and Gloom!!” our Wizards say. “Every last bit of it!!!”

But here’s where *I* quake and with something other than fear. I quake with the force of conviction.

You are not your Wizard.

Your ego is only a mask. It’s only a scary, boisterous story. And the actions and words you know you need to do or say are only dangerous and foolish and awful in the constricting world of that story.

Outside of that story, such things are LIFE – with enormous, capital letters. They’re freedom and flight. They’re you honoring what’s deep and beautiful and true, and connecting yourself with the growth and the learning that such honoring inevitably opens for you.

There are details that will have to be tended to. There are tough decisions that will have to be made. Relationships may break or need to be arduously mended. I don’t want to belittle any of that.

But I want to say with all the spacious, potent power within me that when it comes to listening to your soul and honoring the truth you hear it whispering, being a fool in your ego’s eyes is ultimately the safest, most hopeful, life-improving, trust-inducing move you could possibly make.

I’m cheering you on, with my pom-poms out for me, too, and all the ways all of us fear feeling foolish and try, with faltering steps sometimes, to dive into LIFE anyway.

With so much love,

P.S. This song might be something you need to hear (lyrics below).

Thanks so much to all of you who filled out the survey from last time! That helps so much as I plan next steps and try to find the sweet spot of overlap between my passions/expertise and the things you’d like to see more of here (the survey will remain open for another week, so please feel free to take it if you haven’t already).

Of the nearly 100 folks who filled the survey out, 81% said they want to tend trust around their spiritual path – a percentage far above the rest of the options available.

And I’m thrilled and intimidated, both, by the prospect of addressing it here. I have so much to say on this topic! – a rich history of experience and study to draw from. And (this is where the intimidation arises) up-close-and-personal knowledge of the fears that lurk in its shadows and the feelings, attitudes and actions that flow from such fears. I have wounded others in response to my fears. And I have been wounded.

The arc of my story isn’t unique, however, and I’d venture to guess the wounding and woundedness I know personally are echoes of nearly all of your own.

And too the deep yearning to feed and awaken the soul (however this is defined), and the intuition…and sometimes lived experience…that something beautiful and healing and good is part of each move toward that end – no matter how cleanly you fit religious or spiritual labels or not.

Life’s deepest fears and greatest capacity to set us free to live beyond them seem, to me, to be tangled up in this topic. So it makes all sense, on a sight like this, to start talking overtly about both.

First things…

I foresee orbiting this topic here in a periodic way. And I’m guessing that some of you might like to know where I’m coming from as we start (e.g. am I religious? do I have an axe to grind?). I plan to tell my spiritual story more personally in this week’s Trust Note (see sidebar if you don’t know what Trust Notes are already), but want to say a few things here as well.

First off, wherever you are on your spiritual path, I whole-heartedly bless you. I have no interest in unraveling your spiritual tradition if you have one, and count my work in life and here at this site as a life-long exercise in learning how to love and extend compassion to myself and those around me in ways that heal and enliven and empower, rather than discourage or tear down.

I have every interest in unraveling fear, however, and in tenaciously pushing into and past it in search of what Life beyond it can be.

I actually consider this is our greatest hope as a species. Our greatest calling. And if my spiritual story has any approximation to the human one of growth and discovery, I know that pushing into fear is not a frolic in the park, and that learning to live beyond it can involve a ton of work and pain.

But so can living mindlessly with it. And the latter lacks hope of a bright and beautiful future.

I see few other places where fear lurks as deeply and grippingly as it does around spiritual things – around relationships between people whose spiritual beliefs differ, around our thoughts about death and the afterlife, around our concepts of God/the Universe and the assumptions that come with them, around what can be lost if we listen, truly, to what our hearts are asking of us.

In light of all of this, and despite my own fears of taking the plunge (what if I offend you? what if you offend me? what if I alienate people who would otherwise be nourished here?), it seems to me that a site that’s all about tending trust is an important place to explore trust in relation to spiritual things (!).

So here we go! Periodically, we’ll do just that.

I wish you well and that wherever your fears lurk most grippingly, you catch glimpses beyond them to light your way.

P.S. Those who filled out the survey overwhelmingly spoke of Trust Notes as their favorite part of what happens here, so if you’re wondering whether you want to sign up for them, I don’t think you’ll regret it if you do.

I hope Trust Tending has been even a fraction as life-giving for you as it’s been for me, and that in coming weeks and months you find the offerings here even more reflective of the places you most hope your trust can grow.

As part of today’s celebration, I wonder whether you might consider taking a short, seven-question survey to help me get a better pulse on what people are liking, wanting, or wanting more of here? I’d be so grateful if you would! To me (and really to everyone who reads here in weeks and months to come), that’d be the best birthday present ever. :)

Click here for the short, anonymous survey.

Whether you take this survey or not, I’m so grateful for your presence here. I’m grateful for your company on this bumpy, trust-growing path, and for the wonderful challenge your presence is to me to continue on it with as much heart and…trust as I have to offer. There is so much more to come!! I cannot wait to share and experience it with you…

With all my heart,

Kristin

P.S. If you’re not a survey person, I’d still love to hear from you! I’d love to know who you are and what it is you come here for. What speaks to you here? What would you like to see more of? Comments or personal emails are equally welcome!

P.P.S. For those of you who wondered where my year-end reflections went last week, the answer is no where. :) They remain in my dear head, wishing for time to get put on a page.

While I watch for that, here are my favorite posts from 2011:

• Home in the dark
• On opening the heart
• Small steps into the wilds
• Staying with the discomfort of your power
• What change makers and rest of us need to hear
• Sexuality: Month-end reflections
• When hurry-up angst has you (a video post)
• Coping with death in all forms
• Letter from the universe
• Small acts of celebration
• And you find yourself in a soft place
• On impact
• It’s time

Happy New Year to you, even if what FEELS new to you is only your next breath. May this year (and this breath…and the next) hold riches for you, of the deepest, most trust-nourishing kind!

Whether you celebrate Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or nothing at all this month, I wish you well.

I wish you healing.
I wish your fears turn toward trust.
I wish you know yourself – without changing one blessed thing – dear and loved.
And that you have some sense, whether as a whisper in your heart or a sign across the sky, that your life matters, and that all you’ve experienced so far hasn’t been for naught.

This song, from Renee and Jeremy’s album C’mon, has been on repeat over here lots this year as I’ve thought about all of you and my deepest wishes for the work I do here. (Renee and Jeremy do some wonderful work. I hope you’ll consider supporting it!)

And as a year-end gift, realizing holiday gatherings are imminent for many of you, I’m offering my ebook, Unspiking the Holiday Punch, at half price from now through Friday. Just use the coupon code wishingwell at check-out to have the discount applied.

I’ll be back next week with some year-end thoughts and look so forward to all the new year holds!

All my love to you,

Quick check-in tonight to say four things:

1. Thanks so much to all of you who have purchased Unspiking the Holiday Punch and for your positive feedback on it! (If you haven’t had a chance, you can check it out here.) I hope your coming weeks are filled with much more ease and self-kindness because of it!

2. I was honored to be hosted by Andrea Scher and Marianne Elliott this week (my article at Superhero Journal is here, and the one at Zen Peacekeeper is here). If you haven’t met these women already, I hope you’ll check out their sites. Both are trust tenders through and through, and strike a remarkable balance between sharing honestly about their own fears and challenges and doing so in ways that invite you into the frame, to explore your own life more honestly and find threads of hope and trust there, too.

3. If you’re new to this site, my warmest welcome! I’m actively planning for ways to make this space a fuller reflection of the community that gathers here, but in the meantime, here are a few ways you might wish to connect and/or understand what happens here better:

• This page is list of topics that have been given extensive attention here. Click on any of them to be taken to an annotated page of the articles written on that topic. I’m currently considering reinstating monthly topics and welcome any opinions any of you have to give on that.
• If you haven’t already signed up for Trust Notes (in the side bar), those are my weekly notes meant to connect more personally with readers than often happens on the blog. I send out short reflections, meditations, and sometimes downloadable sketches all aimed at nourishing trust. As part of that sign-up, you receive a free ebook that’s all about tending trust while spending time online. You can read more about that book here.
• Finally, you can find Trust Tending on Facebook here and on Twitter here.

4. This last point has nothing to do with selling anything or signing up for anything and everything to do with love. I’m feeling the hush that’s coming over the internet as people turn toward physical responsibilities during this holiday season. I’m feeling the restlessness, too, and some of the growing angst people are feeling around lots and lots of things (family time, gift buying, trip planning, financial worry).

And I feel so much love for all of us as we go about our business of being human through this time. It can be really, really hard! So I want you to know that as I meditate each morning (don’t be scandalized; I’m talking 10-15 minutes here), I’m picturing all of you surrounded by kindness and gentleness and peace – things that can feel absent in the hustle of traffic and to-do’s, not to mention all the feelings getting evoked at this time of year.

I don’t know what effect this practice has on your experience. But I hope at the very least it’s a comfort to know that someone is thinking of you daily, holding you in love.

Warmly yours,

One of the lessons I’ve learned the hard way is that challenging family time is made far worse when we don’t or can’t treat our own selves kindly. When, because of our own self-critical thoughts, shame, or impatience, we aren’t safe for us to be around, it’s difficult to nurture safe relationships with others. Fear and insecurity get bounced back and forth between everyone until no one knows where they started or how they can hope to end.

I’m delighted to offer you my heart-felt effort to help both things calm down. It’s an ebook for purchase called Unspiking the Holiday Punch: A Trust Tending guide to self-kindness before, during, and after extended family time.

I wrote it with the hope of sharing some of the tools I’ve collected over the last many years for loving myself and my family with more courage, more strength, and more ease than I naturally knew.

I hope you’ll come see! :)

But lately every time I sit to write and quiet myself to hear what needs to be said, I feel edges. Not scrape-you-up edges, but the kind that hold tension. The kind that are the good sort of push to get us (I’m very much included in this “us”) to grow in the ways we desire.

So here’s what I’m hearing tonight:

We’re at the start of the busiest holiday season. And for many of us, that means a season when centeredness and clarity and awakening take back stage to everything urgent (events! what to wear to events! gift buying! home decorating! food prep! travel/hosting planning! worrying about interpersonal dynamics that will happen at imminent gatherings! worrying about not having any imminent gatherings! etc!).

And I think there’s really a time for everything under the sun, including a time for inner things, and a time for intense external focus; a time to be fluffy and celebrative, and a time to contemplate deeply.

But here’s the edge:

I think nearly all of us know one or more practices that help us feel more trusting, stable, and sane, and I think most of us assume there’s an unavoidable pause button on that practice (or those practices) when the tyranny of the urgent hits hard.

When life turns up its flame – and even when our OWN lives aren’t particularly hectic but we’re surrounded by that vibe – we pause things like eating greens, keeping our sugar and alcohol intake sane, meditation and prayer, exercise, sleep…

I’m not saying it’s possible to do all of these things and the hundred other things we have on our plates right now to do.

But I do think we can pick one (and sometimes more than one) of the things we know help us feel good, and do that thing all the way through this season.

In all honesty, as I listen, I feel an urgency to us doing what we can to lean into our best selves. There isn’t fear or judgment behind this urgency so much as a sense that we need the strength and trust of our most awake, alive selves to take us where we need to go – individually and collectively. It’s a sense that now is not the time to sit back and wait until spring or summer or five or ten years from now to do what we know we need to do.

(And I really am talking about the simplest things we know are ours to do. For me, this is prioritizing sleep more than I have been and meditating daily.)

I don’t know “where it is we need to go” – I have no woo woo visions to share with you there. I simply have what I hear as I quiet myself and open myself to whatever needs to be said. And this – all that I’ve said so far – is what I’m hearing.

I want to be clear on something, though: self-kindness and self-compassion feel way at the top of the list of important practices to incorporate into this season (and always). So if your efforts to stay trusting, stable, or sane feel anything like whips or judgmental finger-wagging, please do what you can to close your inner door to them. And to take a different tact entirely.

Like:

Choose one practice that you sense is important for you to maintain through this season and treat it like you might treat breathing meditation: maintain it until you notice yourself not maintaining it (just like you might notice yourself not aware of your breath), give yourself a smile and a warm nod once you notice, and then pick the practice back up.

No judgment. No scandal at not maintaining the practice. Just the commitment to try again (and again and again) (…and again :) whenever you notice you’ve strayed from your course.

What could happen if you did that? Or I? How much trust might get grown? How different might our experience of these next few weeks be?

If you’re someone who likes edges and you want some loving butt-kicking in order to do your practice, watch this video for inspiration and then go find yourself some help. Or use Marianne’s R-rated rant to pump you up for whatever it is you know you need to do.

And above and beneath it all, know yourself loved. If that sounds hokey or hollow, I don’t think you strange. My hokey/hollow alarm is triggered lots by such things.

But they are the truth I know to say right now. They’re the words that I hear in my heart and the feeling I feel so strongly.

You are loved.

You’re okay.

And the time is now to keep waking up.

+ + + + + + + +

P.S. I’m putting finishing touches on a little ebook called Unspiking the Holiday Punch: A Trust Tending guide for self-kindness before, during, and after extended family time – all about self-kindness practices to get you through challenging interpersonal holiday time. Watch for its unveiling next Wednesday, December 7th!

I also spend about a week of every menstrual cycle oscillating between irritable, vulnerable, and ready to cry. It’s almost laughably predictable. And of course last weekend I was smack in the middle of it.

So when my husband and I sat down for a quick check-in Sunday night before watching a movie and ended up launching into a difficult conversation…and then again, on a different topic, once the movie was through, I was a total basket case. One thousand cases of basket.

At one point the shame of crying at an odd conversational moment took me over and I held a kleenex over my face, trying to collect myself. “Good thing I have NO IDEA what’s going on back there,” my husband said. We had a good laugh, which of course sent me back into tears.

And it occurs to me that isn’t this just how life is sometimes? Impervious to “good timing”? We don’t always have a choice about when hard conversations happen. We can’t push pause on injury, disaster, or disease. We can’t predict when the bumps in life’s road are gonna throw us and then adequately prepare in advance for them.

We’re simply reacting a lot of the time. And, often, without the luxury of adequate sleep, an hour spent meditating that morning, the absence of other life stressors, and a green drink just consumed.

In many ways I’ve grown more trust than the average bear, and have collected a nice array of tools for understanding my own psychology and navigating interpersonal things. But damned if I wasn’t about age three on Sunday night, spouting tears and fears like this isn’t my website at all. Like I’ve never heard of such a place. I was humiliated. And ashamed of feeling that, too!

I’m not feeling that way tonight (thank God!), and with the benefit of both distance AND proximity to that kind of shame, I wonder whether it might nourish trust for me and anyone in the midst of or trying to recover from similar feelings to say some things that I know.

So here goes:

• I know that it’s okay to be triggered into old feelings and childlike personas. Such triggers are part of the human experience. Which means ALL of us have them.
• I know that our egos really want to paint and project a unified image of who we are (e.g. mature, trusting, having access to higher functions of reason…), and that when we act outside the range of that image, our egos freak out. They scold us or scoff us or wilt in dismay – anything to try to get us back on track with the image.
• We are not images. And more importantly, we are not unified beings. We have many sides to us. Many feelings. Many parts with not-always-synchronized wishes.

  (There, there, now, ego. I must tell you it’s true.)

• Week-before-period-starts personas don’t cancel out the rest-of-the-month ones. And vice versa. We’re all (all our personas) in this together. (God bless all our souls.)
• Scrappy, jungle-ball conversations or entire life seasons are just what have to happen sometimes. They aren’t pretty. They aren’t elegant. They beg no photographic record.

  But there they are.

• And wow, do you have any idea the potential for love in the midst of them? – love that shines like the radiant outline of sun behind the darkest, crappiest cloud. Love that isn’t pity or about performing to some standard, but about taking a person as they are, being taken as the person that you are, and finding softness in response. Warmth. Kindness.
• Sometimes the love and shining linings happen way later. In the moment, and sometimes for days or weeks or years at a time, there’s only scrap.
• And I know, deep in my heart of hearts, that all of that’s okay.
• And that this letter always applies.

What do you know that might grow trust in the times when life catches you at your worst? Wanna help make this list longer?