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This is the print-friendly version of the December 2007 Newsletter -
Online Issue # 17
December 2007 Newsletter
Online Issue # 17
In this Issue:
See also, the print-friendly version of this newsletter (all the articles are on one web page).
Look for the next issue in April.
The Front Page
Shifting the Pattern
“...without stillness, without being present, we will get it wrong. We will miss the simple quiet opportunities for shifting the pattern.”
-Wayne Muller
Of all the completed projects I’m celebrating this year, my front porch project leaps to the top of every list I imagine myself making. This project spent years on every to-do list and in my nagging awareness, needing attention, begging for attention. The ugly water-stained ceiling tiles bothered me the most, lurking overhead every time I entered the space or even thought about it. The 3-season porch was a do-it-yourself project that really needed to be worked on sometime between April and October, since it has no heat, but not on stifling hot summer days, since it has no air conditioning. In all honesty, it was the last thing I ever felt like tackling on a lovely day in April through October.
I think the primary reason this project took so long to begin is that we were focusing on the wrong energy -- the energy of ugly; so for years we got more ugly. We were also focusing on, and dreading, the chaos, mess and unimagined difficulties that many past projects have produced. We were acting as though the pattern of the past would also be our future, which turned out not to be the case.
Right now, I can’t honestly remember what nudged us out of our resistance and inertia; it may simply have been that the boards we looked at for the new ceiling went on sale at Menards. Then, by the time we had hand selected all 42 of them, hauled them home, and unloaded them, the project was started.
I also used this project as an experiment to work on and talked about it with one of my groups last spring. My public declaration of desire for a pleasant front porch getaway unexpectedly morphed with the idea of a north woods cabin escape. A conversation about old houses, and an upstairs sleeping porch dubbed The Cabin, opened my imagination to the possibility that our porch could be the place we want to escape to for coffee in the early morning, to relax after work, or to spend lazy hours on the weekend—all without having to leave home.
As soon as we had cut and nailed up the first few pine-scented boards our view of the porch shifted from ugly to lovely. Our new perspective energized and motivated us. We wanted to get the next few boards installed, and then the next and the next and finally the last one. At this point we took a break and went on vacation. Once we returned we primed and painted the ceiling and celebrated the completion of what we now called phase 1.
As many of you might expect this is when the project expanded. I realized that we had accumulated enough short pieces of board to cover the walls beneath all the windows, which proved to be a great idea. However, there were a couple of problems to be figured out due to the slope of the original porch floor. But solve them we did. From there we moved to repairing, priming, and painting the wall that was the original exterior front of the house, back in the days before the porch was enclosed. The last big push was priming and painting the floor, first one half and then the other.
Fortunately for me, we continued to use the porch each step of the way. We frequently marveled at how wonderful it was feeling and becoming, not how wonderful it would be when it was finished, but how wonderful it was right now. One day I realized that some new homes are built and moved into in the time we had been working on our porch, and we still had more to do.
The thing I haven’t mentioned yet is the unexpected joy we experienced in doing this project. I reconnected with my carpentry skills which hadn’t been used since I took shop in seventh grade. As a couple married for over 20 years, we enjoyed our process of arriving at mutual solutions to the dilemmas we encountered working on an old house.
This became an exciting lesson for me in how focus and expectations shape life experience. As long as we focused attention on the ugliness of the porch and expected the project to be as bad or worse than previous projects, our porch languished. The turning point came when we realized that our front porch could be the getaway we were seeking elsewhere. This insight allowed us to use our imaginations to focus on the feelings we wanted to experience sitting in our porch, enjoying life. After that, all that we did was motivated by this enjoyment: enjoying the progress as we inched along, enjoying the fact that we were finally doing it ourselves, enjoying the way we were solving problems we’d never solved before, enjoying that what we were doing was good enough and didn’t need to be perfect, enjoying that we were creating the place we wanted to escape to.
On the surface, my front porch example might seem far removed from my career counseling practice and the lives of my clients, but it’s really the same underlying process at work. It’s one of life’s many opportunities for “shifting the pattern.”
Here are two essential questions:
What am I focussing on?
Am I preoccupied with what I don’t like, what doesn’t work, what won’t happen, and what feels awful? Or am I allowing myself to anticipate feeling how I want to feel in a new opportunity, and feeling it right now? Am I allowing the pattern to shift within me?
What am I expecting?
Am I imagining, and thus creating, a series of disappointments that bring more of what I don’t want into my life? Or am I opening myself to change, considering new possibilities, discovering interesting things, and creating what I want? Am I allowing the pattern to shift my experience?
The most amazing thing to me is that we don’t have to start out knowing what we want in order to experience what will fulfill us; what is necessary is that we allow ourselves to feel our yearnings and also feel worthy of them. As soon as we are able to give them our loving, focused attention—whether or not they are logical, practical, possible, affordable—the pattern is already shifting.
With gratitude,
Laurie Mattila
I wish you a gentle, healing end to this year and all that it has been for you. As the new year begins, I hope you will be blessed with a vital desire to live your intentions and the courage to be perfectly you.
I'm including links that take you back to three Front Page articles I've written for December issues of this newsletter in earlier years. If you enjoy them, think about sharing them with other readers you know.
Spilling Over With Joy from December 2005
The Necessity of Darkness from December 2004
Those Deep-Swimming Longings from December 2002
Good Books
The Instruction:
Living the Life Your Soul Intended
by Ainslie MacLeod
Sounds True, 2007
hardcover, $24.95
If the idea of understanding your soul's purpose in this lifetime resonates with you, I can't think of a more interesting book to recommend. MacLeod is a psychic and the process he calls The Instruction was given to him by his spirit guides. This might strike some as too wacky to be taken seriously, but if you can withhold judgment long enough to read a few chapters, you will discover a fascinating perspective on why you're here and what you're doing, along with intriguing insights into the patterns of your lives.
The Instruction is made up of three parts: Direction, part 1, includes chapters about the ten soul ages, soul types and missions; Empowerment, part 2, covers the ten past-life fears, desires, challenges and investigations; and Fulfillment, part 3, focuses on the ten powers, talents and paths. Except for the terms challenge and investigation, most of these concepts mean pretty much what you'd expect.
MacLeod presents a step-by-step process in a matter-of-fact style. Each chapter introduces and demonstrates a topic, before ending with instructions for identifying how it expresses itself in your life. This always involves a simple meditation to ask your guides to help you to make the identification.
The book is full of interesting client stories which ground and illuminate a process that could easily lack integrity or credibility.
The skeptic in me still questions one thing: How is it that almost every list, and there are ten major ones, has ten items on it?
”In everyday life, nothing—and I stress nothing—gets in the way of living the life your soul intended more than this: other people's expectations.”
-Ainslie MacLeod
Sound Health Sound Wealth:
The Biology of Hope and Manifestation
by Luanne Oakes
Nightingale-Conant, 2006
hardcover, $22.95
“Sound—with the dual meaning of fundamental strength and audio phenomena—is the basis of this book.”
Luanne Oakes writes of science, spirituality and health in order to share her lifetime of studying and integrating Western and Eastern philosophies. As a writer she is a master at making science accessible, demonstrating principles through storytelling, and developing innovative tools with names like Frequency Treatments, Future Memories, Crystalline Language, Your Heart's Most Treasured Desires, and Your Magical Divine Experiment.
Sound Health Sound Wealth presents dozens of topics which somehow all end up flowing together to become tools for healing. This is an innovative guidebook to help you expand your consciousness by exploring ways of thinking that increase your sense of wellness. Luanne Oakes is a gifted, pioneering healer.
The book contains many wonderful opportunities for directed writing and comes with one of Luanne's sound Frequency Treatment CDs.
“You cannot necessarily choose your first thought or feeling. Thoughts and feelings often arise unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere. You can, however, choose your second thought and second feeling, replacing fear with faith, depression with hope, anxiety with serenity.”
-Luanne Oakes
The Astonishing Power of Emotions:
Let Your Feelings Be Your Guide
by Esther and Jerry Hicks
Hay House, 2007
hardcover, $24.95
For anyone familiar with the work of Esther and Jerry Hicks this latest book follows the format of their earlier ones: Esther channels the wisdom teachings of the nonphysical consciousness Abraham. Although the process sounds peculiar, their work is engaging and genuinely helpful. The focus of The Astonishing Power of Emotions is on learning to choose thoughts that allow you to be in alignment with your true self, feeling positive emotion, going with the flow—downstream. “Nothing that you want is upstream. Not one thing that you want is upstream.”
Part I - Discovering the Astonishing Power of Emotions, contains nine chapters, but only 45 pages of material, some new and some review. Part II, Demonstrating the Astonishing Power of Emotions, makes up most of the book. There are 33 Examples ranging from I Am Totally Disorganized, I Cannot Find a Mate to People Steal My Creative Ideas, I Keep Getting Passed Over for Promotions at Work. Several of the Examples sounded interesting to me, so I read those chapters, but then skipped most of Part II, which is what many busy readers will do. Considering the cost of the hardcover edition, and the amount of material in Part II which you might not even read, this is probably a book you want to borrow from the library.
“As you begin to go with the flow, since everything that you want is downstream, you begin to float into desired circumstances and events. All kinds of things that you've been waiting for—sometimes for a long time—become almost immediately apparent to you, because the only thing that was keeping you from them was that you were paddling upstream.”
-The Astonishing Power of Emotions
Practice Page
Here are a few more ideas for you to think about, write about, talk about, wonder about—on your own or with a friendly companion.
A List Experiment
In my classes, many people discover that they really enjoy naming and making lists, as long as the lists don't involve work they will need to do. You might be wondering, what other kinds of lists are there beside the to-do variety? Here's where it gets interesting.
How about a list of Anticipation? This list might contain things you love to think about and anticipate. If you take a few minutes to begin jotting down whatever occurs to you, who knows what will happen or what you'll discover?
You might have so many thoughts rushing forward that it will be difficult to get them all written down. If this happens, your list might end up quite long. Maybe, you'll be surprised that your list contains just a few items and you can't think of anything else, even though you return to it several times.
It's not that a long list is right or better than a short list. What matters is your reaction to what's on, or not on, your list. You could be thrilled to know that there are four or five, or several dozen things in your life that you love to anticipate. Or, you could notice that it's been a long time since you've actually done any of the things that you wrote on your list, regardless of its length. Some of you might reconnect with the fact that for you anticipation is actually your favorite part of many of the things you've listed. Maybe by now your thoughts are stuck in a loop, trying to remember the lyrics to the song Anticipation by Carly Simon. Anything can, and does, happen in these list experiments.
There's an easy way for you to personalize this experiment by making up your own appealing, possible names for a list about anticipation. Here are a few examples:
101 Things to Anticipate
Things I Will be Anticipating and Doing in December
What I Want to Anticipate and Do in My Life
My Wonderful List of Anticipation for 2008
Places I Anticipate Visiting Before I Turn 35 (or 50 or 75)
What I Anticipate Learning
What I'm Presently Anti-cipating (whatever that means)
What I Anticipate Cultivating
What I Like to Anticipate, More Than I Like to Do
How I Prefer To Anticipate My Future
When you run out of ideas, select a list name that captures your attention and begin to write down your responses to it. Simply jot down whatever occurs to you, without worrying if it even belongs on the list. No judgment is needed. This is an experiment and a warm-up.
Now, switch gears and take some time to consider one new list that you want to create and pay attention to during the upcoming year. Don't focus on something you feel you should do. Allow this to be something that calls you or pulls you forward. It's probably not about anticipation, because you just read about that idea and it was my example. It might be about people you want to spend less time with, obligations that are wearing you out, lifestyle adjustments you're excited to be considering, what you want to add to (or remove from) your life.... The options are unending.
Whatever you decide to focus on, check first to see whether your current focus is more positive or more negative. If you're thinking of the list, People I Want to Drop (from next year's calendar), you might notice a distinctly negative feeling around that list. Try instead to focus on the positive side of that same idea, which might be, People I Want to See (on next year's calendar). That twist will naturally increase time energy for the people you want to see, thereby reducing time energy for those you prefer not to see or to see less of, without it being a big deal. Here is something you can easily experiment with: how does my list shift my life?
So, give it a try. Have fun with it. Be creative. Keep it a secret, or get someone else involved. Do a list-of-the-month in 2008, or a list-of-the-week. Inspire yourself.
Whatever you do, let this experiment introduce a new energy and momentum into your life and your process. Think of this as a gift you give to yourself. Who knows where it will lead or what you'll discover?
Laurie Mattila
© December 2007
Upcoming Calendar:
Discovery Writing: Creating A FutureSM
For NEW Students:
Discovery Writing: Creating A Future
For 15 years Discovery Writing has been helping people to hear and trust their own knowing, in order to create a life of their own choosing.
This six-session class uses a simple “listening-writing” process as a way to explore what you truly desire; it is also a path to follow in creating your future.
View the online flyer to learn more about Discovery Writing: Creating A Future
Winter Schedule 2008
Monday evenings ( 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. )
January 14, 28 February 11, 25 March 10, 24
Spring Schedule 2008
Friday mornings ( 10:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon )
April 11, 18, 25 May 2, 9, 16
Fall Schedule 2008
Wednesday evenings ( 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. )
September 24 October 8, 22 November 5, 19 December 3
For FORMER Students:
2008 Discovery Writing Yearlong Group
This is the 10th year that I am offering a yearlong Discovery Writing group beginning in January and meeting monthly through December. I am still in awe of the process that evolves and the way our lives connect—sitting around the purple table—listening and writing. If you are a former Discovery Writing student you are welcome to join the 2008 yearlong group, either for the first time or as someone returning.
We will meet on the 3rd Tuesday evening of each month from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at my office in St. Paul. The cost is $100 per quarter, payable in any month of the quarter. The group requires a one year commitment and is limited to 8.
2008 meeting dates, listed by quarter:
January 15, February 19, March 18
April 15, May 20, June 17
July 15, August 19, September 16
October 21, November 18, December 16
Please contact me if you want your name added to the group, or if you have any questions.
2007 Discovery Writing Group
Plans to continue & Welcomes new members
If you're interested in a yearlong group, but the one described above doesn't work for you, think about joining the group that began meeting in 2007 and plans to continue into 2008. This group meets on the 3rd Monday of each month from 6:30-8:30 p.m. and has openings for several new members. The cost and payment schedule are the same as described above. The group requires a one year commitment and is limited to 8.
2008 meeting dates for the 3rd Monday:
January 21, February 18, March 17
April 21, May 19, June 16
July 21, August 18, September 15
October 20, November 17, December 15
Please contact me if you are interested in this option or you have questions about joining an existing group.
Intentional Living-Meaningful Work SM
For ALL who are Interested:
The idea of living with intention and working with meaning speaks to the heart, soul, and imagination. When I created this class ten years ago and began teaching it through the Compleat Scholar, I had no idea it would grow more relevant with each passing year. This year, for the first time, I will offer the class in the spring and I would love to have you join us.
Description:
Poet Mary Oliver asks, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Using this question as a place to begin, you are invited to examine the way you are living and working. Consider other questions too—Is this all there is? What are my true needs? How is my life being consumed? What's worth doing? Grapple with these ideas and more through personal reflection, group discussion, interactive exercises, a little writing, and optional outside reading. The group provides a supportive and stimulating environment that encourages personal responsibility for informed, conscious choice.
Class will be held on the following Wednesday evenings on the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota: May 14, 21, 28 and June 4. Preregistration is required.
To register, you need to contact the Compleat Scholar at the University of Minnesota, once spring course registration opens. For questions about the class itself: call my office at 651-644-7766 and leave a message, or send an email to me at LaurieMattila@aol.com
Intentional Living—Meaningful Work ongoing group
September 2008 to May 2009
Here's something to look forward to next fall. I'll begin another nine-month group that will meet once each month from September through May. This group is open to anyone who is interested in exploring “living with intention and working with meaning,” whether or not you've taken the class. Our focus will remain paying attention to our lives and to what we are creating.
The group will meet from September to May on the second Wednesday evening of each month from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at my office in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul. Look for more details in the August 2008 newsletter.
About the Newsletter
This newsletter is created several times a year for my clients
and students, and anyone else interested in listening to and trusting
their own deep knowing. It is designed to support your process of
discovery and growth, and to bring you up-to-date about my practice.
It offers encouragement, guidance and resources for you.
You will find new issues posted on my website in the months of
April, August and December. I hope you add my website to your favorite
places and check back when the next issues are scheduled.
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