(goldirocks.co)

Are you doing a whole lot in the name of being a better person, all at once, maybe, and really passionately doing it…and it seems endless?

It’s funny what I realize now…after a life of living that way.

A huge way to turn self-help into self-hatred : setting out to fix everything you percieve to be less-than-awesome all at once.

An even huger way to turn self-betterment into a curse: thinking that everything needs to be fixed in the first place.

And the worst way that self-improvement and life greatness stuff turns bad that I’ve seen: using it as a way to try to avoid bad things happening and possibly control the universe. Starting to deem things as bad, wrong, destructive and to-be-avoided-at-all costs that are normal and great parts of life (you know, arguments, bad days, obstacles, hard choices)… it’s a slippery slope.

If you are under the impression that many things are wrong with your life and you’re focused on this… self-help may be serving you destructively, or you may be using it as a way to stay… stuck!

Here’s some feng shui to make bettering life much more beautiful. Open. Flowing.  Easy. Radiant. 

(via)

Let things be.

Let the mess stay in your house for the day without judging it.  Let yourself be totally disorganized, totally turned upside down, totally behind schedule, totally not living up to a standard.

Surrender.

When I first heard the word SURRENDER I snickered inside.  “Yeah, right.  It’s so weak to surrender… I would still be trapped in my home town in Jersey if I surrendered.  Surrender is not for me.”

But… apparently, the more into “perfect” you are the more you NEED surrender.

When I first heard the words SELF HELP it was on a casette tape as a 12 year old visiting my dad in La Costa, California.  I had never seen so many palm trees, I’d never seen Spanish tile, the world around me felt like a garden paradise. It was totally warm and welcoming and self-help seemed to be the key phrase of the day, every day.

My dad did yoga every morning, ate quarts of berries and drank liters of water. We chanted OM in the mornings and I had my first wheatgrass shots. It was a wonderland of being the best person possible. I had never seen anything like it.

I didn’t realize that he was also newly out of prison, cheating on his new wife and downing a bottle of scotch in the evenings out about town stirring up specious business deals.

I didn’t see that.  I just saw  my dad who once looked frantic and distracted glow with this self-help infinite-possibility radiance.

It wasn’t really working for him, the OM, the juice, the teachings and the learnings… but he let me know that my life would be nothing less than a failure if I didn’t start becoming the best at an early age. For him, this fantasy land of betterment was all a way to assuage guilt.  A bottle of vodka was less toxic with a pint of green juice, right?  And his kids not making the mistakes he made every day… well… I get that it was well intended.  It didn’t go as intended, though.

I was a vegan by 12 and a half.  The decade of eating disorders that came next were stunning.  I was shut-down to anything but my obsessive goals. I did achieve them all, even if I withered in the process.  The plague of self-help expanded to find flaws with every possible job… every relationship… every single thing I did could have been so much better.

I wrote a novel at 23, built momentum to get it published in NYC of all places, and totally imploded before it happened because it wasn’t perfect enough.

From there, the strong pull of self-betterment became even more of a way to get stuck.  Broken dream atop shelved dream.  Each time, I thew in extra ways to fix myself.  Extra problems.  Extra tight agendas to make things better.

I never realized that I took every bit of high-vibration stuff I heard from age 12 and used it to destroy myself and any shot I had at happiness until I almost truly died in the process of radically “transforming” myself.

So why in the world would I do what I do if I have such a blackened view of the self-help world?

I knew there was a better way.

And I saw it wasn’t just me using this self-bettering to beat myself up and stay blocked. It was common.  The seekers of self-help all feel there’s something to be fixed.

Once I found a better way, it seemed important to share it, even with just a few people.

There are ways to do everything better.  These ways shouldn’t be mandatory.  They shoudn’t feel forced.

The idea of flow in feng shui is very simple.  Energy doesn’t make judgements.  It doesn’t think with words. It doesn’t do complicated computations.  Energy just is.

You don’t have to fight for it.

You don’t have to dance around and be perfect hoping to attract what you want.

You have to be.

Just be.

Nothing about you is broken.  It’s maybe blocked, out of alignment or exhausted, stressed or, actually, just neglected.

Let it be.

You can’t judge yourself and become happier and more in flow at the same time. You can’t rigorously push yourself and expect not to get pushed back.

Let the mess sit there.  Surrender to it.  It’s just stuff.

Let the disorder be for a minute. If you can’t see it calmly and clearly you can’t do anything about it.

To change it,  be kind to yourself.  Don’t tackle a whole home of clutter in a day, or a big problem in a night.  Be kind.  Go easy. And be consistent.

Consistent kindness cures much more than forcing yourself to clear clutter does. Because… when you really feel love for yourself, the clutter will get cleared and it won’t be dramatic.  The arguments untangle.  The eccentric and the unsual become more beautiful.

You don’t want to become a self-obsessed, righteous self-help person.  I see this every day. Empty, disconnected, self-focused and even paranoid and blocked people who believe that the only way to live is in a bubble where nothing is anything but shining.

Dark skies bring out the big stars.

Let things be and sink into self-kindness.  Shut out the criticism.  Turn off the noise.  Open up to what makes you feel alive.

The flow starts when you connect.

The flow stops when you judge, obsess, over-think and get hung up on perfection.

Connect instead.  Surrender can be your best friend.  Everything worth having comes when you do it…!

xoxo Dana

 

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