about dating

I subscribe to all sorts of things including an astrological guide from Bethea Jenner ( myhealthwealthandhappiness.com). Usually, I simply skim the forecasts as I find:

a) they are too general to do me any specific good, and
b) most of the advice directs me to live my life according to principles I already use as much as possible

Basically, the forecasts good reminders for me to continue to use these tools, and that I am on the right path in life.

However, her letters often contain interesting stories and lessons. This one particularly resonated, as I am preparing to embark on the "dating path" once again.

Dear Julia,

This week I decided to share a story involving today's changing dating etiquette, as I think it brings up some information that many of us could benefit from. A few months back, one of my clients came to me for advice regarding a man she had met through an Internet dating service. They had been communicating for a while and had decided to meet in person. My client was a little concerned about the best and safest way to do that.

It can be a daunting step to meet a potential suitor in person when your sole communication has been via the telephone or computer. This type of scenario seems more and more common in the dating world and, as a result, Julia, I think it is wise to take some basic practical and protective measures in such situations. I shared them with my client and now I would like to share with you.

First, do not get into a car with someone you've only had interaction with over the Internet and/or telephone, and do not tell that person where you live. It is a much better idea to schedule an initial face-to-face meeting in a very public place. I also recommend informing a friend or family member about the details of this first meeting, such as where you are going and what time you expect to return. Try to keep a clear head by not indulging in alcohol, and pay your half of any bill incurred for meals or the cinema, etc. Last but not least, follow your instinct and gut feelings in such situations, regardless of how nice a person may seem outwardly.

My client later told me how grateful she was for my advice. She felt better just having practical information to follow. Apparently, her planned date didn't work out. However, she followed these same guidelines with other potential dating suitors and did meet a gentleman who turned out to be someone she connected with and felt good about. The last time I spoke with her, she reported that they had been "real-life" dating for two months and that it was going well.

Julia, this dating advice is good for both males and females. The Internet is a great place to meet a variety of people, but common sense and a few protective measures can make for a better meeting and help avoid a negative or dangerous situation. I hope that you will find this information useful and will share it with others who do use the Internet as a social network.

Now, please take some time out to look over your Health, Wealth and Happiness Report to see what the week holds for you.

Until next week,
Bethea

I like the practical nature of her story and advice. It goes along with my growing awareness that my dating will be more successful the more I trust myself. By success, I mean that I will be able to quickly sniff out the losers (my weakness) and move on, and that I will be able to identify someone with whom I could develop a lasting, loving relationship.

Recently, I became aware that I hide my vulnerability from many people. I'll talk about issues when I feel sufficiently strong to withstand criticism or an unexpectedly negative or harsh response to my expressing a feeling. Especially I protect with great passion my anger and sadness.

It's extremely rare for me to lose my temper in front of anyone. I can count the times on one hand that I've felt anger in the moment and expressed it right then and there. My sister is the only one who's seen it - in actuality, she is the only one who generates that kind of response in me. With other folks, I withdraw and process it, then present it nicely packaged and controlled as a "feeling I am still working through."

The same goes for sadness and grief. I cry alone, only rarely calling someone in the middle of my tears. It takes me a while to realize that I can call someone, that I don't have to be alone with my pain. And then I spend a good amount of time mentally reviewing the list of people I could possibly call, rejecting most as not giving me the kind of sympathetic response I want and need. Eventually, I might happen on someone who I think will "be nice to me" and also available. Then I call and may be relieved if I get their answering machine. I can count on two hands the number of times in my adult life I have persisted in order to talk to someone. That's 27 years we're talking!

A successful love relationship will involve my willingness to express these feelings in the moment and trust that the other person will be there with kindness, love, support, patience, acceptance - eventually at least. My sadness needs immediate kindness. My anger needs someone to really listen and hear me. Because my anger generally is about someone willfully and persistently misinterpreting me or being unkind/cruel to someone I love.

The question for me is can I be there for myself when I don't get the response I crave? At Train the Trainer, I abandoned myself in some way when I surrendered my power to that woman who was interrupting and criticizing my presentation. My tears were about being hurt and misunderstood and betrayed. And they were also about my caring so much about what the other people thought. I was unable to say "she's messed up, and I know I'm doing a good job, and I don't need her approval, just move on." That is being there for myself.

Thinking further on this, let me be kinder to myself. I did recover relatively quickly, and I did show my vulnerability in public, so there are points for me. I suppose I can take from that experience the realization that the point is not to NOT feel the feelings, NOT express the feelings. The point is what do I do with them, how do I care for myself when I get hurt - because I will continue to be hurt as long as I'm alive, like it or not. I don't like it and I guess I'm starting to tell myself the truth that it doesn't matter if I like it, I can accept it, and give myself a pat on the back for using all the tools I know to process the feeling in the moment.

As I learn to trust myself to take care of myself, I become more able to be in an intimate love relationship.

That's the goal anyway. More shall be revealed!

about changing the world

Of late, many e-mails and magazine articles that cross my transom emphasize my role in transforming first my own world and then the rest of it. The key is self-love and spreading love. And the reward is happiness, inner peace and harmony - and world peace.

There are myriad suggestions for how to demonstrate self-love and how to manifest happiness, many of which I've either incorporated into my daily routine and inner being or tried and found wanting for my own path and process. They include thinking positive thoughts of myself and others, seeking opportunity in what may seem like a disaster, learning one new thing every day, being open to new experience, asking questions rather than making assumptions, assuming the best, starting my day over, praying often and being constantly mindful of God, approaching life with the eyes and heart of a child, forgiving myself and forgiving others, letting go and letting God, writing, talking to a good friend, listening, meditating, chanting, going on retreats, sitting quietly, being in nature, gardening, playing with children, petting a cat, doing art work, giving of my time to help others, putting people first, looking inward to see what I am contributing to a situation rather than blaming someone else, not "shoulding" on myself, accepting where I am, turning my will and life over to the care of my Higher Power, going to church, walking on the beach, getting enough sleep, eating healthy food, exercising, aligning my will with God's will. I know I've done other things, but the list already is pretty exhausting.

And it all works! I am happier, more content and more at peace with myself than ever before. Or maybe it's a different way, because I've often been at peace and happy. I have felt the "flow" of balance and harmony when I'm engaged in love and service. It has a different quality today, deeper and solid. I know it will never go away unless I try really hard - and I'd probably have to start drinking again. That I hope never to do again, a day at a time.

It's like a sand bar, this solid core of peace within me. Sometimes it's low tide and the sand bar is very visible. My outward and inner peace are aligned, all is harmonious, and I'm feeling whole and complete in all aspects of my life. At other times, it's high tide and there are rougher waves passing over and completely covering that core. It's still there, but the externals are rougher, less harmonious, more painful, darker. It's easy to imagine that the core is gone, too, because it's not visible. Yet if I put my feet down, even if I have to completely immerse myself underwater to reach far enough down, I will touch that sand bar, that core of certainty and confidence in my highest good and faith in god. I really hate going under water so far because I'm afraid I'll drown, that the undertow will carry me away and kill me. So far, I've come up and out intact. And more and more, I don't need to venture below the surface to make sure that sand bar is there. I just trust that it is. I have faith that I'm OK no matter what.

Many times over the past couple of years my faith has been sorely tested, and I have wondered if all the "think positive" stuff is so much mumbo-jumbo designed to occupy we powerless wimps in the face of cruel raw power. The power of death, for example. How on earth or heaven can one remain centered when a six year old boy is taken from us? I haven't been able to very well. I talked to him at the cemetary on the 18 month anniversary of his death, and realized that he very much would want me to embrace life and forgive God and even the cancer. No, I don't know if he'd want me to forgive the cancer. I don't think he could have. But he would have wanted me to live fully and with the same kind of joy he exhibited. And Julia deserves my love and joy and happiness and inner strength.

Of course, one of the cruelest passages of my recent life was being fired from City Harvest. I would like to move on from it and believe I have made great strides in the past eight months. It shocked me so deeply because I worked hard to create a work environment based on love and service. I thought it was such an environment. So to be fired in such an unloving way with absolutely no appreciation for my years of service was and continues to be stunningly incongruent and unreal. I'm forced to accept that there was a point at which the environment stopped being loving and compassionate, well before I was fired. So many possible points - when I stopped going to as many meetings, after my friends left town, when I changed communities and became so isolated that I depended more heavily on work for human interaction to a possibly unhealthy extent, after 9/11 and my trauma and egocentric attitude, when I succumbed to paranoia and stopped trusting Liza, when I laid off 20% of the staff in a pretty inhumane way, when I allowed Naomi to be caretaker and guardian, when I started thinking I could write a book about my approach to management, when I identified myself with City Harvest exclusively. I don't know exactly when, or maybe it was all of the above, and more. The important thing is that I do realize that somehow I stopped living the life of love and service and instead began living a life of ego and dissatisfaction.

It got even worse for me when I took the job with NYRP. That was so much about ego and a big "so there!" to the City Harvest Board. And I was incredibly envious and jealous and feeling "less than" and "not good enough" and fat and stupid and just not enough.

That's when I began wondering if it was indeed possible to make any impact on the world at large. Here I've been sober and working on myself for almost a quarter century, and I am still at the mercy of my ego. I still want what I don't have. I want to have more, I want to be more, I want to do more, I want everything more, more, more. Even when I was at my most centered, my impact on others was short-lived. Their impact on me was much more powerful. I succumbed to the power dynamics of stardom and money almost immediately. It's taken me many months to dismantle the illusions and see what happened to me.

How then am I to have any effect on the world? How are any of us who walk the path of ego deflation toward love and service to do anything but work on ourselves? Leading by example is a great concept, yet so limited in effect.

All the articles, books, e-mails, TV and radio shows, albums, sermons and religious treatises are being read by millions of people. Obviously, reading them is not enough. People have to actually put the suggestions into practice. They have to practice ego-deflation in order to become faith-full, right-sized, able to give and receive love and service. That's hard work, a lifetime's work. I don't know anyone who does it perfectly. And I don't know if all of this individual work will really shift the world. Or if it will, I just don't know when the tipping point will be.

So many of us do try our best, and sometimes I catch a glimpse of that perfect serenity and feel it flow through me. Then I go to the CVS and there are no parking spots and I have to practice faith and letting go and asking "how important is it" as thoughts like "what are all these people doing here?" fly through my mind. Or I arrive at work with my heart open only to hear the boss lace into me for being wasteful and not thinking. And she thinks she's perfectly OK. To her and to so many other rich and/or famous people, it's OK to be selfish and cruel to the "little people." Yet they study Kabbala or Buddhism or yoga or any of the other traditions that seemingly emphasize selflessness and self-forgetting. always read that as meaning "egoless" but I must be wrong. I also thought that love for others meant kindness and compassion. I must be wrong.

Maybe I'm just underestimating how very hard it is to be on a path toward ego-lessness, love, compassion and service. I find it difficult, and I've been on the path for 25 years. I've had some pretty major ego-deflating experiences - blessings in very good disguises. If it's hard for me, it's hard for other people. If I succumb to the blandishments of material success, how much harder it is for someone to resist them when they have so much material success already? I think I see now why so many prophets and saints and gurus and boddhisattvas have gone into the woods or the desert or caves, and adopted poverty. It's only when the material is irrelevant that the spiritual can become all.

There isn't any agreement that it's better to embrace love and service. Religions seem to encourage this, yet there is so much infighting and power politics within every church and religious institution that it's clear the words are having little impact on the ego and the behavior. The rich and powerful agree that they are special, better than most of the rest of the world. They even have different AA meetings, a pretty blatant manifestation of ego and fear in a program specifically designed for ego deflation. Love and service require some sacrifice. How willing are people to make sacrifices?

When it comes down to it, I need to focus on myself and being a person I want to live with. For me, it does mean love, service, compassion, kindness, an open heart, generosity, and self-love. I wish it were contagious, I wish what I do would help change the world for the better. I am still too much of a cynic to think that will happen. Who knows, though? The thing is for me to focus on what I can do, which is work on myself. If everyone in the world started seriously working on themselves and agreed that love and service were the goals, we'd have no wars if only because no one would have any time to fight them.

about grief

I got three magnetic picture frames for Christmas so I put a picture of Simon and Beatrice in one, a picture of me holding David when he was less than a year old in another, and a picture of David on his last Memorial Day at Ron, Laura and Ana's in the backyard. He was holding a Spiderman hover balloon, his favorite baseball cap, striped red shirt, and looking down with a sweet smile on his face. I put it on the refrigerator near the picture of him looking right at me while Rick holds him, and near the picture of Julia in her beautiful flowery dress and golden curls, looking so gorgeous and loving.

And it struck me yet again that David's not coming back. He will never see his sweet sister grow older. And as Alana says, I will never have any new memories of David. He's truly gone. The sobs come then. I've been waiting for them this Christmas. He loved Christmas. He loved presents and decorations and candy canes and bows and baking cookies and seeing all the Christmas lights. When I'm with Julia, sometimes I think of how like him she is and how I behave with her like I did with him, pointing out the houses with the lights and buying fun decorations for her. Is it fair that she reminds me of him? She's her own self. But sometimes she sounds just like him - when she growls especially.

I suppose Julia will always remind us of David, because she is his sister. Once she's past six, though, the memories will be in our minds only for she will be older than he ever had a chance to be. Alana's reminder that he had two years after diagnosis is what it is. I continue to wish he'd been cured. It's hard to be grateful for two years when I wish he had eighty-two more years at least. He should be here now. It's so incredibly sad.

So I think about grief. I've learned that grief is indescribable. It just is. There is no rhyme or reason or explanation or control for grief. It has its own path and timetable. It lives deep within until it creeps into consciousness and overtakes my heart to make tears. These tears are like steam escaping from a pressure cooker - they have to come out or I will explode. But there's no relief as I have known tears to give. It's just grief in another form. Sometimes it lurks as depression and no motivation. Or it's irritability and dropping things. Other times I withdraw from people and can barely talk to anyone. All I want to do is be with Julia. Or Ana, if she'd let me. I just want to be with the living, the loving people I already know and love.

One thing I'm learning about the depth of my grief: I have enough of it for a lifetime. I can't add much more. I have spent the past two years grieving constantly. On January 14, it will be two years since those shits at City Harvest stabbed me in the heart and betrayed me, cutting me off from my passion and lifework. I am still angry, yet somehow I'm too tired to be very angry anymore. The grief is exhausting. And then David got leukemia. And then David died. And then I got fired again. And David was still dead. And I still can't emerge from being frozen. How can I open my heart to anyone else when it's irreparably broken already? I am so damn sad every day. I don't cry every day anymore, but most days I have tears come to my eyes. And every day I look at David's picture and wonder why he is gone and I am still here. Why? Why? The question that has absolutely no answer. Never will have.

I get a little sick of all this grief. Is it possible to emerge from it? Or rather to live with it, meaning to live and go on, with it? I don't know how to do it.

That's the other thing I've learned about grief: it has its own timetable, its own rhythm and its own way of directing me. This has been the biggest lesson in letting go ever possible. How do I know what each day will bring? I don't.

I want to be grateful for every day I am alive, in David's honor. I'm not yet there. I can't imagine living without Julia, and I can't imagine Julia and Ana having to lose me. I know I am a very important person to both of them, a very important person. If I am having such a hard time with loss, they are having even harder times.

Julia was very sad tonight. I think she is sad that Mommy had a dream about David. I think she wishes she had a dream about him. She misses him a lot. I also think she hates hearing about Grandma and Grandpa moving. More loss for that little girl. And more loss for Ana. She misses Ana, too. I just want to spare them these feelings.

I remember being so carefree in my loving, so open and happy with people after I got sober. 1982. And then AIDS hit, and my friends died. One by one, my circle of friends got smaller. Bill Pflugradt died. Jose died. Steven Pender. The twins. Dennis. I pulled back. Stopped being able to be friends with gay men, because they would die. Then it got easier again, but when my friends moved out of NYC - Cynthia and Sydney, Barbara, Susan, Anna, Sue, Julie - I lost my capacity to love again. 9/11 really knocked it out for me, as did the whole A2H experience.

I am not who I thought I was, I am not as strong as I thought I was. I have not the resilience I thought I had. Nor yet the resilience others think I have.

So much is written to help people get stronger, to move past their insecurities and frailties, to seize the day and be their best selves, to follow their dreams and take positive action. I've read so much of it, and I've given much advice like it. I still do. Maybe it's necessary because otherwise it's hard to put one foot in front of the other and keep going every day. What's the point? Make a point, give life meaning by taking those steps, doing those things, changing those thoughts, trying those new things on, chasing and catching that dream. If life weren't so hard, we wouldn't need so much encouragement to live it fully. Or is it that it's hard to be conscious and life gets less hard when we are conscious? Blind I cannot feel, heart open I see clearly. Being at ease.

It's exhausting to always try my hardest. That's not being at ease. Being at ease, my being is at ease. And that means being as I am in each moment. If I am grieving and withdrawn, so be it. No urging or shoulds will change my inner being. My inner being will be harmed if I force my outside into a form of "should" or "ought to" or "make an effort."

So I want to say to people, let yourselves be! You are perfect as you are right now. Pay attention to how you feel, to what you think, to your random thoughts and stray wishes, to what you want, to your deepest truth. And speak it out loud, or write it to yourself. Witness your inner being. Allow it air to breathe, light to reveal, voice to be heard. Sad, glad, mad - it's all good for it's all you. No pretzels allowed. Just be.

about 2006

I’m looking back at 2006 and feel more at peace than I have in a long time. While I’ve never written one of these year-end epistles, I have so many friends I’ve sadly neglected that I’m giving it a try to share what’s happened.

2006 began with my growing sinking feeling about my job and my health. I was Executive Director of New York Restoration Project, a position I took in June 2005 on the rebound from City Harvest. A little background – I had a total hip replacement in September 2004, which indirectly resulted in my being unceremoniously and suddenly ousted by City Harvest’s Board in January 2005. Despite physical therapy, I was unable to walk properly by April 2005 and panicked that I could not take the new job. Fortunately, the recruiter from Philips Oppenheim knew a chiropractor who specialized in Active Release Therapy (a wonderful method of deep manipulation of connective tissues and muscle attachments). By June 1, I was ready to start. On walking in the door, though, I got a sinking and ultimately prescient feeling that this job wasn’t the right fit.

By December 2005, I had worked myself ragged trying to prove my worthiness to NYRP’s Founder – and to avoid grief. My beloved nephew David passed away June 29, 2005 after two years battling rare cancer, fibrosarcoma of the brain. I still find it difficult to believe he is gone. Then, I was in a combined state of denial, deep anger at God and the world, and despairing indifference. My lower back gave out and I spent ten days flat on my back working from home.

It was clear by January that there could be only one leader at NYRP and it wasn’t me. The position I wanted was not what I wound up with, and I wasn’t satisfied being a glorified office manager. In a way I was relieved when the Board Chair informed me that the Founder and Board felt this was no longer a good fit. Scared about the future, yes, but relieved that I didn’t have to show up for work that was more and more dispiriting and demoralizing.

As of February 1, I was unemployed – again. I was in shock. Me, who had worked since age 14, suddenly had been asked to leave two jobs in a single year. I was catapulted into self-doubt and, unbeknownst to me, a transition process.

I sought work, of course, and spent most of the spring networking and applying for various jobs in and around the NYC area as well as one in California. While in San Francisco for an interview, I visited my dear friend Cynthia and her partner Kathleen, my Uncle Al and Aunt Jo, and Maplewood friends who’d relocated. Twice, I got to the finalist stage only to be first runner-up. In May, I joined a group in Maplewood to help with my search, TransitionWorks (http://www.transitionworks.org/). Using William Bridges’ wonderful book Transitions as its foundation, TW consists of a workshop series where we explore our pasts in order to identify our intentions for the next phase of our lives. Following the workshop is an ongoing dialogue group, where people share their process and progress toward finding the “right fit” in terms of job, lifestyle and living their values. I was becoming ensconced in the group when physical trauma struck.

June 2 was my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary and we four kids (me, Alana, John and Ron) organized a celebration for them and their friends and relatives. It was a wonderful party – my brother John put together a video chronicling their lives together, my sister Alana gathered tons of photos and put together a beautiful memory book, I downloaded all their CDs and uploaded them on the gold iPod we four gave them, and my brother Ron organized the cakes and lots of set-up/break-down. Actually, all of us did physical labor, so I wasn’t surprised when my lower back began to hurt the morning of the party. After the party, I did what I normally do – went to bed, took muscle relaxants and ibuprofen (at different times), and saw the chiropractor. But this time, it didn’t work and the pain got worse and worse. I ended up having another spinal surgery on June 29, 2006 (L4 microdiskectomy to relieve pressure on the L4 sciatic nerve).

This was my fourth major surgery in seven years, and it dawned on me that I could no longer look for a big job because it required greater physical ability. The past six months have been among the most challenging times in my life, as I struggle to come to terms with being physically disabled. Fortunately, I have a private disability policy. Unfortunately, they required me to apply for Social Security Disability. That form was endless and took forever because I cannot sit for long periods of time. Now, all the forms are in and I await SSA’s determination. Only when they turn me down or accept me will my private insurance start to pay me. Meanwhile, I live on savings.

Physically, I’ve made many accommodations. I have significant pain every day and so am often quite exhausted. I sleep a lot more than I used to. I’ve had the flu three times this fall. It’s difficult for me to walk very far or do much exercise. I no longer lift and carry things, so need help with things like groceries. I traveled with the Cobles (my sister’s family) to Nebraska to visit my Uncle Ron and Aunt Cass, and stopped to see my brother John, sister-in-law Susi and niece Helen – and realize that I can’t really do long-distance travel anymore. Because cooking takes too great a toll on my back, I do very little of it. Thankfully, I am part of my sister’s household since I live just one house away from her. Every night, I eat with Alana, her husband Rick, and their 4 ½ year old daughter Julia (named for me). My housemate, Sue Brennan, helps a lot with the heavy work around the house, like taking the recycling out, and she takes care of the housecleaning. I see a local ART chiropractor twice a week and hope that will have good long-term results. Now that I’ve basically accepted my limits, I’d like to focus on my body becoming more able over time.

I withdrew from many loving friends over the past six months as my internal work was so consuming and my transition from physically able to less physically able so hard. My world got smaller, so living in Maplewood is a blessing for me. Sue’s partner Vivian often visits so it sometimes feels like the old days in NYC with my friend Anna and then Sean next door: an urban dorm gone suburban. I see my parents a lot, as they often come see Julia (and us) and visit David’s grave. My 14 year old niece Ana stays with me sometimes (less than I’d like), and I am learning about how difficult it is to be a teenager these days. I love her and am glad to be close enough to offer her a safe haven. I have two really good friends here, Phillipa and Leslie, and am slowly getting to know other people through Alana and little Julia.

I often get to pick Julia up from day care (we call it “school”) and attend some of the birthday parties and other events. I’m known as Auntie Julie. I love being so close to my sister and being such a huge part of her daughter’s life. Julia and I bonded deeply when her brother David was sick and Mommy (Alana) spent chunks of time in the hospital with him. Now, she has two houses and I have a real role in helping to raise her. My generous sister and brother-in-law are amazing in their acceptance of my partnership and love for their daughter. And my help allows my sister to work hard – she just spent two weeks in Dubai for work. My heart is slowly healing from the grief of losing David and City Harvest in the same year.

The question now is what do I do with my brain. Many people will deal with this issue: I have big brain capacity and limited body capacity, whereas I used to have big brain and big body capacity. I wonder what I can do, what I want to do, and how I can do it. Before my surgery, I laid groundwork for a number of things. I set up an LLC through which I could do consulting and coaching, Mission Advancement Consulting. I started working on an MBA through an on-line university, Cardean, which gets its very challenging courses from U of Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon and London School of Economics. I’m mid-way through that. I host a “Monday morning get-going” meeting at my house for people in TransitionWorks who are not working and need support and structure to stay on the trail. There, I’ve processed a lot of grief about City Harvest and anger and shame about how I was treated, in order to end that phase of my life and prepare for the next. And I’m writing in my blogs like this one. I find I can do things that allow me to set my own schedule and stay close to home: research, on-line classes, and writing.

Today, my goal is to write books that help people forge loving, positive lives in a challenging world. I’ve grappled with things many others face: alcoholism and addiction, job hunting and career building, family and community, self-acceptance and personal accountability, death of a child and other losses, getting fired, moving to the suburbs and creating new community. I’ve emerged strong, compassionate, and convinced that I must be kind to myself and to others. I also face uncommon issues like being a twin and an “almost mom.” I think my approach to these can help others with their unique circumstances. So I put this intention out into the universe to see what happens.