The Aliveness Barometer

I begin this post in the cold, dark-grey light of 3:30 a.m. on a ranch in northern California. I’m sitting on an old stump with a lemon-wedge of a half-moon above, my fingers stiff with chill as I type. Last night someone heard coyotes on this land.

I’m here for a Nonviolent Communication (NVC) retreat, with 40 other people who are excited about bringing more peace into the world through the way they connect with others. I love the way NVC has helped me to live in a way that feels more alive to me. But it’s also been hard at times along the way, since our ways of thinking and acting and seeing the world can be deep-rooted. I find that it takes a willingness to be vulnerable, to be in “beginner’s mind,” to make those shifts.

Opening to our vulnerability can also have some unexpected side effects. At just about this time last year, at the end of another NVC retreat, I said, to the people I’d just spent a week learning with:

“Thank you for reminding me that it’s really only when I open myself up to being vulnerable – when I stop trying to be perfect and am just am exactly who I am in each moment – that I also open myself up to love.”

It turns out that research backs up what I suspected after that week. Brene’ Brown’s work shows that vulnerability is the only thing that differentiates people who feel deeply loved and valued from people who don’t.

A friend of mine read this blog and wrote: “posting my journaling is something I can’t imagine… the popularity of it is a mystery to me.” I was surprised that he saw it that way, since I keep a separate journal and see it as a very different animal.

But it occurs to me now – as I sit under this moon and imagine a coyote pack somewhere out there in the dark, with my 3:30 a.m. brain so fresh and vulnerable that it feels almost newborn – that maybe what he meant was not so much about journaling. Maybe he was talking about vulnerability.

Writing this blog is a stretch in the direction of vulnerability. So were the “things that scared me” these past 2 weeks: getting up to dance in front of a group of strangers; climbing a tree that jutted out over a long, steep drop into a canyon; asking an old boyfriend to tell me what he thinks might stand in the way of my finding lasting love. I also began writing a one-woman show called “My Ass (In the World),” which tells of the many opinions that I’ve heard, in the countries I’ve lived in, about… well, yes, my ass. I think the project is going to be a one-woman show, which is scary because I’m neither an actress nor very comfortable talking about my ass!

Another of the “things that scared me” was to start a “high risk” writing group, in which we’ll be accountable for the degree of risk we’re taking in our writing. I also taught a class in NVC, which I hadn’t done before; spoke up in ways that felt risky to me, in two classes I’m taking; and agreed to mediate for the first time, between an acquaintance and a former business partner of his.

I made a public commitment, during this NVC training, to consistently check in with how excited and alive I feel in the training, and to look for ways to make the learning more alive for me. I imagine I haven’t been alone in forcing myself to sit zombie-like through classes and meetings in the past. But I’ve been feeling a sort of inner refusal, lately, to be anything less than alive and engaged in the hours of my life.

I was thinking of this as a sort of “aliveness barometer” – but the idea quickly evolved into something else. I got a headache that clenched a tenacious grip onto my temples for most of the retreat (this was the reason that I didn’t post here last week, and the reason that I’m writing the second half of this post now that the retreat is over). It was the kind of headache that makes you want to curl up in a dark room, not spend a week with 40 people you’ve never met before. I’ve hardly ever had a headache like that before.

I noticed that I felt not just the pain of the headache itself, but the pain of feeling that I “should” be feeling well, “should” be meeting more of the people at the retreat, “should” be doing expansive, scary things every day, “should” be performing that famous one-woman show for the group... and on and on.

But as it turned out, the scariest thing I could imagine for those days was just showing up, exactly as I was, headache and all. I realized that, even in my trying to be vulnerable in these NVC groups, I’ve been wanting it to be joyful, meaningful – the kind of vulnerability where you open up to others and quickly find connection around it. Happy vulnerability, that is, not “I have a terrible headache for the fifth day in a row and don’t feel like talking to anyone.”

Finally, on the fifth day, I decided to tell everyone what I was feeling, just exactly how bad I felt and how sad I was that I didn’t even feel like talking to people.

The headache left almost as soon as I did.

So I’m wondering: Could that headache have been my real “aliveness barometer?” Is it possible that by avoiding showing those 40 people I didn’t know just how bad I felt, I was avoiding being fully alive – Alive, that is, even when it’s not pretty?

On Retreat

I'm on a Nonviolent Communication (NVC) retreat this week and it's been more intense than I'd expected. I haven't managed to post this week -- but I am doing plenty of scary things! I intend to post this coming Sunday.

"Awe" plus "Aaah"

On Tuesday nights, when I lived in Spain in my twenties, I met with a writing group at a smoky Madrid bar. We argued for hours about writing and life, and drank wine the color of bull's blood.

It was past midnight by the time I got off the subway in the working-class neighborhood where I lived. I remember cold air, the sound of a garbage truck clanging its way through the dark streets, the lingering smell of fried potatoes and chicken fat from the asaderia on the corner.

But mostly I remember the way the cold air seemed to enter my veins on those nights, so I could feel my blood flowing through every limb of my body. I’d rarely felt so alive.

People keep asking me how I decide what scares me each day. But it’s not just about fear. Instead, I want each action to both carry a slight edge of fear and have what I call the “awe plus aaah” factor.

“Awe plus aaah” comes from a question I was asked a few months ago: “What does love feel like to you?”

Here’s what I said in reply (I was living in India at the time):

“This morning, in my little roof-top apartment in Delhi, I remembered a time when i was traveling with my boyfriend through Morocco. I thought, during that trip, of "the cool green touch of a lover" in contrast with the hot chaos of the markets we roamed during the days. 

I was thinking, this morning that "cool green touch" still describes pretty well how love feels to me. Just as I had that thought, I heard a rumble of thunder outside, and within about a minute the day's big rain began.

I went outside on the roof and saw the leafy tops of huge mango and banyan trees shivering under the drops, and whole flocks of green parrots taking off at once, as though shaken out of the trees. Pure awe.

I thought, "That, too. That's also what love feels like." 

So love feels like awe. Plus a feeling (after sweating in a desert town in Morocco, or after feeling a storm build up in Delhi) of "aaah."

You know, a sort of glimpse of that place where we're meant to be, a place that feels like it's home in a deep sort of way, and that beckons to us with the knowledge that we could be there all the time.”

So back to this “365 days” experiment: I want each of the daily “things that scare me” to have the “awe plus aah factor” – that is, to seem like it may lead me to a place that is bigger, truer, more alive.

Writing has always had a huge element of “awe plus aah” for me, so that one I sort of expected.

But one thing I’ve been noticing as this experiment progresses is that it forces me to be aware, in a big way and every single day, of which things really carry that frisson of aliveness – that sense of feeling my blood somehow alive and flowing through my veins.

This week’s “things that scared me” included: pitching an idea for a super-short film to a guerrilla film production group; a freezing dip in the ocean; and replying to a very scary and very personal email with some scary and personal thoughts of my own. I also dug deep into my hippy upbringing, memories of nearly drowning as a kid, and thoughts on my thighs for my writing, and read it to my new writing class. I dedicated a whole day to really being with, and mourning, a betrayal I’d experienced in a relationship, rather than shoving it to the back of my mind and forcing myself to “move on” before I was really ready.

On Friday night, my plans to scare myself by taking a tango class fell through. As a “Plan B,” I went to dance salsa with a friend (salsa, unlike tango, not being scary but just fun) and brainstormed to see what scariness we could come up with. I considered ripping a woman’s tiara off her head and putting it nonchalantly on my own, or taking the floor just after the (amazing) local salsa troupe performed, and putting on a solo show of my own… But the woman looked like she could take me down and neither plan had any real “awe plus aaah” factor.

I mean, I could jump into a pit of snakes, but what’s the point, really? Instead I took another emotional risk and told one of my deepest, darkest, weirdest secrets – something I’ve never told anyone else – to a stranger.

It was really clear, with the “things that scared me,” this week, that some of them really hit the spot in terms of “awe plus aaah” (for example, pitching the film idea and writing) and others didn’t as much. I think I’ve decided to see this, rather than as an “Oh my God, I need to come up with better ideas,” as a great chance to learn what really gives me that feeling of “blood flowing through my veins.” After years of trying to decide what my life purpose is, I think a side effect of this experiment may be getting a much better picture of that.

I mean, after all, what is our life’s purpose but that thing or things that really leave us feeling alive – the way that I felt on those cold Madrid nights when I could feel the blood in my every limb?

The Yin and Yang of Courage

The father of an Indian friend of mine loved to go hunting at night in the deep black of the jungle. When he’d shot an animal big enough to weigh down the jeep, he would leave his five-year-old son at the side of the track to guard the bloody carcass. This was over four decades ago, so there were still a lot of tigers in those forests.

My friend laughs when he tells the story:

“They’d leave a lantern with me. I taught myself never to move the lantern around or look up into the trees, because there I would see all sorts of shapes, things moving around. So I would just look down, like this.” He crosses his arms over his chest, hunches his shoulders and stares fixedly at the ground, eyes wide and brows squeezed together.

This friend is now 46 years old and credits those hunting trips with his father for leaving him with very little else to fear in life. Still, he told me on the phone this morning about a woman.

“I fell in love, so much that it surprised me,” he said. “Then I started to think about all the things that could go wrong, all the ways I might lose her. And I panicked – just pure, screaming, nail-biting panic. But I never panic. I don’t think I even really knew I was panicking. I just looked for a way to distract myself from the fear.”

This is a man who can’t remember the last time he’s felt scared – a man who, when he hears Maoists have taken over in Nepal, hops into the car to drive across the border and check it out.

Then he meets a woman who makes him feel open and raw and vulnerable and hopeful. And he panics.

I feel a lot of companionship with my friend today, because I wrote in this blog for the first time a week ago, clicked on “post,” and promptly freaked out.

You see, I love to write but my fear of showing up on the page has had me skirting around “really writing” for years, always having jobs where I did a lot of writing but rarely sharing anything of my own.

On days 1 and 2 of this challenge – in committing to writing this blog and starting it – I noticed that I was feeling a lot of fear. But it wasn’t just the expansive, “Wow, I just did something a little scary” feeling that I’d expected. I sifted through the fridge for a snack without finding anything I wanted to eat, considered distracting myself with a movie marathon… basically did my own version of my friend’s reaction when he fell in love and panicked.

Finally I went for a hike with a wise friend. As my boots rose and fell on the pine-needle-speckled trail, the smell of damp earth rising to my nose, the swish of our arms in our windbreakers finding their rhythm as we moved, I was able to get at what was really bothering me.

It turned out that my fear had something important to teach me, beyond the expected fear of starting the blog itself:

I’d originally posted that I would blog about this challenge every day of the year. But, as I finally realized, when I went for a walk and talked to a friend and paid attention, the point of this year-long adventure is to do one thing a day that scares me and see how that expands my life. I don’t want my writing on it to be a daily reporting of what I did the day before. I want to actually learn something, about fear and how it works in us, and about how we can expand our lives by facing it head-on. And I want to write about that learning.

(And I might add that I want to do all of that, without developing some sort of addiction to distract myself from the fear!).

Listening to my fear led me to make a couple of changes: first, I decided to still DO one thing that scares me each day, but to blog about it once a week so there’s time to actually learn something along the way. Second, I decided to ask for support for when things get scary again in the future. Another wise advisor had said, when I told her about the idea, that I’d probably want to have a “seatbelt” on this ride. On Day 3 of the challenge, I asked several people, including a few that I don’t know that well and who I thought might say “no,” to be a part of my “seatbelts” – people I can call when I need support.

So that’s what happened when I put on my hiking boots, slowed down, and paid attention.

This got me thinking: not just about how much we can learn from our fear, but also about how we see courage as this big, expansive thing that has us charging out to take on the world.

But what about the other side of courage, the quiet courage that has us, for example, ask for help when we need it; go for a hike in the woods; or just pay attention, sink into our fear and learn what it has to tell us?

I’m thinking of this, today, as the “Yin and Yang of Courage.” The yang, which has us looking outward, doing things that seem expansive – like, say, committing to doing one thing that scares me, every day this year. And the yin, which has us slowing down, paying attention, doing things that may seem quieter but are often just as courageous.

Like, for example, opening ourselves to love.

Things that Scared Me (Jan 1-9)*

*For more detail, see the post that follows this one.

Day 1 (Jan 1) – Commit to doing one thing that scares me every day this year, and writing a blog about it.

Day 2 – Listen to what my fear has to teach me.

Day 3 – Ask for help – finding a “seatbelt” for the ride.

Day 4 – (Try to) start taking a writing class. (I didn’t get in, but am working on other options!)

Day 5 – Clean-up Day: look at any place where I’m not being fully authentic in my relationships and…. clean it up! I had a talk with one person and sent an email to another; not huge stuff, just places where I was avoiding being 100% real about things that might involve conflict. (I love the idea of how honest this can make my relationships, and I may make it a weekly practice).

Day 6 – Go with the flow (on this day I had planned several different things that scared me – including teaching a lesson at an NVC practice group and getting a second opinion on a topic I didn’t really even want to talk about – but they either didn’t scare me as much as I’d expected, or they fell through. So… perhaps another side of the “yin of courage” is to go with the flow when your plans fall through).

Day 7 – Let myself be blatantly set up with a man, by my friends (he didn’t show up and was ten years younger than me anyway, but I was ready to face the music… again, I suppose this was practice in “courageously going with the flow!”).

Day 8 – Ask for difficult feedback (I didn’t get into a program I’d applied for, and I decided to ask why).

Day 9 – Write this post!

A Year-long Experiment in Living with Courage

“Do one thing every day that scares you.” For years I’ve wondered how my life might change if I followed that famous advice from Eleanor Roosevelt. What would I learn, and how might my outlook shift, if I did one thing each day that took real courage?

Yesterday I committed to it: Every day of 2011, I will do one thing that scares me.

Fear is a funny thing. When people ask me about the past five years of my life – working in places like Pakistan and Haiti and on the border between Darfur and Eastern Chad – I sometimes lose myself in the story. I forget to censor myself and I say things like:

“That night we went to sleep in our mud-walled compound knowing that sometime before morning the rebel army would cross through the city,” or “I was lucky I was evacuated from the country, because a few weeks later a close friend of mine was shot in the car that we had always driven together.”

When I say these things, some people go pale and don’t know what to say, quickly forgetting that moments before they’d said, “Wow! That’s my dream job!” Other people murmur something about how brave they imagine I am, to have done that work.

But here’s where the “fear is funny” part comes in: Sure, I’ve been in some scary situations. But have I ever, for example, asked a man out?

No. Believe it or not, in nearly 4 decades of life I haven’t managed to take that small step (yeah, I know… I know!). And while I won’t say that that particular fear is higher on my list than, say, death, I do wonder:

How do even small, everyday fears shape my life? And how might my life change if I walked toward them, rather than away?

My theory is that even the most “fearless” amongst us often live limited lives, fenced in by fears large and small. We shrink ourselves to fit lives that are much smaller than those that we could have, by stepping away from the fears that arise every day – rather than turning to meet them and learning what they have to teach us.

Living without fear is not my aim. Instead, I want to practice facing my fears, large or small, with courage. The word “courage” comes from the French “coeur,” meaning “heart.” To live in courage means to live from your heart.

So this is it: 2011 is my year to see what will happen if I step into a fear every day, arms wide open. This is my year to see how my life may change if I live from my heart.

The rules are simple:

1) Do one thing every day that scares me, that requires me to live in courage.

2) Write each week about what I've learned.


I leave you with a piece of inspiration that a friend happened to send me a few days ago, while I was trying to decide whether to take on this challenge:


I Will Not Die an Unlived Life
by Dawna Markova


I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible;
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.