It all started when I was very young.

I grew up in a religious system which was very fond of emphasizing Just How Bad We All Are. How we are all born into this world as terrible, wretched sinners, and how everything about us is offensive to God and makes God very angry, and how all that we deserve is to be eternally punished by God. But maybe, if we grovel and abase ourselves enough, God will grudgingly agree not to smite us down from the heavens-but only if we agree to remember in every second that we really do deserve the smiting, and never ever dare to think of ourselves as anything better than the sniveling worms we truly are.

(I know that I tend to exaggerate a lot in the interests of humor, but I’m actually not exaggerating this. See: Why I No Longer Participate In Organized Religion)

And at the same time that I was under constant bombardment by this dogma, I was also being told that I was supposed to love God, and do everything for God, and want to spend all of my time with God.

Um, I don’t think so.

It never made sense to me, why I should want to have anything to do with a being that was reported to hate me so much, but because I wanted to be A Good Girl, and I wanted people to like me and approve of me, and I certainly wanted God to like and approve of me, I did my best to follow this convoluted system, which pretty much boiled down to agreeing to lose my mind.

It’s probably not a coincidence then, that from then on I always seemed to find myself in situations where who I was and what I wanted never measured up to The Way I Was Supposed To Be-from not wanting to have a professional career, to the fact that I was born female, instead of male.

Well, I couldn’t fundamentally change who I was-I couldn’t not be female, or not want what I really did want-so instead, I came up with a brilliant alternative:

I decided that if I could figure out some way to suffer “enough”, then I would have paid some kind of cosmic price, and then I would be free to live in whatever way I wanted.

Or in other words, I must never be too happy.

I don’t need to describe the multitude of ways I’ve found to punish myself over the years. We all know them. And this self-hatred, in whatever form it took, eventually became my drug of choice, the substance I would turn to whenever life got too intense for me to handle.

Well, that has kind of become a problem for me lately, because of my intense commitment to personal and spiritual growth. Because right now I am happy, and I am living exactly the way I want to. And so now I am anxiously waiting for some supernatural force to come and collect on my promise of constant suffering, and force me to “pay” for this happiness in some way.

I’ve been laboring under so much anxiety lately-it feels like trying to hold back the ocean with my pinkie. And then, in the middle of trying not to drown under another anxious wave, I got it.

Whenever I have felt this anxiety before, I have always thought, “Oh, if I could just figure out a way to change myself or be different, I would feel better.” That has been the way that I continued this legacy of self-hatred.

But today, for whatever reason, a brand new thought slipped into my head, and I got it. The way for me to change or be different has nothing to do with figuring out how to earn more money, or losing weight, or turning myself into some kind of Stepford Wife.

The way for me to feel better depended only on one thing: in this moment, when I felt like I was drowning under the weight of all that anxiety, what was I going to do? Was I going to try and soothe myself by going down the old, familiar path of committing mental violence against myself, of trying to hate and abuse myself into feeling better, of trying to satisfy some kind of imagined angry deity by eviscerating myself on my mental altar?

Or was I going to consider the possibility that there might be another way to do this?

I’ve gotta tell ya, turning away from my old pattern of thinking is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my entire life.

And I’m choosing to do it anyway.

I’m choosing kindness to myself, instead of self-hatred.

And I feel like I’m going to explode out of my body with anxiety.

I’m choosing to be gentle with myself, instead of telling myself just how much I suck.

And I feel like I just might drown in any moment.

Moment by moment, I’m choosing another way. THAT is how I’m changing this.

It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done.

About six years ago I decided to leave the work-a-day world and go into business for myself. I’ve spent a large portion of those years with different classes, workshops, books, seminars, and programs designed for entrepreneurs. It’s all great information, especially since I was on a pretty steep learning curve. But I’ve reached the point now where those products are actually keeping me out of my life.

I realized that what I genuinely desire, and what the people who produce those products desire, are not the same thing. And I’ve been making myself wrong and feeling guilty for wanting what I truly want, and not wanting what they say I should want. Let me explain.

After six years of trying out a lot of different possibilities, I realized that my goal in life is not to be a worker/earner. If I had to give a name to my “reason for being”, I would say that I am a spiritual contemplative/mystic/writer/professional dreamer. So I like working about 10-12 hours a week, with lots of time left to create a nurturing home, take care of the errands of daily life, maintain my connections with other people, think, observe, process life, and create.

I like that the way I contribute to and help change the world is through working on myself, and transforming my connections to the people around me, one encounter at a time.

Unfortunately, even in the personal growth/New Thought community, that business model is never really presented as a viable option. It seems to me that whenever people are talking about things like The Secret, and The Law Of Attraction, and other principles of Deliberate Creation, the emphasis is always on BIGGER, and MORE. If the concept of “enough” is ever addressed, it only seems to be in the manner of finding a way to temporarily let what you have be “enough”, only so it can move you to a different place where you can finally get MORE. There doesn’t seem to be much work addressing the question of genuinely being satisfied and feeling like you have enough.

And that is where I started to feel disconnected from the popular concept of personal growth, because I could no longer ignore the fact that I am really satisfied with my life right now.

I have no interest in figuring out how to get more clients or earn more money in my tutoring business. The work and income I have now is enough, and more than enough, for me right now financially.

I have no desire to “maximize my earning potential” by figuring out ways to reach the masses and distance myself from people on an individual basis. What I love about my work is its personal, one-on-one nature.

I have always been so afraid to just stop reaching and say, “This is my life.” I’ve worried that somehow that was “settling”, or being lazy, or would make me miss out on something that I really wanted.

Po Bronson has a great quote about this very issue in his book, Why Do I Love These People? He says, “It’s said that there are four basic fears inherent to the nature of existence-you can have some of these fears no matter how well you might have been raised. They are The Fear of Dying, the Fear of Having to Choose, The Fear of Ending Up Alone, and The Fear That the World Is Intrinsically Meaningless. Anne realized that she definitely had this Fear of Having to Choose. Because she had always assumed that having it all was possible, she had never really forced herself to make a choice. She had never recognized that making choices-and being okay with the fact that this means that there are other choices you will never get to taste and experience-was essential to being at peace in the world.”

That’s where I am right now. I feel like I am settling into my place here in this world, like I’m spreading out and inhabiting all the nooks, crannies, and spaces of my life. I am saying, “This is my piece of work in the grand scheme of things. I cannot do everything, nor do I have to.” I’m declaring, “I am choosing this. That means that I am not choosing those other things, and am instead letting them go.”

For example, I recently met with a new client who needed some tutoring. After one session I could tell that this student needed help I couldn’t provide. But what I was able to do was to specifically identify and articulate to the parents exactly what kind of support the student needed, which was information they hadn’t had before.

Prior to this point in my life I would have acted completely differently in this situation. I would’ve taken the student on, tried to become an expert overnight in an area in which I have no expertise (or interest), tried to single-handedly launch the student from an “F” to an “A”, plus tried to find a way to capture this process into some kind of product and market it to the masses, so that I would be able to make a bajillion dollars.

But now I am just sitting with the experience and considering the possibility, what if what I did was enough? What if my job was just to provide this one piece of the puzzle, and now my work in this situation is complete?

It takes an awful lot of courage to live this way, to pry my grasping fingers away from attempting to control all outcomes, and to live in a space of “not-knowing”.

But it’s also kind of exciting. It’s exciting to look around me and say, “Okay, this is my sphere of influence. This is my metaphorical ‘patch of land’ to tend in this life. I wonder what’s here.”

For one thing, this blog is here. And everything I’ve worked through regarding my business also applies here. I finally got tired of always comparing myself to other blogs and bloggers, and always feeling that my blog was never quite good enough.

And when I got really honest with myself, I realized that right now I don’t actually want the kind of results that someone like dooce gets, no matter what the prevailing wisdom says about what I “should” want to accomplish with my blog. For example, I love when people comment on my posts, but I’m pretty sure that if my posts routinely got hundreds of comments, I would most likely have a nervous breakdown. Because what I love about my blog is that I am able to respond personally to my readers, and again make personal, one-on-one connections. So in fact, I’m actually getting exactly the results I want with my blog.

So there you have it, for whatever it’s worth. One woman finally giving herself permission to want what she wants, let the rest go, and enjoy having “enough” in her life.

And it is very, very good.

This material is dovetailing nicely with all the things I was thinking about after reading Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, back before my intestines became the unfortunately fertile breeding ground for Hostile Alien Bacteria. Specifically it’s helping me to answer the question, “What’s my word?” Because not only have I realized that, of course, my word cannot be anything other than FREE, all this reading about my ancestors has given me a good idea of where that might have come from.

Of course we all know the traditional story of the Pilgrims and their desire for freedom from the king of England and his church, but it’s the way that Philbrick describes these desires that sometimes has all my hair standing on end in amazed recognition.

When I read things like, “…the Puritans had chosen to spurn thousands of years of accumulated tradition in favor of a text that gave them a direct and personal connection to God,” I remember how powerful an experience it was for me to go through the workbook of A Course In Miracles for the first time (Philbrick, p.8).

Or when I read that they wanted to be “…free to establish themselves on their own terms”, I think about how I have done the very same thing in creating my own work, my own contribution to the world, and my own role within my marriage (Philbrick, p.16).

And when I read that during their services, “…the entire congregation had participated in a passionate search for divine truth”, I almost shot out the top of my head, because that is what my entire life has been devoted to (Philbrick, p. 12).

Of course the form of this search, as well as the form of the truths I’ve discovered, has taken many different shapes over the years.

In my younger years I was of the opinion that, There Is Only One Truth, And I Will Find It, And I Will Carry It To The Rest Of The World, and, well, I’m sure you can imagine just how well that worked out. But these days I’m more of the mind of Pontius Pilate in “Jesus Christ, Superstar” where he says,

But what is truth?
Is truth unchanging law?
We both have truths.
Are mine the same as yours?

I say that now, because back in March of 2004 at the end of an extended depression, as well as a year of doing the Course, my mind just split open and everything came pouring out. Everything I ever thought I was, every belief, every conclusion I’d come to about myself and the world, every single thought I’d ever had about anything just crumbled and then dissolved away.

I’d just experienced too many things that showed that the way I thought about life, and myself, and God was not the way things actually were. I could no longer not know what I knew. And what I now knew was this: that there are as many unique, individual paths to God as there are unique individuals on the planet.

And so I love this quote by Ghandi which says, “My commitment is to truth as I see it each day, not to consistency”, because that is exactly how I now experience my day-to-day life.

By the time the worst of my crisis had passed, my mind had literally become a completely blank slate. As I went through my day I would pick up every thought that occurred to me, from “I like these pants”, to “I believe in God”, and examine it to see if it was true for me. I literally rebuilt my mind in this way, one thought at a time.

And so now, this is what freedom means to me: that I am free, in each and every moment, to choose my own thoughts.

This was not the first time I’d been introduced to this idea, nor was it the first time this idea precipitated a major life crisis.

When I arrived at college at the tender age of 17, what blew me away was not the freedom I found to act in whatever way I chose, but rather the freedom to think whatever I wanted to at any given moment. Up until this point I was always in an environment where someone else was constantly telling me how and what to think, and because it seemed to work for me at the time I just went along with it.

But when I got to college I was completely on my own mentally speaking, and because I was unused to such total and absolute freedom, I was completely overwhelmed. And interestingly enough, this very same thing happened to the Pilgrims. Before they came to the New World they lived for a while in Holland, and according to Philbrick, “Once in Amsterdam, the Separatists from Scrooby found themselves thrust into conflict and contention. As dissidents who had come to define themselves in opposition to an established authority, Separatists were often unprepared for the reality of being able to worship as they wanted in Holland” (Philbrick, p.13)

I’m not sure exactly what the Pilgrims did to deal with this, but I, brilliantly, contracted mono, which gave me an excuse for lying in my dorm room alone for long periods of time, away from the constant pressure of new thoughts and ideas and experiences. Just like my crisis in 2004 gave me the space I needed to re-create my mind in my own, authentic image.

Happily I’m learning more and more how to experience all this freedom without needing to first experience a serious illness or a major emotional crisis.

Now I know that I can think whatever I choose in every moment. And it is all very good.

Me: Oh look, she likes the Care Bears.

My husband (looking at me a little pityingly): Um, dude, that’s a sticker for the Grateful Dead.