Today’s page was week six’s part 3 (and final) homework for the Soul Restoration class.

This assignment was all about differentiating between things I want to spend less time on and things I want focus more on. The thing that struck me a bit with this assignment was more about what I did not include on my page as opposed to what ended up there. The things that are on the “no more” and on the “focus on” list are both relatively authentic to me and they seem obvious to me. They are things I really need to be more cognizant of when I am living each moment.

here are some things that didn’t make it on the “no more” list

• Abusing: Even though I’ve abused diet coke before and I do drink a little more coffee than I’d like at the moment, I am in better shape on this than I’ve been in the past. I still remember the days of 12 diet cokes.
• Greed: This is another area where I don’t focus too much on anymore. I don’t need promotions and raises. Money is nice to have but I only need enough to send my kids to good schools, have us live comfortably and not be in deep need. Anything else is extra and nice to have but it’s not worth dedicating all my free time to. My family and soul work is where I want the free time to go to, not trying to make a few extra bucks.
• Over-eating: Another area where things are more in control than they’ve been in the past. No devouring chocolate bars. I haven’t had chips or burgers or impulsive eating in a long time. I still don’t eat as well as I should but this is a definite sign of progress.
• Hoarding: I have made tangible progress in this area, too. With the help of digital books, I am not buying books anymore. I have also stopped buying just about any scrapbooking stuff with the exception of punches and white cardstock. I do need to find a good way to donate some of my existing stash but at least I am working on not growing it.
• Overworking: This is similar to “greed” where I am trying to focus on doing a good job at work and focusing hard and then spending the rest of my time doing things I love for myself or for my family. This is something that’s particularly hard for me but I didn’t include it because I think that compared to the 100-hour weeks I was working on Wall Street, I am really doing better on this item.

and here are some of the items that didn’t make it to the “focus on” list:

• Clutter: This is something I feel like I have more under control than usual. I do have a few areas of clutter that keep piling up again and again but in general I think the house is organized and we’re keeping things orderly so I am happy with it and feel at peace.
• Cooking: I have decided that I am not cooking. I might, one day, decide otherwise. But for now, this is not an area I want to spend my precious time on and as long as we all eat whole foods and not processed ones, we’re ok. We will stick to fruits, frozen veggies, yogurt, honey and nuts.
• Meditation: Another area where I often pressure myself to do better and I finally decided enough is enough. No meditation for me. I can focus on the journaling instead. It works well, makes me feel peaceful and allows me to work things out. This is good enough for now.
• Pretty Things/Clothes: While I am fully determined to lose weight and finally look the way I’ve always wanted to, I am not bent on having pretty things or clothes. I am happy with my one item a month rule and even if I didn’t have that, it’s ok. The focus is the weight/size loss here. Everything else is extra.
• Homemaking: Not my area of strength or interest. I like my house to be open, clean, and orderly. I am not spending hours decorating and redecorating it. And I am officially not feeling bad about it. There we go.
• Dancing: This is another area of major guilt for me. I don’t dance. I feel too awkward, self-conscious, etc. People always seem to feel sad for me when they hear this and I keep telling myself I need to work on it. Well seeing here on paper, I decided to let myself off the hook. I don’t need to dance. I do many other things that make me happy and allow me to share my joy. It’s ok not to do this.
• Vacations/Travel: My kids are still pretty young. Vacation for us is more torture than fun. A lot of planning, a lot of being off-schedule and cranky and disorganized. I’d rather just stay at home or take short trips where everyone comes back home to sleep in their own bed. This will change with time but for now, it’s totally ok to not go anywhere and just enjoy our home.

There you go. So many of the lessons I learned this week. And I let myself off the hook on many items. I think that was almost as important as coming up with my lists of “no more” and “focus on.”

With this, my classwork is over. I have some truth cards to make but that will come later this year. I have love love love loved this course and cannot recommend it enough.

Weekly Art Journal is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.

Today’s page was week six’s part 1 homework for the Soul Restoration class. I thought of doing them all together as one post but then I decided if I did each separately, I would take more time to focus on each so I decided to do that. Here’s the first one:

When I saw this exercise, I thought it was powerful-looking and that it would be easy. I didn’t think as much about how it might make me feel. I didn’t think it would be that strong because it was more of a “cut the words out and glue them on this photo” kind of assignment.

But, alas, I was wrong.

This exercise, as with the others, proved to be very very powerful. Just the act of cutting each word up and glueing them down one by one left me more impacted than I imagined. Glueing each of the “black” words made me sadder and sadder. I felt heavier and it took forever to finish the sections. I could almost feel each word taking its toll on me.

Then I did the white words and it went so much faster. I felt happier, lighter, and like a weight was lifted off of me.

I know it sounds corny but I really felt it. After I’d glued all my words down, I was left with a few words and a lot of space. The leftover words didn’t speak to me and I knew they wouldn’t fill the space anyway so I decided, instead, to put the blue tissue paper to make it seem more like the sky. And then I added my house which was red because I wanted it to stand out. I put the word “be” on it to remind myself to just be who I am. And a heart to remind myself that I am loved and that I need to love myself just the way I am.

Then to keep the feeling of light that the white words brought, I added the line “I will go where the peace is…in my heart and in my life.” I think this is the biggest lesson for me. The peaceful and happy words make me feel light and happy and I need to make a point to focus on them more. To remember to go where the good is. Where the peace is. Where all these wonderfully happy words take me. Where I feel unburdened, light, happy and at peace.

Because, there, I can be my best. I can be kind and loving to others and kind and loving to myself.

Weekly Art Journal is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.

Today’s page was week four’s homework for the Soul Restoration class.

This week’s theme is about doing things despite the hardship to one’s soul, heart, life, body, etc. As each time, I’ll just talk some about my personal thoughts and things that came up for me.

I am the queen of “doing it anyway.” I have a deep lack of self-confidence with most things in life. However I just plow through. If there’s one sentence that is common across all the reviews I’ve gotten in my professional life, it’s “Karen gets things done.” I just like to do it. I might feel scared, weak, sad, worried, not good enough but I still do it. I am not entirely sure where the will/drive/power comes from. I think it’s mostly because I really really like getting things done. It makes me feel better than anything else does. So when I listened to this week’s content, I wasn’t sure it was going to apply to me. After all, I am the queen.

And yet.

As each time, I find out more and more things and dig deeper and deeper. This time, as I read the sheets of sentences Melody had written, certain themes stood out to me, so I focused on those particular cases where I felt weak/wronged/sad/lonely/scared/insecure but I did it anyway.

Here are my personal areas:

1. Childhood. For a period of my life when I was in my early teens, I had really terrible friends. They kept treating me very badly. They made fun of me, told me I was ugly, left me out of things, ignored me, ridiculed me, etc. This broke a lot of me and is likely one of the biggest roots of some of my abandonment and loneliness issues. And alas, for this one, I couldn’t really think of something good I did in return. So I picked “She survived it anyway.” And I did. I moved on to make wonderful friends, caring relationships, and more. This is an area that I still do continual work in and will likely keep doing so for a while. I also labeled it “She kept going anyway.” Because I did. I found new friends and a new life.

2. Bad relationship. Many many many years ago, I was in a relationship with someone who was suffering and had problems too big for me to solve. He was angry and he hurt me both emotionally and physically. He loved me deeply and yet it was never going to work out. He had too much anger. But while I left him and I know it was the right thing to do, I marked this one as “She saw goodness anyway.” because he was good. He had survived so much and even thrived in his own way. I bear no ill will. And I know he is well now and wish him nothing but the best.

3. Impatience with my Kids. This is a current issue. I find myself getting impatient more often than I’d like. Yelling. Being crabby. Overwhelmed. I am often not proud of the way I behave. I am working on this though. Every single day. Every single time. I try and try and try. So I labeled this one “She did her best anyway.” All I can do is do my best each time. I mess up, I get up and try all over again.

4. Exercise. I wrote about this at length last week but here’s an area where I try every day. I push myself. I am scared, tired, terrified. I have failed at this before. I know it’s going to be a long long long time. I have no idea if it will work. If it will all be for nothing. I am truly scared daily. And so I picked “She stayed on her path anyway.” Because I do. Every single day. I get up and I do it. Despite fear and tiredness and the difficulty.

5. Friendship/Art. I’ve always had the notion that I am too different and weird. As a kid, most of my friends were nothing like me. And I still feel the same way often. My programmer friends think my scrappy side is a bit odd. My arty friends do not relate to my super-orderly, very scheduled, organized personality. I often feel like an outsider and like the weird one. I feel like I am not creative enough. Not interesting enough. I don’t have that “thing” all the artsy people have. The idea-oriented personality. I am more fact and schedule driven. I often feel odd and outside. So for this one, I labeled “She kept creating anyway.” That’s what I am doing with all these art journals and drawing classes and everything else. Trying to become more of the artsy I guess.

6. Misc. And then I just took a bunch of the others that really spoke to me, like having too much on my todo list, too many emails, domestically challenged, comparing others’ best parts to my worst ones, feeling under qualified, etc. etc. I labeled that section with “She was happy anyway.” Because I am. Happier than I have ever been in my life up until this moment. I feel content and peaceful most days. Even on my crazy days, I have a bottom layer of contentment. So I am grateful. Thankful and happy.

There we go. Another amazing week. I cannot tell you how powerful this class has been for me. If you can take it when it’s offered again in April, I highly highly encourage you to do so.

Weekly Art Journal is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.

Today’s page was week two’s homework for the Soul Restoration class.

This is a representation of the timeline of my life. I will be turning 37 this year and this goes up to 40. Each row is 10 years. There are many sentences and markers. Black is for the hardest times in my life. Grays are for the not-so-great times. Colors mixed with gray are times when there was a mixture of really good and not so great. And the textured wallpaper one is for times when it was overall good but had some roughness day-to-day. Reds are love and children. That’s about it. It all means stuff to me of course but no need to explain step by step since it would be meaningless to most people here.

However, I wanted to talk about some of the interesting things that came up for me when I did this exercise:
1. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that the “really bad stuff” is less than 10% of my life. I am blessed to have never really suffered to anything terrible in my life. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my share of sorrows, shitty friends, broken hearts, rejections, etc. When I was little, my parents got divorced and I took it quite hard. But, they got back together and remarried each other and are married to the day. Wonderfully, I might add. I’ve never lost anyone to a grave illness or really even out of order. I’ve lost my paternal grandfather very young but he passed before I was born. My maternal grandfather died younger than he should have but he wasn’t young. My paternal grandmother just died last year at the age of 92. She was probably the closest person to me who died. I’ve been blessed to never suffer from real abuse of any kind (small case here, i’ll admit but I’ll talk more about this later.) I’ve never been assaulted, robbed, in debt, homeless, hungry. I’ve never suffered from a grave illness or had a close family member who did. I’ve never had to truly hide my identity or beliefs. As I mentioned, I’ve had rougher moments and I’ve worked really really hard in my life, but I’ve also been truly lucky and blessed. And yet, I often live my life like I’ve survived a tragedy. I feel a bit broken inside. I have abandonment issues. I feel undeserving and not enough. I am insecure. I worry constantly about losing my kids, husband, job, anything really. And yet, I have no reason to. Life’s been wonderful to me, and it’s time I start being grateful for it. It’s time I shed the victim mentality. This page shows it to me in black and white. I have much so much to be grateful for. Time to wake up.

2. I’ve also noticed that most of the “bad things” are things I’ve dragged on longer than they needed to. If you look at the last 25 years of my life, the first black is a relationship that wasn’t working and yet I simply wouldn’t walk away. I refused to let it go and I waited until it reached a breaking point. The second one is TFA where I drained every single bit of myself before I let myself walk away. Both of these times could have been at a minimum lighter gray. And yet I pushed the situation until it reached a bad point. I can stop myself from doing that next time by recognizing that I have a tendency not to admit defeat when a situation is obviously bad for me. Defeat is not always bad. Sometimes it’s better to walk away.

3. The last bad thing that happened to me “without my control” was over 25 years ago. The last really gray time was 20 years ago. I need to stop clinging to those things. It’s been a long time and it’s ok to let it go now. I have friends now. People like me and people love me. I can stop clinging to that time and the sadness that surrounded me then. I can be happy now. It’s ok to let it go. It’s ok.

4. I tend to go through periods of flurry of activity and often times even the good periods come with some rough moments. This is expected and normal. The rough times last a lot shorter than they seem.

5. There are rougher times that are there for a reason. Four years ago, I worked really really hard for two years. I mean really long days, for a long time. But it paid off, it’s how I was able to establish the trust and groundwork that led me to be able to work from home now. That’s when I was putting the seeds in so that I could collect them now. Just like I am doing it with exercise now. Working really hard so I can reap the benefits later.

6. I am most definitely in the golden period of my life. I feel more like I’m thriving than I ever felt. I feel more in my element than I’ve ever felt. It’s time to celebrate that and push it even further. Time to use that strength to let the past rest. Give myself permission to let it go and to know that if I lay all this burden down, things will be ok. It is no doubt that rougher times will come. These things are cyclical for sure. So I might as well truly enjoy these moments. Appreciate them, make the most of them. And when the rougher times come, remember to make sure I don’t drag them out and make them worse than they need to be.

I have a lot more thoughts that came up this week. I hope to write about them more but these ones were all directly tied to the timeline art. Isn’t it amazing how much you can realize about your life with one piece of art?

Details:

Weekly Art Journal is a weekly project for 2011. You can read more about it here.