A Power Within Me is Rising

In the summer after my sophomore year of college I was doing geology fieldwork up in Alaska. I had spent a month wearing rubber boots and raingear as it rained 23 days that July. There were more bears than people and only the logging roads to get around on in this temperate rainforest.

After the adventure, I decided to take the ferry through the Inland Passage up to Skagway and then back down to Seattle. This took five days. I had a lounge chair on the back deck of the boat, a sleeping bag and a foot of space on either side. There was nothing to do. I watched the green water, the glaciers and the whales go by. I wrote long letters, read, and went inward.

And I wrote a poem.

The knowing and the passion that emerged from that young me is arising again. It is different now, 35 years later, more targeted, more clear, but similar in its essence.

A Power within me is rising.
The Power of a woman
Eager to explore
And search out the world.

The Power of a woman
Intelligent, and prepared
To speak her mind
To influence.

The Power of a woman
To share
Teach
And to grow.

The Power of a woman
To love
Deeply and passionately
Yet tenderly.

The Power of a woman
Feminine and strong
A Power that will not be restrained.

LDO August 1988
20 years old

Women are Rising

It is hard and painful to watch the blatant repression and disrespect of women that is happening right now around the world. As we wait to hear from the Supreme Court about Roe, as we learn that women have left the workplace and lost income in far greater numbers than their male counterparts, as the #metoo accusations keep emerging…

It feels like we are going backwards – but we’re not.

I believe these are actually symptoms of the grasping for the Old as the New is rising. Those holding up the patriarchy, who have been holding power, control and resources for a long time are scared; they sense the change that is coming. As women stand ever more in their power, express their voices, demand equality, things are changing. And the younger generations simply don’t buy into the old paradigms.

It’s easy to feel despair as you read the headlines, but I say, have hope and dare to believe. We are closer and stronger than we have been for thousands of years. What we see and hear now is the grasping, not the whole truth.

We cannot be restrained.

Opening New Frames

Like many of us, I took advantage of the invitation that the

Great Pause offered. As an introvert, I have not particularly minded the quiet time at home.

I decided not to take on new clients for a bit while I got quiet and checked in to see if I was still on the best track with my work.

After more than 20 years of Life Coaching I am now embracing the frame of Soul Guide, which feels more resonant. I wanted to let you know that I have pivoted my practice, launched a new website, and am taking on new clients once again.

It feels like things are starting to shift and open up more. There’s an energy of new beginnings and re-starts. We are not returning to the world we once knew, but rather entering new territory on many levels.

By breaking the habitual patterns we were all in, we are in a time of rediscovery and even exploring new identities.

Who are you now? What’s actually most important? What are you done with? Yearning for? What’s the best use of you now?

I would be delighted to offer some extra support as you navigate these new times and are exploring the new You.

Here’s a link to my new site. I’d love you to take a peek.

lisaoxboel.com

These are some intense and interesting times. I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to and what might be beckoning you forth.

lisa@lisaoxboel.com

ps The photo is the view from my desk as I write this.

I am Becoming

I am Becoming.
The next iteration of myself.
But right now – She is elusive.
I get glimpses of Her, my future self, and yet, am not quite Her.
I am somewhere in-between this Now Me and She.
Who is She?
What is she doing? Thinking? Being?
What has she finally let go of and released?
What has she claimed? Embodied?
Is she beautiful? Is she round? Contented? Fierce?
Is she relaxed? On fire?
Is she free? Please let her be free
From this confining jacket of appropriateness and responsibility.
Always striving to reach my fucking potential.
In the not knowing, I reach backwards towards familiar versions of myself.
I revisit my old insecurities. Not quite ready, always preparing.
I sense the internal barriers yet to be demolished.
I have become my own next frontier. The Explorer in me is engaged.
And yet, amidst the immense gratitude I have for where I am, and who I am now, I sense a calling forth.
I choose to hold faith in Her as she beckons me.
I want to embody and Know my Divinity.
I want to be the Queen. The Priestess. The Oracle. The Wise One.
To bring forth the highest form of service and offering. To be well utilized.
She is so close.
I am Becoming. 
May we become One.

When It Feels Like Nothing is Happening

I recently shared with you some of the lessons I learned from my experience having Lyme, particularly around being forced to recognize and respect my limits.

I wanted to share something else I learned that really surprised me and that I believe will be life-changing, if I can just remember.

I’m thrilled, but I am also a bit overwhelmed. As my capacity has increased, there is so much that I want to read, learn and write about. I just want to work more, to feel more useful again. 

I was incredibly lucky that I was able to continue to do my coaching work while I had the Lyme, though just not as much of it. Although I have had fewer clients, this felt like such a miracle. It felt so good to have confidence in that area of my life when so many other ones were so challenging. 

As I started to get better over the past year, I experienced grief over the life I didn’t get to live in the second half of my forties. I’d had an expectation that those would be really powerful years. Instead they felt like a dormant time, when I was treading water, not producing, creating, or moving forward. 

So it was a huge surprise to realize that I actually had been growing and moving forward.

But it was on the inside, and without me realizing it. I had thought I might be picking up where I left off before I got sick, but I find myself at a very different place. 

I am older, wiser, more confident. I like who I see in the mirror. I know what I know and hear myself speak with greater articulation and conviction. It seems that my coaching has gone up a level too.  I am absolutely loving the work and craving doing more. 

I have seen this process so many times with my clients, that when things aren’t happening on the outside, when things don’t seem to be moving forward, it almost always means that things are happening on the inside.

I know this to be true, but I hadn’t believed it was true for me here. It's a reminder that we don’t need to be conscious of this process for it to be happening. 

The frustration can come when we are not anticipating this part of the process, when we falsely believe that progress is measurable, linear and tangible. We check things off our to-do lists and feel accomplished. We hadn’t put this quieter time into our calendars, or life plans. Sometimes it’s a day, or a week, or as I have now discovered, it could even be years.

If only we could have faith and surrender to these crucible times. Trust that what needs to happen is happening. I know now more than ever that we are never standing still or falling backwards. 

We are growing, blossoming and becoming ever more ourselves – always. 

These seemingly dormant times are actually a critical time in our process of becoming. 

We are processing, integrating, synthesizing, and healing. But we are also preparing for the next stage, and yes, growing.

I encourage you to trust and go for the ride, and know that it will never follow a straight line. 

When things aren’t happening on the outside it means they’re happening on the inside. 

We are always on our path. 
 

Learning the Lessons from Lyme

Six years ago I was on vacation and something started feeling very wrong. I was slicing an onion and my vision disappeared for a moment. I developed weird pains in my arm. Over the next few days I started shivering as if very cold, but it was eighty degrees. Then the fatigue set in. 

I spent the next two and a half years going to doctors and getting tested. No one knew what was wrong. 

Because the tests kept coming back as “negative” the doctors gently suggested it was in my head. They put me on Prozac and Klonopin in hope of calming down my nervous system, but that was it. I was a wreck. 

It took years before I finally got a diagnosis of Lyme disease. Ironically this happened in New Mexico where Lyme doesn’t even exist, rather than in Massachusetts where it is becoming epidemic. And it turns out that it had likely been in my system for many years. 

My health was always something that I had taken for granted. I knew that I was supposed to feel grateful for my good health. In theory, I knew that anyone of us could be faced with a health crisis at any time, but I didn’t fully understand this until it happened to me.

I get it now. 

I had always heard about the lessons people seemed to learn from being sick, that they just couldn’t get otherwise. This was also true for me. It took years to start to see them, longer to integrate them. And it’s only now that I’m coming out of it that I’m able to have more understanding. 

One of the things about Lyme is that you can pass as “normal.” It’s an invisible disease. It took a lot for me to rally and put myself together to go out and socialize. I couldn’t do it very often because it took so much out of me. But when I was with people, they wouldn’t necessarily know how sick I was unless I told them. 

I am incredibly grateful that I still felt my full capacity as a coach. I just couldn’t do as much of it. 

The most important lesson for me has been learning about my limits. I had always been strong and able to push through to get things done. The invisibility of the illness allowed people to continue to expect the same. 

Because people treated me as they did before, I still tried to push through, particularly prior to getting a diagnosis. It was also very difficult for me to accept and surrender to my limitations. 

It has been a good and also challenging experience to expose more of my vulnerability and limitations. Not everyone understood and respected my reality, but luckily others did. I have also had to learn about surrender and receiving, as many of us eventually do.  

Interestingly, while I have been going through this I also learned about being a highly sensitive person as well as an empath. I believe now that I had shut this sensitivity down as a result of the negative feedback I had received as a child. 

Why was I so sensitive? So emotional? Why couldn’t I just toughen up and go along like everyone else? And buck up I did. At a price.

I knew I was different, and yet yearned to belong and be more like everyone else. 
Now that my capacity is returning, I am aware of being tested in these crucial lessons. Can I stay more connected to my body and its messages, to my limits? I don’t want to override these messages anymore. 

Even if it means I disappoint someone or that I don’t live up to their expectations, or my own, I now know it’s more important for me to stay connected to myself. And I want to stay open to receiving, rather than believing I need to be able to handle it all myself. 

Right now, I have been kind of obsessed with crossing things off my to-do lists. I love the feeling of accomplishment and have been getting so much done these days! But, I know I need to be mindful here. I can sense the slippery slope of being the do-er that is so familiar. 

Experiencing joy has also moved up my list of priorities.

I want to find and sustain the right balance now, more than ever before and I am choosing to raise the bar on how I live in balance. So I am leaning into the scientist within me to observe myself in this new territory. 

Am I putting the right amount onto my daily lists? Is it realistic? Does it allow me to be in flow and ease around the doing? Am I too tired at the end of the day or still energized? 

Luckily, I know that the most challenging parts of us are also the best parts. I know that my sensitivity can be challenging, but it also makes me a fantastic coach, friend and person. 

There’s nothing wrong with me.

The Freedom of Saying No

So the year is underway. How’s it going? Are you focusing your time and energy on that which is most important to you now? 

There are so many things and people that pull on us or distract us, but if we have taken the time to decide what we want to be our focus, we’ll be better able to navigate the many decisions we’ll be faced with every day. 

“No” is a complete sentence. 

I learned this from a dear friend and am so grateful.  Historically, I have had a pretty hard time saying no to things – mostly requests from other people.  The angst I would go through to just say no to something that I knew I didn’t want to do, or couldn’t do, was nuts.  

I would wrap myself up in knots and come up with all the reasons I couldn’t do something – excuses or reality; it didn’t matter.  What I finally realized was that people really just wanted an answer and didn’t need all my explanations or guilt about it.  They weren’t feeling the charge around it that I was.  

So I started saying no more and without the drama and explanations. 

Few things have given me more of a sense of liberation. 

I became aware that by claiming no as an option, I was not only valuing myself and my time more, but I was also able to say yes more consciously and cleanly. 

As women, many of us have been brought up to be nice, accommodating, helpful, and polite. We learned these lessons well. We are dutiful and responsible. But sometimes we end up wrapping our identity, ego and sense of competence into being very helpful, maybe even indispensable, which can make saying no even harder. 

We have conditioned people that they can ask and depend on us to say yes. And this can make saying no even harder. 

Deborah Treisman expressed this so well in her New Yorker article, "Kristen Roupenian on the Self-Deceptions of Dating"
“…many women, especially young women, move through the world: not making people angry, taking responsibility for other people’s emotions, working extremely hard to keep everyone around them happy. It’s reflexive and self-protective, and it’s also exhausting, and if you do it long enough you stop consciously noticing all the individual moments when you’re making that choice.” 

Saying yes means we are feeling clear and should make us feel good, not burdened. I think we’d end up learning that we garner respect, not for always saying yes, but for honoring our limits and boundaries. 

When people trust that we will take care of ourselves, they are freer to make requests and know that we will only say yes when we can. 

Of course sometimes we blow it and say yes when we shouldn’t have. But that’s okay. The good news is that we still have options, as I write about here. 

I have come to realize that where we say yes and where we say no ends up defining who we are.  

Where do you need to say no more? 
What or who do you have the hardest time saying no to?

Now go have some fun practicing saying no. 
 

Doing the Dance: Getting Organized as a Way into Creativity

A couple of months ago, my husband was out of town for a few days, which meant I had three days all to myself.  I was sad for about five minutes, and then I reveled. I realized that I could do anything I wanted.  

What I ended up doing that first day surprised me. I organized my office.  I mean totally.  I filed everything that could be filed, I sorted through all my piles of business cards and tossed a lot, organized the rest with headings in just the right box. I cleaned the supply drawers; I created lists, and rearranged things. It was glorious.  

In retrospect I realized I was doing the dance. Organizing and cleaning are often part of what I do as my ‘dance’– that thing I do as I prepare to do the bigger thing I want or need to do.  

It’s my mental preparation for what comes next. Often, if I have to make an important phone call or write an email, I will find myself tidying first. This can look like procrastination or not focusing on what’s most important, but I have come to see it as my preparation.  

By clearing my space, I clear my head. By focusing on minutia, I focus on one thing at a time. I have come to recognize it as part of my creative cycle. 

Sometimes when I find myself digging in to a deeper organizing jag, I realize that it’s because I am preparing for something.  It could be a bigger shift of my focus, or the start of a new project. Organizing is always grounding and clarifying for me. 

Of course there is a fine line and a slippery slope between preparing and procrastination and avoidance, so we do need to be mindful here. 

I believe that having a clean slate allows us to move forward in a bigger way.  

It is also just a great way to get energy moving.  Sometimes when we don’t know how to get started on a project, the best thing to do is to organize – your space, your office, your to-do list or the project itself.  

Getting organized is a fantastic way to shift energy and get yourself going. 

What does your dance look like?  
What might you be preparing for?