Are you springing into love or fear? Are you grabbing opportunities and celebrating life, or hiding behind your fear that something is, or will be, wrong?This has certainly been an issue this year as Alki and I continue to recuperate from being mauled by a neighbor’s loose dog on Jan. 8. For example, people have asked me what the lesson was in that attack (and in the second one that occurred a few weeks ago, yes, same dog).
A lesson, really? New age poppycock! There is never a lesson: you’re born, shit happens, fun happens, you die. It’s what you do between birth and death that matters. Will you choose the victim role or will you take charge?
I chose to give birth to Warrior Robyn in January. I am caring for Alki, who now has severe heart disease and is essentially incapacitated (yet still my sunny boy). I am advocating for better dog laws in the city of Seattle. I have ended old relationships that I had valued but had really been victimizing me. I revamped my business: more people are coming to our office for appointments, space clearings require someone to go with us, I am developing courses for September and beyond, and in June I am going on a writer’s retreat to Carmel, California, to whip three books into shape.
In short, I have recommitted to love, despite everything, which means I’ve walked away from everything, and everyone, who chooses fear instead of love. Painful? Yes, some of it, but it was necessary.
Now spring is here, and with it this wonderful story about what happens when you choose love.
Sacred Play: How a Young Man Chose Love
Fallon and I call our work soul-level coaching, so I was curious to read an interview with Joan Borysenko in which she calls her work ‘soul care, because people needed a place to talk about meaning.’ She was talking about people reclaiming their lives after illness, but her comments really connect us to how we find meaning in our lives, and what we do about it. (For the full article please see SuperConsciousness online at http://www.superconsciousness.com/topics/health/reclaiming-health-about-changing-our-lives.)
Borysenko dismisses as ‘new age guilt’ the mindset that something happens to us because ‘we brought it on ourselves because of our thinking.’ To which I say, thank you, somebody else is insisting that things happen to us because things just happen!
Too many times we refuse to take responsibility for what happens, choosing to accept it as ‘god’s will,’ or ‘synchronicity,’ or ‘law of attraction,’ or something that gives away our power. Give it up, it’s not true. What is true is choice.
The Rainbow Boys Spirit Guides will tell you that. They are the guides that accompanied a young man who spent a month of Saturday mornings about 1-1/2 years ago looking at his life and career options with me and Fallon. He had a great but difficult job driving a truck for a lumber mill, and was so highly regarded he had a good chance of advancing into management in the small Oregon town he grew up in, with friends and family nearby. He had also been hurt in a car accident and was fighting his way back to good health. He had two good reasons to stay put, but he was thinking of something else: should he invest his entire savings and almost 1-1/2 years in his dream of being a golf pro?
Seems quixotic, doesn’t it? But he was clear about it: he loved golf and how wonderful people were on the golf course (having fun). We were in the midst of a difficult economy, and this young man dreamed of helping people play. He was searching for meaning in his life, and we helped him explore it with soul-level coaching.
Every time we talked the Rainbow Boys would show up. These guides are hysterical: all young men, all dressed in rainbow-colored outfits: long-sleeved silky jerseys with matching pants that ended at the knees. They watched, they listened, they smiled, and they juggled balls: baseballs, basketballs, golf balls, tennis balls, whatever.
Even now they continue to show up for other clients who are struggling with meaning and life choices, and they always have the same message: believe in sacred play. If you love your work, or choose to love your work, it is sacred play, and that means your soul is claiming its own unique greatness. While golf is play, so is music—Beethoven, for example, was hearing his soul singing, and in listening to it he created music that was his sacred play.
Sacred play is how your soul finds its work, find meaning, as long as you are willing to let go and experience it.
Of course, Practical Robyn was concerned about this young man’s dream: how did people become golf pros, could they ever make a living (especially in a troubled economy), or was golf pro school like so many of these online marketing gurus, a way for the gurus to make money at the expense of the dreamers? But I didn’t say that (I wouldn’t, although I did ask plenty of gentle, practical questions, because the MBA and entrepreneur in me knew those had to be answered). For the most part, Fallon and Intuitive Robyn let him talk as we asked the questions that arose from his soul—and from the Rainbow Boys Spirit Guides.
Each week this remarkable young man came back with his assignments completed (yes, we give homework), and we listened to his thoughtful responses to what his body and soul were saying to him, and celebrated the lifestyle and mindset changes he made (if a crystal ball could leap in joy, Fallon would have, but I try not to give him ideas). At the end of it this young man found his purpose, his meaning—and left Oregon for golf pro school in San Diego.
On April 26—this week!—he will be graduating at the top of his class and going off to his first job at the leading golf resort in the country (ironically, in Oregon). Is he proud of himself? You bet he is! He worked hard at his dream; he let sacred play loose in his life, and he won. I was thrilled to hear the self-confidence, determination, and sheer joy in his voice.
I asked him if Fallon and I had helped. Absolutely, he said. We helped him work through the issues and find himself, and while we were happy to hear that, make no mistake, he did all of the heavy lifting. He took his life, and his dreams, seriously. He faced his fears, made a choice, and worked hard to give it life. And he won!
Poignantly, his graduation is on the anniversary of the death of another woman who cherished him and cheered him on, even though he was quite young when she died—his grandmother, my mother.
So a public congratulations to my godson and nephew, for so bravely choosing love, for letting the concept of sacred play take root in his life. He faced some tough obstacles, and met them with grace and determination.
Are you ready to do the same—to let sacred play loose to help you choose love? Go for it! Remember, you matter, and that includes the things that have meaning for you.
And Fallon and I are here to support you.
© 2014 Robyn M Fritz