by tashmcgill | Aug 22, 2017 | Culture & Ideas, Spirituality
Emotions are like the ocean and pain can be like a tsunami wave. It’s a collective bundle of grief, loss, sadness, hopelessness, frustration, gratitude. You can’t feel pain without knowing something is wrong.
But like all feelings, pain is a messenger. When it comes, I like to lean in.
Sometimes I am a witness, sometimes I am the mess. But I am in it all wholeheartedly.
I don’t want to miss a single lesson pain has to whisper to me. Sometimes learning through loss is like a woman giving birth. The more you resist, the more painful labour can be. You have to open yourself in the very places your body tries to resist to be closer to birth.
Pain is the pathway to growth because it shows us where something is wrong and gives us a chance to reset the bones. And pain is the pathway to healing too. Therefore I do not, cannot regret being wholehearted and willing to engage in the gritty and the great aspects of life.
I have an unfair advantage here – I’m wired to see this as the marrow of life, that authenticity and getting to the heart of any matter whether spiritual, intellectual or emotional will always be the place where truth empowers us to move forward. I go to the depths of the ocean all the time. It’s my playground. But don’t imagine for a minute that means pain is any less painful for me. No, it’s brutal and heart-wrenching and grinds my world to a halt.
But if you get to know me, behind the layers and the writing and really get into my soul – if I let you in, there is a gift there beyond worth. It’s taken me a long time to believe it, but I see it now more clearly. I see things all day long and connect the patterns of the universe. I understand music and magic in ways you long for in your everyday life. I’ve learned to see joy and sorrow in the same breath. I am a seer. A seer of possibilities, a seer of truth and a seer of hopefulness. That’s why I long to help others learn to see. Not necessarily what I see – the depths of the ocean is often dark, but to see in their unique way.
Many times in talking to someone, even strangers at a bar, we will end up in the depths of their dark wounds or the questions they wrestle with. I struggle with small talk, I’d rather peel back your layers and understand the real you. That means being prepared for the gritty. The bad ideas, the messiness of human living and relationships laid bare. Sometimes I am a witness, sometimes I am the mess. But I am in it all wholeheartedly.
For me, there is no other way to be. There is no deep enough until we hit the ocean floors. Me, wholly myself celebrating you, wholly yourself.
We spend so much time pretending to each other, when our healing is so often found in disclosing the vulnerabilities that allow us to see each other whole and hopeful. If we could do away with pretending, how much healing might we find in the world?
But instead, we hide our true selves so often behind our fear of being seen for our messy selves. In our hiding we hurt each other, in our hiding we resist the pain of vulnerability and miss the gift of intimacy that comes from it.
Yesterday I was given a good piece of advice, and because it’s never too soon to share what we learn, I’ll pass it on.
In the midst of the pain, don’t lose your shape. Lean into your shape, the unique vocation of who you are. Your vocation isn’t a job but your calling on the earth. Mine is to bring wisdom and beauty into the world, through my stories and my experiences. So I have to write, share, talk, speak and show you what I see in the depths of the ocean. What I’ve learned looking into the depths of a thousand pairs of eyes, all hoping to found safe and sound so they can come out from their hiding places.
So today, writer, heal thyself.
(speak to yourself firmly and kindly)
Tell the truth of what you see.
Remind yourself of the beauty in the world, the beauty in you.
Remember what you sought in your youth – wisdom, understanding and grace before vanity.
Remind yourself – your natural-born ability to emerge through pain and show beauty to others is your gift, your vocation and offering to the world.
Remind yourself that your heart is bigger than oceans and you fear no feeling.
When waves of unworthiness come, you plant your feet on ocean rocks and bathe until clean.
You rejoice in joy and see that sorrow and joy grow best together.
You are wholehearted like no other, you are a gift for those who need beauty and wisdom in the world.
by tashmcgill | Apr 20, 2016 | Culture & Ideas
I live according to a few basic guidelines. It’s a way of navigating through life, which is as complex as it is beautiful. More than mottos, these are principles that help guide my decision-making and my responses to what happens around me.
What’s for you will not pass you by.
I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. (Henley)
There’s a lesson in everything.
There is something gold and loveable in everyone, even if you have to dig.
Actions speak louder than words, but if you speak let your words be true.
Don’t waste energy or thought on what can’t be changed.
Don’t waste energy or time on negativity.
Assume positive intent always.
Hurt and disappointment are the result of unmet expectations.
You have everything and everyone you need to solve the current problem.
Everything is working together for good.
They are a good way to live, but not perfect. Sometimes you learn a principle no longer works because you outgrew it or your circumstance changed; sometimes it ceases in relevance. Sometimes you add new ones, as you grow and face new challenges.
In 2015, I had a principle: true hair, true feelings. I’d been a redhead (again) for a year or so, but the more time wore on, the more the Ginger had a personality of her own. She helped me try a lot of new things, but I wasn’t entirely myself. I became brunette again, and concentrated on understanding what it is I really felt, really wanted, really desired. Confession: I miss the Ginger.
So here’s another confession: I didn’t just outgrow one of my biggest principles, I was dead wrong about it. There, I said it. I’ve been walking around with a false belief for almost my entire life.
You have to give people your trust first to let them prove it.
So very wrong and now you know I was, too. The map of how I got to that belief is not a story for here, but I have always thought the best way to discover if someone is trustworthy was to trust them first and see if they earn more trust. I always thought it was too much of a tough ask to earn trust from a blank canvas starting point. Call it a fatal weakness of my optimistic outlook, but I have hoped for the best in people. Hoped for the best in workmates, in friends, in people I admire and in relationships too. I was hoping they were trustworthy and hoping I wouldn’t be wrong about it.
I’m an idiot.
I have always taken a certain amount of pride in being to face any circumstance with ease. In business I’m adaptable, a fast and sure-footed decision-maker and as an empath, I can navigate the complexities of many social situations, putting people at ease with a little friendly conversation and banter. (When other people are at the center of my attention.)
I can make easy conversation with a stranger at a bar. I can walk into a variety of situations without fear. I have broken curfew in Haiti to buy rum from a gas station, the only woman within miles. I have used my kickboxing training to wrestle my way free from a late-night carpark attack. (I have the scars to prove it. Concealer is a miraculous thing, when you need it.)
But I have other scars too, ones that require a different kind of cover-up. The ones left behind from getting it wrong when it comes to trust, mistakenly vulnerable with those things I value most.
Sometimes you choose to trust someone and if they let you down, it doesn’t matter at all. There’s no high stakes and no skin in the game. Other times, you choose to trust but you’re not only trusting another person, you are also trusting yourself. Trusting your own intuition, your ability to judge the character of others but also to make your own wise choices and avoid poor assumptions. You trust yourself to hold yourself safely together while giving parts of yourself away at the same time. You have to trust yourself to be vulnerable, but to do so wisely and in safe places.
You can trust yourself until you make a mistake, until your intuition fails you. Until you realise maybe you can’t be trusted to choose wisely who to be vulnerable with. You become very afraid.
Within me the battle goes on; a child-like girl who opens her vulnerable heart to the world over and over against the terrified one who holds herself back at every turn. Most of the time, the child-like girl hopes and the fearful girl hides.
The result is I become a little bit vulnerable with everyone, but I don’t know how to move past fear of being truly vulnerable with those I know I can trust. There are, of course, exceptions – my childhood best friend, my trainer and those that have proven themselves over time.
I must choose to trust others again, but I must also learn to trust. Trust has a shape and a form, a sound and a fingerprint created over time. And this, the hardest thing to learn: trust doesn’t look like hope – hope is an altogether different thing. Hope is the belief that everything will work out in the end, but trust is the platform for vulnerability, the vital connection that helps us get there. Hope sustains us, but vulnerability strengthens us to have real connection.
I have confused hope and trust over and over again, because I am so drawn to hope. But trust is built and proven over time, earned in a series of small actions and intimacies that demonstrate what is safe and good and kind. Best summed up by Charles Feltman, who wrote The Thin Book of Trust, trust is “choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.”
Brené Brown says that without trust there can be no meaningful connection between people. And people are the most important thing in my world, connection the only thing I long for. So in learning to trust myself again, I can trust others, which leads to true vulnerability and connection. Simple!
And this, the hardest thing to learn: trust doesn’t look like hope – hope is an altogether different thing.
Trust looks like unpacking those scars and reversing them. Trust looks like paying attention to the small things, making the calls and knocking on the door. Asking the questions and answering them too. Following through on the gritty conversations, letting your actions speak louder than words, but your words also being true. Trust is not accidental or insecure. Trust is persistent and optimistic.
Do you know what hasn’t changed? I still go looking for the gold in everyone. I still tend towards trusting more than distrusting. I am still an optimistic idealist and there is a lesson in everything, even the most painful mistakes I’ve made. What’s for me will not pass me by, whether by the fates or the winds I choose to sail by. I find myself in the waiting space, because trust takes time. It will take time to trust myself again, now I realise where to begin and I will keep digging up the gold within.
Hopeful, optimistic and willing to trust beyond fear.
by tashmcgill | Aug 19, 2015 | Culture & Ideas, Spirituality
On the corner of my street there’s a street lamp shining bright on the intersection of suburban roads. There’s barely a car parked in sight; from the end of my driveway I can count just three. But there under the spotlight, is the corner dairy (a 7-Eleven of sorts), the bus stop and an Indian take-out store. In which the lights are blazing and the door wide open despite being 12 degrees celcius. ‘Well, they’re optimistic,’ I think to myself, my inner monologue dripping with cyncism.
It’s 9.00pm on a Tuesday night and I’m crawling inside to finish a fraction of what needed to get done today and the remnants of a to-do list going back to Friday 2 weeks ago. I’m feeling deflated and empty; I have been for days actually. Everything feels like a fight in which I keep getting ‘No’ for an answer and while I’m not losing – not yet defeated, I’m desperate for a ‘Yes’. For a win, for a step closer to the dream.
I’m close to throwing a tantrum in the face of the Universe. A grown-up one, with big words and everything.
I go out to dinner, to movies, for a wine or three, parties for kids and friends come for dinner and all of it’s good for a moment, until I’m back left with myself. I’d just like a ceasefire in the warzone I’m in, a truce where the Red Cross comes storming in to simply bandage the wounds and nurse me along a little. I’m so hungry for kindness and connection I’m almost like a child who wants to be indulged simply – because I do. I’m close to throwing a tantrum in the face of the Universe. A grown-up one, with big words and everything.
Not for anything trivial like love or biology or even the politics of sexuality and refugees, although I can make a pretty good case there. No, bigger things – like ‘why is meaning so hard to grasp and so much of life filled with meaninglessness’ and ‘why do we live with a sense of displacement and crave belonging’?
I’m almost convinced I could make a winning case to demand answers but the biggest battle I’m fighting is Me. Fighting to let go, to hold on, to give love and stay soft-hearted when I’d rather put up defensive offense. Battling to submit to other people’s methods, to collaborate when I love independence, fighting not to let go of my love of excellence and fighting the urge to say many times over, I call ‘bullshit’.
(I’m sorely tempted to call bullshit on inspirational social media posts, on mindfulness and yoga mantras, especially on religious politics and the politics of religion. I want to remind everyone that you’re just an entertainer on Facebook for an audience you determine and that the strong, independent woman is as much of a Unicorn as winning can be without someone having to lose.)
The biggest battle I’m fighting is Me. To find peace in the midst of ambition, a little give in a world of take.
Most of this could be solved by hibernating for a weekend or three, resting in good company that doesn’t mind taking care of me a little. Strong, capable, independent as I am – I need a little reminder of what it’s like to play. To laugh. To feel good. To feel alive. A gentle reminder that work isn’t everything, even when it seems like it’s the only thing. I probably just need some good sex in good company, with a laugh or two.
And all this probably has nothing to do with the Indian take-out store on the corner.
Except the flashing neon ‘OPEN’ sign now flashes in the front window and sometime in the last week they’ve added twinkling fairy lights. Where the door used to remain closed it’s open to the street and there’s even a sign on the curb of the road. There’s a bus that stops across the road once every 80mins or so, and a tinny house on the opposite corner which is probably mutually beneficial. I’m not sure who they’re hoping will turn up. I’ve lived here five years looking at that same corner, same tinny house, same Indian store and all of sudden they’ve opened the door. The hopeful audacity of it. Open doors, defying belief and daring the neighbourhood to place an order. That if you try, they will come. If you stay open and welcoming, people will turn around and look after you. If you fight just a little more, ‘No’ might turn to ‘Yes’.
It’s easy to turn my cynicism audacious, to make the bullshit calls loud and clear. To turn up the volume on everything but hope. It’s harder to choose a hopeful audacity. A plucky bleeding courage that keeps on playing anyway. A hopeful audacity that compells me to put on my unicorn panties and rise again tomorrow. To keep on battling for a yes.
by tashmcgill | Dec 16, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Spirituality, Strategy
I watched a crane put together a 10-metre tall Christmas Tree in the city a week or so ago. Piece by piece it was lifted into place while a group of 5 or 6 workmen in high visibility vests perfected the placement of shiny glass baubles. What a sight.
Bright neon vests screaming ‘pay attention’ to what is going on here, while traffic trundled past below and pedestrians marched quickly, bracing against the wind.
That’s the Advent season these days. A race against the clock, constructed by the most unlikely people while everyone else races around completing their business. But Advent, deconstructed or otherwise, still matters regardless of your religious beliefs. It screams out, ‘Notice me – I have something to remind you of.’
Advent is a story about leaning in, expecting and waiting. It’s a story about how we hope for better days, the kind of story our humanity needs to hear at least once a year.
You see, I’m beginning to think that a dream alone is not enough to keep us going. In fact, I have been convinced that a dream isn’t powerful at all. The only power a dream has is the focus and motivation it gives you to take the steps required to achieve it.
If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, save money, shake a habit or create a new one – then you’ve tasted a tiny piece of what it’s like. The dream requires lots of action, but they are mostly very human actions. They are based in the natural world.
I’ve become more convinced that dreams need action and longing. Longing and desire are what keeps a dream alive, when hope seems lost. Hope is a supernatural kind of thing. Action comes from within us, but hope is something external and internal that we hold on to. Longing taps into the spiritual within us and dreams need both. Without longing, the dream can become dry and our motivation can ebb away. We lose both our internal and external power.
I’ve got a dream that feels out of reach and almost impossible to realise. So over the last few years, I’ve stopped praying for it, hoping for it and believing in it. I’ve stopped letting the longing for it dwell anywhere but in my deepest secret heart. Slowly, I’ve been starving my dream so that it’s easier to live in the Not-Yet reality, but it’s having an impact on what actions I’m prepared to take to achieve the dream. I’ve leaned back out of my dream, I’ve stopped hoping and expecting.
I’ve got to long for it again, letting the longing bubble up into my conversations with others. I can’t hide it away and pretend like it has no hold on me. I’ve got to seek it, praying and asking others to believe alongside me is crucial to help me lean in and get stronger in pursuit of it. Sharing my longing so that the dream stays strong and alive within me is necessary.
Advent is a season of expectancy and waiting. We eagerly await holidays, Christmas parties, gift-giving, time with family and friends. We await the New Year with expectation of what will come and what we have the chance to leave behind. And in the ancient story the Advent comes from, there’s an extraordinary example of what it means to lean into a dream – something so out of the ordinary and hard to understand that Mary’s only option is to lean forward and say, ‘Ok, let it be with me as you have said’.
Regardless of whether you believe the story to be myth or truth, this story has had a remarkable impact on our human history. Nobody questions the courage of a young teenage Jewish girl under Roman rule to lean in and say ‘Ok, I’m in it for the ride’.
Look, sometimes I feel afraid to share that longing and pursue my dreams because I’m scared that I’m asking for the wrong things. But there is no Plan B – so by sharing my longing and seeking ways for my dream to become reality, I am inspired to steps I should be taking along the way or to realign my heart to alternate pathways. At the very least, by praying and meditating more regularly on my dreams – I am comforted in the Not-Yet season.
Pursuing a dream out of nothing but our own strength is sure to wear you down. No matter the dream, we are spiritual beings and we need to integrate that into every part of our lives. So a dream by itself is not powerful and human actions alone are also not enough. Deep resonant dream-pursuing requires our whole self… spirit, mind and body.
I’m re-aligning my dream-chasing muscles with longing, expectation and leaning in to hope. What are you dreaming for? How are you leaning into it? There are 15 days left until the New Year begins. What will you enter it dreaming of and longing for?
This post was originally written for World Vision USA and adapted here for tashmcgill.com.
by tashmcgill | Dec 12, 2013 | Culture & Ideas, Mind
It’s possible, you know, to get stuck in a moment. To get stuck in a feeling. Reliving the words someone has spoken to you or about it. Reliving the experience you’ve just had. Constantly re-imagining how it may have gone differently, worked towards a different outcome.
It’s possible to just get stuck by running a thought to it’s final destination and not knowing where to go next. Or to forget to change the tape in your head that labels you ‘failure’, ‘loser’, ‘not good enough’, ‘unloved’ … or conversely, ‘hero’, ‘person everything relies on’, ‘fix-it man’.
Stuckness has a lot of layers. At first it can seem like you’re trapped, closed in, prohibited from moving. But the truth is, you’re not entirely prohibited from moving, you’re just unable to move in certain ways. Or, stuck in certain patterns of moving that you can’t change without some external force or intervention.
Internal self-talk is one of these moments. Whether the tapes playing in your head are on just one theme or 12 different ones on repeat, often you can’t change the tapes without further input and help.
Same with rebound relationships and holding a grudge. You know it’s not a good idea, that it can’t get you closer to the end goal. But like a soccer ball covered in glue, these emotional habits can be so sticky that once you make contact again, you can’t let it go.
Then there is stuckness that is good. It’s the kind of stuckness you get to when you’ve been waiting for a while. It’s the kind of stuckness that slowly enables you to open your eyes and see what’s really around you. Spend enough time being stuck and soon, pathways and possibilities for becoming unstuck might appear where they weren’t obvious before. Being stuck gives you time to really observe your surroundings.
Being stuck is a great time to acknowledge how you got to where you are.
Sometimes, when heartbreak comes along, our natural tendency is to find someone to soothe the wound, to heal the break, to make us feel loved again.. but in these times, it can be better to be stuck for a while and get to know ourselves again.
Being stuck is actually, more often than not, a good thing. It’s an opportunity to call on those we trust and rely on to intervene in our situation.
A little unsticking strategy will always require a little effort and patience.
Not unlike writers’ block, a little waiting time is sometimes necessary for the right ideas and new opportunities to shake themselves loose. In the same way the gate and fencepost swell with summer heat and moisture, requiring effort and patience to open. Long walks in sunlit valleys lie beyond that fencepost, but not without time and work.
The trouble is, being stuck can feel like going nowhere, but a lot of the time, being stuck is just the break your sub-conscious needed to figure out what’s next and how to navigate it.
It’s like taking the precious seeds we carry, our hopes and dreams and then burying them down in earth, waiting and hoping for it to come back to life. It’ll take 6 weeks before that seed takes on a life of it’s own above the surface of the soil. It might even take longer. But Stuckness says, embrace the darkness and damp of the soil. Learn to be patient in the absence of light. Learn (and trust) that your time is coming.
That seed will likely sprout and look nothing like the seed’s skin it shed to become a plant, vegetable or flower. But it was never stuck. It was just the unseen growth that happens when it feels like you’re standing still.
