It’s our thing

The fact that it was 5:55am, just after the faint light of the new day had come up, and that I was working hurriedly and feeling some stress about having the dining room ready, might have been enough to challenge me to a new insight, a discovery… We have 5 minutes to have the dining room ready to open.

Someone is going to blow the conch shell heralding the screen doors of the dining room unlocked and ‘the meal’ served. I always hope I get to trumpet out the announcement. This day, though, I’m not thinking about being the announcing musician. I’m busy. More than a little stressed.

It’s Omega Institute, May of 1997. The previous year I’d come to Omega for the first time as part of their seasonal staff. I’d been through a big change in my life and the change of scene to Omega had just felt right, like the perfect – if scary – thing to do. It had been.

My experience in the summer of 1996 was enlightening on many levels. When I finished the season in October, I was 100% sure I wanted to return to Omega – it was the first time in my life that so many parts of myself got to play and thrive. Creative, physically active and thriving, social, spiritual (I hadn’t much consciously known I had a spiritual part prior to 1996, though that’s another story). You can imagine, then, how shocked, hurt, and disappointed I’d been in January of 1996, when I got the phone call from John Berryhill, the seasonal staff coordinator, telling me that actually they wouldn’t hire me back. In effect: I was not welcome. Whoa!

1. It would have been bad enough that I couldn’t go back. I so wanted to, and had planned on it fully.

2. That I was not welcome back… Yikes. That hurt.

3. And, of course, all our pain comes down to the meaning we attach to it, and the meaning I attached to why I was not welcome back… Even more painful.

I asked John why. He explained, in his kind and clear way, that some of my colleagues had felt that I was more concerned with myself than them or the work we were doing. In short, that I was selfish. Not a team player. “But no,” I thought. “I always got all the work done. I never did anything wrong… Sure, I was like a kid in a candy shop there with all the classes and offerings. For a growth junkie – and likely that’s when I learned of my addiction – it was paradise.

It took me a few days to realize that I had behaved childishly. Selfishly. Immediately after the call, just after hanging up, I noticed that I was tending to hold my breath. I stood on the carpeted floor, on the living room side of the kitchen bar at my friend’s house in Montrose, Colorado. The telephone was peach color and had a curly cord.

A couple months before I’d finished a training in Transformational Breathing, and the lessons of it were fresh in my mind. What would happen if instead of holding my breath, I breathed more? I breathed deeply and in 3 seconds found myself on the floor, my crying face mushed right into the shag of the carpet. Whoa! The intensity of the expression, the release, shocked me. I sobbed for a few moments. I mean, I literally sobbed, which seemed like an incredibly strong and severe ‘reaction’ to me. I know now, that the sobbing, the feeling of something so deeply, viscerally and immediately, is part of what helped me to move through that ‘stage’, part of what helped me to realize that what John had said was true. That my co-workers’ experience was valid.

I sent him an email a few days later: explained that I saw the truth of it. That while I had never shirked my responsibility, and every time I stepped out of a shift to go to a class, or talk to some visiting faculty, I asked permission of my team member, I made sure that I did my half of the work, even if it was after hours and on my own. Yep… On my own. That was the key.

John called me a few weeks later and said they would let me come back. On probation. That I was the only one in his many years of working there, and having had to fire more than a few people, that actually admitted to having had responsibility in the ‘problems.’ I was not thinking nobly. Or behaving with integrity. At least not intentionally. I simply really wanted to go back to work there. To live and play in a world where learning and growth was the law of the land and what grew up naturally from all that they had planted and cultivated.

I wanted it for me, and saw my admission, my taking responsibility, simply as a way to get what I wanted. That may have been the beginning of realizing that there’s an intersection between what’s ‘right’ and getting what we want. Practical, or self-motivated, ‘ethics’. I was doing my thing. And then doing my thing had the potential of robbing me of what I wanted.

Funny, when I think about that now, I realize that was the year I first learned some powerful linguistic distinctions too, including one that I didn’t quite resonate with (not yet): ‘whenever we say I, we could say we.’

May we all get exactly what we want.

So, what do you want? Do you want to continue on your path to more joy, more love… expansion in the areas of your life that really make your heart sing?