Going From Broke #5 - Winding the clock

My professional life has changed dramatically since my last "going from broke" update, and I'll leave it to say that my financial situation is now clearly improving. I'm settling into the busy work life of the business I purchased in December, and so so grateful. Strangely though, now that my earlier guiding focus of finding a heartfelt way to pay the bills is taken care of, I find myself showing symptoms of purposelessness.

I have beautiful fulfilling work days, with lovely clients, evenings filled with dance and social outings several times a week, a great reading list I visit almost daily, a couple interesting men on the fringes of my life, shrinking debt, a plan to buy my own condo by the end of the year, and, for this week, a house in Santa Monica to myself. But still, I find myself chronically tired - that emotionally drained feeling of not really wanting to move forward. I have the persistent belly bloat that tells me my digestion is not working quite as it could be, I'm spending way to much time trying to distract myself with what other people are up to on Facebook, and I keep catching myself sadly longing for the comfort of my last relationship, in a way that doesn't fit the picture of really how great my life is now.

My Zen Page-a-Day calendar had, as it always does, a rather compelling little thought one day last week:

"Life without Zazen is like winding your clock without setting it; it runs perfectly fine, but it doesn't tell time." -Suzuki Roshi

Zazen here is the traditional Buddhist practice of meditation, the exact significance of which I'm currently examining a little deeper. I've tended to assume that one could simply replace "Zazen" with the spiritual practice of his or her choosing - anything that would help guide us back to a greater focus than the everyday toils of this mortal coil. (Yes, that rhyme was both painful and completely irresistible.)

I'm beginning to suspect there's something crucial about meditation that nothing else quite gets to in the same way. I've been setting intentions, working a bit with affirmations, tracking psychological reactions, working a compassionate issue-resolution process with myself: simply, engaging in a lot of psycho-spiritual practices. They're all great, but they're also all grounded in material reality. That was what I loved about these exercises the most, as I was learning them, when I'd been searching for a way to make the spiritual practical. Now, I'm finding my needs are different.

I suspect this melancholy is not dissatisfaction with my career, or the days it creates for me, in fact I love those both. I don't think it's just physical blech, although a physiological issue could certainly play into my malaise (eg: the most hated tendency for candida albicans overgrowth in the human gut, for which the best remedy is cutting out all sugars, which is simply not in my realm of possibility at this time - I've tried.) I don't think it's fear at the magnitude of changes in my life, although there have been biggies for sure. I don't think these are just break-up blues, although I do still have a heart full of love for someone far away.

I think this subtly exhausting undercurrent of sadness is a completely spiritual one. I suspect it's actually me longing for something that's not grounded in material reality, that connects me again with my transcendent nature and goes beyond the fleeting highs and lows of life on planet Earth. And, fought it though I have, I think Suzuki Roshi might be right: meditation might be the only way to set my clock right again.

I love other spiritual practices... I love chanting, and dancing suptahs, and eye gazing, and sunset revelling, and loving forgiveness, and random acts of kindness, but as soon as interacting with other people in all our humanness is involved, something of the direct intimate experience of sweet silent divinity is lost for me. The key, I think, to being able to live in spirituality, is to be able to hold a perspective of altitude - one that sees the forest through all the trees. As long as all my spiritual practices involve other trees, however sweet and joyous they may be, I'm not getting re-tuned to the greater forest.

In much lofty hippy-speak, what I'm really saying here is I want to spend more time sitting by myself, staring at a wall.

Actually, when I put it that way, it sounds like something I've heard several friends say after beginning new jobs :)

Welcome to the real world, huh?

If you'll excuse me, I have a clock to set...

Going From Broke #3 - Gone Overboard

I'm frikkin tired. I feel like I've been running a marathon.... and really, in my terms, I haven't been doing all that much. What I have been doing a lot of is examining my financial picture, and digging into core values and assumptions around oh, little questions like, um... only my worth as a human being.

One of my books seems to shame readers into realizing they shouldn't live on credit, spending above their means. Of course, logically I agree with this assertion by all means. However, it's only been a few months ago that I, realizing I'm trying to build a new business, and bound to see a lull in income, accepted that maybe it's okay to live a stint as young and broke, and let myself accumulate a little credit debt. Well, with my allowance from old Uncle Unemployment Insurance running out, I got scared last week, and thought maybe I should just learn how to live within my means, whatever they are at any given moment. So, I budgeted the rest of the month, and have been trying to nurse $48 to cover life in LA for 2 weeks.

Now, tired, hungry, and lonely, I say "f*c& this."

Living within my means right now would require moving back in with my parents, which would prevent me from two other financial keys in this process: 1) building a client base on the Westside, and 2) stepping into adulthood and acknowledging my real value as a human being. Neither of those things can I do from my messy childhood bedroom in Simi Valley.

So, with caution, and awareness, but a healthy-dose of much-needed self love, I say "Welcome back, citicard! I missed you!"

Going From Broke #2: Revving Up...

So there's several posts swimming around in my head right now, but I've just been catapulted into the 2nd year of my master's degree program, and holy crap, is my life changing. Namely we have a big second year project, and I have a question for anyone who'll brave an answer: actually, a choice of questions either (1) What supportive beliefs about money have helped you bring in enough to support you in a thriving life, or (2) What limiting beliefs do you hold about money that keep you from ever having "enough"?

I'll start with one of mine... I caught myself subtly, barely detectably thinking "If I'm financially successful, I'll be alienated from the people I love." Then, I realized I kinda already have alienated myself. (When was the last time I saw you in person?) So, here's a little virtual act of reaching out in bloggy friendship.

The next year of my life is based around researching and restructuring money beliefs and practices, so let the games begin!

Going From Broke #1

The first installment of the chronicles of entering financial adulthood, and stuff.

I realized something today. My Spiritual Psychology education will make me question this statement later, but I'll just say it anyway: Making a living is hard.

I interject with a moment of Heidi history (feel free to skip ahead, if you're feeling impatient) : I know I haven't reached the stage where I don't struggle with it yet, but I figured that was because up until the last couple months, I've still been sorting out what I want to be "when I grow up". Well, after a year of philiso-psychological unpacking of that question, I finally (like in my last post) just let it go. I gave myself permission to not know, and not be "successful" (whatever that is), and to be a broke kid for a while, if that's the life experience I seem to have been supposed to be having. I also removed the burden of my entire fulfillment from the shoulders of my career, where I'd placed it years ago. In doing so, I freed myself up to be open to what I really want to do know. Which is Integrative Personal Training, or Mind-Body Coaching, in case I haven't already told you. (No, there won't be a shameless self-promotional plug in every post, I promise).

Follow all that? It's the Cliff-notes version of about a year of self-work, so I don't expect it to make sense. It's tangential to the matter at hand anyway. The matter at hand is that life is expensive, and paying for it... (again, my inner life-coach is trying to get me to rephrase as I write, but) paying for it blows.

I've been toying with the idea of working in food-service lately. Never done it, I'm just barely charming enough to be able to handle myself well in a tip-driven job, I bet, and working in a cool hippie-fueling vegan joint could be rad. I notice myself delaying applying though, for fear that working the kitchen at YMCA camp won't be sufficient experience to get the job.

Fuck, I think.. I'm a grad student, with a degree from a top-tier university, who gets paid to jump off buildings and crash through furniture, and helps people change their lives on a daily basis (well, okay, on good days), and I'm afraid of not being good enough to get some crappy waitressing job that I'm sure to use as a good source of complaining down the road? Well, yeah. I don't have much experience.

A buddy of mine is looking at taking a job hanging Christmas lights this holiday season, to fill the gaps between stunt jobs. He has extensive foodservice work history, so I asked him... "you'd make so much more money, why don't you get back into that for a while?" So get this... he tells me it's too competitive. He'd have to spend months pounding the pavement to get a waiting job. Which strikes me as not too different from stunts. Or building my training client base. Or landing yoga classes. Or selling paintings. Or booking singing gigs. Or any of the things I've considered doing with my life. Shit, parents pay thousands of dollars for SAT tutoring for their kids, cause this crazy competitiveness makes the average teenager "not good enough".

I used to think that was frustrating and stupid... why does everything seem to be so much harder to succeed at now than I imagine it for previous generations? Why does the majority of my age group have to go back to live with their parents during at least one point in their supposed "adult" lives? There's some actual statistic I could cite, but you'll just have to take my word for it.

Now, I've changed my mind. I like that everything's so fucking hard... it means you had better damn well love what you do. I think it was tempting for earlier generations to get stuck in jobs they didn't really like, because landing and keeping those jobs was easier than having to put the immense energy required to carve out their own paths. Now, it seems to me that going one's own way hasn't really gotten much harder, but there are fewer and fewer easy default paths. At least with Southern California costs of living, just hoping for "whatever" in terms of work won't pay rent. Anything is going to take ridiculous amounts of energy. So, its like the forces-that-be have sweetened the "be true to ourselves" pot, by removing some of the allure of living by default. We're left to make the choice.

So I'm taking one of my favorite sage's teachings, and above all, having fun. I might go work my ass off to get a waitress job, and stay there as long as its fun. I will most definitely slave away creating my marketing machine for my business, because working with my clients just feels damn good inside. I'll put the energy out... cause damn it, it's becoming clear I'm going to have to. But I'm only going to give it to what makes my life joyful.

Think it'll work?

(next time on Going From Broke... does it really have to be hard?)