Om For The Holidays

By Scott Kalechstein

I had written so much about inner peace, balance, and harmony in cosmic terms, when all it really came down to was fallout from Mom and Dad on this earth. What a joke. You think you have a handle on God, the Universe, and the Great White Light, until you go home for Thanksgiving. In an hour, you realize how far you've got to go and who is the real turkey.
Shirley MaClaine, "Dance While You Can"

Are you going home for the holidays? To those people who love you, but who seldom express it in the way you would want? To those people who sometimes (or often!) have no clue how to honor your boundaries or validate your feelings? To those people who can push your buttons before you even push the doorbell?


Coming to a place of real peace in our hearts with mom and dad, whether they are still alive in the flesh or still alive in our psyches and memories, is often both the most difficult and the most important soul work one can do in a lifetime. We can meditate all we want, Feng Shui our home and work environments, visualize our goals, get healers to clear our chakras, and eat organic, live foods, chewing slowly forty times each bite, but if we have unprocessed indigestion from the hurt, anger and shame we felt when we were chewed out by our parents, it's going to get in the way of enjoying lasting love and happiness in our relationships as adults. Engaging in spiritual pursuits without psychological and emotional healing work is like placing icing on a cake of mud. No matter how delicious the icing, the cake won't taste good.

Sometime in my late twenties, a suspicion began sneaking up on me that the difficulties recurring in my relationships with women might have something to do with my connection to the woman I've always had the most difficulty with. (Take a guess!) My mother is one of the most passionately headstrong and expressive women I have ever met. She really voices her opinions and lets her feelings fly! Throughout childhood and on into young adulthood, I often felt swallowed up and overpowered by her emotional energy. It felt to me as if there was no room in our relationship for my own feelings, and even for my emerging (or submerging!) identity. My coping mechanism was to play the game of see-saw. When she raised her voice, I lowered mine. When she emoted, I suppressed. When she expressed caring, I danced at a distance. It was a very painful dance. My mother felt hurt, and she let me know it. I felt both guilty and resentful, and let nobody know it. I became an expert in emotional camouflage.

I started therapy to address intimacy issues that were showing up in my life with women. All roads led to my mother, and I decided to ask her to join me for a five day retreat that focused on healing between parents and their children. She shocked me by saying yes! We found ourselves, along with sixteen other fathers, daughters, mothers, and sons, diving deep into the unfinished business that held us back from loving and understanding each other in the present. Both my mother and I had hopes that the retreat would help us get closer. Much to our surprise and discomfort, what we found out was that we needed to psychically and emotionally separate from each other before we could explore creating a healthy bond. The facilitators recognized a lack of boundaries between us. They helped me see that I had chords going out to my mother, not umbilical, but just as binding, that needed to be cut before I could truly feel and explore my sense of an adult self in the world, as well as have a fulfilling relationship with a woman.

As a child I had gotten myself enmeshed in my mother's feelings. On an emotional level, I was assuming responsibility for her pain and joy, and she was doing the same for me. A song by Barry Manilow described our bond: "I feel sad when you're sad; I feel glad when you're glad." It was no wonder I suffered a bit from codependency in my love relationships with women!

The retreat gave us both a jolt, propelling us into uncomfortable and expansive new territory. We began to practice letting go of trying to change and control the other person, and started seeing each other as unique individuals, two adults instead of simply mother and son.

A few weeks after that experience I wrote the following song, both to share my feelings with my mother and also to express empathy for what she was feeling in her letting go process.

(son) Oh, take delight in my awkward flight
Don't ponder the how or the why
I'm leaving the nest to discover my best
Don't squeeze on my hand as I fly
Let go and wave child good-bye
Oh, take delight in my awkward flight
Your love and your fears weigh a ton
The distance I choose is no verdict on you
Don't battle what needs to be done
A man needs to grow from a son

(mother) Son, I nursed you and rocked you and answered your cries
I looked out at life through your innocent eyes
Now you're turning away and it's so hard to bear
I gave you my all, there's a piece of me in there

(son) Oh, take delight in my awkward flight
Let's cut away old worn out strings
I came through your home to discover my own
Please don't let my spaciousness sting
Take joy that I'm finding my wings
Oh, take delight in my awkward flight
Don't pull on the reigns tightly so
I'd much rather soar from your heart's open door
Oh, mother it's time to let go
Oh, mother it's time to let go

(mother) Oh, I never knew this would be part of the plan
A part of me wanted to always hold your hand
It's sad, but it's good and my heart understands
Good-bye to a son is hello to a man

(together) Perhaps we'll be buddies, perhaps we'll be friends
Who knows where we'll land when we touch down again
But for now we must fly in our own separate skies
Trusting our love as we say our good-byes
Trusting our love as we say our good-byes
Trusting in love as we say good-bye
© 1992 ScottSongs

I would love to report that one retreat and one song was all it took for everything between me and my mom to be hunky dory. Some weekend seminars give the illusion of a quick fix: all we have to do is write one heartfelt letter or make one life-changing phone call in which everything unexpressed is put on the table and the conversation concludes with both parent and child saying their "I love you's" through a shower of grateful tears. Maybe it's that way for some people, but for me the healing has been and continues to be a gradual, and often messy process - one stumbling step at a time.

For instance, one weekend about seven years ago I took a clumsy, but giant, step forward. I was visiting my mother in Brooklyn, and became aware that I was walking on eggshells. I was still intimidated, not expressing myself fully in her presence. She was saying shaming, critical things that were pushing my buttons and I was pretending I didn't feel hurt. Finally I couldn't pretend anymore. My passivity was costing me too much. I recognized that I had been taking care of her feelings again at the expense of my own. I was exasperated, and felt desperate to break through to a new place with her. It was time for ‘pattern interruptus' a phrase I coined for when something completely outrageous needs to happen to break out of an entrenched pattern.

What I did, in layman's terms, was throw a temper tantrum. I let her know how hurt and angry I felt about the ways she violated my boundaries over and over again. I threw out the window everything I've learned about non-violent communication, conflict resolution and taking responsibility for my feelings, and gave her a blast of good old-fashioned, unenlightened, shouting, i.e. "You are the most abrasive person I know! I am sick and tired of you trying to control me and put me down!! I demand to be respected and treated with decency, as an equal!!!" Etc. Etc. (I confess that I am only letting you in on the nicer things I said. For a complete unabridged version, just consult your own shadow fantasies!) Something inside me had snapped, and I was letting her have it with all the gusto that I had been tempering for years.

For ten minutes the storm raged. My mother had shielded herself by pretending to read the newspaper. She probably was somewhat in shock. Actually, I was too. But somehow I knew it was a positive eruption that would lead to healing, the way a thunderstorm leads to cleaner, clearer air and a refreshing break from stagnant humidity.

I went away for two days. When I came back, I was eventually treated to the following miracle: "Scott, let's sit down. You talk, I'll listen." My mother, having been shaken up by a son she had never seen before, had new ears on. I told her (in a gentler way) what was hurting me. I had never felt so listened to and honored by her. She had been jolted awake by my anger and was now receptive to hearing my pain. Our relationship had again turned a corner.

Some people's parents are no longer on the planet. Others are completely unavailable for emotional dialogue. This may seem like a drawback to healing, but it doesn't have to be. The universe is gracious enough to help stage re-enactments of our childhood scenarios over and over again until the healing process is complete-through lovers, jobs, bosses, the IRS-whomever and whatever it takes to bring us in touch with suppressed emotions from our history so we can feel them all the way through to resolution, change our belief systems, and start creating the future without the past as a reference point.

Our parents, thank God, will show up everywhere, until we have learned the lessons they have come to teach. In my case they are still alive and I can relate directly, in the flesh. For many others they are alive metaphorically, in the mates and bosses and authority figures who resemble them. In either case, the gurus are there, not perched up high in the Himalayas, but woven into the fabric of our everyday lives, poking and prodding us in little and big ways, calling us to feel, to heal, to set boundaries, to stand up for ourselves, to release victim ways of being and come into our own power and authority.

How do you know you have completed the lessons your parents have come to offer? When you can admit that the childhood you had was exactly what your soul conspired to create for your highest good, that you were not the victim, and they were not the villains. When you see them not in black and white, but as both imperfect and lovable people with strengths and flaws, people who did the best they could with what was given to them. When you can extend to your parents freely the kind of love, gentleness, attention and respect that you may not have gotten from them in childhood. When what you feel in your heart towards them most of the time is peace and gratitude.


That's when your life is no longer about conforming or rebelling. That's when your mate ceases to act out your past (or you get a new mate!), your boss gets nicer (or you go into business for yourself!), and the IRS is conspicuous only in its absence. Freed from the unfinished business with an earthly mother and father, you can then be about your Father's Business (your life purpose), with full joy and confidence.

After fifteen years of daily meditation, as well as trying all the shortcuts and workshops out there from LSD to NLP, I finally was humbled enough by life to get honest with myself about who my Gurus were and where my real healing work needed to happen. A pilgrimage to Brooklyn may not seem as spiritually significant as going to India, and screaming in anger may not seem as peace promoting as chanting in Sanskrit, but whoever said a soulful and authentic life was going to fit our pictures and meet our expectations? As Maryanne Williamson is fond of saying, real growth is messy. Blessings on your healing journey, wherever it may lead you.

"As long as there is room in your heart for one enemy, your heart is not a safe place for a friend."
-Sufi saying

Scott Kalechstein shares his own healing and awakening process through music, humor, and the spoken word. He travels the U.S.A., Canada and Europe, giving workshops, talks and concerts at churches, conferences, living rooms, and wherever people are open to a heart-centered approach to learning. Scott is also a prolific recording artist, life coach, comedian, and a licensed minister. For a catalog of his music or booking information he can be reached at www.scottsongs.com

SCOTT'S SCHEDULE

MARIN, CA

January 15 - I'll be doing a house concert in Novato. Email me at scott@scottsongs.com for the details.


MENDOCINO, CA

February 14 - I'll be the guest speaker and singer at the Mendocino Center for Spiritual Living, Following the service I will be leading a workshop called The Conscious Relationship Workout. Call 707 964-1458, or visit Linked text for more details.

NAPA, CA

February 21 - I'll be both speaking and playing at the services and then giving a workshop called The Conscious Relationship Workout at the Napa Valley Center For Spiritual Living. Visit Linked text or call (707) 252-4847 for more info.



DELAVAN, WISCONSIN

February 25 - 28 - I will be the comic conference troubadour and workshop leader at an event called Making Choices, Moving Forward - Claiming Your Life Through The Law of Attraction. Please visit Linked text for more details.

ROWE, MASSACHUSETTS

May 29-31 - Every Memorial Day Weekend I offer my music to complement the love and wisdom of Joyce and Barry Vissell at a lovely and powerfully healing Couples Retreat. Committed relationships are supported, renewed, celebrated, and often helped through rough isssues. Contact Rowe at retreat@RoweCenter.org or call: (413) 339-4954 or visit Linked text

HICKSVILLE, LONG ISLAND

June 6 - Religious Science Long Island is proud to have me as the guest speaker and singer, which will be followed by a workshop, the topic which will soon be chosen and announced. More info can be found by calling (516)-822-9314 or visiting Linked text




FREMONT, CA

June 27 - I'll be singing at the services at the Tri City Church of Religious Science. Following the second service I will be offering a concert. Please visit Linked text for more details.


ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

October 15-17 - I'll be the conference troubadoudar at Be The Love Conference. Visit Linked text for details.


TORONTO, CANADA

November 5-7 - I'll be the conference troubadour and keynote comic once again at the 2010 Energy Psychology Conference in Toronto. Visit Linked text

BERLIN, GERMANY

November 19-21 - I'll be singing at a conference of osteopathic physicians.






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Your Joy Is Your Power

By Tama Kieves

I am committed to allowing myself to receive more freaking goodness than I can imagine. To start with, I am going to know that, independent of anyone else's predictions or convictions, my life can be fantastic. I am going to stop calling negativity and limitation "realism." I'm going to just start calling them negativity and limitation.

We have all bought into the superstition that goodness is a soap bubble about to burst. But I challenge you to think of sadness and strain as a bubble, too, a bubble that can burst as easily. It all depends on where you put your focus, what you call real, which altar you light your candles on.

Let me tell you a personal story. Years ago, to support the release of my first book This Time I Dance! Creating the Work you Love, I put myself on the road. It was a brave move, investing money in myself, and speaking to practically any group that had cheese and crackers. At the first event of my "tour," I spoke to a high-powered women's business group. They loved me and I did cartwheels inside.

That afternoon, still cartwheeling, I walked into a Cost Plus World Market, one of those stores that sell ethnic home accessories, fun art, and things you really don't need, but suddenly have to have. I sashayed down the aisles, boogie author, she who had just nailed her first real talk on this adventure. I picked up a piggy bank, a leather olive green pig with red and purple wings. "When pigs fly," I think to myself and grin. My journey of writing and launching the book has seemed like realizing the impossible. I hold the little crafted object. I should get this, I think, to symbolize shattering the customary, rising above the gravitational pull of doubt and fear.

"Yeah, but you know how things go," another inner voice pipes up. It's just the beginning of your trip. You don't know how the rest of the events will turn out. You could be disappointed and then you'll feel silly with your triumphant, hopeful totem here." The voice throws me a bone. "Let's wait and see how things turn out," it says. It's my rational voice, the one that controls the checkbook, buys the sale flowers at the florist, and never orders a brownie with her tea. I put the pig back down.

That night I did a book signing that broke my heart. So few people came. Then a man with long stringy gray hair interrupted my reading with wandering political rampages and very private jokes, every author's nightmare rite of passage. The crowd, or more accurately, the handful, stared at me helplessly. I looked at the empty chairs, and thought about how much plane fare, hotel, and other "manifestations of faith," this trip would cost me. I felt like a piñata, clubbed until the sweetness fell out of me. "Good thing you didn't get that silly triumphant pig," said the voice inside. Now I felt ashamed. I cringed at the thought of having believed in myself, believing everything would turn out just right, believing I was now finally on that roll I'd always dreamed about.

Today, years later, I think I should have bought the pig. I should have bought my celebration totem, because in that moment I felt alive and I believed--I knew something true deep in my bones. The following disappointment didn't change the truth of the original dazzling moment, until I let it. When I said, let's wait and see, I turned my power over to outside circumstances. That "wait and see" was an admission that I could change my mind about myself, about what had already transpired inside me, about my ultimate path and the navigational skills of my Infinitely Loving God. That "wait and see" was a nod to the bitter pills, darkness and difficulties I had trained myself to expect. But more than that, it was also a vote to make moments of pain carry more weight than moments of joy and realization.

"I'm having more fun than I've ever had in my life," a client said to me recently, giddiness in her voice. Her business is beginning to take off and she feels she is starring in a new movie, one in which she's the lucky, leading lady. "I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop," she says. And I'm struck by how we do this to ourselves. We tell ourselves that life can't be that good. It has to stop. It has to end. What goes up, must come down. "We are meant to grow and expand," I tell her. It is our evolutionary instinct to strengthen, blossom, and develop heightened capacities. I share a quote with her from Esther and Jerry Hicks: "The better it gets, the better it gets." She agrees to practice opening to her full expression, startlingly fabulous though it may be.

It's considered prudence to prepare for rainy days and challenges. But we don't do much to prepare for joy. Instead when love or abundance comes to our house, we think it's a fleeting visitor, a lost butterfly, a hoax, or at best, a reprieve from the gray bulldozer of reality. But I invite you to consider that when you're in your joy, you're in your sane mind, your big mind, the part of you that is connected to a wholly alive stream. Everything else is the miscalculation. Just because negativity is familiar, doesn't mean it's significant. When you're in your joy, you are more intelligent, resourceful, and present to possibilities. It's who you really are. Circumstances that follow may tempt you to forget your passion and your knowing. But it's the disillusionment-that's really the illusion.

For me, the path of being self-employed, having a dream and moving it into the world in a big way, has been one of constantly remembering a sweeter reality, no matter what conditions look like. The circumstances fluctuate, but my good does not. I'm always on the road to even more grace. There are so many fantastic opportunities that are waiting to come into my life right now the moment I allow myself to fully accept my value and welcome them. I'm not denying reality. I'm claiming it.

Yes, it's easier to assume doom. We fit in. We'd probably even be seen as thoughtful, prophetic, and on the money. But fitting in is the booby prize. It's not the point of this life. We're here to claim our divine potential, raise the bar, break through old beliefs and prejudices, and allow the Creative Force of Love and Intelligence to have its reckless, abundant, glorious way with us. Our happiness can save the planet. Our laughter can coax the trees to grow, the rains to fall, and the stars to shine. We can do more good with joy than we could ever do with pain. We are here to tap our own magnificent innate powers, shine, boogie, rock on and show each other what's possible in this lifetime.

Of course there is suffering and pain in the world. But these are the places where we, the members of humanity, haven't gotten it right yet. Why would we make these the standard of reality, if it's not a reality we wish to create? By the way, I am not saying it's wrong to feel pain. It's a place we all explore, on our way to healing and joy.

Good things are knocking at your door right now. Open the door. Allow yourself to believe that you can have the dream you desire. Take in the abundance wherever you are and allow more to shower upon you, with your arms wide open for as long as you can. It's never too much for you to handle. You were designed to blossom. Practice allowing yourself to be loved just as the Sufi poet Hafiz describes: "And the sun and the moon sometimes argue over who gets to tuck me in at night. If you think I'm having more fun than anyone else on the planet, you are absolutely correct."

I urge you to try on a new sense of realism. When good things happen to you, don't wait for the other shoe to drop. Expect something even better now. You're just revving up. Remember, you're in your power when you're in your joy. I'd say the shoe on the ground-is about to fly.

Copyright 2009 Tama J. Kieves. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Tama J. Kieves is an honors graduate of Harvard Law School who left her practice to write and to embolden others to live their most fulfilling lives. She is the bestselling author of THIS TIME I DANCE! Creating The Work You Love, and is a sought-after speaker and career coach who has helped thousands world-wide to discover and live their creative dreams. Visit her by clicking on: Linked text, sign up for inspiration through her free e-newsletter and download her free report "Finding Your Calling Now."