The Most Wonderful Mistake of My Life...

I’m going to say a word and I want you to respond with the first words that come to mind.  Ready?

Ready…  set… MISTAKE

Now, if your mistake is a real ethical failure on your part – you betrayed your spouse’s trust, you cheated or lied in some other way – do the Ready…. Set again.  This article is for the merely boneheaded, not  for times when you betrayed your own soul.  [Forgiving the Unforgiveable by Flannigan is the way to go on this serious stuff.]

Did you immediately think about a mistake from your past?  Of course you did.  Know that If you remember it as a mistake, you haven’t forgiven yourself for it.  If it popped into your mind, it has been, in its own teensy or not-so-teensy little way, dragging you away from having compassion for yourself. 

I’ve been working on the self-compassion issue with clients this year, as I see it as the cornerstone of most of the rest of what I do.  For all the “Oh, I wish I had taken the other road” times of life, you end up with better choices in future if we do the deep work with me that gets you to wrap yourself in compassionate forgiveness and move on.

I’ve just been pole-axed by a blinding “aha!” that I have to share.  I KNOW you all that at least one of these “mistakes” from the past.

So come with me on a journey.  I’m teaching a class and answering a question about some subject-specific vocabulary – and I realize that I am explaining the Latin roots of the word, which entirely explains its function.  Everyone is amazingly impressed.  And the staggering reality hits me:  I have been a whiz at science terminology, including human anatomy [taught it at the college level for years], and a whiz at English vocabulary AND IT’S ALL BECAUSE I STUDIED LATIN IN HIGH SCHOOL.

Latin??  Yup.  Latin. 

No, I wasn’t at seminary. 

I dug in my heels and refused to listen to guidance counselors or any other adult who tried to tell me that I needed at least 3 years of a foreign language to get into college.  [Turns out they were right as far as that goes.  My two years of German got me the snooty-disdain treatment from some colleges.]

What in hades was going on with me?  Just me picking an unusual form of adolescent rebellion?

Not really.  What I did was fall in love with a guy who had died nearly two millennia earlier.  That’s right.  I was crazy-mad in love with Hannibal of Carthage and all things Punic.  In addition to book after book on Carthaginian culture and the 2^nd Punic War, I also insisted on learning ancient Punic and Latin.  I couldn’t find any Punic classes anywhere but graduate schools, which weren’t available to a 15 year old, however nerdy, but my school did have a classics track with Latin language.  So there I labored for two years, slogging through the Gallic mud with Gaius Julius and his castra ponere and castra movere.  [Caesar was constantly pitching camp and then moving camp and leaving two cohorts behind to guard the impedimenta, the baggage train.]  I would have committed total academic suicide and taken a 3^rd year of Latin but instead of military Latin they switched to Ovid’s love poems.  Yuk.  So I trundled off to German, and my self-study Russian.

Of course I consciously knew, through all the decades of my life since high school, that the Latin study had made so much of English and science much, much easier for me than it was for my cohort, but it wasn’t until today that I understood down to my elemental DNA that Latin had been a very good choice, a valuable choice and NOT A MISTAKE AT ALL.  Really, truly, madly, it wasn’t a mistake.  It smoothed my path to my eventual career.   It enriched my class this week. 

It was such a small thing, but watching that judgment dissolve away to nothingness, to be replaced by shining sunlight, reminds me yet again that even the most positive of us, even someone like me who is dedicated to blasting through others’ barriers and bringing them more productivity, more happiness, more of whatever matters most to them, is carrying a Marley’s chain of regrets. 

Today I let one of them go, with a laugh.  God bless Latin.  And bless all of your mistakes that you have not yet realized were not so bad after all, and all of your non-mistakes that have smoothed your way through life in ways you’ve never realized or acknowledged.  Pour gentle compassion on them, hug the younger you that made those choices. 

And I still love Hannibal and all things Punic…..

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Want to clear away the boulders that are standing in the way of your goals?  When Hannibal’s army was stopped on an Alpine pass by a big boulder, he had his men build a large bonfire and when the stone was very hot, they poured vinegar on it.  The stone cracked into smaller pieces that could be moved, and the elephants, horses and soldiers could get back on their way to destiny.  I can blast away your boulders, too!  Sign up for a FREE Getting Unstuck session to get your transformation started. Victoria@soaringdragon.biz.   www.soaringdragon.biz

Healthy Female Body Image - and Healthy Female Bodies

Harriet Brown (Missed Images, October 2016, Prevention Magazine, prevention.com) fell into a common error:  she discovered that she’d been doing something to harm her kids and decided the only solution was to go to the opposite extreme.  Specifically, she’s spent years criticizing her body in truly unhealthy ways, in front of her kids.  She’s stopped that.  Good.  

Now listen to her list of what the rest of the world has to do: no mentioning of weight, calories or carbs, ever.  Those of us who are determined to stop being victims of the nationwide-epidemic of overweight – a very serious health hazard, personally and for our country! – can’t even mention our weight loss and strengthening victories, much less celebrate them!   If we congratulate each other on vegetable-eating and subsequent weight loss, talk about recipes, talk about yoga and water aerobics, about losing fat and putting on muscle, then we are “trash-talking” our bodies.  We cannot discuss these health facts and victories with our kids or with each other – ever, in any way.   

Any factual information about the health hazards of obesity are equivalent to body-hating.  What other pressing problems could we solve if we stop thinking about improving our health by reducing our fat, the author asks?  More important than a strong, healthy body and the self-care that precludes stress-eating?  Health is the #1 most pressing issue in your or anyone else’s life.  What does it profit a woman to save the rainforest and die young herself of preventable disease?  We women have been modelling THAT kind of devaluing ourselves for way too long.

The cure for trash-talking isn’t a gag rule.  We can't switch from shaming each other for our unhealthy bodies to trying to make ourselves feel better by shaming those who are trying to improve their health - or ours.  

What this author should have said is that she used to refer to herself in self-loathing terms, now she is self-loving.  She now tells herself that she completely loves and respects her physical self AND she is charting exercise, calories, carbs and meditation every day so she can nourish and care for her physical self in the best possible way, during the making-muscles, losing fat transformation period and on into maintenance of her healthy, vibrant body.  

Insisting that all body types are equally worthy of LOVE is right on.  Saying that all body shapes are equally HEALTHY is utter nonsense.