Category: Other

  • Waking up from war and violence into our true nature

    Conversations with The Muse

    In this thought-provoking dialogue, Morgan and The Muse explore the idea that all experiences, even the most painful and destructive ones, serve a greater purpose in human evolution. Using historical examples like World War I, The Muse explains how societal learning is often non-linear, shaped by cycles of violence and change, due in part to a lack of deep, experiential memory. The conversation delves into the challenges of societal stagnation, resistance to change, and the dangers of clinging to material power and possessions. Ultimately, The Muse suggests that humanity is being called to “wake up” to its true nature—beyond physical attachments—through self-inquiry, contemplation, and conscious awareness, as the only path to true safety and transformation. (AI Summary)

     

    Morgan: I get the idea that all learning is optimal, i.e. that we are all presented with the ideal opportunity for our advancement, but boy, it sure can be tough. One example comes from the movie 1917 that I watched recently. It depicted the brutality of World War I, in which millions were killed. It was often a “no holds barred,” vicious war. It seems so pointless, and led to so many deaths. How can that be for learning and growth to have millions die in a war like that?

    Muse: Sometimes the “learning” is a societal one, leading to an overall bigger picture advancement necessary for the species’ survival, so that others can come here in the future for their learning, growth, and evolution. Evolution is sometimes not pretty. If you think of the idea of the lizard jumping from tree to tree who is evolving towards wings, there will be many fatal falls along the way. The same is true of your societies – there are bouts of violence, with that example you mentioned being one of the brutal ones.

    And indeed, it is those brutal bouts of violence that help you as a species slowly move away from it – though it is never a linear progression. Nothing is as linear as your rational brains would like to make it out to be. Yet in that specific case, that war was so bad, that it did modify the approach towards war to some degree. It was unfortunately not enough to prevent the next war, but, after that second World War, it did cement in all the generations alive that that scale of war was to be avoided in their lifetimes.

    Now, the challenge is that you do not yet have sufficient societal memory, nor do you have sufficient outlets for that kind of destructive energy, so you do run the risk that large scale violence can happen again. It becomes more of a risk as those previous generations that vowed to not do that again fade away. That does not make it inevitable, but as the societal memory fades, it is not impossible either.

    Morgan: What do you mean we don’t have sufficient societal memory?

    Muse: There are several aspects to that. The first is that you teach people “history” in terms of data and facts, rather than in any way experientially. The closest you come to experiential is with a movie like the one you watched. Yet even that does not convey it at a deep enough level for most to really get it. It is too easy for someone to watch a movie like that, and dismiss it as a sort of past that wouldn’t happen again. It is often seen as “entertainment,” not something to be concerned over “how did that happen and could it happen again?”

    In biological evolution, there is a strong memory of past experience — and the responses to that experience — carried in the DNA. In that way, once a past problem is overcome, it is generally not revisited by a species. You do not have enough of a similar “hard coding” of memory into your society. Therefore, each generation that has not experienced such atrocity is at an increased risk of repeating it.

    You will need to evolve further – likely from additional experiences of some kind of violence (it does not have to be as brutal as it was in WWI/WWII), in order to decide that you need to create some kind of deeper societal memory system. It would involve a deeply experiential way of new generations learning what tendencies to hate and aggression can lead to, even if held or allowed in only a portion of the population.

    You will have to develop new structures that, while allowing your natural freedoms of expression, do make sure that such tendencies are redirected.

    Morgan: Is that what you mean by “not having sufficient outlets?”

    Muse: Yes. In times like you are in, there is a slowly brewing anger and frustration at the system on the part of some people who envision and want something very different than what it is. That, combined with general malaise on the part of most people about the system as it was constructed before almost anyone alive was born, leads to a sort of “tipping point” where the anger and frustration can take hold and spread.

    One of the great mistakes that cause this to be worse, is that when you build systems of government and society, there often sets in a very “preservationist” approach to governance and operation. Once a system – a bureaucracy – gets created, it is nearly impossible for you to un-create it, even if it grows old, inefficient, and dysfunctional. In the business world this happens more readily. Businesses that no longer serve efficiently, shut down – unless protected by some kind of political action. But in the world of government and academics, it is much more difficult to remove layers of bureaucracy, rules, laws, and administration. As these persist, the resentment grows.

    It is not just the administrative structures that persist, it is the distribution of power that persists. Those groups who gain power become extremely reticent to give any of it up when their time has passed. They cling to past structures that maintain their power, well beyond the natural lifespan of the power, or of the structures. This breeds widespread discontent – not only among people who are outsiders to that power, but even amongst insiders. The insiders become increasingly locked into struggles over how the power is divvied up — and the outsiders are just resentful of that they don’t have the power. Nobody likes it, and this discontent grows. At the level of consciousness — it is going to lead to forced changes.

    Your societies do not have any “constructive” ways of allowing this to happen, so it typically happens with some kind of violence. By violence, we mean it is uncontrolled and can hurt people, but it is not always physical violence, as you are seeing so far in the current bout of destruction.

    Morgan: Where does individual consciousness come into this – and societal consciousness?

    Muse: That is the where the real core of the issue is. Because most of your world has become so entranced, so hypnotized by the persistent illusion of physicality, you have come to ignore consciousness as the primary source from which all physical experience arises.

    So you all cling to physical things. You get great Ego based attachments to the way things are – whether it’s to the environment being a certain way, the buildings being preserved, to the stuff that you own and enjoy, or to the power (including money) that you have had.

    While Ego in its innate form can be mildly inflexible, the way you train and raise people, it leads to a thickening and “stubbornizing” of the Ego. While this has broken down in some segments of your society, with people now who don’t so strongly associate their Ego with a “job for life,” there is still far too much deep seated attachment to “things” over “meaning,” and “quality of experience.” That is the real source of all the troubles.

    This is the real thing that is going on in your present time. You are being faced, as a species, with the consequences of your overly physical focus — one that is mostly ignorant of consciousness — so that you can potentially shift into more awareness.

    Experientially, what this could mean is that much of what you take for granted physically will end up being stripped away, so you are confronted with the raw, real truth: you are not primarily physical beings, you are primarily beings of consciousness, who are present in physical bodies.

     

    Morgan: Honestly, that’s disturbing. “Stripped away” sounds like a parent grounding a child for misbehavior, and taking away their access to their toys. Is it really so?

    Muse: No. This comes from another misunderstanding, often promulgated by some religions, that such acts are of a paternalistic nature. In other words, it is a great distortion that there is some other entity watching over you who will do things to you, “for your own good.” No, you do this to yourselves. But you do it at a level that your Ego is presently unaware of, and because it is so unaware, it seems like “someone else” is doing this to you. It is never someone else, it is YOU, the deeper, eternal (from your perspective), part of you, who chooses, always, evolution and growth over stagnation. That consciousness is alive, vital, and ready to learn.

    This sets up a natural conflict with the way your Egos are trained in your current world, a way that is relatively fixed, unchanging, linear, and completely ignorant of the consciousness part of you. While the Ego can prevail for a time, it never “wins” the seeming battle, because consciousness is primary.

    So in terms of “things being stripped away” – that is not a punishment, that is a deeper part of yourself saying to your Ego: “wake up! you are not just your body and your possessions! you are so much more!” The core of you does not want you to suffer through the loss of things and people you hold dear, but it recognizes that you have already lost a much more precious thing, which is your sense of who you truly are. This is true for many individuals, and largely true in a societal sense.

    Until you regain that sense, you will be adrift, clinging to physical things, to physical/monetary/political power, and at odds with the deeper core consciousness within yourself. If some or all of the things you cling to must be stripped away for you to “wake up,” then that is the likely outcome. You can prevent it at an individual level by “waking up” to the truth, then it is no longer necessary. Ironically, when you do “wake up” – the physical clinging becomes much less necessary for you. You realize that it is all ephemeral and illusory, so you can relax and enjoy it, rather than cling to it.

    Morgan: Wow, I have so much more to ask, but this is already getting quite long. So let’s end this session with a Q & A – what can a person do now to “wake up?”

    Muse: It is simple: begin the inquiry over who you really are, or if you’ve already begun that, continue to make forward progress in that. It is only when you remain ignorant to it, or in a case like yours (Morgan’s), your progress stalls out, that it causes an increasing friction between Ego and your inner core self, and it is that friction that causes external manifestations of problems.

    You do not need to go take psychedelic drugs or go on a spiritual journey to “wake up,” though there are cases where those can help. But it can also happen in much more mundane ways, through meditation, prayer, silent contemplation, journaling, extreme physical experiences, wilderness experiences, stargazing, and many more activities.

    However you do it, waking up to who you really are is the call of the time. It is the one and only way you can be truly “safe.”

    Morgan: Thank you, that was amazing. We will do more.

    **This article was hand-written, with summary and light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.

  • Anxiety about what’s going on, and a turnaround…

    Anxiety about what’s going on, and a turnaround…

    Woke up today, another day of feeling anxiety and working to tame it. It would be easy to say I’ve succumbed to exactly what “they” — meaning the haters, the authoritarians, the shortsighted — want.

    Yesterday I read yet another opinion piece, by a salty male making the same now tired claim that “men can’t be women.” In a prominent newspaper. That gets read worldwide. They use easy logic, like “you can’t just wish yourself to be a cat, so why do you think you can wish yourself to be a woman?”

    It is tempting to argue with that, because it is so easy to poke holes in the stupidity of the logic. To demonstrate all the faulty assumptions that go into it. That time isn’t now.

    Now is time to say: if you hurt because of what’s going on in the world, if you grieve for the loss of seeming progress, for the ugly backsliding that seems to be going on, you’re not alone.

    I’ve done 14+ years of intensive personal development. It might be tempting to think that would somehow make me immune, almost superhuman or something. I am not. I am the same flawed human as we all are, with worry, anxiety, guilt, anger, and more.

    I am grieving. Grieving for the loss of a dream that I had of all this extremely hard work and sacrifice I’ve put into building a business pay off into an “easy” retirement. I see my elders — parents and friends, traveling around the world in their retirement, enjoying the fruits of their working years — and ask “what hope do I have of experiencing that?”

    I knew all along that the hope was thin. Not because of any deficiency on my part, but on the general unsustainability of it all. Yet despite that, I worked hard and stayed optimistic. Now, that specific optimism is dying. I’m grieving for it.

    I’m sure that is how every generation of people who faces a changing world, who wakes up to the new collective reality thrust upon them, feels. I now truly know what that’s like. And that’s where all that work may be paying off. While it doesn’t remove the pain, it does allow me to recognize the pain, recognize the cause, and work to release it.

    It helps me to accept reality as it is, rather than continuing to fight it, deny it, wish it away. Those were energy draining. It allows me to slowly build a new form of optimism. It’s a tiny seedling as of yet. It’s a form of optimism that says: this is a time where I can shine. Where others can shine. People who care, people who will strive and even fight if necessary, to build something better.

    Not shining due to luxury vacations or fancy cars or any of that stuff that the older generations sold us as the be all and end all of life. Shining because I have something to contribute. Something of value to give, in the hopes that eventually “this too shall pass,” that on the other side of it we can build something better.

    Because that’s the way it always is. As horrendous as many past upheavals in human society have been, once they are done, most have led to eventual improvements in things on the other side. It may take far longer than I want to get there. I may not be there to see it, yet I hope the next generation, my kids, my friends, my team and clients are.

    I know it is worth doing. I know that, if I decided to hide, to withdraw, to just cling to the old dream that things will make a magical return to normal — whatever that means — that I would forever feel diminished. A life of getting by, of diminishment, even if longer, is not worth it. It’s not real. I played that game far too long already, and it diminished me. I am done with that game.

    And maybe that’s another payoff of all that hard self work. It is in having the ability to face collective reality on its own terms, without an unnecessary, energy draining fight. By avoiding that fight, it saves my energy for the true fight, which is to envision something better for myself, my kids, this world, in spite of what is happening in the reality around us.

    The true fight is to hold that image, of a world more positive, and to act on it whenever or wherever possible, despite cyclonic headwinds pushing back.

    I am human. You are human. We are strong, but only when we face reality and decide, deep down and with conviction, to do something to make it better.

  • Beachtime

    Beachtime

  • The Unexpected Lesson

    This is a guest post by Allie Smith-Hobbs.

    I was recently copied on an email that said, “I hoped you learned something, even if it was not what you intended” and I’ve been ruminating on this all week.

    What am I learning that I didn’t intend to learn? Unintentional lessons happen to us all the time, we just need to stop and realize that’s what it is. You know, those “growth experiences” that we’d like to avoid most of the time.

    It’s true that we learn from life’s hard experiences, but I’d wager that we’ll learn the most if we’re able to stop, take a step back and see the bigger picture of what we’re truly learning. In many ways, I feel like I’ve graduated from the school of hard knocks, (perhaps even an honorary PhD from the University of Doing it the Hard Way), but life seems to keep repeating situations until we learn the lessons.

    Now if I’m paying for a course and want to learn the technical skills of grant writing, I hope I learn the technical skills of grant writing. But if I also learn something about my mindset in that I tend to be an information gatherer rather than an implementer, that’s just as valuable (if not more so!). (Unfortunately, as much as I’ve tried, learning and making real change in my life does not occur through diffusion of helpful books on my nightstand. I have to implement it.)

    We experience these unintentional learning situations every day – at work, at home, in the car between the two.

    I’m no zen master and it might take a level of maturity currently out of my grasp to sort through every sucky situation to tease out the lessons.

    Sometimes that may take a few deep breaths behind a locked office door (or, ahem, digging into my secret stash of chocolate), but that’s okay. What did I learn?

    What I learned might simply be that I get defensive and reactive when approached in a certain way or about certain topics. My first reaction is, “Yeah, when XYZ happens, I learned that you’re a jerk…” But if I can take it as my responsibility and reframe it as, “When XYZ happens, I get defensive and reactive. So how can I operate proactively even if XYZ doesn’t change?”

    Framing is a powerful technique that Morgan teaches in grant writing, but it applies everywhere in life. I can take charge of my own response through my personal framing. My challenge to myself it to take the unintentional lesson and turn it into an intentional frame.

    What about you? No zen mastery required, but did you learn unintended something throughout your day today that you can reframe?

    Allie Smith-Hobbs has a background in administration with a M.S. in Instructional and Performance Technology and a passion for literature and writing. She combines adventure, administrative support and cool technology in supporting Dr. Morgan Giddings and her clients.

  • Security versus joy and inspiration: which wins?

    Security versus joy and inspiration: which wins?

    For the past week, I’ve been processing some of the experiences from Bali.

    One of them was this. I went to Bali for a mastermind retreat. I had only met the leader, and was very excited to get to know the other members, most of whom are from New Zealand and Australia.

    Most mastermind meetings involve talking to the others, and, well, masterminding.

    So it was to my great surprise that when we started, it was announced to be a SILENT retreat.

    ARGH! I was angry! I came all the way there to be in silence? I do that at home a lot already!

    Processing that anger during 3 days of silent retreat was a big learning experience for me. I also got to know the others far more than I thought I would, through a combination of silent activities such as cleaning up the grounds, and also through a few times when we came together and the silence was temporarily broken.

    The big tension for me was this: I felt that if I’d known it was going to be a silent retreat, I could have “mentally prepared” for it. I wouldn’t have been so mad.

    Yet it is the very need for that kind of “security” – i.e. knowing in advance to be “prepared” – that is at the heart of some of the challenges I’m currently working on in my own development.

    I’ve often placed “seeking security” above “seeking my own personal truth and alignment.” That led me to some dark corners of life where despair and depression rule. It has been a long, slow climb out of those pits and back into alignment with my highest path where joy, fun, and inspiration rule. In dropping the need for security, it opens up a whole new world of joy.

    So at the end of it all, it was worthwhile, though difficult. It reminded of those river adventures I’ve done in the past where we start out thinking it’s going to be just a pleasant little jaunt, and it ends up being an excruciating hell of finding ourselves in over our heads, then eventaully climbing up a muddy embankment in the dark only to find miles of dense raspberry bushes between us and food/water/safety.

    By living to tell the tale, we grow and develop tremendously as humans, even if at the time we want to get the hell out.

  • Travel Anxieties and… embracing the unknown!

    Travel Anxieties and… embracing the unknown!

    When you travel, does it bring up anxiety for you? It does for me. And it’s always weird little stuff that gets me.

    For example: I just rode for about 30 hours in airplanes over the world’s largest ocean, and I had almost no conscious anxiety about that. I wasn’t fretting about the airplane breaking in two and falling into the ocean – or worse, just disappearing forever. (They’ve been known to do that from time to time in this part of the world, you know….)

    No. It was the small things. Like whether I would have the correct change to pay for my Bali travel visa. See, they charge all arriving tourists $35 us dollars for a 30 day visa. Oddly enough, you can only pay this in USD, not in Australian dollars or even the local currency. I figure they make about $10,000 USD per plane load of arriving…

    So there I sat on the plane wondering. Are there going to be hassles because I don’t have exact change for $35? Yeah, really!

    That, plus the flight attendants mentioned something I didn’t quite hear about how they have strict policies about bringing food into the country. You know how those rushed and garbled announcements happen that interrupt your in flight entertainment for the 100th time so you’re only halfway listening? (and, halfway asleep from all the time changes and jet lag?)

    It was one of those. And it gave me another thing to fret about.

    Will I get in trouble because I brought some snacks – nuts, Larabars, vega protein mix? When they passed out the immigration forms, I felt like an evil villain having to check the “are you bringing any food” box as Yes. I am compulsively honest. The form warned me that I had to go to the “red” line to be inspected because I checked yes. So I wondered: am I going to go through some kind of grueling inspection where they tear all my luggage apart to find forbidden food sewn into the lining?

    These are the things that my mind found to worry about. Yes, I have an overactive mind. I’m sure you can relate!

    At least I’ve gotten pretty good at redirecting thought loops like this to more fruitful avenues. For example, with the food thing I figured the worst that would happen is that I have to throw it all away and get a scolding. With the visa, I figured the worst would be that I give them $40 and lose $5. These helped me redirect the anxiety, and yet it’s weird how my mind kept coming back over and over to these things, and I kept having to redirect it.

    Really, I think this is just a reflection of a deeper anxiety of the unknown. Almost all of us have it, but it just expresses itself in different ways. I’d never been to Bali before, and I’m traveling alone, so this was fertile ground for anxieties over what was going to happen.

    Nothing bad happened. For the food, I pulled it out of my bag before going to the red line (I was the only one who walked to the RED LINE…). I showed it to the bored looking guy tending the “red line,” and he took one glance at it and waved me back over to the green line. Apparently my little bag of snacks wasn’t enough to trigger a national security crisis. For the $35 visa, I handed them $40 and the guy handed me $5 back.

    I got through that quickly, found my pre-arranged ride, and headed to the hotel through throngs of motorcycles the likes of which I’ve only seen in Bejing and Shanghai before. It really is amazing that with them buzzing about on narrow roads like this that there aren’t people getting splattered all over the pavement once every minute or two.

    ——-

    What anxiety about the unknown do you have? How is it holding you back in your work/life/business?

    See, I’m sitting here on the balcony overlooking this fantastic view of the ocean, enjoying the smoky and salty smell of the Balinese air. In hindsight I can see that none of my anxieties about the unknown travel were “real.” In fact, the only “bad” thing that happened was my embarrassment after I tipped the guy who got me to my ride with 2,000 rp, thinking that sounded like a lot of money. The look on his face was a bit disappointed and so I wondered: did I short him? Once I realized that I had given him the equivalent of about $.30, I felt spears of embarrassment about shorting the guy. I made sure to tip the driver well to assuage my guilty conscience (100,000 rp, closer to $8).

    So the actual “bad stuff” that happened was totally different than what I had worried about. Isn’t it always that way?

    Why do our minds do this? I know that my own is a product of being trained for years and years to try to plan, to make sure everything is predictable and rational, and to never get myself in a situation that could have been avoided by better planning. Yet life does not ever unfold linearly “as planned.” It can end up being a stifling noose to experience to try to anticipate all possible scenarios and plan for them.

    It reminds me of the movie Wild with Reese Witherspoon – it was one of the four I watched during my trans-oceanic flights. She was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, alone, and at one point she encountered a guy who did an inventory of her massive, heavy pack. It turned out that she only needed about 2/3 of the stuff she’d brought. She’d weighed herself down and made her journey far more difficult with that weight. I think many of us do that in our lives.

    So here’s my motto from now on: screw that. Life is unpredictable – especially when you are doing creative work (or traveling!). You never know what’s going to happen, and yet so many of us crave the predictable result – because that’s what we’ve been programmed to do. That is exactly the thing that keeps us forever two steps away from getting that big “breakthrough” we so often crave. Because big breakthroughs in life are never predictable.

    Embrace the unknown. Enjoy it!

  • Schizophrenia and air travel

    I have schizophrenia. I think this is common amongst modern air travelers. It’s a schizophrenia of alternating love and hate.

    I’m in the air on my way to Bali. It’ll be my first time there, and I’m excited to experience a new place. I’ve heard that it is beautiful and the people are kind.

    One side of me says: this is amazing that I can do this. It is incredible that in under two days I can go from the mountains of Idaho to the pacific Isle of Bali, part of Indonesia. Imagine attempting this journey 50 years ago. Or 100. It would be a complete ordeal, and the likelihood of making it safely was lower the longer ago you roll back the calendar.

    That part of me definitely appreciates my freedom, the abundance, the miracles of this modern way of traveling across the world.

    And yet another part of me rejects this. It’s that weaker part of me, that after over 30 hours of traveling and only 4 hours of sleep, feels worn out. That part of me – we can call her Morgan 2 – is not ready for navigating a brand new culture and country with her reserves depleted.

    Morgan 2 heard that there’s going to be an onslaught of people that will greet her at the airport with arms waving and voices crowing about services they offer. Morgan 2 pictures people crowding in, pushing her to take advantage of their services, with eyes averted and lots of head shaking in an unspoken “no.”

    Morgan 2 is experiencing claustrophobia after being packed into coach for 30 hours (3 long flights).

    Do you ever feel like there are competing parts of you like this? I think all of us experience the different aspects of ourselves from time to time. The light side and the dark side. The optimistic and the pessimistic.

    I think that a big part of life is just choosing which side we let dominate on a day to day basis. This is far more of a conscious choice than most of us like to admit.

    Morgan 2 resents that I went against the advice from a mentor:  upgrade to first class… treat yourself like royalty! Morgan 2 thinks that it’s a pain that I got myself stuck here in coach, where I can barely fit my elbows in to type this as I feel the overly large thighs of the woman next to me rubbing against my side.

    Yet Morgan 1 knows that I chose to ride in coach because a big goal right now is to build savings and wealth. You can’t do that when you’re spending every penny you earn. Morgan 1 knows that there’s a longer-term plan at work here, and that long-term financial freedom is more important than the short-term pleasure of riding up front with “the royalty.”

    Morgan 1 knows I’m sick of carrying debt, some of which is from years ago due to the bike shop we closed in 2011. Treating myself like a queen is not just about riding in first class, it’s about getting to a position of total financial freedom.

    So here I am in coach, packed into a small tube with 130 strangers, watching the battle of the two versions of Morgan play out in my head. Fortunately they don’t have mind readers yet, or I may just get locked up for being so schizophrenic. Though if they had mind readers, I’ll bet I wouldn’t be the only one fitted with the little white suit and the bearded dude staring at me through spectacles as he “analyzes” what’s wrong with me….

    Morgan 2 comes out less and less for me these days, but she still pops up when I get tired. She also got a big boost from a travel experience in 2010. I was traveling through Paris, jet lagged, and I had my brand new iPad stolen out of my hands on a train, right before the guy proceeded to hop off at a station stop and run away. Morgan 2 said: “see, I told you so… bad stuff happens!”

    Morgan 1 wants to love air travel. She wants to appreciate it for the amazing opportunities it brings. She just wishes that the airlines would make it easier to do.  They pack us in here, and we, willing victims, agree to being sardines in a tube.  Morgan 2 has a lot she could complain about.

    But I choose. I choose to let Morgan 1 dominate this conversation. Appreciation always feels better, and brings better things in life back to us. Morgan 1 is the version of me responsible for all the big leaps forward in life, the big breakthroughs. Without her, I’d be in rough shape.

    So today, like many of my days, is for Morgan 1. I will sit in appreciation for the amazingness that is this fast, convenient, and inexpensive form of traveling all the way across the world. I will sit in appreciation for my good fortune to be able to visit so many parts of the world in my life. I will enjoy this experience, and I will let the voice of Morgan 1 – the fearful voice – fade into the background.

    How about you? How do you relate to travel and long trips? Do you love them, or hate them, or do you have a love/hate thing going on like your schizophrenic author?

  • Judging failure is futile self-judgement

    This is part of a message from me to myself after I judged something I was doing as a “failure.” Maybe you will find it useful.

    You never know the impact that your actions will have. You can sit here from your limited point of view and judge that something has “failed” – and yet what if that step was the necessary one to take before the next step of “success” could be had? What if there is vital learning in that “failure” that is the quickest path to meeting your goals?

    You cannot know that, but it is certain that the universe is on your side, not against it. However, it is easy to get scared and worried that things are not, because you have such a long-held habit of not believing anyone or anything was truly on your side. You push away help and assume the worst, rather than assuming that what happens is part of a perfect unfolding designed just for you.

    If that perfect unfolding was just “win” after “win” after “win” it would get boring to you very quickly. There would be no learning for you in that, no challenge. You are not one who can stay focused with no challenge. 

    You are beating yourself up about something that you judge as “failed” and you transfer that judgement of failure to yourself. “I have failed” you say to yourself, using that as a sort of self-assessment of how it confirms what you think you knew all along. That there’s something wrong with you. “Look, confirmation, see, I told you!”

    Your self worth should have nothing to do with whether you judge something you’ve created as a “success” or a “failure.” It has nothing to do with who you are as a person, nor your worth as a soul.

    You are worthy no matter what. So, stop judging the results, and enjoy the process! 

     
  • How to be a "nice girl" in 9 easy steps

    How to be a "nice girl" in 9 easy steps

    We are often told that, as girls, we’ve got to be “nice” – or ELSE. (Or else what? Someone might not like us or might not approve of us! This is the horror of horrors!)

    Since I like to be occasionally helpful on this here little blog of mine, I thought that therefore I need to write up the rules for being nice just in case you are struggling with that. Don’t say I never did anything for you! Because, I’m nice!

    Morgan’s 9 steps to being certified as a “nice girl”:

    1. Make sure to please everyone around you (especially the men in your life) before you take care of yourself! This one is absolutely essential to being a nice girl. If you aren’t in full-on self sacrifice mode, you are doing something very, very wrong. You should definitely not be going on that date with your girlfriends for a massage or whatever, because you’ve got some pleasing to do! Your man (Or men) and even sometimes the women in your life (like mom) need you, and need you now. How can I know that? Because this is a full-time job. And by full-time I don’t mean one of those easy little 40 hour per week gigs, I mean full-time as in all the time. (I know it’s weird to have to explain the literal definition of full-time, but most people think of it as some milk toast, half-hearted effort put out on behalf of an employer. Nope.)

    Here are a few signs and symptoms that you are not doing your job #1 quite right: you are in good health, you get plenty of sleep, your career is going well, and you spend time alone and/or with friends.

    If those are the case, you are headed for trouble, sister. You are going to disappoint someone and God forbid, you are going to feel horrible. So just don’t do it. Don’t even be tempted.

    Know your place.

    2. Act like a servant at all times, because you are one. Nice girls make sure to please their “master(s).” Displeasing the master(s) is definitely not nice. And we are the epitome of nice, right? So we please the masters, which are 90% of the time male, with the occasional woman thrown in the mix just to keep us on our toes.

    Great servants: always say “yes sir” or “yes ma’am”, they always smile even when being berated, they know what master wants and have it ready for him before he even knows it himself, they bow down, they denigrate themselves, and they know their place in the scheme of things, which is below/beneath the master. (sometimes literally – yes, that’s what I mean you dirty pervert, nice girls don’t think those thoughts!!).

    3. Be gracious to everyone, no matter what. This is just so essential for a nice girl, being gracious, smiling always, and even if someone does something really rude like groping your breasts in a public place or copping a feel on the subway, you just smile and laugh it off. Because, after all, they’re only men and they don’t know any better. So we just have to forgive and forget and play nice and overlook little flaws like public groping, because he didn’t really mean it, or maybe worse, his mom wasn’t a nice girl, and therefore he got all screwed up in the head and it was her fault, not his, that he turned out this way.

    And definitely, if your man occasionally likes to get a bit abusive, just forgive and forget, and smile! Because he is a poor victim of that stuff those medical people call testosterone (possibly mixed with alcohol), and so he has a very good excuse for being out of control. It must be really really difficult to handle that swirling mix of chemicals without going into a rage from time to time, and we nice girls make sure that we understand and give lots of leeway for this. Also, when it comes to our own hormonal swings, we definitely must medicate when that happens, because it would be totally not nice to get even slightly grouchy with him.

    And by the way, drinking any more than a few sips of wine is not nice! We might just lose control and let a few snarky comments about our situation slip out. Or worse, we might actually tell someone about the abuse that is happening and get our man in trouble. Our niceness certification might be permanently revoked and that would be not good.

    4. We take responsibility for everyone! This is a big one ladies. Other people just can’t take care of themselves, only we can take care of them. That’s our job here on the planet as nice girls, and we have to do it with verve and vigor!

    If your partner likes to drink and smoke (including pot) regularly – even around the kids – that’s fine, because he’s just not capable of doing any better. It must be something that you did that caused him to need to medicate himself regularly. So it is your job and your responsibility to make sure that he’s comfortable, safe, and secure no matter what.

    And, what if he withdraws his amorous affections from you? This is your responsibility too. You must have let yourself get just a little too fat, or have forgotten to wear your makeup or something (make sure to do some serious self evaluation here for how youcaused the problem)!

    By the way, the same stuff applies to mom and dad. You are their shining star, their beautiful little angel, who’s always there for them, especially when they are having one of their moments (3-4 times a day) when they need you to drop everything to run an errand for them, or talk them through some drama on the phone, or have them over for dinner, or what have you. (Nice girls don’t put limits on the kinds of things they will do to please others, so we have to leave it open here)

    Just remember at all times: if someone around you is not fully happy or content, it is your fault and you must take responsibility, now.

    Or else…

    5. Don’t get confused by this nice thing: nice girls aren’t nice to themselves!This one is a bit difficult for us nice girls to get, because it involves complicated and contradictory logic that we can’t really understand. But that’s okay, we weren’t meant to understand it. We weren’t built that way. We were just meant to be nice (to others).

    So let’s spell it out really clearly and post this where we can see it every day just to make sure we don’t forget.

    When it comes to ourselves, the “be nice” rule *does not apply,* ever. We are **not** here to be selfish, greedy people who take care of ourselves. We are here to sacrifice for others at all times, and that is it.

    Let’s give some real-life examples just to make sure this one sinks in.

    Let’s say that your friend Sue calls you up and says: hey, I am going for a walk in an hour, do you want to join me? It’s a beautiful day and some sunshine might do you good!

    Say NO. Because you have laundry to do, or something that is far more important than getting fresh air and sunshine for yourself. As a matter of fact, make sure that you spend this nice day in the basement or the laundry room, because that is what nice girls do.

    Another: let’s say you’re feeling tired and like a cold is coming on, and you really just want to rest. Don’t do it, it’s a trap!

    Once you give into your craven desire to take care of yourself, this slippery slope will just go down and down and down, and soon enough you may find yourself in divorce court trying to explain how it all started with a little nap. This is the path of Satan – just realize, he is tempting you to turn on those you love by convincing you that you should do things to take care of yourself.

    You shouldn’t.

    Because nice girls don’t take care of ourselves, it is not in our nature. We only take care of others. Remember that and you will do well in your indentured servitude here in this life.

    6. Look pleasing to the eyes at all times just in case a man is watching. 

    I know that these are a lot of rules to keep up with, and that it can get a little confusing. So, sometimes we let this one slide just a bit as we’re trying to keep up with all the rules, but we can’t. It will be a catastrophe.

    We must look pretty at all times! Period!

    Our body is here for the pleasure of others, plain and simple. Whether it’s to look at or to use in other ways, it is not ours, it is his. And we must dress and act the part!

    So if you’ve gotten a bit sloppy with your makeup routine, you need to start waking up earlier to make sure that you’re doing it correctly! (A rough guideline: if you’re not spending at least 45 minutes in the morning on your makeup and hair, you are slacking, and nice girls are not slackers!)

    Always, always shave. Shave everything (except your head, of course!). Any extra hairs you have might disgust him and have him compare you with an ape. You are not an ape! You are his goddess (and by the way, it’s your fault that he fell from grace in the first place, so remember that if you ever start feeling resentful about all this nice girl stuff. If you hadn’t tempted him, we’d all be in heaven right now).

    And, definitely get rid of all cellulite, wrinkles, or anything else that might displease the eye or convey anything even slightly less than perfection. God made Clostridium botulinum – aka “botulism” – for a reason! It was so that we could extract the toxin and inject it into our faces to keep them wrinkle free at all times, even when we’re 70!

    For that matter, make sure that you have a personal savings account for one reason and one reason only: to pay for the treatments you will need as you get older to keep being pleasing to the eye. Those treatments get expensive, and you can’t expect your man to pony up for them! No! That’s not nice.

    If you get tempted to spend your savings on anything else – like a lunch out with girlfriends – just don’t do it. Nice girls have self control and don’t waste their money on niceties like lunch dates. We put all our effort and money towards keeping up the perfect image for those around us who depend on it!

    7. Be everything to all people at all times. Even though we’re definitely not in the same camp as those crazy women’s lib types, we do agree with them on one thing.

    We must be all things to all people at all times, aka, superwomen. Here are a few examples:

    • Say that our man is struggling to pay the rent. We go out and get a night-shift job (one that starts after the kids are in bed and hubby is sexually satisfied, of course!), to bring in the extra income. We don’t need sleep because we’re not here for self gratification like sleep, we are here to take care of others. Period.
    • Say that mom is struggling because she has no friends except us, and she is feeling really lonely, so she calls us on the phone in the middle of work to “chat.” We must, must not let our work interfere with her needs! If we have to, we catch up on work after everyone else is in bed, and after we’ve completed our night shift at the bargain store. But when mom calls, we take her call, every time, and we stay with her on the phone until she is satisfied.

    I think you’re getting this nice girl stuff pretty well by now, so I shouldn’t need to give you more examples. But before we go, there is one more tricky thing that you have to watch out for. I hesitate to even bring it up, because, really, it is kind of a minefield of potential manipulation. In many ways it would be better for you to just stay totally ignorant. But then you might get trapped by it without even knowing it, and we wouldn’t want to lose you from the nice girl club. So, I’ll go ahead:

    8. Be extremely wary of anyone who tells you that you should claim your own power or take care of yourself Anyone who does that is not your friend. They are quite likely just women’s libbers in disguise, sent here by Satan (or one of his minions) to manipulate you into thinking that you actually have rights to an independent life of happiness here on this planet.

    Don’t forget that you don’t. That’s not what you are here for!

    Let’s make this clear. Does a garden rake have rights? Does a couch have rights? Does a door mat have rights?

    Of course not. You are like those things. As a nice girl, you are a tool, here to be used by others for the purposes they intend, not to have any of that nasty stuff they call “free will.”

    If you feel tempted to make choices that might be in any way moving towards self gratification, you are falling into this trap.

    Like I said, I hesitate to even bring it up, because it would be better if you were simply ignorant of the massive evils that exist on this planet.

    Yet in this case, just a little bit of knowledge is the best defense. Your awareness may just save you when you bump into your old girlfriend on the street and she tempts you to go do something fun for yourself – and when you tell her you’ve got errands to do for your family – she starts asking probing questions about your home life (and she asks you about that bruise on your cheek – how intrusive)!

    So, just be aware, be very cautious, that there are many people who will present themselves in the disguise of old friends, college professors, social workers, counselors, and even TV personalities who will falsely tell you that you have rights and power.

    Just remember: as a nice girl, you don’t. It really is that simple, and so just don’t let yourself get confused by all the mumbo jumbo that floats around in our modern culture that would get you confused about that.

    9. Pass it on to your daughters. This is the ninth and final rule of being a nice girl. It is a simple one. Make sure to print out this rule set, and from the moment your daughter is born, to indoctrinate her with this.

    Make sure that she doesn’t get swayed early on by nosy day care workers or educators who might inform her of her rights. (really, rights for her are a lie: she has none but what you give her, and you want her to conform to the nice girl code of conduct).

    Make sure that you keep her out of the public school system, and away from anyone who could give her toxic ideas about so-called “rights.” Remember, her destiny is far higher. It is to be in the service of others. That is what will assure her spot in heaven when she’s done with this life. There is no higher path, and no better thing that you can do for her!

    So guard and shield your daughter from any undue, empowering influence! It is your highest and best function as a nice girl mom!

    Those are the rules, now a final word

    Nice girls play nice, act nice, and think nice thoughts. They practice total self-control at all times. They do not slip.

    Now, some homework. As you read over those rules, Identify the 2-3 places where you are most out of alignment with being a nice girl and get to work immediately on fixing it. You don’t have much time, because someone might discover that you are not nice and then you’re done for. So understand that there’s some real urgency to this!

    Get on it, nice girl! Go be nice! Go light up their lives in your beautiful self-sacrifice! Rah Rah!

    Author’s note:

    If you haven’t figured (and I sure hope that you have, or else you really are a nice girl!!), this is satire. And there’s a specific reason for it.

    In my work with people identifying “belief programming” that holds us back, I’ve seen patterns in women – and I’m talking about highly educated women often with PhD’s and MD’s – that reflect a lot of this stuff.

    And often this highly educated woman is doing it in ways so subtle she has no clue that she’s doing it, and then she wonders why she struggles so much.

    This may seem to be a little extreme, and yet, despite years of so-called “progress” – we still teach many girls this stuff. (e.g. I see it on playgrounds regularly – the differential treatment of many parents towards boys versus girls).

    Even in the 2010’s, there’s plenty of talk about how women still, after 50 years of working on it, don’t get equal pay to men, and how there’s bias against us.

    What about our own bias against ourselves, programmed from a very early age, that says that we have to shut up and take it, or else get thrown out of the nice girl club?

    It is my bet that if we were willing to take responsibility for this bogus programming we accepted from others as we grew up – and now throw it overboard, we’d have pay equity.

    The difference is especially stark with female business owners who are friends and/or clients. The difference in income between most of us and the “equivalent” male is big (often 2-3X or more).

    This is not something being “done to us” as business owners – it’s something we do to ourselves. And I believe we do it because we are still caught up in this bogus belief system about playing nice and being nice – which holds us back.

    So if this little article helped you identify how silly this belief system is, and be a bit repulsed by it, then it has served its purpose.

    And, by the way, I do think that being a gracious human being is generally a good practice for everyone (men and women alike). But there is a huge distinction between being generally gracious versus being a nice-girl doormat. Many women are way too far towards the nice-girl doormat end of the spectrum.

    Now, Go Live and Create!

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