Shamanically Dazed and Cosmically Confused

I feel as though I am waking from a very long sleep. I am reading Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Lifeby Marshall Rosenberg, and every 20 pages or so I put it down and cry. I feel deep pain in realizing how violently I have communicated most of my life, especially with myself. Even now, I struggle to put aside shame, to stop blaming myself for past words spoken in anger or in haste. Words are my reason to exist, and my sorrow at using them to ever hurt another, even if out of my own pain, is great.

I am also in the midst of a nine-month training course to become a Shamanic Soul Coach. Those of us in the course have one full day of training and one two-hour long teleseminar each month. This month, our training consisted of examining our relationship to money and success. I am still processing the emotions stirred up by the new information I now have about myself.

For one thing, I rediscovered that I move at a slower pace than most people. This has always been true, and I have denied it, pushing myself to spend enough time in the fast lane so I can appear to be “normal.” I often get feedback from other people to hurry up. My mother once told me that it drove her crazy to watch me butter a slice of bread. My memory is that I used the butter knife like a paint brush, pretending the bread was a blank canvas. I took my own sweet time spreading that soft, yummy yellow stuff into every corner, cranny, and nook of a piece of bread.

What I have realized is that this slower rhythm is the rhythm of my heart. Western culture in general — and American culture in particular — urges us to move at the faster rhythm of our heads, our thoughts. My path seems to be to feel my way through the world.

I’ve been looking for part-time contract work for the past five months, and lately I’ve had a lot of “false positives.” What I mean by that is I keep getting offered work and when I closely examine all aspects of it — fees, contractual obligations, circumstances under which I would be working — I find the only answer I can give is “No.” I’m realizing that what I’ve done is slowed the process down. In the past, finding work has always been faster, in part because I take the first thing that comes along. Now I’m choosing to be choosier, so I can take on work that feels right to me.

Where these two things tie together — nonviolent communication (NVC for short) and the slow pace at which I move — is that I have been chastising myself for failing to learn NVC more quickly. I need to jump off the judgment train, cut myself some slack. When the time is right, the right work will come and the money will follow. And when the time is right, I will begin to speakin the language of nonviolence, which will fall from my lips as though I learned it in utero.

After all that, you may be feeling just as dazed and confused as I have. Watch this space for further (and much more frequent) posts, which will explain everything. Once I figure it out, that is.

Thank you for your kind attention. Comments welcome, as always. I appreciate your regard.

~Love and Blessings,
Selene~