How naked can you go in your writing and your living? That is a question I’ve been asking myself lately as I’ve become aware of how much gets between us and… you name it. Other people, ourselves, our writing, full vibrant living.

This question came to me, quite literally, on a recent trip to assistant teach at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

When I arrived, tired after a long trip, I had only a few minutes to dash down to the famed hot springs to soak before a massage. So I threw on my bathing suit, followed the path along the rocky coastline to the springs, and eased my way into the warm water. Only I noticed something unusual. Everyone else was laughing and bubbling and… naked.

I’d heard that the hot springs were clothing optional, but what they didn’t say was that I would be the only one there wearing a bathing suit, and for the first time in my life feel weird about the fact that I was covered up and others were not.

I contemplated taking off my suit… for about 10 seconds. No, I knew how naked I wanted to go and it wasn’t one iota less than my modest one piece bathing suit.

As I was floating in the water, trying not to stare awkwardly at anything other than the faces around me, suddenly one of the women who had been submerged in the springs stood up to look over the ocean. She stretched, and with a conversational tone as if we were in her living room she commented on the sea otters that were playing in the ocean below.

What caught me off guard was her obvious pride in a body that wasn’t 17, but at least 70. It was clear that shame had long ago drifted away and been replaced by acceptance. She spoke and moved in a leisurely fashion, much like the otters below. Her beauty and power were palpable. Meantime, I sat in the springs, fully covered, my mind racing in a disconnected dance apart from my body.

After she left, I was called into my massage, an Esalen special where the strokes are long and fluid. As I lay there, listening to the ocean come in and out, my mind slowed and eventually dissolved. I became a shell on the beach, worn by the water and the sun, or a grain of sand. Rather than my worrying, planning, controlling mind pushing forward my body, the small “me” dissolved and I felt connected to everything around me.

Afterwards, I walked out to the springs, easily dropped the towel I was wearing, and stepped into the water. The modesty and self-judgment that had seemed so real two hours earlier had disappeared. I realized how tightly we cling to our fears, our self-judgment, our over-thinking – and how freeing it feels to release them.

Now, when I ponder whether to expose myself in a sentence I’m writing or a disclosure with a new friend, I ponder how naked I can go. Some days I’m only willing to take off my metaphoric shoes, other days it’s everything. I want to be more like the woman in the hot tub – fearless to expose herself because she already accepts it all. As author Brene Brown says, “We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known.”

I hope you’ll join me in the challenge – together, how naked can we go? …

I’d love to hear your comments on the article, what pearls you notice when you begin reflecting. Please share your thoughts  below in the Reply box …

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to Carolyn’s website. www.backyardpearls.com

Carolyn Scarborough is a professionally trained creativity and writing coach. As founder of Backyard Pearls, LLC, she helps coaches and heart-based entrepreneurs to unblock their creativity so they can connect with and express what’s deeply meaningful to them. She leads retreats, telecourses and does private coaching with new writers, experienced writers, and those who simply need a creativity boost to launch business and writing projects.  She is the author of “Backyard Pearls: Cultivating Wisdom and Joy in Everyday Life,” and is an award-winning magazine writer who has published more than 500 articles in publications around the world.

Request your complimentary “Tapping into your Inner Wisdom” session here.

Do you know the difference between a finished and unfinished project? I can tell you in one word. Staying.

I know that seems rather obvious. If we throw up our hands and quit, whatever we are writing or doing just doesn’t happen. But it’s even deeper than that. Author Leo Babuta says that the key to mastering and finishing things can all be summed up in what he calls “Learning to be comfortable with discomfort.”

If we run every time something gets a little hard, what we leave behind is a wake of unfinished novels, plans, dreams. Then, instead of that feeling of achievement and elation, we are stuck with the frustration and disappointment of yet another broken promise to ourselves.

The question is, how do we learn to “stay” when everything in us wants to run?

The other day I was camped out on the back patio with an article deadline and a glass of iced tea. Instead of a straight shot from the beginning of the piece to the end, I was finding myself caught up in seemingly a hundred different idea tributaries, each one leading a different direction. I felt like I was blindfolded and being spun around as I tried to “pin the tail” on the concept for my piece.

What I first found was that I had a limitless number of creative ways to escape the discomfort. There was the slack jawed staring into space and daydreaming about a completely different topic. Then there was the instant craving for hummus and crackers that had the urgency of a 3 alarm fire. Also, the thought that I should switch over to research mode — Google was singing her siren song, and I was almost ready to respond.

The next temptation was a sneaky one. I started following the trail of thinking that told me “wasn’t I supposed to follow my bliss, anyway?” “Go do what brings you joy,” this voice said. And while I wholeheartedly believe in that, I also am finding that following bliss is more of a tuning in and being willing to change directions when you are doing something that doesn’t serve you; it’s not a knee jerk reaction of stomping off when things aren’t going your way.

As I sat, I watched the fear flicker though my mind that I wouldn’t find the meat of my article, and then I consciously let the thought float away. I breathed into the tenseness building between my shoulder blades. I felt my heart beating a little faster, and still I stayed. And as I patiently waited with myself, the article’s deeper truth seemed to float in. I began to type and before long, I was finished.

Like the yoga stretch, if we can just hold it for a little longer, we get the release. Writing is no different. It’s not about being the most colorful writer, or the fastest or even the most intelligent. It’s about having compassion for our wandering minds and bringing them back home, again and again, as we greet what we’d rather avoid… and move across the finish line.

I’d love to hear your comments on the article, what pearls you notice when you begin reflecting. Please share your thoughts  below in the Reply box …

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to Carolyn’s website. www.backyardpearls.com

As founder of Backyard Pearls, LLC, Carolyn Scarborough helps people tap into their inner wisdom and express it in the world through writing, entrepreneurial creativity or simply being a creator in living your life.    

Request your complimentary “Tapping into your Inner Wisdom” session here.

It is 72 degrees right now, in January no less, and I am sitting in paradise. In my own back yard, with the rye grass a spring green, a bee strolling across my day planner, my dog laying next to the patio sniffing the air. Ahhhh… It feels like such a long ahhhh… because it feels almost as if I’ve been in a 3 month hibernation.

We all experience this – a period of time when we go underground in a sense, pull comfort around us like a blanket, and just try to get through whatever it is. In my case, what triggered it was moving from our family home and downsizing in preparation for our youngest daughter heading to college next year. We released about 1/3 of our belongings, said goodbye to a house full of beautiful memories, and moved.

During this time I didn’t have my usual passion for creating new business programs or socializing or even dancing as much as usual. Instead, it was almost like slowing down my heartbeat and entering a cocoon.

That didn’t mean I didn’t keep busy. I did. In fact, at times I was a whir of movement – pack the trunk with boxes for Goodwill, paint this wall, sort kitchen drawers. Anything so I didn’t have to think too much.

Finally, I felt the call to come back. To spend more time with my writing, with connecting to and embracing exactly where I was. And so I sit on my deck overlooking paradise, shedding the winter layer that has protected me, and feeling the air on my legs. Aliveness and possibility are calling again, and I am listening…

If you find yourself in the midst of hibernation, with your creativity and writing frozen, perhaps it’s time for the thaw? If you are hearing that voice calling for something more, consider joining me on an 8 week adventure beginning February 19. See details above in Reconnecting with your Creative Heartbeat… and Writing from There..

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to Carolyn’s website. www.backyardpearls.com

As founder of Backyard Pearls, LLC, Carolyn Scarborough helps people tap into their inner wisdom and express it in the world through writing, entrepreneurial creativity or simply being a creator in living your life.    

To subscribe to Backyard Pearls Newsletter, visit the site here.

Request your complimentary “Tapping into your Inner Wisdom” session here.

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to  her website. You can get a free audio on overcoming writers block by clicking HERE.

I’d love to hear your comments on the article, what pearls you notice when you begin reflecting. Please share your thoughts  below in the Reply box …

Have you ever wondered just what manual people are reading that culturally mandates how we are supposed to feel about certain things? Child’s birthday – happy. Death – sad. A move you chose – excited.

That last one is what I’ve been dealing with. We are moving. We’ll still be living in Austin, yet we’ll be closer in to the funky downtown area and are downsizing slightly with the empty nest era just under a year away. Everyone keeps asking me if I’m excited, as if it’s beholden on me to spread the enthusiastic move energy around like a wand full of glitter. Come into my orbit, they want me to say, and you too can live vicariously through this move.

I get it. Only problem is, I’m having a hard time actually locating said feelings. First there are a host of other feelings waiting to be felt. They are hiding behind my fears about if this was the right move, the right time, the right house? Will there be lots of West Nile Virus mosquitoes there just waiting to pounce? Would this move have made more sense after our youngest daughter left for college, rather than before?

I felt this way when my mother died, too. People kept looking at me with sorrow on the day of her death, yet all I could feel was inexplicable joy. Waves of it. In time the grief would come, over and over again, but it wasn’t there in the moment people expected it to be. Instead, it appeared out of nowhere as I drank my coffee and poured in half a cup of milk just like she did. Or when I heard a song that reminded me of her. But on the morning of her death, it was transcendent joy.

As writers and creatives, we become more human when we feel what is really there, at any given moment, rather than falling into a role of what we should be feeling. It may not always feel good, but it does feel more alive. And when we do this, we touch into the core of who we are, regardless of circumstance.

Already I can feel the shift as numbness melts like ice floes and everything from elation to boredom float up to be felt.

Recently, a friend asked me if the new house would make me happy. I said that no, it wouldn’t – that I planned to be happy anyway. Ultimately, the house, the death – none is going to deprive me of happiness or the right to embrace whatever I happen to feel. I may look weird dancing at a wake or being cranky at my birthday party, but it’s all good. It’s the pulse of life. And if I’m moving, that’s the direction I want to go.

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to Carolyn’s website. www.backyardpearls.com

As founder of Backyard Pearls, LLC, Carolyn Scarborough helps people tap into their inner wisdom and express it in the world through writing, entrepreneurial creativity or simply being a creator in living your life.    

To subscribe to Backyard Pearls Newsletter, visit the site here.

Request your complimentary “Tapping into your Inner Wisdom” session here.

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to  her website. You can get a free audio on overcoming writers block by clicking HERE.

I’d love to hear your comments on the article, what pearls you notice when you begin reflecting. Please share your thoughts  below in the Reply box …

A couple of weeks ago I started writing my newsletter about a topic I love – pleasure. As I wrote, I was frolicking with words, playfully tossing them up to see where they’d land.

And then I got sidetracked.

I left my pleasure article holding a knapsack on the side of the road as I went off in other directions. Each day,  I’d see “write newsletter” on my to-do list, and each day I’d find other things to do. This went on for two weeks as I kept avoiding completing the article.

Then one morning I showed up at Nia dance, feeling a bit frazzled and out of it. I started moving and found my brain was going into overdrive as my body followed the moves of the instructor by rote. I was just doing well enough to, say, not knock anyone over with a mindless sweep of my arms by going the opposite direction of the class. My body was keeping time with the music, but no one was home.

When I noticed this, I shifted back into presence. My head and body moved back in sync and after a few minutes, the download began. Rather than the annoying, repetitive cycling of my earlier thoughts, now my thoughts felt more like fresh packages delivered to my door, sent  to shift me in a better direction.  Delightfully, this is what happens when we take the time to move back into the present moment.

One of those packages was the sudden realization about why I couldn’t write about pleasure. I had been trying and trying to recreate the mood of the moment I had been in when I was happily writing about pleasure, but then life had shifted and a new direction was calling to me. The longer I kept my eyes closed about what I really wanted to write and forced myself to continue the first article, the more I suffered.

What really wanted to be written was how we fragment in life when we start getting too other-focused.

I had been in the midst of full summer riot gear. I was helping guide one teenage daughter as she pondered jobs, colleges and boys; was annoyed with the giant Elizabethan collar our dog was wearing since his hot spot flared up,  and was busy supporting my husband in the midst of employee changes.

So I didn’t want to talk about pleasure. I wanted to talk about how do we hold onto this cord of “I” and honor it and connect to it in the midst of pulls from every direction. I wanted to see why we release the cord of what we need, with the result being a slow backyard drip that we don’t even notice, other than to feel a little more spacey and fatigued. And how, even in the midst of that, we can ultimately reconnect to what’s most essential in ourselves.

It seems, now that I’m coming to the end of this article, I haven’t written about either pleasure or distraction. I’ve written about how we need to honor ourselves by writing what’s true for us in the moment, because that’s where the juice and the healing and the aliveness are. I suppose I could also add how sometimes we don’t really know what we’re writing about until we’ve finished writing it. Like I just have. Ahhhh… that feels better. Almost like pleasure.

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to Carolyn’s website. www.backyardpearls.com

As founder of Backyard Pearls, LLC, Carolyn Scarborough helps people tap into their inner wisdom and express it in the world through writing, entrepreneurial creativity or simply being a creator in living your life.    

To subscribe to Backyard Pearls Newsletter, visit the site here.

Request your complimentary “Tapping into your Inner Wisdom” session here.

You may reprint the featured article, in its entirety, by including a byline and a link to  her website. You can get a free audio on overcoming writers block by clicking HERE.

I’d love to hear your comments on the article, what pearls you notice when you begin reflecting. Please share your thoughts  below in the Reply box …