What happens when we push through resistance and do something radical with our lives? How do you go from “feeling blue” to “being new”? My dear friend Nancy Shapiro answers these questions with her own story of reinvention in response to a post I wrote called: “Ladies: Are You Feeling the Blues?
Nancy has a coaching practice in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She’s a writer, a poet, and has a beautiful blog. Enjoy!
The blues went away when I began to honor my long-postponed dream/desire/obsession with going back to school to finish an interrupted bachelor’s degree. Thirty some years later I enrolled in college [again], and simultaneously finished a two-year coaching program. Amongst the “doing” I came across ideas, concepts, traditions, and ground-breaking news in various fields that ignited my soul, spirit, and intellect…in other words, my entire being woke up. This ‘waking up’ was perceptual—the way I viewed everything transformed. Many wildly different things happened in those four years of school. Yet the actions and changes that describe my shift from “being blue” to being a truly happy person are few:
1. Creating and keeping a gratefulness practice;
2. Making mindfulness as vital as breathing (helped by becoming aware of the consequences of being mindless);
3. Embracing change and paradox, instead of fighting them;
4. Using mindfulness to watch my thoughts and words in order to improve the way I speak to others, and to myself;
5. Learning to truly listen;
6. Understanding that the blues don’t last long when I do something I love to do…from sitting in a chair watching a sunset, to writing a poem, to taking all the not-so-easy baby steps it took to drag myself back to school; and finally—
7. Choosing to connect with the world around me.
Separation and disconnection from one’s self, and our loved ones, our communities and the planet we call home, can cause the “blues.” Connection, in all of its many forms, proved to be a lifeline for me.
–Nancy Shapiro
