Question the Rules is for people who think they might be crazy. 

For those of you who think you might be the only one who can’t stand to live and work in the normal way anymore. Where the default “shoulds” and rules of society don’t work for you – they don’t make you happy or satisfied or give purpose to your life – and even more, living life that way is making you miserable, dejected, broken.

Yes, this program is for those of you who are still in that stuck, broken place.

But this program is also for those of you who already made the big change.

You already quit the job or started the business or left the relationship or pulled your kids out of school or moved to a hut in the woods (with high speed internet, of course) … and while it’s sometimes been awesome and fulfilling and powerful …

It’s still hard.

And occasionally, you still have trouble having faith. You still feel crazy and scared and alone.

This program is to help you remember that you are not the only one.

That there are others just as crazy as you, who are figuring out how to live an extraordinary life, questioning all those default rules of society, and creating an existence that works for them.

This is a program for you to learn from and connect with your people. People crazy like you. 

As you know, I rarely recommend programs. I’m picky and know that most stuff is bullshit. And I’m protective of you guys – I don’t want you to get screwed.

But as I said when I originally reviewed this program when it came out two years ago, the Question the Rules program is different.

I’m listening to this program myself. And I’ve actually learned stuff. Stuff I’ve already applied in my business today.

I recommend that anyone who resonates with the Live Your Truth message consider Question the Rules 2.0 … and decide if it resonates with you.

Click Here to Get Question the Rules 2.0

If you have any questions about the program or whether it’s a good fit for you, ask in the comments below or contact me directly – and I’ll make sure your questions get answered asap.

Watch the Updated Video Review:

Watch the 2010 Review: I did a screen-capture video review of the program (see below), including a sneak peek of what’s actually inside. Check it out.

I’m sharing my recommendations of who should consider the program, what’s missing, and ideas of how to decide if it’s a great match for you.

(summary: if you’re scared, weird, and/or need to network, check this out.)

Click Here to Get Question the Rules 2.0

The above link are affiliate links — because you could pay them, or you could pay both me and them. If you don’t like that, just do a google search for what I’m talking about. I would *never* recommend something unless I have used it myself or have a relationship with the creator such that I am confident that the service/product is awesome. If you don’t like something that I have recommended, please let me know.

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Faith isn’t about the days when things are going well.

Faith isn’t about the days when the launch brings in thousands, when the spouse comes home and gives you a kiss and asks you how your day has been and actually listens to your answer, when everyone is healthy, when you have a fully funded emergency savings account, when you get 10 interviews and 3 job offers and can take your pick.

Faith isn’t about when you’re following the rules, when you’re doing what the seven step system details for you, when you’re going along with what everyone approves of and what you’re supposed to do.

Faith isn’t about when you feel close to God, when you feel loved and cared for, when you feel brave and able to tackle anything that comes your way because of all the support and strength and power you have behind you.

Faith is about those other days.

When you send out the big email and get no response. Again. When you apply for the jobs and only receive contributions to your pile of 40 rejection letters. When your spouse doesn’t make eye contact when he comes home from work and you do the dishes so you can hide your silent crying from the kids. When no one replies to your texts and you wonder if friendships are an exercise in futility. When your kid gets sick and the doctors are condensing and the insurance company won’t pay for what she needs. When you’re using a gas station credit card to buy generic milk and white bread and non-organic bananas because you have no cash for the regular grocery store, much less Whole Foods. When you wonder if the higher power you’ve been praying to this whole time is just a collective figment of humanity’s wishful imagination and you’re just another fool.

Faith is about what you do on the days when you don’t feel any faith.

Faith is about continuing to go on – even though you’ve failed so many times you have lost track, even though you don’t believe someone could love you, even though you’re not sure why anyone would hire you, even though you’re afraid you’re a terrible mother, even though everyone thinks you’re crazy, even though you don’t think you’ll ever feel better, even though you don’t know if anyone or anything is listening when you kneel down to pray.

Faith is about being in the dark, lonely pit of doubt and futility, and doing it anyway.

Faith is when giving up becomes unacceptable.

There are a lot of things you can use to help you continue on those dark days.

• Having friends or coaches who you can help you remember that the darkness and doubt are liars.
• Creating routines of meditation or prayer or yoga or walking in nature or another spiritual practice that you do even on days when you don’t feel like it.
• Reading or listening to stories of other humans who continued to have faith, even when they had absolutely no logical reason backing them up.

So, what about you?

What do you do on days when you don’t have faith? What helps you to keep going on, when things are bad?

Please share your ideas and resources below – it would help us all to hear them.

–

Next week I’ll be sharing with you one such collection of stories of people who refused to follow the rules even when things didn’t always go well and everyone thought they were nuts – so you can learn from their stories, use it to bolster your faith, and see how you can apply it to your life.

That program (Question the Rules) is not the right thing for all of you, so I’ll share my updated review of the latest version of this program next week so you can make the best decision for your situation. (Of course, I arranged it so you guys get a big discount for a couple days, to make it more accessible for those who need it.)

In the meanwhile, if you’re having a bright everything-is-going-well day, then congratulations and blessings to you, I’m happy for you!

If you’re having a dark, confusing, futility-laden day, know that you’re not the only one.

And, know that it gets better. I promise.

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Nausea.

That was what I felt when my Rolfing guy pushed on a spot deep inside my hip during our session Friday afternoon.

I didn’t just feel his pressure in my hip, I felt a sickening feeling deep inside my abdomen. Foreign. Undefined.

A part of myself I had no connection to, no understanding with, no acknowledgement of.

Then on Tuesday morning I woke up with a pain.

I had dreamed about a fictional fight with my ex, where he hadn’t told me he was moving to San Diego (no idea where that hypothetical came from). When I confronted him, he acted as if I was overreacting and started talking on the phone to a woman at work. I ripped the iPhone from his hands, hung up his call, and woke up.

Woke up to queasy pain in my lower left belly.

Later that morning, as I sat in Panera trying to write and enjoy a shortbread cookie, the email came.

The rental house in St. Louis (which is both underwater and renting at below my monthly overhead cost) needs a new heater. The current one (12 years old) has crapped out and is leaking carbon monoxide. Fml.

I quickly packed up my stuff and drove home so I could be in immediate proximity to my own private bathroom.

(Details are tmi. But you get the idea.)

Since I was useless, I sat down in the leather chair in the corner of my bedroom and listened to a mediation on my new iPhone app Meditation Oasis - a ”Guided Meditation for Anger.”

And that’s when I found it.

Deep inside of me, on that lower left side of my abdomen, is a knot.

A blockage.

A dense oval of packed darkness, energy that has been contained, for years, decades, inside a thick leather shell.

I found where the anger lives.

Left free to discharge, anger is just an energy. Just a measuring tool to give you information about your life and how things are affecting you. Just something to let go of and let it continue its way in the universe.

But … I don’t get angry.

It’s not my “go-to” emotion. I just get frustrated or annoyed or another word more socially acceptable. I’ve even felt a bit evolved for avoiding such a bad feeling.

But of course, that’s bullshit.

Of course I feel angry. Of course I get pissed. I just quickly pushed it down into the knot, for long-term storage and avoidance.

I go straight from anger into self-doubt and guilt and shame and other feelings that fit into my story loops.

I force the anger into the compaction inside my belly, avoiding any admittance that I’m capable of anger, that I’m justified in being angry, that I have the right to stand up for myself.

The angry turned into a stagnation. 

It keeps me from being able to fully ground. From being able to fully be present. From being able to fully connect with the infinite.

It blocks me from being all of myself.

But as much as I want to create a space for it to be free, for it to discharge, for me to learn from it and just let the energy free back into the universe, I couldn’t yet.

The blockage is safe.

I’m afraid if I release the constant pressure, if I let it free, it will explode. It will consume me. It will consume the universe.

I’m afraid that if I’m no longer blocked, if I can be all of myself … then I will be too big.

Like she said, I’m not afraid of my darkness, I’m used to that.

I’m afraid of what I could become.

The bigness, the infinite possibility, the grande power … it terrifies me.

Oy.

Yes, I promised to Be Bold EveryDay.

And as much as being bold is about publishing the 55-Things post and creating a Facebook group for INFJs and shooting video in public. As much as being bold is about asking for reviews of my podcast and asking for help and asking for a playdate.

As much as being bold is about speaking my truth, I think the most bold thing I will ever do is this.

To have the boldness, the courage, the strength, to allow myself to be healed.

To allow myself to be great.

To allow myself to be everything.

#thatisall

–

What is your relationship to anger? Do you have feelings or emotions or hurts that you have been storing in your body? Do you have something blocking you from being all of yourself? 

Please share your story, comments, questions, reactions below – I’d love to hear from you!

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There is a disturbing amount of space and eternity in the old growth redwoods.

Disturbing because, as my BFF said in her blog post today, stillness and silence means that you can’t hide behind your addictions, you can’t hide behind your busy, you can’t hide behind the distractions with which you’ve been self-medicating.

In the silence, you can’t avoid the real.

So to begin my annual personal retreat, to end a year and begin the rest, I traveled to the woods and wandered.

I abandoned the facade I had been propped up behind.

I found myself again, in that ancient space.

Mid day, I stopped along a creek because I knew something was to come.

And there, inside the Northern California coastal fog, I heard what really happened last year.

Last year, I grew up. Realized that life, that this world, is not black and white.

I found humility. Surrendered. Relaxed. Got quiet and still.

I let go of control. Stopped waiting for control.

I started to pray.

I started to forgive.

I became aware of the criticism.

I found empathy and compassion. For them. For myself.

I learned how to trust.

I learned how to ground, center, hold space, wait, open, receive.

I let go.

That even though I felt like I didn’t get as much done as I should have (which is not really true, I later realized I got tons accomplished last year), what I needed to take place in this journey did happen.

I did the most important thing possible. I did what was necessary.

I grew.

But of course the journey did not end there.

The next day I spent in a motel room bed, watching television (the prevalence of reality show programming is fascinating) and suffering from a migraine and the side effects of the medications required to keep it at bay.

But I wasn’t upset.

I didn’t feel like I was wasting time on my retreat. I knew that in that moment, what I needed was for my body to process what had happened.

I needed to just be.

Then I woke up and returned to the woods.

I found a stone bench in the middle of a grove and just sat.

I asked.

What do I need this year?

How do I need to grow?

What do I need more of in my everyday life?

I felt it through me, surrounding me, permeating the branches and the moss and coming up through the decaying logs and needles underfoot.

Peace.

I need to learn how to bring peace into my life. Every day. To exist in a peaceful, serene, centered and grounded state.

To have Peace be my daily life, instead of just my vacation.

I returned to the small town of my temporary residence (which of course has a Starbucks, can’t escape that, lol), sat down in a booth with a grande coffee with 5 raw sugars and my laptop.

I wrote. 

I wrote dozens of journal pages replying to my annual retreat writing prompts, revealing who I was last year, who I am right now, and who I want to be.

I recommitted to what my life is about.

I decided how I am going to grow this year.

And I determined how I’m going to do it.

Yes, I’ll be sharing more about the EveryDay project that I’ve committed to this year, in the weekly video blogs, on the daily LYTD podcast, and in future blog posts.

And next week I’ll share more about the Live Your Truth Guide to Your Annual Retreat, where I’m giving you the exact process I went through last week and how you can create it in your own life (including the behind the scenes details of my journal prompt responses and my 2012 plan).

In the meanwhile, for today … here is the thing.

Before you can know anything, before you can hear a voice from a higher power, before you can listen to your own intuition or find the truth or know what you already know deep in your soul, you need something.

You need space.

Silence.

Time.

Connection to the eternal.

Whether you find that connection in the old growth redwoods or a church service or hot yoga or running a marathon or flying a plane across the sky, you must make your connection.

To remember your truth, you must create space for your truth.

#thatisall

Did you do a personal retreat or annual review? What process did you use?

What are your words, goals, vision, themes, resolutions, commitments for 2012?

Please leave a comment below, I’d love to hear from you!

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You cannot make them love you.

You cannot make them understand you.
You cannot make them forgive you.
You cannot make them accept you. Respect you. Be faithful to you.

You cannot make them accept themselves. Forgive themselves. Love themselves.

You cannot make them accept each other. Forgive each other. Love each other.

You cannot make them let the forgiveness in.
You cannot make them let your love in.

You cannot fix them.

You cannot save them.

You cannot defend them or protect them from everything.
You cannot keep them from being hurt.

You cannot make them give up that addiction.
You cannot make them accept your help.
You cannot make them accept the brilliance and beauty of who they really are.
You cannot bring them back from the dead.

Those you love are never really gone.

You are not broken.

You are not defective.
You are not alone.

The darkness called addiction, depression, lonely, anxiety – it lies. I promise.

It can get better.

It will get better.

Change is inevitable.

You have hit a turning point of infinite possibility.

There is a reason you are here.

You have a purpose.
You have a point.

You are powerful.

You are important.
You change people’s lives.

You are a good mother. Father. Sister. Brother. Daughter. Son. Wife. Husband. Partner. Lover. Friend.

You change the world, just by your very existence, just by being a full expression of who you really are.

You are loved.
You are understood.
You are accepted.

You are beautiful.
You are enough.

There is nothing wrong with you.

You are perfect, just the way you are.

You are brave.

You are strong enough to handle anything.
You will be given what you need.
You are capable.

You are forgiven.

You are whole.

You know your truth.
You know your purpose.
You know what you must do.

You are the architect of your own life.

You are going the change the world.
You are going to do your great work.

You write your own future. 

There is no impossible.

Today is a new day.

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It is that time of year.

Whether it’s in the blog post I just read about a last week of December journal-a-thon, or my client yesterday afternoon who shared how she is working on her 2012 goals, it’s time to create the next plan, the next set of goals, to begin everything that will come to be in the coming year.

I feel that shift.

The standing on the precipice, that tension that builds on the edge of grand release of creation.

But I have not begun to plan 2012. Yet.

Yes, I have tons of ideas and outlines and goals and dreams and desires – coming up with ideas is never the problem for me.

But … before I can sit down to create the 2012 plan, before I can begin everything that will come next … I need to end.

Before anything new can be brought into existence, a void must be created into which it will be born.

So, to that end, I am finalizing documents, purging stuff, mourning hurts, forgiving wrongs, recognizing resistance, releasing tension, accepting truth.

I am letting them go – the illusion of control, the idea that I can be perfect, the belief that there is a magic pill that can be swallowed, the theory that I can make them love, like, accept, understand, appreciate, respect me.

I am opening up a space inside of me, naked and raw and vunerable – opening my hands unto God and the universe and the energies that flow all around us – taking a deep breath – and surrendering into the quiet expanse.

I have faith that the answers, that the plan, will come.

And in the least likely ways, I imagine.

So the last week of December you will find me roadtripping to somewhere different and quiet, somewhere they serve coffee and eggs for breakfast, where they say hi to strangers on the street, where there are trees and sky and water and the fresh smell of earth.

I’ll be there working on finishing and emptying and space creating. I’ll be reviewing all my ideas, feeling how each of them resonate with my soul and living your truth and bringing acceptance to the world. I’ll be opening myself up to whatever is the next.

We shall see what impossibilities can happen.

I’ll let you know.

–

How are you planning for 2012?

Are you reflecting on this year and clearing stuff out? Are you doing a big end-of-the-year retreat, are you meeting with a coach or are you working through a system? Do you create an annual plan or set of goals or themes for the year, or do you just flow with what comes?

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I think that’s where broken hearts come from.

False hopes. Misaligned expectations. Wishes uncommunicated.

Assuming that something, someone, somethey was so aligned with you that your thing will automatically happen.

That you will get in, that she will say yes, that he will want you, that they will buy, that the big heavy box under the Christmas tree will contain a Nintendo (instead of two dolls with two bricks weighing it down).

We should still have hopes, dreams, wishes.

Of course. That’s the stuff out of which amazingness is born.

The problem comes when we assume everyone else has the same dream.

We assume instead of asking. Instead of speaking ours out loud.

What’s your dream?

And … why haven’t you told them?

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Some of you know that a week ago I got my second tattoo, on the inside of my right wrist.

The tattoo reads: “Accept”

This post does not that explain the tattoo.

This post is about the ramifications.

I just returned from wandering around the block of my apartment complex, a few minutes after midnight.

Trying to exhaust my body, after I’ve been curled up in bed for a few hours, post migraine meds and post sleeping meds, unable to quiet my mind from all the realizations crushing me.

Staring at the tattoo on my wrist.

Pummeled by the exquisite pain that exists between realization and acceptance.

Yes.

There is an important moment when you realize that your spouse stopped trusting you years ago, that the job you hate is slowing killing you, that your partner has been sneaking money from the joint account, that your boss can’t protect you from the next round of layoffs, that your child has a brain tumor, that the friendship has died to your lack of attention, that no matter what you do they might never love you.

But realization is just the beginning.

Acceptance is taking it in, without judgment.

Acceptance is not about anger or sadness. It is not about resistance or change. It is not about good or evil.

Acceptance is not about blame.

Now, this doesn’t mean you have to be okay with that thing happening again in the future.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t make changes, set boundaries, learn from what occurred.

It doesn’t mean that you have to like it.

Acceptance is simply giving up the fight of what is already fact.

So you can move forward. So you can make decisions.

So you can live.

P.S. This isn’t just about “bad” stuff – this is about everything. Acceptance of your brilliance. Acceptance of love. Acceptance of help. Acceptance of how you are changing the world.

To be able to live your truth, you must first accept your truth.

–

So now I’m asking you – what do you need to accept?

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I have text file called “blog post ideas” sitting in my dropbox, full of partial outlines and bullet points and paragraphs of stories about my current revelations, about dedicating my life to the impossible, about why I didn’t trademark Live your Truth, about the deserving of weekend things, etc.

And I’ll probably write those posts. Eventually.

But not today.

How I decide the topic for a day’s blog post or email to you is not an intellectual, planned decision.

I don’t have editorial charts scripting out blog topics or pre-planned posts of important shares, stories, teaching points.

I simply type at the top of the OmmWriter page …

What is the most true thing I could write today?

What is the best I could share today?

What story resonates the most today?

What message is fighting to be heard?

What does someone out there need to hear today?

The thing is, Living Your Truth is not about change.

Living Your Truth is about transformation.

And transformation does not take place in the world of goals or spreadsheets or timelines.

Transformation happens in the infinite.

The unreasonable. The serendipitous. The flow.

I used to feel guilty that I didn’t have my year of blog posts and emails all planned out. But while such intellectual systems can be powerful for those of you who are committed to a paradigm of success, that is not that paradism in which I operate. As much as I respect success and plans and goals, as much as I may use them to support Live Your Truth – they are not the point of me.

So if it seems like my launches and programs and posts don’t conform to a recognizable strategy, that’s because they don’t.

This work flows from a different paradigm.

And, finally, I’m cool with that.

#exhale

—

How do you decide what to write about in your blog posts or emails to your people?

Do you have planned systems, or just write what is in the moment for you?

I’d love to hear from you in a comment below!

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Today, I am different.

There is a calm. A grounding.

An ability to see things how they are, not that which my worry imagines they could horribly metamorphosize. Not how they should have been if I had know better, if I was a good mother, if they had treated me right, if I could write all futures.

I’m here.

Yes, there were tactics I used to bring this calm into my life.

Accepting that I am Highly Sensitive and, as such, living in a high-rise in San Francisco a block from Fire Station No. 1 and riding in packed & smelly public transit system all day was not healthy for my body or my soul.

Allowing myself to be healed not only of the injury that was on the surface, but the damage done to me by the tumor my daughter carried in her brain. Healing of the meanness the Ideal Woman in my head pounded me with over the last few years. Healing of wounds I had suffered for so long, I forgot what it was like to be undamaged.

Deciding. Moving. Buying. Signing. Starting new projects, registering new domain names, beginning a certification program in the MBTI and a Master of Arts in Human Behavior.

Writing three pages in my journal each morning, to dump out the crap and the drama and to spread out what’s underneath onto the page, so the truth can reveal.

Playing with a new business plan, a new daily schedule, a new way to arrange my desk. Playing with room for the current iteration of Live Your Truth, room to expand into what Live Your Truth will become, room for entirely new projects that are inviting me forward.

Practicing. Touching. Being. Living the feeling of grounded as I rest here on my sofa entering characters into OMM Writer with my eyes closed, letting the words flow from my insides out onto the screen.

But this transformation didn’t magically happen because of any one of these pills.

Transformation happens in the nexus.

The nexus of these tools and this moment. The nexus of what you do now with all the good and bad and powerful and traumatic that has happened in your life, up until today. The nexus of the pill you practice and the truth that you are.

It is true, that I invite you to find out if your environment supports your temperament.

I invite you to heal injuries that continue to wound you.

I invite you to decide, to move forward, to expand.

I invite you to write.

I invite you to create a schedule with space for where you are going.

I invite you to practice being grounded in this moment.

But I remind you.

What you do this weekend, what you experience in that program, what you write from that journal prompt, what you fix with that healer – the results from those tactics may happen all at once.

Or they may not show up for years.

Just like social media campaigns, constructing a new two car garage, or conceiving a new member of your family, transformational results do not flow immediate from a tactic.

Transformation flows from the strategy.

Do the Work.

Pay Attention.

Love.

Live.

Accept.

Take the Risk.

Have Faith.

Trust.

Trust that the dividends of our investments of work and attention and love and living will reveal themselves in their own time.

When we are ready.

We just have to keep showing up.

—

Are you still waiting for peace to arrive? Are you frustrated because you’re doing all the right things and it hasn’t happened yet?

Have you done work where the results showed up for you years later? Are things finally coming together for you?

I’d love to hear from you below!

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