The area formerly known as “the kitchen”
As our home renovation continues, I am struck by the enormity of the project, the unexpected circumstances, and the budget overruns that are helping to make this an equally enormous opportunity for me to grow.
For someone like me, with an actively frantic money lizard, a home renovation represents the mother of all sanity tests. While I wasn’t worried about the roughly 15% in budget inflation I expected, the actual 50% figure is lighting up the fear response in my amygdala like a summer sky in Tampa.
Fortunately, I was on the phone with Martha Beck yesterday (along with 100 other coaches) listening to her talk about abundance. “God will not reward your desperation,” she said, speaking to the group, but clearly and specifically, I thought, to my fears.
The truth, I realize, is that the energy of the universe will conspire to support me as long as I continue on my merry way, doing what I am meant to do—living every day with the heart and soul of a healer, coaching, creating and “loving people into their magnificence,” as author Gail Larsen says. That’s all I have to do in order for me to survive the physical and financial upheaval taking place in my home.
I have varying degrees of success remembering this simple formula. My immediate reaction is still one of being lit up with a billion volts, roughly equivalent to one bolt of that legendary Tampa lightning. I can’t believe how scary and painful it is, and I have an appalling little story I tell myself about how wrong it is.
But it’s not wrong. It’s exactly right. I have to ask myself the one question my fellow coach Pedro F. Báez loves to ask when he wants to cut to the life lesson: “How is this perfect?”
The answer is that it’s obviously time, right now, for me to strengthen my beliefs in the lavish benevolence of the universe. If God won’t reward my desperation, as Dr. Beck contends, perhaps s/he will reward patience, trust, and an awareness of when I need to return to my center—a place that consists exclusively of the energy of love, trust and generosity.
Hmm. A perfect metaphor for the home I am in the process of building: one filled with love, trust and generosity, where all are welcome and suffering is optional.
Stop by anytime.
