Pamela Madsen
It’s like this, if Christmas can fall on my head the day after Halloween leaving Thanksgiving in the dust, I think I can talk about New Year’s Resolutions two weeks early.
Forget green juice and water with lemon. I’m talking about the big stuff; an emotional cleanse and taking on what you really want to take on in your life. It seems at least for me, I have to clear out the shit first. So how about having an emotional colonic right now before you open “the things” under the tree or eat one more latke?
Let me invite you to the wonderland of standing naked where all of our night terrors surface and we are faced with our fears of not being enough, our wrongness, or jealousy, our lack. You know, the possible poverty and homelessness that could happen at any time? Or that disease that could strike? Our emerging gray hair and laugh lines?
What is it that is so dark and scary that it only shows up at night when you are about to fall asleep? Or where you mind wanders and your bowels turn to water?
You may shake, and quiver and wonder if you can breathe. But if you can look at the fears, you can let them go and be in your happiness. Shake those fuckers out. It may not be pretty, but by speaking them and challenging them you can move them out of the way so that you can have what you really want; this feeling called happiness. After all, those are just cobwebs. Ideas that haunt you, they are not really real. After a good “Girl Chat”, Therapy Sessions, run or scream – take a shower. Drink water and pee a lot. Wash it away and then ask the question:
What do you want next in 2015? How about happiness? And where do you think you are going to find that?
Here’s my tip: go get yourself some experiences – forget things.
So many of us want to feel alive again. We are stuck in the patterns of our lives whether it work, family, relationships, or marriage. We may feel stuck in some kind of trauma that we can’t seem to climb out of. We are longing to reconnect with parts of ourselves that we have lost, forgotten or never got to explore. We may think it’s about getting hot sex; it may be. But I think it’s more about getting attention, feeling desire, dancing in a kind of excitement that we may have lost in our daily lives. When was the last time you felt yearning in your life for anything? Took a real risk, and jumped into an adventure?
How’s that for a 2015 New Year’s Resolution?
When I speak with women who are restless, feeling numb in their bodies, bored with their lives, wondering if this is all there is in their relationship with their sexuality; it becomes clear to me over and over again that they are not looking for another person, they are looking for who they become when they have new experiences. And they need to clean the shit out! Can I say “Clean the Shit Out” enough in one blog?
I know this up close in personal as I shared in my memoir; “Shameless: How I Ditched The Diet, Got Naked, Found True Pleasure and Somehow Got Home in Time to Cook Dinner (Rodale, 2011).
I am an explorer, but I am not reckless. I have a happy marriage of over 30 years, one that I wouldn’t ditch for the world. But sometimes, I need to to ditch who I am in my marriage. I need to go out into the world, and become the other parts of me that I don’t even know yet. I need to cleanse.
That’s often when I feel my most alive, and for me a path to feeling aliveness has been through the erotic. I have wanted, and continue to desire to experience all of my new selves in a way that doesn’t interfere with my marriage. And many women are single and want to have more aliveness too.These feelings are not so different in marriages or in singleness, as we all get stuck in this place of “everyday”.
So how do you do it? How do you create this feeling of aliveness in your life?
My number one tip is go on a retreat, trip or take a really fabulous workshop or course.
For me, it was around sex. I was so bored that I was literally a bird plucking at it’s own feathers. But I don’t know what it is for you. I bet you do. And if you don’t – reach for good ole’ google and put in some of the things that turn you on. Could it be a painting retreat in Tuscany? It exists! Dancing to drum on Costa Rica? It exists! A sexuality retreat for women or couples? Yep, it exists.
I promise you, whatever it is you think might turn you on to your happiness it exists in experiences not things. Try it for 2015.