To be defeated by bigger and bigger things

Rilke said that the purpose of life is to be defeated by bigger and bigger things.  And there are just some nights, like this one, where this feels truer than others. I don’t mean that the past week was bad. I mean that it was a week where I threw myself out into the waves and got rolled around a lot. Where I had to try new things, and old things. Where I had the opportunity to learn and make some new mistakes. And I did. I made some beautiful mistakes.

But I also know that it wasn’t just the challenges that got me. When Rilke talked about the bigger things defeating us—he meant the bigger challenges, our bigger visions, our dreams. He meant we are supposed to run up against ourselves—our bigger natures. Run up against things the way the water ran upon rock and created the Grand Canyon. If we are defeated by bigger and bigger things we become more of who we are. But some weeks, the bigger things that defeat me aren’t bigger, they are just meaner. They are the mean voice that I can use on myself that I have previously called “Bad Dog.” Where no move I make is right and I just can’t seem to let myself off the hook.

The problem with letting meaner things defeat us, rather than bigger things, is that meaner things keep us small. Meaner things aren’t interested in our bigger natures. They are the wild hounds of shame, meant to scare us back into our hiding places, back behind our walls. Meaner things are the guardians of the old rules—the ones you once had to live by.

Meaner things don’t help us learn, they don’t help us grow, they don’t help us heal. The voice, the stance, the belief that helps us heal and grow is kind. It is nurturing. And it is firm. It isn’t nice: It’s constant. It isn’t coddling: It’s coaching. It seeks to have us defeated by bigger and bigger things so that we can grow into the selves we can become.

Many years ago I watched my nephew play indoor soccer. He and the other boys just kept at it, whether they got it right or not. Whether they made the goal or not. Whether they defended the goal or not. But what was even more striking was the way the coach called to them. He did it by calling their name. Then saying one or two words, “Look up” or “Quick.” He called words of encouragement “Good!” Or “Nice attempt!” Nothing he said was longer than five words. He caught their attention. Said what he had to say and the boys played on.

It was such a reminder that the antidote to the meaner things isn’t big. It’s small. It’s one or two word reminders to break through the old story, the old wave of emotion. It’s the inner coach on the sidelines helping you stay focused on the new game, on the new team, on the bigger things.

I learn this. And then I forget this. I write this. And then I forget this. I TEACH this and I still forget this. The meaner things always try to sucker you in to long detailed arguments of your flaws. Beware! Don’t engage them. Follow the wisdom of my nephew’s coach: get your attention. And coach yourself in no more than five words. The shorter the better.

You’ve got this. That’s how you learn. You’re Okay. Get up. Keep going. Breathe. Change is hard. You are doing great. Way to go. Ask for help. Good effort.

Create your own list. You’ve got this. You are doing great. It’s time to go after bigger things. 

© 2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

The Unfolding is What is Beautiful.

“though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing”
— Galway Kinnell, St. Francis and the Sow

This morning, I watched a video of a sunflower blossoming in slow motion. Though I have watched films of flowers blooming before, I saw it differently this time. Blossoming isn’t an event so much as it is an unfolding. And it’s not even a single unfolding or the blossoming of just one flower, because a sunflower is actually an inflorescence, a flower head composed of many flowers. In the case of the sunflower—several hundred flowers of two different types: ray flowers (that are on the outside) and disk flowers (that are on the inside).

I watched the video a few times in a row. I watched those first few ray petals begin to move and I was so happy for them—starting out! Like watching babies learn to walk, or 7-year old’s learn to dive—those amazing first moments that happen and get caught in the blur of forward movement. I felt such a strong pull watching the first few petals unfolding and standing up—even as the rest of the sunflower remained closed.

Watching the first few petals, bright and yellow, anticipating what would come. And I thought of all the things that we try to do, and all of the selves we try to become, and how we judge ourselves against our imagined finished products and who we imagine we should be—without seeing or appreciating those first necessary petals.

In my work there’s an exercise we often do to help people learn how to be helpful leaders and coaches. It’s an exercise called “who helped me” and we have people think about the people in their lives who have helped them, and about whom they would say, “I wouldn’t be the person I am today without them.” We ask them to write about this person and say what they did and how they made them feel—and then share these thoughts with another person. When we poll the group about what the patterns of behavior were from these helpful people one behavior often stands out—the helpful people often saw something in the people they helped that they couldn’t yet see—and encouraged and challenged them with this vision of them.

And I would argue that what these ‘helpful’ people could see was the ‘unfolding.’ They could see those first few awkward petals and know, and trust, that the blossom would come in good time. And not only could they see it and trust it, but they were kind and generous enough to share it. Kind enough to say to their particular sunflower— “Have faith-- I can see your beautiful petals unfolding.”

And like sunflowers-- we too are inflorescences. We aren’t just one flower—we are made up of hundreds of flowers on their own trajectory of growth, bloom, and fade. And not all unfolding is the same. For things that are fun or easy or where we have a lot of support—the unfolding may happen easily, naturally and we may enjoy the process. But in places in us where we need to heal, where there has been hurt or grief—our petals may stay tightly closed for a long time. It may feel like a real risk to allow them to move. We don’t want anyone to see the stray petals, the tentative reaching—we want to be seen in full bloom. And we miss the beauty of the unfolding. The beauty of the courage it took to let go.

When we write we miss the beauty of the messy fragments and pages that we will never use—those early ray petals hidden by the bigger, later, blooms. In our work we may miss the awkward attempts when we learn to communicate in our field, get a procedure wrong, or fail to understand the implications of an action.

In our relationships we miss our attempts to connect, even when they fall short—and we may miss them when the people we love do the same. And when we work on healing our trauma or grief, we may see our meltdowns and first brave attempts at truth as pathetic, rather than as petals. Unfolding is a tender-hearted process.  But the final blossom, while an impressive end goal, is not what holds the radiance. The true wonder –which is hard to stop watching when you watch the film of the sunflower—is in the process of becoming. It isn’t the flower, but the unfolding, that is beautiful.

© 2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lost and Found.

“I mean,
what bird sings in a blizzard? And how
can I learn that kind of hope?”
— GLS

This morning when I got up and looked out of my window, a chubby red cardinal was sitting on the fence next door looking around. He was surveying the yard covered with the flotsam and jetsam of early spring storms And of course he was singing. Or flirting. I don’t really know. I don’t speak Cardinal.

Lately I have been writing about the hope and longing for Spring and seeing him, cheeky and red this morning made me feel hopeful. Made me feel like I had ordered him out of some ‘Looking for signs of Spring’ catalogue—and he had appeared because I needed him to. I felt lost and he found me. Lost and found. 

These two words keep floating through my head this week. They were words of dread as a child—because that’s where you went to look for things you lost, the ‘lost and found’ and nothing you ever lost was there. It was a fruitless exercise to go, and look at the bin of other luckier children’s things. Things that might be found by others and know that your mittens or scarf were still missing.

I’m getting pretty good at knowing ‘lost.’ That feeling of constantly looking around, wondering where you need to go. Feeling like everything is unfamiliar. It’s not always a bad feeling—in the right moments it can feel adventurous or surprising. But it is also tiring. It means you have to pay closer attention to everything. Looking for clues. Looking for signposts—or landmarks to help you remember where you are.

When you are healing from trauma there are a lot of moments of lost. I think that for any real healing, whether from physical illness or the grief of a terrible loss—I think these are all times where we feel lost. We feel like we have been cast overboard by life—and we splash around, we grab on to a log, and eventually find our way to something more solid. Or we are pushed, or we leap, from the path we were on, from a path that felt familiar. We are now in a terrain where we aren’t on the trail—we have to make the trail.

We feel lost, but with each step we are actually being found—by ourselves—and by the people we trust with our healing, and by the people who love us. It’s harder to see the ‘found’ moments. They are tiny and fleeting the way the cardinal was this morning. You are not found all at once. You are found in moments, in flashes. You are found one word at a time, and one cry at a time. You are found in your best moments and your worst moments. I often miss the moments I am found because I am too busy thrashing through the forest. I am too busy looking for something bigger to tell me I have been found, instead of taking in the quieter moments of cardinal song.

But sometimes I do. Sometimes I can hear it. Even when I forget that I have. Lost and Found. It is the repetition of this dynamic—the hide and seek melody of healing. You need to lose your way, the old way, the old rules. You need to let go of the familiar because the familiar was no longer helping you heal, become whole. And with this courage of the explorer self—you get to have the practice. Lost and Found. Again. Again.

The funny thing about learning this, is that I can just as easily forget. I got up this morning to a cardinal. And this afternoon while looking for a work document on my computer, I found a poem I had written on a similar day, with a similar bird. I had lost him, and the hope he brought for a while. And today he was found.

Cardinal
 
I want a poem about the snow
that fell overnight and is now
resting on the roof of my doghouse.
 
I want this same poem to weave the
longing I feel and lack of hope that
a long and snow laden winter can bring.
 
It is likely that this poem will mention
the anxiety that has been stalking me
since last Thursday, and crept into my dreams,
 
though it seems that this poem will have
its work cut out for it, if it thinks
that just by describing the snowy
 
edges of the trees, and the unlikely
song of a cardinal singing this
morning, while I nestled under down,
 
it can change my mind, I mean,
what bird sings in a blizzard? And how
can I learn that kind of hope?
 
Gretchen Schmelzer

© 2024 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

Purpose as a way to heal and grow

“It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river cannot go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear, because that’s where the river will know it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.
”
— Kahlil Gibran

Our first vision of the future propels us through our youth and young adulthood. It’s our booster rocket. It launches us out into our stratosphere, and we are off. But over time we need to update this vision. We need to reassess our trajectory—not just where we want to go—but why we want to go. I call this purpose or noble purpose, but some others call this vision, or mission, or their why.

Purpose can feel both like a destination and the reason for a destination which makes it hard to describe. Purpose is something internal to you. You get to define your direction and the impact you want to have. Your purpose and the way you connect to it belongs entirely to you. And only you can know whether you are living your purpose the way that you want to.

Your purpose doesn’t have to align directly with your job, but it can. Sometimes it’s a 1:1 and sometimes it’s not. I have a dear friend who works as a therapist and her noble purpose is ‘love.’ She lives her purpose by bringing love to her work, supporting her clients to experience and bring love to their lives, and experience love in her own life. Her purpose clearly aligns with her work. But I also have a dear friend whose job is in biotech sales and you wouldn’t necessarily discern her purpose from her job title. Her purpose is ‘community.’ Her job is often technically challenging with a lot of financial pressure- and she excels at managing both—but she lives her purpose in the community she creates in her work teams, and in her volunteering at church. She is the person who is always looking out for the ones in the group or her extended family who are the ‘odd person out’—who need to be included and feel a sense of belonging.

My purpose is to help people who have been hurt to heal and grow, and to help those who work with them and love them. It’s a purpose perfectly aligned with being a therapist and a writer about trauma but can seem like a stretch for a leadership consultant. But learning that 69 of the 100 largest economies in the world are corporations and not countries—I understood that if I really wanted to impact the way adults lived their lives I needed to meet them in the workplace. I found that when I worked in organizations, I learned things about communication, emotional intelligence, systems, power and change that informed my work and understanding of trauma and made my work and writing stronger, regardless of context.

One of the biggest benefits of knowing your purpose at any given time is the clarity it gives you about priorities and decisions. It can help you decide what to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to. It can help you make a choice about priorities or how you are allocating your time. You can use your purpose as a north star.

For example, I was once asked to write a book chapter on a topic that I was not expert in and was not connected to my purpose. The request came from someone who was an authority in my organization and connected in the publishing world. It was offered as ‘an opportunity.’

This is one those requests that I call a ‘shiny object’—like those flashy lures anglers use to get fish.

I could have looked at the request as a way to please a boss. I could have looked at the request as an opportunity to learn a subject area. I could have looked at the request as a way to learn about writing a book chapter. Or I could have looked at the book chapter as an opportunity or stepping stone to bigger publication opportunities. All of these and more could have been options. And any of them might have fit for different reasons.

But I came to this decision with experience of writing a chapter on a topic that was adjacent to my expertise and it was still a lot of work. And I knew that pleasing someone and hoping for future gains were not guaranteed no matter how well I did.

Instead, I asked myself this clarifying question: Will writing this chapter support and connect me to my noble purpose? And the answer was a clear no. It was easier to see ‘publication’ and ‘pleasing someone’ as shiny objects, and easier to let them go.

Recently I heard the author Neil Gaiman talk about purpose: He imagines his purpose as a mountain, and asks himself with each request: Will this activity bring me closer to my mountain or farther from it? 

Purpose is something that needs continual revisiting. It needs tune-ups and alignments. Why? Because we grow and change. Because the systems we are in are growing and changing. Because we get more capable and we need to be able to use our new capacities differently. And because even if you choose your exact purpose again—you are choosing it now, with new energy, and connecting it to the life you have now.

And while I don’t usually give updates in my blogs, I am excited to share a new endeavor very much connected to my purpose that combines my trauma work with the leadership work I have been doing for the last 20 years.

This past week was the launch of the Center for Trauma and Leadership, a leadership development group I co-founded with my dear friend and colleague, Carolyn Murphy.

The Center for Trauma and Leadership partners with leaders and organizations that operate in a context of repeated trauma including first-responders, journalists, hospitals and mental health centers, nonprofits, and government agencies. We offer resources and learning programs that give leaders practical, useful, and supportive tools for leading in a trauma context. Our mission is to help leaders stay in their fields, love their jobs again, and lead through trauma with emotional intelligence and kindness.

You can visit our website to learn more about our work and our upcoming open-enrollment program Leading Through Trauma—as well as other resources over time.

But starting new things and refining your purpose doesn’t always mean the loss of the old. While I will be doing new things, I am very much committed to my writing about trauma, healing and growth, and committed to this blog and conversation with you. I thank you for your support of my work and writing these past 10 years and look forward to the collective healing that we can create together.

©2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

For exercises to support your exploration of purpose you can read: