After two and a half years in Florida, my partner Anne and I are moving back to Massachusetts. It is a decision of the heart. We are choosing to be closer to family and old friends and to remembered places that fill us with great love and appreciation. We are returning home. A few weeks ago, as I was on hold while buying our airline tickets to Boston, Simon and Garfunkel’s song “Homeward Bound” began playing in my ear. The synchronicity was unmistakable. I burst into tears.

I am seeing more zombies lately, and I’m not talking about Halloween. I’m talking about the walking tired. Deadened eyes, pale skin, broken hearts. Yes, we live in interesting times. But I’m more concerned with the casual sadness we inflict upon ourselves.

What if you’re not drained? What if you’re pained …and the pain is a cry for honesty, passion, and the dazzling happiness that is your soul’s intrinsic birthright?

This month I offer you these three revolutionary questions to ask yourself. And to answer with the rest of your life. (So please don’t go for perfection. Let’s do this gradually…and consistently…because you’re worth this life-changing change!) 

So many of us are afraid that it’s too late to start after our dreams or too late to leap towards the life we want, that we end up stuck in place. I get this or similar questions a lot: “Julie, I have a lot of dreams. Is it crazy to make the leap later in life? I’m feeling frozen…”

I think it’s never too late, and let me tell you why.

Take Advantage of Your Time

Once, I had a 72-year-old client go back to law school because he regretted not having done it in his youth. For years before that, however, we would talk about it. I would ask him, “You know, what are you going to do with all this money? Get busy living or get busy dying,” but for years, he put it off.

He kept coming in for his appointment and I’d ask him if he took the LSAT yet, or if he’d gotten into law school yet, or if he’d started taking classes yet. Not attending law school was one of his biggest regrets, but for a long time, he felt like it was too late to change anything about it.

I have great joy in being with thousands of kids every year. Some might define me as a children’s musician but I prefer the job description of, Greatness Amplifier, Engagement Specialist, Experience Generator. I like this description for how perfect it is for what I do performing music with kids, while at the same time it’s not limited to any specific skills or career.

Is there proof love exists?

Children can prove
Love is not based on commitment
It is captured in a moment

There’s so much going on right now that is impossible for us to comprehend.

Movements are taking place around us – but on planes we can’t readily access (and we’re not talking airplanes although I sure wish I could hop on one to see my friends.) Transitions, opportunities, alignments… but it’s outside our reach. Yet we long so desperately to understand! 

How can we surrender to the mystery?

Here’s the deal: We can’t truly “get” what’s happening around us because the web of creation is so vast, so much more complex, so much more intricate than we could ever begin to grasp!

That’s hard for us, in our human state, to accept. (It kinda reminds me of when I was a little kid sitting at the adults’ table and the conversation went right over my head). We want to take part, to listen and to be heard… but we can’t exactly follow the train of thought! So we’re left grabbing little bits and pieces and getting frustrated because it doesn’t all fit together in a nice pretty package we can put in our pocket. 

Some people call it channeling … some may refer to spirit guided writing – where you feel like you are being guided, rather than it actually being your words. Today, I’d like to talk a little bit about that.

Automatic writing is something that I think gets misunderstood a lot.

I think that a lot of people think it’s kinda creepy – and the reality of it is people are doing it all the time. There have been many, many, many – I think more than what people know – singer / songwriters that have written their songs and they have done automatic writing. Channeled them. Paul McCartney will has said, numerous times, that he, I don’t think he used the word channeled, but that he was guided to the words of his song, Let It Be. You know … Let it be, let it be, and then mother Mary comes to me. I think a lot of us think of Mother Mary … but his mother was Mary. So, his mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Carol King channeled much of her music. There are so many singers and songwriters and poets and writers that are channeling. The Course in Miracles is a channel. It is a book that was automatically written and the person that wrote it was an atheist. She just literally got out of the way and let the information come to her. Stevie Nicks channels her songs.

I've Been Thinking...

Not too long ago, a friend suggested I write down the definition, values, and characteristics of the “divine feminine.” He said it would be a “good exercise” for me moving forward. 

“Mhmm, OK,” I thought.

I sat down to give it a try and ended up staring at the paper for a long time. I wrote something and erased it, and I tried again and again. Nothing really felt right to me.

Then last Sunday in this newsletter, I wrote my essay about courage and tenderness. The response I got was overwhelming, from both men and women.

“That is what we need!” people wrote to me. “That’s who I want to be!” My friend Elizabeth suggested I even curate a new conference called “Courage and Tenderness: The New Hero’s Journey.” Others wrote that they had never contemplated tenderness in the public space, but that they were open to it, even hungry for it. (An old video of Joe Biden resurfaced this week that visualized what I’m talking about.)

The culture medium, environment, the chemistry. Yes, not the genes. We said the genes control us. I say, No, wait. They were all exact same genes so the difference between muscle, bone and fat cells was not determined by the genes, they all had the same genes. It was determined by the environment. Now look in the mirror and what do you see back? An individual entity. You see yourself as single individual, human entity. It’s a misperception of a singleness for this reason. Here’s the true bottom line. You are made up to fifty trillion cells. Your body is a community. The cells are the living entity. When I say your name or I say Bruce, that’s a name I give to a community of fifty trillion cells. The cells again are those single living entity. Here’s the point. Jokey but fun and true. You are skin covered petri dish. Underneath your skin are fifty trillion cells growing in this petri dish.

Over the past few decades, there’s been a creeping invasion that has tremendous repercussions for all of us. Strangely, it is the invasion of consciousness. I say strangely because for millennia human beings claimed total possession of consciousness. We think, invent, solve problems, show curiosity, and make conscious decisions. Even the cleverest of our near relations among the primates might or might not have minds—expert opinion remains sharply divided on the issue.

 A chimpanzee or gorilla displays only a limited range of skills compared with human skills. A chimp might learn to dig grubs out from a hole using a stick, but toolmaking basically stops there or using a rock to smash hard nuts, which some monkeys can do. A gorilla might learn to understand language and even use hand signs to communicate, but it can’t teach this skill to another gorilla.

 You’d never suspect on the evidence that consciousness was creeping in everywhere, but now there are books on the conscious universe, and a band of physicists believes in panpsychism, the theory that consciousness is inherent in creation, permeating even subatomic particles. Almost a hundred years ago the astronomer Sir James Jeans declared that the universe “begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”

The Practice:
Drop tart tone.

Why?

Tone matters.

I remember times I felt frazzled or aggravated and then said something with an edge to it that just wasn’t necessary or useful. Sometimes it was the words themselves: such as absolutes like “never” or always,” or over-the-top phrases like “you’re such a flake” or “that was stupid.” More often it was the intonation in my voice, a harsh vibe or look, interrupting, or a certain intensity in my body. However I did it, the people on the receiving end usually looked like they’d just sucked a lemon. This is what I mean by tart tone.

People are more sensitive to tone than to the explicit content of spoken or written language. To paraphrase the poet Maya Angelou, people will forget what you said, but they’ll remember how you made them feel. And we are particularly reactive to negative tone, due to the negativity bias in the brain (written about in previous JOTs).