What I learned the hard way

So you won't have to 💗

You probably know the “why” behind SOULCANDY: I’m writing it because it wasn’t there when I was in my big muddle with no clue how to escape.

The “how” I got there (and here) takes a bit of rubbernecking down memory lane.

So, let’s go!

This is what I learned the hard way….and hopefully you won’t have to.

F*cked

For decades, I’d been a successful, overachieving people-pleaser. Hitting career highs. Two best-selling books. Good-looking marriage. Three beautiful kids.

Then….

Ten years ago, just after my second book hit the New York Times bestseller list, I got the corporate axe. Downsized and handed a cardboard box eight days before Christmas.

Married for twenty-two years, my marriage died.

Driving on a snowy night, I was slowing down for a red light and — instead of stopping — I slammed into oncoming traffic, sending a stranger to the hospital.

Years of hustling — trying to make people happy, prevent bad things from happening, play it safe — and suddenly I was a shivering guilt-ridden mess watching a clusterfuck of emergency vehicles with red lights flashing This is because of you! you! you!

Me. Anne with a Plan. None of this was in the plan.

But it was the beginning of finally facing that queasy feeling that my life had been hurtling off the rails for a long, long time.

» Pay attention to the queasies, sweet pea 💗

Falling down

I’d been playing a big game, but really I was living small. Hiding in plain sight. Stuck inside an invisibility cloak (my cappa) that was decades in the making.

Deep down, no amount of hustle had quieted that anxious, dreadful feeling that I was always working but never doing my real work, that something inside was pinging for my attention but I wasn’t responding.

Until.

I couldn’t run from the wreckage.

Post-divorce, post-downsizing, post-car crash, I was still the primary wage-earner and 24/7 custodial parent to my three beautiful children, but I felt a new sensation: Stay, don’t go.

» Stay, sweet pea. 💗 Even in the shitstorm, stay…..

Just Don’t

Getting knocked down hit me like a ton of bricks. No amount of bustle had kept me safe. I’d just become a jangly hustler, trading overwork for a safe place to hide.

Thankfully, life has a way of rewarding the lost.

» Life has a way of meeting you in your mess. 💗

As an inveterate hider, of course, the first thing I did was hide. Don’t tell the kids we’re fucked in this big house with the big mortgage. Don’t make a fuss when Mr Busy-Busy stopped paying the child support he’d agreed to in legally-binding divorce papers. Don’t rock the boat.

Just hustle. Sell yourself.

A lifetime of being a shape-shifting chameleon had given me weirdly powerful skills. Growing up in a tense, simmering house with angry parents, I had learned how to disappear: I’d simply become whatever was needed by whichever parent was the angriest.

My sense of self was very porous, to put it mildly.

Over time, I navigated life by feeling other people’s feelings. That’s a great career skill when you’re figuring out how to connect deeply with consumers. It’s great for keeping a difficult marriage patched together.

But it’s not great for becoming a real person.

Thankfully, train wrecks are good for that.

» When your life implodes, you either face the music that something fundamentally is wrong, or, you just keep running. 💗

Deep down

Deep down, I’d always known that things were bad.

I’d always felt it.

You know that feeling when you’ve got BO or bad-breath and you don’t want to get too close to anyone because they might catch a whiff? You’re afraid your ick will be outed and you imagine the scene in your mind: everyone is disgusted, pointing, laughing, encircling you like someone who deserves to be kicked off the island? So you clamp your arms down tight by your sides. You contain the smell. You don’t open your mouth except to take small, inconspicuous breaths. You’re careful how you move, how you breathe. Always on alert.

Yeah, that feeling. It had been with me forever, draped over me like a heavy cloak, confining me inside a silent tomb of Plexiglass. I could see out, but I could never get out.

Until.

Going in

From the outside — after hitting the skids, literally —I kept up my old ways. Put on my happy hat for a lucky run of consulting gigs. Took my kids to school, paid the bills, kept the plates spinning. Eventually, I worked up the nerve to confront Mr Busy-Busy, sold the big house and moved into a series of small rentals with my kids.

On the inside, I started peeling back the layers. Bit by bit.

I had a good baseline for understanding the mind-body mechanics of being happy and healthy. For more than thirty years, I’d been the editor in chief of top-of-the-line consumer websites, magazines, and books, working with the “best of the best” experts in health and science. I’d cherry-picked the “best of the best” intel and practices leading the world’s largest women’s health magazine, running National Geographic’s book division, leading Mindful with the nation’s top neuroscientists and mental health practitioners, etc, etc.

But, I discovered, that only gets you so far. It doesn’t fix what’s broken deep down.

» It takes more to transform yourself from a hardworking caterpillar into a wholehearted, happy butterfly 💗

The X factor

Fortunately, life has a way of nudging you in the right direction.

Without a real income, money became an obsession. Cash-flow and savings had always been more than a financial safety net to me. Money was my rock, having an income was more like a life-force flowing through me.

I felt like an addict in severe withdrawal.

One day, I noticed a CD for sale on a clearance rack: Receiving Prosperity. I’d never heard of the author, Louise Hay, but for a few dollars I took a chance.

That was the random start of my life-changing wisdom trail.

I listened a thousand times. Hay’s voice, her encouraging lilt and her oddball ideas about money, family patterns, and taking responsibility opened my eyes to another way of seeing the world and my role in it.

I devoured her books and started tracking down a new kind of “best of the best” series of experts.

For the past ten years, I’ve explored the deep end, studying spiritual wisdom, faith practices, the process of spiritual awakening, ideas ancient to modern, going to the “best of the best” spiritual sources, ancient traditions, experts who’ve been plying these deep waters for decades. I’ve leaned into what the poets, monks and mystics have known for centuries and been astonished by the findings of cutting edge science that openly defy what we think of as reality. I went to an interfaith seminary (becoming an ordained interfaith minister). Not to proselytize. I’m not into dogma.

But I do believe in an X-factor.

That is: you have access to a very powerful force multiplier — an X-factor— unleashed when you start learning how to live in deep alignment: calming your body, clearing your mind and opening your heart up to “spirit,” tuning into the thing that’s been described as an “unseen force” (whatever you personally call it) for millennia.

It’s in the synergy of all three — body, mind, and spirit — coming together.

» As you find your own alignment, you discover a calm confidence, an inner happiness, a freedom from the past and fear of the future, and tap into a fire energy that, bit by bit, encourages you to navigate to what feels most authentically right for you. Yes 💗

Ten years into following an extraordinary breadcrumb trail, I’m still hungry for more, still curious and happily convinced that — with an open mind and a willingness to try — you can unleash your own X-factor.

I’m happy to report that it even works for lifelong hiders stuck in Plexiglass.

Writing SOULCANDY, sharing this snack mix of ideas — sweet, wholesome and probably a bit nutty — on this public platform, is definitely an escape from the silent tomb of my old cappa.

I’m still a work in progress. We all are, sweet pea 💗

But I do hope, by sampling a bit of SOULCANDY and by following your own natural curiosity, you move towards creating your own deep alignment, in your mind, body and spirit. I hope you escape your cappa, find your happy inside and unleash your audacious X-factor in the world. Because that’s why we’re here.

Thanks for joining me.

Hope you enjoy your journey.

Anne 💗

Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone for others.

Unfold your own myth.

— Rumi

Yes, that’s me….

• Woman of depth - I love diving in deep and sharing treasure

• Single-mother - My three beloveds 💗💗💗 are now adulting-ish

• Author - Two New York Times bestsellers, Editor of Prevention (twice), Editorial Director of National Geographic, Content Director for Mindful

• Interfaith minister - Open, curious, with reverence for all

• Traveler - Always and everywhere

  

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