The post is offers a powerful teaching about fear that I learned from the late Rabbi Alan Lew.

This beautiful teaching has changed how I think about fear, and particular how I think about the fears that come up when we are pursuing a dream, stepping into a more authentic life, answering an inner call.

Click here to read the post, “Is it Fear or Awe?” And please share your thoughts on it in the comments!

Hugs,
Tara

Today I woke up with such love for you in my heart, and a very simple message: I want you to treat yourself with the kindness you deserve. I want you to walk with yourself in love.

The spirit of renewal, hope, and healing is moving through our country like a great field of energy. This same energy—that can bring love into being on the collective level—is available to harness for internal transformation.

I suppose this makes sense: at both civic and personal levels, our task is to let go of the past, be willing to begin again, and to turn to love as our guide. And we can be more powerful contributors to our country’s transformation if we are aligned with it: if we have put down old burdens to free up energy for the work, healed our own wounds so we can give to others, and re-payed the debts we owe ourselves, so we can show up healthy, sustained, and whole.

I would like to focus on that piece today: repaying the debts we owe ourselves. You, like all other gorgeous beings on this planet, deserve unconditional love, self-acceptance, forgiveness, delight and pleasure, emotional safety, and respect for and the opportunity to pursue to your dreams. Are thoughts of all the folks that didn’t give you these things falling into your mind? Put them aside; I’m not talking about that. I’m standing for the fact that you deserve each of those things from yourself. Have you given them to yourself?

By being you, a gorgeous, divine, innocent, well-intentioned human being, here is what you have been earning through your work each day all these years.

• A daily gift of forgiveness for your mistakes
• A regular song of self acceptance, playing the background at all moments
• A minimum of three utter delights or delicious pleasures each day
• An abiding, soft care for your emotions and your heart
• A deep and serious respect for own your dreams
• A significant investment in following your dreams

Have you been paying yourself what you have earned, or are you in debt to yourself? If you are in debt, what kind? How much? What does it look like?

If you are in huge debt, don’t get overwhelmed or dejected. I have just the thing for you. This is a time of new beginnings, so I want to offer you a special debt-relief offer. For this time only, when you have the power of a global evolutionary leap at your back, here’s what the universe is offering: A full forgiveness of your debts to yourself, if you meet the following conditions:

1. Awareness: you reflect on and identify the debts you owe yourself
2. Apology: you offer yourself a deep, heartfelt apology and mourn the loss of what you rightfully earned. Go to the core of the pain of that loss and experience it fully. (If you go with full courage and openness, this will be intense, but it will pass very quickly)
3. Action: you commit to begin again, paying yourself the love, acceptance, support, pleasure, and respect you deserve. Define 3 practical things you can do each day in support of each of these, and 1 major milestone for the month in paying yourself what you earn by being you. Let’s make this a time of personal and collective transformation.

Let’s make this the end of your withholding love from yourself and see how that transforms you and what you give to to others. The gifts of love you deserve are tremendous, beyond your imagination. Start offering tender hearted love to yourself and of course, let me know what occurs.

Love,

Tara

I’ve often been struck by the idea that all the suffering in the world, all the world’s problems and deficits and cruelties are exactly equal in might and force to the love, the gifts, the talents, latent in all the world’s inhabitants.

In this way, the world is perfectly balanced: The sum of global pain is equal to our collective capacity for love. The deficit of goodness in the external world is equal to the power we hold within to create good.

Every need can be met. Every wound can be healed. Every pain can be soothed, but only if each of us uses our capacity for good fully.

Yes, the world is full of suffering. Full of it. And we are full of the medicine that heals it.

Thank you for showing up here in soulful connection, for being part of my circle, for sharing in this.

Here’s my birthday wish, what I want for the year, what the year wants from me, the prayer of thank you & request.

Love,
Tara

***

sun moss wildflowers
trees shade dirt
roots wishes seagulls

silence with birds
and laughter against stones
and circles of laughter
and belly everything

and time with the reeds
and pictures with sky
and sun christening

and surrender and surrender and surrender
to the body I am

I surrender to all of this,
to the lusciousness I forgot.
Wholeness rising up, still here.
I lie back in it.

I saw only that this became that.
The petals fell away, and the thing became a stem,
and the floor became scattered in pink.

Containers break. Eras end.
Thing-ness only a stopping ground,
a pause at the train station, followed by moving on.

You were never yourself, and I was never I.
Everything cresting and falling,
giving way, again, to the ocean.

We need more words like arise and fewer like die.

When you know you are a just a disco party
of cells that came together for a time,
you’ll live like the blazing sphere you are,
and dance with the spheres around you.

You won’t ask of them, or tax them, or want them to be anything.

You’ll be boogieing in the sun, and look
over your shoulder, breathless, to say

Quick! It’s only for a moment that we are this.
Let’s feel the sting when we land from a raucous jump.
Let’s watch our knees glisten.
Let’s wait here, as night covers our skin.
Let’s watch our hands darken.

Let’s cry, at the realness of it, and the dreamness of it.
Let’s marvel at it.

-Tara Sophia Mohr

Really doing it, she meant.

Letting go of, “I am she, of this name.
Of this home, and marriage, and weight.
Of this conduct. Of these beliefs, and not those.”

Instead, she said, it could be like this:
I weave at the river. I speak with fish.
When I stand at the water, the sun is in my chest.
The woods walk me home.

Most of the things I know have no words,
but I need none, for I am them.

On my last day, memory will be a blazing orange sunset,
and I’ll rest in the sling of the horizon.

The last word on my lips will be member:
I was a member of this, a limb of it.

I was that blessed –- to be a limb of it.

-Tara Sophia Mohr

Surrender all of image. Let go of your outside eyes.
Be a foolish animal, gaping at the forest.
Be clumsy and too much and wide-eyed.

Kill the thing that pulls back reins,
and run.

-Tara Sophia Mohr

I grew up with lots of love from my family.

I got a good education and good grades.

I got lots of feedback that I was intelligent, talented and could do all kinds of things in the world.

So how is it that I ended up self-doubting, not really doing my thing in the world, and had to fight like hell to find my way back?

What happened? How does it happen to so many of us?

I don’t know the answer, but I have some ideas about the strains of the answer for me.

One strain has to do with what Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck has uncovered in her pioneering research. Her studies show that when children are praised for their innate abilities (i.e. “You are so smart. You are so good at math”) they become paralyzed by the compliments. Rather than becoming more confident, they become averse to doing the activity again, because they are afraid of disproving the compliment. They become afraid of falling short, particularly as the level of challenge increases. Sound familiar?

On the other hand, children that are praised for their effort (“Wow, you worked so hard to learn that –great job!”) learn to link effort with validation and love, and they go back in, again and again, for other challenges. Rather than getting caught up in ideas about their intrinsic abilities (am I good at this or not, smart or not, etc.) they fall in love with the process of working at something to get better at it.

I’ve written about this before here, because when I read Dweck’s research it so strongly resonated with my own experience. In my childhood, I was so used to being told I was brilliant and amazing, so used to being at the top of the class that I found it very difficult to stay in the game when I wasn’t.

As my talents put me in ever more competitive environments, excelling at anything came to involve lot of trial and error, and receiving a lot of negative feedback. I wasn’t used to that, at all. I found it intolerable, emotionally, creatively. I stopped doing the creative things I loved, like dance, theater, and to some extent, writing poetry. I turned to more left-brain pursuits where my performance felt less high-stakes, and that was one of the major turns I took away from my authentic self and my right work.

The other thing that happened was that I lost my spiritual connection. For me, playing big and making an impact has always come from a spiritual foundation. For me, achievement itself has always stemmed from a spiritual foundation.

What I mean by that is this: when I get down on my knees in the morning, and say, to a power greater than myself, “I want to be of service, I want to bring more light and love and sanity into this world,” when I have a regular connection to spiritual texts – from book of John to the Tao De Ching to Pema Chodron -then…big ideas start flowing.

With those ideas come inspiration and motivation that give me a magic carpet ride into action. And with all of that are tears in my eyes, and a sense of poignancy and gratitude about the miracle that I get to do this next thing, that I get to serve and live and express in this particular way.

I remember the first time I realized, with some shock, that spiritual connection translated to all kinds of achievement in the secular realm. These ideas and sense of purpose I would receive through my spiritual life would win me all kinds of awards, and got me into the most prestigious schools. This seemed like a big secret most people didn’t know about – the secret of what actually can bring achievement and success. It’s certainly not the only road to worldly success, but it’s seems much more pleasant than the toiling and scheming one. When I fell out of that spiritual connection, I lost my access to the guidance and inspiration for sharing my voice in the world.

The third thing that happened had to do with my environment. Though it had many, many strengths, my university was not, for me, a particularly empowering or supportive place. I just never quite found my voice there, my creative self or my leader self. I’m not sure why this is – I think it had something to do with being suddenly uprooted from everything I knew to go there. I think it had something to do with the patriarchal and conservative nature of the culture. And it had to do with the way my need for a very safe environment for my creative work couldn’t be met there.

All three of those strands: the need for praise I brought into adult life, the loss of spiritual connection, and the environment I was in – each contributed to a piece of loss of self. I can see that now that I’m on the other side. I can see how each piece created the other – how, for example, my university context contributed to that loss of spiritual connection, how stopping my creative pursuits was such a painful denial of the the truth of me that it then became uncomfortable to face my life during that spiritual time – so the spiritual time fell away.

Right-path-hood, connection to self, is a virtuous cycle and a vicious one. When we gain one anchor in our lives that connects us to our core, authentic selves, we literally gain energy to create more of that. When we lose some strand connection to ourselves, we are weakened by that, and are therefore much more likely to lose more strands soon.

As a coach, I never ask my clients “why” questions, because “why” sends us into the past and sends us into an analytical mode — neither of which are so potent for making change in the present. Most of all, I don’t ask why questions because it immediately sends our minds into hypothesis-making, and we tend to make up answers in order to answer the question asked. Our “why” suppositions, full of projections and denial and oversimplifications, are usually wrong.

But as I teach my course on Playing Big, and as my work increasingly grows in this direction of helping women recover their voices, I want to know why. I want to pull back the camera, go up for the birds eye view, look at the landscape, and ask: “Why? What happened here? How did so many of us lose and shut down our voices, or turn away from our right paths? What is the primary, fundamental cause, if there is one, and what are the secondary ripples that happen from there? Why are so many of us still paralyzed in sharing our voices in the world?”

Why? What happened for you? Please tell me in the comments.

Love,
Tara

Between seven and eight, I’ve still got a shot at writing, but there’s more resistance, more mundane stuff tempting me.

After 8:30 or so, if I haven’t written, the appointments I know are coming in a couple hours start to crowd into my mind, the noise of the world gets louder, and it’s likely to be one of those days when all kinds of emails and logistics get done, but very little writing, very little deep creative work.

I’m not certain why the early morning hours have the power they do for me. I think it has something to do with the quiet of the world at this hour, the stillness I see when I look out the window and that I can feel in the air. I really do feel, in those hours, like the world and being alive are glorious secrets, and I get to witness them.

I think it also has something to do with being closer to the realm of sleep and dreams, which is why I always try to write as soon as possible after rising.

Third, I think it’s genetic. I think we all have unique biological rhythms that impact when we have the physical, cognitive, emotional energy to create, and when our spiritual channel is most open. My mother is also an early morning creator, and we both turn off, mentally, at about 9pm.

For all of us, there are “best hours” for whatever important things we do in our lives. There are best hours for creative work. Best hours for the work that requires sharp focus and deep thought. There are best hours for being present to and generous to our loved ones.

For me, the dance is to honor that, and not get too caught up in it.

It is to arrange my life so that I get to do things during their best hours. That means speaking up for my needs, setting boundaries, establishing routines, and often, departing from the herd – doing things on a different schedule than friends or clients, and being okay with that.

But my work is – just as much – to not beat myself up or panic when it I don’t get to do things in their optimal times – when I end up sending emails during my best “big picture thinking” hours, or using my most alert and creatively inspired hour to wait for the repair man, because hey, that’s how things worked out that day. The fearful, ever-panicking part of my brain can turn the simple truth that early morning is best for writing into “TARA, YOU HAVE TO GET WRITING BY SIX A.M. OR YOU HAVE FAILED YOURSELF” or, at 10pm, “IF WE DON’T GO TO BED IN THE NEXT FIFTEEN MINUTES, I WILL BE FOREVER CREATIVELY DOOOOOOOMED. Not so helpful, those thoughts.

But I do know, that I really love to write, and that writing happens for me much more fluidly and easily in the morning. I have the sense that I have access to better material then. So I do what I can to make it possible:

1. I rarely schedule appointments before 10am, because before that is writing time. But sometimes an appointment needs to happen in that window, and if it does, I try not to worry about it too much. When I worked in my previous job in philanthropy and was on a more traditional 9-6 working schedule, for the last year or two I woke up at five, wrote till about 8, and then got dressed and went to work.

2. I do my very best to go to bed by 10pm. This is a fabulous way to practice, everyday, setting boundaries and speaking up for my needs.

Hip person: “Want to meet for a dinner at x hot new restaurant at 9?”
Me: “Well…how about dinner at 6….or tea at 4?”

But sometimes, a big desire to watch a second episode of The Good Wife gets in the way. Or a late dinner with friends that I really do want to go to. Or being wide awake for who knows what reason. But as much as I can make work, I do bed by 10, or even 9:30. I get my best rest when I go to sleep early, and it sets the stage for early morning writing.

3. I “conclude” the day at night, and create space for tomorrow. That could take any of a wide variety of forms: straightening up the home office from the day’s activity so there is a physical “clean slate” for the day, making a to do list for the next day, reviewing the day in my mind and thinking about the significant moments, making a list of things I’m grateful for from the day, saying a prayer.

So the questions for all of us are:
• In whatever activities are most important to you, are there “best hours” for them? If you don’t know, experiment with doing them during different windows and find out.
• What can you do to set up your life so that you get to do those important things during their best hours? (Hint: you will probably need to be courageous in setting boundaries and creative in thinking about how to rearrange things in ways you haven’t previously considered, and that may be unconventional)
• What’s a truly helpful-to-you way to respond when it doesn’t work out – when you don’t get to use best hours the way you’d like? Instead of beating yourself up, how can real and loving curiosity about what happened and what you might do differently help you? What does it look like to respond with lightness of heart?

Love,

Tara

I steeped downwards, into my seat
and that’s where I caught freedom,
waiting for me, like a lilac.

I ended thought, and I ended story.
I stopped designing, and arguing, and
sculpting a happy life.

I didn’t die. I didn’t turn to dust.

Instead I chopped vegetables,
and made a calm lake in me
where the water was clear and sourced and still.

And when the ones I loved came to it,
I had something to give them, and
it offered them a soft road out of pain.

I became beloved.

And I came to know that this was it.
The quiet power.
I could give something mighty, lasting,
that stopped the wheel of chaos,

by tending to the river inside,
keeping the water rich and deep,
keeping a bench for you to visit.

-Tara Sophia Mohr

Tara is a writer, coach and teacher. To receive Tara’s free articles and poems in your inbox about 2x a week, click here and sign up.