Days 17 and 18 – I Almost Picked a Fight in Lingerie But Didn’t

Living Full-On Every DayMany of you know me as a life coach at my company, Freedom Junkie. You may not know that I am also a midwife, and when I am on call, it is easy to feel Full On when catching a baby, but kind of hard otherwise. You have to stay close to the hospitals (so no hiking or bike rides or skiing), no vino or other excessively fun things, and if you decide to have sex, you better be ready for that pager to go off at any time. Dancing is kind of the only things I can do with reckless abandon when I’m on call, but none of that was going on until 10pm. So…I decided on the sex. THIS lady was going to live Full-On every day.

Even though my partner and I were both exhausted after traveling a bunch and now working a ton, and even though I had a runny nose and wanted to simply curl up and go to bed, I thought, “What the hooha. Might as well live it up.” I rallied, put on that piece of lingerie you see up there, blow dried my crazy hair, and cooked my man some mushroom risotto. He was working hard all day too, and being half-Italian, I knew he’d be psyched for it. He came home after his long day and had a huge grin after walking in and having the scent of onions, garlic and olive oil fill the air, and seeing me in my cute lil outfit being all domestic and shit (I’m not your stereotypically domestic Stepford Wife, although I DO love food and wine).

We ate happily and I poured him some wine and he laid back on the couch, all things content…and promptly fell asleep. Not just dozed off. Like…uber crashed out.

“WTF?!”

No, it’s not a skirt…it’s a freakin’ dress!

Did you know that we humans pick fights when we’re too happy? WE DO! It’s an example of an Upper Limit Problem, a term coined by Gay Hendricks (you can read about it in his book The Big Leap). I was about to do that. Yes yes yes I was going to brilliantly hide it behind the guise of “sharing my feelings,” but it was really going to end up as a conflict of sorts. I was about to get all sobby to the overtired man I love and complain that I felt unloved and unwanted and I wanted to go to sleep too but I didn’t and for fuck’s sake I was wearing a skirt as a dress and I’m not feeling bloated for once!

But I didn’t. I knew better. I knew that he was tired, and he is hardly EVER tired. In fact, I usually look forward to him being tired because it confirms for me he is human and not some bionic athletic machine 100% of the time. I knew that if I said something in the way I was about to say it, it would not serve me, or him. I knew he loved me and wanted me and would have not fallen asleep if he hadn’t worked hard all day for several days and burned 6000 calories a day for the past 2 weeks with less than 8 hours sleep a night (yes, that was vacation).

I knew I was tired and feeling particularly vulnerable and sensitive and I had a few too many cups of coffee which didn’t help me not feel tired – it only made me feel tired but with enough mental energy to madly spin the anxiety wheels in my head so I thought of the 101 ways I could have been sexy enough to keep him awake. LOL. We humans are so freakin’ crazy. Well, I guess I better just speak for myself.

In any event, I decided that I would go to bed, and if I felt strongly about it the next day, then I would say something.

I am so glad I did that instead of get all crazy in my lingerie.

I woke up to his bionic arms around me, sweet kisses, an apology for falling asleep, a promise to cook me dinner tonight, and him radiating love and appreciation like no other, even as I felt him walk out the door to work. And one of the greatest things about him is I know he follows through. On everything. So yes, I felt good about all that.

And I was proud of myself (and grateful!) for knowing that just because something makes me uneasy doesn’t mean someone else has to fix it all the time. That doesn’t mean to hold things in and walk on eggshells. It means to first notice what’s going on, decide what’s important, what I’m able to do about it, get to the root cause of my icky feeling, and if all that isn’t clear, wait until it IS clear.

Full On.

Note: Ana Neff is a personal life coach, guide and FreedomJunkie™ She helps individuals awaken their lives of freedom and personal success with confidence, clarity, self-love, and passion. Her monthly Freedom Junkie ™ eZine goes out to hundreds of subscribers. Her Full-On 365 blog posts stem from her commitment to living full-on, every day, for 365 days in a row. If you are ready to take your life and your world to the next level, you can learn more about her coaching programs and download  her FREE Getting Clear Guide by signing up at FreedomJunkie.com! Sign up for her next FREE Jedi Juice Training at FreedomJunkie.com/jedi-juice

Days 15 and 16 How to Talk Money With Your Partner

Full On 365™ took it to the mountains, and it was awesome! However, the most full-on part of the past few days was going deep with my partner. We spent our first Valentine’s Day together, even though we’ve know each other for years (12, to be exact!). We both had to take big risks to take action to finally be together as a couple after all these years, and it has been an amazing journey so far.

Since we’ve known each other as friends for so long, we both knew that we had some – ahem – “differences” that we’d have to work through. One of these is how we perceive money. In my life and in my coaching others with finance challenges, I’ve learned money issues are never about “money.” Money issues are about what money means to you, what it symbolizes for you.

For me: money is energy: I get it, I send it back out, I have fun with it, I create it, I don’t stress about it as much as the average person because I believe I will always have at least enough. Always have. Always will. I’ve lived out of my car simply (and intentionally!) for years, I’ve grown up in a very poor and violent neighborhood, I’ve stayed in 4-star hotels, I’ve stayed in huts where rats ran over my face as I slept. I’ve had lots of it, I’ve had little of it, I worked through the issues imbedded by my father that money makes people corrupt and, well, evil. With money, I know having it doesn’t mean it will make me happy. I’ve been happy with and without it, and I’ve been unhappy with and without it. I know I need it for some basic things, and I know the rest is bonus and can be really fun and inspiring if I use it well.

For him: money is an inconvenient part of life and you earn it to build security and allow freedom. And you don’t really need more of it than what is needed to meet those two needs. Having lots of money and having “things” as a result is excessive (meaning lots in the bank is OK though). Having lots of nice things (and “lots” is a subjective term!) is being greedy, and challenges values of living simply and not buying in to the consumer culture. For him, having a lot of it is somehow bad. There are so many with so little, and having things (especially nice things) ultimately takes more from them. People with less stuff were more…cool. Of course, I am paraphrasing his opinions, but this is about how I perceived it and tried to stay full-on with it all;)

I’ve been in his mindset. Once I became successful, I used to be ashamed of having money. I knew how I perceived people who had it when I had none. I admittedly judged them, and felt they were missing out on the “real” meaning of life because wealth was a distraction to knowing the suffering in the world and learning the truths of life. Wealth was a distraction to being a true participant in humanity. It separated you out. It made you less…spiritual.

But then I learned differently.

I learned that while not having it didn’t mean you were any less of a person, or necessarily any less happy, having it – even LOTS of it – also didn’t mean you were a lesser person, or any less happy. Money is energy. That’s it. What you do with it and how it affects you is up to you. Just because you have it doesn’t mean you need to be excessive or greedy, and just because you don’t doesn’t mean you are more simple or spiritual a person. Happiness and greed and selfishness are ultimately independent of money. I know selfish poor people and generous rich people. I know incredibly giving people living in poverty who went out of their way to feed me in Mexico despite the fact I earned 5o times their income, and stingy peeps who have millions in the bank that made me split a burrito dinner when I lived out of my car. It is about YOU. Not your money.

This difference between us that came up on this trip was heavy duty. We both share values of living simply, striving to create more socioeconomic equality in the world through the work we do and other actions we take, and have both demonstrated that we know “things” don’t make us happy. We first met when we made less than $11,000 a year and we were blissfully traveling the world. Now we are both successful professionals, blissfully traveling the world. This issue was there at both times in our lives!

This is because the issue was in how we perceived the motivation behind what we were doing – not in money itself.

I like my nice reliable Subaru, my condo in Telluride, my small 900 square foot cottage atop a hill in Ashland, my cute clothes that I feel sexy and fun in. He likes his Alaskan yurt with no running water, no “central heating,” his used Honda Civic that he drives through Arctic blizzards, and was perfectly content with one shirt and one pair of pants for 6 weeks in Africa.

Know what? I like those things too. I like it all. I find his traits totally hot, actually. I like how I have a reliable car but don’t need to buy lots of fancy jewelry or fur coats. I like how we BOTH spend most of our hard-earned money on plane tickets and adventures instead of accumulating things. I like that I can live it up with girlfriends in a nice spa, and also have the best time of my life in the Sierra backcountry, with all I need carried on my back.

It was hard to feel that he struggled with my desire to dance in my own version of the middle way. It admittedly hurt that my nice things made him uncomfortable. I felt judged, even though he swore up and down that he wasn’t judging me (hellooooooo, can you say “projection!”).

I grew up REALLY poor, man! I earned these significant luxuries in my life, and I know I am still a good person with them – or without. But what is the 1% truth that is always in what we think is not true? Ay ay ay. I had to go there.

So we talked about it. Some of the things we did to keep the discussion healthy and safe were:

  • Remind ourselves of our shared values – these were the same. The way we perceived money actually didn’t mean we had different values. It represented differences in what money meant to us individually. We both value living simply. We both value making the world a more equal and just place for all beings. We both value being as “green” as possible…and on and on!
  • Remember you don’t have to understand in order to accept. We trust one another, and who we are. I don’t need to understand “why” he feels the way he does. I simply need to do my best to understand as much as I can, give him the benefit of the doubt, and accept him. This has to go both ways, of course. And it did. Oh, and the other part is to let the other person be themselves as well. Not just accept, but celebrate!
  • Discuss shared long-term goals. This helps to keep the Big Picture in mind. You see how your differing styles can still work towards the same goals.
  • Focus on the ways differences are complimentary. He helps reel in my tendency to overspend, and I help him lighten up a bit (and learn to enjoy being comfortable from time to time!).
  • Remember to have a sense of humor. We crack up knowing that we were saying the same thing, but in different ways. We want the same things, and there are just some tweaks in the way we get there that we need to work through.
  • Remind yourself that while it’s important to share core values, mindsets and habits and behavioral patterns are malleable. Having money or not isn’t a core value. How we live – simply, generously, and in consideration of other beings on the planet – is.

We both stretched. We both went into it full on. He told me how he wanted to expand his perception of money and wealth to allow him to be more comfortable both with and without it. He stretched to understand how the way I saw living a life of simplicity, generosity and compassion was in line with his, even though it may look differently for both of us sometimes. And I stretched to admit I could do a better job at living more simply, and that I had moved away from some of those values more than I was comfortable with.

Whew! Sometimes living full on can be exhausting. After having visited friends in 4 cities, skiing in two states (Utah as well!) and hiking in the desert, this was the most full-on part of it all.

 

Day 1 – Living Full On, Every Day, for a Year

Hey hey!

Here I am. Starting Day 1 of this epic challenge, and I am a bit nervous – yet also super psyched!

Today I lived full-on by getting this blog up. Taking on this challenge acknowledges – very publicly – that I believe it IS possible to have at least one moment, every day, of living full-on, being fully present and fully authentic.

Oh yes, there are naysayers. There are those who told me my whole life that my positive philosophy was rose-colored and not “realistic.” That if I “really” experienced the “real world,” I wouldn’t be so optimistic.

Yet when I found beauty as I slept by my dying father, honored to midwife him to the other side; or when I marveled awe-struck in the depth and complexity of feelings that welled up from a broken heart, grateful for the spectrum of human emotions; or when I sat silently next to a fellow human who lost their child in labor and felt the powerful connection and compassion between two humans fully present with one another, I knew I was right. I felt that Ziji – that radiant inner confidence – in what I believe.

It is all a part of a full-on life. Feeling it all, fully. Living it all, fully. Knowing what you want, fully. Receiving it, fully.

Here I walk my talk. And I also open up to the possibility that I may not be able to do it every day. But my goal is to inspire you…to find that moment in every day and to have more and more of them. And I’d rather at least try than not do it at all for fear of failing.

Well, here we go. 365 days of real.

To Your Freedom,

Ana

 

 

 

Note: Ana Neff is a personal life coach, guide and FreedomJunkie™ She helps individuals awaken their lives of freedom and personal success with confidence, clarity, self-love, and passion. Her monthly Jedi Juice™ eZine goes out to hundreds of subscribers. Her Full-On 365 blog posts stem from her commitment to living full-on, every day, for 365 days in a row. If you are ready to take your life and your world to the next level, you can learn more about her coaching programs and download  her FREE Getting Clear Guide by visiting FreedomJunkie.com (note: it’s new look will be up to rock your world soon)! Sign up for her next FREE Jedi Juice Training call on the Law of Attraction at FreedomJunkie.com/jedi-juice