I’m in the Taipei airport on my way to Bali for the second time. Internet is free, though the instructions on this blog are in Chinese.

I am blogging from Taiwan! How cool is that?

I just tapped along with Brad Yates with his Love Magnet video. People are walking by and I am tapping all over my face, on my sternum, and under my arm. This is where the Rubber Chicken Meets the Road once again.

I tap, use Emotional Freedom Technique, every day. I brush my teeth every day too. I want to be healthy and I know I need to commit to persistent, consistent action if I am going to keep my dental health, my physical health, and my emotional health.

So here I am in this exotic airport tapping as people walk by. Do they think I’m crazy? Who cares? What is it to them? Perhaps someone will come over, get curious about what I’m doing, and want to hire me to come to Taipei and work with people on having an Outrageous Vision so they can see who they are meant to be. Stranger things have happened.

I watched “Julie & Julia” on the plane. A bit of crisis, plus passion. (“I love to eat!” says Julia Child.) Put this together with hard work, a few disappointments, meltdowns, crises of confidence, and mix it with love and support And some good luck, and you have a tale of miracles.

Your life is a miracle too. I can prove it to you if you give me enough time. I will give you fifteen minutes of playing with possibility, and you can see if you resonate with my funky, somewhat wicked approach to spiritual growth, healing, entrepreneurism, and seizing the day.

Contact my business manager, Sandy Parker at sandy@myefficientassistant.com to set up an appointment.

Blessings,

Vicki

The tale of my Passport Renewal Adventure ended yesterday with me on the plane on the way back to Portland. I’m going to give you the short version of what happened.

I missed the shuttle back to Corvallis by two minutes because I stopped to go to the bathroom. Because I missed the shuttle, I had time to call a friend who recommended I call AAA and see if they could help me. They told me I needed to drive to Seattle to a passport Center if I had any chance of getting my passport renewed in one day.

I called the number AAA gave me, went through many levels of “if you want X, press one if you want Y, press two….” Finally I got a human being on the line, and she told me I needed to make an appointment with the office in Seattle first thing Friday morning. They could renew my passport there that day, if they weren’t too busy. Let me emphasize the “if they weren’t too busy” part.

The appointment making was computerized. They gave me a confirmation number I needed to bring with me if I wanted to get my passport renewed. I tried to type the number in, but I was so tired, typing in numbers is difficult for me, and I was holding my cell phone so I had to do it with one hand, so I couldn’t find exactly where I was on the keyboard, so I kept making mistakes, so I kept hitting the key to repeat the instructions. But it wasn’t just the confirmation code, it was all of the instructions I had them repeat four times.

I called my daughter, remember it’s her birthday, and started to cry. I had a Mommy Meltdown. The roles reversed. “Take a deep breath,” my daughter told me. “We will figure this out.”

I have an appointment at nine at 9 AM in Seattle, I don’t drive, and everyone has a job and can’t take the day off to guide me. I keep calling friends and finally one of my clients a young woman of 25, offers to pick me up at five o’clock in the morning and drive me to Seattle for my nine o’clock appointment.

Here come the miracles:

Because I missed the shuttle by two minutes I was able to arrange getting my passport on Friday, and I didn’t have to go to Corvallis and come back to Portland and pay 85 more dollars for the shuttle.

My client lives 10 minutes away from my daughter.

We got to my appointment in Seattle at exactly 9 o’clock. Exactly 9 o’clock.

The day with my client turns out to be my first day-long Play Date. She begins her trip discouraged and afraid she’s going to sabotage her future. We end the day with her excited, deliriously excited, about her future. Not bad.

My husband drove from Corvallis up to Portland Thursday night, bringing me my Oregon Identification Card, which I thought I might need to get my passport. I didn’t need it to get my passport, so I thought perhaps he had made a trip for nothing. As it turned out, though, in order to go back into the passport office and pick up my passport, I had to have a government issued picture ID. If Murray hadn’t driven up from Corvallis, my passport would still be sitting in the passport office in Seattle and my whole trip would’ve been for nothing.

Because I miss my shuttle back to Corvallis, I got to go with my 31-year-old daughter out to lunch with her friends from work. A rare opportunity to see my daughter with her friends, to witness the life she has created. I had a beer, but nobody else could because they were working. That beer tasted GOOD.

Because my passport turned out to be valid but invalid, I got to spend a lot of time with a young woman who really needed me. I needed her, and she needed me. Our day was magical from start to finish. Everyone we met was helpful, courteous, cheerful, and kind. Even the parking lot attendant helped us out when we came in one half hour late for the early bird special. “We missed the early bird special by just a half half hour!” I said as he walked up to her car. He went through quite a lot of trouble to make sure we got the early bird rate, saving me at least $20. He didn’t have to do that. He got nothing out of it for himself, except the satisfaction of helping people out.But that was what our whole day was like.

The security guards in the federal building were cheerful, friendly, and willing to listen to my sad story. When we left the passport office with my renewed passport, renewed until the year 2019, I made up a little song for them on the spot. We all laughed.

How you do anything is how you do everything. If you are not able to see clearly about what your life is calling you to do, it might be because you are telling yourself a disaster story instead of a miracle story. All day long things happen to us — the car won’t start, the dog throws up on the carpet, there’s an accident on the road and traffic is snarled, your passport is valid but in valid when you were on a trip of a lifetime to Bali. What do you get to do? How are you going to choose?

We choose to cloud our vision and pollute our purpose or we choose to see the miracle in everything. We are like that optimistic child who was given a hill of horse manure for Christmas. He shouts his glee and starts digging in the pile. “Why are you digging in that pile of manure?” His parents ask him. “With this much manure, there must be a pony in there somewhere!” he exclaims and keeps on digging.

Let’s all keep on digging, shall we? Let’s clear our energy field from resentment, disappointment, anger, blaming, feeling like a victim, hopelessness, despair — all that energetic crud that clogs our pipes. This is emotional cholesterol.

Send me your stories. When did you choose a miracle instead of a disaster? If you’re having trouble finding the miracle in the disaster, you might want to take me up on my offer of a free 15 minute Play with Possibility Date. I promise you will be able to shift something. I can almost guarantee I’ll get you to laugh. If you can laugh, you can live.

Blessings,

Vicki

It’s 11:15 p.m. and I am standing at the Eva Airways desk in the San Francisco airport. I have just found out that my valid passport isn’t valid enough. Your passport, my passport, actually expires six months before the expiration date. Go figure.

I’m not getting on that plane; I’m not going to Bali. Is this a disaster or is this perfect? This is what I will decide. If my not going to Bali because my passport is invalid is a disaster, then everything that happens from here on out, in fact, everything that led up to this moment, will also count as a disaster. I will have wasted time and money on a flight to San Francisco, and the $85 it cost me for the shuttle from Corvallis to Portland. I am missing out on at least four days of my trip to Bali, which could end up being many more days if I can get my passport renewed. Eva Airways doesn’t fly to Bali every day. Many of their flights are already full.

One of my main purposes for this trip is to be a part of a planning committee for the Bali Institute for Global Renewal. Marcia Jaffee, the president, organized the conference in 2006 with Desmond Tutu as the featured speaker. It is a great honor and privilege to be part of an incredibly amazing group of people who are trying to unite indigenous wisdom and Western ingenuity and create leaders all over the world. Saying that I want to be there for this planning session is a gross understatement. In some ways everything in my life has been leading to this gathering.

Not that anything is at stake here.

This snafu could be a disaster, or, if I decide that somehow my Angel Committee is playing with me again, then I will start to look for Perfection, and my mistake will be turned into a Discovery.

It is now the early hours of November 19, my daughter’s 31st birthday. I have a ticket to fly back to Portland at 7 AM. I decide there is no point getting a hotel room, so I tried to sleep around the arm rests on the chairs, the armrests that are permanently there I’m assuming to stop people from sleeping. The gentle staff of Eva Airways has been incredibly kind and helpful.

The woman who pushed my luggage cart from the international terminal back to the domestic terminal tells me that she is grateful that I have been so pleasant about it all. “Many people yell and scream at us,” she tells me.

“As if it’s your fault Indonesia won’t let me come, even though my passport is valid,” I say to her.

This reminds me of the time I was a counselor at an elementary school in Corvallis, Oregon and a man got a ticket for speeding in front of the elementary school. He came in and yelled at the playground assistant, and then he yelled at the principle. How he does anything is how he does everything. I’m glad am not married to this man.

I try to sleep, but I am worried about the safety of my luggage, and I can’t get comfortable. The airport is surprisingly deserted. It occurs to me that, if I am to go on my newly booked ticket on November 23 in the wee hours of the morning, I must get my passport fixed tomorrow, November 20. I had better find out what I can find out now, so I will know what to do when I get back to Portland.

There is no free WiFi in the San Francisco airport. To get WiFi I have to fill out a lot of information and pay $7.98. Because I am so tired, because I am so disoriented, and because I am legally blind, filling out this form at 2:30 AM is difficult. My username is incorrect. Start over. My password is too short. Start over. My password doesn’t agree with my confirmation password. Do it again.

Putting in numbers in my computer is challenging for me, so re-entering my credit card data every time is taxing. And then it gets funny. It has to get funny, or I will add to my own suffering.

Just as I get online and find the site that has been recommended to me, a site that will help me expedite getting my passport renewed, a man walks by. I haven’t seen anyone in at least an hour. “Is there Internet in its airport? He asked me. He looks tall and a bit disheveled to tell the truth. But there’s something about his voice I trust, something in his demeanor that seems deeply and profoundly human to me.

“Yes,” I tell him, “there is Internet here.” I don’t tell him the sad story of how many times it took me to get on the Internet. “Would you like to check something?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he says to me, “I would like to check a little something.”

“I am legally blind,” I tell him, “and I could use some help on a website. We could just make this a win-win situation.”

He agrees and sits down beside me, and I start to cry a little. “I’ve been really great up to now,” I tell him. “It’s just that your voice is so kind….”

It turns out he is a man who travels around the world healing people. He tells me his name, which I can’t remember, but it is wonderful and musical. I ask him what his name means. He replies by exhaling a long soulful breath that sounds like wind in a tunnel. Cool.

He gives me a healing session. He puts his long-fingered, wickedly long-fingered, hands around my eyes and seems to pull energy out while he breathes. It is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

Here we are, the two of us, alone as far as I can tell in the domestic terminal of the San Francisco airport. I am blind and he is a healer. Is this starting to look like Perfection yet?

All the clothes he is wearing have been given to him, he tells me. “I can count on one hand all the clothing that I’ve purchased in the last five years.” I believe him. He tells about his girlfriends, he tells me about his mom. He tells me he has been on television a few times and that he has written a treatment and has a producer interested in a reality show. I think he will make it happen. I can see him being wildly successful on television. He has a presence that is amazing.

I share with him that I do some energy healing. “Sometimes when I put my hands on people I have visions, I tell him. I don’t say that I am seeing Truth, I just tell people what I see if they want to hear.”

He gives me his hands and asks me to hold his hands and tell me what I see. At first I feel a river flowing through us and then I feel very strongly that he is a tree. His hands are like tree limbs. He is like a character out of Lord of the Rings.

“I see you as a tree. Does that resonate with you?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he says, “I am a tree.”

We part ways shortly thereafter, the terminal fills up, and I catch my seven o’clock plane back to Portland, Oregon. The chances of getting my passport renewed the next day were slim and expensive. “What is, is,” I keep chanting to myself. “Whatever happens, I will deal with it. If I go to Bali on Monday, great. If I can’t go to Bali on Monday, I’ll figure something else out.”

This story is not over. Tomorrow I will finish telling you about my adventure, but I will end today’s post with just two more bits of information.

The first story of Perfection: On the plane back to San Francisco from Portland, the person who sat right next to me was that very same man from the terminal who had spoken so kindly to me. He turned out to be an existential humanistic psychotherapist on his way down to a conference in San Francisco. He is on the board that organizes that conference. His specialty is authenticity and authentic engagement. Let me just say, we have a lot in common.

He suggested that perhaps we could do some work together in Portland. He said he thought I would be great at their conferences, bringing in a whimsical, musical, authentic, on-the-spot songwriting element to the conference. I agreed.

My second story of Perfection: When the woman at the Eva Airways staff told me my passport wasn’t valid long enough to get into Indonesia, I remembered the dream I had told my husband about that morning. I had dreamed that something had gone wrong with some kind of technicality on my trip to Bali. There were lots of people scurrying around trying to solve the problem. When I woke up, I couldn’t figure out what the dream was about, but I had been a little anxious about this trip, which is unusual for me, so I was on alert.

When I learned I wasn’t going to Bali, I realized what my dream had been about. I dreamed that I wouldn’t get to go to Bali because of some technicality, and I didn’t get to go to Bali because of a technicality. Now what is that?

So is my trip cancellation or postponement a disaster or is it perfect? I’m the one who will decide. I’m the one who keeps deciding every moment. How I do anything is how I do everything. How you do anything is how you do everything.

Seeing who you are meant to be involves making choices like this all the time. How are you going to choose to look at your life? How are you going to respond with what your angel committee throws in front of you? Are you going to see Disaster? Or are you going to find Perfection?

More tomorrow on the saga of “Vicki Seeks To Renew Her Passport in One Day.”

Blessings,

Vicki

Getting people up on their feet singing, laughing, and amazing themselves is one of my all time favorite things to do. And I get to do this great, fun thing all over the world. How cool is that?

As I sat watching my fire this morning listening to David Lanz on Pandora radio, I was suddenly filled, completely filled, with the memory of living with my first husband and my children. We are both remarried now, very happily, and our children are grown and doing very well, thank you very much.

As much as I have tried to focus on the love of my first marriage, as deeply as I know that any resentments or bitterness or unforgiveness is a Lie, and prevents healing for the person who nourishes the Lie — as deeply as I know this, I have been unable to completely free myself of the burden of unforgiveness and resentment.

But as I listened to David Lanz this morning, I was completely filled with the loving memory of the richness and truth that was also a part of our marriage, I heard something from my core clearly for the first time: “See them clearly, love them completely. Easy.”

I’ve seen myself and many of my clients try to protect ourselves through perfectionism, judgment, and even self-hate. Our protection is misguided to be sure, but it is oh, so human.

A part of our Stone Age brain, and that is the brain we all have, wants to fight or run in order to keep us safe. Or, especially if we are female, it wants us to be beautiful, attracting those most powerful males who can keep us safe. Our attempts to protect ourselves, our perfectionism, criticism of ourselves and others, gets fed by our hard wiring. The more we practice something, the more cells our brains assign to that task. Even though worrying makes us less safe because it distracts us from the real environment we are living in, many of us worry as a means of trying to prevent the bad thing from happening.

I have come to see that the ways I protect myself often hurt me much more than they make me safe. I am ready now to see clearly those ways I try to protect myself, love them completely, and set myself free. It’s really easier than I ever could’ve imagined.

My visual disability has invited me to see the world differently. I now listen and trust senses that used to be overwritten by the details of daily life. Losing my ability to drive slowed me down. I needed slowing down. I needed to learn to ask for help. I needed to learn that receiving with grace and gratitude and humility is a great gift to the person who receives and the person who gives. It is a sacred completion, this giving and receiving cycle. When we give, give, give, give, give we are like a broken record. We are stuck in a groove that used to be music, but is now only noise.

See them clearly. I grew up in an alcoholic home. As Claudia Black says in her book It Will Never Happen to Me, the three most basic rules in a home full of addiction are: don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel. Don’t let yourself know what is really going on and it will be easier to not talk about it. Don’t let yourself see anything clearly. If you do, then you might have to do something about it, and anything you do is dangerous.

Since leaving my childhood home, I have spent my life learning to see clearly. Losing my vision has only helped me see things, life, more clearly. Learning to see things clearly has scared me and almost everyone I know. When I see something clearly, what do I do then?

This led me to unhelpful ways of protecting myself. Trying to be very, very good, trying to not bother people, trying to not hurt anyone ever, trying to guess what everyone needs before they know so I can give it to them so we can all be safe. All these very understandable behaviors did not keep me safe, they kept me separate.

So this morning, this dark November morning, sitting by the fire listening to the familiar, beautiful piano music of David Lanz, I was filled with the truth that dissolved the Lie I’ve been living with my entire life. I can see clearly, and still love completely, without judgment, without any need to protect myself from anything. It’s actually easy. It’s much easier, in fact, than anything else.

I want to remember this.

I now understand that the ways I protect myself often hurt me much more than they make me safe. I am ready now to see clearly those ways I try to protect myself, see them clearly and love them completely, and set myself free. It’s really easier than I ever could’ve imagined.

I am suggesting we learn to love our worrying and our other misguided attempts to protect ourselves. I’m suggesting we see our worrying for what it is, our Stone Age brain’s best attempt to keep us alive. Love this attempt completely, and then let it go. I’m suggesting this can be and needs to be easy.

When we learn to love ourselves this well, we are able to love others this well. We can see our parents, our partners, our children, our coworkers, our bosses as flawed human beings. Instead of being judgmental and angry, we can feel compassion. Compassion clears our brains.

When our brains are clear, meaning and purpose can rise to the surface like a phosphorescent trail we can follow in the sea. When we’re not distracted by our own human foibles, when we can see our flaws clearly and compassionately, we can take effective action to move toward who we are meant to be, and what we are meant to do in the world.

This way of living may seem difficult, almost impossible when we begin. But living this way gets easier the more we do it. Our brain can assign more cells to compassion, humor, and forgiveness than it does to criticism, judgmental as am, perfectionism, and despair.

Loving our imperfections is easier, in fact than any other way to live. How about that?

I want to never forget this simple truth.

Many blessings to you, many, many blessings to you,

Vicki

P.S. I’m still offering my free fifteen minute Play with Possibility Date, which includes a customized Musical Motivator. Contact my business manager, Sandy Parker at sandy@myefficientassistant.com to set up an appointment.