Big, beautiful flowers growing wild. They’re only weeds if we decide we don’t want them around.

Are you willing to be wild? That was the challenge motivational speaker Vicki Clark issued to a room full of Junior Leaguers at a talk several months ago in Rumson, NJ.

The workshop was entitled: The 11 Commandments of Wildly Successful Women.

The event was not my first reminder that maybe at this time in my life I really, really need to go wild. As a friend’s bumper sticker reads, “Wild women don’t get the blues.”

If you’re open to passion, it doesn’t take much to bring it on. I had a moment in my very own  kitchen the night before the workshop. An earlier library visit had yielded Otis Redding CD with “Try A Little Tenderness” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azpUTXntVagon it. OMG! That song—rocking out in the kitchen as the music built and built, it got me positively vibrating with visceral certainty that life—and Otis!—are goo—oood!

Then I just had to put on my ratty, tatty faded old video of the movie Pretty in Pink, where “Try a Little Tenderness” has a featured role. I soaked up Molly Ringwald’s classic lesson in rising above stereotypes and embracing toe-curling passion. Wild!

I started thinking about wildness again when introduced recently to Traci Bild’s Get Your Girl Back movement http://gygb.com/. Don’t you love it? Getting my girl back is about remembering who I am under all the conformity, responsibility and plain-old life-fatigue. Who I was, I mean, when I rode my bike fearlessly down a flight of stairs. When I swam out to the middle of the pond. When I told off that snotty English teacher. When, country bumpkin that I was, I took on big bad New York City after college.

I’m not a teen or a twenty-something any more, and haven’t been for some time. But passion? I sure know something about that, and now that I’m older and wiser, I know that passion are as much about life itself as it is about youthful romance.

Passion is about being all in. About searching for what you value, then living from that place, knowing, as it says in the Bible, that “a prophet is without honor in her own country.”

The moments don’t have to be big ones. A big smile, a dollar and a little dance move to the sounds of a subway drum duo, that’ll do it, thank you. Yes, lots of people looked askance-ish (New Yorkers don’t stare; staring is too intimate; they just look, with a flat expression.)

But the drummers, and one spectator smiled. We had a moment. Then I moved on, refreshed and renewed by a nice dose of wildness.

What are you going to do today to remember who you are under all the grown-upness?

Self-care? What’s that? That was my thought when I first heard about the crazy, radical concept of self-nurture. That was two dozen years ago. I was pregnant with my 24-year-old and I was overwhelmed and feeling out of control.

Since then I’ve learned and relearned the value of self-care. I’ve learned through trial and error that job one in life no exceptions is minding my nutrition, exercising, being with friends, wearing only clothes that make me feel good, keeping my hair cut the way I like it, putting on lotion after my bath, taking at least a half hour each and every day all by myself just for myself, letting myself have naps and fun. And so on. (The list is ever-evolving.) Not to mention saying “No” to things that don’t feel right, no matter how worthy the request sounds, or how much I feel like I “should” comply.

Understanding that I need to respect my own needs, that’s hard. I forget, collapse, burnout or act out, then remember, again (often because some one who loves me reminds me). It’s so hard to remember because like lots of folks, especially women, I am hard-wired to think that taking care of myself is self-indulgent. Selfish. Ugly. The Puritan culture of my upbringing taught this; my family of origin supported it. Hard work and sacrifice, that’s what was called for. How you got your strength to keep on keeping on, well, that was your problem.

I’m not blaming, I’m just saying. They didn’t know a different way.

But I do. I’ve learned some truths about what enlightened selfishness is. I’m not talking about the attitude that says no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s all about me. No, I’m talking about honoring and supporting with actions our needs for love, connection, good health, serenity, sanity.

Here are few things I remember when the how-can-you-be-so-selfish bug bites. I keep these concepts in mind so that when that fool bug tries to make me feel guilty, I’m ready!

Okay, here goes:

• It’s good to give, but not what you don’t have.

• It doesn’t help the millions who have so much less than you do to keep your soul dry and unwatered.

• You can fully receive the abundance in your life in the name of those who don’t have what you have (even say a prayer for them), then use your well-nurtured skills and resources to help those in need.

• You must take care of yourself to take care of others. No one can get water from an empty well. Self-care is not a luxury. It’s not optional. It’s required.

• You don’t have to be hero, a saint or a martyr. Everyone has his or her role to play.

• People like people who are humble yet confident more than they like doormats. Self-care supports humility and confidence.

• Your higher power lives in the place where your self-care feeds and fuels your joy and your contribution to the world. Be in touch with where you feel loved. Go there in your mind as often as you can during each and every day.

• People will try to manipulate you to give you what you don’t want to give. “No” is a complete sentence. What’s good for you is good for the other guy, even if he doesn’t know it.

• If it truly feels bad, it is. Listen to what your body is telling you. The body knows.

• You are enough, you have enough, you do enough. Really.

Embrace your colors!

November 2012 marks 19 years since I found the solution to my obesity and my food obsession. Effective this month I have been abstinent for 19 years from sugar, wheat and flour. I also weigh and measure all my meals (except in restaurants where I order carefully and moderately). One day at a time I’m maintaining a 100-pound weight loss.

It’s a miracle, for sure. To celebrate, I want to expose three myths about food and weight and recovery from obesity.

Myth #1: Relapse is inevitable. No, it’s not. Sometimes in addiction circles you hear that relapse is part of recovery. My take: Relapse happens. But it doesn’t have to and it’s not required. That we can learn from relapse, sure. With any degree of grace, we learn from any and every painful thing that happens. But there’s no need to set ourselves up for the pain. I worry that thinking relapse is inevitable makes folks relax their guard and lighten up on the hard work of recovery. Not wanting to do what it takes to make a good life, that’s human nature. Nobody is gung-ho all the time. But we don’t have to sink down into the I-don’t-wannas. We can rise above, recoup our commitment to our best interest and move back into doing those things we know keep us healthy and sane.

Myth #2: You shouldn’t deprive yourself. There are certain false truths that get repeated over and over in the popular media coverage of weight loss. The biggest one is, “Don’t give up something totally. Eventually it’ll come around to bite you double-time.” I know what they’re trying to say. They don’t want you to be a martyr to the weight loss cause. They don’t want you holding your breath waiting for that croissant at the end of the rainbow. Let’s be careful here what we call deprivation, though. There are a lot of us who truly have a biochemical sensitivity to certain foods—and the only way to be free is to give them up totally. By God’s grace, I have not had one speck of sugar, wheat and flour in 19 years. Am I deprived? Are you kidding? I have been liberated! Do you truly want to be at the beck and call of a cookie? If you start eating something and then can’t stop, doesn’t it make sense never to start? You only have to do this one day at a time. Don’t give it up, promising you’ll have it one day. Give it up promising yourself it’s just for today. (After all, today is all anyone has, right?) That’s how I made 19 years.

Myth #3: Just eat less and move more. That’s only two-thirds of the truth. What works for long-term recovery is, eat less, move more, believe in something or someone greater than yourself. If we give up things (kinds and quantities of food we think we need or love) without replacing them with healthy things (a power greater than ourselves), we set ourselves up for a fall. We have to nurture our inner life, our spiritual side, our soul, to grow in health. I struggled with this higher power stuff for a long time. But gradually over the years I have found a higher power, through observing the joys of nature, feeling the power of connection with people I love and respect, through reading ancient and modern texts written by those who’ve had these struggles before me. When I feel depleted, instead of reaching for something of the world, I can fill myself up with spiritual sustenance. Prayer. Meditation. Readings. Writings. Journaling. Connecting with others. Yes, I must eat right. Yes, I must exercise. And yes, I must build spiritual muscle.

Love yourself ! I hear this non-stop from all the villagers allied to help me stay safe, sane and joyful. They’ve been telling me this for about a billion years.

And it’s good advice for someone chugging along toward ever-greater mental, emotional and physical good health. I have no quarrel with this wisdom. In pursuit of peace of mind, I worked hard to drop destructive behaviors like eating foods that are bad for me, shopping till the credit card wore out, mean-spirited gossiping, listening to bad advice, etc., etc.

I showed up and chanted “I love you, Gay. I love you, Gay,” just like a mentor taught me, even though it felt really weird. I gave myself real little hugs, took long soak-y baths, bought scented lotion and learned that “No” is a complete sentence. I began to to advocate for my own needs, exercise, manage money responsibly, and to make the haircut appointment well before the Do turns into a Don’t.

It worked, some. But oh, the mind-habit of negative self-talk was dying a slow, hard death. And it can bring you down into depression and defeatism in nothing flat.

I decided, based on the number of angry, resentful thoughts, that the next step was to do some hard-core forgiveness work. Sure folks have done me wrong. But do I want them living rent-free in my head as I ruminate? I think not. And I knew I also needed liberation from the grudges against myself. Sure I’ve made mistakes. But should I be punished forever? Nah.

For years, on and off, I’ve written and chanted the affirmation, “I forgive myself for hurting myself. I forgive myself for hurting others. I forgive others for hurting me.” It’s powerful, and I highly recommend it. As in, what you focus on tends to grow, and all.

Recently I’ve taken to working diligently with Belleruth Naparstek’s CD, “Anger and Forgiveness.”  After lunch, a rest with Belleruth’s guided imagery and affirmations is a thrice-weekly routine. Oh, the places we go! Way down into the deep hurt that was under that enormous pile of grudge. Stay with it, feel into it. Process it.

And into the mix came my spiritually focused peer support group. Last Saturday, because I was leading the meeting, I invited recovering folks to address the topic, “Anger, forgiveness and acceptance.” Wow! Did I get an earful.

For me the pivotal moment was when someone said, “When you forgive someone, that doesn’t mean you have to trust them.” Right. But the next question is, well, if I’m not going to trust people, who will I trust? God as I understand God is the obvious answer. But what does that actually mean, I thought.

Trust yourself! That was the answer! God lives in you as you, Liz Gilbert says in Eat. Pray. Love. Yes!

I accepted the challenge.

And since then, when the scared, anxious, defeatist, depressive thoughts rise, I’ve been relaxing my tense belly, dropping my tight shoulders and saying, “Trust yourself.” Wham! Away goes the nonsense about figuring out the “right” or “perfect” thing. I can be in me, as me!

Slipping out of that, into “trust yourself” makes things so simple.

Whew! That’s a load off. I can be trusted. I trust myself. Love is good. I love love. But trust, well, that’s a form of love in action, don’t you think?

Trust yourself. It really works. Trust me.

Freedom is wanting what you need.

Say what? First time I heard this saying, I thought, Whoa, now this is getting scary. But I thought about it some more. And some more.

Then I put it away for awhile and let it season. Meanwhile, I continued my usual clunky, woefully imperfect prayer and meditation practices.

And lo and behold I began to see the simple wisdom of aligning myself with all that’s good in the universe, then going ahead and doing what my own personal desire was telling me.

It’s simple, really. If I am living in the light, what I want will be what’s best for all.

Years ago I had a spiritual director, Kathy Duffy. I was having such a hard time. Could not see, feel or experience God, try as I might. I could sometimes take in miracles around me, and I knew enough to make a gratitude list whenever I was in a funk.

But I just wasn’t sure where this personal higher power I’d been hearing about was. I knew it was not some bearded white guy in a robe in the sky. (That had to be a notion invented by bearded white guys. Seriously. If God was any kind of guy at all, which seemed doubtful to me, he probably was a cool swarthy dude who looked more like my husband.) Kathy  explained that I am closest to God when I am most myself. As in, Gay-God, God-Gay.

Well, as my Dad would have said, how ‘bout them apples?

I experimented. Probably because I come from Puritan stock, or maybe because I still fear being sent to the principal’s office more than death itself, I didn’t go crazy. Which is good, because loving God and doing what you want does not mean a free-for-all.

What I learned is that I’ve got to keep checking in. Otherwise that other critter, the will, will take over. The Gay-Will, Will-Gay.  The one who says, let’s have lunch now, though it’s 10:30 in the morning and I have work to do.  The one who tells me it’s okay to stay up till all hours watching Tom Selleck in Jesse Stone on Netflix. The one who leaps before she looks and speaks before she thinks.  Nope. Gay-Will is just not an okay guide. She’s too connected to venal desires, not spiritual wants.

Instead, I have to keep going back to the source. I have to sustain the relationship with that part of myself that’s good and wise. Respect and hear her. That way, we’ll all sleep better at night.

Which means that today’s assignment, and I do choose to accept it, is to receive and give love. And then, go ahead and do what I want.

Make sense? What about you? How’s the whole God/will/wants thing working for you?

Well, sort of.

Full disclosure: I am not now, nor have I ever an actual, factual Marine. Nor have I played one on TV, though I did wear my brother Dale’s Army fatigue shirt a lot during the 60’s.

No, what I’m referring to is the story in Sunday’s New York Times about how women are soon to be invited into the inner sanctums of barf-your-guts up, have-a-heart-attack-and-die Marine training.

I think it’s great for women to have all the opportunities a man does (though, frankly, I’m a bigger fan of the talk forms of peace-making than the attempts that use violence).

But what got me was the line: “…let a guy dig down and find himself.” I know that’s a phrase guys use a lot for these intense physical things they get themselves into (like when you’re down by a run and the count is 3 and 2  in the bottom of the ninth)

It’s also a phrase, though, that’s pretty familiar to those of us on the road to an ever cleaner way of living, where nothing comes between us and pure, unadulterated living. Nothing. Not excess or toxic food, not drink, not shopping-till-we’re dropping, not even obsessing over this that and the other thing.

In my life, I’ve dug pretty deep, as have my pals who are trying every day to make a good and decent life.

Sometimes what I’ve seen has been pretty scary. One of the scariest things is knowing that there’s always more to learn. But on a good day, that’s also the fun stuff, especially when we drop cruel judgements and just, well, take a deep breath and hang in there. Dig down, I mean.

Are you a digger? I am. I have to be. Not in a warlike way on myself or my life, God help us. Honesty without compassion is violence, says Pema Chodron, author, among other things, of, When Things Fall Apart.  But mining for the true me is the only way I know how to live, clean, abstinent and sober from all the junk that wants to take me down.

From Pema’s book I distilled the following as the ideal approach to the mining process:

When life nails you:

1. Stop there. Hold
2. Don’t act out
3. Don’t repress
4. Don’t blame it on anyone else
5. Don’t blame it on yourself
6. AND you will meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer
7. AND you will encounter your heart

Thus trained, you’ll be ready for anything.

God loves me just the way I am, and s/he loves me too much to let me stay that way. Growth is uncomfortable, but staying the same is deadly. May God’s will, not mine be done in all areas of my life. May I forgive those who’ve hurt me; may those whom I’ve hurt forgive me; may I forgive myself for hurting myself. I live in incredible abundance, for which I am truly grateful. Amen.