From my fourteenth summer, the time of my first real job, having enough money has generally and magically not been much of a problem in my life.
Part of it has been that I've never been much of a consumer. I've always hated shopping and felt oppressed by having to manage more than a relatively small number of possessions.
Part of it has been that I've been blessed with an automatic, less-than-conscious balancing process inside of me: When there's less money coming in, my spending habits spontaneously reset themselves accordingly. It seems to happen without any effort or thought.
.
In graduate school I had what all my friends agree was the most outrageous of my jobs in the willing-to-do-almost-anything category. I worked the night shift at an open-all-night fancy ice cream parlor and restaurant in New York City that showed old-time movies. At 24, I was a budding feminist and a graduate student in psychology running subjects for my dissertation research project by day. Four nights a week from 8 P.M. till 6 A.M., I worked as a poor-man's-Bunny. The job involved wearing a leotard, cinch belt, mesh stockings, high heels, white celluloid cuffs and collar with a black bow tie while serving enormous ice cream sundae specialties, espresso and after-bar-hours breakfasts. (And, quite often, falling up the stairs with my tray-a particular specialty of mine.)
There were free dinners and breakfasts for me at the restaurant and usually $40-$50 a night in tips (there wasn't any hourly pay). For 1964 that was an incredible deal, never mind fending off the salacious remarks /attentions of the late night drunks. (We had a genteel bouncer watching out for us, and we learned to finesse things with quick and easy humor.) By 7 in the morning I'd be back home in my fifth-floor walkup tenement, soaking my chocolate imbedded body in the cast iron claw-foot bathtub-in-my-kitchen. I'd sleep 4 hours or so and then go back to my laboratory to start my day life again.
After completing both my Ph.D. degree and seven years of being a private practice psychologist in New York City, I dropped out at 32 and took to the road, heading west in a van that I'd set up as a bed-sitting room. (See Pirouettes for more about that.) At that point, I never thought I'd do psychotherapy again.
A lifelong over-achiever, I spent almost 20 months learning how to be comfortable doing nothing. Then, I began to experiment with different ways to make a living: For a while I did cake and cookie baking in an organic bakery. I spent several months selling my own designed and hand-crocheted clothing in a shop within a 70's-style marketplace. I worked for over a year as Health Education Coordinator in a collectively run free clinic (speaking about mental and physical health in schools and colleges, on a weekly radio show and with kids on bad acid trips at live concerts).
I worked at cleaning houses with a woman's contract cleaning service (I loved cleaning and making order–something I usually do to ground and calm myself). I did other people's errands. For a while, I even tried being the doorperson-cum-bouncer at a women's bar. It was this connection with the women's community that opened me to the possibility of trying to do psychotherapy again-in a new, untraditional and experimental way.
Over the years, I've actually started four different psychotherapy practices in four different geographies. Each time, I've managed to be making a living at them within three to six months. Since my standard of living has consistently been a fairly modest one, this was never particularly difficult.
In the first years of my first private practice, whenever a client might feel done or choose to come less often, or when there might be a rash of cancellations, I'd feel a little panicky about my practice falling apart. It was that sharp, edgy feeling familiar to most people that freelance or work for themselves. Yet, each time, there would be new clients appearing quite soon after others were finishing a cycle of work. It felt magical, as though some benevolent presence were watching over me, keeping me secure.
Over time, I came to trust the self-renewal of my practice. Gradually, I was able to hold that trust even when replacement clients were slower in turning up or when I had an increasing number of empty hours in my workweek for longer periods of time. Everything that happened seemed meant to be. The slow times, I learned from experience, were times for resting; they inevitably came before cycles of accelerating growth in my own journey. The more often I saw that this was so, the more I was able to relax into the rest cycles. I became able to stop filling that precious time with worry, doubt or fears about the end of my income.
In my work life (and in all the other parts of my life), my trust in the ongoing presence of support from a benevolent Spirit has continued to deepen and grow and flourish. That presence, (that I now call the Grandmothers) seems to help me be in the right place at the right time, to bring the right people into my life, to nudge me along, to open my eyes to possibilities and sometimes, to slow me down. I have come to believe that, no matter how it may look, everything is going just as it needs to for my unfolding.
There are times when that belief is profoundly tested.
For three years, starting more than a dozen years ago, my practice and income seemed to be slowing and diminishing at what became alarming pace. Over and over again, I reminded and reassured myself of what I had come to know under less alarming circumstances. Still, I began to wonder if Spirit were actually nudging me out of this kind of work, or maybe even forcing me to let go of it. I couldn't begin to imagine what else I might do at this stage of my life. At 54, I was feeling somewhat less adventurous than I had at 24 or 32 or 42.
Though there were many moments of serious edge-walking, I would repeatedly come back to center: to remembering, to knowing that, if this were truly to be the end of this cycle in my life, the new direction would reveal itself to me when it was timely.
The challenge of staying in this precarious place of balance was compounded by what was then happening in the professional lives of three of my closest women friends, all of them also therapists. For each of them it was, professionally, a time of flourishing and abundance. Their burgeoning practices were full or, sometimes, over-full. Each was experiencing a seemingly endless stream of new client referrals. Their incomes were healthy and expanding.
And there I was in what looked, for all intents and purposes, to be a serious professional decline: very few clients, no new clients being referred and living quite close to the bone. I was feeling baffled, working very hard to use the open time to rest and not to worry, working even harder not to measure myself against what was happening in my friends' professional lives, not to find myself wanting. I was constantly having to remind myself that what was happening in my life was for some purpose in my journey, even as the particulars of that purpose were remaining obscure to me
Even as I knew not to make comparisons, knew how damaging that would be to my tender, delicate, in-transition self, I struggled mightily not to measure, not to compare, not to judge. My challenge was to trust what was happening in my life as part of a transition, an unfolding. My challenge was to resist the outside eyes/cultural view of this process as one of failure or collapse.
It was a time of enormous stretching and deepening, of radical trust, of resisting the temptation to do something, anything to force this process to abort.
In the end, I felt so proud of myself for lovingly, tenderly staying with all of the frightened, distressed parts of me through this arduous passage, proud of me for actually being able to do some serious, deep resting in the middle of it. The way out was in going through all of it, all of the feelings, all of the questioning, all of the doubt.
At some point three years later, the releasing that needed to come inside of me did at last happen. (And that is a whole other story for another time). Then, new directions did emerge. My website was one of them. Now my practice (which I continue to love and enjoy) is usually about as full as I could want it to be. New people appear just as others come to places of closure.
My trust in the flow of the process is more profound now than ever. And, still, I know that there will be other times and ways that I will be challenged to keep holding to that trust-even when I have no idea or understanding about the why or the meaning of the challenge.
It helps so much to remember that each of us has different lessons we're learning, different learning styles and different inner timetables for our own unfolding. Your own way is always the best way for you-believe that.
Consider honoring your very own way and your very own pace.
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
© For the Little Ones Inside - All Rights Reserved
The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
If you'd like a deck of your very own to support you in your journey, click here to download Order Form.
Please feel free to e-mail me at rposin@hotmail.com. to share your reflections and responses to any or all of what you find here . I'd really like to hear what touches and nourishes you!
Click here for More Like This Or, explore the Monthly Musing Archives
Site Directory (for non-frames viewing)
*
**X