For a Winning Smile

My go-to voice of reason had been silenced by getting so many things wrong. I had, in a single national moment that was the culmination of everything that had been building up over the past six months, simply lost faith in the idea of a productive, rational, honest conversation and so decided to avoid them entirely. Meanwhile, the Trump presidency continued to unfold over the coming weeks, months, and years. I knew in the back of my mind that avoidance wouldn't ultimately be a very satisfying position to take, but I didn't see how reason would make any difference either. If I couldn't gain any traction with my closest, most trusted, deeply respected friends over the course of six months and thirty thousand words regarding a single decision about who to vote for, then how many words and how much reason would it take to reach the sixty-two million people who voted for Trump, or the almost one hundred million eligible voters who didn't vote at all? The worst part wasn't that I couldn't figure out how to convince one hundred and sixty-two million people that I was right but that I realized that I didn't know what I wanted to convince them of. I had missed something that had been very obvious to lots of other people. Unlike during other periods of severe collective cognitive dissonance, I no longer believed that we had the tools to find out if we were right. If it was impossible to change minds, what fixed them in place? I wasn't just saying: I got faith and hoping to be blessed abundantly. I actually believed that one day I'd be ok with my mom's death. That one day I'd no longer be scared of living without her. I had faith I'd see and feel this day eventually. This, my beloveds, is my new normal. { Things no one wants to hear or see when they are grieving } The one thing I know for sure is that every day in the beginning of grief will absolutely suck. Birthdays and holidays were the hardest. The Internet is the main culprit. It makes the process of grieving really unbearable at times. At some point, we all experience being hurt by someone, and maybe you can look at a single moment in that relationship when you decided, I forgive you.

But sometimes forgiveness is a journey. Time may need to play a role. In those moments when someone has been hurtful and you are in pain, you just need time to confront it, deal with it, and figure out how to move forward. When a relationship has been ruptured, maybe because of deceit or some type of inflicted pain, the nature of the transgression has not changed, but your beliefs about the transgression may change over time. I think about the times when I have worked with clients who have suffered a terrible trauma. Very often, the client cannot summon the words to describe what happened. The mere thought of addressing the event creates tenseness and inner turmoil. Sometimes, we will just sit with that pain together. The client may cry or yell until such a moment arises that the client can collect the words to describe what has happened. You can tell if you accept them by the way they make you feel. Say these affirmations out loud and with strong conviction. You might look crazy, but who cares! Your life is changing! On Abundance Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and all achievement. There is no such thing as lack. Screw what the evening news tells you! We live in a very abundant world that is always replenishing itself. If you don't believe me, look at the grass in your yard; Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and his thought experiment with Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky which explains `the entanglement of quantum particles'.

INFERENCE: Everything is relative and everything affects everything else. John Lennon's lyrics: Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. Love is the answer. INFERENCE: Self-explanatory. Mohandas Gandhi's non-violent movement and its contribution to India's independence. INFERENCE: Don't feed wood to your enemies' fires. Don't fight negativity with negativity. The Mahabharata. Well, yes, ideally. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world. Due to a myriad of mitigating circumstances ranging from lack of resources, early medical trauma, familial mental illness, family separation, neglect, and abuse, many students enter school missing more than the visible deficits of nutritious food, safe family, and/or shelter. At-risk students may even have been born into abundance and/or privilege. But what is missing may be invisible to those trying to decipher the mysterious symptoms of challenging children without knowing about the development and various functions of the autonomic nervous system. Without the safety and trust that grow from a secure bond, the vast network of nervous system connections necessary to create the matrix for school success and socialization is compromised. A secure bond is much more than a cozy connection and sense of protection from harm while young. It's even more than the loving feelings from the cocktail of bliss produced during nursing and cuddling, when oxytocin is released into the bloodstream. Safety and trust constitute the very first stage of child development. Even in the era of Freud, specialists in this field understood that this first task of growth was crucial for being grounded and feeling welcomed into the world as a safe place. They have a really difficult time dealing with the reality that someone that they care about has lied to them or deceived them in some way.

They will get lost emotionally and many times they will blame themselves for what someone else has done to hurt them. They always have to have the things that they need or they will lose their minds very quickly because they cannot handle any type of emotional confusion. The life of this type of person can be very challenging and exciting from the teenage years up until mature adulthood. It is a very beautiful and fulfilling skill to have, especially when you learn to manage it. They are very much into controlling their environments and changing the energy of the room so that they can feel stable. They usually have many talents and skills which enables them to be successful in multiple ways. They will always manage to contribute to society in very important ways and they consistently do very well in the scientific world and when dealing with the spiritual realm. When they have their energy in the correct space, they will always want to bring others into that same space so their energy is good as well. When an empathetic person connects with what they truly need, this is when they truly realize that they are in contact with their healing power and they get energized and their light begins to shine like I was meant to do. Even if it was the knitting club, it will suggest that you can come up with a plan and follow through with it. Also, to knit an article of clothing, you need to be able to manage your time and keep yourself motivated. No matter how meaningless you might think it is, I can assure you that it is not. Take a closer look at it and see how you could talk about the skills involved with it. If you were in the gaming club, it shows you have both a strategic mind and an ability to work as a team, seeing as many games involve incorporating a variety of skill sets into one team that can successfully complete a challenge. Also, many times in gaming scenarios, things do not go as planned. Someone misses their cue, or a skill doesn't work, and yet you have to improvise and make a new plan quickly while you are in the middle of a heated situation. Do you now see how much these supposedly little things can mean? Also, you never know what they could see on your resume that could be a conversation starter. Being hired and succeeding in the work environment is not always about your qualifications. Was it reason?

It didn't really seem so, because if that were the case, then reason could move it. Brute force didn't make sense as a valid strategy for getting people to vote, and not voting or talking about politics at all would certainly only make the problem fester in its current state. I sincerely felt as though my country was a boat and it was sinking. Rather than doing anything to help, I was paralyzed--and also suddenly feeling implicated in the sinking. What had we done to cause this? What had I done? And what, if anything, could I do to help reverse it? This is when the voice of possibility whispered its first coherent words to me. It was a quiet voice, asking me to withhold judgment for as long as I could, to allow contradictory perspectives to sit side by side without freaking out and flipping a table. On Mother's Day at every corner of the Internet you can find a mother and daughter duo posted up enjoying hugs and kisses followed by overly sappy verbiage from Hallmark. Cue thug tears! When it's not a birthday or a holiday, your friends, family and strangers will have no clue what to say after you unload the dreaded statement: My mother passed away. And, it does not matter if you say it happened last week or 20 years ago, America's universal response will always be: I'm sorry to hear that! This must be taught in college, right? It's a constant funnel of I'm so sorry your life now fucking sucks without your mom (the dramatic kid in me comes out sometimes). And maybe you can tell that story about how your best friend's cousin's sister's daughter also suddenly died from cancer, but now is probably not a good time. Grieving shouldn't feel like some sort of heartache competition. But I do get what you're trying to do. And in that moment, what seemed like an unspeakable trauma has been decreased to something that can be confronted, processed, and healed.