Seven Marathons on Seven Continents

Photo by Josh Adamski

Dear Friends Who Live in Places on the Rest of the Planet,

I have visited more than 20 countries (and all seven continents) on this globe. I was not someone who jumped off a plane and booked myself into an anonymous hotel as I was on my seven marathons journey. No. I always seek out connections wherever I go. And I have the gift of having developed and now maintaining friendships with interesting and lovely individuals from many of the countries I’ve been to.

Everywhere I’ve traveled, people have rarely expressed contempt for the American population. Occasionally, well-informed friends (especially in Chile and in parts of Europe) have shared with me their opinions about US politicians or policies, yes, but I have always experienced warmth and openness toward me as an individual and toward Americans as a citizenship.

Thank you dear ones. Today I do not blame you if you are wary of us. We just did something really upsetting and, frankly, despicable. We voted someone into office who would build walls around our country to give you the message that you are not welcome. Someone who thinks you are “less than” if your skin is brown. Someone who will harass and accuse you if your last name sounds Latino. Someone who would grab your “pussy” if you are female. Someone whose best ten-dollar word is “tremendous” and who does not have any idea of the history of YOUR country.

WE did that. WE did that to YOU. Knowing that our wealth, our use of natural resources, our carbon emissions, our purchasing power, our stock market, and many other aspects of our power impact YOUR politics and YOUR individual lives, WE elected this “tremendous” bull-shitter, this dangerous person, into our most powerful office.

I have never written a political blog before. I haven’t done it precisely because my love of running and my love of writing (as a way to inspire others) transcend politics. I know many of my friends and followers over the years come from very different philosophical and cultural backgrounds. I’ve wanted to hold tight to uniting factors: that we are runners, travelers, adventurers, and humans. Most who read my books or blogs are also women.

Today, then, I must speak of this. I must speak of this to and for all of you around this planet that I care so deeply for. I love your countries, your natural spaces, your unique ways of being as people. I respect your histories—the victories and the tragedies. From you I have humbly learned about the effects of my privilege as a white woman born in the United States at this point on the human timeline. And every time I vote—for officials or for policies—I have always kept you in my heart.

This time my keeping you in my heart was not enough. This time a huge portion of the white female vote went to this hostile, ignorant man.

I am sorry; I am sad; I am scared; and I am determined. I am determined never again to shy away from political discussions with friends or family. I am determined to stand up for and stand with my friends of color and my gay and lesbian friends who are now feeling more terrified than ever. I will write my representatives. I will continue to vote. I will look for ways grow in consciousness and in conscious actions.

The United States is not the center of the universe (as I sometimes think our politicians make us out to be), but we do make a lot of noise and we do impact what happens elsewhere. Friends, I cannot even ask you for your patience with my country. I WOULD not ask you for your confidence. I hope that our constitution and the structure of our three-branch government will provide the checks and balances it was created to provide, but I won’t ask YOU to put trust in this.

Today, I only promise you that there are many of us here in my country who know we are citizens of the WHOLE world and who think beyond our own comfort and our own religious and political values. There are many of us who know that poverty and injustice ACROSS THE GLOBE are also our concern. We were not enough to keep this terrible man out of office, but we are not few.

I thank you for your friendship and for welcoming me into your nations, your homes, and your lives. I know you are with me in my grief today. But somehow (I don’t pretend to know how), we must not let fear rule. It isn’t fair for me to look to you for words of hope (though I’ll take them if you have some), but I do believe that humanity is evolving toward wholesomeness and justice in spite of what this looks like.

Love to you all.

How Do You Know When It Is Time to Make a Change?

“If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” –Abraham Maslow

The weekend before last I participated in the Northwest Passage Ragnar Relay. This is a 192-mile relay run that snakes its way mostly on back roads from the Canadian border down to Whidbey Island, where teams are rewarded with pizza and beer for being crazy enough to stay awake and on the move for nearly two full days. I was runner number twelve on our team of twelve—the last runner, a position I’m used to and comfortable with.

On one of my legs (the second one of three), the one that started at 5:30 on Saturday morning, I ran for nine miles alone over rolling hills on streets surrounded by evergreen trees. I watched the morning gently emerge and appreciated the coolness in the air even as I was beginning to feel the heat the day promised to burn down on the runner who would take the baton from me.

Because I hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours and was addled with fatigue, my attention was hazy. There wasn’t much traffic, so I didn’t fear a run-in with a car, but I did worry about getting lost. Runners were spread out so far that there were several points on the course when I couldn’t see anyone in front of or behind me. I was grateful that Ragnar had placed signs at every turn. This meant I could do the work of running—placing one tired footfall after the next in a rhythm that echoed the beat of the music playing in my ear—without pulling up the map of the route on my phone. I could focus on the task at hand until a three-foot high blue sign with a red flashing light and an arrow appeared on a street corner.

I never lost my way.

Only later, after a couple nights of good sleep, when I was reflecting on the race during one of my morning meditations, did I realize that those big blue Ragnar signs were a terrific metaphor for something I’ve heard many of my clients talking about in therapy sessions lately. At least five different people have recently said something like this to me: “All of a sudden, when my child left for college (or when my spouse died/when I received this diagnosis/when I got divorced), I realized something had to change. I can’t keep on in this meaningless job (or this cement jungle/this lifeless relationship/this breakneck schedule).”

My clients are naming something really important: Life sends us signs when we need to make a change. Events, be they crises or normal life-cycle transitions, are very often signals meant to tell us that it is time to up-level our commitment to life, that it’s time to turn a corner and change directions. Our circumstances call us to re-evaluate our approach to our activities and to our relationships (with self, significant others, work, the body, etc.).

Though change can be anxiety provoking, it’s also an opportunity to upgrade your self-image and renew your vision for your future. It is a chance to catch a second wind for the miles ahead.

I’d love to share with you what my clients are discovering in our work together about how to follow the signs to change direction.

Join me for a FREE tele-conference called:
How to Catch Your Second Wind:
Transforming into the Next and Best Version of Yourself

I’ll be sharing with you what I’ve been guiding my clients through:
The three key tasks that you need to complete in order to catch a second wind.
The number one habit you need to incorporate in your life in order to upgrade your Self-confidence.
How to master jumping over the biggest hurdle that keeps people stuck when they hit a crisis or major life change.

When: Wednesday, August 12 at 5:30pm Pacific Time
Where: On the phone. In the comfort of your own home.
How to sign up: Send me an email (clostman@live.com) with “Second Wind Workshop” in the subject line. I’ll send you the conference number and a reminder email.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” –Mary Oliver

(Note: If you don’t want to be added to my emailing list when you sign up for the tele-workshop, let me know.)

Those of you who have followed my blog for years have wondered where I’ve gone, I’m sure. I’ve been taking an unscheduled hiatus from posting here since shortly after we arrived home from Chile. To be honest, although my five months in Chile were wonderful—full of adventure and beautiful new friendships—it was also a time full of serious reflection for me.

One of the things that came to me while I was in Concepcion was a good old-fashioned sense of my own mortality. I began to think about how short time is on this globe, too short to let life pass without really committing to living out our fullest potentials.

Part of the reason I was reflecting on this is that I had downloaded the Feminine Power course by Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas, which I listened to whenever I ran alone on my signature route around the U de C campus. In the course, Claire and Katherine, two women I would call “evolutionary leaders,” talk about how right now, more than at any other time in history, western women enjoy the opportunity to be asking questions about self-actualization. This is luxury our foremothers did not enjoy (and a luxury many women around the world still do not enjoy) due to their location in the social stratosphere, financial dependence, and lack of available birth control. Claire and Katherine’s message—that to whom much is given much is required—really resonated with me.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to save the world. For many years, when I was involved in an evangelical faith, I thought that meant saving people’s eternal souls by telling people what they should believe. In the days since I gave up that notion, I haven’t been sure what my contribution on the planet should be, but I’ve always felt strongly that I wanted to leave this place better than I found it.

Only how? There are SO MANY causes I feel passionate about: saving elephants from poachers, cleaning up the massive island of plastic that lives in the ocean, protecting orca whales from toxins that may have been making the NW resident pods infertile in recent years, stopping human sex-trafficking and female mutilation, etc.

As I listened to the FP course over and over on my little runs, I came to a place of clarity. I had to come home and do what I was born to do: to bring healing to people who are stuck in their pain. I suddenly realized that I was perfectly positioned to see EVERY single one of my causes attended to because I had the gifts and skills to free people up out of their small visions of themselves so they can live bigger, more contributing lives.

I knew I had to go back to helping people tell their stories—in therapy and in memoir. When people tell their stories, they move beyond them.

So I’m on a new quest. I’m still running of course (I’m off to a half marathon as we speak), but I’m committing significant energy to growing my business(es) this year and next. For starters, I re-opened my therapy practice in the Seattle area and am also offering online memoir writing classes. Both of these endeavors are bringing me a lot of joy, but there’s more joy to come, too! I’ve hired a coach to help me develop a program that will help my clients quickly break through their inner glass ceilings so they can launch themselves into the causes that are meaningful to them (I’m calling it SHINE, of course).

So forgive my absence here on 7marathons7continents. I’ve been busy. Follow me here on my new quest. I can always use your cheerleading and encouragement. Running is the practice that keeps me centered, and the running community is my Sanga. I can feel your support.

Before I get to the “H” in SHINE, I want to tell you about a new development in my life:

Now for the “H” in SHINE

In the 7-week SHINE program I will be talking about how how you see yourself is directly linked to the choices you make in life. We will do a powerful visualization that will help you press through limitations that have held you in place or made you feel stuck. 

SHINE program details:
When: Seven Thursdays, beginning February 25. 4:00-5:30pm PST (with an additional 30 minutes afterwards for discussion applicable especially for writers).
Where: On the phone. Conference call-in numbers provided to participants.
What: Lecture, opportunities to be coached, homework assignments, bonus writing assignments.
Cost: $99 — To sign up, click here.

See the world through the eyes of a foreigner.
Hold your experience gently.
Invest wisely in relationships.
Nurture your core self.
Expect Life to support you.

In the next weeks, I’ll be writing an introduction to each of these ideas and then, at the end of February, I will be starting a 7-week group coaching session for anyone who would like to go deeper with me into the practices I’ve been developing based on these principles (see details about the group below). Let’s get started:

The “S” in SHINE

See the world through the eyes of a foreigner.

The Buddhists call this “beginner’s mind.”

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice.

Most of the time in this life, I (and I daresay I’m not the only one) walk about knowing—or believing I know—what I’m doing. I mean, I get up in the mornings and make my coffee the same way every day. I can do (and have done) it with my eyes closed. And from my morning coffee forward there are many tasks I complete that I can put on autopilot. Driving my car, for example, is like breathing: shift into first gear, let up on the clutch, push down on the gas. And then I’m in motion.
Furthermore, I grew up as the oldest sister with three younger brothers, a sibling position that gave me something of an expert complex early in life. Then I became a teacher, a therapist, a writer, and a coach. All of these roles have led me to feel I’m responsible for knowing what I’m talking about—or at least for putting on a good show AS IF I know what I’m talking about.
So it isn’t surprising that although I’ve been reading about Buddhist ideas for years and have appreciated many of the concepts and incorporated them into my life, the principle of “beginners mind” has always been a little bit elusive to me. I’ve struggled with how to bring an open curiosity and wonder to my daily life.
This last episode of travel cured that for me. When you go to a foreign land, you can’t expect anything to be as you knew it back home. Whether you like or not, everything is new. Toilets flush differently, the rules of traffic are different, time and timeliness function differently, and people don’t relate to each other using the same paradigms you rely on.
Here’s a concrete example (pun intended): The first morning I walked out my door in Concepcion, the rain was coming down hard. Even though rain irritates me, it is also oddly comforting. As someone who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, rain is familiar, centering even. “Just like home,” I said to my husband Bill that first day.
But as we walked the two blocks from our new apartment to the university where Bill would be working on his Fulbright duties, I saw that I was wrong. Walking in rainy Concepcion was not like taking a walk in our hometown.
The streets of Concepcion are flanked by sidewalks just as most city streets are around the world, but the sidewalks we treaded on at that moment buckled in places, crumbled in others, left off existing altogether here and there. Concepcion was the epicenter of one of South America’s largest earthquakes only a few years ago, after all. Though much has been rebuilt and reconstructed, the evidence of the big “terremoto” is still visible if you but look down.
Right away I could see that walking around town was going to require the concentration of trail running if I didn’t want to fall and break my nose.
Here is another example, more to the point: Because I possess a very limited vocabulary in Spanish, leaving our little apartment was at first anxiety provoking. What if the concierge, Julio, asked me something I didn’t understand? I had some shame about not being able to speak Spanish, so I worried about what Julio thought of me. How would I manage to communicate enough so that he would let me go on my way and stop requiring me to stand there looking like an uneducated, insensitive foreigner?
But in fact, my relationship with Julio is what helped me truly catch on to the concept of beginner’s mind. I pushed through my shame, and day after day, Julio and I stood at the gate and literally made up a means of communicating with one another. He is a kind, patient man who was willing to spend as long as it took to help me catch his meaning. We often started with charades and graduated to drawings. If all else failed, I ran inside to google how to say something in Spanish, wrote it down, and went back outside to read my scribbles to Julio. We sometimes laughed at our misunderstandings and at my mispronunciation.
I was a beginner. But Julio did not approach our conversations like an expert waiting for me to get up to speed; he attended to my imperfect and garbled language as if my way of communicating was every bit as legitimate as his was. Being on the other side of his patience taught me how to be a beginner with a sense of humor and a dose of nonjudgment. I began to feel free to make mistakes and experiment with new words because of Julio’s attitude.

To see the world through the eyes of a foreigner, or a beginner, we have to remember that we really aren’t experts at living—we are experimenters. We aren’t expected to know what we don’t know, to understand what we don’t understand, or to have an edge on anyone else. And this is oddly both disconcerting and freeing.
I want to continue to practice seeing the world through new eyes now that I’m home. I want to bring the same curiosity and openness to my life and relationships that I exercised when trying to figure out how to say, “Can I buy a token for the dryer?” And I’d like to invite you to join me in this practice.
I made a decision during my first month in Chile to suspend judgment; it was the only way to stay sane in a place so different from home. Even when frustrated by confusion over an interaction or a different way of doing something, I began to tell myself, “Don’t decide what anything means. Just let it be what it is.”
We are meaning-making creatures, all of us. When something happens, we try to toggle it into some place in our schemas that helps us to make sense of it. We do it all day every day. Someone pulls into the parking space we planned to pull into and we decide he is a “jerk.” Someone lights a cigarette on the trail we run on every morning and we decide she is insensitive. But when you are a foreigner in a foreign land where you don’t make the rules, you have to suspend this meaning-making.
Staying open frees us up from misery because we aren’t clinging to how things ought to be, to how they do or don’t fit into our expectations. We simply notice what actually IS.

I encourage you to embrace a “foreigner’s mind” this week. What kind of space might open up in your mind and heart if everything you looked at was new to you? If you didn’t try to quickly categorize events and people into your familiar internal filing system?

In the 7-week SHINE program I will be talking about howpeace of mind is directly linked to the practice ofbeginner’s mind. We will do two powerful exercises that will shift the pressure we feel to be experts in so many areas of life (challenging perfectionism and shame), and we’ll create a statement of intention to move us toward an experience of real joy (even without knowing what the future holds).

SHINE program details:
When: Seven Thursdays, beginning February 25. 4:00-5:30pm PST (with an additional 30 minutes afterwards for discussion applicable especially for writers).
Where: On the phone. Conference call-in numbers provided to participants.
What: Lecture, opportunities to be coached, homework assignments, bonus writing assignments.
Cost: $99

To sign up go here.