It’s a wonder any of us ever actually choose to get married, much less decide that we’re in love with another person and want to have a relationship with them.  Let’s face it, according to a  2011 Pew Research marriage survey, marriage is at an all time low in America at 51% of adults getting married. Pew goes on to say that,   Having a successful marriage is “one of the most important things” in life for 36% of adults, according to a 2011 Pew Research survey. An additional 48% said it is “very important but not the most” important.”

Later this afternoon, I’ll be interviewing Marcia “Naomi” Berger who is known globally as the Marriage Maven, about her latest book, “Marriage Meetings for lasting love: 30 Minutes a Week to the Relationship You’ve Always Wanted” on BTR’s Hope42Day.    When the publicist first sent me Naomi’s book I was at once interested to have a guest who could offer tools to my listeners about having a good marriage but also hesitant because “I’ve already been there and done that…hasn’t everybody?”

But, no, not all of us have created a vehicle that cultivates and supports a loving marriage for the long haul. That’s why many of us are still Googling to find the answers and why my friend and fellow web radio host Psychic Tee has a clamoring of listeners calling in to her shows, especially when she offers advice and readings about love and marriage.

For the record, there should be a special award given to my husband for sticking it out with me as we muddled through the first decade of our marriage.  Along the way we learned to remember not to take each other for granted and not to throw things at each other (physically or verbally).  24 years later, we have found lots of ways to enjoy each other and be grateful for our time.  Thankfully, we’ve always seemed to find ways to make each other laugh. For example, I wish I could secretly take a video of David dancing to the theme song from the TV Show Castle (which he does every time we watch it and makes me laugh every time) but you’ll just have to click on the hyperlinked Castle and imagine it for yourself.

Listen to what Marriage Maven Naomi Berger has to say about Marriage Meetings  and keep in mind, all good things come to those with patience and the willingness to work on themselves!

The first time I really wrestled with mortality and reality was after a weekend of psychedelic imbibing that pretty much burnt away any filters my brain and consciousness came with and any defenses I had created along the way. My response was to dive into intense fear of being alive with constant panic attacks and severe anxiety. Nothing brought me peace, except my big red Golden Retriever who kept a watchful eye on me as my serenity sentry.

The blessings from this time were plentiful including getting into some much needed therapy and finally sobriety. During this journey, I cobbled together a belief system and spiritual path created from many discoveries and learnings which helped me to find peace about death. I believe this acceptance allowed me to be there for others in their time of grief and also for friends who were making their own transition from this life to the next.

Two “teachers” come to mind this holiday season as it seems many of us are experiencing a dance with death. One is a friend I’ll call “N”. N and I were part of a group of women (he being the only male) who explored and investigated all kinds of spirituality and psychic worlds. Our whole intent as a group was to learn how to help in healing animals, people and the planet. About a year into our studies, N found out that he had AIDS. We all gathered around him and loved him through the next two years until his passing. I will be forever grateful to N for allowing us to experience his most intimate experience of life in his last years on Earth. One of the lessons I took from N was that each person’s choices to how they handle their illness, life and death is ultimately their choice! And the best way I could help N was not to try to save him with all the ideas, information and knowledge that I possessed but rather to love him and accept him fully where he was at even though he chose a different way to handle his disease than I thought I would have chosen for myself in the same situation. I learned that this kind of all purpose accepting love would break my heart open to grow even bigger.

The other teacher I’ll call “I”. “I” had beaten non-Hodgkin Lymphoma 11 years prior to when I met him. A year later a cancer came raging back that was not Hodgkin. My friend “I” handled his prognosis in a way that I will always hope that I would follow if God forbid I found myself in his situation. In the beginning, he held a large pot-luck party with friends and family to let them know about his diagnosis, the process and how he wished to have his time unfold with all of us along the way. He gave us all permission to have our feelings and to be there for him (if we chose to) in our own special way. Some cooked meals, some cleaned house, some took him to appointments. “I” definitely took the power out of his death sentence. His life and how he chose to handle his last years encouraged me to become the kind of person that I always hoped I could be. The last week on Earth, I picked him up from an appointment and we went for an early lunch at Magnolia Cafe with his constant companion of the oxygen tank. I was so grateful for our conversation about life, and what was on the other side. And he was able to shed some tears about the beauty of it all and also some pain and sadness. I’m so grateful that I was able to just be there and hold the space without interjecting myself.

Who knows the whys and wherefores of this life that we are all living right now. We’re all really just doing the best we can as a result of the choices we’ve made up until now. I will tell you that, for me, I’ve learned that in illness, dying or death situations going fully into the love that you have in your heart and allowing it to break through the crusty constraints you’ve let settled around your heart is the way to peace. A warm kind of peace.

Break through to the peace. Love will take you there.

Today I had a conversation with a very good friend, who I’ve known for twenty years. She said she was having a sort of identity crisis that got kicked off when meeting some new people in a high-powered public setting and they asked what she did and since she was project less at the moment, she became tongue-tied and they moved on politely to the next person. Now, I am sure that this particular friend is just super sensitive to what all is going on with the planets right now (don’t ask me, look up my friend the astrologer Laura Waldman for insight at www.laurawaldmanastrology.com).

But I noticed that when my friend described a couple of reactions that she has had from some high-powered women, I felt really sad. I felt sad that those women did not have the awareness to realize what an incredibly special woman was standing before them. I felt sad that even in the year 2010, we humans still seem to be so focused on WHAT WE DO and not on WHO WE ARE.

This friend of mine has been such an important spiritual teacher to me through all kinds of thick and thin that I’ve been through over the last twenty years (and that’s in more ways than one!), she has a deep knowledge about life, about God, about animals and plants and if all that isn’t enough there have been delicious moments in our friendship when she makes me feel like I am about 8 years old—especially when we giggle so much I fear that I will pee in my pants! I am so grateful that I have the capacity to be aware of so many special people who are in my life today. Sometimes I feel like I must be in the center of an overflowing waterfall of lovely people. Real people. People who would be there for me (and have been there for me) when the rubber hits the road and the mud is flying all over the place.

These kind of people all around there for you too. It’s all about how deeply you’re willing to pay attention. How many more stories, fables or morals will we have to hear before we get it that WHAT WE DO is NOT WHO WE ARE? Sure, it’s great if you can run a multi-million dollar company, but I think it’s more important when you can enjoy the people you meet along the way because of whom they are and who you are, not because of what they can do for you.

I was thinking today of a friend that I’d become connected to on Facebook who is a fellow Coach and has gone through the same Coach Retreat training as I have. As I was thinking of this person and some other friends that I’ve gotten to know on FB, I had a warm glow in my heart for them because of how loving and sweet and caring they’ve been to me with absolutely no hope of gain from me other than my friendship. What is more important than that?

Believe me, if someone like me who can be one of the most skeptical people on this planet when it comes to other people can recognize the beauty within so many people and feel a genuine love for them I just know that you can as well. Do I really get angry at human actions and thoughts sometime? Oh, you know I do. Do I feel disappointed in human beings sometimes, of course I do. But if you think about it, statistically, out of billions and billions of people on this planet the odds are that there must be quite a large number of pretty amazing people out there for us to notice and enjoy. At least, that’s where I prefer to put my attention.

Who are you really? Follow your heart, it will always tell you the truth.

Love you!

Being married to a geek head comes in very handy at times and I am very grateful for all of my “honey’s” traits. I mean, at least he has something to show for his geek-i-ness such as being incredibly good with the computer and inventing all kinds of things to make home appliances work better. He’s almost a mad professor inventor scientist but I don’t think he’s created a time machine….that I know of…..!

Take right now for instance, he got a coke out of the fridge, drank it up and then disappeared from our office for about ten minutes and came back with the can all cut up and his cell phone inside of it. It seems that our cell phones are not getting as good of reception and so my loved one saw this invention on YouTube for creating a buffer for your cell phone from your computer. Better than paying the $190 we saw on E-Bay for a cell phone booster!

And there was the time that we were planning to go scuba diving at the Flower Gardens in the Gulf Coast in November when he proceeded to buy a thick mil wet suit that we didn’t have in our collection. I found him floating around in our swimming pool in the middle of November like a mini-Shamu that had escaped from Sea World. It would have never occurred to me to do that but his reasoning totally made sense when he reminded me how a wet suit works (water floats through it and gets warmed up by our own body and then holds the warmth in place) and that the ocean would be very cold in November. He wanted to test it out for himself so that he would be prepared for what the cold water would feel like since all we’d ever dove in was the warm Caribbean. Me? I ended up not going on that particular trip but I probably would have just waited until the trip itself to experience what it was like diving into the middle of the Gulf at night in freezing cold water and then figured out what to do on the way back to the boat freezing my patootie off!

Being married to a geek is great because he is so focused compared to my splintered off thinking patterns. Whereas I will think a multitude of thoughts in any one sitting, he will follow through one or two till he feels comfortable with their completion. And get this, he actually reads directions!! Can you believe it!? And also follows written instructions. After twenty years, some of his behaviors are rubbing off on me finally because I’m noticing more and more that it is occurring to me to read the directions to something first instead of just trying to figure out how to get from point A to point Q. After ten years of riding around with him in his Mazda with his radar detector, I finally understand which of the four buttons i need to press when the durn thing goes off like Will Robinson’s robot in the middle of a shopping center parking lot (reference to a very old TV show called Lost in Space from the sixties)….but it wasn’t from reading the directions…I just chose to listen attentively as my pilot explained it to me.

When we first got together, I was attracted to my husband because of his smoldering personality. We made it through the first seven years out of shear respect for each other and both having hard heads. For awhile, his inner geek would bug me because I did not understand the “code of the geek”. Somewhere along year 13 or so, I began to see the light and learned how to enjoy how my husband thinks and “is”. His sense of humor now makes sense to me. Like one time when we were having a close moment sitting at the edge of our pool and looking out at the wildflowers that had taken over our lawn, I asked him “what are you thinking?” and he replied, “about rocks”….and he was serious, he really was thinking about the rocks in our yard and how to move them and use them etc. We had a really good laugh over that! Today we use that discourse in many situations when I am trying to dig further down the rabbit hole than necessary.

If my husband is a geek, I’m not exactly sure what that makes me because it turns out that I am very interested in a lot of things that he is interested in but just don’t have the fortitude or tenacity to go after them like he does. Furthermore, I don’t know why a geek would want to be with someone like me who likes to dance through life like a whirling dervish but I can tell you for sure that there is a huge plus side to being married to a geek.

I’ve been writing letters to the voice within me (who I call “God”) since the beginning of May. Last night I sat out on our front porch to write my letter to God for the day and simultaneously attract my cat, K.C., out of her dark hiding place to come in for the night (she had been hunting a rather large mouse at dusk). The breeze was sultry and cool (amazing how non-stop days of triple digit heat can make evenings in the 80’s seem cool)….. K.C. never showed up (I suspect she munched on her mouse all night because she was very proud of herself when she greeted me this a.m.) but I did get in some rather important questions to God.

Such as, why is this writing down my soul stuff important? And, what questions do I need to be asking you God.

As usual, I had a montague of dreams that were shooting through my consciousness too fast for me to slow down until one scene. In this one scene I felt very afraid and I was screaming and then looked into a big mirror with a gold frame–still screaming–only to see someone else’s face so I shook my head a few times and then saw my own face. What was powerful about this was that the minute I saw my own face, I relaxed and calmed down and felt that internal peace. I also felt the loving presence of God behind me whispering into my ear that I was loved and that all was well.

Seems pretty significant to me. I’ve never “seen” my reflection within a mirror in a dream before. Maybe I can look for my hand next time?!

May you find that inner calm peace and self-love today and know that all is well in the present moment.