I frolic with fairytales to unlock lessons about reality, and in the haunting presence of an Evil Queen, study the nuanced and dualistic nature of humanity.
I focus on where I fret away my precious life-force energy. I stay in that shadow of a wound until the lightness of surrender empties me forward.
I fail and I reframe the perspective.
I fall and in the free-falling, I find my faith.
I forgive, reluctantly at first, and then the force of the freedom that follows propels me to forgive more widely.
I fashion autumn ensembles fit for the stage: sheer black floral blouses with cranberry velvet boots, tutus with cherry bright sweaters, and an Eric Carle tee featuring the Very Hungry Caterpillar with pale, ripped jeans.
I fantasize, and based on the vision, I forge the next step.
Feeling flows me into the next step, into an October friendly and fierce with a soul-work that grounds me into fuller integrated being.
I fall into the spotlight as an honorary teen.
The show’s hostess calls for the crowd to cheer us on once more. I gulp at the applauding audience enthusiastic in supporting the city’s talented youth.
Little do they know I am almost thirty. I’m a last minute sub for this team of rockstar improvising teens, all of them current students in a class I co-teach on Sunday afternoons.
I am wildly moved when I get the text asking if I am free to Friday night play for a special show designed to highlight and celebrate Austin’s comedic blazing teens. The answer is an immediate YES.
As I share the stage with two middle schoolers and a sophomore, whose luminous leadership style consistently amazes me, I feel a lightning bolt of excited confidence. This complete sizzle of security directly speaks to the skilled abilities of my teammates.
We’ve got this.
Well…THEY’VE got this. I’m just here to support the spirited improvised fun ride.
My best improv teachers are kids, naturally. They live in the realm of imaginative play, innovation, fun for the sake of fun, and they’re REAL in their reactions, and the funny exists in the real.
As an adult improviser, I work to unravel all my mental conditioning so I can relax back into that freeing energy of spontaneity, joy, ridiculous whimsy.
Basically, I’m unwinding into the wisdom that is my younger self. I’m rediscovering faith in her, and simultaneously, I’m reestablishing comfortable trust in my adult self.
Cue duality.
Standing on that Friday night stage with my teachers, I reconnect with my inner child so I can endow a teammate with the magical gift of talking to animals, and I stay in my adult reasoning as I pretend to be her mother and voice real motherly complaints that tickle the audience.
The show ends with a warm wash of applause and we dash backstage and huddle around the curtain to listen in to the rest of the show.
I adore sharing this moment with them, these intelligent and creatively daring teens.
And I think about my teenage self, too. My teenage self wouldn’t have been ready for this. And I don’t judge her; I don’t belittle her. She needed to grow, needed to journey through certain experiences to become the woman I am today, and the woman I am today is youthful enough and adult enough to improvise play as an almost-thirty, honorary teen.
I fall out of illusion and fall into fairytales.
“You’ve given away your power. Your un-forgiveness has kept you trapped.”
I bulk at my counselor’s unexpected feedback.
Fancying myself on a crusade for justice, I rattle off the long list of the grievances to justify my actions. And as I rehash and replay, I begin to realize the resistance, the friction that signals an edge of change.
“Forgiveness,” the counselor calmly reassures me, “does not condone their behavior – because they’ve acted poorly, and I don’t like it. Forgiveness frees you from being controlled by their behavior. And right now, you’re being controlled by their behavior because you haven’t let it go.”
I draw in a long breath, inviting the fresh energy to stretch a little spaciousness within the stubbornness.
“Think back to how you’ve handled past difficult relationships.” Paper rustles across the phone line. I envision him reviewing the copious notes from previous telephone sessions that detail the catalyzing challenges of my late-twenties.
I scan the bumpy terrain of ex-friendships and narcissistic entanglements. In the retracing of betrayals, heart-breaks, and grudges, I notice that I have to mentally WORK to think about the hurts that once clutched and squeezed a tremendous amount of heart-space.
Each time, forgiveness liberates me from the haunting pains.
This is a journey I have traveled before, and I am destined to travel again and again. And this time, my quest for forgiveness is facilitated by my Floridian counselor and famous fairytales.
Snow White and the Evil Queen help me, and now I feel less guilty for my post-dinner Netflixing.
October stirs a mood for fantasy, the supernatural, the enchanted. So I follow the Netflix steps to “Once Upon The Time,” the ABC television series that recasts fairytale characters in our non-magical land.
I binge, hardcore.
Reenactments of ancient tales with a modern and clever twist assist as I contemplate duality – the dark and the light – that battle and coexist in every fairytale character, and in me.
The dualistic nature of the Evil Queen entrances me. She’s magnetic in power. Bold in vision. Passionate in a pursuit for revenge. Her backstory reveals the tragic and heartless death of her true love, and this unshakeable grief festers into an insatiable rage that retaliates in sinister acts against Snow White’s happiness. So there’s a reason for the fury, and the reason does not excuse, and provides an explanation to the conniving cruelty.
And after all the hellish havoc the Evil Queen lashes upon Snow White, the pure-as-snow princess forgives the queen, and in the forgiveness, unshackles herself of the Evil Queen and all lingering energy of her vindictive doings.
In the ABC show, Snow White radiates strength and emotional intelligence, and her forgiveness comes from wisdom, not from toxic positivity or spiritual bypassing which rushes and skips to turn-the-other cheek by glossing over the painful reality.
Watching a calm and confident Snow White forgive the Evil Queen reminds me of who I want to be.
In order to forgive, I spiral into the deeper chambers of my shadow self. I sit beside the darker waters spilling the wounds and the fears that led me to self-betray, and self-sabotage (because in this specific situation, I denied my intuition from brightly informing me that this was not in alignment, this was not serving my highest good).
In this reflective pool, I recall the people in question, and revisit when I loved them. This flickering of remembered connection, of our joint humanity, softens the reluctance.
I tend to see and celebrate the best in people. The best beams as their light, their soul-truths, their talents. And yet, sometimes this focus blinds me to their shadow, and how their light has yet to be integrated into their wounds, and their wounds yet to be integrated into their light.
As I befriend my shadow, make deeper peace with my fractures, I relax into a wholeness that lets me extend compassion to the Evil Queen and the people I perceive in my own 21st century fairytale to be the Evil Queens. They mirror my own self-righteousness. They reflect my own seeking to fit in and belong. This inherent human need to belong drives us all to make choices that we think will get us closer to achieving and confirming our connection, our place in the tribe, and if I was perhaps to step into their same backstory, maybe I would behave and make those same choices, too.
Because they are me, and I am them, and yet, I live in this dualistic world, so I acknowledge the pivotal distinctions as a being living in this dimension, and harness the teachings to forge and form the boundaries to self-nurture, discern and guide on how I proceed. And to proceed in a freedom fostered by a Floridian counselor’s wisdom and late-night fairytale watching TV.
I fall into step with the unicorns and superheroes.
In a city both far away and heart-beating close, a seven-year-old is shot while trick or treating. She’s dressed like a bumblebee. The bumblebee takes a bullet to the lower neck and remains in critical condition.
Instinctively, I place a hand to the heart. I pray. I breathe. I determine to direct wholehearted presence to the children in my yoga classes, up on the improv stage.
I fall into a sprint. I race across the school gymnasium’s carpeted floor with the bright-eyed yogi crew of first graders and kindergarteners. Yogi freeze dance: I pause the song request from “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” and call to shape-shift into werewolves. We howl and then race off again.
I fall into the tech booth and spotlight the improvisers with reds and blues and turn on the soundtrack to “WALL-E” as they makeup stories about space.
I fall into giggles as the teens transform the table on stage into a pogo-stick, a golf-cart, a park bench.
And in the hallway of the theater, in between the laughs, I think of the Bumblebee. And I pray. And I breathe.
And I pour all my life-force into listening as they recount their Halloween stories and tell me riddles. (What goes up and never comes down? Age. Ha!)
Everything becomes precious and everything is fleeting, and I feel distracted by a pain that grows louder and louder.
I fall back to a pattern with men that is too familiar. And I cry at 4am because I feel like a failure for falling for this, and for failing myself. This focus on how I feel, on how I can rise to take care of my needs, gives me a glimmer of hope. Perhaps I am growing.
I fall into the understanding that my pain is the way through. That my pain is not a wound to push to the side and fix in the after-hours. It’s through my pain that I am of service. My pain offers me the tenderness to relate, to cradle the sacredness that is a rough and raw life. My heart-break, my grief fuels my heroism. How would the heroine rally and rise? Now show up as her because you are her.
I fall back into Halloween, into a pink twilight that casts a spell-binding glow over the city. I stand on the hill in a tutu and velvet boots and think it’s been a beautiful and brutal fall, and my heart encompasses it all.
And the Bumblebee. When I stood on that hill and thought sad and lovely thoughts, where was she? And was the twilight pink where she was too?
All I can do is show up in my pain, and show up in my joy. And the pain informs for the joy and the joy illuminates the pain. The two coexist.
“It depends on the depth of my pain and the height of my joy on that particular day,” and I immediately commit Danielle LaPorte’s wisdom into a box of collected soothing affirmations and poignant and poetic sayings.
The depth of my pain. The height of my joy.
Both. Together. The pink twilight and the gunshot.
I serve by addressing my pain with the same lightness and seriousness that I address my joy.
The depth of the world’s pain. The height of the world’s joy.
Breathing together.