Once upon a time, there was a young prince who, when he came of age, left home to become the ruler of neighboring kingdom. His father, a wise and good king, told the prince that if he ever needed help, he should put a light in his tower window, and the king would send a special horse and carriage to carry him to safety.

However, the king also warned the prince that an evil wizard lived not too far from his new home. And when the prince turned on the light, the wizard would also see it and send his own horse and carriage to carry the prince off to danger.

This frightened the young ruler-to-be. After all, how would he be able to tell the difference? His father assured him there was a foolproof measure. Each time, before entering the rescue carriage, he was to closely examine the horse pulling it. A light-colored horse would always take him to safety, but a dark horse would always take him to danger.

As time went on, the prince was faced with many trials that came with ruling a kingdom – and each time, he put a light in the window. And for many months, because he was in such a rush to escape when he was upset, he failed to heed his father’s warning and forgot to look at the horse that came to get him. As a result, he often found himself on one painful wild ride after another. And he realized too late that in his hurry to escape, his impulsiveness was causing him as much distress as the condition from which he was trying to escape.

This wonderful fable from author and teacher Guy Finley shines a light on how we react when things get tough. Do we pounce into familiar unhealthy patterns or do we pause?

We are the only creatures that have the ability to pause and choose our response to situations. And unfortunately, we often react not respond, and in doing so, make a bigger mess out of an already messy situation.  Or we hop on whatever vehicle we use for comfort when we’re upset, whether that’s raging, shopping, smoking or drinking a martini. These are our red shoes: They don’t solve the problem or eliminate the pain – they’re just a distracting and often agonizing ride right back to the issue that upset us in the first place.

The power of a pause is priceless. Even waiting a second or two before you speak or act can make all the difference. When you stop and hit the mental reset button, it’s amazing how your perspective can change.

Back to our prince. I’d like to think he eventually learned to pause, observe his reaction to stress and elect to wait for the light-colored horse. Because when we do this – when we choose a positive response and not engage a negative pattern – eventually, the dark horse will stop showing up.

I don’t know when my first exposure to the word “surrender” was, but it very well could have been courtesy of the Wicked Witch of the West and her smoke-writing broom.

That visual was horrifying enough to persuade this 6-year-old that surrender was a dreadful, terrible, very bad thing.

But what if it wasn’t?

What if you could reframe surrender into something far more positive? What if surrender didn’t mean giving up, it meant opening up – to whatever is going to happen, knowing all will be well.

Life serves up all sorts of tough experiences – from the mildly irritating to the downright painful – and when we rely only on ourselves to fix every situation we very often bump up against our own limitations.

Instead of asking for help, we find ourselves gripping, grasping, clinging, clutching. “I can fix this,” “Just let me try this.” “Let me do it.” We analyze and agonize until we’re exhausted, but we’re no closer to a solution.

When a friend once asked me if I’d tried just surrendering a particularly vexing project, I was aghast. What? I should just sit here and do nothing and wait for the dogwood bush to burst into flames and intone instructions? Mon Dieu! How could that help?

Thankfully, this friend is very patient with me. She explained the idea of surrender as  letting go, not giving up. She reminded me what was in my control – like tapping into my inner wisdom and leveraging others for ideas.

Then – and this is the really important part – after I had done my best, I was to let the outcome go. That was uncomfortable and unnerving. But I did it anyway. And remarkably, in this particular situation, solutions began falling into place like the tumblers in a complex lock disengaging in succession.

Surrendering outcomes, not beating our heads against a wall, not feeling responsible for fixing the world – all are very difficult to let go. But anything we’ve learned to do, we can unlearn.

And as New York Times best-selling author Gabby Bernstein says in her new book, The Universe Has Your Back, “The moment you embrace your peace within and surrender the outcome is the moment the Universe can truly get to work.”

When Dorothy found herself abruptly dumped in Oz, her first thought was “How do I get back home?” She pleaded with everyone around her, believing they possessed some special power to make this happen. But in the end, Dorothy understood she — and she alone — had the ability to change her situation.

I was reminded of this yesterday listening to a friend talk about change. Powerful change. The kind that picks up your life and redirects it like a tornado picking up a car and setting it down on an entirely different freeway miles away.

And while it may be triggered by an external event, transformational change always starts from within, whispered into consciousness by that quiet voice that tells you it’s time to grow, go to the next level, live your purpose.

The right path doesn’t necessarily equal the easy route. Sometimes the right thing to do is the most terrifying option. It’s like you’re at the door to the next phase of your life, and your heart is telling you “Walk through,” but your head is conjuring up all manner of monsters and misery on the other side.

We all face these doors. They might be the “leaving an unfulfilling job” door, or “letting go of a bad habit” door or “leaving an abusive relationship” door.

Some people listen to their heart, get the message the first time, turn the door knob and move through.

Some of us walk up to the door, knowing it’s the right thing to do, but then listen to the misguidance from our small self who wants nothing to do with change. So, we move on and ignore the pull.

But if the change is necessary to our soul’s growth, and we continue to avoid the door, the Universe will drop-kick us there until we get the message.

The obvious question is why do we resist? One reason is because given the choice between certainty (or the familiar) and uncertainty (change), most of us will choose certainty – even if that means continuing to muck around in a painful situation and rationalize why it’s safer to stay there.

But a more empowering question is how do we get ourselves to open the door and walk through? I think the answer there is faith and trust – that no matter what happens, we’ll get through it. And at least from my experience, life has always been extraordinarily better on the other side. Always.

I wrote the following poem when I was confronted one of life’s doors of change recently. (And yes, I stepped through – this blog was the result.)

Entering the Arena

I am at the arena door.
I have come a long way to get here
I’ve studied every route, every entrance and exit
What to wear and how to present myself.

I hear the howling and the roar from inside
Then the silence and I am afraid.

Perhaps I should come back another day.
Another year.
Another decade.

Yet something pulls me through
And inside, there are no lions waiting for me
Just kittens playing
And the whole world applauding.

Everyone has their own inner critic committee – the group that holds wild parties in your head, starts food fights and generally tries to unseat your serenity and centeredness.

Here’s my cast of characters, who may have made guest appearances in your head as well:

The Judge – The leader of this band of critics, she revels in pointing out my latest wrinkle (literal or figurative), flaw or faux-pas. Her favorite words are should and shouldn’t, and she’s quick to cite case-law (aka past transgressions) as irrefutable evidence of unworthiness.

The Skeptic – Always quick to dose my dreams with doubt: “Are you sure you can do that?” “You’ve never done that before.” “You’re not qualified.”

The Perfectionist – A study in two extremes – either inaction (“You hadn’t better try this because you won’t be good at it”) or perpetual action (“Just a little more tweaking and it will be done. Oh wait, here’s another spot you missed.”). Both are aimed at acquiring external approval.

The Drama Queen — Always ready to give an Oscar-award winning performance on making Mt. Fuji out of a speed bump.

The Salesman – A pushy dude who’s quick to shove me into acting on whatever fearful thought pops up. “If you don’t act NOW, the price will triple tomorrow.”

The Jackhammer – He just loves noise and making negative thoughts fly around like chunks of cement and rebar. When he and the flying monkeys get together, well, it’s just nasty.

So what do you do when they decide to hold an impromptu meeting or food fight? The first thought that comes to mind is to bind and gag them, heave them into a really dark part of your psyche, and pretend they’re not there.

Unfortunately, they’ll find a way to escape. It may not be tomorrow, or next week. But one day, when you’re puttering around peacefully, they’ll hold a jailbreak. And like any negative thought, they will have grown stronger in the darkness of denial.

New York Times best-selling author Pam Grout says a negative thought is “temporary until you decide to invite it in for martinis and offer to make up the guest bedroom.”

So today, I try to listen to the committee’s input (up to a point, but not including martinis and the guest room). And I look for the lesson. If the Perfectionist has me running in circles, I need to become aware and remind myself that I’m perfectly enough just as I am. If the Drama Queen rants about the sky falling, I can remember to accept a situation for what it is – not more or less. If the Skeptic beleaguers me about not being qualified to write a blog, I can remind her that because I am the only Me on the planet, no one else has the exact same perspective and experiences.

Now I’m off to a meeting of the Fan Club Committee. They’re a lot more fun.

I’m sure at some point someone will land on this blog hoping to find a good deal on Manolo Blahniks. (And it’s ironic that this blog came to be named after shoes, because I couldn’t be any less interested in footwear. I dislike buying shoes, and have four basic pair that last me all year long.) But the mental footwear – those ruby slippers and red shoes – is another story.

The inspiration for this comes from my sister-in-law, who, after reading the blog, came up with a list of her red shoes (which she called her danger zone) and her ruby slippers (life enjoyment). Thank you Dawn!

So in no particular order, here are a couple pairs of red shoes and ruby slippers from my cerebral closet:

Red shoes:

• Self-criticism and judgment: This is the perpetual feeling of never-enoughness. The inner critics, while not as mouthy as they used to be, are still alive and well and ready with a nasty barb anytime I am less than perfect. As my sister-in-law says, this behavior is flat-out destructive. Sometimes the only thing that works is to internally respond to the critics: “I hear you, but I don’t agree with you.”
• Control, control, control: Wanting to control everything and everyone is a fear-based behavior, that stems from my strong need for certainty and safety. But the harder I try to control people and events, the more internal chaos I create. I’ve learned you will never gain control until you lose the need to have it. So I try to LET GO and remind myself that everyone is on their own path. Plus, the last time I checked, I wasn’t General Manager of the Universe.

Ruby slippers:

• Listening to my intuition: This sixth sense, which I feel in my solar plexus area, has never steered me wrong. That doesn’t mean it points me down the easy path – in fact some of the decisions I’ve had to make were gut-wrenchingly difficult – but when I follow my intuition, everything always works out.
• Allow and release: As uncomfortable as our thoughts and emotions can be, they can’t hurt us. So when I feel a wave of anxiety or resentment or other strong emotion, I try to just allow it to be, then release it by imagining I’m blowing dandelion fluff into the wind.

So what’s in your closet?

 

 

 

A zebra is grazing in a small cove. Suddenly, she hears the almost imperceptible rustle of a leaf, sniffs the faintest whiff of danger and goes on high alert. Her finely tuned fight or flight instinct kicks in, and she starts running as a lion slinks out of the bushes and begins the pursuit.

Thankfully, our zebra escapes, and minutes later, she is back in stasis, heart rate lowered, grazing in a new field. The zebra doesn’t consciously have to “let go” of her stressful experience. She just does.

We, on the other hand, will continue to spend countless hours in a conversation with ourselves about what happened. We return to the scene of the stressor, as if we could affect another outcome or go back and this time, say the clever line we thought of afterward.

Had I been that zebra, my internal conversation wouldn’t have subsided when the lion stopped the chase. It would have escalated: “I knew I shouldn’t have been eating in that area – my mother warned me about that neighborhood. Boy, that lion got real close. I need to work out more. I almost didn’t make it. What if I had died? Is there a zebra heaven? Maybe I need a bucket list. What if I see another lion tomorrow? OMG these horizontal stripes make my butt look fat. I need to go on a diet. Is that something in the bush? I think I maybe should just find a cave and stay there where I’m safe.”

The Buddhists have a term for this incessant internal chatter: Monkey mind. And there are moments when my mind feels like it has flying monkeys in it, those frightening beasts who did the Wicked Witch of the West’s bidding.

The key I’m learning is not to fight the “flying monkeys,” but to try to just become aware and observe – watch my thoughts swirl, watch my mind reach into the past and fumble into the future. If I don’t fight or latch onto the thoughts or emotions, they pass of their own accord.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, who wrote My Stroke of Insight, explains the process this way: “When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop. Something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body it takes less than 90 seconds.

“This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away. After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking – that are re-stimulating the circuitry – that is resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again.”

We don’t like to hear that our anger, or frustration, envy, resentment and distress are within our control. It’s much easier (and less upsetting for the ego) to blame someone else. But in the end, as Bolte Taylor says, after 90 seconds, it’s a good bet we’re the ones stoking the stress fires.

So the old adage about counting to 10 was useful, but neuroscience shows us that counting to 90 is a whole lot better.

 

Remember when we were kids, and the only time was Now? We didn’t fixate on what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow (unless tomorrow happened to be Christmas).

When I was young, I lived moment to moment — playing and running and cartwheeling with friends, absorbing the azure color of the sky, tasting the smells of the seasons. Every moment was a sensory picnic.

But somehow, as the years passed, I moved out of my body and into my head. And left to its own devices, my head would rather time-travel to anywhere but the present. It’s either frantically reliving yesterday or anxiously pre-living tomorrow – two insidious red shoes that look practical on the surface but hurt like hell when you wear them too long.

Somehow I learned to believe that if I worried hard enough about what might happen tomorrow or Tuesday or in 10 years that I could somehow prevent it from happening. Brené Brown says we’re trying to “dress rehearse tragedy so we can beat vulnerability to the punch.”

She is spot on. I have dress rehearsed thousands of imaginary tragedies that I never got to star in. Meanwhile, my poor body got to experience a constant cocktail of stress chemicals courtesy of worry and anxiety.

Living in yesterday isn’t any less harmful. Sure, it’s important to have a rear view mirror.  But if you drive using only your rear view mirror, you miss what’s in front of you and crash.

Intellectually, we know that it doesn’t matter how many times we visit our past, we can’t change it. We can only learn from the experience. Yet we keep churning and re-analyzing. What if I did this? Or what if I did that?  Maybe I looked at it wrong.  Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Maybe it was worse.

And before you know it, a day or a decade has gone by and you lost that, too.

There are several tools that help me out of these red shoes and bring me to the present. One is mindfulness – just trying to be exquisitely aware of where I am, what I’m seeing and hearing, the feel of the chair supporting my back or the cat purring in my lap. That forces me to be present and back in my body, even if for a moment.

Another tool is releasing or surrendering. When we realize our “power” to control past events is nil and our “power” to control or influence future situations is minimal at best, that’s when it’s time to resign as General Manager of the Universe, and let whatever you believe in take over. It requires a whole lot of faith, but yields a whole lot of relief.

And when I’m present, in both my head and my body, that’s when I feel powerful joy and true peace.

 

It has taken two years to get up the courage to start a blog, which, even as I write it, sounds incredibly silly – like saying it’s taken two years to work up the courage to try cotton candy.

But, as someone acutely sensitive to other peoples’ approval and disapproval most of my life, this was a huge leap. A huge step toward vulnerability.

My inner critics have done their best to completely throw me off track, with anxiety (what if people think I’m unintelligent, weak, a horrible writer, a loser), harsh judgment (what makes you think you have something worthwhile to say?) and downright fear (what if you fail at the only thing you’ve ever felt good at?)

Who these voices are and where they come from is the topic for a whole other blog. But suffice it to say, I’ve spent a lifetime running from them. And as the saying goes, wherever I go, there I am, and there they are, too.

So, this is my line in the sand.

I’ve spent the last 35 or so years dissatisfied with who I was – one aspect or another – and trying to find this ephemeral better version of myself. In my quest, I’ve read over 500 books from Anne Lamott to Zig Ziglar. Some were useless, some gave me incredible insights, and a few actually changed my life.

But I didn’t find Debbie.

I didn’t find her in a relationship, at a particular weight, in a career or in hobbies – all things  I thought at one point would be the finish line to happiness.

And finally, after all these years, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to find myself, I needed to free myself. And that’s what this is all about.

 

This is a blog about The Ruby Slippers and The Red Shoes.

The Ruby Slippers are the ultimate expression of our Highest Self – that part of us that is courageous and wise and visionary and able to manifest whatever we desire, named for the “magical” shoes bestowed upon Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

Most of us know the story: Dorothy traversed the dangerous and bumpy brick road, desperate to get what she most wanted (back home). She tried neurotic friends, The All-Powerful Man, even murder (well, involuntary manslaughter when she dumped water on the Wicked Witch). But in the end, Dorothy never needed any of those things: She had the power all along by clicking her heels together three times and visualizing what she wanted.

On the other hand, the Red Shoes represent the ultimate expression of our ego – that small-self part of us that tells us we are empty unless we obtain, achieve, or covet something. That manifests itself in dissatisfaction, cravings, addictions and never-enoughness.

The Red Shoes are named for the malevolent footwear from Hans Christian Andersen’s eponymous fairy tale, in which a peasant girl named Karen is no longer content with her well-worn red shoes and yearns for a pair cut of the finest silk. As the sad story goes, she gets the shoes, but they begin to control her, compelling her to dance day and night until she is forced to cut off her feet with the shoes on them.

The red shoes are symbolic of our vehicle to escape to anything we’re running away from, like a difficult boss, a stressful home life, grief, sadness, anxiety, whatever. Your escape could be work, alcohol, drugs, anger, shopping, or any number of things. These things may bring momentary peace, but done to addictive levels they also bring pain — and a lot of it.

This is about my search for my Ruby Slippers — my Highest Self — and the hard lessons I’ve learned about keeping the worst of the “red shoes” at bay. I’m far from perfect, although I tried so hard to be, doggedly believing that the road map to happiness and away from pain led outward rather than inward. It is this commonly held belief that keeps people buying, striving, seeking, drinking, drugging, whatever — and at the end of the day still feeling empty and asking no one in particular, “Is this all there is?”

But there is so much more. So much more. And it’s a magnificent journey.