A photo of me with some of my paintings.  I included this photo in a recent blog post on “Creativity: The More You Use, The More you Have”

Please join me this June for a special month of a creative blogging experiment over at my other blog, Renascence:  http://leahrenascence.blogspot.com

I’m blogging every day for the month of June on a variety of topics, many of them on the creativity and personal evolution.  I’d love to have you visit me there!

The Dream

 written by Tara Rice Simkins, art by Leah Campbell Badertscher

Last week was rather extraordinary.

I believe (I hope) we all dream of, someday, our dreams coming true.

Last week, one of my dreams arrived in a big brown box on my front porch.

Actually, there were at least a hundred dreams wrapped up in that box, a hundred that seemed to just come all together at once.

Let me tell you the real story, though, about just a few of those dreams…

One of my dreams is that I have the opportunity to do what I love and to share it with others.  Long before I ever picked up a paint brush, which is to say, long before I finally had the courage to pick up a paint brush, I dreamed of being an artist.  I didn’t have any “rational basis” on which to build this “castle-in-the-sky” dream.  I didn’t (and don’t) have an art degree, I’d never painted much less had any formal training or education, I had no idea if I’d ever be good enough to make a living being an artist….and yet there was this internal longing that insisted, I am an artist.  Completely crazy.   And yet, it felt truer than anything else I was then trying to do.

Finally, against all logic and evidence, I decided to listen to my heart.  So I painted and, in an instant, my heart exploded with joy.

That was hour #1, day #1, week #1 of painting.  I hadn’t finished a single painting, much less sold or shown my work, but that experience of great joy told me all I needed to know:

Yes, this is something I’m meant to do.  Yes, I’ve always been an artist.

Now I’ve just decided that it makes a lot more sense and for a lot greater joy, peace, and fulfillment to be an artist that actually creates art.  Countless hours, days, and over five years later, I would do it for the pure love of doing it.  So the opportunity to also be able to share it with others heaps unthinkable blessings atop immeasurable blessings.

Next dream…

To work and collaborate with amazing people, people who are as big-hearted and deep-souled as they are gifted, and, together, to create projects, pieces, work, bodies of work, opportunities, experiences that bring as much goodness, love, meaning, beauty, healing, or peace to the world, to the others we want to serve, as the making of it brought us enthusiasm, fulfillment, and just crazy unfair amounts of fun!

Next dream…

To make great books.  Specifically, books that remind people of the great Goodness in the world, to remind them that they are that Goodness, and to encourage them to align their inner and outer worlds with that Goodness.

A short time ago, these three dreams (and many, many more) all came together and the result is a beautiful little book, The Dream.  

The Dream,written by an amazing woman, Tara Rice Simkins, is a modern day parable with a timeless and inspiring message about remembering your dreams. Tara’s elegant, lyrical prose is accompanied by soulfully rendered, one-of-a-kind paintings…my own!

The box of dreams that, literally, arrived on my doorstep!

As I mentioned, the book is just fresh off-the-press and copies are available through my on-line Art Shop.  I’ve also just listed in my Shop all the original paintings as well as matted prints of the originals that appear in the book.

In this post and in upcoming posts, I want to share with you a sneak peek into our book.

Today I’m sharing the genesis of the dream, which Tara describes in the book’s preface…

Writing this story was a gift to me which I want to share with you.  

An inside look at The Dream…

Tara and I, both in our creative endeavors and in our coaching, are passionate about empowering people to live their dreams and fall more deeply in love with their lives.  I’m thrilled that she asked me to collaborate on project that inspires people to do just that.  If you’d like a copy of your own, or to purchase one for loved ones, once again they are now available in my Art Shop .

Here’s to remembering…and living…your dreams-

XOXO-

Leah

Quick studio shots of a couple of my recently completed paintings, “POPPY DREAMS” and “AWAKE”

Dear Friends,

So much can happen in a month!  It’s been a little over five weeks since I sent out my last newsletter and it’s been a wonderfully, intensely creative time.

Since I last wrote to you in February, I hosted one of Fran Quinn’s (peerless poetry teacher and all around amazing life teacher) magical poetry weekend poetry workshops in my home.

I am in the process of finishing an audio series of my Soul Genius Coaching Program.

I’ve finished four new paintings – and three more are almost ready to hatch and take flight!  I’ve included a couple studio shots of two of the four new ones at the beginning of this article.  Originals as well as prints of these and the others will soon be up on my website.

I learned I’ll be teaching a segment of an exciting new course on discernment being piloted for University of Notre Dame freshmen students.  The course, which I am co-teaching with Notre Dame professor and all around luminous friend, Wendy Angst, is entitled, “Listening to Your Inner Voice: A Lifelong Exercise.”

I was also contacted to collaborate on a beautiful book project with an amazing woman, colleague, and friend, Tara Rice Simkins.  I met Tara almost a year ago at a leadership retreat and within the last few weeks she contacted me about a very exciting opportunity.  Long story short, Tara had written a beautiful narrative and wanted to know if I’d be interested in having my paintings featured as a companion to her story.  The turn-around was going to have to be fast (longer story), but I had several paintings in the works and thought I could finish enough of them to make the deadline if I really focused my efforts on painting.

Fast forward to today and the final draft of our book is off to print!  The book, titled The Dream, features Tara’s graceful, elegant prose and several of my paintings.  I loved having the chance to see the pdf version today and can’t wait until April 17th when it comes out in hard copy!  Below I’ve shared the preface Tara wrote as it explains the genesis of the book as well as its evolution.

As I mentioned, The Dream will come out April 17th and will be available for sale ($15) through my site (www.leahcb.com) and Tara’s.  If you’d like to learn more about Tara and the wonderful, important work she is doing mother, I’ve included her bio in this newsletter as well as links to her websites.

And, last but not least, some of the most intense creative work I’ve done this month has involved growing eyelashes, body fat, and billions and billions of neurons!  This is all according to www.babycenter.com, which also tells me that by the 28th week of pregnancy (which is right where I’m at today), my baby girl weighs about as much as a Chinese cabbage and is developing eyesight so that she can see light filtering through the womb.  The part that really gets me is where it says she can blink her eyes.  I can feel her kick right now, which is surreal enough, but thinking about her eyes blinking is like a zen koan.  My whole being is arrested just trying to fathom it.

In this video, I share that particular ritual as well as the other practice that has helped me achieve so many creative breakthroughs.  Most importantly, these practices have allowed me to fall more and more in love with whatever creative process I’m engaged in, from coaching and writing, to painting, motherhood, and creating a successful business.

If you are ready for your own breakthroughs and wanting to accelerate your own creative, personal, or spiritual evolution, I offer free initial consultations so that we can explore whether I’m the right coach for you.  Through the end of May I’m accepting a limited number of new clients.  You can check out the “Work With Me” link for more details or email me at leah@leahcb.com to schedule a free, twenty minute consultation.

All my best to you,

Leah

But what do you do when you’re doing everything you can to live from the heart but you have a bad day – or a long string of them – and things just don’t seem to be going your way?  You can feel anything but aligned and alive and it’s easy to feel lost, lonely, and disheartened.

In preparation for this piece and other projects I’ve been working on, I’d written pages upon pages on the necessity of things like vulnerability and beauty for living fully alive and how shame can steamroll your deepest and most earnest attempts at living wholeheartedly.  I had started writing this newsletter days ago with the intent that I would send out a beautiful and inspiring newsletter to kick-off my 34th year of life.  But, after a particularly long week that included an ER visit (all okay now), some events that felt like professional failures and personal rejection- after really getting my hopes up, and one crazy-town day too many of being snowed in with small children, it occurred to me this morning as I went for an extra-long birthday swim that there is a different kind of post that I am supposed to write today.  

It’s easy to love life when things are going your way.  But in addition to reminding yourself “This too shall pass,”what else can you do to find your way back to life’s sweet spot?

Yesterday I did not feel fully alive, wholehearted, or anything at all resembling beautiful – from my bad mood to my second-day mommy-yoga clothes, I was in an dark, ugly funk.  It was yet another gray and cold day in South Bend, I hadn’t gone to sleep until 1 AM and both of my boys were up by 5:30 – not giving me a chance to reflect and center myself before the day went from zero to 150 miles an hour and stayed with the accelerator stuck there all day long – no naps, no other adults, just a long day of cooped up, little boy hyperactivity, which, for whatever reason was at levels that I have never before witnessed and, try though I did to help them burn off energy constructively (why does it just naturally veer to the destructive?) or quiet them down (quiet time with books turned into a bed-jumping, pillow-throwing, sing-song-screaming tiny person rave) .  I knew my husband would never believe me how wild it was, so at one point I tried taking pictures, but all you can see is a grand mess and two short, fair-skinned blurs.  Bare-skinned blurs, to be exact. The four year old had decided that one more snowy and cold day outside was just the perfect occasion to strip down to his birthday suit and convince his two year old brother (who at least kept a diaper on, thank goodness) to join him.

I did see the humor this.  Plenty of times I found myself laughing (which does not work well when trying to use a “stern voice” and convince someone that, NO! They cannot answer the door for the Fed Ex man wearing no clothes!)… but there are some days when emotions (and, let’s be honest, pregnancy hormones) are raging, built up frustration gets the best of you, and on these kind of days laughing hysterically is not so far off from crying – which I did as well.  In the back of my mind, I was also still sorting through feelings of hurt and disappointment that were following me after experiences earlier in the week where I really stepped out, showed up, put myself and my work out there and made myself vulnerable and was disappointed, criticized, rejected.

The irony was, as I mentioned earlier, that I’d spent the last two weeks thinking intently and reflecting intentionally on living fully alive, wholeheartedly, vulnerably and with courage, and, importantly for all of these things, without shame (or, to begin with at least, with less of it).  Author and researcher Brene Brown says shame consists of essentially two streams of self-talk: 1. I am not good/I am not good enough, and 2. Who do you think you are?  I could recognize I was in the throes of shame both in going over my professional disappointments from the week (Clearly those disappointments are just proof that I shouldn’t be doing this…who did I think I was putting myself out there like that?) and in my harsh judgment of my parenting, blaming myself for my kids’ crazy behavior (A better parent would not have kids acting like this, or, a better parent would know to do x,y, and z to improve this situation).

All day I kept thinking of a line from a Florence and The Machine song, “It’s hard to dance with a devil on your back/So shake him off…”  The devil on my back is so often shame, and I so wanted to just shake it off and slip into embodying those words I had been thinking and writing about the last week – words that I really, truly believe.  I do believe and I do try to practice as best I can living gratefully, wholeheartedly, and in the stream of aliveness…so the fact that I couldn’t get to that place was just compounding my frustration and shame (again, the thought was who do I think I am to write about this stuff and be a coach if I struggle with it in difficult times myself?).

I’d say I’m fully aware that shame is the number one thing that holds me back/has held me back creatively, spiritually, professionally, and in relationships – with others, myself, and God – but there are still some times when I’ll be ambushed by an overwhelming wave of a negative emotion that seems to come completely out of left field.  In the beginning, it’ll seem vague yet intense, but after a little excavating I usually find the roots are in shame.  From the people I’ve had the opportunity to work with as a coach and teacher, I know I am not alone in this.  And yet it persists.

Perhaps because it is true that what you resist persists.  And that is what occurred to me this morning as I was swimming.  Just last night a friend was telling me that she hates to swim, mostly because she hates to be cold.  I completely understand this because although I swim on a regular basis and I love it, there was a time when I resisted it tremendously, to the point I would’ve said that I dreaded it.  It was when I was training to be a competitive triathlete, however, that I decided to dissect my heavy dread of swimming laps in order to understand it and maybe, just maybe, learn not to resist it and maybe even like it.  When I broke it down into its parts, I eventually found that if I was mindful and completely present through the entire process – from packing my bag to go to the pool; to the breath-by-breath, stroke-by-stroke, the act of swimming itself; to showering and dressing afterwards, that I actually, to my surprise, was able to fall in love with swimming.  Now it is not only one of my favorite forms of exercise, but it is really a form of meditation and prayer for me.  I often think as I’m moving through the water, that I’m swimming to find God.  And then there are those moments when I really drop down into the experience, am one with the moment, and feel as if I’m swimming with God.  I don’t recite a prayer or hear a divine voice in my ear, I just feel I’m at being in the presence of God, or that I’ve tuned myself into some kind of God-sending, God-receiving energetic oneness radio station.

Except for those moments when I first get into the pool and before I warm up.  I do not love that.  I still resist that.  I sometimes find myself absentmindedly fiddling with my goggles a bit longer than I need to because, almost unconsciously, I’m trying to delay that inevitable shock of entry into cold water.  But I have found a way not to hate that part, not to hate the shock, not to hate the cold, and not to think of it as “the bad part” of swimming.  I try to slip beneath those thoughts that are so flash-like and instantaneous that seem almost like a natural reaction and not what they really are, judgments, to just the underlying, indisputable reality of what is happening.  The flash thoughts are those like, “I HATE BEING COLD! AND I ESPECIALLY HATE BEING COLD WHEN I’M ALMOST NAKED!”  What’s really happening, just the facts, on the other hand, are the objective experiences of a body entering water of a certain temperature.  Skin pricks, muscles and lungs may contract, body may shiver.  And if this attention to the facts still doesn’t quiet the wigging out flash thoughts, then I just swim faster and tell myself I’m just uncomfortable and it’s a good practice for me to experience being uncomfortable without wigging out.  In other words, the thoughts can wig out, but I don’t have to.

(Just a little side note:  It just struck me how nakedness and near-nakedness seems to be a a recurring incident in this piece, but since vulnerability is one of my intended themes maybe that is an unintended but appropriate metaphor.)

And I was going through the uncomfortable start to my swim this morning, and noticing how I relaxed after I told myself I can do uncomfortable and unpleasant and still be okay, it struck me that I’d forgotten a very similar mantra I’d used when my boys were infants and waking up every 90 minutes through the night to nurse.  In times like those, there’s no getting over being exhausted.  What I didn’t want to do was spend so much of their babyhood and my young motherhood wishing things could just be different then they were, because it struck me that doing that was actively rejecting and resisting the life (and lives) that were unfolding in front of me.  All I could do was resist it and miss it, or  cease to resist and began to open it.  This was not easy and I needed a way of reminding myself, so I fell upon the following words,  ”All of my life is my life.”  I’d recite variations of this to myself when I felt my head start to swirl with overwhelm and my heart start to jam with frustration.  THIS TOO is my life.  Right now, just like this, no other way, this IS my life.  Not just the restful, bliss-comes-easy, pretty and peaceful parts.  Wholeheartedness, connection, oneness, aliveness don’t come automatically in those moments.  You still have to pay attention.  It’s just a lot easier in those times because you don’t have external factors like a red-faced, screaming, infant who refuses to sleep the sixteen hours newborns are supposedly said to sleep causing your mind to scream on the inside.

I share these stories because I have a feeling that you, too, probably have some variation of the crazy kids, professional disappointments that feel like deep personal rejections, cold water shock, and screaming baby in your own life.  If you are reading this, I’m guessing that you, too, have a desire to live fully alive and yet sometimes find yourself in external situations or the internal hot mess of shame, temporarily or prolonged, that make living wholeheartedly and vulnerably so hard, if not nearly impossible.  Just know that it is not impossible.  What is impossible is trying to rearrange, control, and manipulate the outside world so that you never have to experience pain, loss, discomfort or difficulty.  What I have to learn over and over again is that in those moments when I just feel like I’m going crazy and about to lose it, is that I’m trying to do the impossible.  I’ve found  trying to change or arrange or somehow influence a difficult external situation to make it into an easy one, because then if things are easy, I won’t have to be uncomfortable.  But this is just another form of trying to avoid vulnerability.  In waiting to forge ahead because if I think I’m somehow doing it wrong if I haven’t found the easy road – you know, the one where everyone thinks your fabulous, loves everything you do, and you’re one of those people who just always have their stuff together –  if I miss the truth that aliveness is a moment by moment journey that you can only enter into if you open your heart to life as it is, right now, in this moment, I might never plunge wholeheartedly into the wilderness and taste all its fruits, sweet and bitter.  I might never experience my own vulnerability and courage, my one and only true life.

Stained Glass Magnolias, original acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48, Leah Campbell Badertscher

Two updates and also a poem I love that I just sent out with my newsletter and wanted to post here as well.  If you’d like to receive my newsletter, you can sign up at: www.leahcb.com/free-updates/  Just look to the right sidebar for the prompt to enter your email address – I’d love to have you!  

ARTS CAFE!

This Sunday, November 4, from 10-5, I’ll be setting up shop at South Bend’s Near Northwest Neighborhood’s Arts Cafe.  I’m taking original (BIG) paintings and also prints (among them, the Blessed Baby portrait above and the Stained Glass Magnolias painting in the feature article) .  It should be a really great event, and if you’re in the South Bend area, I’d love to see you there!  My booth will be inside the home at 718 Cottage Grove.

With over 1,200 people attending the Café is an opportunity for the NNN, Inc. to open its newly renovated homes to the public and celebrate all that is great about living in the Near Northwest Neighborhood. Local artists fill the homes and street with their creations.  Live musicians perform all day long while neighbors and visitors greet each other, grab a bite to eat, and enjoy the Autumnal weather.  You can find more information at http://www.nearnorthwest.org/resident-committees/membership-committee/arts-cafe.html

Release

original 24 x 48 acrylic on canvas, Leah Campbell Badertscher

If you’re reading this, I suspect that deep down (or even close to the surface), you have a sense that you are called to play bigger in your life…but you are either just a little confused or completely lost as to how to make that happen.

On one hand, you sense you have gifts and so much to offer.  In the moments when you allow yourself to consider that, you are filled with hope and possibility.  Then the tables turn to doubt and in the next moment you are chastising yourself for grandiosity or going through a mental checklist of the impossibly tremendous amount of work it would take for you to achieve that potential.

You sense your potential and for moments at a time, maybe you can actually imagine well enough to feel what this life – of you being fully alive and more fully expressing your potential – could be.  You may begin to take action on it and maybe you even make substantial headway, but then something happens.  You lose steam, you lose momentum, you start to feel confused, disorganized, you doubt yourself, and you begin to feel like you are sliding back down the slope of that steep mountain, right back to where you started.

Maybe you want to write a book, advance in your career, change careers, heal a troubled relationship, start a movement, find a cure, expel your demons, move to the South of France, lose weight, or fall in love – for good this time… You are smart.  You research, you read, you study, you apply.  You are hopeful, optimistic, full of energy and enthusiasm.

The going gets tough.  And you expected this, you are a tough cookie.  You know how to persevere.  You don’t quit.  You keep throwing yourself into the work.  And yet, the results don’t come.  Progress doesn’t come.  The harder you try, the more you feel like you are churning your wheels in the mud.  You get confused, disillusioned.  You want to quit, but you’re not a quitter.  Maybe you even start to hate that about yourself – the part about not being a quitter.  You wonder why you just can’t go along and be happy with a “regular” life like “everyone else.”  Why can’t you just suck it up and do the 8 to 5…or even 90 hour workweeks…isn’t that at least respectable whereas chasing after a dream…well, that’s just selfish, childish, and indulgent.

But you keep at it, you do your best.  But maybe your best isn’t cutting it.   You can’t figure out what you’re doing wrong, you begin to wonder if you were just silly and naive to imagine all these things about your potential and the beautiful possibilities in life.  You don’t want to be irrational, so you do (we all do) the most irrational thing possible…you begin to doubt yourself.  You don’t want to give up, but you’re so disheartened.  This was your dream and now you can’t even find the heart to work towards it.

Maybe you’ve put yourself out there.  You took risks.  Announced to the world, to the universe, your intention.  You proved you’re willing to lose face if it means saving your soul.

Then you put your money where you soul is.  Which would make for a great story if it all panned out, but when it doesn’t and you have bills coming do and still income to show for “going for broke”… you feel less like an inspiring heroine and more like a humiliated, broke fool.

You’re suffering from the worst kind of disappointment of all – you’re disappointed in yourself, you’re disappointed in life.

So, what went wrong?  What goes wrong?

Nothing.

I’m convinced nothing goes wrong.

If you’re still reading this, you’re not done yet.   Even if you think you’re bouncing along rock bottom (or not too far above it), you still have a lot of fight left in you.  I know that from where you are it doesn’t seem like it.  That’s actually your biggest problem right now.  Your biggest problem is not that you haven’t made whatever it is happen yet even though you think you’ve exhausted your resources.  Your biggest problem is not any of those things that have gone wrong.  Your biggest problem is not that you were wrong about your potential.  You weren’t – unless it was maybe that, even in your wildest dreams, you haven’t begun to glimpse the limits of your potential.

The problem is is that you aren’t able to see your potential in this moment.  Not the you that you will someday be, but the you that you are right now.

You are momentarily experiencing a disconnect.  Experiences like disappointment and failure can overwhelm us, obscuring our vision of our true selves.  They can be disorienting, like a fog.  You are not the sensation of disappointment or the experience of failure or even the pain of a more devastating loss.

Then who are you?

That’s the question you have to ask yourself.  Over and over and over again.

Who am I?  Who am I? Who am I?

And allow yourself a clearing in time and space for the deepest answers to arise.

Doing this has helped me immensely through some dark and difficult times, but it has also been those dark and difficult times that allowed me, sometimes forced me into, knowing myself so much more deeply.  It was in those times that I realized so many of my prior ideas about who I was and what I was capable of were only scratching the surface.  It’s this kind of work that challenges you to your limits, beyond your limits.

Something else has also been of immeasurable value to me, whether I was venturing into some dark pain, healing deep wounds, or “simply” trying to paint better, write better, parent better, be a better friend and wife, coach better, or get a business off the ground.  (I say “simply” in quotes because I truly believe that each of these endeavors I’ve listed are just as valid and deeply important as a spiritual practice as some of the “deep” stuff.)

And this “something else” was to have someone else, a friend, a coach, a teacher, sometimes even a stranger, help me to remember who I really am.

This something else has been to give up the idea that I have to do it all on my own, which includes giving up the illusion that anything we do is on our own.  It has also meant that I don’t just wait for luck or happenstance to bail me out.  If the right help sometimes does fall into your lap, but I’ve also found it to be so true that the the moment you take one step, the Universe really does take a thousand steps towards you.

At first I just read and read, still trying to learn and do it all on my own.  But it wasn’t until I took what felt like a huge risk and not only began to ask for help but I began to invest in myself.  Sometimes the commodity I exchanged was cash, and lots of it - whether it was from personal coaching, group coaching, art classes, writing coaches, or attending workshops and retreats.    At other times, the commodity I exchanged was my bare soul.  By being so to the bone honest and rawly vulnerable with a few special people, I felt I was risking my most sacred sanctuary and putting what was most closely guarded and precious to me out in the open to be not stolen, but worse – judged, degraded, scoffed at.

The paradox is is that only by truly believing I was risking what is most dear could I save it.  The experiences have been life changing.  It’s not that I don’t have challenges or face adversity these days.  The only thing that’s changed about that has been that the challenges have gotten harder.  But I’ve also gotten stronger, largely because I’ve learned how to surrender, including asking for help.  Because of this,  on so many levels I feel like my learning, growth, and progress have lassoed some flying, burning, shining comet these last few years.

In the paragraph that follows, I include an excerpt from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen’s book, My Grandfather’s Blessings.  It, in turn, references a book called The Celestine Prophecy.  I include it here because it is one of the most beautiful, moving, and accurate descriptions of the power of coaching and mentoring at its best.  It describes the best friends and coaches that I have ever had and it also captures the intention my heart and soul aspires to each time I sit down to coach a client or listen to a friend.

“It [The Celestine Prophecy] says that there is a way of relating to others such that one deliberately listens for the hidden beauty in them.  The place of their beauty is often the place of their greatest integrity.  When you listen, the integrity and wholeness in others moves closer.  Your attention strengthens it and makes it easier for them to hear it in themselves.  In your presence, they can more easily inhabit that in them which is beyond their limitations, a place of greater freedom and sanctuary.  Eventually they may be able to live there.”

I’d love for you to take two things away from this post.  First, realize your own power to hold a loving, compassionate space so that your attention may strengthen great beauty, integrity, and wholeness in others.  Second, know that you, too, deserve this kind of space and seek out someone who can hold your highest vision of your potential, even and especially when you cannot, so that you may be able to move past limitations and live, fully alive, in that space of freedom and sanctuary.