Four New and Subtle Ways I'm Staying Big
it was never about fitting in
A couple of weeks ago I removed my nose ring. After 17 years of having a piercing in my face, I suddenly looked at myself and thought "this no longer feels like me." My partner noted the 16 inches of hair I cut off of my head last summer, and now the removal of my nose ring.
"What's next?" he asked playfully. Oh, the possibilities.
I sat in the piercer's chair as she removed the nose ring as another piercer congratulated me, saying that most people buy motorcycles when they have an identity crisis.
"I'm used to it," I say to her with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders in response; the undercurrent of change, letting go, and identity shifting that exists in my life is constant. It’s not so much a crisis as it is learning to ride the wave, and I’ve learned to ride while supplementing with copious amounts of chocolate of course.
Removing the ring from my nose did feel like a shift in identity for me. The piercing represented the creation of a version of me who didn't feel like she fit in this world. I became a version of myself who felt wild, grew her hair long, covered her arms in tattoos, and poked holes in her skin, becoming a physical representation of how different she felt. How removed she felt from "fitting in." A version of me who believed there wasn't a place for her here, and wore that belief outwardly. A persona that I created to support that belief. A persona that for years knew well, in broad day light, how to hide.
There was a brief moment of internal struggle around removing that piece of metal from my face. Will I regret it? Am I doing this just because someone mentioned my nose ring the other day and whether I worry that it might affect me getting new work/clients? Am I making a brash decision? Can I be who I want to be and achieve what I want to achieve regardless of how I’ve altered my body?
As I sifted through the questions, I arrived at what I felt to be the truest question at the root: Am I ready to let her go?
The wild, rebellious, blunt, adventure-seeking, rejector of society and capitalism part of me protected me for a long time. She provided me what I believed to be safety. Her resistance to her reality showed up as avoiding society because she continued to find herself in spaces that didn’t know what to do with her expansive, most authentic self. She believed she had to make herself smaller to fit in. That there wasn’t a place for her here. And while she believed that resistance and avoidance and contraction saved her from conflict, ridicule, and rejection, it also created other forms of suffering that only a collapse in spirit could impose.
I sat in my car outside of the piercing shop and looked in the rear-view mirror to examine my nose. What is this face? Who is she now? Who is this woman that no longer masks who she is? Who is this woman who allows herself to continually be transformed? With whom do I have the pleasure of meeting on this hot July summer’s day?
I felt enamored by my own face. “Cute,” I said lovingly to myself with a gentle graze of my fingertips along the bridge of my nose. What a reunion; it is very sweet to meet this more authentic version of myself with such love and compassion. I’m grateful to always be surprised in so many ways in all of the unfolding.
Ram Das says we should expect miracles and every meeting I have with myself in more and more authenticity feels nothing short of miraculous.
I thanked the version of me I let go of that day. I thanked her too for being a miracle.
I know you’re probably thinking “wow, she just wrote a whole newsletter about a nose ring that she doesn’t even have anymore.”
Yes, yes I did.
And, as with everything, it’s about more than that.
It’s about how the most subtle changes can have the most profound affects on our lives. It’s astounding the meaning we can create out of the simplest of things and the narratives we can write about our entire identity and reality around the simplest of concepts. The way our lives can be executed in myriad of ways depending on the lenses and perspective we are choosing.
We are subconsciously living all the time in ways that we’ve constructed without really even being aware of it in order to give us a sense of being contained in safety. There are so many ways we are unconscious about how we show up. The behaviors we exhibit. The beliefs that are driving us.
Being too much has always been a theme for me. I’m too direct, I’m too excited, I’m too observant, I ask too many questions, I am too intentional, I feel too much, I sense too much, I am too intuitive, I’m too much of a dreamer, I have too many needs, I question authority too much, I am too unwilling to be a “yes” person, I am too this, I a too that, I am too “other”.
Two significant people in my life, unknowingly to them, both recently told me that I need to “stay big”. All within one or two weeks of each other. They said that the problem is not that I’m too much, it’s that I haven’t found all of the spaces, places, or people who don’t require me to be a more palatable version of myself to be in relation to them. The problem has never been about whether I fit in or whether people “know what to do with me.” The real work has been building resiliency in my heart and spirit to keep showing up, to build on my belief in self, and to remain unattached to how anyone thinks or feels or reacts about me except for me.
The real work has not been about fitting in. It has been in learning to take up space regardless.
“You can not retreat, Jenny. Stay big.”
Ways I’m Staying Big.
DELIGHTING IN MY DELUSION
I’ve always been a dreamer. My dreams have usually been outside of the box and not congruent with most societal standards. My desire to build a life around working for myself, traveling, build wealth in a diverse way, being of service to the world through heart-centered, body-based, holistic coaching and consulting, owning my own home in Northern Michigan as my home base, building a clientele in a way that aligns with my heart, soul, and energy rather than how society tells people to generically build their business - many people like to share with me their stories of why it will be hard, why it doesn’t work, and why they didn’t succeed how they thought they would so I might not either.
For a long time I took to heart their stories and made them my own, thinking “maybe they’re right. Maybe I can’t build a business, maybe it IS hard building a coaching business, maybe it IS hard explaining what coaching is - and what GOOD coaching is. Maybe I can’t sustain myself doing this work, maybe maybe maybe.”
The dreams and delights and things that sit in my heart day in and day out are not delusions, nor accidents, nor unrealistic. I’ve been clear about what I want damn near my whole life: to create spaces for people that feel like safe containers for them to be their biggest, most authentic self, and to build their resiliency to bring that authenticity out into the rest of their world. I have been committed my whole life to uncovering the truth of who I am and bring that truth out into the rest of the world because 1.) it simply feels good and 2.) so that others know how to do the same. Can you imagine a world like that? If that is living in delusion, I will forever rest there and delight in the world becoming a better place for us all.
Piggy backing off of that, I’ve come across a lot of articles, podcasts, and books lately that normalize being obsessed with our passions, interests, the things we’re good at, and our work if we love what we do. They’ve said that the obsessions can give great insight into what matters to us, what we value, and what is it that wants to be brought alive through us so that we may live our lives in a way that makes us feel alive. Like ALIVE alive.
To not be obsessed about anything sounds absurd to me. I’ve lived my life in a way that centers around the things I can’t stop thinking about, doing, wanting, and dreaming of. The experiences that make me feel the way that I want to feel. The steps that bring me closer to my obsessions. The things that my heart pleads for.
“More. more. more.”
Some days it’s rocks. Other days it’s coaching a human into their dreamiest of dreamy life or business or way of being. Some days it’s being enamored by what light and smoke do together (ie the above photos) while sitting with the duality of that magic being a result of forest fires. Some days it’s writing myself into oblivion and 6-10 pages later I have no idea how I got there as I opened to whatever wanted to come through me.
Some may say I’m an enabler. Some have said I’m too much of a dreamer, while others say I’m quite rational. In truth, I know what I want and I know what I like and I know what brings me alive and most importantly I like the way those things make me feel. I believe we need more people to feel good about how they feel and what they’re doing to make them feel that way.
So I say so what if you’re obsessed? Maybe you’re tuned in to a special kind of magic that we all have access to but only some choose to engage with. Who knows what might happen if you choose to say yes to being obsessed.
Perhaps it’s no accident that “yes” and “obsess” rhyme.
HEART-CENTERED TRUST
My tendency is to grasp on to life. To not trust it. The tighter I grasp, the further the Universe ushers me into the unknown. Uncertainty has built a home here and it has not been until recently that I’ve knocked on its door to introduce myself and befriend it. When I take inventory of my life, I can map out all of the ways everything has always worked out, and usually better than I expected. Even at the 11th hour, I have been supported when I didn’t think anything or anyone would pull through.
I believe deeply in the support that I know is all around me and all within me. Humans in the forms of family, friends, and community, and a spiritual team that is extraordinarily powerful and yet offers the most gentle guidance. A heart and spirit resides in me that just. keeps. going. A strength continues to be unearthed in me that I have come to believe is an infinite oasis. I have a deep knowing that not only is everything I need and want coming, but that in some ways its already here. I hold these belief and knowings in my heart just as my heart holds me.
It may seem trivial, but allowing yourself to be wrapped in your hearts wisdom and your own self belief is a powerful shift in being. It is something I practice embodying as often as I can remember to be aware of it.
BUDDYING UP TO FEAR
My fears are my fuel. Everything I want I also fear. Even my own power. It hasn’t been until I’ve allowed my fears to have a seat in the room that I’ve moved forward with clarity and motivation.
My friend Chelsea from Holy Architecture told me recently that fear is my spice; a flavor for me to taste more deeply. That I am to partner with fear, have important conversations with it, and ultimately transmute it into enthusiasm. It really feels like building that kind of relationship to fear allows me the ability to take my power back from it while also collaborating with fear in a way that drives empowered and aligned actions. Chelsea’s statement about fear being my spice reminded me of a Rumi poem I’ve carried with me for years.
A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot
where it’s being boiled.‘Why are you doing this to me?’
The cook knocks him down with the ladle.
‘Don’t you try to jump out.
You think I’m torturing you.
I’m giving you flavor,
so you can mix with spices and rice
and be the lovely vitality of a human being.Remember when you drank rain in the garden.
That was for this.’Grace first. Sexual pleasure,
then a boiling new life begins,
and the Friend has something good to eat.Eventually the chickpea will say to the cook,
‘Boil me some more.
Hit me with the skimming spoon.
I can’t do this by myself.I’m like an elephant that dreams of gardens
back in Hindustan and doesn’t pay attention
to his driver. You’re my cook, my driver,
my way into existence. I love your cooking.’The cook says,
‘I was once like you,
fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time,
and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.My animal soul grew powerful.
I controlled it with practices,
and boiled some more, and boiled
once beyond that,
and became your teacher.’
ASKING FOR HELP
Jenny Bremer Coaching is in full swing. I’m working with clients one on one, I am working on a conscious leadership workshop that I was invited to teach at a local economic development agency in Traverse City, MI, and opening to more and more opportunity through this business. I’d like to ask for your help in creating a larger channel for me to work with more people through coaching, consulting, and teaching.
Walkie Talkie - I am now offering Walk and Talks! I’m excited about this offering. Building relationships has always been my preferred method of going about pretty much anything, but especially building a business. I’m not interested in selling myself, I’m interested in getting to know you to see how I can help you get to where you want to be, and to be the person you need to be to get there.
This is not only a fun way to have more meaningful and impactful conversations with people as a powerful mirror, intuitive, and guide who knows how to ask the right questions, but also gives you a taste of coaching with me if you’re curious but not sure yet if it’s for you.
Walkie Talkies are 60 minute phone conversations that happen during my evening walks. Receive intuitive guidance, access to a sounding board, run ideas by me, receive clarity, receive coaching about any topic, etc. These conversations are great for efficient but powerful, transformative, and clarifying communication and support.
At $100 for the hour, this is over half off of my normal coaching rate and certainly does not replace my usual coaching containers. I am not sure how long I’ll be offering this opportunity, so schedule here while you can. And of course, if you’re ready for coaching, or want to scheduled a consultation, you can do so through my website.
Google Reviews - If you’ve ever been a client, or on the receiving end of me or my coaching in any way, or if you’ve received anything through being a loyal reader of Field Notes, please leave me a Google review for Jenny Bremer Coaching. Whether it’s simply five stars, and/or a written review, your contribution will allow me to appear on Google and in searches with more ease and visibility.
The more people I reach, the more I get to work with, the more resourced I am to continue doing that work and to collect data in my research of meaning, magic, and truth; data I summarize here in Field Notes.
Share Me With Your Friends and Colleagues - Know anyone, teams, leaders, creatives, entrepreneurs who would benefit from my services and is willing to be subtly but profoundly transformed in the ways they’ve been seeking? Please give them my email address or web link.
jenny@jennybremercoaching.com
www.jennybremercoaching.com
Thanks for your help. Thanks for being here. And hey, maybe just for this week, but perhaps beyond: be a little delusional, wouldja?
Tallyho,
Jenny
“Delighting in my delusions” — yes yes yes keeping that one close. 🙌🏼