I have a couple of brief announcements. First, please join me live on Conversations with Suzanna Wednesday, August 26th at 10:00 PT/11:00 MT/12:00 CT/1:00 ET. Click HERE to listen.
Second, Jamie is teaching an online class that sounds really, really good. Imagine how you could change your life in a positive way by using the tool of ESP! I’d love to read others’ thoughts, but I can barely read my own! Here are the details:
How You Can Enhance Your Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) – A Web Class with Jamie Butler
September 16 @ 6:00 pm – 6:45 pm
Cost: $20
To register for this class, click HERE.
Yesterday, I did something very brave. Backstory. I have terrible hair. It gets really frizzy and poofs up in humid weather, so why I continue to live in the meteorological armpit of America where the humidity is 300% defies logic. I’ve seen the before and after pictures for in-salon keratin treatment, and it looked like a solution, but I’ve been too cheap to pay the $250-300 for it. Desperation is a great motivator, though, so I searched Amazon to see if I could buy the keratin solution online and do it myself. It turns out that I could, so I wasted no time and bought a bottle for a measly $34. When it arrived in the mail, I noticed that the directions included a warning to watch the instructional video and the link to access it. That scared me. If it was going to be complicated, I could risk waking up with a pillow covered with my hair. So I let the kit sit on my bathroom counter for a couple of weeks. Maybe one of my daughters could be the first guinea pig. They declined.
Boredom and high humidity took over yesterday, however, so I decided to take a leap of faith and go for it. I watched the instructional video with it’s porn movie style background movie and went through all of the steps. The verdict: I love it! I can’t wash my hair for 2-3 days, so we’ll see if I revert to my previous Little Orphan Annie hairdo when I do. Fingers crossed. I did have one problem, though. Since my hair is short, flat ironing in the keratin was a bitch. I kept burning my fingers trying to cram 2 inch long hair between the scorching hot ceramic plates. Worth it, though. At least so far. Now, my daughters want me to do the treatment on their hair, which is fortunately very long. KERATIN PAR-TAY! Bring on the mimosas!
Okay, Erik gave me some fierce goosebumps on my left thigh. Maybe he’s getting bored with all this housekeeping stuff. Let’s move on to today’s post!
Me: When you—move your butt, Bella! She’s sitting right on the question I want to ask.
Jamie giggles. Okay, here’s it is. “When you’re afraid to let others in because you’re afraid of yourself and can pick up other’s feelings of discomfort in you—what can you do to let others in without overwhelming them to the point of you feeling overwhelmed and at the breaking point?” I don’t know what this one means. I guess we’ll have to skip it.
Erik: No, no, Mom. I get it. I get it; I get it; I get it.
Me: Good!
Jamie: Yeah, I didn’t get it either. Thank god he did.
(Pause)
Jamie (laughing): Stop patting me, Erik! He’s like, “It’s okay if you don’t understand, Jamie,” and he’s patting me!
Me (chuckling): How condescending!
Erik: Basically, what they’re saying is that they know that they’re a different person inside. They know that other people can see that they’re not opening up all the way, that they’re keeping some kind of privacy, and then this chain of uncomfortable happens. Bottom line here is you, who is asking the question, you don’t know how to communicate. Period. You feel like you’re hiding something because you’re right or wrong; you’re hiding something because of personal judgments, and that’s keeping you trapped inside yourself, and it’s keeping you trapped in using language that really fucking sucks and is not expressing your feelings. That keeps you in this vicious cycle again and again and again of showing face but not knowing how to make connections for fear of judgment, failing, succeeding, whatever the fuck it is. I would say to you –
Jamie (laughing): He’s just being funny now. He said, “Get thee to a nunnery!”
I laugh.
Erik: Go learn to communicate. I can’t push that hard enough. You know, Mom, we talk about NVC—
That’s a communication technique called Nonviolent Communication. Everyone. Everyone should learn this.
Jamie: He talks about it so much that I finally started training in NVC. He’s mentioned it so much that I’m starting to take classes.
Me: Oh, there are classes? Awesome! So, what do you think? Is it good?
Jamie: Oh god, last night was the first night that I dreamed about it all night long. All these problem-solving conversations. Wow. It’s pretty amazing but, damn, it’s a big learning curve.
Me: I bet so!
Erik: Especially for Jamie.
Jamie: Whatever!
Erik: Remember when I said this should be taught in every school?
Jamie: This is me, Jamie, talking now. I can see what he’s talking about now, and I totally agree.
Erik: For this person, just trying something like that and learning how to communicate all of a sudden, everything will be released. No more vicious cycle. No more uncomfortable. No more, “Hey, they see the inner me. I have to hide the inner me.” No disconnection. It’s all there, and it’s healthy and fine.
Me: Good!
Erik: I wish that we could all just get up every fucking day and know that, without a doubt, we’re not fucking broken!
Me: I know!
Here comes an Erik rant.
Erik: We wake up and we go through our lives and we look at how we can fucking fix things. “Fix it. Fix that. Fix the pipes. Fix my smile. Fix the way I look. Fix my shoulder. Fix my this. Fix my that.” It’s tiring watching people on the journey of fixing instead of being present in the moment.
Me: Yeah. That’s what happened to me. You were so miserable all the time that I got into that cycle. I loved you so much that I wanted to fix your problems, so you became something to be fixed.
(Long solemn pause)
Jamie: He’s nodding his head, “yes.”
Me: That was sad. I really didn’t know what else to do, to tell you the truth, but you fixed yourself, so there’s that.
Things feel awkward for a moment.
Erik: Fixed!
Me: Anything else on this?
Erik: Ding.
Here’s the link for the book, Nonviolent Communication.
