To sh!t in the cake, or not to sh!t in the cake?
Set your intention and choose your own adventure
To celebrate our marriage, my colleagues gifted us a sunset boat cruise off the South Shore of Oahu, where I was born, where we were married, and where we live. They wanted us to get to experience our home in a way that we hadn’t before and it was beautiful to enjoy.
When I told Bev about it, she was hyped because she had recently discovered the sunrise cruise from the same company and she had wanted to go out on said boat. I guess you could say she manifested it, which leads to the topic of today’s publication Dear Readers, or rather, the focus of today’s adventure…
What thoughts have you chosen to set your intentions for the day ahead? Have you consciously done this? If you haven’t, all good, we are human, and practice makes perfect.
The simplest way to choose your adventure, or at least an enjoyable adventure, would be to give thanks. When I wake up each day, I do my best to share my gratitude for another opportunity to breathe and for my heart to beat-beat its drums. From there, I give thanks for having a home.
I learned the value of this during a season of loss where I hopped around without anything permanent beyond seeking to heal. But even now, with more of a foundation beneath me, it can be a struggle to really feel that gratitude. If there’s a potentially stressful task, meeting, or few on the agenda, anxiety and worry can kick into high gear. Add in daily life events, loss, and the energetic toll on the mind when we set out for the day can be a lot to bear.
Over the years, I have deployed multiple tools to help me remember the gratitude. Some learned, others I have developed on my own, but all with the point of tricking that part of me that’s so good at jumping on the self-sabotage train because let me tell you:
Just a single, errant thought that runs wild out the gate can derail the flow of your whole day.
Week.
Month.
Quarter…
Year(s)?!?!
If I’m honest, errant thoughts have led me off track in all of the above lengths of time at different points in my life.
My teacher will often point out to me that I have worked very hard at the inner work, on growing in consciousness. As that has progressed, I can see the difference. I still feel all the feels but it’s in cleansing within, it is as though the cleansing magnifies what I see.
ONE my favorite verses in scripture to help with all of this is: Remove the timber from thine own eye before removing the splinter from the eye of another.
That one thought, the fear, anxiety, whatever it is, is the timber that blocks the outlook for the day, the week, (the DOT DOT DOT but let it not be your Life). Best take the time to clear that before beginning to work on anything else that day.
But I get it, we’re great at putting our sh!t aside so that we go and ‘help’ others. I say ‘help’ because more often than not, what we see as something else that needs addressing for another is something we ourselves have the opportunity to clear and work through in ourselves. On one hand, that’s kind of amazing, that when we love others, we love ourselves by looking in the ‘mirror’ reflected outside of us and loving the reflection no matter what we see.
The challenge is that too often we don’t lead with love because the meh is mixed in with the yay so the result is all too eh.
Another way to reflect on all of this is inspired by the sh!t cake analogy, one of the great life lesson electives that I learned from a mentor (high five RDK) back in college.
It begins with a thought experiment:
What happens if a recipe calls for 5% sh!t in the ingredients? Well my friends, you have yourself a sh!t cake!
I’ve lived long enough to be fortunate enough to have eaten my share of sh!t cake, alot of which I’ve baked myself. This is fortunate because there is beauty and knowledge to be gained from having a few sh!tty ingredients in the mix. But be wary this can also lead to misfortune and if we don’t adjust the recipe moving forward, we run the risk of baking the same sh!t cake twice.
Don’t get yourself in the trap of, well at least it was better than last time and settling either. Remember, while 5% is better than 50% sh!t, no matter how you slice it, it’s still a sh!tty cake.
How does this help us to set us up for more intentional living?
Because the cosmic joke is more than just LOL. If you lead with LOL - Light of Love - put that filter on everything, then the true, deeper beauty that exists, and I believe to be the thread that binds all of Life, is then revealed.
So what say you?
Sh!t cakes for days or LOL no matter what’s going on?!?!
Whatever your choice may be, don’t take it too seriously.
“That is all.”