Liberation Was Only a Vacation Away…

As I write this, I sit on a plane bound home from Cancun Mexico. I was in this beautiful (if not also caustic after a fashion) seaside city for the past 14 days. I had come for sea and sand and fun, as well as for a business seminar. But I got far more than I bargained for. And only a week and a half after my life-changing experience in Irvine, life seemed fit to continue the thread.

Arriving with my best friend and colleague, Rachel Rofe, we stayed our first two nights at a sleepy, quaint hotel just north of the popular Downtown area of the Hotel Zone in Cancun. After our first full day of sunshine, blessed Caribbean seawater, and a rip-roaring good time at Senor Frog’s that evening, we both reveled in our good fortune. If Day One was any clue as to the quality of our trip, we were in for the best time of our lives!

And we were.

Our second day, we transferred over to Club Med to meet up with 20 of our friends and colleagues for 7 days of learning, business strategy, networking, and fun.

Now I must pause and tell you that I had never known anything of Club Med before and at first, I had balked at their prices. But WOW. I am hooked and will be a Club Med fan for life. I can’t say enough about the quality of the experience they provide. They have GO’s, a French acronym for “gentleman” and “gentlewoman organizers” who take care of your every need, provide entertainment, champion watersports and tennis, sailing and dancing lessons, even a circus area where we could fly on a trapeze.

Every patron arrives on Saturday and stays for the week, so it’s kind of like a one-week reality show. You get to know fellow patrons as you all dine together, enjoy evening entertainment and the nightclub together, and spy each other daily at the beach, pool, and activity centers. It added an entirely new dimension to vacationing.

But as wonderful as Club Med was, it only provided part of the magic of our vacation. The rest came through our seminar, and a certain 20 minutes…

And Those 20 Minutes Changed Everything

Our first speaker at the seminar was life coach Jane Strauss, bestselling author of Enough is Enough. She shared the importance of realizing that we are, in our own essence, enough. More importantly, we are worthy. Worthy of love, worthy of success and wealth, worthy of our purpose and happiness. Most conflict and pain occurs because we seek ways to feel worthy and validated, usually at the behest or expense of someone else.

She asked us to, just for a moment, feel and know that we are worthy. And then she asked a fascinating question I will always ask myself when faced with a decision:

“What would I do in this situation if I knew I was worthy?”

For instance, if you know you are worthy, you will never be without abundance or enough to be happy – hence you can act without fear or haste. You don’t have to feel that you are worthy in that moment, but rather only ask yourself what you would do IF you knew you were worthy – and then do that.

I liked the concept and instantly liked Jane.

Then she offered each of us a 20 minute session with her during our stay at Club Med. Nearly every one of us took her up on the offer and my session was at noon the following day.

When I walked into the room, she greeted me with soulful eyes and a kind smile. She asked me to select two cards, a large one from one deck, and a smaller one from the other.

The larger card I picked was Boredom. I was perplexed…I’d never been bored in my life!

The smaller card instantly made more sense, but of what I couldn’t be sure. It was a picture of a fist and a hammer, both facing each other and surrounded by white and yellow “thunder” like the pointed “POW!” stars that would surround emphatic blows or strikes in a Batman comic. Behind it all were vertical black and white stripes.

“What do you see?” she asked me.

At first I wasn’t sure. I said I saw the hand and the hammer both as mine, and that I was perhaps abusing my own hand with the weapon in my other. I saw harm and pain.

“What about Boredom?”

I said I could not know.

Then she asked me, “Now what does your Spirit see?”

I started to cry then, after only two minutes! I had doubted what she could accomplish in just 20 minutes, but already I was convinced we’d struck pay dirt somehow.

I told her of my experience in Florida and the abuse I suffered those three weeks. I told her what I’d discovered in Irvine, that deep down I’d hated being a woman, blamed my femininity and that I sought to be masculine.

She asked me if I could forgive myself and be more compassionate and gentle with myself. To comfort the little girl inside of me rather than feel I had to protect her or further abuse her for letting something happen to her.

“You have to stop taking on the karma of your abusers,” she told me. And I realized…

They often say that the abused becomes the abuser. I had done just that, but I had turned that abuse inward, punishing myself for what had occurred. I looked at the cards again and suddenly they looked different. They made sense.

“I’m bored…I get it,” I began as fresh tears renewed their flow. “I’m so sick and tired of being a man for myself…to have to be right all the time, protective all the time, standing guard so no one else can get in and hurt me.” I sobbed harder with each new part of the admission.

And then she said one last thing to me that liberated me. She said, “you can’t promise yourself you won’t be abused again. Someone will abuse you again. It’s inevitable. And you’ll survive. You’ll be ok. It’s the way of the world and a part of our path to growth.”

Those words should have stung, but I saw where they freed me. If it was inevitable, I didn’t have to marshal my defenses against it. I could let go, open up, allow. Because it wouldn’t make any difference to keep protecting myself. I could live my life and be open to it all and know that when the time came, I’d get through it. That simplicity sat well with me.

I left that session a new woman. The transition had already begun in Irvine, but the rest of this trip, I had really let go of my defenses. Old friends saw the shift in me. New ones had entirely different first impressions of me than others had before. They saw me as softer, intriguing, feminine, and open. Before, people would always describe me as strong, intimidating, and powerful.

I like the new me so much better.

The Power of Vacations

So what does all this have to do with vacations changing our lives?

Sure, the 20 minutes that initiated my process were part of an organized seminar (which is a form of vacation just as a spiritual retreat can be). But had I returned to home and work and daily life after the three days of that seminar, rather than enjoy an additional 11 days in Cancun, I never would have had the breadth and space to let those 20 minutes’ epiphanies take seed and blossom. They would have rotted and died had I dove right back into my old life and old ways of being.

Vacation affords us the opportunity to see in new ways, experience in different colors and tastes and rhythms. We free ourselves (hopefully) to reach out to people we would have otherwise shied from, and we (again hopefully) strike out for new experiences and ways of being we haven’t experienced before.

All this broadens and deepens us and allows new insights and growths to occur. Rest and relaxation are also integral to our re-energizing and replenishing our stores.

Best of all, vacations, particularly in my view, are an excellent opportunity to “trip into flow.”

I’ll discuss this in my next post.