Nine Houses: My first studio at Lowertown Lofts

House #1

My first moves in the Twin Cities, happened way before I ended up at Lowertown Lofts in St Paul.

I came all the way across the country in 2010 seeking a life that didn’t involve living at home with my parents as an adult.

The California of 2008/2009, reeling from the multiple econonmic failures of the time, was not a hospitable place in many ways. Hiring freezes and an over-saturated job market going back to the woes of September 11, tech start-up failures, Enron and the financial markets as well as the later mortgage crises were the norm. I felt lucky to get temp jobs and most of them didn't last over six months.

Moving to Minnesota, was both a risk and a challenge to live differently. I left the comfortable, known world in California and ventured east.

My soul called to me and said, “You are going.” This was both frightening and exhilarating. I had plenty of time to deal with the feelings around this yearning to follow my soul’s call and yet, as time passed, it became this daily feeling of uncomfortable staying home in California. I might not ever explain it logically. I just knew that if I didn’t go, I would get more and more uncomfortable.

I realize now just how unusual it is to live beyond one’s comfort zone and follow the call of soul. So many would never do what I did. At the time, I had gone through enough spiritual and personal growth to know that the best aspects of life come when we’re willing to venture (maybe not entirely fearlessly) into the unknown.

I can tell a story about what inspired me to live in Minnesota and the Twin Cities. A collection of facts and figures. I’ve told parts of and versions of it to many people. And yet, the most important part of it all is that I was willing to follow the energy that occurred at the time and go after my best life.

Maybe the only thing I didn’t know, was that it wasn’t going to be a short journey with an easy rise to the top. It turned out to consist of starting over with multiple deaths and rebirths along the way. That was the sacred path I had chosen, I suppose.

By the end of end of 2010 I’d lived in my friend’s parent’s house in Osseo; a room in the house of a local music promoter which I rented for a small weekly fee; a room in the house of a disabled alcoholic who stayed up all night playing computer games and a room in a student pad on the University of Minnesota campus. The student pad was the last straw. Between the loud parties, pot smoking, crazy roommates and washing machine that didn’t work, I was fed up.

The path to Lowertown Lofts

I asked for help from my parents to move into an apartment. At the time, I looked for a place that was the antithesis of the insanity I’d lived in for a year as I began my new life in Minnesota. However, I still didn’t have a steady job or a temp job that paid more than $13/hour. I couldn’t technically afford Lowertown Lofts.

I had a healthy dose of belief that around the corner, something good had to come. It had to get better. What I didn’t realize at the time I signed my first lease at Lowertown Lofts was that my soul and God had a much bigger plan for me than simply getting a nice apartment and cushy job.

This path I was taking would not be linear, normal or even explainable. It was a journey toward a type of self-love that most people never achieve, and I continue to work on. And that type of crucible like experience in which your entire way of being is cleaned out, morphed, remade and spit back out, would take years, not months.

Lowertown Lofts was not my first choice

By first choice, I mean, I almost went after an artist’s loft at one of St Paul’s many buildings (at the time) dedicated to fostering arts in the city. I had already published my collection of short stories and poetry titled “The Journey of the Malevolent Empress” and so I had a portfolio. I’d visited the building for the art crawls St Paul conducts twice a year.

I imagined participating in these crawls and the artist community and thought it would be inspiring and exciting. At the time, a huge 1-bedroom loft was about $150 a month cheaper than Lowertown Lofts. My income which was limited at best, certainly qualified for the Section 42 income restrictions. I still couldn’t technically afford it. I am not sure if it would have been a better choice to end up there. because I didn't choose it.

At the last minute, before I signed the lease, I visited the Lowetown Lofts. It had a coffee maker/espresso machine in the lobby with free coffee, access to a rooftop pool in the summer, a great walk-in wardrobe, and a view of Mear’s Park. Even though (unknown to me) I would shortly be let go from my temp job and be unemployed, I managed to use my meager paystub to get approved.

How faulty were my thoughts?

If all the belief systems I have released in the last few years through Three-Dimensional Therapy are any indication, despite my clear intuition to go after the Lowertown Lofts studio, it is likely that the choice was built on a heavy dose of faulty-thinking. We’ll never know how I may have made different choices as I headed into my second year in Minnesota because that is not how life works. We do our best with the information and limited “intuition” we have.

The reason I remember choosing the Lowertown Lofts studio over any other option – an affordable room in a different location, the Tilsner space or an apartment in a cheaper neighborhood -- was pretty clear at the time and made perfect sense.

When I visited the Tilsner artist space several someone’s were smoking pot in their rooms – the unmistakable smell of burning greenery floated through the halls. Anyone who knows me knows I can’t stand the smell and have had very strong viewpoints about the use of it – specifically for myself, and more largely the energy of being around pot when others are using it. I’d just planned my escape from a house where regular parties included pot. I was already turned off.

The affordable room in a different location was largely not considered because I’d just spent a year couch surfing, in addition to the practical camping in the above-mentioned unsavory locales. The mixed results of these experiences were fresh in my mind. The memories of putting up with insane behavior and various aspects of my housemate’s mental illness as well as subjecting myself to what I saw of as the dregs of humanity were too overwhelming.

Only a year into my living in the Twin Cities, I didn’t know the area or the available rentals well enough. I also didn’t have reliable Internet most of the time to conduct a thorough search. In addition, I didn’t own a car so I was heavily restricted on locations close to bus routes with easy access to the majority of job sites I might be sent to with a temp agency.

My main goals with this move were not living within a means that was unreliable in the first place. It was to have a sanctuary where I could come home and be at peace, free from what I perceived as negative vibes, bad behavior and unsavory practices. I wanted to enjoy my existence and not be fighting turf wars with other people’s demons.

I sought something greater- a beautiful space, an adult life-style, a means to extend myself into this new community. Even though I needed my parent’s help with finances, I considered the apartment a long way and a far cry from living in their house. I felt on my way to a more independent life.

A decision made, peace at last

I signed my first lease at Lowertown Lofts and moved in with the help of two women friends from the St Paul Curling Club. Donations of kitchen supplies came from a recently married couple at the curling club who provided dishes, glassware and more. Some additional kitchenware I purchased with any extra money I could scrape up, adding to my collection of stainless-steel pans with trips to Marshalls in downtown Minneapolis.

Peace and tranquility appeared to be achieved and I was certain that a great job paying twice as much as most of the jobs I was getting through OfficeTeam would be right around the corner. I mean I had a Master’s Degree and fifteen years’ experience as an Executive Assistant. No brainer, right?

Maybe if I truly had faulty-thinking it was in the area of time and in accepting what my true calling really was. And that, was not going to happen overnight or even in the next few years. I just wasn’t willing to accept this and therefore didn’t see it coming.

In the next blog, I’ll go into more detail about my lessons that came as I started my new life as an apartment dweller in Lowertown, St. Paul. This city apartment was the first of two studios I occupied in the building in my time at Lowertown Lofts and living downtown.

Adventures would be had, cooking mishaps and difficult life experiences. It would turn out to be quite the journey of self-exploration.

#2019 #ancestraltrauma #BodyCode #boundaries #mind #financialhealth #betterchoices #selfhelp #connectiontoself #energy #energyclearing #familytrauma #innerwork #wellness #wellbeing #TrueNorth #bestself #soul #Transformation #patterns #empathic #empath #career #threedimensionaltherapy #jobsearching #mindset #learning #process #emotionalsupport #personaljourney #life #Authenticity #selfempowerment #selflove #Writing

Day 8: New vistas, old habits, journey of the soul and other Truths as summer winds down

I took a shift unexpectedly at the restaurant downtown today. Biked home and realized half-way that it was Tuesday night work crew at the Saint Paul Curling Club.

Stopped in to see what the summer projects were all about. Loni mentioned that while the roster wasn’t large, they’d managed to wait until the last minute, once again to complete things.

The ice set-up projects will start next week!

Hard to imagine that in just a month, fall activities will begin and temps will start to drop. The State Fair – our big Minnesota get together will be completed and Halloween on its way.

I’ve never known any place to have summer last less than three months. Why did I have a soul contract for this place again? If you’d asked me in 2001 if I’d ever leave California and venture to the mid-west, and a city, I’d have cringed. I always saw myself settling in the country like up in Napa or Petaluma with a large tract of land, maybe working for a vineyard.

The first time I got confronted with the idea of living in a city was when I took my first CTI coaching courses back in 2005. We did a guided “future self” meditation where we went to visit ourselves 20 years in the future. My future self was wearing a suit and hanging out in an office space in a city I didn’t recognize. The only ones I thought remotely close in size and scope were San Francisco or Los Angeles and I hated those places. I ran out of the room crying.

When much later, around 2008/2009 I was introduced to Minneapolis-St Paul I freaked out because it looked just like the “future self” meditation, and I felt like I’d been there before. It took several more coaching classes and sessions to consider that maybe my soul had been speaking for a long time. So, while it may have seemed like a sudden, or even insane decision by some who didn’t know the whole story – I’d been working with the idea for quite some time.

I tried to avoid it for about another year. Increasingly though I had this strange internal nudging going on. The temp jobs I took were more and more temporary – often working for companies that were about to go under or were in merger-acquisition. In the end, I stopped getting jobs altogether. The only thing that kept rearing its “ugly” head was this idea of re-location.

Our souls know exactly what we should be doing. Maybe, I knew better than to avoid the call too long. No need to get hit over the head with a two-by-four to wake up to my future.

Back at the curling club, we talked summer projects, curling, boats, an open bartender spot. We ate pizza and drank beer (and no I didn't do any work - I was told to come back next week) I was reminded just how fast the summer had gone. Perhaps the constant stream of interviews, job hunting and MIMA work kept me busy. Here I thought I’d have a job and move from my sub-let to my own apartment or something. No such luck.

Dreams don’t always land the way you think they will. We can have all the pre-conceived notions we want of life, or even the people in our lives and many times they’ll simply not add up. I had no idea what I was getting into when I first moved to the Twin Cities in March of 2010 with two suitcases and a dream.

The path and the journey has both been more amazing than I could have imagined and more daunting. I didn’t know when I moved that starting over would mean literally from scratch. Or that I would meet so many amazing folks from all walks of life, who’ve turned into friends. Or that I’d be confronted with the most difficult people and situations I’d ever experience, having to dig deep to find my True North, gain personal efficacy and know the potency of my determination and strength.

More changes are coming. The summer is winding down. Decisions need to be made. New choices, new vistas and grappling with our winter weather, once again. What magic will the holidays hold for 2018? A year of deep spiritual awakening.

What new horizons will show themselves and what will continue to stay the same, not quite going as planned or changing direction altogether. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

#2018 #frustrations #selfhelp #intimacy #connectiontoself #connection #TrueNorth #Curling #betterchoices #innerwork #energy #energyclearing #Relating #patterns #seasons #heart #knowing #personaljourney #Journey #soul #SoulJourney #Soulmates #Innerlandscapes #life #Relationship #Writing #coaching

Day 2: The Real Cost of Ice Cream and my Journey with Finances

A word on the cost of this ice cream

I purchased the pictured ice cream at Grand Ole Creamery on Monday. It is a double scoop – birthday cake and chocolate fudge brownie with their homemade cone. It isn’t cheap ice cream. The bill was $10.93. It tasted amazing and I appreciated the moment of sitting there with all the other denizens enjoying my summer treat.

Except it cost me more than $10.93 in the end. While I knew my account was low, I wanted to treat myself after a heavy week of interviews and rejections.

Unfortunately, I dipped below zero in my account and it cost me an additional $33, along with three other charges that same night for a total of $66 in bank fees.

Even though I’d paid off the overdraft I was carrying in that account (with a property tax refund) and started using the YNAB app (You Need a Budget), living on less than $400 a week in unemployment takes its toll on every aspect of my life. In theory I should never have taken my wallet out for my evening walk.

A sorry state of mind

This is more than just a treatise on spending plans and deprivation, though. It is a state of mind. Somehow, I created a life that barely sustains my existence on this planet. While I consider myself a happy person, deep down inside, I am clearly not feeling worthy of existence. Let’s get real about abundance blocks. They are insidious. Band-Aid approaches do not work for those of us with these deep-seated blocks.

Given the high profile and not so high profile (just see the RIP posts on my Facebook on any given day) suicides and early demises which have taken place, and you have to admit something is wrong with this picture.

Most people are not feeling worthy of their existence and it plays out in a myriad of ways from actual death to dying slowly – dating the wrong people so they don’t have to be alone, drinking too much and drug use (often backed up by a bunch of reasons why they NEED to be on drugs) and loads of other ways our shame is played out on the world stage.

Just this weekend, friends of mine were dealing with a member of their own family who had been committed to a psych ward with a suicide note and a heroin addiction. This shit is real. And everyone is touched by it in some way.

A long history of financial problems

My financial issues have plagued me my whole adult life. As I realized in 2016, I would need to deal with them head-on or I’d probably die early. Not from suicide (although when you aren’t able to sustain a regular existence it comes across your mind) but from a failure to thrive. Not eating enough, not paying rent on time, and a mounting debt problem weighs you down for real.

But how do you change this?

The fact is, it isn’t just a case of managing your cash flow – or all the books I read, classes I took or the software I owned would have made a difference before now. Yes…managing your cash is actually what it takes, in theory and if you just use your mind. However, realize that people with a skewed vision of money, carrying the baggage of ancestral and family trauma can use all those tools, and their subconscious will play out the pain body, sabotaging these efforts.

How money feels to me

It was never around, abandoned me just when I thought it was going well, looked like it was going to work out and disappeared (I often didn’t know “how” it disappeared), and was continually plagued by outside circumstances – i.e. - how does one pay rent with so little coming in? The shame around not being able to do what all my friends were doing was real almost every day. Still is.

How trauma works

Painstakingly, I have had to go into my energy body through my therapy sessions, uncover and heal stuff that I would have had no idea affected the way money worked in my life. Most all of it was passed down and I agreed to take it on, in utero.

After I was born, I just took those subconscious beliefs and created more on the top of them, based on how I already felt about my experiences from the ancestral baggage. This continued building through different periods of my life until the load was so heavy, the real world showed the signs. I could have read every book on the planet related to money and none of it would have made a damn difference.

How stuff started shifting

Unravelling the trauma required sessions at least every two weeks if not more for the last several years. As the past unwound, and my co-dependent relationship patterns emerged and left, the real-life stuff started happening. I have had to let go of structures (like my apartment I loved), friends, family members, jobs, dreams, dreamy thinking. I have had to create new structures – finance spreadsheets, apps, calendars of bills, paying only what came in (even if it meant making smaller payments for rent), and living a nomadic existence while I did it.

It DID NOT happen overnight. Each week I healed, maybe some tiny behavior shifted and it was easier (not easy) to do something like manage a spreadsheet. Or maybe, that week, it was time to tell a friend off and let them go because their way of thinking and being just wasn’t supporting my growth. That is A LOT OF PAIN. Trust me…each time, I felt I was ripping off a piece of my soul to do it.

The path forward

I look around at the destruction going on right now. There is a war going on in my inner world too. My ancestors and parents and other family may not have realized they passed down their unresolved feelings, beliefs and mucky attitudes. Nevertheless, somehow, I was left with the bag. The bag is going to be left behind before I die though. That is my plan.

Unfortunately, all around me I see the pain body – people hooked on drugs, people slowly dying in abusive relationship, people settling for less than the amazing life, people domineering and controlling, domestic violence, racial tension and violence and elected officials who would rather rape everyone then step up to the plate. People everywhere are not feeling worthy of their existence.

My YNAB app today

So, I got my unemployment check and a good $150 of it was already spent on ice cream and bank fees. Then I had to look out for the next couple weeks – something I just recently was able to do – and see all the charges going out. I was left with $20 – if I don’t spend anything on anything that isn’t already planned for until my next unemployment check. I *may* but it is not guaranteed, make a little cash at my part-time job at a restaurant movie theater on Friday. Our sales have been down, and my shifts cut so the likelihood is 40%.

Nevertheless, technically I am making more money than I did last week because an even higher percentage of my income was going to overdraft fees. We’re making a concerted effort to stop that from happening this week.

My soul today

I may not have healthcare, a job or even any prospects for making an adult living and yet, here I am surviving on less than $400 a week without my parent’s assistance (also not always the case). My Dad has been sending money to my school loan for my MBA, which is great because right now I can’t send anything to anyone that isn’t just about living right now. Past expenditures are not on the list yet.

I guess I feel a little better about myself deep down than I did a year ago. While not everyone would say my present is successful, I choose to see all of these steps as a huge win. Every day I get up, update my Excel spreadsheet, my Quicken file and my YNAB app and I am willing to look at my actual checking account without cringing (most of the time). Only a month ago, I was lucky if I could force myself to do it weekly.

This is day 2 of my writing journey. Let’s see where each day takes me. Let’s get real about who and what we really are made of. And it isn’t wine and cheese – at least not today.

#2018 #mind #innerwork #connectiontoself #betterchoices #wellness #energy #health #soul #selfhelp #financialhealth #Transformation #intimacy #Food #Heartwalls #BodyCode #threedimensionaltherapy #EmotionCode #Relating #empathic #empath #selflove #selfempowerment #bestself #life #career #caring #family #ancestraltrauma #patterns #familytrauma