The Dolphin in the Snow

“It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.”  (Me too, Mr. Einstein, me too.)
–Albert Einstein

Authenticity is at the core of living life by heart. The heart doesn’t operate by logic and it wants you to honor who you really are and to be completely who you came here to be. Without apology.

I love stories and my favorites are of people or animals overcoming incredible odds, underdogs succeeding, and people who’ve made radical reinventions. On Oprah Radio the other day I listened to a man who had been a successful lawyer speak about starting a mustard museum with incredible passion (say what?) much to his Jewish mother’s mortification.

Our genuine selves are sometimes so deeply buried we don’t have a clue who we are not being and what we are not doing. The whispers of the heart are easily drowned out by the static noise of life.

I have been excavating my inner world for years and thought that I was fairly cognizant of my true self. But going deeper down the rabbit hole (in the meditations of the emotional rehab I wrote of in an earlier post) it came to me that there may be even more layers to unearth to get to the real McCoy.

With a new onslaught of spring storms and exhausting hot flashes, I found myself unable to get out of my robe on Saturday—the best day of the frigging week. Highly uncharacteristic (especially since I get my coffee on the outside), I had no desire to leave the house or do anything more than read. Finally at 8:00 pm, I showered and got dressed with only one mission in mind: go to McDonald’s. For anyone who knows me, you’ll read this as a Code Red Alert. Not only did I have a manic urge for McDonald’s, I drove in and asked for the ‘Depression Combo Pack.’

“What is that?” asked the cashier.

“A Big Mac, fries, and a hot fudge sundae,” I said, and then gunned the car to get the goods.

“Having a bad day?” asked the young guy at the window with a sympathetic smile.

“Yes. I have never ordered $10 worth of McDonald’s food in my life! And you can name that combo pack after me if you want.”

The next day when I awoke to a raging blizzard, I could have cleaned the snow off the sidewalks in a Bugs Bunny nanosecond, I was that much of a Tasmanian devil of annoyance and white fury. (Unfortunately, Dispenza does not lie when he says you have to lose your mind to redesign a new one.)

Why such agitation? I can tell you best in an analogous story that may trigger some insight into your own Tasmanian moments.

Let’s imagine that the earth is, by and large, Rabbit World. There is nothing wrong with rabbit life and there are billions of rabbits happily mating, reaching pinnacles in their careers, and living in gorgeous rabbit homes.

I have lived as a rabbit for most of my life. I was born into a rabbit family, went to rabbit schools, eat rabbit food, married a rabbit man once upon a time, and have worked at many rabbit jobs. Most of those whom I love are rabbit people.

But, I am a dolphin. And I have lived much of my life with the notion that wanting to be my dolphin self is wrong and that I should try my very best to be a good little rabbit. The tenacity with which I’ve clung to that notion is rather mind-boggling. What has kept me going are the moments I’ve spent in a dolphin’s life—I know it exists and it is magnificent.

In the dolphin world, femininity is revered. Male dolphins act like males and female dolphins act like females. It is all very natural. When I date the rabbits, they are suspicious because they think nobody honestly wants to play that much and that I must have a hidden agenda.

I am sometimes given carrots, but dream of little, brightly colored fish. I find getting the carrots difficult. In the sea, abundance is everywhere, all of the time. There is an endless supply of whatever you need and all flows effortlessly. Here, I have to change my coat to live in the snow and dig deep for the carrots. Dolphins don’t swim or breathe well in snow.

Each day, I wake up as though I’ve been back to the sea in my sleep and I need to talk myself into rabbit life. I awaken reluctantly and drag myself out of my bed. Gradually, I succumb to rabbit life and its demands, although, as a dolphin, I frequently wonder why anyone would want to be a rabbit.

I am fascinated by all non-rabbits I hear about like Laird Hamilton, Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey and Ernest Hemingway. I have a few non-rabbit friends who have successfully defected to their rightful domains. I am sometimes happy for them and sometimes ashamedly green-gilled with envy.

I’ve played by rabbit rules. I’ve answered my whole life to Boss Rabbits who frequently asked me if I was hitting the Customer Rabbits on the head with a hammer to get them to buy things.

Instead, I told the Customer Rabbits dolphin tales and brought them dolphin treats and gave them TLC and I knew they liked this so much more than getting hit on the head with a hammer and that they bought a lot from me because they liked dolphin energy. But I always held an underlying fear that the Boss Rabbits would figure out that I am a dolphin and would take away the carrots that I got.

I am told I have to do many strange things in order to be successful in the World of Rabbits. I do as many as I can, but I am not “successful.” Personally, I think swimming and telling dolphins stories and just being a dolphin is success.

When I went through cancer two, I made decisions from my dolphin self. I decided not to run back to my old job and old world, which would have nicely kept me at status quo in Rabbit Land. I innately knew it would be death for me. I chose to use the rabbit money I’d painstakingly saved to recover in a dolphin’s best environment.

I went to the ocean for six months and I lived life at my finest. I lived in a dolphin house for the very first time in my life (a spectacular view of the sea on a hilltop, a beautiful little kitchen for cooking, a minimalist home with massive windows and a cool breeze blowing through, a huge patio with a hammock and super power binoculars to see the craters on the moon at night, and a big bed that I had a view of the ocean from). Every single day I said thank you for such a blissful place to live.

I was surrounded by dolphin people. I ate dolphin food. I did dolphin things; walking on the beach, watching sunsets and full moons over the ocean, dancing, listening to beautiful music in the streets each day, and I often went on the ocean to bond with sea life, my hair blowing, the ocean mist and sun on my skin, the whales breaching, the manta rays floating by and … the dolphins jumping out to say hello. I was in awe of life.

I wrote my dolphin tales at an outdoor café in front of the ocean where both non-rabbits and rabbits came by to talk to me and visit. I sang in my home because I finally felt like singing once again.

I was so much in my frequency that the skin condition, which had taken over my body and flared up to the extreme during treatments, began to subside in one month. By the time I left, my skin was its beautiful, smooth, clear self for the first time in eight years. (When I returned, they returned within one month).

I came back at ground zero financially, but with a bunch of dolphin ideas of how I would sustain my dolphin life and I was excited and optimistic. But the ideas didn’t fly with the rabbits. I kept creating and trying. I went to rabbit school for six months to learn the right ways to make the plan work. And as time crept on, I little by little built a trap of rabbit debt to survive.

In the process of trying to rewire my emotions, I see the crux of my angst is the confining trap I’ve created for myself in Rabbit World. How do you leave rabbit life to live the life you were born for from a trap you walked into? There are likely 1000 solutions in Universal Mind, but from the cage, I can’t see them.

Trying to create a dolphin’s life by rabbit rules doesn’t work. When you’ve wedged yourself on a fence keeping one foot firmly planted in Rabbit World and one dipping your toes back and forth in dolphin waters, it makes for a very irritating pain in the ass.

When we live out of sync with who we truly are and what we need for much too long, that’s likely the place where we hit the wall.

Who are you not being?

What do you need that you hide under the rug as a one-day thing?

What things ignite a fire inside you that you ignore?

Here is a brilliant story from an über unique non-rabbit. It is a tale of a woman who lives life on her own wildly nonconformist terms with an extraordinary trust in life, in the goodness of people, and in her art. What happened because she honored her “non-rabbitness” in a rabbit-dominant world, in spite of criticism and harassment, will astound you. It’s 14 minutes of your life worth spending that may shed a sliver of light on your own authentic and beautiful raison d’être.

DON’T MISS A POST! SUBSCRIBE (free) HERE.