I am sitting here with a bag of chocolate wafers and my coffee. I have been sitting like this for the last 15 minutes, shoving my face with wafers, and writing and deleting over and over again. About an hour and a half ago I tried to sit down, but I remembered I needed to make the beans for tonight, and then I needed to clean the kitchen, and then I needed to make some coffee because I was tired, and then I would have done laundry… but I knew I wanted to write this blog and the clock was ticking before my next client arrived. So finally I decided to stop, breath and ask myself WHY IS IT TAKING SO LONG TO GET TO THE BLOG!!!!!!! The answer comes…”because you are afraid of letting go!!!” “Oh that old thing,” I say. “Can’t I move forward without letting go?” Silence… and then comes the biggest laugh I’ve ever heard.

Yesterday I admitted to holding on to the rules, but what’s really annoying is that even though I can’t stand people who are controlling, now I have to admit to being controlling! Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of compassion for controlling people, it’s just that it drives me insane! And it also drives me insane when I am trying to do something the way I want it to be done, but it’s not getting done that way. I think that’s called hypocritical…

I’m not the kind of controlling where I need to make the plans, pick the restaurant, and tell everyone what to do. I’m controlling mostly in relation to myself. I learned early on from my experience with my mom that you cannot control what other people do (although that hasn’t stopped me from trying), so instead the way I try to control things is by avoiding people. For instance I might be invited out, but then I can’t get a babysitter, or I don’t have money, or I’m too tired or I don’t feel well. The deeper reality is, I am trying to control the situation to protect myself. I think that if I isolate myself nothing can happen to me, no situation or person can hurt me, but really it’s not the situation or person, but how I feel about myself. I could move to a desert island and the feeling that something bad will happen would still be there, but if I’m loving myself, I’m strong, I shine.

When I started this blog, one of my many intents was to let go and not be afraid of what people thought about me. So as the blog developed day after day, everything seemed to be going well. Then suddenly people I didn’t know, started reading the blog! My first thought was “Wow, how did they find me?” Then I realized I had never thought about that happening. I just thought people I knew would read it and maybe some of their friends but I hadn’t imagined total strangers, with no connection to me, reading it. Of course, for me this makes it feel out of my control, and I flip. I could feel it hanging over me, this idea that I am not in control of who is reading what I say, and when I looked at my stats a couple of days later, as I sometimes do, suddenly there weren’t as many people reading. Uh oh, here I go again! This is my pattern, create, destroy, create, destroy, and every time I say, “What did I do?”

During my music career, when my manager told me that five labels were looking to sign me, I got down on my knees and prayed like I had never prayed before to make them all go away. The next day, he calls and says, “Kid, it’s the strangest thing, no one’s calling me back! What happened?” Needless to say, I didn’t tell him about the praying.

Over the last two years, since we moved to New York, I have created opportunities that could have made my career sky rocket, and each time it starts to take off, I start to freak out, and then without a word it ends.

This past October while we were visiting in Ireland, there was a huge lottery jackpot of 190 million Euros (about 244 million USD). I had a feeling, so I played. I felt it, I got excited and then I let it go, or so I thought; The night before the draw, I started to think of all the horrible things that could happen if I won, like maybe it would ruin my family, ruin my kids, people would hate us, it would cause arguments, I wouldn’t do this work anymore, my husband would stop painting, and money would basically be the end of the life I knew. I mean, to be honest, yes, my life would change if I won 190 million, but how it would change is up to me. I live in New York city with millions of people from all different backgrounds: rich, poor, black, white, asian, muslim, christian, jewish, gay, straight, medium, large, happy, sad, crazy and so on, but no matter what you look like on the outside or have in your wallet, it all comes down to how you feel about yourself. I have known addicts who come from all kinds of families, and kind people from all kinds of families, and I know it’s how you feel about what’s happening that’s important. One of my deepest worries was that my kids would loose their gratitude for life, and take things for granted. I believed that struggle makes them better people like it made me a better person. It was not struggling, or my background or my surroundings that made me a kinder and more caring person, but my understanding and compassion towards myself and others. But even though I know this, I was not aware that I was not really feeling it; and those are 2 very different things.

To think is to be in the mind, and to feel is to be in the heart, and it is our heart that leads us no matter what. So there I was thinking the worst about having loads of money and then I decided to let go and think happy thoughts like: I deserve this, we all deserve this. As I was falling asleep I repeated this over and over again in my head.

Then the next day I get an email from the lottery (because I had bought it online) saying that I had won 212 euros. Huh?! That’s a lot of money to win in the lottery, I thought. You play by picking 7 numbers; five between 1-75, and two ‘lucky stars’ between 1-11. I checked my ticket, I had four out of the five numbers and one of the two lucky stars. If I had gotten one more number I would have won a million, two more would have been the jackpot 190 million.  “Hmmm…” I think, “What is going on here?”

Years ago when I was living in NYC in the 90’s the homeless population was overwhelming. Every day as I’d walk down the street, I would give money, food, clothes or anything else I had to homeless people. I was overwhelmed and felt powerless to change the world. At the time I was 20 years old and barely getting by. I kept wishing I had millions of dollars so that I could help these people, but I didn’t, and I didn’t understand at the time that money wasn’t the answer. These people were homeless because they didn’t feel like they had someone to go, somewhere they would be accepted. In the moment of accepting my powerlessness a thought came; how can I help anyone when I can’t help myself.

So now I realize, Wow, I have won the lottery, the lottery of life. My life is the lottery. This blog is my lottery. The universe has given me the greatest gift, an opportunity to see what crazy thoughts and beliefs I have and share them with others. A chance to create change in millions of people’s lives by just helping myself. I don’t know what will happen for others, but I know that when I change myself I am changing the world around me, because we are all connected and that is something I can never change, thankfully. I have already heard from so many people that this blog is helping them to see things about themselves that they never realized before, and for me for that is the most beautiful gift I could ever receive; seeing others find their inner beauty.

So I send this blog out with no cares of where it goes, knowing that I am not in charge of who reads it or where it goes and my only hope is that whoever does read it finds the beauty within themselves.

with love,

Oskar