a firetender's chronical.3

My strongest suit, in terms of supporting all aspects of my life, is my writing. The internet provides me the vehicle to work out a lot of the details of the new territory I'm exploring, and now, I'm seeing how it can help me gather allies to bring forth my work.

In this blog, my intent is to share my experiences here at Zaadz as I manifest people to help me get my work out there. In this process, I will examine as best possible the ways I have been and am blocking my ability to be effective. I'll also share my experience of how what Zaadz has created fulfills its mission by helping me get over my self-imposed barriers.

A big part of my challenge has been I've been slack at getting myself out there talking about myself and what I do long enough to convince someone that they might need what I have to offer.  I've come to the conclusion that my first problem marketing me is I know too much about who I am.

I look at myself - and I know a hell of a lot more about me than you do - and say, "I wouldn't follow that guy as a healer." So I've got no juice for representing myself to people who might follow me and make me rich. Maybe a deeper truth is I don't follow anyone and think maybe you shouldn't either, but what does that mean?

Here I am, building a case for you that I can't market me because I really don't meet the standards of what I think you think a healer is. It's all so much bullshit! In the final analysis, it's all about the work, of which I'm only the vehicle.

Full-disclosure: This is all a semi-slick ploy to get people to take responsibility to do what I am too lazy to do myself. On another level, this is all about knowing that I can't be all I'm designed to be without your help.

If you want me to talk about the work in person, I can go on for days. If you want me to talk about me, in person, I may start out rolling, but after a few short minutes, if I don't get bored to tears, I certainly lose steam and I've lost you. This is no good for marketing what you offer. (Paradoxically, sit me in front of a keyboard like this and you can't shut me up about my process!)

So basically, I've come here to Zaadz to find people who will talk about the work I do to others, for me, so that something actually happens with it that will support me as I do the work they're talking about.

Maybe a major thing that I keep stumbling on is that I'm having an increasingly more difficult time thinking in terms of "Ownership" of anything I offer. That may play a part in my financial situation.

When I speak of myself as a spiritual counselor, for example, I credit whatever wisdom I may have gathered as a direct extension of the incredibly varied textures of pain that I experienced as a child. I know the stuff that lives inside you because it is still living inside me somewhere; that whole resonance thing.

I'm sorry, but I've never gotten it in my head that before I can recognize and relate to your pain, we need to figure out a financial arrangement; before I can offer you an image that will soothe you, I need the check in hand; or before I can tell you as a healer you're gonna have to face your own shadow over and over I'll need you to sign up for the newsletter so I can sell you some art. In my cosmology, those "befores" are unnatural acts against my nature.

All of my pain, all of my experience, all of the routes I've taken to figure it out, all the words and art I've produced to articulate the territory so you don't have to is sacred stuff that is a part of my moment-to-moment being. It is there, period, and will not wait for the lure of money before it comes out.