Perhaps we react differently in those environments because we can't hold that consistency within ourselves.. or perhaps our bodies are screaming at us that we don't belong there.

Richard

@Shaina - your comments have helped inspire tomorrow's show. Thank you. Oddly enough, our dads were such pioneers yet their children have various urges to conform. Good point!

@Alana - where are you??? Hope you are coming back to the islands soon. :-*

I am finding that my father's recent death is opening up space and permission for me on many levels. He was a major carrier, in my life, of the pressure to at least TRY TO APPEAR NORMAL!!! Growing up in the midwest with a powerful, CEO father, as I know you did, made for a persistent and challenging pressure to conform to that world that he lived in and assumed was the only relevant, important, meaningful or safe way to go through life.

Now that he has passed, I find a new space is opening up, quite without effort on my part. Something is reorienting in me, and my internal experience of my place in the world is shifting. I am already feeling more free to explore and express my eccentricity and unique way of being in this world, and sense that something very new is just beginning. At the heart of it is a new clarity that I have every right to fully claim and live what feels true and relevant and of value to me, just as my father did in his life.

Thanks for marking the territory today, and for being my companion on the edge for so many years

--Shaina