Leadership and Embodying Your Ideals

(and how to make yourself extremely unsexy with a high pitched Yoda voice)

I once asked my husband what he thought my mental/emotional age was. He replied, “You are ageless.”

A tactful man. But he was also being honest, regardless of looks. It is all happening at once, I am told, so in fact I am probably many babies and many old ladies and a few old men and a few strapping young boys and middle aged men and teenage girls all at once. Also that lifetime I was probably an aphid and the one where I was an elephant and all the ones where I live on other worlds. Add to that, all the parallels of this one. We are in a phase where I believe we are having the opportunity to confront, integrate and in some cases dissolve old timelines.

I am one of those people who was born old and in some ways has gotten younger with age. I cannot remember a time of not feeling serious about the world. My childhood bestie labeled me her “serious friend.” I sometimes still get too serious. A bunch of years ago, I attended a dinner with my spouse. It was the last of its kind funded, before it went the way of most company funded perk things. I sat at a table with doctors, a CEO and another spouse who owns a fried chicken chain. I didn’t talk much with the fried chicken guy but he seemed cool. The CEO responded me to my question about what he had learned from cross cultural experiences by telling me that in a certain country you are expected to flirt with a man’s wife, otherwise it’s like your insulting him indirectly by insulting his wife by not flirting with her. Fortunately he didn’t add, “And don’t you look stunning this evening.” If he had replied, I would have put on my best Yoda impersonation and said “When hundreds of thousands of lifetimes old you are, look this good, you (probably) will not.”

I was telling

Dea Devidas

the other day that Yoda once served me well in fending off unwanted attention, probably around the time of the dinner. I was at a coffee shop and a fellow was being persistent and intrusive in his interest. So I finally just broke into a Yoda impersonation in which my voice went really high without having intended it to, so that I sounded even weirder than I originally meant to come across, which, admittedly I was hoping would be weird enough to scare him off. The man went away shaking his head and muttering. He left me alone and I never had any issues after that with him. While I wouldn’t recommend the way I found my spouse as dating advice (you know, marry someone who treats you like shit, get knocked up within six weeks, then listen to your intuition for which church to go to and beeline for the couple that looks approximately your age in a sea of white and gray heads…then ditch spouse 1, cause a sooner than otherwise break up of the other pair, marry that guy and move to New Jersey,) I do recommend the Yoda approach for deflection. The truth is, in general, just being myself works fine. Once a man tried to engage me in small talk while I was staring at some plants growing on a fence along a sidewalk passage way we call the secret passage, even though it is commonly walked upon, known about and even plowed in the winter. The man said, “You really like plants, huh?” I said, “Yes, yes I love them very much. If I could, I’d grow plants out of my body, as long as it didn’t involve using CRSPR.”

In that moment, when I saw him go bzzz like a small electric shock had hit him while he walked away, dumbstruck, apparently, it occurred to me that the wild feminine is the answer to the matrix because of its inherent spontaneity. By the feminine I don’t mean anything specifically to do with female, but that aspect of quantum improv that doesn’t follow blind scripts or straight lines or linear thinking. I didn’t plan, “How to weird out old guy who tries to engage me in conversation,” any more than I preplanned the Yoda impersonation, or the many conversations I’ve had over the years with strangers, baristas and neighbors - most of which have been positive, if often brief. You can’t plan spontaneity - you can only be available for it. But Source can coordinate your quantum expression just as you can send love to all the babies you are in the cosmos from your current life, just as you can also re-member that you are already that ascended, super evolved, amazing angel that you are on the way to becoming for this life!

At that last funded dinner - the one where I got to go up and add to the live painting being done for entertainment…and learn about the CEO’s cultural studies, I tried to talk to the doctors about changes I thought healthcare could benefit from that I thought would be win win win for everybody. They seemed a little weirded out and commented that I seemed to have a lot of passion. I used to believe transformation was possible within the system. I now think the system will function until it doesn’t and it collapses or is subsumed by another system until that one too collapses. I think births of newer paradigms will happen - ones where the role of healer is restored beyond clinician and the power of nature, communion with one’s own soul, Source and fellow living beings is an integral part of medicine and where human beings are valued not as assets but as embodied expression of the Sacred. That day is coming. However I don’t think the old will be salvaged. I don’t stress trying to change it anymore. I occasionally vent and my husband I both throw up our hands and sigh.

A year -ish ago, I heard through the grapevine that I have a reputation at his employer for having the “flowing presence of a yogi.” I have no idea who saw me, in what context or how they drew that conclusion, (clearly they didn’t see me on one of my immature moaning and groaning at my higher self days where I over rehash Kubler-Ross stages of grief about what I’ve agreed to in certain parts of my contract in coming here,) but maybe I have mellowed a little since they stopped funding dinners? Is the wise old owl coming out in me? But simul to that, whoever observed that clearly also don’t know about the fantasy my inner child has of bringing crayons into the backroom and coloring all over it. Still, maybe I have matured a little.

It’s not that I’m cynical. I’m just realistic.

And really, sometimes the foundation itself really does have to go in order to build something that arises from a space of integrity. Miracles birthing this divine new, however it looks - are quantum events coordinated by souls with embodied prayers of faith to birth heaven on earth, drawn together to co-create in alignment with and Divine Will.

The problem with outside in change is that ideas are forced on people, which isn’t very ideallyc when you rest to think about it. Ideals, deals have to be embodied and I am the only one who can embody my own. I can’t do it for others, nor should I, for only dictators try to make others conform to ideals rather than inspiring them to do so, as true leaders do.