Warning! This post is long because I’m on valium. Read on to find out why.

I want to share some things about this amazing journey of creativity and right-livelihood. I’m going to tell you a story about my first ever just launched acting class in my first ever just rented studio space. The first class was on Saturday, June 20. But I need to travel back in time a bit – all the way back to Thursday, June 18.

Thursday afternoon around 2:40 PM, I was in my office at the day-job and I was talking to our student assistant about this or that. I looked away from him and turned back to my computer and the room began to spin. Spin as in rotate around me in a circular motion! I thought it was a blood sugar issue since I’m not so good about eating when I’m busy. Fine. No biggie.

Friday morning, I roll over in bed and the room begins to spin. I roll over again – again with the spinning. I’m thinking, “Gheez! What’s the deal with my blood sugar?” I get up and start going about my business getting ready for work. And I end up dropping to my knees in the bathroom when I try to get in the shower. Now, I’m pretty sure this is not good so I call in the troops and make an appointment to go see the doctor. The doc diagnoses me with BPPV, Benign Paroxsymal Positional Vertigo. I call it BPPV – Bi-polar Pain in the Patootie Vexation. I’m given a prescription for motion sickness meds and valium (yuck)! So now I’m spinning and drooling – kind of like my dog when she’s on a rampage. Bear with me here. I’m getting to the point.

The world is spinning around me. I’m not allowed to drive or operate heavy machinery. I’m on drugs that knock me out and I’m supposed to teach my first acting class tomorrow morning. And there is nothing – NOTHING – that is going to keep me from starting that class. The main reason I won’t let anything stop me is that if I call my students and say, “I’m sick. I have vertigo. I’m going to have to cancel class – your first class – and we’ll start next week or the week after that or the week after that, okay?” – I’m afraid that if I cancel the first class, I will never have a first class.

Getting to the point of offering this class has been a big leap for me and I don’t want to lose the momentum that I’ve built in order to get here.

I was scared about canceling the class and I was scared I wasn’t going to be able to pay my expenses. I budgeted the class to have 10 students and I had 3 – maybe 4. That’s just enough to cover the studio expenses and I’ve been worried that I should cancel because the class didn’t “make”. And I had gone through a lot of thinking and stewing during the past week to get myself to the point where I was determined to teach those 3 lovely people what they wanted to learn come hell or high-water. Then this whole vertigo thing started and I’m thinking, “What now!?! What am I going to do?”

I spent Friday sleeping (actually, hallucinating thanks to the valium) – but when I wasn’t hallucinating I was thinking about the big picture of my soon to be realized independent right-livelihood career – the one that was scheduled to begin the next morning and the one that was choking along barely covering expenses. And I knew that I wasn’t seeing the big picture of my calling yet. I have faith that I will see it soon, but I have more soul searching and researching and planning and visioning to do.

If I could have driven myself to the bookstore I would have, but that wasn’t an option so I began prowling around online looking for a spark. I came across AssistU – and I was reading and my wheels were spinning and I’m thinking about possibilities and on AssistU there was a link to The Success Clinic. I start reading Noah St. John’s blog and I come across a new word – afformations.

My cynical brain clicks into high gear and I have to find out what this is about because it sounds really silly. I’ve worked with affirmations on and off and my success rate has been sketchy to say the least. To say the most, I felt like I was lying to myself while affirming that I was a wildly wealthy sexy sought after actress and entrepreneur who travels the world at will in her mazzerati.

The first thing Noah St. John says is that affirmations don’t work because our subconscious brain knows we are lying to ourselves. I think, “Okay. So far this guy is making sense because I know that’s true.” I had to know more right away which means I wasn’t willing to wait for Amazon to deliver his book, The Secret Code of Success, and I don’t have a Kindle so no automatic purchase was available. I thought maybe Audible will have something. I downloaded his Great Little Book of Afformations from Audible and settled in to listen while I popped another valium. I’m still a drooling idiot, but at least my mind is opening up a bit.

I listened to the whole book. It took me about 6 hours to get through it between naps, but someone who isn’t on drugs could manage it in an hour and a half. I took some notes as Noah encouraged and I wrote some personal afformations. Here are some of my favorites:

• Why do my students enjoy and get so much value from my acting classes?
• Why do I get to do what I love and get so wonderfully paid for doing it?
• Why do I love so much expressing who I really am and being fabulously paid for it?

I strongly encourage you to find out about these afformation things. I’m a fan. Read on to see what happened.

When I crawled into bed Friday night, I picked up A Return to Love and read this:

When our goal is making money, creativity becomes distorted. If I saw money as the ultimate goal of my teaching career, then I would have to think more about what people wanted to hear and less about what I feel it’s important to say. My energy would become tainted with efforts to get people to come back, to sell them on my lectures, to get them to bring their friends. But if the purpose of my career is to channel God’s love, then I’m only there to open my heart, open my brain and open my mouth.

I wasn’t looking for this passage. It was simply waiting there for me on the page behind my bookmark. I believe synchronicity is a blessing.

Here’s what happened: On Saturday morning my mother volunteered to drive me to the studio and my boyfriend volunteered to pick me up after class. So I went. I taught the class. I explained that I wouldn’t be up on my feet much during the class and that was fine. Usually I can’t sit while I’m directing/teaching. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed sharing what I love with my students. We had fun. I got a note from one of my students saying how much he enjoyed the class and that he’s looking forward to learning more. Awesome!

But wait! There’s more! As of this morning I have three more students and possibly one more referral joining class next week. The class has doubled in size over night! I can’t wait to start working with them!

So forget about the Bi-polar Pain in the Patootie Vexation. This journey, all the amazing things I’m learning, all the fun I’m having, finally letting go and giving myself permission to do what I love doing – this is what’s making my head spin!

I hope you are having as much fun with your journey as I am with mine.

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Tags: Acting, Business, Right Livelihood