This is an open letter to Gabrielle Bernstein, author of Spirit Junkie and Add More -ing To Your Life and creator of HerFuture.com. We met last month at the WIE Symposium.
Dear Gabrielle-
I hope this letter finds you well. I thought the letter was a novel way to reach you and then posting it on the Huffington Post even more unusual. But there's a reason, a point I want to make. I'm not all gimmick.
When we met, one of the things we talked about was the power of words -- words used in conversation in our daily life, thoughts we shove around in our heads, messages we send others through our interactions whether face-to-face talks or through social media or some other method. You said you're a Twitter junkie. I get Twitter's appeal. The immediacy is pretty cool. I watched Hurricane Irene come up the coast through Twitter. I was checking out #Irene until well past 1 am, making sure friends and family were safe and I got completely caught up in the descriptions of the storm that people were sharing and how fast new bunches of tweets were appearing.
Is Twitter as much about the power of words or the compressed speed of words? I'm not sure. At the moment, it's about frustration as the site is over capacity and not loading. I wanted to check out some of your tweets. You said that you "tweet affirmations or ... positive shifts on a way to see a typical situation." Well, it's still not loading, so I'll come back to that. I'll try to be positive because maybe I'll find one great tweet by you when I reach the end of this piece that will sum everything up and make it well worth putting up with the spinning beach ball of frustration.
I still haven't gotten to my point. Hang in there. I'll reveal it soon enough. I loved hearing about your website, www.HerFuture.com. Here's what you said about it right after my friend Hope was thoughtful enough to bring us glasses of water:
And this site's just been a tremendous way to carry the message and have people not just feel like it's their own journey, but they can take that journey with others. So on my site there are women talking about reproductive rights or talking about recovering from addiction. They're talking about yoga and health food, spirituality, business -- all the things that women need to connect on. They're there having that really intimate conversation ... There's this odd experience of freedom and just this opening for people to come on and say things like, "I binged last night. How do I get over that?" I don't think you find that in the other places.
There's a generation of women and people in the world today and that fourth wall is not there and it's a powerful, powerful tool if you use it in the right way. Really recognizing your intention and the energy behind what it is that you're sharing and posting. And what an impact that has.
Much of what I teach is that every word and every thought that we put out into the world is an affirmation. So we're affirming love or we're affirming more fear and more chaos. And we have to become extremely conscious of what messages we're putting out because our thoughts can be toxic and so can our words. And the world does not need any more toxicity. So a ... primary focus of my work is to change perceptions and when people make that perceptual shift that's when they get that miraculous energetic shift. They can experience the world in a different way.
I'm sending you this as a reminder. This is what you shared with me and all the other women at The WIE Symposium. And here's the point of writing you this letter. It's not really such a big reveal after all. This isn't a reminder for you -- it's for me. Everyone needs reminders about the good stuff from time to time. It's not that we forget, it's just that the daily bits and pieces of our lives can take over the bigger picture.
You gave me pause when we talked. I've seen in my children's faces how a tone or edge to my voice affects them even when I'm just having a bad day and not upset with them. I know when I'm working myself up and need to stop taking everything so seriously. So I'm writing you this letter rather selfishly. You probably don't really need the reminder to be conscious of what you're thinking and saying nearly as much as I do, but in writing you, I sort of trick myself.
Hope your book is selling well and the tour isn't too fast-paced. Let me know how you're doing and if you're going to be in LA anytime soon. You can even leave a comment below. Now, let's see if Twitter is back up so I can find that perfectly poignant tweet that wraps this all up.
I didn't find what I'd hoped for. All I got was this: "Your connection has timed out. Please try again later." Not exactly what I was hoping for. But at least they said please.
Sincerely,
Deborah Stambler