​LOVE this TedTalk from the woman who changed my attitude about my own writing (for the WAY better), Book Mama Linda Sivertsen!!! Love love love this woman. Such a brilliant idea for making your life so much better and getting out of time debt. And seeing your dangerous patterns so you can call yourself out on it.

"I had been so blind. I wasted time in unhappy relationships and wasted more time trying to make sense of them. My patterns didn’t change because you can’t change what you don’t see."

And then...COLOR changes it all. <3 

I just spoke with my dad for Father's Day. He and my sisters are out to dinner/lunch in Rochelle Park, NJ eating littlenecks and drinking wine and Johnny Walker Black on the rocks and passing around the horseradish. 
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He wanted to know what I'm up to and was very pleased to hear I've been working on music and melodies have been coming to me.

"A woman I trust told me to ask for Archangel Gabriel's guidance," I told him, "and I did and got like three great ideas right in a row and a melody."

"Gabriel. That is marvelous," he said. He was thrilled, I'm sure, because this is the closest I've come to religion over the past several decades. Also, I grew up going to and receiving all the Catholic sacraments at Saint Gabriel's church (St. Gabe's for short), which he still attends.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night with chest tightness — I pulled myself out of bed, sprayed FES Flowers Post-Trauma Stabilizer into my mouth, rubbed DoTerra Peace oil onto my pulse points and breathed through it. 

The anxiety was from lying there trying to come up with a defense for why I don’t want to do a certain thing, reach out to a person, so that I could explain it to a veritable stranger who told me I should do those things. From my pillow, I crafted the reasons why, I apologized, I placed responsibility on myself for things I have never done, feelings that I had nothing to do with fostering.

This is the old me. My husband helped me see that this morning.

“This is the old people-pleasing you. You are also a rule follower,” he said.

“YES!” I slapped myself on the forehead (gently, lovingly, because I love myself). That makes total sense. The old me thought she needed to explain herself to everyone. I am doing exactly what Danielle LaPorte talks about in White Hot Truth! Slipping into the old way — where I want to open my heart so wide it’s raw, just to prove I’m good, and let people take up whatever kind of residence there at their behest, regardless of whether it’s impeding the function of my internal organs or my own growth.

“NO!!! NOOO! NOOOOOO!!!” My inner self-loving person who has become less enmeshed screams at me. And therein lies the conflict and the chest-tightening at five in the morning.

And it reminds me of one of the many times someone let a shop door slam on my niece, who is 4’11”.

“Sorry,” she said to the clueless perpetrator. 

“You didn’t do anything,” I said loudly, my ears hot. “Why are you apologizing?”

“Someone had to,” she said.

I can so relate to this. When things are emotionally jagged with someone I always feel like someone has to smooth it out. Being a peacemaker, that’s usually me.

“Tar baby,” my therapist has said to me many times. Meaning — you can put your hands all in a dramatic situation, but you’re just going to get tar all over yourself. Think before you swoop in. So that’s what I’m doing. And it had me up at the ass crack of dawn because the old people pleaser wants to run in and slather someone else’s tar all over my body. And current me is like, “You have a book proposal to finish! And other family to support! And your own energetic trajectory to follow! Quit with your self sabotage, resistance, messiah complex, enmeshed family conditioning and now, to top it all off, tight chest and lack of a good sleep.”

From the genius White Hot Truth:

“You will experience sharp and surprising pangs of self-hatred on your way to self-respect. This is what happens: you’re morphing beautifully and certainly into your assured self. You’re less critical, more embracing, and, just as marvelously, you are expressing yourself more purely. You’re really becoming YOU, through Love. You are Loving yourself into fullness.

“And then you slip into the old you for an interminable minute. Something triggers you, and you revert to that former, rougher, or wimpier version of yourself. You try to get something done with your old tricks and tactics—and then you extra extra hate yourself for it.”

OMG YES. Wimpier FO MF SHO.

And then DLP goes on to explain how, instead of hating yourself, love that sweet person. Have compassion. I keep getting this message again and again. From Martha Beck, to the medical medium I talked to the other day, who said to counter every self-attack with the mushiest “I LOVE YOU” I can muster. Break down the defenses of the ego by inviting everybody up on the sweetest lap for hugs and kisses and smothery motherly love.

Another thing the medical medium and I discussed is that my mother was probably molested (something I had suspected and that was gently alluded to, but never confirmed). It all clicked: Oh, hey, I have all this weird shame around sex, but it’s not from anything that happened to me. I’m carrying my mom’s stuff. I mean, yeah, I’ve had some lowdown cheater boyfriends, but no one has ever done anything sexual to me without my true consent. (And I don't think the momentary phalanges-phallus contact with the singer with the foot fetish counts.)

My siblings and I didn’t talk about what had happened to my mom except someone may have touched her breasts at some point when she was young. We all felt shame around so many things, in part because we were told to. And I started trying to “fix” my mom at a very young age, but never quite knew why. My love was good enough. I might not have been able to fix her, but who can fix anyone? So then to find myself about to go down another road of trying to fix and smooth un-smoothable others…NO THANK YOU!

I think at this point in my self-loving life I’m going to keep living by example. I’m going to keep my vibration high and keep my hands out of tar babies, even if someone tells me I shouldn’t. And I’ll have conflict here and there because of that. Oh well. 

There might be a lot of overgrowth on certain roads of communication but I have no gate up nor have I ever erected one. And to me, that is actually quite loving. 

Danielle LaPorte:

“Here’s the white hot Truth: Loving yourself doesn’t guarantee that you will be Loved by others.

“As a self-celebrating, self-respecting individual, you might really annoy some people. You WILL annoy some people. You will annoy a LOT of people. You will be misunderstood—perhaps thought of as arrogant. You may be uninvited. When you Love yourself enough to say, 'This is acceptable in my life and this is not,' you will become unacceptable to other people, especially those who tend to push against your boundaries. (You will also become a magnet for real Love and respect, so don’t dillydally with the haters.)”

BOOM. God, I love this woman.

You know when you have those moments where you’re like, “I'm here to learn”? Yeah. I am a sensitive soul who has often processed other people’s feelings through her own body (not anymore). And what a boot camp of a learning ground I find myself on with my old dad and the trickle down of all that DNA. To navigate out of the knotted rope obstacle course of other people’s feelings with my own oft-quiet voice not only intact but singing to high heaven, well, it’s been no small feat. And I welcome and thank the lesson I had early this morning.

A Czech friend once told me “Sutkowski” means “knotty.” Yah, no shit. Knots are tough and really hard to unravel sometimes but knots are also strong as this sometimes stoic Slav.

Today the escapist in me has spent too long on the internet looking at absurd clothes. I found these thigh high psychedelic sequin tights, for example, that I cannot find any good reason to buy. But they’re on sale from $110 to $88! What a bargain!

Maybe a giant Monarch butterfly wing cape is a better choice? That one is only $45 and could certainly be used to keep the sun, the people, the malaise out of one’s face? Eh, it attaches with a choker and I already wore my fill of those in the ’90s.

This website, Dolls Kill, has the best ridiculous clothes, perfect for the most insidiously trendy festivals of the season. They even have intricate rhinestone appliqués for your face and every size and shape of glitter imaginable. And of course all the pasties you could ever shake a nipple at. I bought a friend of mine a pair of poop emoji ones. What? They were on sale! Never pay full price for #2.

Or if wearing really small things like pasties isn’t your speed, maybe wearing really big things is a better plan? I also found sunglasses from Quay Eyeware so big you can cover your whole cheeks (but not quite as big as those giant joke ones), a behemoth yellow cropped sweatshirt with bell sleeves from The Ragged Priest and mom jeans so high you may as well be nursing your waistband. Pair all that with some mermaid glitter lashes and/or a fishnet face cover and some hologram platform boots from Demonia and you’re all set (and all sweat, likely, because baking all day in the festival sun is hot. Like temperature hot, not Paris Hilton “hot”).

It’s been a long time since I had anything made of holograms, but I’m no stranger to the prism. I had a silver hologram skirt once made of some kind of plastic (probably full of BPAs, but I only consider that now that I’m in my 40s), some orange prismatic booty shorts, and glasses that had winking hologram eyes in the lenses. Those glasses, however, weren’t as cool as these Heart Attack Sunglasses by My Willows, which feature “black side chains that hook behind yer ears with black tourmaline crystals hangin’ down at the bottom.” Be still, my heart (shaped sunnies).

The sunglasses rabbit hole alone is enough to make me believe I’m in the “Telephone” video with Lady Gaga and Bey. From half-lidded cream color ones with cacti and crescent moons, to biohazard ones with spikes.

The old romper standby, however, is always a classic choice. Little pleases me more than seeing someone in a really cute one piece shorts number or jumpsuit, knowing she’ll have to get naked to use the Porta-Potty. As I giggle through my rainbow dust mask and third-eye-bedecked sunglasses. Might I suggest the more practical (but still impractical) “play set.” Still matchy-matchy, but shorts and a top. If we’ve learned anything, it’s that convenience is key. Winky-face.

Jenn Sutkowski wishes you a rainbow-hued and totally impractical festival season. And always use (sun) protection. Find her getting prismatic and being glad she appreciated without appropriating all these clothes and accessories at jennsutkowski.com (uh, here...Duh. This Full Frontal column appeared first in the Newport Mercury.)

Here I am reading this week's column -- about flower essences! I've been MIA the last few weeks due to dealing with some anxiety and family things, which I'll get to later. In the meantime, here are some things that have been helpful.

After having an anxiety-ridden time of it (most of my life), including a good old-fashioned anxiety attack last week — bully for me! — I’ve been amassing a list of helpers and non-helpers. Which you may or may not follow, because, if I knew how to get rid of this chest-tightening friend, I wouldn’t have it anymore, right?

Here’s what happened: Since I’m hypersensitive these days to my body’s weirdnesses, I started asking myself why I couldn’t take deep enough breaths after singing and feeling winded. This began a spiral in my head: “Can I breathe enough?” And then I got dizzy and next thing you know I am in the bathroom trying to calm myself down.

Watching the new Starz series, based on Neil Gaiman’s novel, “American Gods,” didn’t help. I know people are going nuts over this show. I think it is just a toughie to adapt in a way that actually feels satisfying to the viewer, as currently it is very episodic. But, I thought to myself, anxiety attacks AND erections on television are on the table of my life now? Yeesh. (Ian McShane, however, as Mr. Wednesday, is magic.)

Other things that probably don’t help: caffeine, blood sugar spikes/plummets, crowds, but mostly the fear of fear (as my therapist has explained can turn a sporadic anxiety attack into panic disorder).

I sprayed Fear-Less by FES Flowers into my mouth and it helped, I think. Who knows? It’s a combination of essential oils and flower essences that are to help with panic and the like, such as red clover, mountain pride, California valerian, Oregon grape, mimulus, rock rose and green rose.

“Composure and containment when challenged by fear, anxiety or panic,” it says on the bottle. I’ll have what she’s having.

If you aren’t already hip to the flower essence tip, basically it’s known as a vibrational essence of a flower or plant (or, in some cases, trees, rocks, gems) mixed with water and brandy, traditionally. Usually the plant is left in water in the sun, but the possibilities are endless, including “no-pick” essences, etc.

Flower essences in general are my jam. I have gotten a few custom ones from a woman in North Carolina — Purifoy Spirit Essences. I also love Bach’s Rescue Remedy and FES Flowers’ Yarrow Environmental Solution. Yarrow is amazing for boundaries, if you’re into those sorts of things.

Herbs rule (chamomile, holy basil and lavender are some faves), provided you don’t have any medication interaction. Always check with your docs. This is why flower essences are sometimes a better choice. You can use the flower essence of St. John’s Wort since it is merely a vibrational imprint of the plant without it messing with your hormonal birth control or hormone-manipulating meds, whereas using the actual plant or a tincture is contraindicated.

Also helpful: Acupuncture, lying on the yoga bolster, yoga in general, massage and distraction. And going easy on yourself. Like the flower, we get to be simultaneously thriving and delicate.

Jenn Sutkowski realizes that moving across the country in the same year as having a cuckoo diagnosis might also be contraindicated. Certain music is helpful for that, too. She wishes you lavender essential oil-scented calm. Find her handling it at jennsutkowski.com.

This Full Frontal column appeared first in the Newport Mercury.