The Power of Mess

An interview with S.C. Lourie

Hi Friends,

We’ve got another terrific interview today, and it’s a pretty long one, so I’ll keep the introduction short. S.C. (Sam) Lourie and I found each other through Facebook a bunch of years ago and even got to spend a beautiful day together walking around a sunshiney London. She’s a positively lovely human being and gorgeous writer. You may have come across her writing online through her Butterflies & Pebbles pages. I love her heart and her work and suspect you will too. Just look at her!

Sam’s new book, The Power of Mess: A Guide to Finding Joy and Resilience When Life Feels Chaotic, is a truly wise, comforting and helpful read. I highly, highly recommend it. Especially now, when life seems to feel chaotic with regularity.

This was my endorsement for it: With The Power of Mess, S.C. Lourie invites us on an adventure into ourselves, and she serves as the most trustworthy and gentle guide. I've long been a fan of her gorgeous writing on social media, and this book beautifully reflects S.C.'s rich wisdom and poetic prose. She reminds us that even at our messiest, we are no less worthy of love, and helps us navigate through life's more difficult moments with self-compassion and tenderness. The book will have you loving yourself more, and I can't think of a better gift than that.

Here’s a taste of Sam’s wisdom, and her huge heart…

One of the problems with the messy times in our lives is that when we go through them, we often don’t feel powerful. So where is the power waiting in the mess?

Well, I don’t want to spoil the ending of the book! But there are so many realisations of your own power waiting for you from the moment you decide you will face the messy moments in your life rather than follow the habits that mean you avoid them. We don’t feel powerful a lot of the time because we don’t put ourselves in a position to discover these realisations about our potential and our capability that are often only available to be found in challenging circumstances, when we decide to grow through them. I haven’t quite worked out if it’s because these realisations are not available in less challenging times or if we only become ready enough to embrace those truths when we are challenged and feel desperate enough for that level of truth and wisdom.

Okay, so what does facing messy moments in our lives so that we can grow through them look like? Where does finding our power begin?

My book is a kind of manual to do just that. It’s a why-to-do-it, a how-to-do-it and a when-you-do find your power in the mess, or the Great Mess as I like to call it. I think our power begins actually at the point that we get honest about why we don't feel powerful. Everything transformative begins with honesty because it's in the process of honesty that we start opening our hearts. And I truly believe there is nothing more powerful in this world for you than your open heart. And getting honest or getting more honest about things is something we can always do and it's something we can always get better at. Even as we feel powerless, we can always be honest about what we are imagining and going through. This is an empowering practice because we learn to put words to our feelings even if we feel clumsy and often silly doing so, and this process stops the emotions we have from feeling so abstract, uncontained, and uncontrollable. Words can lock feelings down, so that we can begin to better understand and express ourselves. This dramatically helps in the mission to open our hearts because often it’s the fear we have about feeling certain things, that keeps us shut down, removed and numb to life around us.

So it begins with honesty? Then what next?

So yes, honesty in the beginning is basically calling things what they feel to be. Having the courage just to do that. There is a lot of healing just in this stage because so much of what we feel we keep bottled up inside for so long. We communicate what we believe will be received more easily but all those things we are scared to share for fear of judgment we need to make our way through. As you get that out of your system through some kind of mindful expression, you can then go deeper into your honesty and clarify if what they feel to be is the same as what they are. This is another huge step. And another dose of courage is required. There is so much illumination and many aha moments waiting for you in this part of the process. Because experiences can feel something different from what they actually are and to be able to make that distinction offers incredible insight and clarity. The clearer you feel, the more in touch you become, and that’s when you can really start accessing your intrinsic power. Getting honest allows us to take the sting out of things. The sting out of feelings we have about the things we have witnessed and experienced and the sting out of those memories (recent and old) of those very experiences as well. When we take the sting out of them, they can no longer hurt us, we no longer need fear them, we know that we will no longer feel overwhelmed. And we can start excavating the other ‘nutrients’ in the experiences. Processing them and integrating them from a different place. Basically, when you are not battling with your own overwhelm, or trying to contain or ignore it, then you have space to explore your own power. So really, in the book, we look at how to put the overwhelm to one side over time. Because it’s the overwhelm that shuts us down, sometimes much more than the actual obstacle we are faced with. What we think about the obstacle and then how we perceive it, is more important than the obstacle itself. So, exploring other ways to perceive it and approach it are ways towards freedom and empowerment and heightened creativity as well.  We look at this specifically in Chapter six of my book where I discuss reconceptualization and how my husband reconceptualised or reframed his epilepsy to make it almost like an ally and definitely a teacher so that he could better understand his own personal intricacy.

Ah, this seems like a key point. Reconceptualisation. Can you say more about this?

Yes, it really is. The power of reframing is something I lean on all the time. It’s a principle to this day that hasn’t let me down and the application of it always points back to my power, my own creativity and possibilities. It’s the act of taking your life into your own hands and saying “I will do something with this,” with the emphasis on the ‘I’. It’s as though you are saying to yourself and to the world, “I might not have wanted this to happen, but this is still mine now, this is my life and my life is for me to get busy in, even in all these details of my life I would prefer to be something different”. So reframing is not about denying the truth. If you have a mountain straight up ahead, you don’t then pretend that the mountain is not there. You acknowledge the mountain, but it’s the next thought about the mountain or the following thoughts about it that are really important. Is the mountain going to batter you and shatter you and wear you down and out, or might this mountain take you to some beautiful sights, some exquisite heights and views on your world and life that you won’t come across without it? Reconceptulisation is when you create a framework for the situation with reference points that will benefit you, open your mind, grow you and nourish your life to some extent (either internally, externally or both). It’s a powerful medium for exploring how much our own perceptions and approaches can have on our experiences, despite whether they are presently negative or positive. It’s good news either way, because even if they are negative right now and they have a negative impact, once you make them positive, they will have the same kind of influence, but just in a brighter and more freeing way.

You write in the book that reconceptualization is like a super power. How so?

Yes, the sky is your limit once you realise how much your thoughts and what you focus on are holding you back. And this is essentially good news. I really want my readers to see that. If your thoughts are holding you back then once you do some work on them, they will be a force to propel you forward.  It’s like there are two versions of the Mess that we are always dealing with. What we automatically think about and fear about the Mess at hand and then what the Mess objectively is. And often the first version of events is the heaviest and scariest to work through. But once we learn how to manage that, all the feelings that normally distort our ideas about life and ourselves are no longer so apparent and we can then tackle the second version (the facts of what we are dealing with) in a wholesome and concentrated way. Reconceptualisation tackles the first version, eventually freeing us from it and getting us on top of our own tendencies so that we are no longer victim to them. And then we are free to get to work at the real mess at hand.

You write a lot about grief in the book. How does grief relate to life’s mess in your eyes?

Well firstly, I feel that grief gets a bad rep and we imagine grief to be the same thing as loss, but in actual experience, it’s not. Grief is the way through the brutal reality of loss. Loss is the bad guy. Not grief. Loss is the taker of all things meaningful, but Grief is the road to walk to get something meaningful out of the absence. It’s the car drive through the landscapes of loss, so that we can move through the debilitating swarm of emotion that often accompanies it. And yes, grief is hard and heavy, it's relentless and it feels so unforgiving and overwhelming at times, but that’s because the loss is so harsh to hold. That’s because there was so much love once to have felt the loss like we do. There is something deeply spiritual about grief, it is love continued. And it offers a way towards a rebirth of whatever life is left over through Loss’s wasteland. Grief will get you there. Grief is the bridge. And we need to walk upon it.

Forgive me for perhaps oversimplifying what is essentially a deeply complicated, personal and often brutal and ongoing experience, to get my point across. I don’t mean to belittle any experience of it, or glamourise how painful it essentially is, but bear with me, because I do believe there is a deep gift in grief, like the rose amongst the thorns. In the same way that loss often snatches away, grief gives something back and if we walk with grief long enough, with an open heart, what it yields is transformational.  

Because it’s so hard and strange to face at the beginning we try to avoid the way of grief. We try to just go numb. And there is definitely a time for that. There will be different points along the way that going numb is necessary temporarily. To feel the loss – well, it is imagined and feared as worse than just having the loss. Which at some points is true. But all this unprocessed, deep, sacred emotion is then just left to fester, rather than go through a process of alchemy. These deep, hard feelings just remain and eventually they start to corrode. And I believe they create the filters we look out to the world through. We make choices and judgments through these filters daily. Through all we have lost and not made peace with. But when we start dealing with our losses through processing our grief about them, we make space to be able to see life from different and more edifying angles. It’s not an overnight or 7-point process. It is a rite of passage in itself but through it we slowly make space to feel outside of the losses too. Because there is more to life than loss. And there is no end to love no matter what the loss. But if we don’t process them, we don’t really ever believe that or trust that. Our hearts stay broken and shattered, but just covered up with the other details of life. So, to answer that question, processing our grief is how we cleanse our vision so that we can see the messes of life outside of feeling imprisoned, numbed or paralysed by whatever heartbreak we have. That is a huge game-changer. There is real power waiting for us in our Grief too.

You have mentioned another really interesting concept that you explore in the earlier chapters of your book and that’s emotional shutdown. Can you share more about that?

Well, I think it’s emotional shutdown that we are really working with, when it comes to healing our hearts and getting our life onto a path of honest and authentic choice-making. Shame, not mess, is the enemy if there is one in this life, and shutdown is the central habit that can become a kind of ‘bad habit’ to unlearn in the face of life not going the way you want it. I wish I had devised the subtitle of my book as ‘how to get out of your shutdown and into your healing’ because that really is the overarching intention behind the book. The how to and the why to. And it’s something we need to learn, because we will have to pull ourselves out of a state of shutdown multiple times along life’s passage. Firstly because it is an immediate reaction we all tend to lean on quite unconsciously, and secondly it can definitely also be a temporary help and survival strategy as we acclimatise to any foreboding stress in the air. The problem is that we tend to stay in it for too long and lose touch with our power, our clarity of mind, and the way through the dark moment. Shutdown for me is the antithesis of joy.

Again, apologies for the seeming oversimplification, but I believe we all live in a some kind of state of shutdown -- until we don’t, and often our lack or levels of joy are a reflection of that. Most of us live in a state of what I call ‘functional shutdown’ which is when we live our day to day in a state of being that is cut off from parts of ourselves that seem too overwhelming and painful to connect with. This means that we live estranged from these parts, feeling fragmented, broken and weakened underneath it all. You don’t experience joy when you feel all these other things and that’s why happiness and joy are different. Happiness is a temporary state which you can feel whenever, and it’s mostly caused by something happening in our external lives, but joy is something more permanent and consistent, not so impacted by the outside world at all. Anyway, we can still function to live our lives that on the outside look generally fine and consistent with what is expected, even when in this kind of shutdown and that’s why I call it functional. But because it’s functional, we often convince ourselves that we are not shutdown. The moments of happiness we come across can distract us from the reality of feelings we carry underneath. And then life will happen in a way that by its very nature evokes and demonstrates what’s really going on inside us. These are not moments for us to fall into shame, these are moments for us to step into deeper self-awareness, love and more holistic processing.

Functional shutdown isn’t a great way to live but it is indicative of how resilient we actually already are. We can and do get by, with mounting frustration and separation from ourselves. Until something gives. Something implodes or explodes or falls apart and these ‘shatterings’ can wake us up to the facts of this harsh reality. And to the potential for change. Because we are the ones to suffer from our shutdown. We are the ones that feel like we are dying on the inside, alone, out of reach, our abstract sadnesses a terrible secret we have no one to really share with. We are the ones being punished every day as we continue to turn away or hide and try to keep up with everything moving at an accelerated rate in our fast-paced world. We suffer from the difficult happenings in life and then we suffer again in the shutdown they cause. But we can also realise through error and heartbreak, misfortune and letdown the state of our own shutdown and we are then afforded an opportunity to open up again. To come into the light. To stop turning away. To stop doing the same old things, in the same old ways. For me, this sums up the pursuit and the mission behind every effort to emotionally heal. It really is about how to open up our hearts from being closed or cut off. And I always say this, an open and integrated heart is the most powerful thing in all the world. When we live our lives with open hearts, we are indeed tapped into our intrinsic power and everything becomes creatively possible, meaningful, and indeed joyous.

So how do we deal with our shutdown? How do we learn to open up?

These are big questions that took me a whole book, like 70,000 or so words to answer! But to summarise your personal shutdown is the thing to become aware of first, what causes it, how it happens, how it shows up and stays…and the messes of life can show you this very thing. How you react to messy situations – like the way you talk to yourself through them, your overarching emotions through it, the things you believe about yourself and indeed life, the actions or lack of action you take – these are all powerful and helpful indicators of the complexity of your heart. They show you what you are really dealing with. You will find it’s not just events that happened in your life that have shut you down, but the shame you carry about them as well, maybe even more so actually. Shame is a real heart-closer, which is why I call it the enemy. And our buried shame starts to emerge when dealing with a difficult moment. ‘Why am I such an idiot?’ ‘Why am I so incapable?’ ‘I have nothing to offer, I am unworthy.’ This feels like a further obstacle, but actually it’s an opportunity to shake some of that shame off, through committing to some easy-to-apply integrated approaches and perspectives that are founded on your worth. It’s important to note here that any shutdown you feel, however solid, immovable and heavy it might feel, is a state of mind and heart. It is not permanent, even if you feel it’s all you have known up to now. It can change, be metabolised, or better still, go through a process of metamorphosis.

Once you have become aware of your shutdown and how it shows up in your life, no longer judging it because you better understand yourself, it’s then time to focus on the ways in which your heart can open again. And my book is a poetic exploration of some of those things and this whole process and shift from shutdown to openness. Things like learning how to pause and breathe, how to reframe situations in your mind, how to use your imagination and changing the narrative you automatically lean on are ways in which to open your heart. And there is so much joy, resilience and a growing sense of confidence discovered in this process. I deep down believe we want our hearts open and we want to believe we can handle things. Shut down for too long and you start to doubt that until you no longer believe in yourself in that way. So moving through that shutdown means your self-doubt decreases and you start to experience yourself and your life in a new way. The experience is electric. It leaves you wanting more, to feel this again and again and so you stop trying to avoid the mess of life because you have experienced you can find more of your authentic power in facing it. 

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I hope you enjoyed today’s interview, and if you’re so inspired, be sure to support Sam’s work by picking up The Power of Mess wherever you most like to get your books. Thank you, Sam!

Here’s to finding the beauty in our chaos.

So much love,

Scott