Tracey Schmidt’s poetic reading of a Blessing for Our Death reminds us of the complexities of life – how we can be gatekeepers and entrance points, light filled and vulnerable, lonely and loved, all at the same time. She praises life and exhorts us to do the same, to “sing as if tomorrow will not come because one day it will not.” This singing of life’s praises enables us to live fully, “as if home were everywhere and you are no longer a guest but a loved and welcome member.”

L   I   V   E
L         I          V          E
W   E   L   L

It won’t receive a Tony award or any other for that matter, but last Thursday I saw LEAP OF FAITH, the musical at Blank Canvas Theatre, an intimate little place that holds only about 100 people in an old warehouse on W. 78^th Street in Cleveland.  I’ve seen several plays there and have never been disappointed but last Thursday, even though it wasn’t my favorite play seen there, was one I’ll never forget.

Right before the show started, the Artistic Director and Founder of Blank Canvas, Patrick Ciamacco came out and told us that the lead for the show had fallen ill and instead of canceling the show like they had to do the weekend before because of multiple illnesses, that he would be filling the role of the lead actor and apologized that he would be having full script in hand and further apologized that he had just gone over the musical pieces he’d be performing and hoping it wouldn’t take away from the show.
Utt-ohhh didn’t get sighed out loud, but I believe the audience of about 70 people thought this might be one to escape by intermission.  WRONG!

Patrick’s THE SHOW MUST GO ON mentality for me, WAS THE SHOW.

He shared in his Director’s note:

It’s always been my goal for Blank Canvas Theatre to present shows that are rarely, if ever, produced in the Cleveland area.  We strive to give you, our audience, an opportunity to discover something new, whether it be a recently-written piece or a little-known show.  Leap of Faith opened on Broadway on April 26, 2012 but despite its impressive credentials, an all-star createive team, an EGOT winning composer, multiple Drama Desk Award nominations and a Tony Award nomination for Best Musical—it ran for only 20 performances.  That’s just twice the number of performances that Blank Canvas Theatre will present!  While no piece of theatre is ever perfect, Leap of Faith certainly has its flaws.  But it is still a story worth telling and seeing something new is always fun.

I saw the film, Leap of Faith in 1992 and remember being intrigued by Steve Martin’s performance in a very different type of role than he usually played.  Religion was not a crucial part of my life growing up, and while religion and belief in God play a role in Leap of Faith, I find that the story of Jonas Nightingale means much more.  To me, this is a story about faith in all its forms: religious faith, yes, but also the faith we have in the world, the faith we have in our friends and family and most of all, the faith we have in ourselves.  We may sometimes lose faith in those we love because of their actions or our feelings.  We may lose faith in ourselves, doubting every decision and choice we make.  Each of us has flaws, and we all may feel like we are far from being who we want to be, but with faith, we can succeed.

I hope that you share our faith that this show will succeed both as an evening of entertainment and as an opportunity to consider the role of faith in our lives.  Thank you for taking a leap of faith in coming to see a show that is most likely unknown to you—and thank you for supporting live theatre!

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”  Martin Luther King, Jr.
Patrick Ciamacco
Witnessing what Patrick did on stage that night will never be award winning, but more importantly, never forgotten by those of us in attendance.  He not only took a huge Leaf of Faith, he GIFTED  IT, and for then as in right now, (and I believe a part of my ‘forever’) I’m a severely grateful beneficiary
SO.            .            .
what Leap of Faith
have you not only taken recently
but have gifted another.            .          .          ?
THE WORST STEP OF ALL
IS THE ONE
NEVER TAKEN.          .          .

Viktor Frankl, one of the great psychiatrists of the twentieth century, survived the death camps of Nazi Germany. His little book, Man’s Search for Meaning, is one of those life-changing books that everyone should read, SEVERAL TIMES

Frankl once told the story of a woman who called him in the middle of the night to calmly inform him she was about to commit suicide. Frankl kept her on the phone and talked her through her depression, giving her reason after reason to carry on living. Finally she promised she would not take her life, and she kept her word.

When they later met, Frankl asked which reason had persuaded her to live?

“None of them”, she told him.

What then influenced her to go on living, he pressed?

Her answer was simple, it was Frankl’s willingness to listen to her in the middle of the night. A world in which there was someone ready to listen to another’s pain seemed to her a world in which it was worthwhile to live.

Often, it is not the brilliant argument that makes the difference. Sometimes the small act of listening is the greatest gift we can give.

WHEN YOU HOLD SOMEONE’S SPACE; when you unconditionally accept, listen, hear, validate, affirm, you just don’t hold their space, you hold something even more sacred: THEIR SOUL.           .            .
THEY have trusted you with their whole, wounded, vulnerable Soul for the price of your offering to A LISTENING they never before had but desperately needed.        .        .

I threw this out to a group that I was presenting to recently:
“HEY, HAVE ANY OF YOU WORRIED ABOUT WORRYING?
Everyone kind of laughed and began hushing to a few mufflecd chuckles as hands went up in the air.          .           .
WELL,
ARE YOU GUILTY?
I mean, it’s kind of hard to
BE THERE
for someone if you’re worrying about worrying
even you’re worrying about them.          .          .

If You’re Feeling Anxious,
Try This 2,000-Year-Old, Neuroscience-Backed Hack.  .  .

Julia Hotz from Time Magazine took a deep dive into our worrying.  She reported that some 2,000 years ago, in the throes of a targeted chase to his death, a Roman philosopher named Seneca had a thought: “what’s the worst that can happen?”

Today, a growing body of research finds that a Seneca-inspired exercise—inviting the worried brain to literally envision its worst fears realized—is one of the most evidence-based treatments for anxiety. In scientific terms, that exercise is called imaginal exposure, or “facing the thing you’re most afraid of” by summoning it in your mind, says Dr. Regine Galanti, the founder of Long Island Behavioral Psychology, and a licensed clinical psychologist who regularly integrates imaginal exposure into her therapy.

As a subset of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), imaginal exposure relies on simple logic. Just as anxiety is created in your head, it can also be squashed in your head. And even though the most effective anxiety treatment is administered by a mental health professional over a long period of time, a growing brigade of psychologists are finding ways to help people do imaginal exposure in their own homes, on their own Two thousand years before imaginal exposure would be proven one of science’s strongest anxiety treatments, dozens of Greek and Roman philosophers had the same intuition about the theoretical value of putting worry in perspective.

In a letter to his friend Lucilius, around 64 A.D., Seneca wrote: “There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us. We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes, since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you.”

Dr. Marc Antoine Crocq, a psychiatrist at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire in eastern France, says that worldview had to do with their religious beliefs.

“They believed in a god (Zeus or Jupiter) who was rather distant and not interested in the daily life of humans,” says Crocq, who has researched the topic. “So they tried to understand the world and human functioning with a more materialist scientific approach.”

The philosophers’ conclusion, Crocq says, was that “pathological anxiety is a mental representation”—and therefore, something that humans can address themselves.

Dr. Stefan Hofmann, a professor of psychology and director of the Psychotherapy & Emotion Research Laboratory at Boston University, has proven this empirically and, like Crocq, has studied the theory’s deep historical roots. He references the ancient Greek philosopher, Epictetus, who wrote: “Men are not moved by things, but the view they take of them.”

As Hofmann explains, “The idea [behind that quote] is that we are always engaging with our environment to make sense of it, and so it really matters how we perceive things. Anxiety itself is a healthy, adaptive response to an environmental threat, but sometimes, those perceptions are maladaptive, if they’re not actually putting you in danger.” He points to the way people commonly fear spiders or snakes, or even social situations. “Sometimes we respond with emotional distress in situations where it doesn’t make sense to feel emotional distress.”

Correcting those maladaptive perceptions, Hofmann says, is at the heart of CBT, a practice he describes as “toning down the intensity of the emotional states” that follow anxiety, in order to feel better. When Dr. Aaron Beck, who died last week, coined the approach in the 1960s, he was interested in helping people recognize how their thoughts were often separate from reality.

And though each therapist may differ in precisely how they administer CBT, the elements of imaginal exposure—confronting the source of anxiety-provoking thoughts, and developing healthier thought patterns around them—is a common entry point.

In the decades since, CBT has consistently been considered one of the most effective practices to manage anxiety in the long term. Hofmann conducted one of the most widely cited literature reviews on its efficacy. And imaginal exposure, the small Seneca-inspired slice of CBT, is associated with a wide spectrum of mental health gains, including reduced worry and negative emotion, improved symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorderand increased ability to engage in the once-feared activity

Still, not all people have access to professionally-administered cognitive therapy. One study of 2,300 psychotherapists in the U.S. found that only 69% use CBT when treating anxiety and depression. And then there’s the problem of access: one Census Bureau survey indicates that more than one-third of Americans live in areas lacking mental health professionals. The problem has worsened over the past year. Just as the pandemic triggered unprecedented rates of anxiety, it also led to a shortage of therapists available to treat it. But even without professional supervision, psychologist Dr. Regine Galanti says there are simple CBT-informed techniques anyone can integrate on their own.

Before encouraging people to actively confront their worry, Galanti starts with a simple question: why is it there in the first place?

“People don’t often stop and think about what it is that they’re afraid of, or even that they’re afraid at all,” she says, describing a patient who’s scared of dogs and, as a result, avoids them.

After identifying the cause of someone’s fear, Galanti focuses on validating the emotion—not diminishing it or reassuring the patient. “We think naturally when someone’s anxious to say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s gonna be okay,’ but anxiety is not logical,” she says. “Often when we feel anxiety coming on, we do everything we can to get away from it, but we’re rarely successful, since we don’t follow it through to its logical conclusion. So these little worries just pile up, and you never actually give it the time and space to see what happens when it is there.”

Take, for example, the patient afraid of dogs. Galanti did something that perhaps seemed counterintuitive: inviting the woman to spend time with a dog, so she could face the fear head on. That worked well, Galanti says, but what about when people’s fears—like the death of a loved one—aren’t as plainly testable? “It’s about learning to handle uncertainty that we don’t know what’s going to happen,” she says. “But how can we orient ourselves to the present to say it’s not happening now?”

That advice was particularly apt during the early days of the pandemic, when uncertainty skyrocketed. At the time, Galanti advised people to set aside 15 minutes of worry time for themselves.

“Anxious thoughts tend to take over your thinking, and it ends up being a game of whack-a-mole—when you knock one down, another pops up,” she says. “So this strategy focuses on not postponing your worries, [instead] setting up a time where you can worry all you want.”

Through this strategy, Galanti encourages people to jot down whatever is causing them anxiety, and then to pick a dedicated time—ideally not before bed—to revisit those concerns. “The reason why this works is that it sets boundaries, so when a worry comes up at 9 a.m., you can say, ‘Hey, not now, your time is coming.’”

She says people rarely use the full 15-minutes of allotted worry time, but it helps put anxiety into perspective. ”Sometimes when you hit your worry list, you might find that the thing that bugged you at 9 a.m. that you thought would be the end of the world is actually not bugging you anymore at all.”
SO.          .          .
are you worried about worrying.     .     .     ?
WHAT’S THE WORST THAT CAN HAPPEN
Psssssssssssssssssssssssst:
SAYING IT WON’T HAPPEN
doesn’t make it so
.      .      .THINK ON IT
for a solid planned 15 minutes
not an out-of-control-anxiety-filled
24 hours
and then
RINSE & REPEAT

A Lady asked an old street vendor: “How much do you sell your eggs for?” The old man replied“0.50¢ an egg, madam.” The Lady responded, “I’ll take 6 eggs for $2.00 or I’m leaving.” The old salesman replied, “Buy them at the price you want, Madam. This is a good start for me because I haven’t sold a single egg today and I need this to live.”

She bought her eggs at a bargain price and left with the feeling that she had won. She got into her fancy car and went to a fancy restaurant with her friend. She and her friend ordered what they wanted. They ate a little and left a lot of what they had asked for. So they paid the bill, which was $150. The ladies gave $200 and told the fancy restaurant owner to keep the change as a tip.

This story might seem quite normal to the owner of the fancy restaurant, but very unfair to the egg seller. The question it raises is;

Why do we always need to show that we have power when we buy from the needy?

And why are we generous to those who don’t even need our generosity?

I once read somewhere that a father used to buy goods from poor people at a high price, even though he didn’t need the things. Sometimes he paid more for them. His children were amazed. One day they asked him “why are you doing this dad?” The father replied: “It’s charity wrapped in dignity.”

Being A Caring Catalyst won’t cost you anything but it’ll make you richer than any lottery winning. Invest in what compounds by one kind moment to the next one and it’ll no longer be about mere facts and figures, because it’ll figure much more than any known fact.      .      .     .
MAKE SURE YOUR CUP OF KINDNESS
IS ALWAYS FULL ENOUGH 
FOR ANOTHER GULP
SO THAT OTHERS
MAY DRINK DEEPLY
WITH A QUENCHING
THAT’LL NEVER KNOW
ANY OTHER THIRST.          .          .

Do   you   have   a   Personal
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE ?

Would you even consider writing one especially now that the 4th of July has come and gone as we begin the race to back-to-school sales and Labor Day

in between picnics

in between family gatherings

in between the parties/the outings/

in between the FIREWORKS

Well.          .          .

may be it’s time

HIGH TIME

that you

Write Your Personal Declaration of Independence

T  H  O  U  G  H  T  S ?

DO ANY OF THESE STRATEGIES WORK FOR YOU?

Pssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
Don’t tell anybody, but I turn to music to feel better in almost any situation, You?
(My thanks to Polly Castor for the graphic.)

FEEL BETTER

John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the Standard Oil Company, the first billionaire of the United States of America and once the richest man on Earth was asked by a reporter, “How much money is enough?” He calmly replied, “Just a little bit more”

Is John D. right?  Is JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE, really enough or is there ever an ENOUGH-NESS that’ll satisfy.          .          .When Rockefeller was asked this question he had a net worth of about 1% of the entire US economy.  He owned 90% of all the oil and gas industry of his time.  Compared to today’s rich guys, Rockefeller makes Bill Gates, Jeff Besos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffet look like paupers; and yet he wanted
“JUST A LITTLE MORE.”

Maybe before we can know how much is ENOUGH, we’ve got to define
E         N         O         U         G          H
.          .          .and dare consider
ENOUGH
is more than just an amount
(but also an attitude)
MUCH-NESS

HOW MUCH
is never a question
to be Asked
yet is always Answered
HOW MUCH
isn’t found in an
Enough-ness
Much-ness
is daring to Give
a More-ness
than you can expect
to ever receive in a
Getting-ness
MUCH-NESS
is when a
Giving-ness
means so much more
than a piddle Getting-ness
MUCH-NESS
takes on an unimaginable hue
that can’t be found
on a painter’s palate
but always at the end
of your Soul’s brush
waiting to paint anew
the landscape scene
that completes us all
as it becomes a
Giving-ness
eclipsing the horizon of any
Getting-nesses  

.           .          .S O M E T I M E S
the shiny empty plate
waiting to be
SHARED
more than
PASSED
is all the
ENOUGH-NESS
necessary
I  F
it’s indeed more than a
passing partaking.        .      .
May your ENOUGH-NESS be Another’s as well.          .           .

Tony had a perfect life — until his wife Lisa died. After that tragic event, the formerly nice guy changed. After contemplating taking his life, Tony decides he would rather live long enough to punish the world by saying and doing whatever he likes. He thinks of it as a superpower — not caring about himself or anybody else — but it ends up being trickier than he envisioned when his friends and family try to save the nice guy that they used to know. Golden Globe winner Ricky Gervais stars in the comedy series, which he also writes and directs.  Mind you, THIS IS NOT PRETTY; GRIEF seldom is and what it is during this three season hiatus is downright PROFANE at times; UGLINESS at its worst and yet deep within its TRUTH.  I have shown a clip or two from this show before which makes these series of clips a little different, a little difficult and hopefully, a little more digestible for that which is most distasteful for all of us…dare I say, ENJOY.     .     .     ?

Hmmmmmmmm.          .           .
Maybe like Tony, there’s been some things in our lives that make us feel like him, that
“NOT CARING is a Superpower; CARING ABOUT STUFF; THAT’S WHAT REALLY MATTERS!” but we’re not a NETLIX episode or series that we can turn off or on or yes, put on PAUSE.           .           .

WE ALL COME WITH EXPIRATION DATES
which means we’re one DATE closer than we’ve ever been before
BUT THE GOOD NEWS
is that we can be more kind, more loving, more compassionate than ever before because knowing
THAT WE WILL EXPIRE
also means not so much postponing the DATE
but living lovingly today.          .          .
IF DEATH IS INEVITABLE
LET’S MAKE SURE OUR LOVING IS, TOO.        .        .