Monthly Archives: November 2024

Find Your Center

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It’s hard to know what to write about at this time of year that doesn’t sound like a platitude. That doesn’t ring hollow. Or that doesn’t inflict some burden on us that we should be experiencing things in a certain way, when maybe we’re not. But as it goes whenever I’m in short supply of what to write about, a real gem dropped into my lap. A yoga teacher I love said something this week that feels like an enduring approach to a life well-lived. No matter the times. What she said was this:

“Locate your center. Move from there.”

At the time she was offering an instruction for a particular posture we were in; guiding us to go into the core of the body as a starting place before reaching out through the limbs. But as all great guidance goes, this sentiment can be applied to all the areas of our lives; helping us navigate through times that may feel confusing, triggering or overwhelming.

In life, locating your center, is all about starting with yourself exactly as you are. There is no reminder here to be grateful or to see things in any particular way. No instruction to rise above anything. Instead, it’s about knowing where you are, and anchoring yourself into the core of yourself before you reach out into the world.

This is different from believing you need to show up in a certain way. Different from expecting yourself to feel a certain way. Different from needing to measure up to some internal or external standard around how you must meet the times.

Instead, this is a moment to moment call to return to yourself over and over again, and to step forward from there. To speak from there. To act from there. To go in before you go out. No external instructions to tell you how to be or feel or act because when you go in before you go out, you connect to wisdom that is eternal, along with a clarity that transcends party lines, political correctness and social niceties.

And it is as simple as asking yourself, “”What is here for me at this moment, and can I be with it?” Whatever it is. Not as a way to indulge anything. Or to judge anything. Or to feel guilty about anything. But instead, a kind of going into yourself that allows for an honest recognition of what it is you find at the center of yourself. It is from there you are able to authentically, powerfully and respectfully step forward.

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The “Easy Steps” Trap

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I was listening to a podcast recently around Wholistic Health and Healing. An orientation which I find to be a real and true inclusion of, and alignment with, who we are and what we need in order to be well. A way of considering everything that needs to be considered in the service of greater wellness and well-being. An “all of us gets to be tended to” kind of mentality.

I’m all in.

But at one point, the author began to outline his steps for how to get there, and I was once again struck by the dilemma we all face. That being, how to engage with the particulars of what needs doing for health and healing, without reducing it down to a formula. A kind of one-size-fits-all approach that pervades so much of how we think about what it takes to care for ourselves.

As I listened, I felt a desperate part of me want to subscribe to the steps being offered. The ones I was being told would insure my health and well-being. A kind of guarantee and well laid out plan that if I just followed it, all would be well. But then right beside this grasping desperation, I felt a deep rumbling around something else.

Around what it is I know to be true.

I began to think back on some of the most influential moments of my life when it came to caring for myself. They never came neatly packaged. As a matter of fact, every single authentic and lasting shift I have ever experienced in regard to self-care, health and healing (or really anything else for that matter), always started by admitting how awful things were.

Always began with me feeling how deeply I was suffering, and how fed up with business as usual I was. Done with the way I was treating myself. A change that was always initiated by some part of me having gotten so sick and tired of what I was doing, that I was ready to open myself up to what I had been previously closed off to. Maybe it was a knowing I had been ignoring. Maybe it was a fear I couldn’t address. Maybe it was a worn out habit I hadn’t been able to put aside.

Whatever it was that I was ready to open to, it ultimately carried me out of being separate from myself and the choices I was making, and right into the Truth of whatever I was experiencing. This is what took me to the “answer” or to the “formula” I had been seeking. Only now, instead of it being a hollow version of what someone else said I needed to do, it came from the deepest of wisdoms. A place born out of the suffering being felt, recognized, honored, and ultimately, transmuted.

Answers not delivered by another in some neat little package, but ones that emerged out of the messiness of giving birth to the Truth of my experience.

But of course, this requires being with what hurts. What is uncomfortable. What is messy, embarassing, scary and more. All things we typically choose to avoid. But all things that also carry with them the catalytic power of going from illness to well-being. No matter the specific outcome.

Which is why instead of going down the road of the promise of the quick and easy formula, we would be well served instead to pause for just a moment to notice that part of ourselves that wants the neatly laid out package, while learning to be more committed to the messages the suffering is sending.

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A New Day

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Since the time change, I’ve been up well before dawn. It’s not my usual routine. But I’ve felt such a draw to being up to watch the day come in, that I’ve just been going with it. Every morning something unexpected happens; from deep insights about Life, to amazing encounters with Nature.

One morning, as I watched the sky turn into the most amazing gold and rose tones, all streaking across my view, it occurred to me that this was A New Day. Not in the obvious sense, as in, not yesterday, but in the largest sense of all. A brand new opportunity to be alive. A chance to do my life anew. An offer to experience what I have never experienced before.

A blank slate where anything and everything, could happen. A moment in time where I knew that that “anything and everything” possible was all up to me. And it felt good. 

But of course, the reason we don’t experience A New Day is because we think, speak and do in the same ways over and over and over again. Every single day. Our reactions to what Life brings us? The same. The words we use to talk to ourselves? The same. The habits we engage in? The same.

The enemy of A New Day will always be the refusal to let go of what we’ve been doing. In effect, the unwillingness to reconsider ourselves and our beliefs. And it will always be our fear of the unknown. Of not knowing what is going to happen. Which is why we so often double-down on what we have always done. Especially when things in our life or in the outer world get shaky, chaotic or frightening.

But as we find ourselves in such accelerated times of change, something more than just doing what we have always done, is being called for. That something more is surrender. A yielding to the Reality of the moment that has nothing to do with anything other than moving with What Is.

Just as the leaves are doing now as they release effortlessly to the season in their complete and total alignment with What Is.

We will move through many, many seasons in the years to come. Shall we act as if there is only one season? Or will we open ourselves to meeting what comes without resistance? And while many of our minds might go to a kind of “grinning and bearing it” mentality, a kind of hunkering down or sucking it up, this state of mind will never suffice. It will never be big enough to hold the possibility of A New Day. Nothing about “hanging on for the ride” will ever be magnificent enough to take our lives into a New Dawn.

If this lands, each morning as you start your day, offer up as a sacrifice your old self and your old ways. Speak to the dawn a prayer for What Might Be.

 

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The Great Balancing Act

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There is a principle in Ayurveda, the 5000 year old tradition of health and healing in India that says: Opposites Balance.

Personally, I can think of no greater medicine for the times we’re living in where polarization with its black and white thinking leaves many of us stuck on one side or the other. So like a seesaw weighted down on one end with a boulder, the natural flow back and forth between the two sides grinds to a halt.

If you ever had that experience as a kid, being the one stuck up at the top of the seesaw with the other kid taunting you and wielding their power to keep you from moving, you know it doesn’t feel good. You might remember the frustration and the sense of disempowerment. More to the point, it never felt natural because there was no opportunity for balance. No chance to weigh in from your side.

No chance for that one brief incredible moment where the two sides come into perfect balance with absolute joy being the outcome.The ultimate and perfect expression of opposites balancing.

For despite all of the ways we might have wanted to be the one controlling the seesaw, maybe keeping the other kid stuck at one end, you just couldn’t deny what it felt like to be in perfect balanced harmony with another. That feeling of flow back and forth between the two sides. If you remember the experience, you remember there was always a choice at some moment. To go for the imbalance and the lording over, or to go for the balance.

And so we find ourselves at that same tipping point now as grown-ups. Will we go for what brings in greater balance? Or will we add our voice to further the imbalance? This choice point is where our power lies and where we have the capacity to move the world into a place where the opposites bring in harmony instead of entrenchment. This is a moment in time to decide who you will be in this process. The one who includes the opposites in the service of balance? Or the one who puts a boulder down on your side?

It does require great courage to not get mired down in your side of things. It does call for immense tolerance to set aside your personal thrill and adrenaline rush of pushing something to its extreme at the expense of another. Great foresight to do what you can do to create that moment where the two sides come into natural and joyful balance.

All of this is as close to you as your next decision. Your next comment. Your next post. Your next characterization. Your next expression of emotion. Make no mistake about it, you are not separate from what you see out there. You are contributing to it, or not. When we allow ourselves to know this, we get up close and personal with ourselves and our choices, as opposed to believing it’s all happening “out there” beyond our control. For when we can come to admit that what hangs in the balance is how it feels to be alive and how it feels to be living in our world with those on “the other side” of the seesaw, there is only one conclusion we can ever come to:

The choice is always ours to make.

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Changing Yourself

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There has been logging going on across the road from us for weeks. The noise is loud. And it’s constant. Often, it serves as an annoying, nervous system jangling back drop for an entire day. So when one morning this week, I’m sitting outside in meditation and it hasn’t yet started, I feel so grateful. At the same time, I feel anxious, wondering when, at any moment, it will start back up and turn this perfectly beautiful quiet morning into what will feel like an unwanted intrusion.

It was right then, that I became aware of something I aspire to: To be in the world as it is. To be accepting of the reality of the moment; blaming no one and nothing for my personal discomfort. I’ve had enough experience with this to know that when I can accept things as they are, everything changes. From this place, I am no longer at war with either myself or the world. And possibilities I didn’t even know existed, open up to me.

When all of this dropped into my mind, a quote I haven’t thought of in a very long time came to me. It’s from Leo Tolstoy and it goes like this: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

Why is that?

Because of how hard it is. Because we haven’t been taught this perspective. Because it’s easier to blame someone or something else for your misery. Because that’s how we gather in ways large and small; from friendships to political affiliations. Because accusing someone else is the way that the war machine works. And because this mentality is so entrenched in us culturally, that we take it for truth.

It is the largest personal leap you will ever take to go from believing that the world determines your peace of mind, to knowing that you and you alone carry that sacred responsibility. It is utterly and completely an inside job to make the commitment that no matter what is happening all around you, you will learn to do two things: Say “Yes” to what is happening. Claim radical responsibility for your response.

This doesn’t mean you like or agree with what is happening. Nor does it mean you don’t get to have your reactions. Instead, it means admitting that something is here and then becoming aware of how you feel about it without projecting your feelings onto anyone or anything.

Not easy to do, but oh so worth it when you begin to understand that the way out of everything we are experiencing collectively is to work through all the ways you won’t see honestly what is happening. To work out owning all of your blind posts, triggers, expectations and projections.

And it all begins by saying “yes” to what is happening and then wondering why you feel the way you do about it. This is the royal road to changing yourself, and by extension, the world.

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