Author Archives: Susan McNamara

Do No Harm (As Best As You Can)

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I am teaching a yoga class at my house this week, when out of the blue comes a “thud.” I know immediately a bird has just flown head first into one of our windows. There is nothing I can do in the moment, so I continue teaching; hoping against all hope that it is not dead, while equally knowing that based on the force of the thud, it likely is dead.

After class, I look out the window to see a beautiful robin, the very harbinger of Spring itself, lying dead on the ground. I decide to let it be where it is, thinking (hoping) that an animal will come by in the night to take it away so I don’t have to be the one to do it. As fate would have it, the robin is still there in the morning.

This is mine to do.

As I carry it towards the woods looking for a place to lay it down, I am connected to two things. The first being the childhood memories that start popping into my mind. How when I was a kid, I would find dead birds, mice, the desiccated turtles that had escaped our aquarium only to be found months later, along with the kitten that died on my birthday and more, that I would bury under the giant pine tree in our backyard.

In honor of that “random” memory arising right at the moment I have this dead bird in my hand, I look for a pine tree.

The second thing that comes up for me is that even when we as humans are trying not to do harm, we do. Like building a house in the middle of a huge open space that serves as the flight path for many eager birds building their nests at this time of year. We did not do it with the intention to harm. But it brought harm nonetheless. As evidenced by the robin in my hands, and all of the other consequences to the natural world through our choice to build something.

I do not say this to beat myself up, or even to say that we should not have built the house. That would be a waste of time, and an exercise in a guilty indulgence that takes us nowhere. As in, if I feel bad enough about this, it somehow balances what I did. It does not.

I say it as a point of fact. Everything we do has consequences to everything else around us.

There is no getting around this reality. And yet, we try. We pretend what we’re doing doesn’t matter. We ignore the consequences of our ways. We deny we have anything to do with the devastations going on all around us. We kick lots of cans down the road despite the impact it will have for the generations to come.

Or, as happens in so many segments of the culture (like the area I live in), we endlessly beat ourselves up, ever-guilty about every single choice we make. Frozen in our ability to feel good about being alive because we cannot choose anything without feeling remorse. We then we go on to judge and accuse others of not doing enough to save the planet. Of not caring enough. Of not feeling ashamed enough of our very presence.

It’s all exhausting, and it all misses the point. Everything we do has consequences to everything around us. Now what? Without hiding behind guilt, fear, or denial, now what? It is an absolute fact that we bring an impact to bear upon the world by the very nature of our existence here.

What if we started with that knowing, and lived from there? But this does not fit neatly into a definitive answer, and therefore does not sit well with us.

Do no harm, as best as you can is what I say. What might that even look like? In my view it is far less about the specific actions we take (although they matter a lot), and more about your level of awareness. A kind of consciousness that says I know I walk heavy here, how can I see that and still live in relationship with everything around me?

How can I honor all Life while living here as fully, responsibly, and joyfully as I can?

This is far more difficult to do and be with than guilt, or manmade rules. Which is why we likely opt for those approaches rather than a deep exploration around how we are here. If we were deeply contemplating our existence here, it would mean looking into the closed eyes of all the dead robins we have ever had a hand in.

Without turning away. Without beating ourselves up. Without blaming someone else, or feeling like we were entitled to something. What if we just saw that to be human in modern times is so very, very complicated, and that the very best that we can do, is to do the best that we can do.

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Every Single Bit Of It

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“All of it gets to be here,” is a practice I come in and out of using. Right now, I am back in.

I both love and hate this practice. I both resist it, and know it to be true. Beyond true, I know it is the directest route to healing my own body/mind separation, the splits that divide us as people, along with the false personas we mistakenly claim as being who we are because we don’t feel we have a right to be all of who and what we are.

This is what gets to be here in my world. The wasps and the ladybugs that infest my home each year. The people defrauding our government, and the ‘entrepeneurs’ bringing us closer and closer to the brink of extinction with their GMO’s, chemicals, surveillance technologies and fake foods. The policies that deny anyone free will over their own body. The people I feel have hurt me. Any and all of the ways that I believe the ‘wrong’ things are in charge.

The list goes on, and it’s enormous! But all of it, every single bit of it, gets to be here. Day after day. Year after year. It’s maddening to include what I don’t want to be here. And frightening. It can feel depressing and risky to believe, to know, that it all gets to be here. That pain that won’t resolve. The lingering illness. That unresolved conflict. The corporation bringing harm.

All of it gets to be here.

I am in no way suggesting that I want these things, like them, or am giving them a free pass. What I am suggesting is that when I take this attitude my life changes for the better. This sounds hard to do. Impossible even. You might even be wondering, Why bother? What’s in it for me? In a word, PEACE. A literal oasis in a desert of fighting against everything we do not want, but that is here nonetheless.

Think about it. How often are you fighting something within your own mind? All the things you don’t want to be here. All the ways that you resist and try and manage ‘what is.’ The weather you don’t like. The traffic you rage against. The annoying co-worker or boss you wish would just go away. A family member not supporting you. The government or a political party that just makes you want to scream.

On and it goes. All day, every day. Big and little wars within that go on to create our outer wars in the places we inhabit together. For as the old adage goes, “As within, so without.”

If this makes any sense to you, give it a try in low stakes situations. For example, ‘let’ the weather you don’t like be here. ‘Allow’ another person’s bad mood to be here. ‘Accept’ that those you disagree with, even vehemently, get to be here.

Instead of looking around at how the world will fall apart because it’s not going according to your plan, watch what happens inside of you when you can honestly and truly let what is here, be here.

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What Will You Resource?

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I am in practice this morning setting an intention for the month to come. Here in this moment, everything seems so doable. So clear. So full of possibility. And yet, I also know that when I meet up with the ways of the world, along with my own personal habits and limitations, I will have a choice to make. A choice that will feel far more difficult out there, than it does in here on my yoga mat.

That choice being: Do I do what I always do? Or do I do something else?

It is never easy “to do something else.” Our brains have a proclivity to default to the past to decide what to do. So whether it is your own personal past, or the evolutionary past of your reptilian brain, when challenged, you will always go to what you did in the past, as your first go-to. This makes good sense. Of course our brains would reference a past challenge to see what we did, and then go from there.

The problem being, that as long as we are still alive, our primal, default system believes that what we did in the past must have been successful because we’re still here. This part of our brain does not take into account the emotional and spiritual suffering we are experiencing by doing the same unsuccessful things over and over again.

There is no fighting with the most primitive parts of us. They need what they need. However, we can appeal to Something Else. For me, that always comes in the form of the Natural World.

I see this today as I make my intention, and then feel the uncertainty of being able to hold to this intention when challenged. At that very moment, the most poignant of questions arises: “When I am challenged, what will I resource?”

Instantaneously, a bird flies across my line of vision. As big as a crow, but not flying like a crow. I lose it as it lands in the trees. I find it again as it begins to beat out its rhythm. The telltale sound of the Woodpecker. I burst into tears as I realize I always have a choice as to what I will reference. Whether that be the same old unsatisfying ways or, though experienced as risky by my “past,” new ways that are more in alignment with the rhythms of my soul.

So, here’s the question: As you step forward in this day, will you resource a past that has kept you alive, or will you resource what allows you to thrive? 

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Wanting & The Modern Age

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I am regularly wondering how it is that we are going to be in the world of Instantaneous, Effortless, and Disposable Everything, and still remain Aware, Grateful, and Conscientious.

Still remain Humans Connected to the True Source of Everything.

We all know that in a matter of mere seconds we can locate something online and in one easy click find it on our doorstep. Sometimes even the very next day. No trip to the store required. No experience of going to get something, and it being sold out. How wonderful to get something we want so effortlessly!

Simultaneously, how very, very problematic. As we have quicker and quicker access to the stuff we want, it reshapes our experience to wanting itself. What it is we think we need to have. What it is we believe we deserve.

As the effort, the wait, and the weighing of options gets taken out of the equation of the stuff we want, while the impulse to “want what we want when we want it” takes over via the technologies, we create a world of impulse buying. With all of the detrimental consequences that impulse buying brings to not only the planet, but to our very sense of what it is that we actually need.

Of what it is that is most important.

Yesterday I got one of those notes from the post office that said I had an envelope waiting for me to be picked up that needed to be signed for. I literally had no idea what it was. It was from France of all places!?? When I got it, it was so light that I thought this must be a joke. Or a hoax. There’s nothing in this.

When I opened it up, it was seeds. In a moment of feeling a deep connection to the plant Desert Rose several weeks earlier, I had gone online and purchased seeds to plant in my medicine garden. In that impulsive moment of buying I had not noticed how ridiculously far this would travel to get to me. Worse than that, I forgot about it as soon as I was done.

If those seeds had not arrived, I would not have remembered ordering them. That’s a problem.

It hurt my soul to be standing in the parking lot of the post office looking at those seeds. It felt like such a dishonoring of the very essence of what seeds represent: Life. Pure potential. A connection to not only the earth, but to the very Source of Life itself.

It leaves me wondering: How are we going to do this? How are we going to be with our wants as they get more and more accelerated through the technologies, and still remain true to what is most essential in Life?

How are we going to be with this seemingly bottomless pit of human wanting as it meets up with the instant gratification of The Modern Age? How are we going to remember that while to want is human, the amplification of that very same wanting, as encouraged by the technologies, is absolutely disastrous when it comes to what we make most important in Life.

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Embracing Obstacles

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It’s not easy being in a body. There are so many sensations, pressures, thoughts, beliefs and experiences that go along with how we feel about our bodies, and what it means to inhabit them. That’s why it can feel preferable to “leave” them. Or let someone else be in charge of them.

It has become a socially condoned way of “living” to leave our bodies and what it is we are experiencing. Take my college students and the way that they “party.” The way they use drugs and alcohol to knock down the stress. To keep them from feeling what they don’t want to feel.

I know this place. All too well. It was how I lived for years. Partying, eating and exercising to excess and as punishment. Self-loathing and worthlessness arising out of the choices I was making. It was only when I began to feel how horrible what I was doing to myself felt, that I was able to shift. Only when I was willing to encounter the obstacles to good and fulfilling connection with my body did things, slowly and steadily, begin to change.

While incredibly difficult, excruciating and sad to come up against the obstacles that were keeping me from myself, it was real. Most of all, it was true. Obstacles are an absolutely unavoidable and essential part of the journey of being at home in our own body. So that’s where I began. With what was real by way of what was in between me and my body. In between me and my ability to be at home in myself. 

I know the current thinking is to get away from what feels bad. I would even go so far as to say that it is built into us as mammals to get away from what causes pain. That it is a necessary part of our survival and coping mechanisms to avoid what hurts. This life-giving tendency most certainly has its place. However, in modern day living where our pains are often self- and culturally-induced, with no connection whatsoever to real physical survival requirements, our wires have gotten crossed when it comes to avoidance. 

The basic, primal instinct of avoidance has gotten flipped on its head, and is now bringing harm rather than relief, while being met by a world all too happy to sell us things that keep us from ever having to feel what it is to be in our own bodies. 

Given the cultural mindset that says “Take this to get away from feeling what you are feeling in your body,” to hear that in order to be at home in yourself, you must go towards what you typically avoid, can sound paradoxical. Or even insane. But if we don’t include this part of embodiment, we’ll miss out on some of the most important information we need when it comes to the body and how it is that we are treating it. Not to mention that it is pure fantasy to try and avoid what we would rather not know. 

Acting as if something is not there, does not make it so.

It is only when we include what does not feel good, what is not working, what is keeping us from a good relationship with ourselves, can we see that what we’re doing is actually not working. Maybe even hurting. That any of the denying, diversions and medicating we’re engaging in, outweighs any “benefits” they may bring in the short-term. Worst of all, that what we’re choosing through our avoidance may actually become the impediment itself to healing what ails us.

In the end, keeping us from not only the health we desire, but the opportunity to know ourselves fully through the empowered journey of learning to trust and care for ourselves. 

 

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The Words We Use

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Our precision (not perfection) at naming the moment to moment and daily truths of life in a body, will determine how well we can respond to what it needs and what it is saying; which will determine the overall feel and quality of our lives. The words we choose about our bodies carry great weight. They shape the stories we tell ourselves, revealing powerful belief systems about how we really think about ourselves and the world.

The words reflect not only what we think is happening, but what we believe is possible in terms of health and healing. Most of all, the words we choose determine how we feel about these bodies of ours, and what it means to be alive.

When my mother was still living, we had this bit we would do. She would disparage some part of her body (the stomach that was never flat enough because of the four cesareans and one hysterectomy, the skin that was too loose because she was in her 80’s, her weight on any given day that she tracked repeatedly by daily weigh-ins on the bathroom scale), and I would look at her and tilt my head. To which she would respond, “Oh yeah, I’m not supposed to say that.” 

It was funny. And not. After years of us doing this bit together, although she had come to know that if she ran her body down in my presence I was going to challenge her, I don’t think she ever actually knew the extent of what she was doing to herself. I don’t think she ever allowed herself to feel the impact of maligning her body, sometimes even with great disgust at its inability to measure up to some externalized state of perfection. I don’t think she ever got it was her own self she was running down.  

I will say here to you what I said to her: Your body is listening, and the words you use about it hurt or heal. If this makes sense to you, practice being more mindful about the words you use in reference to your own body. When you catch yourself using hurtful words, say, “I’m sorry. I take that back.” 

If we use pejorative, fear-based, and negative phrases about our own bodies and what is happening for them, our ability to see clearly will be grossly obscured and misleading; rendering any “observations” we make, inaccurate. False. Potentially even detrimental in outcome because we have misnamed them. Meaning, we won’t be able to take good care of ourselves. 

Not only that, any ongoing negativity towards, and about our bodies, will have a detrimental impact on the overall experience of being alive. As in, it won’t feel good to be here. 

P.S. If you’d like to feel better in your body, consider joining my health and healing community at: https://rememberingwhatmattersmost.thinkific.com/courses/membership

 

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The Antidote To Selfie World

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Years ago, during a yoga training that brought up a lot for me around how I felt about myself, the teacher suggested I do a ceremony. Basically, to place a mirror on my alter at home, and to spend part of my daily meditation looking at my reflection as a way to get to know and honor myself.

I balked. Part of me freaked out at the thought. I mean, who knew what I might see? Did I even want to know? I thought I kept my reaction inside, but he must have felt my response because he smiled, and said, “That’s a hard one for you, huh?”

As you might imagine, the suggestion fell on deaf ears. I literally “forgot” about it. Completely.

Cut to a current training I’m in where the homework was to spend 5 minutes gazing at yourself in the mirror. I put it off for as long as I could. It just felt too close. Too intimate. Too filled with the possibility of seeing something I didn’t want to know.

But surprise, surprise, after spending just a few seconds evaluating myself, I looked into my eyes. Beyond the skin, beyond any “imperfections,” I really, really, looked. And there I was! I could see a tiny reflection of me in my own eyes. How cool.

It made me wonder: How often is that thing we don’t want to know about ourselves not dark or ugly, but actually cool? 

What I’m referring to here is not the mega-absorption of selfie world where out of desperation and a false sense of ourselves, we seek, demand even, accolades for our appearance and other curated and contrived activities. Ever on the hunt for “likes’ to validate our existence.

This is not an honoring, it’s a diminishment. Selfie world is for the amateurs among us. For the desperate. For those too afraid to take a real look. For those who have forgotten their value and seek to get it back in the most destructive and unsatisfying of ways.

As harsh as this sounds (and feels to be writing it), it’s true. And somewhere, down deep inside, we all know it. If this makes any sense to you, throw away your selfie stick, and find some time in front of a mirror, with just you.

Let all the noise, the judgment, the evaluations and the criticisms fade into the background. Don’t worry if they don’t completely leave, that takes practice. Instead,  watch what happens when you give yourself the time to really see yourself.

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Who Are You Following?

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It’s so easy to get lost these days in other people’s lives. Lost in what they’re doing, thinking and saying. Lost in the fantasy of how much better (happier, healthier, more fulfilling) their lives are than our own.

Many of us are spending inordinate amounts of time “following” other people and calling it a life. Our precious energy and attention bound up in other people’s carefully constructed antics; endlessly scrolling and thinking about another person’s so-called “life.” Too often, to the detriment of our own do we believe that these curated and caricature-like representations depict something real. Something we have convinced ourselves we can have by association.

Something so worth following because…

I’ll tell you what’s worth following: YOU. Your life. All of it. What’s noteworthy, and what’s not working. Why? Because it’s real. Because by being with it, all of it, is the only way that you will ever know whether or not what you’re doing is working for you.

By following another, we miss ourselves. Our thoughts. Our dreams. Our needs. And we run the risk of following the wrong things. Duped into believing in that old adage “The grass is always greener…,” we become hypnotized by the pretty lights and pretty pictures; abandoning our own lives in favor of someone else’s.

But the Truth is, you have your own unique patch of grass that needs tending to. Your own mind to cultivate and body to care for. Your own soul to nourish. Without which, they atrophy and die on the barren ground of believing someone else’s grass is preferable to yours. Poisoned by aligning with the collective envy and orientation that says, someone else is doing better than you. Someone else knows better than you. Someone else’s life is more desirable than yours.

I think part of the reason we do this is because it’s easier to be enamored or envious of another life, then it is to take stock of our own. Easier to fill our days with the comings and goings of other’s presentational lives than it is to be with ourselves. While it gives us a momentary thrill, that ubiquitous hit of dopamine, the cost is high to medicate ourselves in this way.

Each time we turn towards yet another post, deep down we know something is not actually right here. And it haunts us. Like the ghost of Christmas Past and Future, outlining for us what we are losing in our obsession by tracking other people’s lives at the expense of our own.

What if you began to swap out how often you follow, and chose instead to be the leader in your own life? What might you discover about yourself by making your life as noteworthy as those you follow? By choosing the full reality of your life as opposed to the illusory one as delivered by a two-dimensional, screen-version of what it means to be alive.

 

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Love

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There are those who say, and have said since time recorded, that Love is the very fabric, energy and pulse of the Universe. If that’s so, it seems important enough to ponder what it is beyond flowers, chocolates and jewelry. Wouldn’t you say?

I know we use the word. I know we see it “represented” in emogees and on cards. I know we will say we love things like cake or our iPhone. I know we are expected to love certain people more than others, and that we are instructed to “Love thy neighbor.” And even our enemies.

But what is it exactly that we’re doing here? Do we even know?

It has been said that love heals. That love conquers all. That love is blind. And that love can move mountains. Still. What is it?

Personally, I know that love is not money. Nor is it things. I believe many people would agree to that, and yet those same people, at any given moment, might equate love to something too small to be it. As in, the bigger the diamond the more he loves you.

I know it’s not words, though words can express it. And I know that saying “I love you,” can be used for many, many reasons other than love. I also know that since the advent of cell phones, it is used liberally. Becoming a must-have way to say good-bye whether you are feeling it or not. A needy gesture to the other person serving as a desperate stand-in for how little we show it.

It’s almost like the more disconnected we get from each other, the more the words replace what it would actually take to create the connection and the closeness we all long for.

I find it harder to say what it is, then what it is not. As in, it is not desperate, anxious, or manipulative. It does not fill a void. It does not demand anything. Nor does it make up for personal lack and insecurities. It does not punish, withhold or humiliate. And it never, ever forces another to engage in a particular action to prove itself.

Perhaps love with a capital “L” is beyond words. As ineffable as the Source from whence it comes. Something available to us, something we can pass on, but never of our own making. So maybe the very best we can do is to open our heart to its Presence and its desire to flow through us.

Whether we ever say those three little words, or not.

 

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A Manifesto

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I am in the midst of exploring, very deeply, what health is. What supports it. What undermines it.

The deeper I go, the more I come to see that there are fundamental perspectives that must be embraced first. That before we can even decide what healthcare or medicine looks like for each of us, we must first develop a way of being in relationship with ourselves and all of Life that comes as close as we can to working with basic truths around what it actually takes to be healthy and to thrive.

Here is my attempt. Run it though your own system. What resonates? What challenges? Where could you begin?

 The Embodiment Manifesto:

A Revolutionary Commitment To Redefining How We Care For Ourselves

Mission: To explore what is possible when we learn how to recognize and honor real human needs, live according to life-affirming values, express the Truth of who and what we are.

As Fully Sovereign & Embodied Beings, We Believe That:

  • Who we are and how we live matters.
  • Our health is our own responsibility.
  • The single greatest contribution we will ever make to the world is how we take care of ourselves.
  • Honoring real human needs is the basis for how we know and care for ourselves.
  • Self-Care is built-in.
  • Everything is Connected.
  • The body is Intelligent & any signs or symptoms we experience are worthy of our attention.
  • Claiming bodily sovereignty is a healthy act.
  • Valuing our own life is valuing all Life. 
  • Good Medicine is always in the hands of the people: For the people, by the people, and of the people.

 

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