You And Nature Are One

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Note: I am transitioning the blog over to Substack. There is nothing you need to do if you want to keep receiving the weekly blog. You’ll be getting a welcome letter from me through Substack introducing the change in platform. I will continue posting in both places until I know the transition is complete.

I am just back from guiding a women’s retreat in The White Mountains of New Hampshire. While I was obviously there to be of service to others, I was also there for myself. I was there to put myself in the company of the mountains to be reminded of what I never, ever, want to forget.

Nature and I are One.

The majesty of the mountains is me. The wind swept ice fields and the eighty mile an hour wind gusts are me. As is the frozen lake, the running streams and the taste of Spring on the air.

I didn’t always know this. Or more to the point, I did know this as a child. I did know that feeling of being swept up by the snow and the sea and the trees and the dirt. But then I lost it. Or maybe better said, it went underground. Like some animal that burrows way down deep to hide as a way to protect itself. But at some point that started to become unbearable; taking its toll on my spirit and my very sense of who I am.

That unbearable feeling of something being lost to me has been my guide over the years; taking me into greater and greater forays into the Truth of my existence through my experiences of untamed places. Places not touched by my past conditioning, fears or what “they will think.” Places that have always brought me to one irrefutable understanding: Nature and I are one and the same.

To believe otherwise, is to suffer, while living at odds with the Reality of Life itself.

Writing this has gotten me to remembering how twenty years ago, when I moved out into the woods that is only accessed by several miles of a long dirt road, I was too afraid to walk in the woods on my own. Too afraid of what I might encounter. Too afraid of what might happen to me. So I stayed on the dirt road. And while walking this dirt road was a big leap forward given the paved city streets I was used to, the woods kept calling.

A yearning for something I could not name kept calling. At one point the call became greater than the fear. Greater than the irrational, culturally generated, news-fed fears that had kept me at odds with the more wild, undomesticated and free Nature of myself. So I went in. And I have never stopped since. For the place I once feared is my greatest ally. My truest reflection of who I am. My greatest confidante to go to when the world becomes too much and I am confused by the ways of man.

To fear the natural world is to fear ourselves. It is to keep ourselves locked up in some cage. It is to be deceived. And it is to live a lie.

And so my friends, as we live through times that would have us fear the weather, the creatures of the earth, “unsterilized” and wild foods, backyard chickens, growing your own food, disease-bearing insects, and so much more—do not take it all on face value. Instead, go to the woods, the fields, the sea, the lakes, go to a single tree, a flower, a bird… and find yourself.

Beyond all that you have been told and sold about the natural world, if you could set aside your fears and your repulsions, what would you find?

 

 

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Be Simple & Be Free

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Things are out of hand when it comes to how complicated our lives have become. Along with how unhappy and anxious these complications are making so many of us. If making things more and more complicated were making us happier, healthier and more connected, I would say, Let’s keep going. But it’s not. The reverse is true, and we’re all feeling it.

The increasing levels of complications in our tech-driven world is leaving many of us feeling worse off; trapped in the mind set of, This is just the way it is now. Or perhaps, There must be something wrong with me that I can’t keep up with it all.

Neither are true. Neither are true. The feelings of overwhelm and the inability to keep up with it all, are not failings on your part. Instead, those difficult feelings are warning signs telling you something is off. Telling you to reassess. Despite what you have been told and despite what you believe around all the messaging that says, This is what “progress” looks and feels like now.

Just because it looks like this is the way it is now, does not mean you have to acquiesce. It does not mean you have to keep letting more and more lines get moved in your life that have nothing to do with what you want or really need. Despite what we have been told and sold, it is always a choice as to how you live. Always a choice as to how you spend your money, what you align with and how you choose to spend your time.

Something has been coming to me of late that I am experiencing as the antidote to the complications of the times, and as a reference point to help me remember, the choice is always mine. It is a Shaker hymn that feels to me like deep instructions for living. Guidance that is tangible, immediate and impactful. The first lines go like this:

I will bow and be simple. I will bow and be free.

To bring this into your life is as simple as the following:

Do Less

Get Out Of The News

Go Outside

Sit And Do Nothing

Spend Time With Those You Love

Eat Real Food

Forgive Everyone Everything

Sleep More

Breathe More Intentionally

Get To Know Your Neighbors

Stop Scrolling

Focus On What Is Beautiful

Move In Ways That Feel Good To You

Listen More

Talk Less

Pray

Look At The Stars

 

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Create An Uplifting Story

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Years ago, my yoga teacher was talking about our attempts to know and understand Reality with a capital “R.” He spoke of how because this is actually more than we can comprehend as human beings with our limited perspectives, we create stories. We create mythologies to know what is not knowable.

Stories are what we make up to explain who we are and why we are here. Stories explain back to us how the world works and how to make sense of things. Stories tell us what to do when we are lost and how to understand “good and evil.”

The problem is not necessarily the stories themselves, but the fact that we mistake the stories we create, for Reality itself. The problem being, that when we forget these are just stories to help us navigate by, we lose track of all that we do not know or comprehend; deluding ourselves into believing we know more than we actually do.

The very mindset, by the way, that stands at the heart of every wrong turn we have ever taken, or will ever take, as a species.

My yoga teacher pointed this all out by encouraging us to do two things: Create the most uplifting stories you can, while remembering that it’s “just” a story. This can be a tremendous paradox to hold. To both go for creating the most amazing and uplifting view of the world and your life and what it’s all about that you possibly can, while at the exact same time, holding that this story is but a mere drop in the ocean of Reality.

No matter how true, vast or inclusive you believe it to be. In other words, that what we can hold as human beings, even at its highest, will only be a tiny piece of the vast puzzle of The Great (and often unknowable) Mystery.

Admitting to this is a huge step and paves the way for understanding Life in a way that is tremendously liberating; despite how challenging it is. The challenge being, getting past our need to know it all, to be right or to try and control it all. The challenge being the way it might make us feel small and insignificant, afraid or like nothing we do matters. As in, “What’s the point if what I’m believing in isn’t actually accurate, true or the total picture?”

But it does matter. It does. Because every uplifting story line we create is a facet of the Total Reality; acting as one side of an eternally-sided diamond. And the more we can claim that understanding, the more we evolve with our story lines; ultimately taking us closer and closer to The Whole Truth.

To be clear, “uplifting” is not the same as illusion. It is not the same as denial or some Pollyannish take on Life. Uplifting does not distort. Instead, it holds what is possible. And every time you hold what is possible you are in the realm of Reality at its highest. This then becomes a map for even the darkest of times because when you run all your stories through what is possible, even the most painful or the hardest to digest, will now stand in service to Something Greater.

Everything that ails you, when seen through the lens of possibility, becomes a stepping stone to greater self-awareness, self-agency and self-care. Every conflict with another, becomes a bridge to creating a collective story of greater harmony. And every single experience of a world gone mad becomes the royal road to creating an inner world of sanity, peace and harmony, which then loops back out into the world.

Our stories matter. How we tell the stories of our lives and of the times we live in, matters. Because in the end, how you tell the story of now, has the power to create heaven or hell.

 

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The Place of Change

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I recently heard someone say that it is not a matter of science, but a matter of psychology when it comes to how it is we change our beliefs. When I heard it, it was like another piece of the puzzle fell into place. As someone in the business of change, both personally and professionally, I am ever trying to understand what it is that gets us to open enough to take that step into unknown territory. To enter into the rich and mysterious place of change.

Willingly.

It’s not like we don’t know something needs to shift. It’s not like we’re not getting feedback from our lives and others that something really must change this time. It’s not like we all don’t long for something more. We do. So why don’t we change then?

For sure, we’re afraid. Afraid we won’t be up to the task. Afraid to lose our hard won identities about who we believe we are. Afraid our lives won’t fit us anymore. Afraid of losing something. Afraid others will leave us. Afraid to admit that what we’ve been doing was foolish, and even destructive, and has maybe even hurt others. Afraid, it’s too late.

So many fears all piled into one resistant, and often intractable, blob.

But if we had a way to enter more gracefully and intentionally into The Land of Change, maybe we wouldn’t be so afraid. Maybe we would be able to bear the discomfort around all the adjustments we would need to make with more courage. Personally, I believe that way is seeded in wanting something more than what you’re afraid of, and then honing in on that with great single-mindedness and perseverance.

If you had that, would you enter into the change more willingly? Would you be able to shift because what you wanted was more powerful than your fears? I think so. I would even go so far as to say, I know so.

To be clear, you already have that. We all have that. It’s a matter then of pulling it to the surface so you can see it and be energized by it. What’s yours? What do you secretly long for? What pulls at you? What have you been wishing for your whole life?

To change it is to evolve. It is to move closer to what lives deep within us. It is to contribute at the highest of levels. With that known, how does change look to you now?

 

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Make It Simple

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In times of difficulty, make it simple. 

This is the guidance I received recently on a day where my mind was whirring away trying to account for everything that could possibly go wrong. For all of the ways I might be negatively received by another. A time of trying to fit all the puzzle pieces of protection together to create a picture of certainty.

It seems to be the nature of the ordinary mind to over-complicate and over-exaggerate in its desperate need to try and figure everything out. To try and have all the answers where quite likely the need for those answers arises precisely because of what the mind is doing in this regard. It also needs to be said here that this facet of the mind has been at the heart of figuring out complicated and complex problems that we all face. And yet, left unchecked, this very same aspect has also created many, many of our personal and social ills through its need to over-think, over-do and over-complicate.

We can readily see this in conventional medicine where more and more interventions create side effects and complications all their own. And where if a more simple approach and perspective was taken around what creates health, we would see more clearly what is needed, as opposed to coming up with more and more ways to chase symptoms. In so doing, creating harm that wasn’t even there to begin with. Nor even necessary, if we had only been more simple and humble in our approach.

Less certain and arrogant in our assumption that our complicated standards of care were the gold standard of the world.

We can also see complication that harms in the ways that more and more generations of the technologies are being imposed on our lives. Where the time-saving “convenience” we have been promised has turned into a full time job of managing passwords, platforms and apps. And how often it is we are consumed with just trying to deal with all of the intrusions and the demands of keeping up.

More to the point, keeping up with a whole bunch of things we never even asked for, and where the exchange of greater and greater complication for the promise of better living has grown increasingly false.

To complicate is to obfuscate the truth. To complicate is to distract, distort and detract from the beauty of our lives. To complicate is to create the wrong ideas about who we are, what we need and how to live. To complicate is to erode our well-being and the experience of being alive.

For the longest time, I had a button stuck to the back of the visor in my car that read:

“Live simply, that others may simply live.”

While this was a plea to be more conscientious around our resource use, we can, for our purposes here, extend the meaning.

Live simply that you may know ease.

Live simply that you may know peace.

Live simply that you may know what is true.

 

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Will You Cross The Threshold?

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One morning in practice, I find myself standing on the threshold between two rooms while I face in the direction of the rising sun. I had not intentionally positioned myself there. Yet, the physical placement of my body speaks volumes about the internal choices before me now.

Will I orient in the direction of the new day? Towards what is possible and fresh? In other words, will I cross some internal threshold and choose to face in the direction of the Light? Or will I continue to live at war within myself? Fighting old battles and living in the Darkness of my fears while remaining stuck between two worlds?

It is said that as within, so without. I am feeling this. I am feeling all of the ways that when I look out into the world, I can see my inner battles mirroring the outer battles being waged around me. From forever wars to intractable party politics to so-called incompatible ideologies to the wars being perpetrated on the human and the natural. It is everywhere you look.

And while many of us would state that we want things to be different, that we want to heal the divide, too often, our version of this equals believing the other side is the reason for the conflict. That it is another that must change, or right the wrong.

By holding this attitude we miss what we bring to the table; blind to all of the ways that what we accuse others of is exactly what we are doing, thinking and feeling. We can see the blindness to ourselves in the need to be right. Or our distorted perception that we must take down another to right the wrong. That we must fight, defend, prove and justify to protect ourselves and what we value.

As I explore this within myself, I find that at the heart of what creates the war within me is fear. Fear that my needs won’t be met. Fear that I’m not going to be seen. Fear that another’s opinions will annihilate something that matters to me. Fear that I will be judged and found lacking. Fear that my sensibilities and what I have to offer won’t be valued.

And so I fight.

I do this with the fake conversations inside my own mind, and with the tension that gets generated within my body. I do this with all of the ways that I drag yesterday into today by identifying and rehearsing myself against the ghosts of the past. And I do this with all of the ways I guard against the possibility of being rejected over who I am and what I most need.

We all do this.

We don’t really want to, but it is how we have been taught and how we figured out how best to keep ourselves safe emotionally, spiritually and physically. But our deepest selves yearn for something else. They yearn to heal the divide and to live in harmony within ourselves and with those around us.

But it can feel like a big, vulnerable leap to admit what your heart desires given how many of us got our hearts broken around this as kids. That’s why it can feel insane, naive, or even dangerous to open yourself up like this.

If however, you are feeling the call to be part of helping to mend the world, the first step here is admitting to yourself what it is you really want. By that I mean, what kind of a person do you really want to be, and what kind of a world do your really want to live in?

From there, it’s simply about noticing when your thoughts, words and actions are at odds with any of that.

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Becoming Truly Sovereign

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Whenever themes start showing up in my life, I always pay attention. Lately, everything is converging around sovereignty; both mine and other people’s.

Sovereignty for me equates to rulership over oneself, one’s body, one’s own life. It is the god-given right to determine your own way, and is something that no one has a right to other than you. What I mean by this is, no one else has the right to tell you how to live, what to do with your body or what you should think.

In essence, true sovereignty is about owning oneself; where what is inside of you is far more powerful and trustworthy than what is outside of you.

It may be important here to point out that I am not prosposing some crass free for all where we get to act in disrespectful ways to ourselves or to others. As a matter of fact, the truly sovereign would never engage in such things for they are aware that life is sacred and that to take up the full responsibility for your own life is an act of incredible bravery.

As well as being the greatest gift you will ever offer another. Even if, and maybe even especially when, another doesn’t agree with you or understand what you are doing.

Why? Because when you are truly owning your actions, your thoughts and your behaviors, you become a trustworthy source for yourself and for all those around you. This as opposed to being someone who bends according to the prevailing winds. Who disrespects themselves because they are afraid of what others might think, say or do.

I find the exploration of sovereignty to be both extremely challenging, and at the very same time, perhaps one of the greatest contributions we can make in a world gone mad with telling each other how to live. Whether it be in the virtue signaling pressures and cancel culture of the social media world, the one-size-fits-all conventional medical mandates, or the surveillance culture that leaves us more comfortable with being spied on than on determining our own way, so much of “modern” day life is literally stripping our sovereignty away.

And for far too many of us, we are literally giving it away, without so much as a whimper.

But if you are moved by what I’m talking about here, recalling your own sovereignty can begin with one simple, but direct contemplation: Do I know why I do what I do? Do I know what drives me?

If you can to begin to become aware of who’s actually in charge of your life, you are now in a position to challenge whether or not you want to give that authority over to another person, thought form, system or set of circumstances.

 

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What Are You Entraining To?

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I love the word “entrain.” It always feels to me like a way of becoming absorbed by something. A kind of joining up with a rhythm of some sort. One of the definitions of entrain is “to draw in or to draw along.”

That’s exactly how it felt to me one early morning this week as I sat by the river. Most of the water had turned to ice, though some was still moving beneath the frozen layer.  As I sat with the water and with the trees, feeling an enormous sense of calm come over me, I was reminded of why it is I am called to the woods.

It’s always far more than just a walk for me, or some form of exercise. Instead, it feels like an opportunity to get closer to who I am and to who I most want to be. It’s so much easier for me to remember what I want to remember and what it is that I want to emulate in Life when I am embedded in the natural world. There, the cadence and the flow of everything around me is something my body not only wants and needs, but is.

This is often a far cry from how I feel in the man-made world where the pace, the energies, the expectations, the visual landscape, the smells and more can leave me ragged, overwhelmed and out of touch. I think therein lies the rub for all of us.

What I mean by this is that what we expose ourselves to is what will determine how we feel. What we entrain to by way of what we surround ourselves with creates our experience of being alive. What we allow ourselves to be “drawn into or along by” tells us who we are and how to live. It tells us what is real and what is important. It tells us what is worth looking at and what is worthy of our precious life.

For a moment, just imagine yourself sitting by a river. How does that experience play in your body and mind? What possibilities and mind sets come pre-installed into this kind of entrainment with something outside of you? Then, imagine being glued to your screen day after day watching horrific images of suffering that you have no control over. What happens here?

Every day we have a choice about what we will be drawn into. What it is we will go along with. And while many would say there is nothing we can do. That this is just the way it is now. That’s just not true.

Unless we decide that it is.

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Show Me, Show Me

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It’s not always easy to be in a body. So many things to feel. So many changes to experience. So many unknowns. So many ways we’ve been led to believe how quickly things can go so “wrong” so fast.

Which is why it can be so easy to try and over-manage our own bodies, or to give the responsibility for them to another person, system or thing. Because we have been so conditioned to look outside of ourselves for the fix, it can feel impossible to believe that our very own bodies are a source of great wisdom unto themselves, and that we have access to that wisdom as a source of guidance and inspiration around how to heal.

But if you’re willing to shift your perspective, and be a little (or a lot) brave, there is a way to rethink your relationship with your body that opens the door to all that wisdom, guidance and inspiration. And it all begins by deciding to see that you can be with this body of yours in a way where you come to trust what it is doing, and therefore telling you, about what it needs.

That means seeing the sensations of pain or the symptoms of illness and disease as pieces of information to pay attention to. And while many of us have never been officially schooled in decoding that information, your capacity to understand is already built right into you.

Somewhere deep inside, you do have the awareness of how to be with your body in a more open way. But to access that awareness means putting aside your assumptions and fears about what is happening and what you must do. And to instead, open yourself up to not knowing. This is not where most of us want to go. It feels too scary. Too risky. Too much like we’re not doing enough or that if we take matters into our own hands in this way, something will go wrong.

Not to worry. Your body knows what it is doing. If it didn’t, we would not have survived to this point in time. That’s why if you can be open to that reality, you have created an inroad into a perspective of how our bodies actually work. This as opposed to believing they are dangerous or out of control or something to fear.

One very tangible way to give yourself access to what your body is doing and what it needs, is to say to yourself, Show me, show me. Show me what this is all about. Show me what you need. Show me how to be with you now.

While saying this, if you can put aside, for just a moment, your fears or the drive to already have the answer, you’re in a position to be shown what you most need to know. You are in a mindset now to receive some real guidance as you begin the journey back to a loving and trusting relationship with your very own body. One that will serve you well, as well as serving those you come in contact with.

For the Truth is, you cannot be here without a body, and the more connected you are to your very own body, the more satisfying and connected you will be to your own life, as well as to the lives of all Life.

 

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Yearnings

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All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.

~Andre Breton

This beauty came across my desk recently. It felt as if I could have written it. When I thought about it more, it felt as if any one of us could have written it.

Below all of the to-do lists, the distractions, the hurts, the confusions and the unworthiness lives a place that yearns for Something More. Beyond all of the thoughts that would say, This is just how it is, and there is nothing I can do about it, dwells a knowing that anything is possible when the heart and its most sincere yearnings are involved.

Outside all of the fears that would say, It’s too dangerous, you’ll get hurt, that’s naive, people will make fun of you, this could never exist in the world, is an understanding that despite all the push back you might ever get from the world, this is actually what everyone truly longs for. A chance for the heart to give voice to its yearnings.

A chance to put the heart’s yearnings into form, to offer them as a gift to the world and to see them received by other hearts.

This takes a lot of courage. Especially in a world that has grown so jaded when it comes to matters of the heart. Not to mention all of the ways that each and every one of us has had our deepest yearnings denied, ridiculed, driven from us, and even harmed.

But the time is Now.

The true “fix” to what ails us resides in the heart and what it longs for. This is The Force in The Universe powerful enough to cut through the distortions, the derangements and the deals we have all made with the wrong things. Things that will never be enough because they do not honor what it is the heart is trying to name.

Personally, I yearn for relationships that are authentic and that bring out the best in all of us. I yearn to live in connection with All That Is. I yearn for the most loving energies to be in charge. I yearn to speak my truth and for it to be received. And I yearn for all of us to make way for the differences among us.

What does your heart yearn for? Can you be brave enough to name it?

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