The Place of Change

 

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?

 

Becoming Truly Sovereign

 

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.

 

Yearnings

 

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?

Find Your Center

 

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.

The Sacred Thread Of Our Lives

 

I was in a yoga class this week and we were talking about the full moon. It seems in the Vedic tradition, this moon symbolizes a recommitment to that which you hold dear. The teacher spoke of this time as a “Re-tying of the sacred thread.” The thread referring to what is tied around the waist of young initiates with the re-tying referring to a reconsecration of your vows.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the phrase re-tying the sacred thread all throughout class. Even though I didn’t have a lot of words for it in the moment, it felt powerful and sacred. It felt necessary, honest and true. Truly, it felt to me like the greatest thing any one of us could ever choose to do.

That being, to visit over and over and over again what it is we are committing our lives to.

What a True North this would be in a world increasingly less sacred, honest and true. In a world that encourages us to not have a compass by which to navigate, but instead, to be like a leaf in the wind, getting blown all over the place by whatever the prevailing winds are.

But to engage instead with the sacred thread is to choose what it is you stand for, and who and what you will be in the world. No matter what. Can you imagine it? What it would be like if more of us made a commitment to what is most important to us, and then lived by that?

This is not about party politics or forcing your views on another. Instead, this is about a deeply personal vow you make to the sacredness of your own life. One where you begin to walk the path of courage and discernment that says I will pay attention to what pulls my life out of balance. I will get a handle on what my mind is doing and how it is taking me in the wrong directions. I will become accountable for every single action I take with others; foregoing the victim and the need to blame another.

Our lives are like a great tapestry composed of so many threads. So many of which we have left ignored and untended though they be the most essential.

To even be in the position of re-tying your sacred thread is first and foremost to know what it is you have bound yourself to in this lifetime. For this, you need look no further than how you spend your time, money and energy while you wonder to yourself if your daily choices line up with the preciousness of your most sacred threads.

 

Beyond Groupthink

 

“Courage is fear that has said its prayers” is a powerful statement I came across many years ago at a time when I was first confronting a lot of fears that had long gone unrecognized. Ones I was working my hardest to not see or deal with. Ones that were driving me to be and live in ways that were hurting me.

So it was nothing short of miraculous to hear I could find a way to be with what I thought I could not be with.

I turned to this sentiment as a touchstone to get a handle on the fears that were driving me. Getting into it, I saw the fears that were the scariest were mostly centered around (and still do) what would happen to me if I really stepped into the full expression of who I am.

Stepped into being the one beyond what others believed she should be. Stepped into being the one who used her own unique voice; even when that rattled the status quo. Stepped into being the one who did things differently because she had gotten clear on her values; even when those around her hadn’t and where that clarity might be perceived as a threat.

The fears I am referencing are deep and primal, and are the ones we all carry. They include the fear of being rejected. Of being retaliated against. Of being kicked out, not loved, gossiped about, ridiculed. I think you get the picture. As a matter of fact, I know you get the picture because these are the fears that keep all of us from being who we are.

Whether these fears are intentionally disseminated or are just being passed onto us, they are the ones that cut the deepest because they are the ones we learned about in childhood. The ones that came in when we didn’t have the cognitive capacity to discern whether to take them on as valid or not. The ones that came in at a time when it was impossible to go out on our own.

The ones that showed up at a time when we had to negotiate who we were, in order to stay within the safety and belonging of the group. And now, because we live in a world ever more infused with a kind of growing comfort around being surveilled, where our very actions, and soon to be our thoughts, are known and can be used against us, our belief that being ourselves is dangerous, is being amplified.

If you believe I am overstating something here, or have gone off the deep end, just think about the cancel culture that has been birthed out of our unhealthy attachments to social media where if you say something unpopular, you can be de-platformed and publicly humiliated; serving, in effect, as a kind of modern day stockade in the public square where you are held up as an example of what not to do as your community jeers at you.

Or how about the current practice of the social credit system in effect in China now (as well as being considered by other countries), where if one does something outside of the officially sanctioned government narrative, you lose access to things you need to live as a functioning member of society.

All of this to say: Never has it been more difficult to be who you truly are, and never has it been more important for the future of a world leaning more and more into a kind of enforced groupthink.

It is a very big ask of each of us to explore who we are beyond what “they” expect or demand of us because it requires us to be with our fears. To seek them out and to challenge them. To feel the fears we all experience around being ourselves and to step forward anyway. Not as a way to re-traumatize ourselves, but as an act of sovereignty and bravery that says “My life is far too precious for us all for me allow it to be silenced by out-of-date and culturally-induced fears.

 

What Is Happiness Anyway?

 

If you were to ask the average person what they most wanted for themselves or their kids, I think many would say “happiness” topped their list. But I also think this is about as far as many people go with what one could argue needs to be a necessary examination of something so important to you.

For starters, do you even know what being happy means, what it costs or even how to get there? I don’t think we do. Which is why it’s so easy for us to be manipulated into believing all kinds of things when it comes to what happiness is and where it comes from.

“Good fortune, prosperity, a state of well-being and contentment” are what the dictionary has to say about happiness. Seems like something worth going for. These days though, this worthy state is fraught with all kinds of problems, misdirections and brainwashing.

In our heavily influenced and commercialized world we are being sold to by billion dollar companies what well-being and good fortune looks like. Guess what? Happiness looks exactly like having things. Their things in the shape and form of products and services. Or perhaps it’s all about having lots of followers or garnering lots of likes for curating your life on social media and exploiting yourself by posting it all to be used as a kind of fodder for your ever-hungry “friends.”

Then there are all the streaming and online services that make their images of other people look so enticing, while creating big feelings in you. These externally induced feelings are what you go on to equate with a kind of contentment and good fortune that compel you to sit and watch for hours on end as figures on a screen go on to have the life you want. Or maybe, being glued in front of a screen helps you forget the life you are living that you don’t want.

Either way, you call it happiness.

Of course we can’t forget about the drugs. All the wonderful drugs that will create a pseudo state of happiness that can be purchased in pot shops or through ask your doctor campaigns. And if that’s not your jam, your happiness can be bought by your next online purchase and delivered right to your door the next day. No effort on your part other than to push a button.

None of this is happiness and we deserve better. We deserve better than to believe our well-being can be bought and sold. We deserve better than to medicate ourselves into some false and illusory state that we now equate with contentment. But because so many of us are doing it, we don’t much question ourselves, and even if we do, we hide out under the cover of the herd.

As much as we may be going along for this ride, deep down, we know we are being lied to. More to the point, we know we are lying to ourselves. That’s why whatever we do in this modern day frantic pursuit of happiness always falls flat, always needs another fix, and always is at the hands and mercy of a thing that someone else is willing to sell us.

Happiness is an inside job. It doesn’t look like what Hollywood portrays and it definitely does not come in a pill. It is hard won. It is fleeting. It is honest. It is a choice. It is enduring in its simplicity and it is personal to you. What might it look like?

Personally, I take my cues here from a synonym for happiness. “Blessed.” What is it that makes you feel blessed? For me, it looks like watching the moon or your kid play t-ball. It looks like sitting down for a meal you prepared with those you love. It looks like being with a good friend for a walk in the woods. It looks like getting your chance to be here and learning and growing yourself into who you most want to be.

Beyond Wrong

 

I’m in the middle of teaching my Healer Within program and I am prepping for the class that focuses on what I refer to as “Learning the Language of Your Body.” In other words, coming to see the symptoms and sensations of the body as vital and necessary communication you want to be in touch with. Working with this material keeps drawing me back over and over again to one essential truth: In order to learn the language of your body, you must be willing to go beyond “wrong” when it comes to what your body is doing.

This is not easy to do. In fact, it’s exceedingly difficult given the intense conditioning by our current conventional medical system that insists, despite any evidence to the contrary from other health systems, that any imbalance in your body is a problem, an inconvenience, a misstep on the part of your biology that must be addressed with pills and procedures.

There’s more. For you to suspend the belief that there is something wrong with your body is also to tap into another deep-seated piece of conditioning we are all subject to: There is something wrong with you. Something wrong with you if you think differently than your tribe. Want differently than what the culture offers up in terms of its insane pace and inhumane approach to life and living. Feel differently about what you are told and sold when it comes to who you are and what you are capable of.

In other words, don’t stick out, don’t be too great, don’t rock the boat. Instead, do all that you can to never be wrong in the eyes of another.

Bottom line? To even consider to begin to unwind from the wrongness you unconsciously direct at yourself and your body each and every day is to knowingly make the choice to depart from any and all of the places you make yourself wrong. Whether those places exist in your own mind, or are reflected back to you from a consensual reality that is predicated on you fitting into it. Even if that means it needs to snuff out any chance of you questioning the current reality by undermining you with a big dose of, “You’re wrong to step out of line as we have drawn it.”  

This can feel like an enormous task and even quite scary to take on. Why? Because we use making ourselves wrong to dim our light in order to belong. And we use something being wrong with our bodies as an escape hatch to avoid getting to know our bodies more fully, while learning how to claim full responsibility for them.

However. It can be simplified and made doable by asking one penetrating question:

If I wasn’t making myself/my body wrong right now, what would I know?

 

What The World Is Really Here To Give You

 

“The world is not here to make you happy. It’s here to make you conscious.” I heard these words spoken last week by Eckhart Tolle, renowned teacher of Presence. It came at exactly the right moment for me as the words broke through the haze of being lost in a deep well of grief.

I am no stranger to grief and sorrow. They have been traveling companions of mine for my whole life. Grief over the ways of the world. Sorrow over missed and lost connections in personal relationships. Sadness over how we treat ourselves and others.

At times, I have felt broken and victimized by how grief-stricken I have been over the ways our children’s innocence is being violated via the screens. I have been filled with sorrow over how we allow our lives to be gobbled up by distractions. And I have been heart-broken over how often the wrong things are in charge; despite the obvious destruction they bring.

This and more is what I have been revisiting of late, being “stuck in a grief loop,” as one of my practitioners so aptly put it.

But when I heard Eckhart’s words, something in me snapped to attention. Something in me knew immediately the Truth of those words. And all at once, I could see that the lifelong suffering around the grief and sorrow I have always felt has been not just because of how devastatingly sad all these things are, but because I have been expecting the world to take this sadness away from me by being other than it is.

Now, I know that our minds might go immediately to Well, what sane person wouldn’t want the madness of the world to end? What sane person wouldn’t want more respect for life? 

This is not to negate that healthy yearning. But it is to point out that when we refuse to acknowledge how things are, not how we want them to be, we suffer; fighting in vain like a fish on a line.

To see that there is something greater at play than even your most heartfelt and noble expectations of the world is to step into an entirely new game. It is to open to your spiritual nature and the real reason you are here. Which is to grow in consciousness. Which is to walk the path of remembering who you really are, and why you are here.

When I look at my life through this lens, I can say with certainty that this is so. For each time the world has not made me happy, and I have chosen to let it grow me, I have changed. And always for the better. Every unfairness and disappointment that the world has ever delivered to me, a blessing.

I guess it’s time for me to step out of the grief loop I’ve been in.

A New Year

 

As we stand on the threshold of a New Year, contemplating what it is we would like to change within ourselves, there is no better time than right now to really feel into the deep connection between what resides in each of us, and what it is we are watching play out in the world.

This can be hard to see because none of us wants to imagine the darker sides of the world existing within us. And, because it is far easier to blame the world for its current state than to figure out how to change yourself to contribute to the world you would like to see.

This week, I’m going to do something I’ve never done: Share an entry from my journal. I do this in the spirit of my experience serving as an example of what is possible when one woman dedicates herself to looking closely at how she engages with others when the going gets rough.

I am aware that as I shed my fears around others and how they might respond to me, as I get more skilled in seeing what I see, as I get less willing to carry what is not mine, as I become less interested in doing penance for another’s dysfunction…I am able to be in a place of naturally and organically arising clarity and compassion for the one who stands before me.

More tolerant. More accepting. More appropriately boundaried. Less reactive. Less desperate to have them be something I need them to be. Separated from the morass of dysfunction between us, I am able to claim a piece of Earth to bear witness to them. Their struggles. Their magnificence. 

And in that moment, there is no separation between us. No difficulty we cannot resolve. No need to blame, shame, manage or control. No need to take on what is not mine. Instead, a naturally arising organic compassion that knows beyond the labels. That offers from a place beyond good/bad; right/wrong; what he said/she said.

A holy place beyond what you need to do and who you need to be to confirm my worldview and for me to feel safe. This is where I aspire to live. This is where I yearn to be with another.

For what I know to be true is this: The only way for me to find my way into this state of being is through the committed effort on my part to learn how to be with myself in such a way that I run down every single personal response to another and claim it as my responsibility to figure out why I feel the way I do. Why I think what I think and react how I react.

A lot of work. Yes. A lifetime of work. But the rewards are great. And vast. They touch the generations to come and reach into the past to heal the wounds of our ancestors. They lay the foundation of Life here on Earth, with others, based on what we all yearn for. Peace and love between us.

And so, it is no small thing to wonder about yourself. To dedicate time every day to ask yourself the question, “How’s it going for me?” To pause long enough to hear and feel deeply into a real answer, and then to set yourself to the task of pulling on that thread long enough to get to the end of how it is you are feeling. And why. 

It won’t happen overnight. Nor will it be easy. But in the end, when you come to know how you tick, you are more generous with how others tick. Along the way, those ticking time bombs between us, get defused.