Tag Archives: A Better Life

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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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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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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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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Finding Your Outrage

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In the Yogic system, it is said we are living in The Kali Yuga. The Dark Age. It was predicted thousands of years ago that these would be difficult, selfish and desperate times. Times characterized by great upheaval. Times rife with apathy in relationship to what is occurring.

How interesting that the complacency we can observe in ourselves now was predicted.

This feels important somehow that this age, and our response to it, was already known. That a kind of forewarning was sent to us from another time. The question being, what will we do with that information? Will we use it as guidance? Or will we succumb to it all?

Yes, we are busy. And perhaps we believe someone else will take care of the strife. Yes, we are overwhelmed. And so we tend to stick our heads in the sand when it comes to doing something about what we are seeing. Yes, we are perpetually distracted and medicated. And so we do not feel the full impact of what is happening to our humanity. Yes, it is intense. And we can feel like we would never make a dent anyway, so why bother trying.

Therein lies the allure and the entrapment of apathy. That place where we don’t even try because it all feels like nothing we do will make a difference anyway. But aren’t there still some things worth fighting for? Things that matter enough to us that we will no longer tolerate the wrong things? Some set of values and beliefs that we will not negotiate?

I recently came upon a quote by James Hillman that I believe offers guidance here.

“Outrage is a sure sign of a soul awake.”

What brings up outrage in you? Could you imagine being brave enough to forego all the social niceties you have agreed to in order to harness the power of outrage? Would you be willing to let the voice of your very own soul speak up as a way to combat the apathy that leaves you agreeing to the downfall of humanity?

 

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A Winter Wonderland

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It’s the first real snowfall of the year, and I’m out in the woods. There is nowhere else I’d rather be. Nowhere else that holds me like winter woods and fresh fallen snow. I can feel the silence, and it is deep. I can feel the stillness, and it is vast. And while I would love to get this all down on paper, my pen won’t work; despite how much I try to get it going. When I finally stop trying, sensing I’m not meant to put this into words just yet, that’s when I hear, “This cannot be captured or owned. But it can be known.”

As I walk on, I contemplate traditions like Ayurveda, where the understanding is that the wisdom teachings of this discipline and science are eternal. That a kind of primordial and powerful knowledge of “how things work” has always been here. And that that knowledge was “downloaded” into the hearts and minds of ancient seers and sages. To the Western mind, this seems absurd. Crazy even. And yet, even quantum physics would tell us that there is a field where all possibility (including knowledge) exits in potential form.

If this is so, wouldn’t it make sense that some of us could be so attuned as to be able to receive the infinite wisdom and knowledge that is available to us through that very same field?

What I’m talking about is different from information. Different from memorizing something. Different from being told something and believing it. What I’m talking about here is as different as reading about how to play the game of tennis, as opposed to being a master player. One is a bunch of thoughts and detached from experience. One is fully embodied and experienced on all levels. One is a surface approach. One is known at the cellular level.

There is a kind of deeper knowing that is available to all of us. This includes, but is far vaster then, what our intellect is capable of. But because of the strong hold that the intellect has on us, because of a culture that prizes the rational mind above all else, we have boxed ourselves out of the vastness of who we are. We have excluded ourselves from the possibilities available to us when we avail ourselves of Something More than what the rational mind thinks it knows. All that we are so sure of. All that seems so solid and true to us, is but a speck of dust as compared to what is available.

This is where Nature comes in. She can help us unlearn the limitations and blindspots of the rational, and often closed off mind that we have imposed upon ourselves. With a more open mind, there is no way you can be standing in the magic and mystery of a snow covered forest and not sense there is Something More. No way you can see everything around you and not know that you are but a speck in some vast Universe.

But it doesn’t end there.

When you can feel the speck that you are, you open to the Truth: Every speck is also the Universe itself, and therefore, has access to Everything that the Universe has to offer.

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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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