Tag Archives: Healing

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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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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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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The “Easy Steps” Trap

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

I’m all in.

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

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

Around what it is I know to be true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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True Self-Care

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Last weekend I co-facilitated a restorative retreat at my farm where the focus was on self-care. While I had prepared a lot around what would be the obvious candidates for caring for ourselves, as the afternoon went on, it was amazing to hear how much nuance showed up around what self-care truly is.

We live in interesting and often confusing times. On the one hand, we are encouraged by a multi-billion dollar wellness industry to take better care of ourselves. To buy more things, get more services, do more around our self-care. On the other hand, we have a machine-driven culture that not only does not make time for what we actually need, it doesn’t even recognize it. We see this demonstrated in the unremitting schedules we are attempting to keep and in the rewards bestowed upon those who seem to be able to work without pausing or attending to their needs.

Both are terribly out of whack. False. Misleading. Destructive. And ultimately, very, very harmful to actually caring for ourselves in a way that is real and true.

Self-care is not something to be bought, acquired or negotiated over. Instead, it is built right into you. As a mammal, it is part of your survival response and is your relational glue. It serves as the foundation for your self-worth and is the gas that runs your life. And it is the homage you pay to the Creator for the gift of Life.

It shows up in your natural capacity to set a boundary and to use the word “No.” It is present in your ability to know when you are hungry, tired and need to move, and then to go on to actually satisfy what is being called for. As a matter of fact, self-care, the capacity to know how to take care of ourselves, is inborn and natural. Otherwise, how as a species would we be able to exist?

The trouble is, of course, we have allowed ourselves to be pulled away from what is natural and so when it comes to what we need. We have allowed ourselves to be bought, misled and medicated. I realize this sounds harsh, but without owning up to the part we play in the care that we need, we will never get out of the mess we find ourselves in; the one characterized by more illness, dis-ease, unrest and dissatisfaction than likely our species has ever experienced.

Self-care is not complicated. But it does require some things. Like paying better attention to yourself and to the messages you’re getting around when and where your life is out of balance. It requires being in your body and developing a respectful relationship to it (no matter what your mind or the culture demands). It means turning away from the habits and screen messaging that confuses your capacity to start inside your own self to determine what you need.

Your self-care is a reflection of how you feel about yourself and what it means to be alive. What would it be like to begin today to care for yourself as if you actually mattered? As if you actually knew what to do? No gadgets, apps, programs, books, advice required.

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Living For Today

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Last weekend I ran in a road race with a notoriously steep mile long climb. As I passed one of the volunteers, as a way to assuage the intense experience I was about to partake in, she said to me quite enthusiastically, “It’s not yesterday!” To which I responded as enthusiastically, “No it’s not!”

She was referring to the fact that the day before the weather had been intense. Huge downpours. High winds. Lightening. But as soon as the exchange was over, I realized what was spoken between us was so much more; serving as a profound reminder to get out of living and dwelling in the past as quickly and as often as I can.

To let yesterday be yesterday as I opened to, and lived fully in, today.

It was easy to see this during the race. Easy to recognize I could dwell on the poor night’s sleep I had experienced, or I could be on the road running and recognizing that I was doing quite well actually. I could focus on a couple of people displaying some poor social behavior at the start of the race, or I could be with what was actually occurring in any given moment. Opting to let go of what had already come and gone, and instead choosing to be with what was right now. And what was right now was filled with some truly wonderful, supportive and energetic people.

If you have ever learned to watch your mind and what it is thinking about, you know how often your mind dwells in the past. How often you live today colored by what was said and done “yesterday.” What that person did or didn’t do for you. How you were overlooked or embarrassed. How your heart was broken. How you were called something that hurt. How something was taken from you.

While we could all argue that something harmful or unfair did indeed happen “yesterday,” it is us who is keeping it alive in the “today.” It is us who keeps going over and over it. It is us who has allowed it to limit us now. It is us who can’t stop thinking about it or living by it.

If this makes sense to you, and you want the freedom and the possibility that exists in a “today” less colored by “yesterday,” get in the habit of checking in with yourself throughout the day by asking “Where am I right now?” Use this question to gauge whether you are in “today” or “yesterday.”

And whenever you catch yourself in “yesterday,” say to yourself “It’s not that time anymore.” 

It takes practice to get out of the habit of dwelling in the past. It takes courage to let go of the identity you have created based on that past. But if you stick with it, you will be rewarded with greater ease, clarity and a much more sane and realistic view of yourself and the world. One that is not rooted in “yesterday,” but in “today” with all of its limitless possibilities.

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Standing The Test Of Time

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It can be so incredibly difficult these days to know what is good for you when it comes to how to take care of yourself. Should you eat the new line of fake “meats” being touted as helping to save the climate? Should you choose the latest drug promising to cure obesity? Should you consider wearing or having embedded into you the latest technology to monitor your health?

In a world moving at the speed of light when it comes to what we are being sold around health and self-care, how will we keep up? How will we determine what a human body actually, fundamentally and always needs to be healthy in the face of so many choices that may not have anything to do with real biological Truths?

As a matter of fact, to try and run down every new fad, food item or pill that hits the market would be a full time job. Basically, out of reach for most of us who are just trying to live our lives, pay our bills and raise our kids. Meaning, that most of us will never devote the time or the energy to thoroughly vet what is coming our way in this regard. This leaves us at the mercy of the commercials and other agendas trying to get us to buy or do something.

What then? Isn’t there something we can return to? A kind of infallible North Star to help us navigate far too many choices, hidden agendas and scare tactics?

I believe there is, and I think of it as “Those Things That Stand The Test Of Time.” What this means for me is looking back across history and to earlier generations to see what was naturally done in the past. Not as a way to romanticize earlier times, but as a solid foundation for determining fact from fiction when it comes to what our bodies truly need to be well. What it is we did before all the technological inventions and marketing schemes.

An easy example to work with is food. Each year, we are bombarded with tens of thousands of new and “improved” food items in our supermarkets. And while this is a great way for Big Food to claim more market share, along with the stellar profits that goes with that, is it actually good for your health to eat what they churn out? The current chronic rates of lifestyle diseases, obesity in particular, would say no. As would the food research that tells us these so-called “new and improved” food-like substances are merely a new take on highly processed ingredients created to trick your taste buds in order to get you to buy in order to create more profits for them.

Does this sound like a scenario where your health and well-being are central in the equation? If not, you are onto something and it’s called using your common sense; the main ingredient in what it is that stands the test of time.

To get even more specific, if we apply standing the test of time to our food choices, some simple questions to ask would be, “Is this something my grandmother or great grandmother would have made for her family? Would she have recognized this as food?”

In a world that loves to complicate things, one of the best ways to navigate our way through when it comes to health, or really anything for that matter, is to get simple. There is nothing more simple than common sense. Nothing more basic than looking at what has stood the test of time.

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A Curated Life

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I’m in the midst, on one particular morning, of tending to the new plants, making sauce and creating medicine when it strikes me that if I was on Instagram, if I was a so-called influencer, I would be having a very different experience.

I would have changed out of my comfy clothes and chosen a perfectly curated outfit to go with the homestead/farm feel of the moment. I would be staging my morning and positioning it all just so to give you the impression of just how perfect it all was. I would do this by taking multiple pictures from different angles with multiple filters to give you the impression of a spontaneous and unplanned moment.

In the process, I would have sacrificed all of the naturally arising peace, contentment, presence and gratitude that organically arises whenever I am in alignment with what I love best. Without the pressure to post and perform, I am connected to the abundance of the natural world and to a morning where I have the precious space I need to be with what matters most to me.

This is what is being lost in our ever so carefully curated lives: A chance to be with ourselves in a way that nourishes us. So much so that even when we choose not to take that picture, to refrain from posting, is it not what we are often thinking about even if we are not acting on it? Curated lives as a performance vehicle is so insidious now that it’s with us even when we are choosing otherwise.

What strikes me as the most disastrous, the saddest, the most dangerous even, is that we haven’t considered what we are losing each and every day as we orient ourselves ever-more to allowing the screens to mediate every moment of our existence. Desperate as we are to show others something about ourselves and willing to do so at any cost.

But only after it has all been carefully, carefully curated.

In the meantime, we don’t notice that our self-esteem is in the toilet, satisfaction in our relationships plummeting, our stress accelerating, the chase for perfection never ending, with our very existence reduced down to some glam shot.

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Just This Moment

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I am having one of those days where my thoughts are leaning towards anticipating negative scenarios and engaging in the “what if’s” the mind is so compelled to do. And while at this point I know enough of the machinations of the mind to not go down those rabbit holes, it still can nag away at me as it was doing on this particular day.

While I have many techniques I use to bring my mind back into balance, something happened quite naturally on this day that really struck me. After a walk with my husband where I had laid out my potential “what if’s,” we made our way over to gather eggs and look at what was happening with the starts and seeds we had recently planted.

It took no time at all for my anticipating mind to tune into something life-giving; shifting me out of a chaotic mind to one quite naturally and easily at peace. A mind at ease as it found itself immersed in the bigger picture of Life. All of this with no effort on my part, other than to be in relationship with Something Greater than myself, while spontaneously repeating over and over “Just This,” as I moved through the garden.

The “Just This” was my way of focusing only on what was right before me; whether that was the lettuce I was picking, the conversation I was having or the observations I was making of the seedlings. In effect, immersing my mind in the right now versus the “what if” future.

We so take whatever we think to be truth. As something to believe in and act on. Even when all signs point to the fact that our minds have gone off the rails with fear, anxiety and judgment. And while in this day and age there is no end to solutions for an imbalanced mind from medication to meditation, we can skip right over the most accessible and effortless of approaches to healing our minds.

Here I am referring to the natural world. To the elements and conditions and living beings that we have co-evolved with since we first appeared on the planet; our very home and the clearest reflection of who we are, where we come from and what we need.

Why would we go anywhere else to gain perspective and to ground ourselves in Truth?

Because we have been conditioned to believe that our well-being resides in a screen, a pill, more stuff, more prestige, more “likes,” etc. We have come to experience ourselves as separate from, and therefore not needing the support and the tutelage of what The Earth has to offer us. Unfortunately, many of us have strayed so far and for so long, we have come to see the natural world as foreign, dark and scary. An enemy as opposed to an ally.

But here’s the thing. We are Nature herself. We are created and maintained by the same force. To know this is to tap into the good news that even if we have forgotten, even if we never learned to begin with, all we have to do is to put ourselves in the Presence of the natural world for her to do her work on us.

So find a reason every single day to linger, even for one minute, somewhere outside. Go without agenda. Go and be a listener. Go and allow yourself to get lost in the breeze, a bird singing, some fragrance, a starry night, the feel of rain on your skin. And say to yourself, “Just This.”

 

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