Category: awakening

with roots, we rise

magnificent trees, their root structure spreading
horizontally twice their height.

icebergs, 90% of their mass underwater.

deep sleep, providing the substrate for your body
to integrate, heal, and grow.

real, nourishing food, feeding your cells, cre
ating your bodies, emotions, and thoughts.

movement, pumping blood and air,
forming flesh and bone.

inner practice, deepening your connection
to your whole bodysoul.

These are the roots you need
to rise up and live your life.

Winter is the time to nourish your roots:

Listen to a grounding meditation to deepen your inner roots.

Try my Parsnip-Burdock Breakfast Bowl to feed your belly roots.

Join me at Wild Church!

Are you self-full?

Woman in Center: Russian Painting, Artist unknown

At an Enneagram presentation a year or so ago, a question came up about being selfish.

Selfish is such a buzzword–especially for those of us who grew up as women in this culture, over the age of 30 or so…

We were taught that to be selfish–to be concerned about ourselves–was wrong. Our presence was valued when we were selfless–when our concern was for others.

Of course, this has not been true for most men. Men who focus on themselves and who talk about their accomplishments are most often seen as successful and strong.

Well, this woman shared a distinction she had heard, which I have been considering and sharing with my clients ever since.

Instead of worrying about what it means to be selfish, let’s consider being self-full.

Self-full. We can’t be self-full when we are being self-less!

We can’t develop the fullness of our voice and presence if we feel it’s wrong to be concerned with ourselves. (Thank us, women of the #metoo movement, for daring to share our voices.)

All the heroines and heros of our time have modeled being
self-full, not self-less.

They knew what they valued and loved. They knew what they needed–and they acted on it for themselves and for their greater communities.

We have to fill our own wells so we have water to share with others. This creates a self that is full, that over-brims with the water of life for all. This is being self-full, not self-less, or selfish!

 From this place, we meet the world with greater presence, which means we are more able to show up with what’s needed in the moment: more grace, strength, ease, equanimity, joy, power, love, etc.

My primary Enneagram teacher, Russ Hudson, once responded to a question from one of the Christian students about presence by saying “Whose Presence do you think it is, anyway?”

How do you fill your well
to be self-full?

What does self-less look like
in your life?

New Year, New Light, New Practices!

Remember with me for a moment what it was like for our ancestors, for some of us, even as close as our great-great grandparents…

 

As the Autumn passed, the days grew darker and darker.

After the harvest celebrations and the fields gone fallow, people cozied up together, sharing the warmth and the light of fire as the darkness grew deeper every day. They structured their lives around the light, sleeping when it was dark, up to 12 hours or more per night.

At the peak of darkness, when it seemed like its reign would never lose its grip, the people started to notice that, slowly but surely, the days were beginning to grow lighter again. They ventured out earlier and stayed out later…

The return of the light meant the return of life–of days warming, of plants starting to grow again, of animals mating and giving birth…

 

It’s no wonder that this season, regardless of which

religious celebration you participate in, is all about

waiting for and celebrating the return of the light.

 

This natural seasonal rhythm is built into our genes, passed down through thousands of years of biological, ancestral memory.

 

We celebrate that there is always a new spark of light–birthed right in the middle of the darkest of days. 

 

We celebrate that there is always an end to the depth of darkness.

 

We celebrate that there is always the light that returns again, bringing with it new growth and new life.

 

What new sparks of light within do you want to tend?

 

What new ways is your soul asking you to grow–to

open, to melt, to become more whole in the New Year?

 

Before we can nurture the new light, we have to first get clear on what we want–we must dream, vision, and imagine the life we want to live!

 

That’s what this dark time is meant for.

 

We sleep, we rest, we become more receptive to the life, the light that wants to live through us with practice, introspection, contemplation, meditation, prayer…

 

I have a perfect practice opportunity for you, one
that will support your sacred dreaming and visioning time.

 

Create space in your life through presence practices.

 

Feel more centered, more soulful, more connected.

 

Reconnect with your daily actions and make them into sacred ritual.

 

 

I’d LOVE to practice with you as a sacred beginning

to the New Year of more Light!

Practicing Gratefulness

I taught a class on practicing gratitude just before Thanksgiving.

We explored how we can’t just assume an “attitude of gratitude,” but we can practice to be present, to open our heart, mind, and body to more gratefulness.

When we brainstormed how gratefulness / gratitude feels, there were so many ways we experience it on the inside. We feel connected, warm, loving, kind, happy, open, excited, tingly, uplifted, grounded, centered, accepting, positive, and more… 

What about you? How does gratefulness sense and feel to you?

These are all aspects of Who we truly are.

Of course we would want to be in touch with them! We can think about them as aspects of our Essence.

Your Essence is something that never goes away. It is an essential part of you, not changed by mood or anything that happens to you. It feels like home, like our birthright.

When we feel in touch with this, we can relax.

We know all will be well.

We make better decisions.

We trust life.

We talked about a lot of different ways to practice opening to gratefulness—from gratitude journals to thanking those who help you, from saying grace at meals to practicing random acts of kindness… The  one I’m going to try on in the New Year is a Gratitude Jar!

There are so many ways to open! 🙂

Please join me in the simple 3-minute body practice below to invite more opening–to help release the habitual contraction we hold in our bodies so that we can make space for more gratefulness and be more present.

Gratitude is a Presence Practice.

When we want something, we find a way to get it or work toward it, to practice.

We have to prioritize practicing gratefulness!

  • Not to get it right.
  • Not to reach some ultimate gratitude high.
  • But to be more present, to open our hearts—for ourselves and for the world.

If you want an opportunity to practice with me for a week, join the
free online 5-Day Practice Presence for Life Journey,
starting in January.

Set yourself up with a sacred and mindful start to the New Year!

#15daysofgrateful

We’ve passed Autumn Equinox, Halloween, and now Thanksgiving is coming, and after that the Winter Holidays and the New Year!!!

Every year, it feels like time begins to move ever more quickly just about now, doesn’t it?

Here in Minnesota, the second half of Fall is here. Overnight, the cold and graying blew in–we went from gorgeous blue skies and Indian Summer to hurrying to empty the rain barrels and rake the leaves, to winter coats and mitts, and to putting the garden to bed.

 

We have 15 days–if you include today–
to prepare our hearts for Thanksgiving.

 

Let’s use them to practice gratefulness!!

I’m choosing “gratefulness” instead of “gratitude” because it feels more active to me, even though they are both from the same root word, going back to Latin, gratus, or pleasing, agreeable, kind. Let’s practice creating these feelings in our bodysoul so that by the time Thanksgiving arrives, regardless of how quickly we are moving, the experience of gratefulness can shine through.

How it Works:

  • Every day, practice being grateful–for something as small as appreciating the 1st sip of tea or coffee or the soft, welcoming cocoon of your bed, to something as big as the fact that you are alive on this planet!
  • Here’s the key: Being grateful is not an idea in your mind, although your mind might help you come up with something to practice with.
    • In order to practice being grateful, you need to take the time to actually experience being grateful in your whole bodysoul. You need to feel the gratefulness. 
    • Where do you experience it in your body? What does it sense like?
    • How do you experience it in your heart (feelings)?
    • What happens in your mind (thoughts, quality of mind)?
    • Savor it, take it all the way in, infusing yourself with gratefulness as much as you can, from the tips of your toes to the top of your head!
  • Then post below and/or on your profile in Facebook with this tag: #15daysofgrateful.

I’ll begin: 

I am grateful that we finished painting our dining room! #15daysofgrateful

 

Ready, set, go!

 

If you want more support practicing being grateful, join me at my class, Practicing Gratitude, Sunday, November 19th from 1:00-2:30.

Gratitude heals your heart, helps your mind calm down, and even creates health in your body. So, why do we tend to wait until Thanksgiving to really focus on it? Join Holistic Life Coach Katy Taylor to learn not only the power of gratitude, but also hands-on practices you can take into your daily life.

 

I look forward to practicing with you!

with each step

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking
we used when we created them.” ~ Einstein

Dave and I taught a daylong on the Law of Three, a deeply embedded teaching of the Enneagram, for our Minnesota Enneagram community this past Saturday.

The more I work with this teaching in my own life, the more I experience this truth—

When I’m stuck trying to solve something with my thinking, I don’t solve it by chewing over the same thoughts…

When I’m stuck in my feelings, re-experiencing them over and over again, they do not release…

There’s actually something valuable about that funny and famous cartoon (I paraphrase):

  • Patient: Doctor, when I move my leg like this, it hurts.
  • Doctor: Then don’t move it like that! 🙂

If we’re not running our habitual patterns to find an answer—overthinking, overfeeling, avoiding, denying, repressing, all of which cause us pain—what DO we do?

We apply what the Buddhists call skillful means.

Monday morning after my run, aware of a problem my mind and heart had not solved from the day before, I was practicing one of my favorite walking meditations from Thich Nhat Hanh:

The mind goes in a thousand directions.
The beautiful path is the path of peace.
With each step, a gentle wind blows.
With each step, a flower blooms.

This is an example of using skillful means—

When you’re stuck in your mind or heart, running the same old tapes…

Try coming back to the body.

As I walked this meditation, my senses came alive–with each step:

  • the gentle, cool breeze was blowing and kissing my face,
  • the flowers in yards and boulevards were blooming,
  • the trees were standing solid, tall, rooted, their leaves waving to me as I passed,
  • the sun filtered through the canopy, lighting up all it touched,
  • the moon, moving to half-waning, holding watch in the sky.

And my body came online, her intelligence sparkling, softening, supporting all that was trying to work itself out in my mind and heart.

No big “AHA,” but now, where there wasn’t before, there is space for something new to arise.

It can be this simple.

We can trust the intelligence of the body to support the heart and mind.

What body practices do you have in place to help you open to more spaciousness when you are stuck?

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Season of Celebration and Regret

The light is changing and dark is coming faster in the eve and staying longer in the morn.

Once again, the trees are dropping their leaves, returning them to the ground.

Plants are flowering and fruiting, putting the last of their energy into ripening and celebrating, giving their all.

 

Autumn Equinox is Friday, September 22nd

at 3:02 pm CT,

marking this next pass through the seasonal rhythm that holds our lives.

 

I am experiencing sadness that summer and all its bounty is waning and gratefulness for the bright, crisp Fall days, colorful leaves, and invitation to turn inward. All accompanied by a sense that life is moving by so quickly!

 

The Jewish tradition has this Fall theme built into its yearly cycle.

September 21st marks the beginning of the Jewish New Year with Rosh Hashanah, the Days of Awe, and then Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on September 30th.

There is joy for the opportunity to begin a new year combined with an inner examination of the past year and atonement for regrets in order to start the new year freshly, cleanly, returned home to God.

 

This is truly the season of Both/And,
of acknowledging all we have to celebrate
and all we have to regret.

 

Autumn invites us to use this changing of the seasons as a time to pause and assess our harvest.

 

What are you celebrating from the bounty of summertime?

What will you pick and savor and what will you let fall like leaves to the ground?

What needs to be cut back or released so that you can live your life
with more presence?

What did not turn out as you had hoped?

Do you need to repair any relationships—with yourself, others, or the Divine—
in order to return home?

 

For my part, when I look back, I see I have fallen again into piling my plate too full, and I regret that I didn’t make more time for what I call “right living,” living the daily rhythms of my life with less rushing and more connection.

 

I am letting go of a lot of things this the Fall to make space for slowing down to a rhythm that is more sustainable for living my life—workshops and events I wanted to attend, the poetry list I was sending out, preaching, music gigs, tea events I host, travel, even some teaching. I feel sad to not do these things that I love, and I so much look forward to the space I am opening up for more presence-full living.

 

There is always so much to hold in our lives—to celebrate and to regret.

Especially when we widen our gaze to include not only our individual lives, but the life of the earth, the life of our political environment, the lives of many who are suffering and many who do so much goodness in the world.

 

Sometimes finding our way to the goodness, the beauty, the wholeness, and the celebration is hampered by our inability to take a deep accounting of our actual lives. Aligning with this seasonal orientation, we need to acknowledge and work with the ways we are holding ourselves and others with unkindness so that we can recalibrate our lives and start fresh and clean again.

 

This usually invokes not only celebration but also a need for repair. Just as our Jewish friends are practicing atonement,

so our souls yearn for forgiveness,

of ourselves and of others—for harm we have done and harm we have suffered.

 

How about you? What regrets do you have that could be
eased by the soothing balm of forgiveness?

 

I’d love to support you this Autumn in recalibrating, repairing, and returning home to yourself with my new, 4-part series:

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Do Two Halves Make a Whole?

Apple pie and cheddar cheese.

Fear and courage.

Hungry and satisfied.

Independent and dependent.

Grief and compassion.

Utter lostness and presence.

Single and partnered.

Strength and helplessness.

Female and male.

 

Dualities. Opposites. Two halves of a whole.

I name them, breathe them, own them.

They are part of our human experience.

Without one, the other does not arise.

 

Often in relationship we see this clearly. If I hold down the pole of the kids keeping their room clean, you will hold down the opposite one—the kids should do what they want. If I say I want to work all day, you say, we’d better give ourselves enough time to rest and do other things…

 

It’s like we are covering the full spectrum of life in these dualities.

 

One complements the other. How could I really feel satisfied if I never felt hungry? Without being lost, how would I feel my presence? How could I really enjoy my apple pie for breakfast without a good hunk of cheddar cheese? 😊 (Thanks, mom!)

 

Diamond Approach teacher AH Almaas takes it a step further and says that the qualities of our Essence arise as needed.

It’s not that we just don’t feel the pole without its opposite. An Essential Quality like Compassion has no need to arise unless a state of suffering like grief or fear or shame calls for it. Strength only arises when needed—when I’m feeling helpless, weak, unconfident, etc.

One is not “good” and the other “bad.”

That’s just another duality—each side of the equation keeping the other alive…

 

The old saying “Two halves make a whole” has some relevance here.

My mom used to emphasize that in relationship, that saying is not true—if we come to each other as halves, we won’t find wholeness. We each need to be whole in ourselves first.

This also applies in looking at life through the lens of duality. If I get caught up in juxtaposing the halves, the good-bad, strong-weak, independent-dependent, happy-sad, etc., I am not living into the wholeness that is possible.

Holding each pole of the duality, welcoming it, getting to know it, and not grasping, but opening ourselves (heart, body, and mind) allows something new, fresh, and essential to arise.

How do you work with duality in your life?

 

Dave & I are teaching a full-day workshop about this:

 

And I will be teaching a 4-week series on Forgiveness, which I have found is a HUGE part of being able to open to the innate wholeness, too:

Unfolding the Heart: The Journey of Forgiveness

We hope you will join us!

and there is only the dance

We begin in the name of Allah.
Alleluia, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.
There is no God but God.
Sacred, Holy, Heaven here on earth.

Just four of the many chants/dances we began with our first night of the Dances of Universal Peace retreat with Sufi teacher Maitreya this past weekend.

We sway, bow, pray, sing, open…

Holding hands with our neighbors…

  • stepping into the center, lifting our hands and hearts and minds to the Divine,
  • bowing to each other, to True Nature within, to ourselves,
  • collecting the mercy and grace in our cupped hands and letting it pour down like rain, blessing us head to toe.

Maitreya reminds us over and over that we are already enlightened.

There are obstructions to this light, but it is already within. We dance to remind ourselves, to reconnect to this light within, among, and beyond us.

The rhythm of the simple chants and steps entrains the bodysoul.

Step, bow, turn, spin.

Forward & backward, surrender, change course, turn inward & outward.

 Again. Again. Again. Again.

 

Perfection in the repetition, in the fullness of the unifying rhythms of body, heart, mind, and soul.

This is embodied group spiritual practice, joining hands, hearts, and voices together to weave the fabric of Love.

How do you embody your spiritual practice?

Join me for another, perhaps more accessible-in-daily-life, form of embodied spiritual practice: Healthy High Tea in the garden, in which we mindfully nourish our bodies, hearts, minds, and souls with real food and good company.

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Building Temples of Forgiveness

This is the final post in a 3-part series on Unfolding the Heart.
Find the first post here.

Let’s take this a little deeper.

Let’s look for the innocence.

This was a hard one for me in the forgiveness work I’ve been engaged in over the past year.

To protect others and not cause more harm, I’ll give you the general outlines to describe what I’ve been working with:

I worked for a spiritual organization for 14 years and when I decided to leave due to integrity issues last year, they didn’t pay me the $5,800 in back vacation pay and consulting fees they owed me. They said they only way I could be paid was to sign away that 14 years of my life—to never publicly claim I had worked there. And to top it off, they still won’t talk with me and tell me why. I went from being the most valued employee to this.***

For the first half-year, all I could do was suffer.

  • I judged them as wrong and bad and lived in fear.
  • I went over and over the situation in my mind to try to make sense of it and see my part, learn my lessons…
  • I mostly saw their guilt and wrongdoing. 😦

Then I found some work to help me with the F-Word, forgiveness.

And I saw how I was keeping my own suffering going by splitting off and separating myself from them:

  • I was good one, the wronged-one, the victim.
  • They were the bad ones, the wrong-ers, the perpetrators.
  • End. Of. Story.

As you can imagine, this view was not helping me find freedom or a way to move forward in my life!

So I decided to look for their innocence—and I found it.

I saw how they were not doing this to me on purpose. They were living out their own separation and splitting, their own fear, their own attempt to be happy. I just happened to be affected by the wake of their huge ocean waves.

When I looked deeper, I could imagine the suffering underneath their actions, what might be causing them to treat me this way…

And over time, my heart unfolded, becoming bigger and wider and more available to Love.

Do I agree with their actions? No.

But I no longer judge them as bad or wrong because I can see underneath the rocky waves to the ocean of Oneness that connects us:

  • the ocean of innocence,
  • the ocean of groundlessness,
  • the ocean of Love.

And I invite you to do the same.

Whether you are working with forgiving yourself or an “other,” you can always look for the innocence underneath the actions.

You can see that underneath it all, there is an innocent, small childlike place that is just trying to be happy, to feel OK, even to survive.

peony-white-beginning 1200x

We can’t force anything. We can’t force our hearts or the heart of the “other” to unfold. It has its own timing and process of growth.

But we can look for the innocence. And notice how our body, heart, and mind respond.

Make this practice your own. Forgiveness is usually a long process, and it can’t be rushed.

I found that I needed to fully feel my own suffering before I was willing to see their suffering and innocence.

And after that, I needed to keep turning my perspective toward innocence, toward a willingness to see with fresh eyes. Every time the feeling of being wronged arose, I tried to reorient to the Oneness with an intention or prayer.

May I see their innocence.
Open my mind to a deeper truth.
I am willing to see Love. Show me.

I let my heart yearn for this opening.

Research shows that those who practice forgiveness—and it is a lifelong practice—are healthier and happier.

In one Stanford University experiment, people reported fewer backaches, headaches, muscle pains, stomach upsets, and other common physical signs of stress. They also reported higher levels of optimism, hope, and self-confidence.

In a study at University College of London, they found that those who didn’t practice forgiveness suffer from a 55% higher risk of serious heart disease.

The negative emotions of injustice, anger, bitterness, vengeance, unfairness, and more cause biochemical changes in your body that damage your physical health.

And setting the physical health risks aside, who wants to live in the constant state of negativity that unforgiveness creates?

Contrary to popular belief, we are not stuck here just because something “bad” happened that we had little or no control over. We have a choice—a choice to do our own work and practice forgiveness, over and over and over again.

Forgiveness is an act of the heart, a movement to let go of the pain, the resentment, the outrage.

And as Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says so simply: Letting go begins with letting be.

That’s why the first step is to stay with our suffering—we let it be, we acknowledge it, we allow it, without judging, but with gentle holding and compassion. (You can read more on that in the 2nd part of this series.)

By opening to the pain we are trying to push away, we clear a space for something new, fresh, and alive to awaken in our hearts, for a return to Love.

Forgiveness is about accepting what happened (letting it be) and finding a way to release it so that you can live now, regardless of what happened in the past.

  • It’s about releasing the attempt to control the outcome and letting your heart and your life unfold in the present.
  • It’s about allowing healing without knowing or controlling how that will happen or look.
  • It’s a return to an open body, heart, and mind, softened by the healing power of Love.

red peony partially closed-1200x

One last practice, this one from Rob Eller-Isaacs, one of our ministers at Unity Church Unitarian in St. Paul, Minnesota.

I invite you to close your eyes again and bring your grievance to mind, heart, and body once more.

  • Think about it, and then sense and feel how it affects you.
  • Let these things be as they are, without trying to change them, opening to the truth of your feelings and sensations in the moment.
  • If you have a sense of your or the other’s innocence, bring that to body, heart, and mind—if not, no worries.

Now place one hand on your Heart Center and one on your Belly Center, below your belly button. Let them be kind, loving, allowing hands. Accepting you just as you are, like a loving mother would.

And repeat silently:

  • I forgive myself.
  • I forgive you. (Perhaps this is said to a part of yourself.)
  • We begin again in Love.
  • [Repeat this 3x]

And say it once outloud as if we were saying it all together, to feel the solidarity and possibility in this common intention for our lives:

  • I forgive myself.
  • I forgive you.
  • We begin again in Love.

I end with a quote from Jack Kornfield that encourages us to take on the sacred work of forgiveness:

If only we could help each other build temples of forgiveness
instead of prisons. We can. In our own hearts.

** Jack Kornfield quotes from The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace

*** Note: On August 8th, 2017, I received financial payment in full without having to sign my affiliation away, after over a year of spiritual work on my own. (With support of friends and teachers!) It happened after I had fully released any expectation of payment and had focused on my own work and ways I could make amends.

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