nurturing & greeting rituals

Imagine coming into the presence of a baby. (Or, if it’s easier, a baby animal.)

Eyes round and open, she is awake and alert, expressions flitting across her face.

Would you ignore this luminous presence?

Or would you take in her precious being with an attuned, loving, perhaps even grateful greeting? Perhaps some sweet words, a higher-pitched, maybe even cooing, voice, a soothing tone…

In so doing, you acknowledge that her presence affects you. That she is here and you are here. That you are connected with her. In a way that feels nourishing and contactful to both of you.

What if this were the way we lived our lives?

In contact with each other, with the earth, with the other-than-human beings, and with the rhythm of our lives, all the time?

What would change?

I know I would feel more open, more grateful, more awake, more alive… more present.

From what I understand, our indigenous ancestors lived in this way—in deep contact with themselves, each other, and the earth—and from this deep experience of kinship, in deep gratitude.

Our Native American brothers and sisters, indigenous to North America, continue to carry this relationship of kinship, of respect and gratitude into our modern times. They remind us of what is possible.

As you know, I’m all about practicing presence!

It’s my tagline, afterall: “practice presence for life.” And I’ve written a whole e-book about small, doable rituals you can incorporate into your daily life to feel more present.

But I think there is something else I’m exploring here.

It is what all my presence practice rituals are pointing toward. Like the Buddhist story of the finger pointing to the moon, we don’t want to get fixated on the finger, but to focus our gaze on the moon.

All my presence rituals are meant to support a dropping into this deeper contactful presence.

So, what is presence, anyway?

Right now, I am experiencing it as a full-bodied, full-souled contact with myself and “the other.”

And when I feel it, I feel grateful. Presence and gratitude go hand in hand.

Since many of us don’t often get the chance to interact with a baby—human or animal—how about practicing with an alive being you connect with daily?

- A partner or child
- A pet or plant
- Some other being outside—the snow (a good choice this winter in MN!), the sun, the moon, a tree, or a mountain?

Find a specific living being—human or otherwise—and let that being teach you how to be fully present. (You might also find some of my other presence practices/rituals help prepare you for this. Poetry is one of my favorites, so here’s one:)

Praying by Mary Oliver

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Here are a few suggestions* for getting started:

- Open all your senses to this being—sight, sound, taste, scent, touch. And keep returning to your senses when your mind sidetracks you back into thoughts. Take this being in as fully as you can.
- Receive how their presence affects your whole bodysoul—body, heart, mind, soul. You might experience it as pleasant or unpleasant. Continue to drop thought and come back to body and heart, in particular.
- Make some sound—words or otherwise—to express your experience. It might be joyful or sweet, or you might feel sad or angry or confused. Express whatever it is with sound.
- Notice how you feel nurtured having greeted this being.
- Take some time to receive any greeting in return.
- Then thank the being for this contact that brings you here, in touch with yourself and the living web of relationship all around you. Use words or sounds or movement or gestures and keep coming back to your body and heart.

Let’s close with a nurturing and greeting ritual:

Place your hands in prayer position in front of your heart with me.

As we bow our heads to our hearts….

We are bowing to ourselves for practicing.

We are bowing to each other for practicing together.

We are bowing to the earth as the ground of our practice.

Namaste.

Notes:
* After writing this, I realized how influenced I was by the recent work I have been practicing. You can find a similar practice in Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin.

I also want to credit the phrase “nurturing and greeting rituals” as originally from Erik Erickson as “daily rituals of nurturance and greeting,” which I found in Dolores LaChapelle’s book Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep. She uses it not only in the realm of humans, but to include all of the natural world. (p. 170+)

to love

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings
in such a way as to complete and fulfill them,
for it alone takes them and joins them
by what is deepest in themselves.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We are part of everything we see—
this is the love that keeps moving us back
into wholeness when divided.
To love by admitting our connection
to everything is how we stay well.
~ Mark Nepo

We spent last week on a retreat in the strangely and wildly beautiful Sonoran desert pictured above. I had no idea how many living beings I would encounter in the desert!

I was struck, over and over again, how what looked like inhospitable earth—rocky, dry, severely lacking the the lush green carpet I am familiar with as an Easterner living in the MidWest—could not only endure, but encourage such hospitality!

Every day, we participated in practices to connect us with our earthly selves, in particular, our wild, indigenous nature and deep instinctive, and imaginative soul. These included yoga, dancing, dreamwork, ceremony, council, and long wanders on the land.

We gathered together, united in our love for this precious eairth.* Our practicing was to come into deeper communion with eairth and the other-than-human beings living in the desert, as well as to see the ways we get lost and forget this primal connection, this original love.

There is no wasted energy in the desert. As a cactus passes from life into death, it slowly allows its outer skin to fall away or decompose to create nourishment for the next being to grow. The generosity and nobility of each being releasing its life to the next joins them in an unending cycle of death and birth, and, dare I say it?, Love.

Love unites, completes,
and fulfills them, joining them
as outward emanations
of eairth’s love,
as we humans also are.

On this Valentine’s Day, I invite you
to engage in presence practice
on behalf of eairth.

Something that joins you to this deepest uniting, wholeness-creating power of Love that eairth and all her beings so generously express, even as we pollute and ravish her/them.

- Thank the water as you use it—for washing, drinking, flushing, cleaning—the wood as you burn it, the food as you prepare and eat it, the gas, oil, and electricity as you heat and light with it. This is being present with and appreciating in the moment, the gifts of eairth.
- Sing to eairth, her creatures, and her other-than-human (and human) beings.
- Engage in a ceremony to acknowledge and honor your commitment to being in deeper relationship with eairth’s love.
- Or try a practice we did on retreat: Take a praise walk and appreciate, bless, and praise all the other-than-human beings you encounter (plants, trees, animals, rocks, snow, sunlight, rain, fog …).

What are some other practices
you can engage in to live
your deepest Love today?

* eairth = earth and air as one

the longest night

Winter Solstice is just about here.

Friday, December 21st, at 4:23 pm Central Time.

This is not a human-formed celebration, but an earth event, a turning of the earth wheel that happens once each year. As we are inhabitants of this earth, earth standing on two feet, this longest night of the year is happening not just to us, but within us, in rhythm with us—we are in rhythm with the Winter Solstice.

“…everything is potentially a sacred text through which God can speak to us.”
~ Christine Valters Paintner, in her book Lectio Divina, p. 20

By acknowledging this darkest night of the year, viewing it as a sacred text, we can participate consciously in the turning of the year, in the unfolding mystery of nature through which God speaks to us.

We can participate consciously in the sanctifying of time, the sacredness of this natural earth rhythm, this holy turning of the year through which God/True Nature expresses:

in the darkest depths of night
in the stark, cold of winter,
in the birth of the new light.

What might this look like?

Our ancestors experienced a sense of “original participation” as Owen Barfield called it, or, “participation mystique” as other authors have named it.

It is the experience that we are not separate from nature, but of nature, one with nature. The darkening earth, the cold, the birth of the light are all mysteries of our own being, not just something happening to the earth around us.

Mysteries happening to us, in us, through us. As God speaks to us, in us, and through us.

To enter into this embodied experience of Winter Solstice, you might ask:

What is alive in my darkest depths? What is deep down, inside me that feels dark or perhaps even endarkened?
What in me is cold, perhaps hibernating or perhaps needing warming?
What wants to come to light in me? What spark might I tend and allow to grow into a flame and life-sustaining embers?

I invite you to create your own ritual to honor this turning of the year, something as simple as considering the questions above. And I would love to hear your answers! Please post in the comments below.

living fully!

“For what makes you come alive can keep you alive,
whether you are paid well for it or not.”
~ The Book of Awakening, Mark Nepo, p. 399

I’m just back from my last training session to become a Full Voice Coach!

What a rich and beautiful time, being with others so fully committed to bringing more wholeness, aliveness, and freedom into the world!!

On the journey of learning to live my life more fully, I’ve found I needed to repeatedly inquire into what was keeping me from living fully.

Why don’t I give myself more time to play, to rest, to get outside, to hang out with friends, to dance, to sing? Even though I love these things?

Your list may be different from mine, but I bet you have things that make your life feel more rich and full of meaning that you don’t prioritize either. What are yours?

Barbara McAfee, our fearless leader, models what living fully can look like. She fills her life with things that make her come alive, and, in brilliantly following her passions, has created a life in which she can earn her living doing them!

At the end of our final training session on Wednesday morning, we were talking about our time together—about what really worked and what we might have missed in our process of becoming Full Voice Coaches. We got to talking about more and more goodness we could add in on top of what was already SO well sequenced. Knowing they didn’t want to make the training longer, I mentioned that I’d never participated in a training where we had the whole afternoon off every day!

I was really struck by Barbara’s response.

She passionately talked about how necessary it was to have a break—to integrate, to walk outside, to rest, to connect with our fellow trainees and our aliveness, to live a FULL life, even when training…

I am freshly re-committing myself to this.

How can I choose to live my life fully RIGHT NOW?

Even though I have to cram a lot of hours in this week to make up for being at the training… Even though there is ALWAYS more to do…

How about you?

Even in the midst of the busy holiday season. How can you live your life more fully?

Here’s one fun way—it’s 4.5 minutes and worth every single one (and you get extra credit if you can identify the 5 Elements of the Full Voice Approach!).

Keep your eyes open—I’m going to be offering Full Voice Coaching, individual sessions and groups in the New Year!

If you want to a practical and experiential way to explore how you can live more fully, you might want to consider a session. We start with making sound as a way in, and the aliveness, freedom, and wholeness you find there tends to trickle into your whole life! (And you don’t have to be a singer, but singers will benefit, too!)

p.s. You might be wondering what’s with the dwarves… They live in a boulevard garden in a nearby neighborhood, and I think they look like they are living their lives fully! They are talking, smoking, healing, playing instruments, walking, hanging out, foraging, resting, welcoming, boating. 🙂

Tea & Be

Tea after water when I first awake.

Tea as a meditation.

Tea on a walk through the neighborhood.

Tea while I work.

Tea in the afternoon with a creativity break.

Tea shared with friends.

Tea in the evening before bed.

I wrote this post on the airplane on my way to visit my sister’s family in Alaska, accompanied by… tea! I always bring an empty thermos or travel mug and my own tea and get hot water once I’m through security.

Why this love affair with tea?

Considering the Camellia Sinensis plant–black tea, green, white, oolong, and more–tea offers a well-balanced mix of relaxed alertness.

The caffeine is about 1/3 less than in coffee, and it contains an amino acid, L-Theanine, that promotes relaxation. It’s the only nourishing hot drink I know of that can help your nervous system wake up and become more alert while relaxing you at the same time!

Tea’s warm liquid soothes your throat and nervous system and can be flavored to suit your taste. It invites you to slow down, to savor, to appreciate–even in the midst of a busy or stressful day.

Tea’s many forms accompany me through my life–black in the morning, green or white in the afternoon, and herbal tisane in the evening.

What other hot drink can shape-shift to match the needs of your day and balance your nervous system quite so well?

Watch my calendar for
opportunities to practice with tea!

what do you want to re-member?

What have you inherited?

With All Hallow’s Eve, the Day of the Dead, and All Soul’s Day almost here, it’s a good time to consider our ancestors.

We have inherited so much that we often forget how indebted we are to those who came before us…

Your genes hold the physical coding of your mother and father’s lineage passed down to you.

Perhaps you have your grandfather’s nose or your great-grandmother’s smile?
Or you inherited a sensitive or healthy immune system…
I got my mom’s mom’s jaw and my sister got hers from my dad’s mom.

Household items–furniture, dishware and more–are passed down.

Perhaps your grandmother kept love letters from her fiance–your grandfather-to-be–in that slender bedside table drawer.
Or canned peaches in those beautiful blue canning jars.
I’m grateful to be drinking tea from some of my nana’s teacups.

Family attitudes are also woven into who we are today–whether we’ve taken them on or fashioned our identity as a rebellion against them.

Perhaps there was a strong emphasis on honesty–maybe even in a hurtful way–so you can’t forgive yourself for not telling the complete truth even at an unhelpful time.
Or maybe going to church was important and now you rebel against it or feel guilty when you don’t attend.
Or maybe, like in my family, hard work was valued and you have a difficult time not overworking…

Ways of managing the often challenging path of being alive are also passed down–some more, and some less skillful…

Perhaps you learned from your ancestors to take the edge off with a daily drink or two…
Or you learned that a quiet walk in the woods was oddly comforting.
Or that eating sweet treats could soothe your need for connection/love.
Or, from my parents, that sitting quietly together in the morning by the fire restored a sense of connection.

All of our ancestors strove to survive and thrive.

Amazingly, they did, and they passed their genes, their attitudes, their coping behaviors, and their stuff down to us.

We are here.

We are the result of their surviving, of their whole lives–their attempts to love, to live, to create a good life.

And we have choice as to how we interact with our inheritance.

What and how do we want to live now?

What do we want to re-member?

Because we are literally re-membering–practicing in our bodies what they practiced–when we continue to do what they did.

Do you want to re-member hurting someone with your words?
Do you want to re-member an unrealistic ideal of what it is to be a good hardworking person?
Do you want to re-member habits that are not skillful?
Or would you rather re-member the goodness of your ancestors when you see their likeness in the mirror?
Or the love of your grandparents?
Or the moments of connection?

Whatever we choose, we can honor our ancestors for their perfectly imperfect lives which created the reality of our being alive this Halloween, Day of the Dead, and All Soul’s.

We can take the time to honor their gift of our life.

Dave and I are keeping it simple–we will be getting some photos out, lighting a candle, and spending some time remembering our ancestors together.

ripening into harvest’s fullness

Our bodysouls are always doing their best to move toward their fullest, wholeness in any moment.

Even when we get pneumonia unexpectedly, when our bodies have pain we don’t understand, when we feel exhausted…

In the Diamond Approach, we call this the optimization of Being–Being is always moving to evolve, to be as fully expressed as possible through us, through these fragile, earthly, human bodysouls.

We can choose how much to participate in this flow, in this optimization, by how we live our lives.

Call it life force, kundalini, chi, ki, spirit, shakti, or prana,
it is the unimpeded circulation of energy that gives us
health and satisfaction…Life [Being] is generous;
it wants to flow through us amply and freely.
~ Maurine & Roche, in Meditation Secrets for Women, p. 91

So, how do we allow and cooperate with this natural, ample, free-flowing movement of life?

It’s about more than physical movement. Yes, finding enjoyable movement that strengthens, aligns, and creates flexibility and resilience in your physical body is important.

And, it’s about more than what and how we eat, though being aware that EVERYTHING you put in your mouth becomes your bodysoul–your tissues, bones, blood, emotions, and thoughts–might help you to choose food that supports your wholeness.

It also includes your psycho-spiritual practices–how you are in relationship with your bodysoul: sensations, emotions, thoughts, and soul.

Full expression of the pulsing movement of life includes listening to and responding to the body’s sensations.
Free-flowing optimization means paying attention to and working with ALL emotions to undo blocked energy (stuck patterns) from your history and personality.
Natural, free circulation means mindfulness of the monkey mind and learning not to believe everything you think.
And all of this affects the wholeness and ripening of your soul.

The secret is to cooperate with the process and provide
the right environment. Staying physically and emotionally
fluid is key, and awareness is the magic ingredient.
~ Maurine & Roche, Meditation Secrets for Women, p. 92

And it includes being curious and open to exploring our edges so we don’t simply stay in our comfortable, cozy nest where we don’t need to challenge our way of being, but rather ripen into our fullest harvest of wholeness.

The way I’ve been doing this recently is by
exploring my voice!

Even though I’ve always sung and have learned to love my pretty, pure tone, in the last few years, it’s become clear how attached I’ve been to singing in this one way. My voice–sung and spoken–has been another way of keeping me in a familiar, comfortable way of being, in my Enneagram type One personality.

In January 2017, I started exploring how to reclaim more of my voice–originally due to a really difficult situation I was going through (read more). I didn’t know that I would be challenging my tried and true way of singing, too! This journey continues to be an amazing one, opening me to not only fuller range in my singing and speaking, but also in my whole bodysoul.

Because I’ve been loving the work so much, I’m training to include Full Voice Coaching as part of my coaching work–so I can share this beautiful, life-transforming, ripening-into-fullness work with others.

the time of interim

Autumn Equinox, Saturday the 22nd at 8:54 pm CT.

We are in a time of interim.

Between Summer and Fall.

Summer’s waning light. Fall’s bright, crisp color not yet arriving.

You are in this time of interim
where everything seems withheld.*

I am here again. This time with learning how to listen more deeply with my body as I continue to learn the lessons pneumonia brought this summer.

Dave and I are here, too, with our planned move to Port Townsend, Washington next year, and all the things to take care of, understand, and prepare for.

Clients and friends are here.

Finding a new way to be living with alcoholism.
Recommitting to a path of practice when busy life keeps overwhelming.
Searching for a way to break up old patterns that just keep pulling back to “happy” oblivion.

The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born.

This is a difficult place to be.

Our bodysouls know there is another way, and yet “the way forward is still concealed.”

In each moment, we must choose, without seeing the way forward, to stay devotedly, steadfastly turned toward our new life.

We must drop deeper than egomind, into an alive body and heart, connecting to the intelligence of life living in / through / as us.

Even though the old has not yet died away and the egomind will constantly try to pull us back into our old ways, we choose to practice presence–to come back to the Truth of this moment.

There are so many paths for getting under the chattering monkey mind and for cultivating presence: meditation, conscious movement, Course in Miracles, the Diamond Approach, the Work of Byron Katie, The Embodied Presence Process, Circlework, women’s work, the Enneagram, voice work, yoga, zikr, mantra, dance, prayer–to only name a few that have graced my path!

It’s all about coming into Presence NOW, under the mind chatter, to whatever needs to be experienced in the moment–often revealed quite unexpectedly in body and/or heart.

“We soften our focus, remain alert, and drop deep into ourselves.” (Anne Hillman in Awakening the Energies of Love, p. 295)

We make a conscious choice to shift our attention.

Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust;
You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow your confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free
From all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.

Can we let the coming of Fall–of beautiful and then falling leaves, nature’s interim–support us in not knowing how?

Can we simply do our practices and face forward toward the unknown newness we yearn for in our bodysouls and trust the process?

Can we faithfully endure so that our hearts are prepared for our “arrival in the new dawn”?

How are you abiding in your interim?

What is supporting you?

* Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from John O’Donohue’s blessing For the Interim Time, from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings.

Scribing the Sacred

I’m thinking of all the ways
we scribe the sacred into our lives.*

Surely, when I write prayers into my dedicated prayer notebook, praying them as I do, I am scribing the sacred.

And when I lie down on the floor to listen, move around, and rise back up in my movement practice, I am scribing the sacred into my body.

When I start the day listening to the birds and the neighborhood sounds, singing myself into the day, I am scribing the sacred into my hearing.

Choosing my food with care, savoring it, and letting it nourish and heal me from the inside out literally scribes the sacred into my flesh and bones.

Speaking words of understanding and compassion, cultivating conscious relationship with all those I interact with scribes the sacred into my mind and heart.

Meeting my reactive heart-mind with compassion, with a practice for relief—meditation, yoga nidra, journaling, any practice for releasing tension and stress to encourage opening—this, too, scribes the sacred into my bodysoul.

Sipping tea—the comforting, warm aroma and flavor suffusing my senses, bringing me here, now—this is scribing the sacred into my presence.

Greeting the day by reading poetry, receiving the beauty, inspiration, and delight, scribes the sacred into my heart.

How do you scribe the sacred into your life?

*This blog was inspired by this blogpost about a spiritual practice of copying the spiritual words of others in a sacred manner.

Presence Including

Inhale. Sense of self.

Exhale. Compassion.

~ Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening, p. 198

Inhaling, feeling the back of my heart, my root, my feet, my sense of self.

Exhaling, allowing my heart to soften and open, to include others in a wide, compassionate embrace.

This is one of the conundrums of the spiritual path.

How do I stay connected to an inner, deeper sense of self–to the me that got hidden under the surface-layer facade of acceptability:

who got shut down when she was too loud
who held her tongue when she wanted to speak her truth
who said yes when she meant no
who yearned for loving contact with her parents and friends and lovers so desperately that she covered up her own needs and her own inner self to be acceptable and loved, to survive…

How do I do this AND open, mindfully,
safely, curiously to include you–
without losing me?

Because, if contact with my inner self is lost, there is no-one home to be in contact with you.

There are so many practices that can support this beautiful, meaningful work of coming home to ourselves and opening to others. For today, let’s keep it simple and try breathing together.