One day, when I was a kid, I was at the shopping mall with my mom and we saw a ‘famous’ soap opera actor signing autographs. The role he played was a rockstar and he was there that day dressed the part with his leather jacket and feathered hair. The response to him was rockstar-esque; lots of screaming and security.

Photocopies of his picture were handed out to everyone and there were also copies scattered all over the floor. I noticed a lot of people were stepping on his handsome face in their eagerness to meet him. When I got up to the front of the line and it was my turn to get his autograph, it was nothing like I imagined. He asked me my name but then wrote a different name on the picture. I was too shy to correct him and also strangely fascinated that he was wearing such heavy make-up. In that brief exchange while he was signing someone else’s name to my page, I just blankly stared at him. I wasn’t star-struck or impressed. I just kept thinking I was sorry to be playing along. It didn’t seem fair to anyone.

Have you ever been right in the middle of something akin to this? Have you ever seemingly woken up amidst something that felt like a sham? Is it worth a continued investment of your energy to maintain the expectation? Ask yourself in your quiet moments, who really benefits?

Maybe this, in part, is what I love about Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, Famous. The connection between ‘being-ness’ and fame has an eternal quality that my heart recognizes and affirms so readily, like, “the cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds…,” while the “pulley” and “buttonhole” remember their own worth.

Isn’t your true life’s work to let go of external validation and explore your inner guide to being? Is it ever too late to begin? To begin again?

I have been spending time with my best friend during the last part of her life at a Hospice. The view out of her window is a garden.

For some reason I have been seeing everything as a window the last few days: the body language of loved ones, the skill of staff, the room itself as a window into all those who occupied it before, her surgeon’s words who likened the cancer in her body, ‘to a dandelion gone to seed and blown across her abdomen’.

Mostly, I am thinking about what I imagine as her windows; her view. At times I believe I have seen her clearly aware of both sides of the window of her body. Looking in. Looking out.

My view has been fractured. I keep thinking, ‘she is still here.’ She is still ‘in there’. At some moments it seems there must be a way to close the cancer window and ‘fix’ these unwelcome circumstances that have so swiftly swept my beautiful, exuberant friend toward the end of her life. I also see that the time has come to open the window wide for peace, to release her tethers through the freedom of a merciful last breath.

When I was a little girl, I had two windows in my bedroom. One looked out into fairly dense forest that went gradually downhill toward a pond that you couldn’t see through the trees. Out of my other window was a crooked apple tree surrounded by grass. Lots of light came in through this window especially in the morning.

I want to unflinchingly look now through windows like those. I want to persist and assist in this willingness to see what’s bright, lush, crooked, dark and deep. I want to practice the traverse down that slope into unknown waters and explore trust in the impermanence of one moment constantly dying to the next.

Is there a way for you to do the same with your difficult moments? Your joy? Your boredom or loneliness?

Awareness is truly a radical kindness for yourself and others in the great turn toward it all.

And for my incredible best friend who has lived her life packed full of adventures, enjoy this link to a site that shows the view from 50 windows in 30 countries. She would have loved to visit them all.

What if you lost your kids in a wilderness area measuring about half the size of Belgium? Imagine you set them off ahead of you with some camping gear but knowing you are carrying most of what they need to survive including all the food. They are nowhere in sight and the rough trail you are trekking through has abruptly come to an end.

This is what happened this past week on a canoe camping trip with my family and some friends. One moment we were following a path and the next, there was no clear way to go and the kids were gone.

Immediately there was fear amongst the adults. We dropped our packs and canoes and started calling out to them. 

My heart rate accelerated and a barrage of thoughts began: How would we ever find them out here when everywhere I looked was dense forest? How had I not anticipated the danger of them losing their way? Did they even have their water bottles?

This worry was short-lived because soon the kids called back out to us without a worry in the world. They had already made it to the next lake undeterred. They’d forged ahead even though the path wasn’t clear.

Think of the times when you have done the same; when you have lost the job, a relationship, an opportunity or a loved one and you have plowed through the overgrowth, jumped over the fallen trees and beyond the difficulty because reaching your lake was a stronger drive than the fear of loss along the way. This can be a natural attribute of youth. This can also rest upon the belief of something bigger. 

Think of times when you were like the parents in this story; when your thoughts and emotions ran wild while you dropped everything and stopped moving forward. How can you begin again after that kind of hijack? How can you take the necessary steps and choose to skillfully respond to the barrier on your path?

Sometimes you will recognize the difficulty as part of the adventure. You might call out to your fear and be answered by the voices of those who have gone ahead.

What about when there is seemingly no one to lead? Think about those times when your path became unclear because it was only yours to follow for a little while. Or when your path ended in rejection or a deep loss. How do you carry on?

Consider the practicality of presence.

Your mind can’t drag you from one scenario to the next when you are rooted in presence. When your mind is steady, the resulting effects on the body become steadier too. This can be a great benefit to manage where you’ve come from and to assist in knowing where to go next. Practising present-moment awareness, over time, will also help you notice how all things rise and fall away. Change is ever-present in our thoughts, emotions and circumstances. Watch this in yourself. Watch this in nature. Watch this in those around you.

Perhaps there are no dead ends. Maybe, when it feels like you don’t know which way to go, it is your internal compass asking you to pay closer attention to exactly where you are.

Note: If you enjoyed this post, have a look at another called, ‘The Weight You Carry,‘ written after a previous back country camping trip 🙂

Do you know that unique green of spring? Willows begin spring-green and seeing them never fails to make me pause and ask myself if I can live up to their example.

I imagine other trees do the same this time of year and that after a short while they decide to burst forth too.

‘Let’s do it,’ they say, after watching the Willow so brave and delicate all at once.

After all, they have watched her green wisps reach across a canvas of grey-brown and into weather that begins to nurture and then turn back on itself. She sways gently and is tossed wildly. She is rooted strength and flexibility, trusting that spring will unfold and so will she.

Sometimes the change-makers are who you least expect.

I wrote a poem this week that I’ll include below about a time I ran right up close to a deer in the woods. He wasn’t startled. He just stood. Watched. It made time instantly less elastic; moments just piled on top of each other and I was aware of each. I was in real time; inside the power of presence. Everything else dropped away.

Imagine living your life like that? Is it even possible to grasp that kind of fullness? Of course there are the practical matters we must attend to that make the past and present useful. And yet, what a human frailty it is to allow the past and present to use us much more frequently so that it is the present moment that seems to disappear.

Presence is where magic lives.

How often do you run oblivious through the forest to shake off a demon from the past? How often do you focus on the path ahead completely unaware of what lives all around you? How often do you side-step the magic and look back over your shoulder afraid of what you might lose, or what will ‘never be’ in the future?

The present is truly all we have. Choose it. Live it. As I write this, I want to stop forgetting that simple truth. As you read this, I hope you remember too.

Do you know those days when grief or an ending has a grip on you in a way that makes you pay exquisite attention?

My grandmother died this week and her funeral was this morning. Everywhere I looked today there were opportunities to surrender. There are opportunities of course everyday if we make the choice to truly live the moments we are given.

I wrote a poem for my Grandma that I read as part of her eulogy. Maybe sharing it again here is another way to let her go; to let her soar.

What is our obligation to ourselves and each other in regard to listening? I mean, deep listening so that the wisdom of the body reveals more than our thoughts and spoken words.

I have felt increasingly heart-sick with events in the world and with the echos of divisiveness seemingly louder than the unity and oneness that also continues to have a voice.

I am pulled to consider how our collective consciousness is a direct result of our neglect to nurture awareness within ourselves.

The practice of turning toward difficulty, to listen with the intention of upholding space and safety for ourselves and each other allows all of us to become more of who we can be. This is an art form of vast importance.

Isn’t loneliness a result of the absence of deep listening of self and other? What lengths will you go to to be heard? To not hear? And isn’t reactivity, a protection of the smaller self, a source for violence through thoughts, words and actions?

If I can learn and practice to rest in silence, to let go of the conversations in my head, to create necessary boundaries, I believe it allows for the space and capacity to be with difficulty, differences and with what is as opposed to how I wish things were or could be. There is freedom, peace and opportunity within that. There is a gift right there for each of us to receive and to give to others.

Notice your tendency, when someone wants to share with you, to respond with agency – to fix, judge, be offended by or run away from. Consider how instead you might be called to be a witness to another’s struggle. Consider how you might choose and practice peace.

Deep listening may feel like an approach that is too slow or irresponsible when it delays doing. And yet, listening to yourself and others can be the grounding presence necessary for sustainable response. Listening can provide you with the energy, attention and focus to love; to truly explore love.

Become a beacon of peace in the world. Radically depart from all of your ‘I am important’ proclamations and decisively move instead toward a witness-consciousness.

Allow listening to become an art. Give to yourself. Give it away as a gift. Make the choice, moment-by-moment, to use inner listening as an act of service for all of us on the planet. We need beacons.

In the words of holocaust victim, Etty Hillesum,

“Ultimately we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”

I just returned home from leading some yoga classes followed by a meditation class. I feel so lucky to have people in my life who choose to move, breath and practice presence alongside me every single week. It is amazing. Thank you with my whole heart.

During meditation tonight I saw some people struggling to get comfortable so here is the link to an old post that might be helpful. There is a preamble in the post and then a short video showing props for a seated practice.

Have a look, comment or send me an email if you have any questions 🙂

Taking a break from yoga instruction during lockdowns and closures has helped me to inhale a big, fresh breath of gratitude for leading classes and being in community again. I simply feel that I am showing up and exhaling more of myself.

In a note I wrote and handed out to yoga students in February of 2019 (included below), I said, ‘we are in this thing together,” a sentiment that has been used to describe the pandemic to evoke a feeling of solidarity.

When is anyone really in anything together? I have considered this phrase so much during lockdowns aware that one person’s experience was certainly not someone else’s. And yet, community is a powerful way to not feel so alone. To be understood. To belong. To feel wanted. To be aligned with purpose. To feel brave enough to ‘jump in’. The thing is, you still have to jump. No one can do that for you.

Once your basic needs are met, what stops you? What holds you back from living authentically?

Do you create a list of reasons of why together won’t get you there, why some of the gifts you bring to the world are unworthy, or you don’t deserve a certain kind of life because it is too late, you are too old, too comfortable, too set in your ways, not old enough or smart enough or not something-enough yet.

Isn’t there a middle ground like the letter below suggests? What about committing to showing up for yourself? What about showing up for yourself with others cheering you on? And then, showing up again and again for something that shifts you? What about committing to nothing else but to overcome your own objections?

A note I gave to yoga students in 2019…