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Open to Synchronicities

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An audio version of this blog post can be heard here.

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”

The following day his son tried to break in one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.

Why I Love This Story

It’s a reminder that our inner peace isn’t tied to the ever changing tides of life: this is true freedom. The farmer understood how interconnected life is.

Such insight and it’s resulting equanimity may be challenging to come by these days and yet, with practice we too can find steadiness within ourselves and remain open to synchronicities. That steadiness is always there within us and the journey home to it is essential now. It doesn’t mean we don’t take action, it means we know what motivates our actions and we keep the big picture.

Boundaries & the Boundless Heart

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“There’s respecting first your own boundless heart, its wish to connect and a respect for your own limits and the limits of others. It’s tender work that with time brings ease. I know this from my own experience.”

Here’s an audio version of this blog post.

There’s a premium placed on healthy boundaries. Boundaries are necessary because there are people who wreak havoc in our lives. And boundary setting is only one part of the skillful means required in our relationships. Clear boundaries help us to respect our limits. There are people we must keep a safe distance from and often times they are some of our closest people.

That’s not a moral failure, it is a dilemma for many.

Boundary setting can be conflated with a closed heart which causes confusion when we are challenged by a family member or close friend. We don’t want to cut off from someone yet at the same time, there’s the sanity of a boundary that is necessary. And sometimes, there are people we must close the door on completely, that is important to name. And yet, closing a door doesn’t mean we close off from the boundlessness of our own hearts or theirs: somewhere behind all their confusion is a boundless heart.

What I’ve come to learn and continue to learn is that setting a boundary doesn’t mean I am cut off from my own boundless heart or the boundless heart of anyone else. It’s a practice of discernment.

If we listen to our body, it will tell us where we are on the spectrum between boundlessness and boundaries. With time and awareness practices, we come to know the difference between when we are shutting down or when we are in the space of “both/and” which is a place where our hearts are open and our boundaries are clear.

Shutting down is part of the learning curve so go gently with yourself. It doesn’t mean you are doing anything wrong, you are learning and most of us have not been educated as to how to remain open and yet keep ourselves safe.

There’s respecting first your own boundless heart, it’s wish to connect and a respect for your own limits and the limits of others. It’s tender work that with time brings ease. I know this from my own experience.

Navigating Uncertainty

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“If you are open to fine distinctions, you can observe that something in you knows the way home, slow as it may be, it returns you to the center of itself.”

An audio version of this blog post can be found here.

This quote above from Ruthy Alon, a late and great Feldenkrais somatic movement teacher, is a favorite of mine. It points to the radical trust required to make our inner journeys and not just the journey-ing itself but also trust that each step, each movement forward or back is part of the larger mosaic of our life. We are by nature meaning making creatures. We are also creatures that when faced with uncertainty regress into what’s known. Our growth is a few steps backwards and a few steps forward.

“The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty.”

We are beings who crave certainty tossed into a universe that offers none. The quote above from Rachel Naomi Remen points to our working edge: it invites curiosity about how to open to those “fine distinctions”. It’s key to living authentically. A life that Ruthy Alon would say includes having a “better tuned instrument for playing your song of life.”

“Recover & Restore” a 3 part course on Insight Timer!

Brand new just out this week. It’s my wish to introduce you to new ways of sensing, feeling, thinking, moving, and acting that expand what’s possible for you in body, mind, brain, and emotional heart: embodied guidance for finding your way forward in a way that is kind, compassionate, and effective.

Keeping Our Balance

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An audio version of this blog post is here.

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”

Rumi’s quote offers a beautiful insight about the dynamic nature of balance. Balance includes both opening and closing, exertion and rest. It’s important to recognize that there’s a continuum of possibilities between open and close. This is part of what Rumi is talking about here–your deepest presence is in every aspect of the movement itself.

Your whole being is conveyed in every gesture that you make.

This kind of exploration is delicate, deliberate and requires a quiet sensitivity to ourselves. We can learn to listen for our own opening and closing.

Reclaiming these rhythms is restful. The potency of our exertion depends upon the depth of our rest. One student I worked with recently said to be able to give herself the permission to rest was profound. What a curious world we live in that we need such permission!

Do you need support? Reach out. Heart streams to you, Meg

A way of restoring your own rhythms of exertion & rest

“Freedom From Habits of Body & Mind: Body Centered Practices For Your Whole Being” can be found here at Barnes & Noble and Audio Books.

From the introduction: “It’s one skill to become aware of our experience, it’s another skill to know how to recognize and trust that content as a gateway to the relief of our suffering…how do you come to trust that your experience can offer you wisdom, dignity, and meaning?”

Softening the Belly Meditation

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As the seasons change to either spring or autumn depending upon where you are in the world, it’s time to pause. It’s also a good time to evaluate as to whether you’ve gone into empathetic distress.

There’s plenty to be concerned about in our world. And it’s a good time to rest. Pull back, take a breath. If that suggestion seems out of touch then I’d ask you how does it serve for you or me to be in ongoing empathetic distress? Brain science and neuroscience have proven that focused breathing and consistent rest slows down our trauma and trigger responses.

Take rests as much as you can: even between breaths there’s a rest. The turmoil we are in will last for some time to come so it’s wise to know ourselves and pace ourselves.

The message from the famous Oracle at Delphi is “know thyself” and “nothing in excess”. This is timeless guidance for our world today.

Listen in for 10 minutes.

Knowing Yourself Whole

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An audio version of this blog post is here.

“Self help books (or videos) are like car repair manuals: you can read them all day but doing so doesn’t repair anything. Working on a car means rolling up your sleeves and getting under the hood, and you have to be willing to get dirt on your hands and grease beneath your fingernails. Overhauling emotional knowledge is no spectator sport; it demands a messy experience of yanking and tinkering that comes from a limbic bond. If someone’s relationships today bear a troubled imprint, they do so because an influential relationship left its mark on a child’s mind. When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it.” “A General Theory Of Love” Lewis, Amini & Lannon, MDs

In the past few weeks I’ve received emails, listened to clients or read articles filled with despair: people seeking to be free of suffering. There’s been an uptick in the wish to get free, along with frantic searches. In the process they’ve read every self help book or viewed videos across the internet. And they’ve come up with a painful hodgepodge of self diagnosis. I call it “painful” because the self diagnosis is based on just enough psycho emotional knowledge to deem themselves as insufficient. There’s not a shred of self compassion: after all why else would they still be in psychic or physical pain, they must be failing in their quest!

What propels our quest too often is the assumption we are not enough and that we live in a reward and punishment system.

Once the pain in our lives has reached a crescendo, it often spurs us to begin our search and that is good. What’s also good is that we stop our search somewhere. Just. Stop. It’s good to give ourselves a place to land. It’s good to also appreciate that each method, technique or “life hack” has its strengths and limits. At different times we need different kinds of support but to avoid committing altogether is also a form of suffering. When we recognize that, we could then commit ourselves to going deep rather than going wide. The process of healing remains the same as it always has: “the way through, is in”.

At some point in our healing quest, we need dare to acknowledge the relief of how small, simple steps add up to larger shifts over time. It’s not as sexy, it doesn’t have the same heady buzz and it’s not Instagram worthy.

Simplification requires discernment, letting go of much of the “wellness bling” and accepting that life contains suffering: suffering is not a moral failing, it’s a part of life and it’s an invitation to learn something about ourselves and how to experience agency within constraints. Those of us who have a life that allows us to transform our suffering into wisdom have an obligation to do so. At some point it’s not just our own private little project. We too can help others to navigate the chaos and complexities of our times. If we want a world that reflects wholeness, we need to commit ourselves to knowing ourselves whole.

Self Compassion Once Again

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You can listen to an audio version of this blog post here.

What is self compassion and what gets in our way of accessing it? It seems like an elusive concept. Most of us have not been raised or educated to appreciate self compassion yet, I’ve found it to be a potent medicine.

In conversations with those whom I work and from my own experience, self compassion gets confused with self pity or self indulgence.

Self Pity Isolates Us

Self pity is part of a reward/punishment system within myself that tells me that I have failed or life has failed, that I deserve to suffer and I am not worthy of compassion. Offering compassion from the point of view of the hardened heart, is seen as weakness and potentially a threat to what little protection I perceive myself as having. And self pity deserves our compassion.

Self Compassion Is Based On Our Shared Humanity

While my circumstances may be unique, the suffering I endure is not. Somewhere across this big wide world others suffer the way I have. That kind of reflection is not to diminish or bypass my experience; it is an opportunity for me to break the trance of isolation. A more subtle idea is that “soft hearted” self compassion might lead me into condoning others’ bad behavior. But the practice of self compassion offers me time and space to sort out my own experience. It protects me from being rushed by others’ expectations or timing. Self compassion reveals I can trust myself.

Above all else, self compassion is a wellspring of inclusivity we carry within ourselves and for those of us who can work in this way, we learn, with time, to include more of the rejected, neglected, denied parts of ourselves into our hearts. The more of ourselves we are able to invite back into our hearts, the more contentment we experience: we are not waiting for the world to be different. We can free ourselves and free others.

I’ll end with a simple practice of embodied self compassion inspired by an excerpt from Antonio Mercado’s poem called “Last Night As I Was Sleeping”

“Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.”

Take a moment to let that image land in your heart and body. Imagine offering “white combs and sweet honey” to yourself.

Change and Beauty

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“The world is as beautiful as it ever was. It is changing, but then it always has. This is a good time to change and remain beautiful with it.”

This quote from Alice Walker has been lying on my desk for about a week. Reading her book “We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness” is worth your time. And I love her invitation here to allow ourselves “to change and remain beautiful with the world.” What is it to allow yourself “to change and remain beautiful with the world”?

I’ll leave you with that contemplation.

“We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness”, Alice Walker, The New Press (11/06)

True Contentment

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These are challenging times and here’s the test of these times: Do we allow our contentment, our joy, to be determined by outer circumstances only?

On a recent trip which took me through Los Angeles International Airport, the Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” played while I was at the boarding gate. It is a contagious piece of music and a group of us broke into spontaneous dance. It was the medicine of the moment. During the flight I thought about what it is to experience happiness or contentment in harsh times.

Your contentment and mine is an inside job. It is an inside job because we already carry on the inside what we keep seeking outwardly. What appears as obstacles to our contentment is at the heart of all inner work and just happens to be what I love to explore with people.

The” Logical” Client

One person I work with is a scientist. She tells me that according to her “evidence based” approach to life, she is unloveable. I gently let her know that I only work with lovable people: this caught her by tearful surprise as she realized she was one of those people!

One of the aspirations of supported inner work is to assist people in discovering or rediscovering their own goodness. When we reclaim or discover our inherent worthiness what naturally follows is responsibility for our own contentment.

Yes, there is plenty to be concerned about these days. And recognizing that our inner peace is not dependent upon the ever changing tides of life, is freedom from unnecessary suffering.

It is possible to be deeply touched by the aches and pains of the world and not be upended by the chaos. This is a necessary skill for these times.

Authenticity

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It’s the beginning of a new year, at least according to the Gregorian calendar and with that comes an almost compulsive need to make “resolutions”.

I do not engage in resolutions nor do I work with the usual intention setting, mind maps, vision boards, or other similar processes because they interfere with the natural flow of my creativity. To those who benefit from these practices I say: “Wonderful!” To those who do not I say: “Trust yourself!”

It’s taken time for me to understand and appreciate my own creative process and I write about it because I know from my own experience that it’s easy to succumb to cultural norms and leave ourselves behind.

To “be ourselves no matter what they say”, marks a defining and defying moment into adulthood but younger parts of ourselves may be left behind in an unnamable anxious tug between belonging and authenticity.

“If I am myself, will I be all alone? “Will people still love me?” “Will I be safe?” These are universal concerns and if these concerns are not skillfully brought up to conscious awareness and transformed, we will find ourselves in an ongoing struggle with what feels like an irreconcilable task.

Recently in a talk I heard from Gabor Mate, MD, known for his expertise in trauma, said that so much of our “small-t trauma” is the result of our perception that we are caught between the need for attachment and our wish to be authentic. Authenticity and attachment are basic human needs. When we allow ourselves to be emotionally honest with where we stand in relationship to our attachment needs, our relationship to authenticity becomes clear.

Ideally we discover that we can be authentically attached. In the journey, is the revelation.