Category: meditation

The Do-Overs

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“We do not heal the past by dwelling there; we heal the past by living fully in the present.” – Marianne Williamson

Funny how life sometimes provides a do-over.

Last spring I was talking to a mom whose oldest child was a pandemic virtual Kindergartner with Miss O. At the time of the conversation, her second child was just finishing Kindergarten. The Mom said to me, “I had no idea how healing it would be to have a normal Kindergarten year.”

I nodded and noted it, knowing that I didn’t really get it.

But now that Mr. D has been in Kindergarten for almost two months, I’m finding she was spot on. The field trips, waffle parties, recess, and gym class. All sorts of things that Miss O’s class couldn’t do. And all the learning – the ABC chant, the letters and numbers – I get to hear about but without having to sit alongside.

I wouldn’t have said that I needed to heal. I was surprised to find this do-over feels like balm for my nervous system; an edit to a storyline I wasn’t even aware had been written.

It feels like I’ve put down the weight of having to be a teaching assistant on top of everything else. There’s delineation between weekdays and weekends. I’m watching things happen like the socialization of five-year-olds without my facilitation. I’m able to take a big step back and breathe out what I didn’t even know I was carrying.

It makes me think of other do-overs that I’ve been able to do. My second attempt at climbing Mt. Rainier when I summitted after having to turn around on my first attempt. Falling in love again after a heart break. Re-doing a crochet project after unraveling a crooked line.

I also can think of do-overs that haven’t been so fun – colonoscopies come to mind. But my friend’s statement reminds me that each time, for better or for worse, is a chance to re-write the script. Seems like a good thing to remember, especially on a Monday.

(featured photo from Pexels)

An Open-Hearted Meditation

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“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.” – Anne Sexton

My heart absorbs a lot in a day. That is to say that as I traverse my days, bouncing between to-do’s and must have dones, I collect a lot of nuggets that I store away in my heart as if it is a four-chambered storage cabinet.

– The note of trepidation from my kids as they start a new activity.

– An observation about a colleague who appears to be wrestling with anxiety.

– The feeling I shoulder when coming alongside a friend’s worry.

At some point I have to empty my heart storage cabinet so I can carry on and pick up new things, about myself or others. I think that’s why I love this breathing/heart meditation that I originally picked up from Deepak Chopra almost twelve years ago. [With all due respect to Deepak Chopra, this may no longer resemble the meditation as he taught it so please forgive any blips in the flow.]

Sitting with your eyes closed, feel your heart. Notice how it is feeling. Is it heavy? It is happily skipping a beat? Is it calm and serene?

Now take a deep breath into the front of your heart. Feel your chest expand. Feel that front wall where your heart meets the world.

Next breathe into the back of your heart. Allow the solidity and strength of your back to make room for the heart.

Take a deep breath and direct it to the top of the heart. Does it feel like there is a lid on your heart that can crack ajar to give the heart a little room to expand?

Now send your next inhale to the bottom of your heart. Breathe through all that might have settled there and benefit from some air to get moving.

The next breath is for the sides of the heart. As you feel the sides of your heart lengthen with the inhale, sit a little taller to feel your whole ribcage expand.

And finally, breathe into the whole heart. Notice how it is feeling. Is it the same as when you started? Or have you uncovered something tucked away there?

(featured photo from Pexels)

Love ‘Em Anyway

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“I’ve often kidded folks that when you start working with people, the first rule that you live with is, ‘People are weird.’ We are ALL weird, we are all funny combinations of funny stuff. So, what’s that mean for us? How do you love people that are different in a weird sort of way? Well, you just try to help them, wherever they are.” – Dr. Richard H. Leon

Not long ago I was helping someone from my dad’s former church install some technology so that she could do some volunteering. It was the first time that I met this person but she let me know that she knew both my parents. Then she ran down the list of all that she did for the church.

As I nodded while trying to keep focus on the technology at hand, she proceeded to make fun of the people that she would help as a volunteer, in a “I know more and am more way.”

This is something I saw a fair amount of as a pastor’s kid. The desire of a few people to use scripture and participation to prove they were better. Usually, my dad was the intended recipient of these claims, but in a pinch, the pastor’s family would do. To be clear, there were many incredibly lovely people in the churches my dad led that didn’t have anything to prove. More it was that the small minority who wanted to use righteousness as a measure of their worth were often very vocal.

I don’t believe this is limited to Presbyterians specifically, or religion in general, because I’ve seen this across belief systems and in other healing therapies. The subtle yet important shift between using a teaching as a shield and measuring stick versus actually learning from it.

To me, it’s the difference between me claiming that I don’t have any problems because I meditate versus saying I meditate to better handle my problems and faults.

In the end, this has made me reluctant to state that I’ve achieved any level of enlightenment. First, because I think life is going to remind me that I always have more to learn. Second, because I’m wary that hubris blocks growth.

And lastly, because as my dad said in the quote I used for this post, we are all weird. I’m including me and my beloved dad in that “all.” The trick is to try to love everyone, including ourselves, anyway.

(featured photo is my dear dad)

My book about the conversations and my journey to find what fueled my dad’s indelible spark and twinkle can be found on Amazon: Finding My Father’s Faith

Related posts:

The Longer I Live, The Less I Know

Holding Out for a Hero

Deep Knowing

The Glass is Refillable

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“Only the closed mind is certain.” – Dean Spanley

This was previously published on 9/28/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this.

I was traveling last week, something I haven’t done without my kids in 7 years. I’d perfectly engineered the school drop-off and transfer to the nanny, filled the fridge with food, done all the laundry, and even unloaded the dishwasher. I thought I had everything well in-hand.

But then I got to the airport and all my planning fell like a stack of cards. My flight was delayed. My transportation to the hotel when I arrived at the destination changed so I needed a last minute rental car. I took a wrong turn and had to back up in a strange car on a dark road. I didn’t know how to navigate New Jersey turnpike tolls and was guessing. I got to the hotel so late that they were no longer serving food so I ended up eating the cup-of-soup noodles you get by pouring hot water over and they are only marginally less chewy than styrofoam. Then as I gave up and just tried to sleep, I could hear a very faint security beep if I lay on my left side so I had to only lie on my right. Anytime I forgot and turned over, I woke up.

I was tired, pissy, disappointed and completely spent.

More than that – I was surprised. My congenital optimism as described in  Rose-Colored Glasses had predicted none of this. When a couple of days later I talked this over with my friend who is a self-proclaimed pessimist, I asked if optimists and pessimists suffer the same amount: optimists from disappointment and pessimists from catastrophizing.

My friend asked something like, “Why can’t you set your expectations differently?” Well, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t get that right either. I could imagine how things would go wrong but I doubt I’d be any closer to reality.

“People who wonder if the glass is half empty or full miss the point. The glass is refillable.”

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Refillable – yes! But first I have to empty it of all the bubbly stuff I put in there to begin with. What works for me is to get up every morning and meditate to make friends with uncertainty. That practice of mindfulness helps me to embrace that I have no idea how things are going to unfold, no matter how much I’ve planned…or maybe even more poignantly, how much I’ve dreamed.

Whether we come at it from a perspective that everything is going to be great or that nothing is going to work, the truth remains that we don’t know. Even the people that I’ve met who identify as realists don’t know how something will unfold. Being optimists, pessimists or realists might set the tone of how we feel about the day before us but the mystery of life remains that we can’t predict how life will turn before us.

This brings to me something I heard Franciscan Priest Father Richard Rohr say about certitude.

“The thing called certitude is a product of the enlightenment, and it did so many good things for us, science and medicine but it made us feel that we have a right to something that we really don’t. Our ancient ancestors grew up without expecting that. So they were much more easily able to hold on to mystery in general, God in particular. Whereas we worship workability, predictability, answers – we like answers.

We think we have a right to certitude.”

Father Richard Rohr

With the help of meditation, I come back to knowing that I don’t know and then I feel more able to improvise. When I touch uncertainty, I let go of my plans. When I empty my head and hands of the vision of me being in charge, I more readily accept the mystery unfolding before me.

The glass is refillable. Indeed it is. I concede that it might be my optimism that gets me up and ready to practice refilling it. But whatever it is, I have to work at it every day, meditating in order to make friends with uncertainty in a practice to embrace the mystery again and again.

Meditating on uncertainty on my recent trip helped me enjoy the experience: it wasn’t as I had expected but it had lots of twists and turns that fed me in significant way. That interpretation might sound optimistic but it’s much deeper than that – its meaningful. And isn’t that part of what we ultimately want from life?

(featured photo from Pexels)

Good Mood of the Soul

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”Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.” – Joseph Campbell

This post was originally published on 8/10/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this.

Recently, a friend sent me a printout of a sermon that my dad, who was a Presbyterian pastor, gave on parenting 36 years ago. She had a printed copy and kept it filed away. Now that her kids are long grown, she sent it to me.

In it, my dad gives a quick synopsis of his children’s personalities, “We look at our three children and see that their responses to life were distinctly different from day one. Our first child was laid back and relaxed … our second was wound up so tight she couldn’t keep her head still to nurse … our third was happy and charming. They had those marks when they were born … they still have them today.”

I’m the third one. That was written when I was 17 years old. But there’s something about family patterns that keep us trapped in roles from which we need to move on from. For me that was moving from happy to joyful.

In her recent book, Atlas of the Heart, researcher and author Brené Brown defines happiness as “Looking at the data we’ve collected, I would define the state of happiness as feeling pleasure often related to the immediate environment or current circumstances.”

And that fits pretty well with the list I can name of the things that make me happy:

  • Dance parties with my kids
  • Finishing a shower without interruption from my kids
  • Hearing a song I loved from college in the grocery store
  • A vanilla milkshake on a hot summer day

When I discovered meditation and mindfulness during my travels through the less pleasant periods of my life, it taught me that joy is a different feeling altogether. Brené Brown says she thinks of joy as “‘the good mood of the soul.’” She defines it based on her research as, “An intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure and appreciation.”

For me joy comes when I let go of seeking and preference. As poet Mark Nepo said, “One key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.” It’s cultivating my awareness of what is already present and my delight at the magic in the air. It works when I stop narrowing my field of vision to my agenda and open to all there is. Not surprisingly, researchers have connected joy to gratitude and describe the two together as “an ‘intriguing upward spiral.’ (from Atlas of the Heart). Gratitude increases our ability to feel joy, joy makes it easier to find gratitude and so on.

And here are the things that make me joyful:

  • Every time I get to wake up and witness a sunrise
  • Catching a glimpse of my kids in a circle with the other kids in the neighborhood leaning heads in to examine some fascinating part of life
  • Holding hands
  • Hearing the clink of glasses at a dinner with dear friends
  • Witnessing a whale surface to breathe
  • Listening to the Bach Cello Suites played by Yo-Yo Ma
  • The view from the top of a mountain no matter how breathless, exhausted and cold I am
  • Anything that comes out of a conversation that starts with “How can I be of help?”

The conditions of happiness are specific and fleeting. I’m frequently happy but it certainly isn’t a constant.

The conditions of joy are deep and enduring. They represent ties in my life, beauty of this world and things I’ve worked to make priorities. It is the current underneath my mood. It’s the reward for when I’m aligned with my values.

For the times of my life where I’ve felt like I’m stuck, wading through glue or too busy taking care of others to take care of myself – it’s joy that pulled me through, making it worthwhile all the way. I might have been born happy, but I’m grateful to live joyfully.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Doing Nearly Nothing

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“Recognize what is simple. Keep what is essential.” – Lao Tzu

I spent some time this past weekend sitting on the porch of an AirBnB cabin on Whidbey Island doing nothing. Well, I was drinking tea so not technically nothing. I was going to say maybe more accurately, I was just doing that one thing so I wasn’t multi-tasking. But I was eating popcorn along with the tea so perhaps that is multi-tasking.

Okay, maybe we can agree I was doing nearly nothing. I was sitting on the porch with my tea and popcorn not doing anything else. I didn’t have my laptop open or my phone within reach. My kids were off at a playground with a friend, so it was just me and Cooper the dog, looking at the bay.

I knew the next thing I needed to do to get ready for dinner but I hadn’t moved yet. I was trying to extend the moment of doing nearly nothing for as long as possible. I found this to be extremely difficult – to drop the should and the oughts and just sit.

It reminded me of the question of whether finding inner peace will ruin our ability to get things done. I have both heard and thought myself, if I wasn’t so ________________, I wouldn’t be nearly as productive. Fill in the blank with ambitious, anxious, efficient, motivated, OCD or whatever else suits you. Sometimes it seems to me, with Buddhism especially, if I let it all go, what’s going to be left?

I live by a lot of rules that help me get stuff done. Rules like:

  • No tv after the kids go to bed.
  • If you notice something needs to be done, do it now. And really, with two kids, a dog, a cat, a job and a house – how hard is it to notice something that needs to be done?
  • If you pick something up, put it away properly so you only handle it once. This includes emails and work tasks.
  • Go to bed by 10:30 so you can get up by 5:30 to get sacred time and do it all again.

My structures help me but also limit me. They keep my head down so that I don’t notice other things.  When I let them go, even for just a short while, I’m happier because my head’s up.

In the few moments when I’ve been able to experience something akin to inner peace, here’s what I’ve noticed: that I’m able to float peacefully along with the stream instead of trying to constantly generate my own power. That the biggest effort is quieting the should and oughts in my head and then everything else flows rather nicely.

I’m so grateful I was able to practice doing nearly nothing this weekend. I need to do it more.

Be a Campfire, Not a Conflagration

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“Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm” – Rumi

We traveled this weekend to visit a friend in Eastern Washington. On Saturday morning, I crawled out of bed early for my sacred meditation time. After I meditated, I built a fire in the wood stove to take off the chill of the early morning in the woods.

The sequence made me realize the similarities between meditation and fire building.

We accumulate the debris from our lived days – the celebrations, the joys, the annoyances, the worries. It sits like stacked wood until we are ready to coax out the heat and the warmth. Somethings are easier to ignite than others while others need some tending to burn.

It requires a spark to convert it to something other than dead wood that we carry around. The spark can come from something like writing, introspection, or meditation. It can come from people around us or circumstances can set us off. But one way or another something is likely to light us up in good ways or in bad.

Some sort of ventilation is necessary in order for the process to work. We can talk it out, sweat it out, write it out, pray it out, cry it out, or some combo of it all.

Thinking about these parallels as I sat watching the fire in the stove, I found myself mesmerized by the beauty and warmth. But there are few things that scare me as much as when fire escapes its boundaries and roars out of control.

I came home from the weekend with a new motto: Be a campfire, not a conflagration.

Waiting for the Big Answers

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“Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.” – Kahlil Gibran

This was originally published on 8/24/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this.

My 7-year-old daughter asked me the other day, “You know how I want to be a teenager?” After a pause for me to nod my head she asked, “Do teenagers want to be kids?” I explained that teenagers want to be adults.

This is just the latest of her big questions: Where will I go to college? Who should I marry? How many kids will I have? When we get a dog, will it be so excited to see me every day after school?

And I completely understand because I have big questions of my own: Will I fall in love again? Will I be around to see my kids answer their big questions? And every time I’ve stood at the base of a mountain ready to climb, I’ve always wanted to know, before I’ve even taken the first step, whether or not I’ll summit.

Like my daughter, I want to know how the story ends. Except that I don’t want it to be the end. In the worst moments when I get too attached to how I want it to work out, it makes me anxious and keeps me up at night as my brain tries to cycle through the permutations of how to control things.

In those moments, I’m not a very good Buddheo-Christian. That is to say, I know our spiritual traditions teach us that peace comes when we leave the outcome up to the Universe. As Buddha said, “Serenity comes when you trade expectations for acceptance.” Or in the Christian tradition, I think of “Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice.” (Philippians 4:4). But I have a sports metaphor that helps me settle into the tension.

In 2001 my brother and I gave my dad tickets for the US Open Tennis Tournament in Flushing Meadows, New York. We spent the week together in the great city of New York, eating fabulous meals and watching great tennis.

The pinnacle of our experience was a night match on September 5th between Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. The three of us sat high in the stands watching this amazing quarter-final between two great players: Pete, one of the best servers in tennis, wearing white, Andre one of the best returners in the sport, wearing black. Both were playing their A-game so as the first set unfolded, they each held serve and the set was decided by a tie-breaker that Agassi won. The second set started and again each man held serve but this time, Sampras won the tie-breaker.

One set each, nobody had lost serve and the tension in the stadium was palpable. It felt like whatever allegiances we came in with, no one was sure any longer who to root for because they were both great. The third set continued, both held serve and Sampras won the tie-break.

So it went to the fourth set. Again, they both held serve and we reached the fourth set tie-break. Here’s how Andre Agassi recalls what happens next in his memoir:

“We’ve played three hours, and neither of us has yet broken the other’s serve. It’s after midnight. The fans – 23,000 plus – rise. They won’t let us start the fourth tiebreak. Stomping and clapping, they’re staging their own tiebreak. Before we press on they want to say thanks.”

Open by Andre Agassi

I can remember feeling the tension. I started the match as an Agassi fan but somehow witnessing this great effort, I dropped my expectations and no longer wanted the answer to the big question. And yet it came – Sampras won the 4th set tiebreaker and the match.

That matched happen 6 days before 9/11. Not only did we not know what would happen with the match, but we also had no idea that the biggest terrorist attack on American soil was about to occur and change NYC forever. Had we known, we wouldn’t have sat and watched tennis. The weight of foreknowledge would have crushed us and destroyed my ability to learn the lesson of how to drop expectations and just enjoy the tension.

When I get too impatient and want to know the answers to the big questions, I think of that match. Sometimes we need to stomp and clap to stay right in the moment, relieve the tension and stay open to whatever will happen.

I tell my daughter that any flower that tries to open before its ready will rip. Which is too abstract to mean much to her. So I try to participate in the present with her as much as possible so that it becomes like that match, so exciting that you don’t want it to move on. And I learn the same lesson for myself, again and again.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Rose-Colored Glasses

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“You know what’s funny? When you look at someone through rose colored glasses all the red flags just look like flags.”- Wanda Pierce

This was previously published on 7/27/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this.

A few weeks ago I had plans to take my kids to a wedding in Leavenworth, WA a couple of hours away from where I live. On the day we were to leave, my stomach hurt. I chalked it up to a deli sandwich that I’d eaten the day before and loaded the kids into the car anyway. My only concession was to bring a can of Ginger Ale to calm my stomach but I judged my ability to go and take care of two young children was fine because that was as bad as I was going to feel.

I’m a congenital optimist. That is to say, I don’t work at having an optimistic attitude and it took me at least 40 of my 53 years to figure out how deeply my outlook is colored. And even that is an optimistic estimate because I’m still working it out. There are a few things that my optimism has categorically gotten wrong:

  • Dating: Nothing in common? No problem, I just figure that makes it interesting.
  • Traffic: Despite living in a metro area with consistently bad traffic, I always go with the low end estimate of travel time.
  • Weather: When it’s raining, as it does often in Seattle, I think it’s great because that means it going to stop when I want to go out for a walk.

The Ancient Greeks inscribed “Know thyself” at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. I’ve found that self-awareness to be a powerful tool to help correct for my inclinations. Specifically, to help me peel back the rose colored layer that my mind adds to pretty much every scenario. It helps me to add 15 minutes to my travel time, dress appropriately for the weather and realize that I don’t need to sign up for every date.

Even as I’m optimistic that I’ve learned how to adjust for my optimism, life presents me with new opportunities to be self-aware. As I traveled on that trip with my kids out of town, my stomach pains got worse and I had a couple of sleepless nights crammed in a hotel room with my 2-year-old and 6-year-old. Now I realized my optimism had told me that how sick I was when I first got the symptoms was as bad as it was going to get. Oops!

Fortunately, it wasn’t all that bad and I just needed to power through getting us home safely. And since optimism has signed me up for a lot things I think are going to go great and turn out to require a lot of resolve (I can think of at least 2 mountain climbing trips in this category), I am plenty experienced at powering through.

Mark Twain said, “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.” Maybe that’s because if optimism hasn’t killed us before we reach old age, then it’s poor form if we haven’t figured out that it’s all a trick of the mind. I don’t think my optimism is going to ever go away but when I see it now I laugh and say, “Hi, Old Friend!”

(featured photo from Pexels)

Climbing Out of My Gunk

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“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” – John Muir

This post was previously published on 12/14/2022. Heads up – you may have already read this!

The other day I felt like I was working at my desk when pressure tipped the scales and slid into anxiety. I had a client project that wasn’t going well, something that I tried to do for a friend didn’t turn out as I hoped, the holiday bills were adding up and I had strange red spots splotching the skin on my face. In response, I was eating all the Christmas candy I could find even though I knew the only way that candy would solve my problems was that it soon would be my biggest belly-ache. So I managed to put down the sugar and I went for a walk.

“And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”

John Muir

For all the John Muir and Henry David Thoreau quotes that I love, the person that I often think of when I feel this way is Beck Weathers. I wrote a post about him – The Power of Stories. He is the Texas pathologist caught in the 1996 storm on Everest that Jon Krakauer wrote about in Into Thin Air.

Beck tells the story that he climbed to escape depression. He’d head out into the mountains because climbing helped alleviate the darkness he was feeling. But it became a cycle of its own – he had to climb bigger and bigger things in order to keep depression at bay. Which is how he ended up at 27,000 feet on Everest in one of the deadliest storms.

I relate to Beck’s story not because I’ve suffered from depression but because mountains have given me relief from my own psychology. I started climbing in my late 20’s because I was bored after breaking up with a boyfriend and yearning for something bigger. I literally turned the corner on a street one day, Mt. Rainier lorded over my view, as it does so often in Seattle, and I knew I had to climb it.

What is it about climbing that makes it such a relief? For me it’s that when I’m having to work so hard to keep my body safe, my mind finally takes a back seat. When I’ve reduced what I have to do to the simple task of putting one foot in front of another and find a rhythm that works, I relax because I have far fewer choices about what to do or say next. At the same time, the perspective puts my ego into check because I’m no longer the main player in the small stage of my life, I’m a microscopic speck on the enormous stage of nature.

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

John Muir

In many senses, climbing was the beginning of my meditation journey. It slows my mind down, it simplifies what I need to do and it puts my ego in its place. To a degree now even walking does that for me when the muscle memory kicks in.

My favorite meditation is one that makes me think back to my climbing experiences. It’s where I feel the weight of everything I’m carrying on my back – the way the shoulder straps dig into my shoulders and the hip belt cinches my gut, the pressure of it all pushing my feet heavily into the ground. And then I take off the metaphorical backpack and sit with it in front of me, emptying out everything I carry one by one onto the ground before me. As I watch myself unload my problems and worries, I get a sense of detachment from them, a space that opens ever so slightly because they have been separated from my back. And then, after a few minutes of unloading, contemplating and breathing, I reload my backpack with only what I need to carry.

I always walk away from that meditation feeling lighter. Like walking and climbing, it gives me a bit of perspective and distance. I still need to return and figure out my problems but I can do it from a more capacious sense.

That happened with Beck Weathers as well. When he returned from Everest, albeit without his toes, nose, most of one arm and the fingers from the other, he was able to deal with his depression more holistically. His story always gives me inspiration – that I can face what’s weighing me down, use the tools I’ve learned from my experience, and maybe even roll it into something hopeful for others.

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

John Muir

And so it went the other day with my anxiety – I took it out for a walk and it came back in a much more manageable size. One where I could sit with one thing at a time, hold it in perspective to life and the world and then deal with it in its own rhythm.

I only scarfed down just a little more candy along the way.

I’ve written a post about a different type of letting go on Wise & Shine: Am I Copying? Getting Over Writing Defensiveness