Three Things I Learned in 2020

I bumped into my friend Judith and her white-as-snow 12 year old mutt Buddy on my usual Saturday afternoon walk to coffee. Well into her seventies and dressed to the nines with her matching mask, as we made casual chit chat of the 2020-variety, she mentioned she was thinking about posterity. 

“What will future generations say about how we met this time in our history?” was her question.

That query stuck with me. Not just because of its seriousness, but because it posed a challenge to me and all of us, really. 

It led to my curiosity about what we as a species learned this year. 

And because of the fractal nature of the universe (where each piece is a perfect reflection of the whole) it seemed time to ask what I had learned this year.

So, besides new additions to my vocabulary like Blursday and doomscrolling, what did I learn in this incredibly challenging year? 

Here are three things I learned in 2020

Think of my learnings as rich morsels to chew on, like a piece of sticky holiday fudge. If you want even more, check out the questions for reflection and journaling at the end. 

1. Our needs are simple.

When I was a kid and felt anxious or scared (which was pretty much all the time), the feeling of my father’s substantial hand on the middle of my small back was a signal that everything was ok. Feeling the weight, pressure and warmth of that hand on the back of my heart told me I was supported, not alone and that I didn’t have to hold all those big emotions by myself. 

He didn’t have to take me to Disneyland or buy me a new Atari (look it up). All he had to do was this simple gesture, and my nervous system would calm down and settle. 

Even today, having a trusted friend or my honey put a hand on that spot for me tells a deep part in my animal brain that things are alright. 

This year, when so many of the more modern paths to wellness - trips to the Amalfi Coast and in person yoga classes - were stripped away, I became more aware of how simple our needs really are. 

We need food, shelter, warmth. We need a sense of belonging and connection. We need a warm fuzzy blanket and bowl of steel cut oats. 

Most importantly, we need to know that we matter.

Simplicity, alas, is where it’s at.

Here are some questions for self-reflection that might help you explore how you can create more simplicity in your life.

What are my basic needs? 

What are my wants? 

How big is the gap between my wants and needs? (Notice that the bigger the gap is, the greater the suffering)

What can I do to narrow that gap? (Hint: Explore reassessing what is a need and what is a want).

What is one thing I learned about simplifying my life this year?

2. Systems are complex and interdependence is real.

Whether it was an ICU nurse holding an iPad for his isolated patient to say goodbye to her family members, families in close quarters jostling with competing Zoom calls and online school, or a murder in Minneapolis sparking off a wave of racial awakening, 2020 has shown us how interdependent we truly are to one another. 

On a spiritual level, I’ve known for a long-time that we are all fundamentally connected in what the Buddhists call a web of kindness. What this year did for me was make that reality all the more vital and important to acknowledge.

I saw how many of the folks working with me for psychedelic integration work, for example, began to see the urgent necessity of embodying experiences of unitive consciousness more deeply. It’s wonderful to get a glimpse in a session of what Dr. King described this way: 

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

What determines the quality of our lives though is how we act on that knowledge. 

Insight without inspired action doesn’t change our lives.

Or the world. 

To be sure, leading companies are talking about what it takes for platform integration to be seamless. But the kind of interdependence I’m talking about here goes far beyond what it takes to make a buck or “unleash innovation” as if it’s some kind of panacea.

What we each need to watch for and begin really noticing is how our interdependence calls us in and up to both be better people and to fulfill our human potential for each other.

For our benefit and for the benefit of all living beings.

Here are some questions for you to reflect on:

What did I learn about interdependence in 2020?

How am I being impacted by the systems around me?

How am I impacting those systems?

Where have my actions and my values diverged? 

Where have my actions and values been aligned?

(Bonus if you’ve never really explored this one, now’s the perfect time to do so: What are my deepest values?)

3. Our survival depends on expanding our sense of community. 

One thing I’ve heard this past year from my clients, friends and colleagues is about the epidemic of loneliness. Again and again I heard people shyly talk about, and experienced myself, the gap between how much connection we want and how much we actually have. The bigger the gap, the greater the dissatisfaction.

So what can we do?

My teacher - great-grandmother, activist, and yogi Nikki Myers - talks about how in 2020 she discovered her Whole Foods sangha (spiritual community).

Each week as she sheltered in place, and protected herself and her loved ones from the coronavirus, she found herself seeing the same faces at the grocery store, both behind the counter and in front of it. 

Rather than ignoring those rare opportunities for social connection, she started to think of these folks as being part of her spiritual community. Instead of seeing strangers and obstacles in her way to the checkout counter, she began to cherish and cultivate those micro interactions.

When I lived in Europe, I always felt warm inside when the guy at the periptero (kiosk) near my apartment in Athens said hi and acknowledged me by name. Or when folks got onto the elevator or on the street and nodded with a “Bonjour!” when I was in Paris. 

In many parts of the U.S. I’ve found that unfortunately far less common.

This is important because these micro-social interactions not only feel good - they actually help to regulate our nervous systems and decrease stress. 

Spontaneous social engagement, like the kind that happens when you’re walking your dog and see a neighbor doing the same route or when you’re in line for a latte, actually helps to activate the ventral part of the nervous system. To radically simplify, when we have a well developed social engagement system of spontaneous interactions, our tendency to go into the survival responses of fight-flight-freeze is mitigated. 

In other words, saying hi to your neighbors isn’t just the civil thing to do.

It’s actually protective against the long-term cumulative effects of stress by creating all kinds of hormones and chemicals that are connected to a sense of wellbeing. A true win-win.

Reflect on these questions about community:

Who is in my inner circle?

Who is in my outer circle?

Who is beyond my outer circle?

How can I expand my inner and outer circles to increase my sense of connection?

Now I’d love to hear from you: What did you learn in 2020? 

Let me know in the comments below. 

Ready to set yourself up for the most fulfilling and supported year yet in 2021? Join the Mastering Resilience Online Group Coaching Program beginning January 5th, 2020. For more details and to apply to this unique offering, click here.

Why You Shouldn't Forget The Past

Years ago, a shaman told me something that forever changed the way I looked at my past and really my whole life.

I had gone to an Amazonian plant medicine ceremony as a way of releasing and transforming trauma. 

After years of talk and other kinds of therapies, the painful past was still very much alive and well in me. 

In my discomfort and desperation, all I wanted was to be free, once and for all, of the burdens of the past that kept me chained in place, unable to move forward in my life. 

If I could have mercilessly cut the past off like an overgrown fungus that ruined the garden of my present day reality, that’s exactly what I would have done.

But then, a dark haired, brown-eyed medicine woman who had spent years deep in the jungle learning to listen to its wisdom shared with me something that still brings me chills whenever I think about it:

“Rather than wanting to cut the past off,” she suggested, “think of the past as your medicine. That it is the sacred medicine that you can offer to other living beings -  your precious and sacred gift, your unique contribution to the healing of yourself and the world. Turned outward, in the service of others, it is your gold.”

Listening to these words, I could feel every cell in my body light up, as if being charged with an electrical current that connected everything from the depth of my bellybutton to the outermost stars in the cosmos. I could see that I was part of what Buddhist’s call the web of kindness that connects all of life and that, rather than being something to be surgically removed with a sharp knife, my past was actually the most precious gift I had to offer the world. 

I thought of this story recently when a woman in my group coaching program mentioned how angry and frustrated she was with the uncaring response to the covid crisis among her friends and close family. How what was being revealed in this particular apocalypse (and remember the Greek word means “uncovering”) wasn’t love and light, but rather a marked difference in values that had long been papered over merely for the sake of getting along.

I could really relate to playing the role of the peacekeeper and not wanting to rock the boat lest other people be uncomfortable.

Like her I, too, have spent far too much of my life wanting other people and society to change, rather than risking the courage of offering my own medicine as a balm for the wounds of others. 

Today I can look back on the times I lacked the courage to challenge injustice and said nothing with deep compassion. It’s one of many ways I continue to mine the gold from the past, and encourage my psychedelic integration clients to do the same. 

I also know that the greatest medicine I can offer the world is that of my own past. 

I cannot cut it off, for that would be like a tree cutting itself off from its roots. 

But I can trust that, in the healing light of presence and compassion, it is the most sacred medicine that I, and perhaps any of us, have to offer for the healing of the world. 

The List of 100 and Mountain Tops

A time out to appreciate the mountain tops at Glacier National Park in Montana.

One of my favorite parts about being a kid was going back to school in the fall. The new notebooks and pencils. The school bags waiting to be filled. The excitement of a fresh clean slate for the year. The wonder and surprise about the lessons and learning ahead.

For adults, that hankering for a fresh start often comes a bit later, right around this time of year as we naturally draw inward around the time of the winter solstice.

New Year’s Resolutions are our attempt at getting a fresh start.

A clean slate. A brand new notebook on which to write the tales of our lives for the upcoming year.

And while there is a great deal of talk about the excitement about something new, what I have often seen is a resistance to looking back, to consciously looking at where we have come from in the past year, what we already have accomplished and achieved, and the challenges we have already faced.

This was pointed out graphically to me when I was going through a particular growth spurt in my personal development years ago.

I was reading every spiritual and self-help book, going to every class, trying every healing modality and really pushing full throttle at self-improvement.

One day, I had a talk with Kathy, an incredibly insightful and intuitive woman I knew.

She had seen me over the past two months bingeing on self-improvement, falling into what Tara Bach calls the “trance of unworthiness” as I tried to whip myself into shape and, despite my exhaustion, march right up the next peak on the mountain ahead.

Instead, what was offered to me was a totally different type of guidance.

As gently as she could, she suggested that rather than plowing ahead to the next achievement, task and accomplishment, that I take a look back and see where I had already come from in such a short period of time.

What had seemed impossible to me just a few months earlier (like camping in a tent alone, something that caused me to feel sheer terror) had now become an integrated part of me. She suggested that I sit down, set up a metaphoric basecamp to mirror the tent I was actually camping in as I volunteered, and look at how far I had come.

Rather than obsessing about the next peak I saw ahead (“Lose 20 pounds! Write a book! Become an enlightened guru with great abs!”), I was invited to celebrate the progress and journey already made.

I was, in that moment, given permission to breathe, to relax, to enjoy the process of transformation and to begin to trust my own inner guidance a bit more.

In the years since, I have found that the end of the year is a marvelous time for this kind of stock-taking, and encourage my one-on-one coaching clients, students, friends and anyone else who will listen to do the same.

The exercise is quite simple.

Sometime in December, I begin to write The List of 100 for the year.

This is a list of things I am grateful for, such as: the new group of friends I made in March, that my best friend’s cancer is gone, the incredibly brilliant and courageous men and women who have allowed me to serve them as their coach over the past year, going to the Cloisters in New York in the spring with my beloved partner, spending time with my godson and so much more.

And it also includes a second part which many of us find far more challenging: things that I did or facilitated, am proud of and want to celebrate.

For me, this includes saying yes when asked to lead a couple of retreats in Greece in 2016, getting out of my own comfort zone and finding a great office in Palm Springs that I share with wonderful, empowering and inspiring professionals, being of service and present to a sick family member, endeavoring to maintain a work-life balance with mindfulness and my highest values at the forefront of my mind each day, continuing to show up for my own personal deep transformational work that I might be a better instrument through which to serve others, not once buying a package of doughnuts this past year, etc.

I could go on and on (brevity is not the wit of my soul, alas).

But you get the idea and I want you to stop reading and start writing.

Writing this list can be done in one sitting, or it can be done in multiple short spurts.

One client of mine who has had a truly incredible year, thriving in her personal life and taking her business to the next level, decided to take on this exercise I suggested, make it her own and post her list on Facebook as she was doing it. I love the authenticity, vulnerability and courage that are wrapped up in that gesture.

It is in owning and celebrating our own lives and our own progress that we actually begin to build the internal momentum, confidence and inner resources required to take us to the next place in the journey of personal development, growth and transformation.

Taking the time to celebrate gratitude for what we already have -- and what we have already been and achieved -- is an incredibly important part of building our spiritual fitness muscles and growing in humility. The more internal resources we have and can access, the stronger our spiritual fitness and the more exciting, fun and fulfilling challenges we can take on.

We don’t celebrate ourselves to puff up our egos. We celebrate ourselves with the kindness and gentleness we would use to encourage a young girl performing in her first school play. To own her strengths as well as her weaknesses, something that challenges even the most mindful adults, but which creates a beautiful humility and authentic sense of power.

For even more power to this exercise, share it with a trusted friend, family member, therapist or coach (or on social media if you desire). Maybe you want to invite your spouse or children to join in and create their own list, to be celebrated as year-end ritual.

Whatever it is, before you think about crafting those New Year’s Resolutions, I invite you to be present to what you have already been, done, achieved and overcome in the past year. The smaller it seems to you – like getting your twin boys fed daily, or creating a schedule for yourself that you stick to, painting your bedroom dresser or starting your own meditation practice even if just 2 minutes – the more important it is to celebrate.

The Buddha said, “I prostrate to the New Moon,” meaning he understood the need for celebration of what seems small and insignificant, but that is actually incredibly important to honor, celebrate and cultivate.

There can be no full moon, after all, without a New Moon.

Happy holidays, dear ones!