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!

Why You Need a Crayon

I love this quote from Anais Nin. So grateful that my dear writing coach Tammy gave this to me ... and that I used it!

Here we are once again with me wanting and needing to write, and being absolutely overwhelmed with the who, what, when, where and why.

Wanting to find the perfect practice.

“I will write for 1 hour every day first thing in the morning”, my brain spits out.

I have done this a million times before, too.

I love the idea of a linear, consistent and disciplined writing practice. I want to be like those writers who go on interviews saying that they wake up at 5 am before everyone else in the house (Jimmy Carter, Stephen King, Stephen Pressfield are just a few that come to mind) to get a few hours of writing done before everyone is up.

That sounds wonderful, juicy and so inspiring.

The reality though is that I need my sleep. Yep, I need a lot of it. And while I would love to get up at 8 am and have a few hours of quite at home to meditate, do my morning practices and then sit down to write for you, there is the problem of that whole, ahem, cohabitation with others-thing.

I fantasize about all the years I was alone and how I could have written more consistently then. I did the best I could. And I am certain I am doing the best I can now.

It does seem dissatisfying though.

I’ve just participated in a two-day silent meditation retreat. I love the space it gives me to breathe and just be. It’s so funny that as human beings in this culture we feel we need social permission to just be. Like we are all so compulsive about doing something, that being gets relegated to something that other people can do … if only we had time …

Retreats are a way of providing serious social permission to just be. Most people don’t think of them as such but think about it.

You say you are going on a retreat and people think, “Wow. Must be nice. I could never do that. I have SO much to do and can’t afford it anyway. But it does sound wonderful …”

Being on retreat is like taking a big fat crayon, and making a big red circle around yourself on the playground of life:

“I love you guys. You are my friends. But for right now, I am just going to be in my little circle and am going to be with myself. Don’t worry, you didn’t do anything wrong. I’ll be back though, and we will play again together soon. Thanks for understanding.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could give each other permission to do that more regularly?

I am always impressed by the busy productive people I know who have clear boundaries around protecting their alone time.

Most of us are great at keeping commitments to be with others. We show up for doctor’s appointments, parent-teacher conferences, date nights. We also show up for things when we have skin in the game, either financially or for other reasons that have to do with our survival.

But how often do most of us honestly and without guilt say, “Here is my big fat crayon. And I am going to draw a circle around myself in the chalk for the next hour so I can be alone and just be"?

For me, doing so is a way of allowing writing to come forth. I am not one of those, like Elizabeth Gilbert, who can write for 15 minutes before getting on this plane to Bali or 20 minutes after doing a TV interview. I feel the compulsion to have oodles of uninterrupted hours to play with the blank screen or page and to get the sense I am actually making progress. I also want to hide out from the phone and social media and pretty much all human contact.

In many respects, I am really well suited to the monastic life. The empty silence nurtures me. The community of support in which we are together in our solitude and our common purpose excites me. The permission to truly serve something greater than ourselves without concern for self-protection, self-promotion or much of self at all attracts me enormously.

And at the same time, I remember Thomas Merton, peace activist, writer and Trappist Monk, also exploring the same tension in himself in his epic memoir, “The Seven-Story Mountain”.

The longing and line between quiet contemplation and a life in the world is one which he straddled throughout his life. His conclusion? The most sacred life was the one that integrated time for quite contemplation and reverence with service in the world. After all, the only way he created his books which have given solace, comfort and inspiration to so many others was by diligently, rigorously and compassionately taking out his big fat crayon and drawing a circle around himself, a circle in which he could commune with his Creator and creative process and give birth to works that have inspired millions.

A recent piece by award-winning author Courtney Martin prompted me to explore the notion of creating space for creation and being. Anecdotally, it seems easier for men in our culture historically to feel entitled to take space to create and be, while women – as the mothers, wives, sisters, teachers, nurturers – find so much more conflict about it. I don't know and certainly have no answers. But I do have incredible admiration and deep respect for anyone who creates something from their deepest source of being, just for the joy of it. When it is a mother with children still at home, I am floored. Each and every time. And so much of the time, the tension in the internal world (creation and being versus guilt) mirrors the social pressure in the external world.

Having spent my 20s trying to change the world on the outside, working in organizations like the World Bank, slaps in the face and defeat have taught me the great truth that the only thing we have any power over changing is ourselves. Yes, Dorothy, we must be the change we wish to see in the world.

It is a radical act of love for self and others therefore, when anyone takes a time out to be and be with something that is longing to be expressed. Whenever anyone takes that radical stance of picking up the crayon, drawing the circle and saying, “This is for me, and this is my radical act of changing the world”, it makes it easier for the rest of us to do so.

Every time I get a new, fresh book – or see a new documentary or taste a meal made with a new recipe using all organic and sustainable foods, or hear a song that a mother has written after cooing her baby to bed – I am inspired and feel hopeful.

I don’t believe revolutions happen from one moment to the next. They happen when we each stop, take a moment to pause and reflect, turn on the timer to take a time out for ten minutes or ten hours, and allow what is supposed to come forth the time, attention and care it deserves.

Without expectation or judgment about outcomes, simply as a radical act of self-love.

The only kind of love there ever really is.