The Wisdom of Retreat

The view from our little retreat overlooking Central Park. 

On the streets of New York City yesterday, I was astonished to find that the people around me were very, very different from when I used to visit in my 20s.

The people were calmer, nicer, much friendlier.

They weren’t rushing around as nearly as much as I had remembered them from the days when I would leave work at the World Bank in Washington and come to stay for a few days of socializing, partying and burning the candle at both ends.

Had New York really changed that much?

Maybe the city that never sleeps is a bit different these days – after all, the whole country is different, too.

But what I know is profoundly different is my experience of it and the mind I am bringing to it.

Whereas in the past I ran around and wanted to suck the marrow out of every moment in the Big Apple by doing it all, this trip is remarkably different.

Chinese and Indian philosophy are replete with the complementary wisdom of the energy of going out and forward into the world, and the deep need to retreat and withdraw. In Western culture, we are obsessed with the former, the yang energy of the world.

We worship the sun, energy, movement and going for it. We are all about doing. Americans are prone to this more than perhaps any other culture, and New Yorkers (of which I am one by birth and claim proudly) could be collectively called the poster-child for yang energy.

The mantra of yang is simple:

Go.

Go.

Go.

Do.

Do.

Do.

More.

More.

More.

But alongside that powerful yang energy (the kind you might find in a strenuous yoga posture like a sun salutation, for example), balance and harmony also require the other side. The darker, more still, more internalized side of life.

The yin quality of life. The being which balances and tempers the doing.

I have been humbled by the opportunity to explore this yin side by actively cultivating an intention to retreat on this trip in what could seem to be the most unlikely of spaces.

Rather than racing from the shops on Fifth Avenue to bars, I am savoring the chance to really appreciate the beauty of nature overlooking Central Park from my window as I write this. Instead of feeling the compulsive need to see and do it all right now, I am indulging in the sweet luxury of coaching my amazingly courageous clients and exploring the joys of mediation with them. In place of waking up with a hangover from spending a night out with a dear old friend I hadn’t seen in years, I linger on the tender memory of ducking out of the rain into St. Patrick’s Cathedral for a few moments to sit, pray, love in community.

As someone who has always loved to travel, I am experiencing the world in a far deeper way by intentionally cultivating opportunities for retreat.

Like many of my clients, I used to seek escape from life by acting out compulsively – eating, shopping, drinking, traveling, always running to the next thing under the imperious tyranny of His Majesty, King FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).

I am so excited to have learned a much, much better way to cultivate those opportunities for retreat (rather than escape) and to be able to share them.

There are so many ways to retreat, both at home and when travelling. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

You can curl up with a good book and rest for an hour when you come home from work rather than getting on the computer. You can do one yoga posture. You can meditate (try some here if you are looking to start or boost your practice). You can plan to join me in Greece this September for two powerful retreat opportunities that will give you a chance to reboot, recharge and reconnect, on an Aegean island and in a secluded olive grove. You can turn off your computer or your mobile right now, get out your journal and a pen, and write a few lines of poetry or doodle.

The wisdom of retreat is available to each of us in every moment. It’s our chance to get nourished and rest, before our lives break down and we are forced to by our health and other markers of how in alignment we may be living with our values.

And when we do retreat wisely, we go back into the world with something to give it. We fill up our cups, that we may have something with which to nourish others.

The Circle of Life

It's the Circle of Life

And it moves us all

Through despair and hope

Through faith and love

Till we find our place

On the path unwinding

In the Circle

The Circle of Life

Tim Rice and Elton John

Like all young in the animal kingdom, I adored my mother when I was a small child. 

I was absolutely convinced that she was the best mom, the one who smelled the sweetest, the one whose arms were the most gentle, the one whose hands could stroke any pain or sorrow out of my curly brown hair simply by touching it.

Everything in my biology told me that this person was the key to my survival and, as such, she was the most important thing in my life. From an evolutionary perspective, the mother-child bonding occurred perfectly and without a hitch.

And in harmony with nature’s perfectly timed clockwork, whether lion cubs, puppies or kittens or baby ducks, eventually it came time for this new member of the tribe to look around and see the rest of the world. Very quickly, I especially noticed the other baby animals and their mothers, and that is probably when the fall from the pedestal began.

Indeed, for the next several decades of my life, I could only see how the other mothers nurtured their young, what they gave to them and what I wasn’t getting. It was especially prevalent with my aunt and cousins: she seemed to be the perfect mother, suckling her young in a way that made me wistful.

My mother’s way of raising me was, to put it mildly, far more unconventional. Because of her formative years and growing up, she was much more of the “let-her-figure-it-out-on-her-own” school. After all, she had done it and it had helped her survive as a young cub.

I was the kid who would be picked up hours after school had ended with a sheepish look on my face, the one who had to figure out how to make friends without a mom at home who knew my classmates’ names, the one who had to go outside of the small cocoon of the nuclear family to get basic needs met from a very, very young age. One of my other aunts tells the story of how, at the age of four, I would climb up on the kitchen cabinets to get cereal to make my own breakfast. She was appalled and judged my mother fiercely for that, as did I.

But the circle of life gives us opportunities to go back to the beginning and see things with a fresh perspective.

Nearly six years ago, when I was living in Europe, my mother was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic breast cancer. From that very first phone call, I knew it was terminal and that there was no time to waste. Nature compelled me to return to my roots, to go back to the den and to see and accept this fierce lion as she truly was, not as I would have had her.

Two weeks ago today, my beautiful, fierce mother passed away after a long and valiant journey, not just through cancer, but through the pain and tragedy of her own years as a small, vulnerable cub with no one to consistently protect and nurture her in her formative post-war years in Greece.

We were given the opportunity, each in her own way, to let go of the mother and daughter that we had each wanted, and to fully, completely and whole-heartedly accept the other woman as a force of nature unto her own self.

Let’s face it, for all the times I judged and criticized her for not being Betty Crocker, I’m sure I wasn’t Daughter of the Year at all times.

As I sit in the grief and loss of this time, it is so clear that my mother was not only my greatest teacher in the Buddhist sense, but also did exactly what nature had compelled her to do: to create a young one strong and capable enough of fending for herself in the jungle.

It’s no accident – if you believe in that sort of thing – that we are both Leos, too. She didn’t do this by coddling me and making it easy and I can assure you there were many, many times I desperately wanted that. She did it by recognizing the truth of my spirit, honoring her own style of mothering and letting go of what the PTA ladies thought. Of the many, many gifts my mother gave me during her time here, the desire to seek and know my own truth and live it to the best of my ability was certainly one of the greatest.

The circle of life with my mother came full-circle in the days, months and years that I cared for her during her journey with cancer. When she passed, the only thing that remained was love, gratitude and forgiveness.

So many men and women I know stay perennially stuck in what they didn’t get and deserved as a child, what they were robbed of, how it is a wonderful excuse for not thriving today. I know it well because I, too, did it for a very, very long time. Indeed, I had to then, as it was an integral part of the slow, complicated process of healing and growing up. And I am so grateful for the teachers, counselors, coaches, friends and others who validated my experience and feelings while I went through it.

But while a child can be victim, as an adult, make no mistake about it: we are volunteers if we accept and embrace the burden of the victim story.

The men and women I know who thrive in this world are those who carefully, gently and methodically – and with the help of loving, compassionate witnesses – go through the stories of the past, grieve their losses, keep the stuff that continues to serve and empower them, and let go of what doesn’t.

My mother did a great, great thing by opening up to healing and forgiveness with me, too. She didn’t have to, but she chose to. And once more I adore my mother Lioness.  

We have once again come full circle.

Evolutions Not Resolutions

The Frank Gehry-designed Google office in Venice, California. 

Evolution (Webster’s): noun

(secondary definition) a process in which the whole universe is a progression of interrelated phenomena

By this time of year, more likely than not, the shape of the New Year has already taken form in your life.

It probably looks a lot like it did last year.

Unless of course you have undertaken some hearty resolutions in 2016.

Then perhaps you are busy working out, eating vegan, meditating daily, starting your own company, volunteering, saving money, having fabulous sex and being on top of all of your email accounts.

No? Not really?

Yeah. Me, neither.

And that’s why years ago I gave up entirely on the whole idea of New Year’s Resolutions.

By this time of year – late January – I was back to my old ways, beating myself up because, once again, I had failed to live up to the promise of the earnestly made and sincerely hoped for resolutions.

All the guilt, blame and shame couldn’t get me to the gym when it was freezing outside or to reply to all correspondence in an efficient and orderly fashion.

Touch each piece of paper only once!

Reply immediately to all email correspondence in the order received!

File all bills and paperwork chronologically and pay upon receipt!

And when I looked up from my own messy pile of paper and electronic flotsam and jetsam, I noticed something else:

Most other people I know and admire don’t make - or keep - New Year’s Resolutions either.

So what gives?

Why do some people achieve and maintain a level of mastery and fulfillment in their lives, while others loll about wanting and resolving to make this the year that our dreams come true but never actually achieving it?

I am convinced that the difference between those that do and those that don’t has to do with who and what they are identifying with in each moment.

If I see myself as a small, separate little ego-based entity, it is hard to get traction on achieving goals. I might make plans, spreadsheets, to-do lists. But if I am identifying with the isolated “I” – and the scared, anxious and frightened states of being associated with it – it is almost impossible to create long-term sustainable change.

But when I begin to reflect on who and what I am being in relation to an experience, and how that being is manifesting in the world, all of a sudden the small, sustainable actions required to transform a life become not only doable, but meaningful, joyful and often fun.

One of the more interesting definitions of evolution touches on this inter-related nature of all phenomenon (what the Buddhists call dependent arisings or emptiness).

Think about it.

If you want to, say, write a book in 2016, you can think about wanting to say something to the world, and finally proving to your high school classmates that you are worthy, valuable and special and let your ego drive you to wake up at 4 am to write before going to a job you hate.

Or you can think about who you want to evolve into being in your life – perhaps a thought-leader or someone who has an impact on the world – and allow that state of being to pull you forward in your vision as you acknowledge the impact your own personal evolution has on the inter-related nature of all phenomena.

When you consider and reflect on who you want to evolve into in the coming months and years, something special happens. You fully harness the power not just of doing in the world – something most of us are pretty good at – but also fully maximizing who you are being, as the highest expression of your own potential.

And when you do that, not only do you begin to achieve your New Year’s Resolutions, but you also evolve into the man or woman you were always meant to be.

Want to explore New Year’s Evolutions even more in the coming year? Join me Friday, January 29th at the Google office in Venice for this community event and get started being the change you wish to see in your own life in 2016.

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.