Making 45 Great Again

45 has gotten a bad rap recently, and for good reason. It's time to make it great again (with mindfulness!) 

CRAZY-MAKING!

The past few months in the U.S. and around the world have been exceptionally intense. And week after week, my students, clients and colleagues, talk about how crazy-making the world around us can be.

It's not easy to stay calm and centered these days, that's for sure. Especially with senseless violence and one tragedy after the other in the headlines.

I've felt it myself, in Europe while I was visiting this Spring and at home in the U.S.

And it has certainly made me feel an urgency to do something more to be part of the solution.

At the same time though, even in the midst of the incredible challenges we face politically, socially, and personally, we also have things to celebrate: family reunions, anniversaries, summer vacation and (drumroll please) ... my birthday!

Yep, it's that time (again! ;))

This year I wanted to do something different to celebrate the big 4-5 and have a bigger impact on the world that is so in need of a greater sense of peacefulness.

And I want to start by RECLAIMING 45 and making IT great again!

That's why I am super delighted and over-the-moon to share with you something I've been working on for a long, long time: a FREE guided e-course to help you practice 45 days of mindfulness.

Why 45 days?

Research at Harvard shows that daily mindfulness practice can actually help begin to re-wire your brain within about 8 weeks.

(I know that 8 weeks isn't 45 days, by the way, but it's a great start and you can continue to hopefully practice unguided after the course ends).

So why would you want your brain re-wired and to do this?

Some reasons are:

• To help you relax and de-stress (without that extra glass of wine or bag of chips)

• To help you have better relationships through improved empathy and attunement with your family, colleagues, clients and co-workers

• To help you be less reactive to social media, texts and other electronic stimulation (like sending that snarky text when you're overly tired!)

• To help you do something positive for yourself to take advantage of the summer slow down

• To be more compassionately engaged in the social, environmental, political and cultural causes you care about deeply but want to navigate with greater ease, self-compassion and boundaries

• And finally, to be in community and celebrate with me: we don't just get older, we really CAN get wiser!

(Me, I'm taking to looking at the wrinkles, bumps and gray hairs with way more compassion and say, "BRING 45 ON!")

So join me. There is nothing to do and nothing to pay.

(Because it's my birthday and I love my peeps, this is my love offering to you FREE: at times like these in the world, we ALL could use a little time out to chill out).

Oh, and this e-course won't just include breathing meditations (click here for some audio meditations you can practice with to start), but also ways of cultivating mindfulness with mindful eating, mindful walking, mindful social media, working, technology, movement and more.

Starting today, participants will receive an email that will have a super, super simple mindfulness practice for the day. And we start with just ONE minute per day.

(I've already heard from some of you how just taking ONE minute to practice can be so transformative in re-setting the day!)

By the time my birthday rolls around on August 5th (yay Leos!) you will be practicing mindfulness for up 45 minutes a day.

And if you drop off for a day or two because you're taking a weekend off to enjoy the summer's delights, no worries. You can just pick right back up with the group.

There is great power and energy in knowing that you are cultivating mindfulness in a community.

And rather than getting on a community group online, I'd love it if you could actually talk about what you are doing with the people you know and practice a little digital detox (yes, we all could use a little help in putting the phone down and being present to the world around us in my not-so-unbiased opinion).

So, let's be in community and cultivate mindfulness there, off line, too. As you begin to practice, you will notice opportunities to connect with others and tell them how you are practicing mindfulness. 

Perhaps you'll inspire them, too.

Sign up to join 45 Days of Mindfulness here. 

Interested in connecting and practicing with me and other peeps live? Tell me what you'd like: a live interactive webinar where we could practice together, a series of FB lives, or what else. Just drop me a note here or let me know in the comments below. 

When a Man Cries in Public

In Paris last week. A man and his phone. 

His sobbing could be heard only faintly amid the din of conversation and beeping digital devices that contributed to the on board cacophony.

He was a tall, dark haired man, probably in his late 20s. There wasn’t much that was particularly noticeable about him: the T-shirt, shorts, flip flops, wristwatch all were standard issue.

In other words, there were no external signs that this young man’s behavior might not conform with the expectations of public behavior and decorum in our society.

And yet, here he was, on a flight halfway between Phoenix and Albuquerque, faced turned downward and towards the window, sobbing.

Rarely have I seen, if ever, a man sob that way, especially not in public.

It was the kind of body shaking that was more like that of a howling, wounded animal than of a human, perhaps more like a woman in labor than what sexist and outdated cultural norms demand of men.

He convulsed and shook, and tears rolled down his face.

And all of this he did, with minimal sound. It was almost eerie how quiet it all was, except for the muffled noises as he seemed to fight between his own need to sob, and knowing what public expectations demanded of him as a man.

My head was buried, ironically, in Huston Smith’s Why Religion Matters, part of my intention to fight against the tendency so prevalent in our world to stay at the surface of life and thought exacerbated by the ubiquity of technology. I was longing and hungry for more time to be spent in the depth and richness of deep contemplation underneath the realm of our ordinary diurnal tasks, where meaning is made, and this book was simply one of many such oft-foiled attempts.

Huston, one of the greatest religious scholars of the 20th century, writes about how a pseudo-scientific understanding of the world (what he calls scientism) has ripped away our common sense and traditional ways of knowing about things that are not proven by science in double-blind trials. Again and again, he writes about the realm of meaning that is valid and deeply worthy of respect, and which is all too often dismissed as not being factually based. A bias as crippling as the biases which Galileo and Copernicus had to face, too. 

I was captivated by the depth of the book and so grateful I had escaped the surly bonds of social media for long enough to actually read this way again. 

And here I faced the struggle that I find gets the better of me and many of us all too often: to say something to the young man sitting just a few inches away, or to keep my head buried in the book in fear of what might happen if I do?

The reality is that, in so many ways, our common experiences of compassion and tenderness towards those who are suffering are radically limited to safe spaces where we have permission to be with people in sometimes intimate ways. I make up that hundreds of years ago, if you saw someone sobbing right next to you in the orchards where you were picking apples or on the farm where you were milking cows, you wouldn’t think of not reaching out in compassion. That the imperative of being civilized, respectful and always decorous, actually prevents us from exercising our natural impulse to authentically connect with and be with those who are hurting.

I contemplated the dilemma in front of me: reach out to my brother or respect the rules of modern society which value privacy and individualism far more than they value connection, and risk making it worse for him and, potentially, me.

Eventually the impulse to care for another human being got the better of me and I had to say something.

But what?

What the hell could I possibly say to this man I didn’t know in a public place whose body language clearly seemed to signal that he, like a wounded animal, wanted to be left alone?

With whatever courage I could muster, I decided to wait for a pause in his sobs when he finally had to look in my direction.  After several minutes, with red eyes and a splotchy face, he glanced up.

And I heard this come out of my mouth:

“Do you want to talk?”

He nodded no, silently, but his eyes spoke of gratitude

He put the palm of his hand to his chest in that well-recognized gesture of being touched emotionally, and mouthed,  “Thank you”.

I nodded, as if to say, OK, and went back to my book.

Here it was, two perfect strangers in a public space, having a deeply authentic and private moment.

I had no idea why he was sobbing and noticed my analytical mind trying to find reasons why:

Had his girlfriend broken up with him?

Was he on his way to his father’s funeral?

Did he lose his job?

But none of that actually mattered.

What mattered was that this human, an American male no less, sitting in seat 8A, was hurting amidst dozens of other people. And he was courageous enough to be showing it.

How many others on that flight though were holding their pain to themselves?

Holding on to the idea that, in our culture, it is weakness to show emotion or to need others, medicating themselves with everything from food to obsessive social media, prescription drugs to sex?

I had no answers only more questions as my eyes went back to my book.

But over the past month of travels on more planes than I can count - from Oslo and Prague, Paris to London - I’ve been noticing more and more how much harder it is becoming for us to authentically connect. And how especially tough that must be for men, who still have even less social permission to publicly express emotion and vulnerability than do women.

We look down, get on our devices and check out of communal spaces as soon as possible. And then we wonder why we feel lonely, disconnected and frazzled.

Instead we could take a risk to look up, to each other and to what lies within us. 

The yearning to authentically connect with others is as common in Paris and Papua New Guinea as it is in Poughkeepsie and Pasadena. And for those of us living in the undemocratically elected Reign of Technology, leaning into a mindful and authentically meaningful life takes great intentionality and care.

It also takes a community to remind us of its value and necessity.  

And it takes a willingness to make ourselves vulnerable to those across the aisle - whether on an airplane or in the halls of power - to make us feel human.

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to keep trying. Even if it does get a bit turbulent at times.

Want to connect more authentically with those around you? Sign up for a free coaching session and start building the life you truly want today. 

Death, Money and Sex: The Open Secret

A beautiful, passionate, soulful artist and mother reached out to me to coach her recently. She was eagerly wanting something and sensed that it might be found in the connection her intuition told her to follow.

But by the time was approaching for her scheduled session, she was in an entirely different place than she had expected to be.

A beloved person in her life unexpectedly and tragically died.

She cancelled her session, wanting to howl and grieve and be alone instead.

I could relate.

Boy could I relate.

This week, in fact, is the one year anniversary since my own mother passed away.

There have been so many hours of howling and grieving. Even some, yes, this very morning.

Like animals who run off to the cave to lick their wounds, we humans, too, have a wisdom and knowing that draws us inward in times of deep pain and sadness.It is part of the human experience: the allegorical archetype of diving into pain and loss and tragedy like Persephone and then, by some miraculous resiliency that’s part of the human spirit, coming back to life.

But this depth of common experience can only be revealed when we are willing to go down deep into our own psyches. And for many, the conflict between wanting to look good and put together on the surface can raise a deep conflict with the inner yearning and desire to howl like an animal at times.

Isn’t that what wild animals do, after all?

Howl and hide in caves and then, eventually, come back to circle into the pack of other animals?

What I wanted so much was to deeply honor my artist friend who wanted to take the time to howl and grieve and experience the deep loss. To know that that depth of being is what makes us most deeply human.

Week after week, I see clients who want richer, fuller, more meaningful lives. They - we - want more joy, more peace, more fulfillment in our lives.

And the ones who get those lives I have seen again and again, are the ones with the courage to both wail like a wild wounded animal or a puppy that’s been taken from it’s momma … and show up to the pack of animals again.

There is a paradox that, while there is a time to be alone in the cave to lick one’s wounds, in our culture especially, that is where the story ends.

We lose a child, a friend, a partner or a beloved pet.

A relationship fails.

Our political leadership goes mad, making choices that look insane.

We face the reality of our childish and inauthentic relationship with money.

In all these instances, our habitual tendency is to hide out alone, and then start to cope alone.

We turn to compulsive busyness, to keep the pain of loneliness from seeping in.

We turn to fixing ourselves to hopefully avoid the pain of ever feeling vulnerable to loss again.

We numb out on empty carbs, one too many glasses of wine after the kids are in bed, or sexual misadventures.

All these things we try to cope with alone. 

Death. Money. Sex.

Rather than pretending they don’t cause us all pain, we can try something different.

We can try to accept what the poet Rumi referred to as the Open Secret, that I first heard about from one of my mentors at the Omega Institute for Holistic Learning, author Elizabeth Lesser. 

You know that thing when your friends ask how it’s going and you say, “Great!” with a big smile on your face while you are secretly freaking out about the fact that your new husband won’t have sex with you?

Or when your boss asks if you need some time off to deal with health issues and you say, “No, no, I’m FINE!” because you're secretly terrified of losing your health insurance, job and financial security if you tell the truth?

Or when your friend who is a little more outwardly successful, more organized and well-spoken asks you to support a cause she’s involved in and you say yes but secretly think, “Shit, she has it all together and I am going to look so stupid next to her. What’s the hell is wrong with me?”

What Rumi invites us to do, way back from the 13th century, is to stop pretending it’s all fine and cop to the open secret. Because we are all pretending and that's partially what causes the suffering and isolation. 

To reveal your hurt and your truth to another, safely and appropriately, is where authentic connection is made.

And this is where mindfulness comes in.

By developing a practice of “paying attention on purpose in the present moment without judgment” (in the words of mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn) you begin to watch your thoughts, feelings and beliefs and not take them so seriously.

You can watch them rise and fall in your mind and body, and let them go without telling such a long involved story about what a loser you are, how everybody else is better at life than you, and how lonely you are.

Or how it is always going to hurt like it does now.

With a regular mindfulness practice of even a few minutes a day, you learn to rest in compassionate presence with yourself. And when you can cultivate self-compassion towards the parts of yourself you judge the most, you can begin to open up to the compassion in others.

Let me be honest here: I have in no way mastered this.

But I am nowhere near where I once was in terms of vicious self-judgment.

The open secret is that we all have pain.

Death, money and sex cause every human alive to have challenges at some point or another in life. It’s the human condition, not a personal failure.

And when we can accept it, and accept the loving kindness available to us, both within our skin and in others, we come back to life and light.