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.

How to Get Motivated When You're Stuck - COVID19 Edition

If you’re a regular reader of the blog, then I know at least 2 things about you:

1. You’ve likely experienced stress, anxiety or trauma.

2. You care deeply about making a meaningful impact in the world.

Between the two of those things, and what trauma-informed yoga therapist De Jur calls, “The Global Retreat” caused by the pandemics of COVID19, racism and economic recession, my guess is that finding your mojo these days can be tough.

Recently there was a discussion in my on-going Group coaching program about how to get and stay motivated when you’re stuck in these incredibly challenging and poignant times.

Between the heat of the dog days of summer, the stress on parents with school-aged kids, and the upcoming election, it’s no surprise you might want to bury your head in the sand and take a 10 year nap.

Let me be clear: there are days when cultivating somatic awareness, listening to your body and staying in bed is definitely the wisest thing to do. 

And, for many of us, particularly folks who have been carrying too much of a burden for far too long, that’s often the most compassionate and loving thing to do.

But if that’s not you, how can you get up and go, when your giddy-up has up and gone?

Here are three questions I shared with my Group that might help you get motivated when you’re stuck around your personal, professional and spiritual goals, too:

1. What’s the smallest action you can take without your resistance kicking in?

Let’s say you’re a marathon runner. You love to go on long runs, with the wind in your hair and open country ahead of you. But when it’s 100 plus degrees out, even with a treadmill in your guest room, you can’t get motivated to move. 

Instead of trying to do the kind of run that you usually do, what’s the tiniest action you can take without your resistance kicking? 

Could you do one mile? 

Nope.

Still too much? What about half a mile?

Hmmmmm …

How about 100 yards?

The trick here is to reduce your expectations of yourself in the short-term by so much and make them so low that you cannot possibly fail. 

By focusing on the smallest action you can, you set yourself up for a win which boosts your self-esteem, gets you off of the endless Tiger King binge you’ve been on and breaks deadly inertia.

2. Can you use bookending to support you?

I absolutely love what I do for a living.

Helping folks master resilience to stress, anxiety and trauma in order to have a more meaningful impact in the world is my jam. It’s pretty much my favorite thing in the world (besides swimming in the Aegean, but that’s for another blog post).

But the one thing I still don’t love doing is accounting and bookkeeping and taxes.

(Can I hear an amen, my intuitive-feeler readers?)

Left to my own devices, I’ll put it off way too long.

What helps me, instead, is to use a practice called bookending, which creates some inner motivation and helps me engage with others. 

With bookending you have a goal in mind.

Say you want to spend 1 hour working on your taxes (or going for a run, or meditating for 20 minutes, or getting onto your yoga mat after weeks of eating too much Halo Top on the sofa). 

Next you commit to someone what you’re going to do and when. It’s usually a good idea for this to be a person who isn’t deeply impacted by your decision but wants to support you. It could be a friend, a co-worker or an Accountability Partner, like the ones in my Group Coaching program. 

Finally, when you’ve completed the task, you “bookend” the action, to once again reach out to your Accountability Partner and let them know you’ve done so. 

This ending ritual in particular is super important and is magic for self-esteem.

By doing so, not only do you get stuff done and keep moving forward with your goals, but you might even inspire someone else to take action, too. A win-win for sure! 

3. How can I create some regular accountability for myself in this area?

Our culture is obsessed with the toxic-fantasy of the self-made man (or woman). 

This is not news to you, I’m sure. 

The compulsion to pull yourself up by your bootstraps is one that many of us have learned is the only way of living that has value. Our egos get so wrapped up in doing things alone, that we don’t achieve what we could if we had just a little support. 

Full disclosure: I’m an unmarried only child and a double Leo. 

 Let’s just say that, like the sun, my ego can get so big because part of me still falls into the trap of believing the oppressive lie that, for something to count, I need to do it all by myself.

Thankfully, I’m supported by a number of spiritual, professional and activist communities that remind me that I can only show up for the work I’m meant to do in the world if I allow myself to be supported. Just the simple act of checking in with my authentic communities - where I can show up as my wholehearted, fabulous, and sometimes completely insane self - helps me stay accountable for my bigger purpose. 

Folks in my Group coaching program see that, too. 

They regularly create accountability for personal (“I’m gonna finally build that bookcase I’ve been staring at for months!”), professional (“Finally, I’m going to commit to launching that Healing Circle I’ve been talking about for ages!”) and spiritual goals (“I’m going to stay accountable for keeping my word this week to myself as well as to others”).

What matters is that you let someone (or some community where you can show up authentically) witness your goals, speak them and then take action around staying accountable. 

The bottom line, my dear one, is that right now, things are tough. 

Years from now, we’ll look back on this time inshallah and see how we used this seminal moment in our history. 

Not just what we felt, but what we did as Kamala so brilliantly reminded us.

My hope for all of us is that we use it wisely.

With these three questions you can check in to help yourself get motivated when you’re stuck.

For your benefit. And for the benefit of all those whose lives you touch. 

Interested in getting some support to stay on track with your personal, professional, and spiritual goals? Check out my justice pricing-based Mastering Resilience On-Going Group Coaching program 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. 

July Community Support Call

Join me for a FREE Community Support Call on Friday, July 31st from 10 - 11:30 am.

This is for anyone who is looking for tools and practices to deal with stress, anxiety and trauma in these unprecedented times in a supportive community setting.

My intention is to support us in connecting with ourselves and others as we navigate the uncertainty of this moment.

There will be a community check in, practices that may include meditation, gentle chair-based yoga for all bodies, somatic ways of releasing stress, tension and anxiety in real time, plus sharing and Q and A.

The call is FREE to join, but you must REGISTER HERE to attend.

June Community Support Call

Join me for a FREE Community Support Call on Tuesday, June 30th from 10 - 11:30 am.

This is for anyone who is looking for tools and practices to deal with stress, anxiety and trauma in these unprecedented times in a supportive community setting.

My intention is to support us in connecting with ourselves and others as we navigate the uncertainty of this moment.

There will be a community check in, practices that may include meditation, gentle chair-based yoga for all bodies, somatic ways of releasing stress, tension and anxiety in real time, plus sharing and Q and A.

The call is free to join, but you must REGISTER HERE to reserve your spot.