The Details vs. The Mechanism

One of my teachers, Michael Singer, likes to remind his students that we’re spinning on a ball of dirt around a star that’s 93 million miles away. It’s hot out? That’s the star’s radiation warming our planet enough for life. It’s raining out? That’s the star’s impact on weather systems that allow life to flourish.

By zooming out a little, we begin to appreciate the mechanism instead of being distracted by our judgments, opinions, and insecurities about the details. 

When I get hooked by a thought or a feeling, my attention focuses in on it, and I suffer. When I can back my awareness off the detail and witness the mechanism, I get free again.

Regardless of the details of my experience - a particular feeling or thought, a memory or a projection into the future - the mechanisms of human being are beautiful.

For me, meditation isn’t trying to attain the absence of thought or feeling. One way I meditate is by relaxing my awareness beyond the boundaries of the details - I'm practicing witnessing the mechanisms. 

The mechanisms of being human are beautiful, powerful, miraculous. That we think, that we feel, that we move. Beautiful, powerful, miraculous.

It’s backing up from a single brush stroke and seeing the whole painting on the canvas. It's moving back from a single leaf to see the tree.

There’s freedom, peace, and insight in backing off the details a little to recognize the mechanism at work.

What I most want for myself in this life is an experience of being unconditionally in love with being alive. So my explorations, studies, and practices are usually in service of that desire (and my purpose: elevating the well-being of all life, no one left out). Uncovering the mechanism behind the details of my experience is one of the ways I find myself accessing more love in my life - witnessing and then expressing gratitude for the mechanisms, I get to fall more deeply in love with being alive.

Much Love. ❤️

(As always, 100% human-written.)

The Most Important Practice

21 years ago, I lived in the mountains of California for a year. My brother and I would plan mountain biking or hiking activities, and I would sometimes have to wait for him - he had a full-time traveling job and ran a local business. 

Being back here on a visit for the first time in over two decades, I enjoy the wait. I stand around or sit down. I look around. I breathe in this fresh mountain air. I thank my body, I thank my senses, I thank nature. I thank the opportunity it is to hang with my big bro.

Of all the practices I’ve learned and taught over the years, the most important and impactful is the practice of patience.

In patience, we can listen. 

Patience is a space. It’s a welcoming of the experience of being human. It’s an invitation for opportunity to show up.

Whether it’s challenging emotions, unmet expectations, or difficult circumstances, patience gives us room to relax - to relax our minds, our hearts, our nervous systems. In that space of bio-psycho-social-spiritual relaxation, we get to reside in a more full and fulfilling experience of right now.

There are no ordinary moments. 

The moments I’m waiting. The moments I’m seething. The moments I’m scared. Each moment is extraordinary.

Patience gives me the space and the listening to be with it all, and when I’m truly listening, there isn’t a part of my experience that I need to run from, avoid, or change.

I have a client who’s struggling with a potential big change in her life. Her suffering isn’t coming from the possible change, though - it’s coming from what it all means. Patience gives her space to be with her experience, to relax her mind’s stories and concerns and worries, and to settle into trusting herself and her innate capacity to thrive no matter what.

That’s the power of the practice of patience - trusting and cultivating our innate capacity to thrive in life, no matter the circumstances. 

With the practice of patience, waiting becomes an opportunity to fall in love with myself and the universe, frustration becomes an opportunity to compassionately give to another, and fear becomes an old friend just looking out.

(This is patience, by the way, without distraction - without our eyes in our phones or on our TVs.)

May we each be blessed with the power of patience, and the willingness to practice it unconditionally.

Much Love. ❤️

From Insight to Transformation

I was at the movies with one of my kids last week to see the Odyssey. While waiting on our popcorn, a worker behind the counter told a co-worker that he recently saw the movie Hook for the first time. Hook - that Robin Williams movie from 1991 where Peter Pan returns to Neverland as an adult. I loved that movie!

What I remember most about the movie was a moment near the end, when Peter realized that the happiest thing about his life is that he’s a daddy. It dawned on him like it never had before, and his long list of more important priorities disappeared in the light of that brilliant insight.

Insight is powerful. People in the transformational coaching and self-help circles are sometimes insight junkies! I’ve been one myself at times. 

Insight is like a flash of lightning. When it strikes, we see something that we’ve never seen before about ourselves, others, the world, or life itself. The brilliant light of insight is sometimes powerful enough to knock our minds, hearts, and nervous systems into a new and lasting state of being.

Most of the time, though, after the initial brightness of that flash of insight, our conditioned minds, hearts, and nervous systems go back to business as usual. (We sometimes then even add some guilt and self-judgment on top, for seeing Truth but not acting on it.)

While insights are powerful moments of awareness that inspire, motivate, and move us, that flash of lightning fades quickly without sustained, reliable, and effective practice.

A flash of lightning vs. the sustained and reliable light of the sun itself.

That’s how lasting change happens - a consistent returning to and grounding in the truths that show themselves through insight.

A more direct way of saying it is this: insights only make a difference when we practice them.

Yes, it gets dark sometimes. It gets stormy sometimes. Man, I've been going through the bumps and potholes of that dark and stormy inner weather myself a bit more intensely lately! The light, however, is always there, reliably returning to us as we return to it.

If you're lucky enough, or committed enough, to experience insight in areas of your life that matter to you, honor that stroke of lightning and consider how you might sustain the light of that insight into transformation.

What are some recent insights that you’d like to deepen into your being and your experience of life? What would support you?

Not every insight needs to be honored with consistent practice, discipline, and support, and some are really worth it.

Much Love. ❤️