We're Made to Wobble

There’s an old toy from the 1970s called a Weeble. You can tilt a Weeble all the way over onto its side, but it will stand itself back up again - over and over again. Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.

The Weebles tilt under the forces against them. So do we. We feel pressure, we feel tension, and we feel stress. So we act against our circumstances and we push against those feelings because we’ve forgotten that we will always get back up. The Weebles always do, and so can we.

I had a conversation with a friend yesterday, and she shared about the intensity and overwhelming busy-ness of her life at the moment. “Can’t you see it?!” she joked. “It’s swirling all around me!”

I obviously couldn’t see it how she did, so I asked her to describe it.

1) What’s actually happening in life? In other words: What are the circumstances?

We all have circumstances, and it feels like they pull and tug and push and press us sometimes. Like the Weeble we feel like we’re leaning over sideways under the weight of it all.

2) What does it actually feel like? What's in this feeling of overwhelm? We feel it in our body, so let’s really feel it in our body. For her, it was tension in the chest and shoulders, a tightness that felt like it was constricting her breath. She also felt nauseous in her stomach.

We hung out with those feelings for a couple minutes, just observing and describing them.

When we feel emotions, we usually think they’re telling us to act, but they're not. When we feel the pressure of overwhelm, we get busy and frenetic. When we feel threatened, we put up a fight or we run away. When we feel angry, we intensely express ourselves with righteous indignation. And so on.

3) She and I then did a grounding exercise, a guided meditation to expand our awareness of our body and our place in space, that lasted about 5 minutes. Upon opening our eyes, both of us were experiencing ease, clarity, peace, and well-being.

4) We got in touch with what we really want. Acting from stressful overwhelm doesn't usually serve what we're really after, what we're really committed to. In fact, my friend demonstrated beautifully that acting from overwhelm was actually hurting her chances at getting what she really wants - deep connection with the people in her life.

What if we can’t actually fail in life? What if we won’t buckle under the pressure? Like my friend pointed out when she found her feeling of clarity: the steaming kettle of her overwhelm wasn’t screaming at her to get more done and handle the craziness - it was telling her to settle down.

When we settle down and find feelings of clarity, ease, and presence, we both enjoy life a whole lot more and we’re more effective in our actions.

The truth is, we actually can’t fail in life, it only seems that way. For some of us, it seems that way a lot of the time. But our feelings might actually be pointing somewhere else, and we've just never learned to look in the right spot.

My friend and I left the conversation with this beautiful and simple reminder: taking care of our own well-being and fostering habits that bring us ease, clarity, and appreciation feels pretty amazing. And we’re better able to provide the care, thoughtfulness, and effort that our world has asked us for.

What's one thing that you can easily fit into your day that would serve your own well-being? After all, when the emotions flare up, we only need to give our bodies and minds enough room to right ourselves, just like the Weebles. We too are made to wobble, and we can always stand back up.

Thanks so much for engaging with my work. ❤️

How the Mundane Becomes Sacred

Some teachers say that there’s no such thing as 9th graders - there are only 8th graders and 10th graders, and students in the 9th grade fall into one of those categories.

One thing that I like about 9th graders is that most of them come into high school with eyes wide open. For most 9th graders, high school is new physical, social, academic, and athletic territory. The kindling is prepared and they’re ready to be lit on fire by this new experience.

In other words, they’re primed for awe - an emotional mixture of wonder and reverence, maybe a little fear.

Sophomores tend to be different. They seem to carry a bit more arrogance, like they know the ropes. The only thing different for them is that they now have experience, a past to draw on, and gives them permission to feel more settled and comfortable. They seem to know this territory a bit better, so they’re more confident.

And school is less exciting for them because they think they know.

We adults are the same way. With our own lives each stage brings something new to which we open our eyes wide. Then we get used to it and run on autopilot. We do this in our jobs, in our routines, and with our families. We think we know.

And that’s how we diffuse the sacredness out of our lives.

Each of us is a miracle. Your two biological parents: 1 million eggs that the female body produces in a lifetime and 5 billion sperm cells the male body produces in a lifetime - there’s a 0.00000000000002% chance that you are the one who would’ve been born from all those cells.

And here you are.

It is in emotions like awe, love, and joy that our spirit suffuses our experience. And we can actually bring those emotions with us wherever we go. There is no mundane when we bring awe, love, or joy with us. From any one of them, the mundane becomes sacred and we awaken.

For the last couple days since beginning this post, my 1% better has been to see the sacred in the everyday. How could I have forgotten how good this feels? Being in love with the people in my life, with the feeling of the ground and objects against my feet and hands, with the sunlight against the trees...

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

Spirit Murdered, or Spirit Obscured?

Last night I had a dream that I was walking through school with a baby. A student asked me about it and so I held the baby up and looked at him. Beautiful, curious, awake. Kicking legs and wide open eyes. And then he smiled. Even now as I remember the dream, my body warms and each of my cells smile in return. (I’m not usually all gaga for babies, but I certainly was with my own and it clicks on sometimes with others.)

There’s just no layer between a baby and it’s core awareness, its spiritual essence. It’s a pure being, a "wisp of un-differentiated nothingness."All of us still have that fundamental level of awareness. Actually, all of us are that fundamental level of awareness - we've just distracted it with thought. Babies haven't gotten around to being trained in that yet, and our love for them is actually us reawakening, even if just for a moment, to that part of ourselves.

In a professional development workshop that our faculty participated in last year at the beginning of school, the workshop presenter asserted that many of us teachers are responsible for "spirit murdering" our students. We were told that through our ignorance, intentional and unintentional discrimination, and our inherent biases, we are spirit murdering our students.

This was likely just metaphor to get us to see the intensity of our impact on students, but maybe not. Either way, I think this highlights a flaw in our approach to education, the "untruths" that we are fragile, we should reason with our emotions, and that life is a battle between good and evil.

Yes, our students’ bodies and our bodies are breakable. There are wounds, scars, and stored traumas, some diagnosed and mostly undiagnosed, that have become part of our physiological and mental lives. All of us, and some more than others. But these wounds, scars, and stored traumas can’t reach our spiritual core. They can cover it up with distracting stories and thinking, but injury can’t so much as tarnish our fundamental nature.

Our students, like us, are spiritually unbreakable. Yes, "life happens" and we add layers of obfuscation on top of our spirit. We do so because we want to survive and we think that these layers of guardedness, cynicism, resignation, and “being real” protect us from real hurt and maybe death. But these layers obscure our light, and we wonder why life gets so dark sometimes.

It’s totally fine that we do this - it’s natural and probably a good idea sometimes. The problem, though, is that we forget that we are the ones doing it. All we know is how we feel, and out of compassion, empathy, and fear we want to protect our kids and students from the same fate. So we misdiagnose their problems just like we’ve misdiagnosed our own problems.

The source of our internal challenges is not the world outside. The real source is being out of touch with our own wholeness and ability to respond no matter the circumstance - our innate response-ability to thrive creatively. And the layer of obfuscation that’s dimmed our light is only as solid as our thinking about ourselves and the outside world.

A teacher’s (and parent’s) job isn’t to avoid hurting a student’s spirit. The spirit can't be hurt. Instead, a teacher could encourage, guide, and support the thriving of students’ spirits. Imagine a world where students are guided to thrive in their fullest awareness and understanding, creativity and self-expression, and freedom to live from their own innate wisdom, clarity, and well-being.

How we do that is to model that our experience of life is much more from the inside-out than the outside-in, and to model what it is to thrive in life no matter the circumstances.

It begins with a willingness to be responsible for our experience of life.

Out of fear of hurting our students’ spirits, we’ve become afraid of nudging them toward insight for themselves, insight grounded in their whole, perfect, and unbreakable essence. It's as if out of fear of skin cancer, we’re keeping our kids from even seeing the sun.

Well, here comes the sun.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️