 So here's the thing. Last week I broke my own rule.
I didn't meditate. (and before you start to think I'm talking about 20 minute downtimes... let me say this is a 2 minute thing for this busy mom.) I had 3 mornings in a row that I had something to do, and quite honestly after the first 2 times of jumping up and running out the door, I literally had already forgotten my own practice. I'm not a morning person. I take my mornings very consciously. Mornings start with eyes open and “How do I want to Feel Today...” or maybe even more so... “Good morning God.” (Yeah... I call Source/Spirit/Universe God within my own heart. It became my spirit vocabulary when I was really young... but I use all terms readily.) After that... Cuddles with my husband.... love expressions. Get up. Take the dog for a walk. Then I have breakfast with my darlings. Possibly check my phone for emails. Day plan discussions. Then, I go upstairs and before work I stop, drop, breathe and do my inner connection practice. 2-5 minutes later, I'm ready to go. So, actually, it's not really meditation. It's more that sense of drop and remember. Remember who I am. Remember the Spiritual flow that is flowing. Remember my breath. And ALLOWING. So, what happened when I ran without dropping... Oh it wasn't pretty. I felt the stress building, but it was that run away train building that leads to heart pumping tension and headaches. I even noticed I wasn't remembering anything the way I usually do. (Honestly, I climbed into bed and had to wonder if I'd said goodnight to our eldest. I hadn't and she was waiting for me to turn out her light. An honor to be had by a near 17 year old.) My thoughts were scattered. My focus all over the place. It felt rushed and... outside of me. Yeah. Life was being lived outside of me. I felt more reactionary. More easily triggered. Luckily I noticed before meeting with clients or with my membership program. Then I was able to call myself back to center. What this really did was validate the importance of that inner connection practice. People tell me all the time, “I don't have time to meditate” as they imagine deep meditations lasting 20-30 minutes. Got it. They are nice to take part in, but if I try someone usually walks in half way through. Busy parents, need quick reset buttons. If you have time to brush your teeth you can reset. (In fact, do it while brushing your teeth. The universe doesn't mind!) Reset buttons to remember your truest self. Remember the resources and spiritual flow cascading to support you. And Connect to the Divine. So life flows better. It's simply a habit. A new pattern to set. A new practice to establish. In case you didn't know I'm offering a Free class on one of my favorite Inner Connection Practices on Sunday. I'll be live at 2pm EST, but if you can't make it then there will a replay sent out to with a PDF and an image for you to put on your phone as a reminder. If this sounds like something that you could use then please sign up for it here. I'll then send you the information on Friday. Now, it may be you already have your inner connection set. That yoga serves you, or just that morning coffee pause... maybe you wait until kids are at school... or for that night time sink into your pillow. Your authentic spiritual connection is what matters here. What gets you heart centered? What gets you filled up? I would love to hear your processes and what spiritual connection looks like to you.
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 Living Inside Out. Allowing. Knowing. Intending. Connecting.
To live inside out means you tune in before reacting. You shift focus before stress overtakes you. You breathe deep and find inner resilience, before trying to push to make something right. To live inside out means you trust your inner world over the outer. You know that your higher self, Universe, God, Goddess, Spiritual connection has your back and it's really about letting it in, allowing the solutions to flow. We can all shift back to living Outside In. We can focus on a problem until we're blue in the face. We can get out the pros and cons list, intellectually weighing up the Hows of it all... the What Ifs... the What could go wrongs. But, there's this innate relief that happens when you simply pull in the oars and... float. A Space is created, a space for the universe to provide. When we're banging our heads on a problem there's literally NO ROOM for a solution to flow in. And yet, knowing that... knowing that we have to let solutions in, knowing that we have to “reprogram” our brain to let go of resistant thoughts and practice mindful Being... can easily turn into knowing we need to live inside out, but looking in through a window. The lens of intellectualizing Spiritual practice and mindfulness is a bit like putting our hearts and spirits under a microscope and asking... am I at peace yet? Living inside out, says live the inner peace, let it flow over you, and you won't have to look to see if you are there. We're a thoughtful bunch of people in this world. We think out everything. I have a bit of a Holiday, Seasonal vision… for all of us.
We practice being ourselves, in a heart connected space, no matter the circumstance. In simple terms... We walk a little slower. Drive with a little more observance to the scenery. We let people line up in front of us at the cash, so we can stop and focus on our breath a few moments more. We play in the toy aisle with our kids. We let them do the decorating and make a mess. We stop the pushing. We take small moments of deep breathes and silent appreciations. We give ourselves permission to fill our buckets, fill our wells, savor the smallest of joys. Currently, here in Nova Scotia, the leaves have fallen and the smallest of animals are running to prepare for a long sleep. There’s a sense of enclosure as well as closure. There’s a sense of Endings and appreciating of the endings before the new beginnings. Its the natural flow of all that is. We can all miss this moment, can’t we?  The Universe is always responding to what we're focused on. So,when life feels frantic and chaotic, sadly things just keep building on that momentum.
The law of attraction can easily pick up on a space of franticness, or on lack of time. We can hold those stories up and the universe sees them, hears them and feels them and responds to it as... More of this please. So, when we hold up the sign of Stress. We get more stress. When we hold up the sign of scatteredness... Boom... life fragments even more. Oof! (as my daughters like to say.) But, that doesn't mean we're part of a vicious cycle of momentum, which is uncontrollably barreling down the hill of each day. Rather, we simply need to find that inner pause button, Connect, and ease up on the story.... to allow one of relief to start to build new momentum. Over at the Spiritually Aware Parenting Community, I've been offering these simple tools to feel connection with You again. Because when you can connect to the deeper version of YOU, everything else seems to fall into place. Well, she's been at high school for 3 days and already it's time to have that talk.
How to find the space and mindfulness practice to keep connected to Who You Really Are when you are in chaos. (If you thought I meant a different talk I can assure you that all took place awhile back... but even in that discussion staying true to yourself and who you want to be has been the theme.) My daughter loved her first few days at our local high school. She manifested courses she likes, which are easy and fun. She has meant some great friends already, she's surprised at her own confidence and ability to talk to groups. She feels like herself. But then she's coming home, and collapsing into bed. Exhausted. When 9/11 hit I was in Glastonbury, UK having been pulled to visit there on a spiritual quest.
Spirit had called me and I had answered. No, really. I had been called. I had found myself in the UK quite suddenly having said I was going out of the blue. The plan was barely out of my mouth when the money showed up by chance. So, for September 2001, I was backpacking, writing a novel and researching a spiritual documentary program for youth I was developing for Channel 5 in the UK, it was called "Spirit in My Suitcase." I’d traveled down to Cornwall only to be spiritually "told" in the middle of the night, get to Glastonbury on the 7am bus. When your only focus is connection and spiritually aware living... things like that happen. I’d gotten in the habit of listening to that calling. So onto the bus I jumped.  I was visiting Brene Brown's site today and I found this image that was available as a download for your desktop. I quickly downloaded it and personalized my home screen with it... and I had to share it with you as well.
Because this... this is a powerful statement. This weekend was the start of JULY! How did that happen? And while we here in Nova Scotia celebrated Canada Day, and all of my friends and neighbors in the states are looking forward to July 4th... the truth is we all know that summer has officially arrived. And with that, we start making plans for beach days, holidays, playdays, sunbathing days, parkdates, picnics... We get our long sheets of paper out and start with the lists... the agendas out to figure out how to fit it all in, around our businesses, our work and our children's routine so they have stability. We feel the summer start to slip away and it's not even begun. And that very feeling, is what I want to discuss with you today. I read the other day a very poignant post that someone had written. It said "We have approximately 18 summers to enjoy with our children. Make this one count." Ouch. But as my children grow older, I happen to know this hits too close to home. So, today my quest, my Summer mission, is to offer you some tools and opportunities that will help you drop the To-Do list, Stop in your tracks... Rest your mind, Nurture your Spirit and Play... with your children and your own inner self.  Winnie the Pooh, on a hunt for huffalumps and woozles, walks around in a tree following tracks in the snow. The prints keep multiplying as he walks around, unable to catch up with the creature.
They multiply again when Piglet joins him. Pooh and Piglet get quite worried when they start to see the large amount of tracks that must be made by “ferocious” animals chasing them. Until Christopher Robin sets the story straight. The tracks were made by Pooh and Piglet themselves. We can all be pursuing something that’s within us all along. And we can all be scared of What’s Out there, so forget to recognize it in the first place, In other words. In every step of the journey, you have arrived. I was raised with the idea of a ladder. That life was about learning how to “be good” and that we often failed. This week we finally put our tree up and it was so exciting to see how our three children really dove into it this year.
At the same time, I had to do a little bit of inner work to really release the outcome and allow it to flow. You see, I have this box of Christmas decorations which we’ve been lumbering around with us for the past 15 years. They’ve been carefully gathered and collected over our family’s childhood. Many of them were bought in the UK from when we lived over there when our girls were small. There are the few things that were gifted to us during a particularly broke time. There’s even a small angel decoration that I made for my husband’s and my first Christmas together. (We were “in-between” countries, not knowing where to settle so not really wanting to buy a lot of things. We had a small apartment and at the last moment I decided we needed to decorate for Christmas after all. The little angel’s face was done with embroidery thread and her body was ribbon found in the bottom of a sewing basket. Her head was literally the blower of a bubble bottle, covered in material. Every year I hang her on the tree with fondness.) Over the years our box of decorations has been bashed around as it traveled from place to place with us. Not only that, many a time I’ve stressed about its wellbeing, begging my husband to do check ins on its care. There was the couple of Christmases it had been left in storage and I would mourn the little angel or special trinkets that wouldn’t be on the tree that year. There’s even been late night panic attacks where I’ve planned fire escapes and wondered how to get that box of decorations out from wherever it was stored. At a certain point I’ve had to ask the magic question of “why?” Why? Why was a box of decorations so important? |
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