Mindfulness
Migration & Knowing When to Leave: Surrender into Certainty
Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash
“It is always important to know when something has reached its end.
Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters…
what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.”
~~ Paulo Coelho
Greetings to all my precious people, my fellow travelers,
You’ve been standing at doorways for three weeks now. This week, we walk through one.
Overhead, the geese aren’t practicing formation anymore. They’re gone — or going. Nobody called a meeting. No committee reviewed the data on when, exactly, to leave. Something in them simply knew, the way it has known for longer than any of our calendars have existed, and they went.
I want to be honest about something most migration stories skip past: knowing when to leave and knowing where to go are not the same knowing. Geese have both, wired in together. We rarely get both at once. Usually we get the first — a restlessness, a door that’s suddenly, undeniably closed, a chapter that has plainly ended even if we can’t yet see the next one’s title. Coelho’s line isn’t really about destinations. It’s about having the courage to close the circle before you know what the next one looks like. continue reading
The Harvest and The Hinge: Surrender into Certainty
“Most experiences are unsayable;
they come to fullness
in a realm that words do not inhabit.”
~~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Greetings to all my precious people,
There are some things I’ve been sitting with lately that don’t really fit into words, which is, I think, exactly what Rilke meant. But I’m going to try anyway, because it’s been coming up again and again in conversations with my patients, and I don’t want to keep it to myself.
Before you were you, there was an errant sperm and egg, colliding. And then — with no coach yelling instructions, no manual, no one standing over the process telling it what to do — that collision replicated itself, over and over, in the most intricate and masterful sequence imaginable, until nearly ten months later, an entirely unique being took form and opened its eyes. That is happening right now, in bodies all over the world, and it has been happening since the beginning of everything. We almost never talk about it. We need to talk about it more. continue reading
The Sacred Pause: Surrender to Certainty
Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash
This week we pause.
25 years ago, September 11 was a sunny Tuesday with a brilliant blue sky. It seemed a day like many others: a return to school, a return to work after the Labor Day weekend, a certainty to the air, the schedule, the path to the season of Autumn. But on that day certainty broke, publicly and completely — the ground everyone stood on, the buildings people worked in, gone in real time. But what came after is where our theme gets its proof: the certainty that did show up that day wasn’t about answers to the questions, and it surely wasn’t shelter from the storm. It was people. continue reading
Late Summer: The Gifts of The Fifth Season
Greetings to all my precious people!
There’s a particular quality to these first days of September — nothing dramatic yet, nothing you could point to and say there, that’s the change. Just a cooler edge to the morning air. A slant of light that wasn’t there last week. Somewhere overhead, geese are beginning to practice their formation, long before they actually need it.
We are standing at a threshold. And thresholds ask something of us that the wide-open seasons don’t: they ask us to trust a turning we cannot yet fully see. continue reading
Your Healing Was **Never** Just About You
Photo by Dana Sarsenbekova on Unsplash
“In the shelter of each other, the people live.”
(Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine)
~~ Irish proverb
Greetings to all my precious people!!
Longtime readers will remember The C.O.A.C.H. Method I return to again and again — Curiosity, Optimism, Awareness, Courage, and Hope & Healing. (New here? Welcome. You’ve arrived right where you need to be.) Today I want to follow that path one step further than we usually go — past your own healing, to the quiet truth that so many of you have been sensing lately:
Your healing journey was never just about you. continue reading
