The Magic of Meditation

I always tell myself I'm going to start meditating, then I do, but I only keep it up for about a month or so before other things become more attractive. Like running or sleeping. I've read a lot about meditation, and I know that physiologically it makes a difference to how our bodies process stress hormones, how our blood moves, and how our bodies function in general.

But since I'm not a meditator, how can I access the kinds of things I want from meditating, without meditating? What do I want to feel? How do I want to change my body and my mind? What's my goal?

My goal is inner peace. My goal is world peace. My goal is a healthier body. My goal is a better temperament. My goal is a better birth experience for women. My goal is to be a better person. My goal is to be the best ......

Hold it right there! "working on yourself", having a "goal" in terms of self-discovery or self-care, or healing from trauma or whatever... these are not useful. Why are we starting at a place where we are intrinsically broken? Why don't we start from that place where we are whole? If you can sit with yourself for one minute and be grateful for ... grateful for just being. For the little things that may give you pleasure in the here and now, then that is good. And that's all it is.

Life is made up of tiny drops in the ocean. Do something, it will have effects. Don't do another thing, that will have effects too. I try to experience that physiological state that I imagine meditating achieves when I lie in bed. I move my consciousness through my body and check where little glitches might be, and then I fall asleep. It's when I'm running that I can free my mind. When I run my goals disappear. I run to get lost. I run to lose mySelf. I run to run.

Home Can Be A Tower

I'm thinking a lot about home, and what home means to us. We moved our family to a medieval tower in 1988: it was the beginning of a long series of adventures, some cool and exciting, others devastating and dangerous. I pulled the Tower card this morning for my reading, which can mean change in a fundamental way. It can mean the destruction of one home and the creation of another. It can signal the breaking down of old habits and patterns to make way for new: an eruption, a revolution.

I work alongside women who are thinking deeply about how they want to give birth. Most of them want to birth at home, and many of them do. Last week, one of the women I have been working with over the summer gave birth at home, peacefully, in her place, with her partner alongside her. She came back to the city from abroad because she felt the need to give birth "at home". She didn't just mean in her own apartment, on her own bed. She meant "in her home". She missed the smells of her city; the bicycles; the streets and trees of the place she knew - she knows - as her own home.

When I am invited to accompany a woman during her reproductive experience, whether that is pregnancy, birth, miscarriage, abortion, infertility experiences, or the decision whether or not to have children, I try to facilitate a way that she can work her way back to her "home". We all have a centre place, a home, that we need to be able to return to. When we can't return, we get lost. We get lost in other peoples' needs and desires. We get lost in addictions. We get lost in our jobs. We get lost in cleaning up. We get lost in the search for money or new things. We get lost and then the Hungry Ghost finds us and we feel empty all the time, and hungry, and we don't even know what we are hungry for. But the answer is, we're missing our Home.

I've never felt I had a geographic home. I moved from one continent to the next all my life: Africa, North America, Europe. I love the Canadian Rockies. I feel at home when I'm on a trail. I love the desert. Give me temperatures at body temp or higher, and I'm happy. Then again, I love the challenge of a 20 k run in 20 below zero. 

But I wouldn't say I have a home, like, I don't feel "at home" anywhere. I am at home when I'm with any number of my five children and their spouses. I'm at home when I'm running a long distance. I'm at home ... when I'm on a plane, looking down at my planet.

I listen with awe to people who speak of missing their home, how they miss the taste of a place, or the feeling of the wind on their faces in their home place. My journey is different: because I've never felt the geographic pull of home, I seek to find my centre, and I accompany others on their own journeys to their centres. When a woman is birthing in her centre, she is birthing at home. When she gives birth in her power, at the centre of the event, she has found her home. My job is to navigate with her so she can find the path home. Sometimes there are huge prickly trees in front of the entranceway. Sometimes her home is very small, so small she can trip on it at night. Sometimes she needs to lose something in order to find her home. Sometimes she needs to let go of one place to journey to the other.

Peace.

Seek Peace

It is the time of year when a lot of people are thinking about the future: the darkest time of the year, in the northern hemisphere, and the coldest. I, for one, am hoping that in 2020 I can be a better person and I hope my friends and family stay healthy and get joy during this coming year.

I just started my new agenda for 2020. Passion Planner is my favourite agenda: it helps keep me focused, lets me multitask and still be organized, and I can write all my dreams, hopes and ideas in it and keep everything in one place.

Last Passion Planner (was in 2017, I skipped a year and feel I got disorganized), my main goal was to build up my cafe. I wanted to get to a place where I could make a living from it, instead of working for free and watching every penny. I had a secondary goal for 2018, to run a marathon. I achieved both of those goals that year and felt very proud.

This year, I have a few goals for 2020. I have pretty specific goals for my cafe. I want to grow my retreat project, WorkInProgress Retreats. I want to run a marathon in May, and my first trail race in October.

But the goal that I realized was my most important one for the start of this new year was "regain and retain my inner peace". I lost my centre this past year, and I'm not sure why. Partly from overwork, and a sense of fatigue. Partly from feeling like my "good works" - the projects I have put hours and hours of my life into - are such a tiny drop in the ocean ... it's almost not worth it. Partly from my intense sense of disillusion and concern for the political and social climate we live in. Anyway, my centre walked away, and I want to run after it.

One of the most interesting things about getting old in this culture is that there isn't a lot of value placed on having lived on the planet for a long time. In fact, the general feeling I get (apart from the lovely young people who offer me their seats on the metro) is that when you're over 60 you gain a certain stupidity, a certain slowness of mind and dullness of brain.

And, the fact is, my body is changing. So is my mind, and my heart. In fact, I am experience this change as much more radical than several of my previous ones. I slid into pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and child-raising like a fish into water (well, giving birth was tough...). I felt myself, I was alive and centred in my skin. Adolescence, on the other hand, was awful. I was already shy, I spoke with an accent, my hair was frizzy, I had crooked teeth, and I was smart ... AND two years younger than my classmates. I didn't feel at home in my skin for a long time. Poetry helped, and copious amounts of beer and other mood stabilizers.

Now I feel the same. Where did this frizzy grey hair come from? Why do I look so old in the mirror? How did my body get shorter? My knuckles are bumpy. I have arthritis in my knees.
This is not rational stuff: I know I am incredibly lucky to be as healthy as I am. I run marathons, for God's sake. But it feels like adolescence, all over again. And the difference is, this time I'm older and wiser. And I know how to regain my inner peace, and retain it.

So, a list for the coming year:

run every day, even if it's just a mile with the dog
be master of my devices
do a meditation retreat in 2020
say no if I want to (if it's not a big deal)
be kind
take proper care of myself
turn away from evil and do good
seek peace and pursue it
don't nag the kids
lower expectations
have lots of parties

I'll be letting you know how it goes. In the meantime, stay well everyone, keep joy, be kind, do good.

Dreamchasing Trails

In 2003 my winter blues reached a breaking point and we decided to leave the city for the summer, use our savings to buy a piece of land in Italy, and start building. This is what we bought, the second year after that - when we first bought it, you couldn't even see the house because everything was so covered in greenery.

But I knew when I first stepped out of the car and breathed the clear air, and looked down into the valley and saw this:

that I was as home as I would ever be. Time passed and over the summers we made the house beautiful. Then we started working on the barn:

This fine structure is a drystone construction, with high beams and rafters, and an original thatched roof that had been covered with corrugated metal at some point. It housed animals, shepherds, resistance fighters, snakes, squirrels and other assorted creatures. We found in it many wine bottles, the old blown glass kind wrapped in straw, two army helmets (one German, one American..), lots of old shoes and garbage, and some religious postcards.

A few years ago we started work on it. I wanted to do some upper body work that summer, so I figured a good start would be hauling 20 cubic meters of dirt from where it was down to another terrace. After the dirt was hauled away, we started building a retaining wall or two,

And we ended up with these pretty terraces.

This summer we have to redo the roof. It's gotta be done. If we don't do it, it will fall in. Not a good idea. So, we have to take it down, remove the beams, then make a new roof. Don't worry, I'm not the master builder. There is actually someone in the picture who knows what he's doing. But I have built a couple of roofs with him, so I'm pretty handy with a cement mixer and all that.

This place contains some of my dreams. Not all of them, because I'm not that rooted in place. But I have plans to create a space up on the mountain where people can come and retreat. They can come and run, eat, think, create. Or just play nutball, which is played with unripe walnuts and a stick.

What I love to do there is to run on the trails. I have been running in the mountains since I was young. I love the feeling of my breath, my legs, I love taking in the air and the sights, the sound of my feet on the ground...

But you don't have to run. You can slowly walk up the hill, to the abandoned village, then take a left and go to the fixed-up house, or follow the road past the evergreen grove and past the house and then follow the bend which takes you up further, where there are often deer, and the best St John's Wort on the mountain. Then straight, and up and up and up, until you reach the logging patch, and then you go further and further and further, up and up, until you reach the ridge where you can look down - you are at about 1000 m above sea level now .... and running this trail is such a pleasure. You're sweaty and breathing hard. All around you is green, peace, and the sound of the mountain's breath. 

Life on the mountain is good. It's understood that you mind your own business. The road is treacherous and not for the weak-hearted. Occasionally a hiker passes by, or a cyclist, or a Scout. Often lost. It's quiet at night, and sometimes the whole mountain is lost in a cloud and the wind howls up from the valley.

There are buzzards in the sky, cuckoos in the spring; wild boar, deer, badgers, porcupines, snakes, lizards, all sort of bugs, honey bees... scorpions ... wild flowers everywhere, cherries, plums, apples, medicinal herbs of all varieties, mushrooms poisonous and otherwise. Nature is present, and thriving, as it does.

The green heals my soul. Running the trails on my mountain, I find peace from the human world, where cowardice and selfishness are fast becoming desirable attributes. Wordsworth wrote over 100 years ago:

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours"

Yes, we are getting and spending, and wasting ourselves. We imagine that busyness is constructive and useful, but it's not. It is much better to be consciously not busy; to have time to look around at the world, and to look deep inside yourself.

Don't be too busy to go for a run.
Don't be too busy to lend a hand to someone in need, even if it's inconvenient.
Don't be too busy to spend time with your child.
Don't be too busy to spend time with your lover.
Don't be too busy to give a friend some time.
Don't be too busy to cook supper, to eat with others, to feed yourself.
Don't be too busy to make the world a better place.
Don't be too busy to do hard things. It is the stuff of life, and it centers us in this marvellous world.

When the S!*@*#t Hits the Fan (and you get splashed)

Midwives have a kind of cute expression for it. "Meconium happens." Meconium is the sterile black sticky poop that babies have in their guts until they are about 3 or 4 days old. Some babies poop it out in the womb (not great). Others spray it all over everyone when they're being born.

I'm not big on euphemisms, generally. Let's talk it out and use the correct language, ya? But sometimes, you just feel like you've been crapped on.

Yip, and you're there, underneath the working parts, wishing you were on vacation. So, what to do? What do you do when someone poops their stuff out on you?

Unfortunately, this tends to happen more frequently when you are a caring person. I don't know why. The poor sod who has some stuff to work out doesn't really understand what's going on and they often regret their misdeed afterwards: "I don't know what came over me". Or they are so confused they think the whole episode is your fault: "Well you know I am sensitive about ... blah blah." We can theorize forever about what makes people tick, or explode. But ...

This kind of thinking is EXACTLY the opposite of what you should be doing. It's not about that other person. It's not about Frank Zappa, or whoever it was that just pooped on you. Imagine a newborn baby, slippery and new, who just happens to spurt meconium all over your clothes, face and .... everywhere. You don't blame the baby! Right?

How can we effectively live through the experience of being dumped on? First of all, this advice is NOT for people who are being physically attacked or threatened. I am talking about emotional dumps that make you feel bad, for an hour, a day or a year.

1. If it's something that happens over and over again with one person, you need to take a good look at the relationship and figure out what you're involved with. What is it inside you that needs that dynamic? Do you need to end the relationship?

2. If you've decided to continue a relationship, despite the occasional dump, you need to understand the emotional activity inside yourself when someone takes a dump on you. We react in two ways, and both ways involve a mental loop that keep repeating inside your head. Some of us turn the hate inside, and go into "poor me" mode, remembering ancient and not-so-ancient hurts, reminding ourselves of all the times someone wasn't nice to us, listening to that voice inside our head that says: "I hate you because you are a loser". Harsh.
Others react with anger, and take their anger out on anyone and anything around them. "How dare you do this me! I'm gonna hurt you bad, and also you, asshole, because you can't drive worth shit!"

Let's get to some fundamentals here: Peace. Love. Most of us want inner peace, and everyone wants love. So, how to get there? Best to avoid emotional road accidents. Like the midwives say, meconium happens. Really bad meconium can happen, stuff we have no control over. The least we can do, then, is regain some control over the things we CAN control. And we can start with our reactions.

Phase One: Person does an emotional dump on you. Breathe.

Phase Two: Distance yourself.

This is their poop. If you can't distance physically without making it worse, then go away emotionally. Be mindful. Feel your body. Let go of tension in your muscles. Breathe.

Phase Three: Disconnect the loop.

Remember, the other person is doing something, not you. Don't react. If the loop starts, go back to your breath. Feel your body. Breathe.

Phase Four: If you can, connect with the compassion inside you.

Look at the person who is having a fuss. Shine your love on them. Don't say anything, and don't get a sucky look on your face. Just sit with compassion and love. Breathe.

Phase Five: Get on with your life.

Do something physical. Yes, go for a run! Maybe take a break from the dumpster, if you can and you feel it is necessary. Have some fun. Be aware the looping can start at any time! Breathe.

Do Not:

1. Explain. No reason to! You do what you need to do. No need to rationalize, describe, justify.

2. Give advice. The person does not need your unsolicited advice. You can only protect yourself from damage if you fortify your own emotional immune system (using breath, mindfulness, attention to your body and by avoiding toxic activities like explanation, bad tape loops, and self-pity).

3. Take yourself too seriously. 

 

You can change the world! 

 

One good habit at a time. Join the fun side! Be mindful, be compassionate, be loving and kind. But don't make a comfy house for yourself underneath Frankie's toilet, or you're in for a world of pain. 

International Women's Day

This International Women's day, I would like to hand a mimosa branch to each and every one of the people I love.

This day is about women, about peace, strength, the power of love. 

We are not there yet, but I dream of a world where women can give birth with respect and honor; where we can all walk wherever we want whenever we want, a world where there is no hate, no war, no hunger.

"Se non ora, quando?"

If not now, when?

Please go out today and do one thing that will help bring peace.

Never Give Up

Never give up

no matter what is going on
Never give up
Develop the heart
Too much energy in your country is spent
developing the mind
instead of the heart
Develop the heart
Be compassionate
Not just to your friends
but to everyone
Be compassionate
Work for peace
in your heart and in the world
Work for peace
and I say again
Never give up
No matter what is happening
No matter what is going on around you
Never give up

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet