It’s hard to understand life in the moment, especially the tough moments. When I look back on my hard times, I know now why each of them happened. This is why reflection is so important, why it helps to move on from and let go of any negativity as soon as possible. It’ll all come out in the wash and the wash is time. Time doesn’t heal all wounds but it certainly makes sense of them so that we can wear the scars proudly. Peace is just up ahead around the bend. Move toward it.
Category: peace
Beautiful: Relish the Lull
“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” ~ Ram Dass
The days just before the New Year are magical and unique. They give us a lull to look back, be where we are, and look ahead all at the same time. Generally they’re quiet – a good time to catch up with friends, organize, and rest. It’s a time of Thanksgiving and a time tailor-made for imagining and crafting the life we want as the calendar turns over. Enjoy it.
Beautiful: On the Third Day of Christmas, Let There Be More Peace
“Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.” ~ Unkown.
So much of our history has been about wars of all shapes and sizes. Conflict. People who lived and fought and died for ideals. History is a wonderful teacher but it need not define the future. We can change within our own hearts to generate change in the world. It is often said that in times of peace, we should be prepared for war. I disagree. We generate what we prepare for and I hope we are always prepared for peace, that we can be willing to accept peace, and work for ways to foster and build it. Peace within our own heart, with our past, and with others. In a world that is so full of violence and discord, I believe that peace is the surest and best way forward on all paths.
This post is part of the “Let there be…” consecutive series of Christmas wishes.
Beautiful: My LA Adventure Taught Me to Be a Tree in Winter
“I realize there’s something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they’re experts at letting things go.” ~ Jeffrey McDaniel
My LA adventure is drawing to a close. The last few weeks have been a kind of magical transformation for me. I stopped trying to force my experience here and just let it be whatever it wanted to be. It was both liberating and invigorating. I could delight in the hazy sunshine and the gorgeous trees and the cool air without asking anything of them, knowing that they ask nothing of me except to be seen, felt, and experienced.
It’s not in my nature to stop inquiring, to stop digging, but it’s kind of lovely once in a while to take the advice of John Lennon and Paul McCartney and let it be, knowing there will be an answer. Trusting that somewhere along the line that answer will rise up when it’s good and ready. The more we let go, the easier it is for that answer to rise. Sometimes the very best thing we can do is just stop, take ourselves out of the equation, and wait.
It takes nerve to wait. We worry that we’re wasting time, our most precious and irreplaceable resource. Here in LA I found that in a calm mind resides every answer we need. They’re there all along – our only job is to get out of the way and listen. Let the answers rise. They always do.
Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but I’m going to try my best to bring a little Los Angeles back with me. In the hustle and bustle of New York City’s streets, I hope you’ll be able to spot me as the calm in the middle of the storm, leaving a wake of peace everywhere I go. New York is where I’m needed. That’s where I’ve got something to give.
Thanks, LA, for taking me under your wing and for teaching me more about me than I ever thought possible. I’ll never forget you.
Leap: For the Happiness of Others
“One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: The only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.” ~ William Carlos Williams, American poet and physician
In this season of gift giving and buying, the idea of “it is better to give than receive” runs through my mind. The follow-up to this idea is “it’s best to give and to receive because when you receive, you give someone else the opportunity to give.”
For many of us, receiving is difficult. In order to fully receive, we need to leave our hearts open. We must let ourselves be vulnerable. On occasion, we receive from others because we have asked for help and support – another tall order for many of us who take pride in our independence and strength.
I am someone who once believed I was an island. I often felt like one not because I wanted to, but because I needed that toughness, that independence, to get through my days. It’s not true anymore, though old habits die hard. Every once in a great while, I still catch myself closing off at exactly the moment when I should remain the most open and receptive. I reverse course quickly but it’s not without effort.
If this sounds familiar, here’s what’s helped me: I know the joy I feel when I serve others. It brings a deep peace and purpose to my actions. It’s one of the very best feelings that I know and I try to bring it into my life every day, even several times a day if I can swing it. I want everyone to share in this feeling, to get that same sense of giddy happiness that comes from giving to others. Every giver needs a receiver.
It’s wonderful to be an angel to someone, to provide them with exactly what they need at exactly the moment that they need it. But angels come in many different forms. Sometimes, to be angel to someone else you need to be able to receive what they have to give, what they have to offer. Your sincere smile and thank you is exactly what they need to feel valued, appreciated, and useful. And we all want to feel useful. We all want to feel like we matter.
This holiday season you only need one recipe to feel the happiness that we all deserve: let others matter. Give and receive in equal quantities. Play both roles. Appreciate others and allow others to appreciate you. Love and be loved.
Leap: The Meaning of Stillness
“Being still does not mean don’t move. It means move in peace.” ~ E’yen A. Gardner
So often, especially in yoga, we think stillness means that we must not think or act. We are told that stillness is the gateway toward some sense of enlightenment and connectedness. Truthfully, we can never be fully still. Air will move through our lungs, blood will pump through our veins, and impulses will travel through our nervous system. We are beings of movement.
Stillness is steadiness. It helps us move with intention, purpose, and confidence. When we go somewhere, we go with our whole heart. And once we know the feeling of traveling and moving in this way, then we know that deep peace that no outside circumstance can disrupt.
In stillness, we show up in the world as an open vessel, allowing the energy and knowledge around us to pour into us. We are able to parse what matters and what doesn’t with efficiency, kindness, and the deep wisdom that we are connected to everyone and everything around us.
In stillness there is no separation between us and our environment. Instead, it all weaves together and we begin to find the ways in which we can affect its rhythm and path. Suddenly, as the world converges in stillness, we recognize just how great an impact we can have.
Leap: You Already Have What You Seek
“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” ~ Joseph Campbell
In the hot, hot city last week, it was tough to keep our spirits up when all we wanted to do was lie down. In all of my yoga classes last week, the teachers emphasized balance. With the heat outside, we needed to take our practice slowly and with ease. Conversely when it’s cold outside, we tend to have practices that are more heating. We show up on the mat offering the practice that helps us to be in harmony with our nature and the Nature around us.
This same principle applies off the mat as well. When we find ourselves in a lethargic state, best to listen for what’s going on, and then give ourselves whatever gift we need to feel re-energized. When we find ourselves anxious, nervous, or out-of-sorts, we need to provide ourselves with comfort and security.
And here’s the best part: whatever we need at any moment can be found in the breath. As long as we are breathing, we have the ability to come back to balance. Balance is not a far-off goal; it’s a choice and we make it in every moment.
Right now, we have everything we need.
Leap: Google Teaches Us How to Create World Peace and Other Circumstances of Goodness
The New York Times ran a story over the weekend about Google’s efforts to increase mindfulness among its employees. The story, Ok, Google, Take a Deep Breath, featured Chade-Meng Tan (Meng), an engineer at Google and the creator of the Google team course, “Search Inside Yourself.” I clicked the link to watch a sample class on YouTube and I was both disappointed and annoyed.
Meng explains that he wanted to see a dramatic shift in world towards peace. Given the company’s policy to let all employees work on personal areas of research for a certain percentage of their work hours, Meng decided that the best investment of his time would come from figuring out how to generate world peace. It’s an insightful idea. What I hated about it was his conclusion that to get individuals and companies to care about world peace, we have to help them understand what’s in it for them. Meng went on to explain that no one is going to create peace just because it’s a good thing for society. They have to get something out of it on a personal level before they care about peace. We need to tap into people’s individual needs that make the objective of world peace an inevitable by-product.
Gross.
I hate that conclusion. Is that what we’ve amounted to? A collection of 6 billion bodies who only care about themselves? I stewed on that as I ate my lunch, determined to prove that though Meng may be a very bright engineer, his conclusion on how to bring about peace was unfounded.
I couldn’t. I got more annoyed.
Thankfully, my post from yesterday on the value of having our personal philosophies unsettled was still top of mind. Why did Meng’s conclusion, one that I had a hard time refuting, bother me so much and what could I learn from it? Could I apply it to my own work? Was I already subconsciously already applying it to my own work?
A New York Times column that Thomas Friedman wrote for after 9/11. In it he explained that, “If you don’t visit a bad neighborhood, it will visit you. “ In other words, get out there and do something that’s good for you and good for others. The trick we have to benefit individually as much as we do collectively in order to get community efforts and acts of goodwill to be sustainable.
Environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility really took off when companies realized they could benefit financially and in terms of customer and employee loyalty. In these efforts, the win-win is what tipped the scales. We are beginning to see these same seeds planted in healthcare. Our current healthcare system is no longer sustainable, so we are beginning to see more emphasis on preventative health measures that give people a way to be well before they ever get sick. The same is true in education. We are beginning to see a proliferation of new channels for learning because entrepreneurs realized that they could profit from disrupting the traditional education system.
In all these examples, the answer to the question “what’s in it for me?” came into balance with the answer to the question “why is this good for society?” We need both side of the equation to really make an impact. Thanks, Meng, for stating the cold, hard facts, for not letting us let ourselves off the hook, and for showing us that we can make a positive impact on humanity by truly understanding humanity.
Incidentally, Fast Company ran an article this week with a similar conclusion, stated a little bit more diplomatically. Another solid, if philosophically unsettling, read. 3 Tips for Making an Abstract Idea Relatable to Everyone, Not Just Geeks.
Beginning: Writing Out and Learning from the Ugly Parts of My Experience
We run from the imperfect. We want everything to be flawless. We praise beauty; we seek it out; we convince ourselves that we can’t live without it. Ruin is something we have come to dread. To feel ruined it to feel busted up, disappointed, and taken advantage of. We desperately cling to the perfect – in ourselves, in others, in a moment of time. We try to rush through ruin as quickly as possible, and with closed eyes. By running from ruin we are missing so many opportunities for growth and personal evolution.
Dancing with our disappointment
I know this dance well. I have been running from ruin and toward perfection for many, many years. Brian calls this my intricate skill of “maximize this, minimize that.” In other words, I make the most of the good things and try very hard to ignore the bad things, hoping that those bad things will just magically go away. For the record, they don’t. They accumulate until their collective voice is so loud that they must be reckoned with in one way or another.
We can learn a lot from sadness if we’re willing to sit with it
I received a lot of positive feedback from my last two posts – the first about how my dad taught me that the only advice we can take is our own and the second about how a chance encounter with an ex taught me about feeling and transcending anger. So much so, that I’ve decided to take my writing in a very personal direction. I’m at a point in my story where some previously disjointed pieces are starting to fit together in a very powerful way. Steve Jobs said that, “We can’t expect to understand our lives living forward, but only by looking back.” That’s why reflection is so important, why writing it all down and sharing it is critical to our own understanding. All burdens can be borne if we can put them into a story.
Some of the pieces of my story are jagged and uncomfortable and some of them are smoothly crafted. Somehow, they’re all finding a way to come together and co-exist side-by-side, not stealing the limelight from one another, but sharing in it equally. It’s quite a surprise, even though I’ve been working on this very hope for such a long time. I never thought I’d realize it, and certainly not so early on in my life. And while this surprise is of tremendous benefit to me, I want it to benefit you, too, because I want you to have the same experience of holding up a mirror to the parts of you, of others, and of your experience to see that the good, the bad, and the ugly are all extraordinary teachers.
For a long time I vilified my dad, and many of those reasons were justifiable. What I shunned for too long were all of the lessons he taught me, albeit in a manner that I would never wish on anyone else. He was a cold, austere, sad man, and my family bore the brunt of that for a long time. What I didn’t know as a teenager, what there was no way for me to know, was that his behaviors and his personal history that caused those behaviors, would give me the tools I need to do the work I was meant to do with Compass Yoga.
This is about honoring our whole self, not about making lemonade
And this is not some pathetic attempt by a hopeful gal to make lemonade out of lemons, to make the most of what she’s got even if that isn’t much at all. It’s about honoring every part of our past; it’s about recognizing that in every moment, in every experience, there is a very deliberate, necessary teaching that sets us up to live our dharma, our path. We need the painful, sad parts of our past just as much as we need the joy and light. And I would argue that we need them in equal measure. The poetic Dolly Parton is famous for saying, “The way I see it, if you want rainbows then you gotta put up with the rain.” Truer words were never spoken.
So here in my promise to you: you will learn about my own personal story, layer by layer, piece by piece, even the ugly parts. Especially the ugly parts. It will be revealed in as thoughtful and sacred a manner as I can muster, and you will eventually see the complete picture. None of it will be gratuitous and all of it is intended so that you can benefit from these two learnings:
1.) where and what we come from has every bit to do with who we eventually become
and even more importantly,
2.) the depth of our roots does not determine the spread of our wings. We can fly as high as we choose to fly regardless of how far down we find ourselves at any point in time. It’s all based on our will to find our way. And I intend to find mine.
Beginning: Preparing for Peace in a Time of War
With Osama bin Laden now gone, we can finally turn our sights to preparing for peace. To be sure the war is not over, not by a long shot. As good as it feels to celebrate the end of Bin Laden’s reign, there are still too many others who wish to do us harm. We still need to remain vigilant, on guard, and careful. That, sadly, may never change.
What we can do is turn our sights toward our sights toward the Middle East and begin to truly rebuild relations. Justice has been served, and with justice comes the beginning of the healing process. Though we have been celebrating the end of bin Laden here for over 24 hours, we must remember that many people in the Middle East, many Muslim Americans are also celebrating. They too can begin healing – this war has happened to them, too, and that was not of their choosing. It was the choosing of a vicious, sick man who thankfully is no longer among us.
My sister, Weez, put up a Facebook status yesterday that really struck me as the most beautiful set of words I heard about the situation and our emotions surrounding it:
May 1st Prayer
Now I lay me down to sleep
one less terrorist this world does keep
with all my heart I give my thanks
to those in uniform regardless of ranks
You serve our country and serve it well
with humble hearts your stories tell
so as I rest my weary eyes
while freedom rings our flag still flies
You give your all, do what you must
with God we live and in God we trust
Amen
Christa Avampato 