Leap with Love

Let 2024 be the year we lead with love!

What is love? 

Love is vulnerable, warm, compassionate, fierce, tender, caring, joyful, harmonious and courageous. Love is a state of being, choice, and action. If we can open ourselves up and even take a leap, love can lead us through anything, especially seemingly dark and fearful experiences, with innate wisdom, equanimity, and grace. 

Love is not defensive but reciprocal. 

Love is energy that needs to flow, move, and expand. It is not meant to be compressed, compartmentalized, or cut off. The flow is in giving and receiving love in all that we experience - the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. 

When faced with uncertainty, scarcity, cruelty, loneliness, overwhelm, and other big challenges both personally and with the collective, we can default to old survival, coping mechanisms that can be restrictive and reactive and can cause more harm than good. This instinctual attempt to protect ourselves can actually inhibit an ancient intuitive flow by reactively pushing, clinging, people-pleasing, fighting, fleeing, or freezing up. 

With patience, humility, and practice, we can learn to lean into a loving awareness and leap into the magic of this mysterious life with love as our guide. 

What if we lived by the notion that there is no separation from one another or our ancestors? What if we lived this life as if everything is connected? Everything! How would we meet life on life’s terms from this place of connection? The older I get the more lived experiences I have that make it evident how connected we are and not alone. But it is how we relate to life, whatever we are experiencing, that determines if we are disconnecting from or connecting to this incredible gift of being present, alive, and having a sense of belonging. 

Fearful beliefs and thoughts give us the illusion of being disconnected from anything, including our whole selves. Healthy fear is helpful when it alerts us to protect and defend ourselves in times of immediate threat. But excessive fearfulness is misleading when it divides, diminishes, demonizes, catastrophizes, and separates us from one another, ourselves, and beyond. 

What if we took a vulnerable risk and let love lead the way by facing everything with compassionate curiosity instead of criticizing or condemning what we are experiencing? By seeing life through a kind and caring lens of loving awareness, our perceptions can begin to shift out of a distorted view of separation and excessive threat no matter what the experience may be. Coming from this stance of awareness, we can choose how to respond to our experiences and see with spaciousness and clarity while living from an intuitive place that connects and empowers. This can allow us to feel safer and steadier and live in a graceful flow with life regardless of conditions and circumstances that we feel we can't control or want. 

This isn't necessarily an easy process nor is it supposed to be. There will be times that we will come across obstacles where we will feel frozen with fear or hot to fight or flee. This doesn't mean we are doing something wrong or there is something "wrong" with us. Collectively, we all have early historical experiences that were overwhelming enough on some level that we went into reactive coping strategies to simply survive because we didn't have the resources, support, or maturity to do it differently. This is part of being human. We also inherit ancestral conditioning that is meant to be protective and is passed down through generations whether we signed up for it or not. This is part of our humanity. 

The good news is we don't have to stay in these habitual, defensive and reactive patterns. We can see them as signals that we need to go deeper, open up, reach out, and love more. With awareness and practice, we can take contrary action to old defensive mechanisms when feeling anxious, stuck, or overwhelmed and learn to blindly leap into more of an unknown way of being with a courageous heart. We can learn to intuitively draw on the wisdom and resiliency that we carry within us by acknowledging our ancestors who walked through so much that allowed us to be here now. We can develop healthier strategies and boundaries that honor our true values and essence. And we are not meant to do this alone. We are social creatures and beings that are meant to connect and resiliently flow in and out of solitude and togetherness. Our unresolved past pain can prime us to get stuck in isolation or be enmeshed in relationships out of self-preservation and protection. Healing these patterns requires bravery and support, even if it is reaching out to only one person we feel can have our back and heart or reaching in and having times of quiet and introspection. 

When feeling challenged, we can learn to pause, breathe, soften tension, and let our generous hearts respond naturally to life with daring compassion. We can take small steps and actions with love as our guide and as an anchor, especially in times that are unsteady, unclear, and burdened with unhealed pain. 

By facing and embracing our experiences with compassionate curiosity, we can alchemize pain, grief, sorrow, and fear of the future into equanimity, fortitude, and feel the cradling care of unconditional love.

Here are a few tips to help Leap with Love:

• Pause - many times throughout the day take time to stop, slow down, and check in with where your body is. Start to move the body by breathing deeply, stretching, and/or shaking out your limbs. This will help connect with our bodies which are always in the present moment, unlike our busy minds. 

• Presence - get present by tuning in from a place of compassionate curiosity and notice what you are feeling, thinking, and sensing. See if you can breathe into the places that feel tight and tense and begin to soften into what you are experiencing with loving awareness as your guide. 

• Phrases  - choose an empowering phrase to help redirect and ground your attention as many times as you are challenged or feel yourself slipping back into old survival patterns. Here are some to choose from and see if you can create your own! 

• "May I choose to meet this moment with loving awareness" 

• "May I meet this moment with warmth and friendliness"

• "May I trust that my daring heart can guide me in this experience"

• "May I receive the loving care that I need to support me during this time of challenge" 

• "May I leap blindly with a loving, courageous heart into the unknown and uncertainty of this time" 

For those like myself who can be complicated thinkers and have to manage both personal and collective trauma, facing and leading a life with loving awareness may seem too simplistic or even foolish. I would challenge this and say that both professional and personal experience has shown otherwise. Leading with fear tends to tighten, complicate, and even corrupt. Whereas leading with wise love can soften, simplify, and strengthen our integrity. 

We know that what we pay attention to grows, so what do we want to grow in 2024? How about hope, trust, strength, joy, and togetherness? Letting love lead is how we can shift our personal and collective experience and live in harmony, balance, safety, wholeness, connection, and passionately with a fulfilling purpose. 

Let’s leap with love into this new leap year and in every area of our lives.

Love More, Fear Less

“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” — James Baldwin

February is a special time for me, it is a time of heartful reflection. I became a mother to my beautiful daughter, Sequoia, who is 20 years old this month. Astonishing. When I first found out I was pregnant I was thrilled and when I found out I was having a little girl I was terrified. I didn't want my mother's curse to come true. In a fit of anger during my teenage years, my mother was exasperated and said, "I hope you have a daughter just like you!" Well, I am glad to say that even though there were some bumpy rides, Sequoia is very much her own person and did not react or behave the way I did when I was her age. She even has learned to set boundaries with me when I get in her lane and project my experience or story onto her. I know I am not alone in hearing that kind of statement from a parent and at times I too wanted to say it to my teenage daughter.

My mother and I were able to repair those younger years but on some level, those words did haunt me. Mainly because of the deep self-loathing, fear, and unprocessed trauma that I was uncovering within me. Facing ourselves and really taking an honest look is a heroic and loving act. Taking off the masks of pushing, pretending, people pleasing and hiding, and finding stillness to just be our real selves takes a lot of courage. It is worth the effort because what is revealed underneath in all of us is worth loving.

In mindfulness, we refer to our Buddha Nature as we are what we already seek. Our true nature is whole and innocent. I didn't want to have a little "me" because I was still trying to heal that inner child in me that I shamed and lost connection with. My daughter and son are teachers for me in many ways especially in befriending that little one in me with unconditional love, as I do for them. Core relationships humbly or annoyingly mirror to us who we are and where we are in our lives. Having a sense of humor is key in this human life.

Instead of being cursed, I am truly blessed to have my beautiful daughter, Sequoia. I couldn’t love you more and happy birthday!

Be Free in 2023

No More Pressure to Self-Improve

"Joy is a decision, a really brave one, about how you are going to respond to life." - Wess Stafford

2022 was quite a year for so many of us and for me, it has been a time of continued healing and recovery from the grief of my Father's passing. Elizabeth Gilbert says, "Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love." I find these words comforting because it resonates with my experience. The gift of grief is knowing that we truly opened our hearts, cared and loved and that is why it hurts and turns things upside down. It takes time to adjust and healing is a nonlinear, messy process.

Then there is the annual pressure of needing to be different, better, improved, or we should be farther along by now, which comes with the New Year. Upon critical reflection, we usually come up short so we better pick the perfect resolutions to make up for it - this time we really need to get our act together! More pressure and for what?

This year I invite you to be playful and silly and create a new tradition. How about approaching this time of old endings and new beginnings in a new way by letting Mindfulness & Joy be your guides? How do you want to live and feel more in 2023? It's not about doing everything right, perfectly, and then we can be happy or finally be happy with who we are. If it is, sadly, this day doesn't really exist. The ego or comparing mind will always find something that doesn't quite measure up. Instead, what if we connect to the truth of who we are already? Joyfully owning our true nature that is whole and not broken. When we come from an intention to cultivate gratitude it connects us to our clarity and wisdom and can set us FREE!

We can use this time of year to reflect from a place of gratitude for all the ways we showed up, walked through adversities, and surprised ourselves with what we discovered, learned, handled, and faced. Also, from this place of loving awareness and wise perspective, we can envision what we would like to experience more of in our lives that actually gives us JOY!

Reflecting on 2022 we can ask ourselves:

- In what ways did I surprise myself and others?

- In what ways did I risk and challenge myself and others?

- In what ways did I learn something new about myself?

- In what ways did I have fun, was silly or playful?

- In what ways am I grateful for 2022?

Envisioning 2023 we can ask ourselves:

- In what ways can I allow myself to play more?

- In what ways can I allow myself to rest more?

- In what ways can I give myself permission to own more of who I am?

- In what ways can I be more curious and compassionate with myself and others?

- In what ways can I let go of the "shoulds or supposed to" and feel joyful and free?

Wishing you a practice or a way of living that inspires, supports, and leads with a playful and loving heart. May 2023 be a year of finding the gift of the present moment and may you spoil yourself with more self-love and share it with others!