How can we find our center amidst what is? 🌊

 
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This past week marks the one-year anniversary of all of us plunging into a global pandemic. Last March, I could never have imagined how much life as we knew it would change. Over the past year, we’ve also been invited to grapple with systemic racism, political polarization, climate change, our mental health crisis, and other painful truths of our time. It’s been a year of hard things and then some.

Tossed by the waves of change, we’ve all experienced loss, grief, and pain in one form or another. We may have been feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or frustrated. We may have been paralyzed by the uncertainty of it all and unable to imagine our next steps forward. Or we may have been in denial of the reality and magnitude of the disruptions.

Amidst change and uncertainty, how can we find our center to envision and create a path forward?

Equanimity is a helpful inner resource in these times of continued change and uncertainty. Equanimity is a sense of openness, care, and ease amidst whatever comes and goes. It allows us to stay centered and look beyond judgment and self-interest as we engage with a range of people and situations in our life and work.

Poet William Butler Yeats wrote: “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

Equanimity involves clearly seeing what’s going on inside and around us and choosing to respond in a non-reactive way. It’s not indifference, withdrawal, or not caring. It means accepting (rather than resisting) reality so we can live, feel, envision, and create solutions and new ways forward, fully centered in what’s so.

We might say to ourselves: “This moment is like this... And it doesn’t have to be different right now. I can allow what’s here and respond with what’s needed.”

And equanimity also means realizing that despite our best efforts to be of service, we may not be able to care for and support every person and issue we wish to.

We can grow our capacity for equanimity through formal mindfulness practice. We can also cultivate it by focusing on intentions for equanimity throughout the day. Below are a few equanimity phrases that I've used:

May I find peace and ease amidst it all.

May I see the world with clear, calm, and compassionate eyes.

May I offer my care and support, knowing I cannot control others’ pain or the course of life.

May I have the inner resources needed to contribute where I’m needed.

May I be free from unconscious bias and limiting beliefs.

I invite you to find two or three that resonate (or create your own) and call them to mind at different times as you move through the day.

What if we met the coming months with an attitude of equanimity?

With love,

Sarah-Marie

 

Keep going. No feeling is final.

 
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"Just keep going. No feeling is final." - Rainer Maria Rilke 

I needed that reminder this week as the days, weeks, and months have been blurring together into one steady stream of hyperlocal existence. I reminisced about my previous geoflexible life of 1.5 years, being more at home in the sky than in any physical place. And I dreamed of all the places I wanted to go and friends and family I wanted to see again. 

Being caught in thoughts about the past and future, now felt deficient and unsatisfying. I felt disconnected from myself and others. 

I reminded myself that we mostly can't control things, but we can participate with what's emerging around us, between us, and through us. That requires coming back to the present moment and asking ourselves:

What's happening inside me and around me right now? What am I feeling? What am I sensing? 

From this place of contact with what is, we can wake up to the gifts and shift to an abundance and sufficiency view. We can open to our innate resourcefulness, creativity, and the support around us as we respond and contribute to what's called for in these complex and uncertain times. 

As for me, I was able to relax back into letting things unfold and being patient while doing what I can to serve. 

The future emerges out of presence. What's happening inside you and around you right now? 

Below are a few resources that I hope may be helpful for you. 

With love,

Sarah-Marie

Resources  

Guided Meditations 

 

Can I be with this? Cultivating resilience.

 
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What a year 2020 has been so far. We've all been asked to expand our capacity to be with pain, change, and uncertainty in these turbulent times.

As Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha wrote: “Every challenge you encounter in life is a fork in the road. You have the choice to choose which way to go - backward, forward, breakdown or breakthrough.”

We can actively cultivate resilience in the face of life's challenges. With mindfulness and compassion, we can be with and effectively navigate more and more of the experiences that life presents to us. We can bounce back and recover ourselves when we lose our ground.

When we encounter difficult emotions or experience, we can take a breath and ask: Can I be with this? Gradually and with kindness, we can learn to stay with our inner experience and expand our capacity to respond intentionally.

Over the past few months, I've been asking myself this question many times a day, and I've found it creates more inner space to carry on. 

Below are a few reminders and practices that I've found helpful:  

  1. Change is the only constant. With mindfulness, everything becomes more workable. This too shall pass. 

  2. Remember that difficulty and suffering are a part of life and all beings want to be well and loved. We are never alone in our experience of hurt.  

  3. See crises as opportunities for growth rather than insurmountable challenges. We can learn to surf the waves and realize that everything is workable.  

  4. Be kind with yourself and others. Start close in tending to your own emotions and needs. Pay attention to the demands of the physical body and rest, nourish, and move as needed. 

  5. Cultivate self-trust and a positive view of yourself. Listen to your own inner guidance and work with your inner critic. Self-compassion can be very supportive.

  6. Be in community with others. Accept help when needed and offer help to others, when possible. Contribute to and stay engaged with family, friends, colleagues, and community.  

  7. Take action in small and bigger ways towards creating a more compassionate, equitable and beautiful world. 

Everything becomes more workable as we stay open, flexible, and connected to the bigger picture. 
 

How have you been cultivating resilience? What practices might you try?

Below are a few more resources that I hope may be helpful for you. 

With love,

Sarah-Marie

Resources

[LISTENING, WATCHING & LEARNING] 

[PRACTICE]  

Guided Meditations 

 

Don't prepare. Just show up.

 
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"Don't prepare. Just show up."

This felt like radical life advice when I received it from my design thinking professor at Dartmouth as he gifted me the book Improv Wisdom by Patricia Ryan Madson. Taking his advice felt terrifying to me and at odds with my whole education experience and way of living. I was overprepared, wanted to optimize everything, and tried to plan out each step of the way. Fueled by a drive to avoid failure, that approach worked quite well for me to "succeed" throughout school. 

Since college, I've learned just how valuable my professor's advice was. And I'm seeing the value in it anew during this time of uncertainty. This is a time for just showing up to this moment as it's unfolding. 

The nature of life is change and uncertainty. We come alive in the act of balancing, not in being balanced. We can learn to embrace the wobble. As Patricia Ryan Madson writes: "Sensations change moment by moment; sometimes we feel secure, sometimes precarious. In the long run we develop tolerance for instability. As we come to accept this insecurity as the norm, as our home ground, it becomes familiar and less frightening." 

As we get better at being with change, we can practice sensemaking of what's emerging in this collective inflection point. We can say yes to what's arising and practice staying open and flexible so we can respond intentionally rather than being in fear-based reactive mode. 

Let's embrace the wobble together. 

Below are a few resources to support you. 

With love,

Sarah-Marie

Resources

[MIRCO-PRACTICES] Recentering 

I wanted to offer a few examples of micro-practices that you can use to recenter yourself throughout the day. When you are centered, you are most in touch with yourself and your resourcefulness, creativity, compassion, and wisdom. You are also more easily in touch with others and your surroundings. What micro-practice could you use to recenter yourself? 

Two Feet, One Breath

Feel one foot, then feel the other foot, and then take one conscious breath. 

Sensing into Mind, Heart & Body 

Take a few moments to check in with yourself. Allow your attention to drop deep within your belly. Sense your whole self from within - your body, your heart, and your mind. What are you present to (physical sensations, emotions, mood, thought patterns, clarity of mind, …)? Not to fix anything but to allow what's there. 

STOP Technique

Developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. 

S- Stop for a moment. Don't react. Give yourself the gift of a brief reflection. 
T-Take a breath. Breathe in and out. Track your breath. Sense the chest rising and falling. 
O-Observe your experience. Notice the sensations in the body. Observe the thoughts or the story going through your mind, and appreciate that thoughts are not facts. Explore your emotions and get a sense of where you are in this moment. 
P - Proceed. Move forward in a way that feels right to you and is consistent with your values.

[POEM]

Cleave by David Whyte

 

Shall we dance with Uncertainty?

 

How can we hold uncertainty in life-giving ways?

This is a question I've been living for years. It feels more urgent now than ever before. Our future feels palpably more uncertain. Nobody knows how all of this will unfold. That's a lot to hold for all of us individually and collectively.

It's also true that life has always been uncertain. And change is the only constant.

As Pema Chödrön writes: “The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have.” At least we have that certainty!

Accepting and embracing this can empower us to choose how to be with and respond to uncertainty. While it's still a work in progress, changing my attitude towards uncertainty has helped me better navigate this time of crisis.

What's also helped is dancing with uncertainty, both figuratively and literally. James Brown writes: “The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.” Maybe it can't solve all problems, but dancing has helped me a lot.

I take dance breaks as a daily practice and when I feel triggered by bad news, a change in plans, something scary, ... It prevents me from going into fight/flight/freeze mode and helps me open to new perspectives, alternatives, and possibilities. It allows me to express and move through my emotions and cultivate positive ones.

Dancing with uncertainty helps me see there's always a way to move forward.

So, shall we dance?

Below are a few resources to support you.

With love,

Sarah-Marie

Resources

[PRACTICE] Dancing with Uncertainty

Purpose: To connect with your body, express and move through your feelings, and generate positive emotion.

Create a playlist with songs that bring you joy and dance to it by yourself or (virtually) with others for at least 10 min every day.

[POEM] by Rumi

"Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.

Dance in the middle of the fighting.

Dance in your blood.

Dance when you're perfectly free."