What Happens When You Meditate For An Entire Day

Spoiler: Nothing. 

Nothing happens when you meditate all day. Sweet, blissful nothing.

You go in with an agenda, because of course. You are a human being and if you're going to spend all day staring at the wall, you'd damn well better get something out of it, thank you very much.

You walk out having no idea what your agenda was or even that you had one, because you’re all pumped up on peace endorphins.

We all want the answers. We want to know that our actions will yield fruit, that our life is headed in the right direction, that we are safe. 

But sometimes we have to realize that it's not time for answers. That there is absolutely no way we can take a wrong turn in life. Because there is no right path or wrong path. 

My brain is already kicking in with OF COURSE THERE'S A WRONG PATH AND YOU HAVE OBVIOUSLY TAKEN IT, EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT IN THE GUTTER WITH A NEEDLE, WHICH IS ANOTHER WRONG PATH. OF WHICH THERE ARE MANY. 

Why meditation can be really nice. Especially a day of it. Because, after two sittings where my brain spun mercilessly, it finally wore itself out like a three-year-old after a birthday party with Spider Man, a piñata and multiple rainbow-frosted layer cakes. 

And then there was silence. My need for answers quieted. My desire to be safe quieted because I am safe. In this moment, I am always safe. My path is just my path. It just is. 

Quiet.  

My inner guidance has been prompting me to meditate two hours a day. Obviously, my brain thinks that’s bullshit, so I haven’t been doing it.

But absent other answers regarding my life, I’ve vowed to follow my internal guidance and trust it, even when it doesn’t seem logical - which, frankly, is most of the time. So when a friend invited me to a day-long meditation retreat on Sunday, it sounded like exactly what I needed. So off I went. 

It was held at a beautiful home in the Oakland hills - complete with pool, mountain view, and strategically placed Buddhas - and the day was run by a man with luxurious locks of the Inigo Montoya variety. He also had a duck wing to wave the smoke of burning palo santo on us.

I admit, I did wonder where he got that duck wing. Is there a one-winged duck moping around in a field somewhere?

I also wondered how everyone else kept their lower extremities from falling asleep. I had to do the awkward attempt-to-slowly-and-subtley-stretch-my-legs-out-in-front-of-me as my feet get caught on my skirt and I almost tip over, while everyone else is a marble sphinx of enlightenment. 

What I learned from a day of meditating with my body: Healing can be easy. (Except for the feet thing.) 

It doesn't have to be this elaborate ritual of energy clearing and slightly-frantic prayer and lists of things I have to do daily in order to stay sane. My god, no wonder I burned out. My perfectionism even got my healing in its sticky grasp. 

Sometimes, allowing ourselves to just quiet down and rest is the very best healing there is - the very best thing we can do for our brain and our body and our life. 

What I learned from driving to Oakland to meditate with my body: Men I have dated are everywhere.

This is the problem with being single for a long time. At some point, people you once dated become impossible to escape. Driving to the house on Sunday, I drove past the street of one of my poor dating decisions a few months ago. (The one who yelled at me a lot, if you happen to remember that.) Then, on the table at the retreat center, I saw the face of a guy I dated years ago staring up at me from his business card. He's now, apparently, a Tantric sex coach. It was too good not to share, but we were on a silent break. It almost killed me not to wave the card in my friend's face so we could die over it together. 

Anyway. 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Is not to meditate two hours every day because that's still crazy talk. But do pay attention to those little nudges - the ones that are prompting you to a new habit or a new creation. They're gentle, they're quiet, but they're so very worth listening to. Listening to your intuitive nudges is the easiest way forward in this time of uncertainty and change. 

Bumblebees On Yoga Mats and Other Signs from the Universe

A few days ago, I was in downward dog when I noticed a bumblebee ambling slowly down my purple yoga mat. Not buzzing around in flight, just...walking. Straight toward my left foot.

I admit, bees make me skittish. A perfectly reasonable response, given that they are quite capable of piercing flesh and any part of me they touch swells to four times its normal size.

Once, on a camping trip as a kid, a bee landed on my ham sandwich. In my usual oblivion, I bit into the sandwich anyway and the bee, trapped inside my mouth, bit me. I yowled and spent the rest of the afternoon being deeply unhappy.

After a few more such events, I came to the wise conclusion that if a bee decides it wants to share my airspace, I will cede the battlefield and scurry for the nearest indoor haven.

But with the bee on my yoga mat in my living room, there wasn’t really anywhere to go, except into the bathroom. So, as we gingerly shared floor space, I remembered that this wasn't the first bumblebee recently.

After managing to avoid bees for at least twenty-five years, I'd had three visits in less than a week.

A few days earlier, I was eating on my deck when a bee decided it was deeply interested in my lunch. Rather than argue over who gets the potstickers, I picked up my bowl and went inside with a  "good riddance, sucker." The next day, another bee decided it was curious about my lunch. But this time, I was inside a restaurant. To get to me, the bee had to abandon the safety of the great outdoors, fly through the door, navigate the counter and past any number of tables and other people’s presumably tempting food, before getting to me and my shrimp curry. I shrank away like the coward I am and eventually it buzzed off. 

It took a bumblebee strolling down my yoga mat to finally get my attention, walking in a straight line all the way down the long side of my mat - quite a trek for an insect - before wandering off.

I’ve been asking the universe for signs lately. I do that, especially when I’m feeling in the dark. Nature is pretty smart - it knows how to make mountains and construct the human hand, after all - so I figure it has a better grasp on my life than I do.

Three bumblebees in three days? All right, universe. I’m listening.

So I did a little research on the symbolism of our furry flying friend.

It’s said that if a bumblebee appears in front of you, it will lead you to your destiny.

Yeah, wish I knew that before I saw all those bees. DID THEY FLY TO MY DESTINY WITHOUT ME? Curses.

Well-trained little service bugs, bumblebees tirelessly pollinate blooms and remind us of the interconnectedness of all living things. Also, stop and smell the damn flowers.  

As signs go, it felt fuzzy. But the reminder to stop and appreciate the sweetness of life is very needed right now. I've been lapsing into fear lately, and it does my life zero good. But I do know that when I stop to notice what's happening here and now, the fear eases. Because there is no fear in the present moment. Fear only holds sway over the past or the future. So if I just look up at the blue sky or the bougainvillea crawling up a porch, everything settles.

It wasn’t until a few days post-bumblebee that I remembered a vision I had in Hawaii a few months ago. Hawaii has a big energy and I was getting downloads every few days. In one of them, I saw my (as-yet-nonexistent) daughter, age nine or ten, dressed as a bumblebee. She was racing around and yelling - goggles strapped on and wings flapping in her wake. 

Maybe that’s what the bumblebees wanted to tell me.  

That everything is on its way and my only job is to trust that it’s all happening perfectly.

May you also feel the sweetness and the trust this week - preferably minus bumblebee attacks. 

The In-Between Is Where Life Happens

My horoscope said that the entire month of July was going to be awesome.

So far, I’ve been dumped by someone I really liked, run out of money for the first time in many years of self-employment, and turned 38. 

Dear Horoscope: I CALL SHENANIGANS.

But I actually do feel better than I have in a long time. Peaceful, calm, and happy. Despite that whole turning-38-with-no-job-no-money-no-husband thing.

Because I’m doing my thing.

We all have our thing. That thing we do to keep ourselves sane, keep ourselves happy. The thing that, if we stop doing it, our life slowly starts to slide off the rails and we’re not sure how or why it happened.

Some of us need to run, some of us need to write, some of us need to garden, some of us need to draw, some of us need to meditate.

My thing - apparently - is diving deep into the center of my soul and my energy, digging around, and seeing what needs to be released and moved around and otherwise shifted.

It settles my head, the head that wants to spend its time making me feel less than, feel unworthy, feel like it’s best that I don’t have what I want because I just don’t deserve it.

It settles my heart, the heart that sometimes hollows itself out under the weight of what it sees and wants but feels it doesn't have yet. 

It helps me feel at peace with whatever is happening in my life, helps me understand that my worth does not rest in external circumstances, and it helps me feel open enough to smile at people I pass on the street. 

The power we wield over our own lives isn’t so much around getting what we want, but in how we exist in the in-between spaces - when we don’t have what we want, when we don’t know what’s coming next, when we just don’t know.

The in-between is where life happens anyway.

It’s tempting to feel like my life will start when I have the job, when I know where my money is coming from, when I meet my future husband.

But that’s just not true. My life is happening right now. It’s happening in this coffeeshop, on this bright California July morning, as I write for you. It’s happening when I go out for a run to the beach or remember that the top on my car comes down and it’s a beautiful day, so I should really just drive out to Sonoma in the open air to eat hush puppies.

The in-between is where we can sink down into our thing - dig in our garden, write our next story, run an extra two miles today. Just because we know that our day goes better when we do.

And all we have is the right now. Literally, that’s it. It’s a relatively simple concept, but it’s one of the hardest things for humans to grasp. We’re constantly straddling what happened last year and what we hope will happen next week. But our only real power, our only real joy, is in what's happening in this moment.

So look up. What’s happening right now?

Is your tea kettle whistling? Is your favorite person or animal in the room with you? Just be with that for a moment. 

I’m sitting in my favorite coffeeshop on the road to Stinson Beach. The sky is blue, the sun is bright, Can’t You See by The Marshall Tucker Band is pouring out of my headphones, and words are finally pouring out of my fingers after staring at my laptop for half an hour worrying that whatever I wrote wouldn’t be good enough.

But it is good enough - as long as one of you reads this and gets something out of it, then it’s perfect.

That’s my life. Right now. And it’s a good one.

May you enjoy each moment of your life for precisely what it is, as it’s happening. Because this is where joy lives. Right now. Right where you are.

Owning the Witch

Six years ago, back when I first learned what energy healing was, I was sitting at my kitchen table in San Francisco with a friend who had flown in from Australia to spend the summer with me. We were releasing energy together when all of the sudden, I got hit with the biggest vision I had ever experienced, before or since.

I was huddled on the floor with my children as the cottage burned around us. I was trapped in that hellish heat, knowing that my children were going to die because of what I was.

The vision was so strong that I couldn't breathe. I was left gasping and nauseated and clutching the edge of the table. It was your classic burn-the-witch flashback, one that any woman healer - any woman, really - will be familiar with.

My friend sat across the table, hand wrapped around his coffee mug, looking at me quietly. With empathy, but also with a prosaic “yeah, that’ll happen” demeanor.

For years, whenever this vision would pop in, I would see a tree, barren and blackened by flame. It’s only been recently that the tree has begun to flourish and blossom again.

Whether this is something that really happened to me in a past life, or was my assimilation of the collective consciousness, or was simply my subconscious processing fear doesn’t really matter. Even though I’ve worked with it for years and healed much of it, it still has the power bring tears to my eyes.

Years later, I was working with a healer on burnout. Energetic work - channeling, healing, holding space, helping people process their emotions - can completely tank you out if you aren’t replenishing yourself properly, and I hadn’t been. She noticed that I kept putting my right hand on my neck and tipping my head to the left when I was thinking, something I’ve done for as long as I can remember.

She closed her eyes, opened them again, and told me that I'd been hanged in a past life for being a channeler. 

I think of that every time I find myself holding my neck.

Coming out as a channeler was hard - it took me years. I still feel uncomfortable talking about it with people, and not just because it's a tricky thing to explain. Even though I've become slightly more open with it, whenever I think about posting something extra hippie on social media - crystals, oils, sage, whatever I’m geeking out about at the moment - I hesitate. 

Lately, I’ve been thinking about where I’m still hiding, where I'm not stepping in fully. And what my responsibility is to those who have come before me and those who will come after. 

Part of our feminine ancestry as healers, herbalists, and midwives has been many millennia of fear and often violent death.

But it’s safer now than it has been in any point in known history to practice this light. We are now on the leading edge of processing that pain and that trauma for thousands of our ancestors, for our future children, and for the collective. But it’s not easy. It can make something as simple as an Instagram post feel deeply unsafe.

I’m a channeler and an empath and a light worker. And since we are all mirrors of each other, if you’re reading this, you're probably a healer too.

If you’ve ever held energy in your hands or used light to heal an energetic wound or burned sage and felt the difference, this is part of your journey. If you know you’re meant for something bigger and you feel right on the edge of that power, this is part of your story.  

We are all part of this history, whether in past or present lived experience or as a member of the collective.

I want to fully step into this. I want to own the witch and the hippie and the channeler and know that those are all just labels to help put words to a universal truth that we are all so much bigger and brighter than we know. We have power we don’t yet fully understand. We have access to wisdom and abilities that we are only just beginning to dream of.

It’s time to harness our potential and learn to ride the edge of that wave. Because it’s just beginning - and it’s going to take us somewhere we can't yet imagine.

Left to Roll

Dance class usually makes me feel better about life - I get to spin and move, endorphins kick in, sweat flows, my brain disengages, and my daily life disappears for an hour. 

But today, I couldn't get the backward roll. Tip onto your right elbow, swing your left foot above your head, tuck your chin, roll to the back of the room. I just couldn't get there. As I stood behind my section of the class, scrambling to catch up while everyone else rolled perfectly with the music, I got hit with it: 

If I don't do it right, I'm alone. 

It felt like the room expanded and contracted around me as my heart flipped in my rib cage. One of the main limiting beliefs that's driven my life clicked into place like the last puzzle piece. 

Perfectionism is a tender spot for me. There's always this need to "do it right" and I think I finally understand why. If I don't do it right, then I get left out. If I don't do it right, then everyone rolls without me and I don't know how to catch up. 

Pretty deep for a Wednesday morning. 

Catching where we limit ourselves is crucial. Because I'm tired and it's been a long week, a long month, a long year, I don't know quite what I'm going to do with this. But awareness is plenty for now. Along with the knowledge that there is no right, there is no wrong, and I'm not going to be left behind if I'm not perfect.