Jun 18 2017

Gratitude in Action

“I am so incredibly grateful that you and your car got us from Portland to this trailhead safely,” my friend Mary stated.

And now it was my turn...”I am so incredibly grateful that I have a refrigerator and cupboard stocked full of healthy foods.”

Another steep part of the hike was upon us, we both went back into the solitude of our minds until we reached flat land again.

“I am so grateful for the household that I live in,” Mary said.

“I am so grateful that I have my health to be able to do this awesome hike,” I said.

My friend Mary and I have been on many hikes throughout the Pacific Northwest together since I started hanging out with her almost three years ago. A few weeks ago we ventured on a hike and came up with a new way of hiking. Each time we came upon a new incline to hike up, we had to each think of something near and dear to our heart that we were grateful for and then once we reached flat land again, we’d share with each other what we were thinking. We did it in some back lands behind Silver Falls in Silverton, Oregon. The trail had many inclinations and there were no other souls around. I felt so light and as if my body was buzzing throughout the hike.

I have always known the power of gratitude as I have seen it work wonders in others’ lives and my own. Meditation has helped me to further integrate into the wonderful energy of gratitude. By being so completely present in the moment, everything seems like a miracle. Of course, the monkey mind comes back quite often (dang it, I’m still human!) But for the most part, ever since starting my meditation practice half a decade ago, everything…a spoonful of delicious soup, resting my body on a comfortable bed, or having a meaningful conversation with a dear friend have all become moments of gold.

A couple different spiritual teachers that I have been listening to lately have inspired me to start a new daily practice, I made up my own term for it, I call it “3 and 3.” It’s super easy, doesn’t take a lot of time and is incredibly powerful. I either do it at night or in the morning when I’m having my coffee. Basically, I list three things in which I am grateful for, but honestly it’s more than just listing them…I actually try to really feel how deep my gratitude is for them. Then I list three intentions that I have for that day (or if I’m doing this at night, I list three intentions for the next day.) I have found this to be a very powerful practice because more often than not I reach almost all of those intentions that day.

If that seems like a lot of extra activity to your already packed world, maybe just try to do it for the week. So before the week starts, list three things you intend to get done that week and three things that you are in gratitude of from the last week. I have found that actually writing them out, with pen and paper really seems to make it happen. Do whatever works for you yo, I just hope you do give it a shot and see for yourself!

Peace out!

Jun 10 2017

Listen to Your Heart! And Woah! I did a video?!

Took a hike to one of my favorite waterfalls and decided to try and attempt something that scares the crap outta me: vlogging! Click and watch a short 2-minute video done by a rookie. The message is all about following the heart!

Jun 5 2017

Materialistic Mindfulness

AmericanBeauty

After my first 10-day meditation retreat, something within me really snapped and shifted. All of a sudden I wanted to get rid of a ton of personal belongings. I still found a few items very meaningful: my journal, coffeemaker and hygienic tools were things that were important to me. However, my shelves upon shelves of dusty DVDs, CDs, books, and random knick-knacks felt heavy. Impulsively, I grabbed a few large garbage bags and just started pulling all of these items that felt heavy to me and gently placed them into the garbage bags. Without thinking twice, I jetted the collected items over to my local thrift store and dropped them all of without looking behind. I felt a lightness in my mental and physical state instantly.

Materialism has never been my thing, but especially since starting meditation in 2011, it seems that any fractal of interest in it has dwindled even more. Almost a year into my 20-minute daily meditation practice, I was inspired to write a piece for Lightworkers World about how I feel in regards to the idea of physical things creating inner happiness. The deeper and deeper that I have gone into the depths of my soul, the further I have gotten from caring about comparing what others’ have to what I have. I have instead thought more and more about how I appreciate the things that I do have and truly taste the blessings that I am given on a daily basis. The cravings for more lessen as I see how amazing it is that I have a fully stocked kitchen, efficient means of transportation, and ohhhhhh so much more!

ChuckP

When I was visiting my sister on the East Coast over this past winter, I had a couple of Netflix binges and upon doing so came across an incredibly inspiring documentary entitled “Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things.” The main two cast members of the documentary Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodermus also have an inspiring website, The Minimalists, which you should definitely check out if you have time. A lot of what they mentioned in their documentary was exactly the same thoughts that I had been having shortly after my first 10-day meditation retreat. They touch upon the last few decades of American culture and how it has heavily influenced our consumer mindset. We have somehow been driven to think that things create happiness, but as the late George Carlin would state “trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all of your body.”

Over the last six years, I have moved about eight times (what can I say, a spiritual awakening can cause a bit of chaos, hehe) and one of the moves was cross-country. With each move, my amount of possessions has lessened and I find myself only holding onto the things that I find necessary. Not having a whole lot of clothes makes life so much easier to me and the few clothing items that I do have are my absolute favorite, so I get excited to wear them. Everything that I own, besides some old mementos stored in family and friends’ attics, fits into my vehicle. It feels so freeing to be able to pick up and go to a new place if my heart is calling it, I feel incredibly blessed to be able to do this.

I am excited to see a lot of other people feeling the same way about materialism, how it’s not truly all that it’s cracked up to be. Advertisements are unfortunately always going to be around as long as money is around, but at least as we get more and more in touch with ourselves and remembering who we truly are, we will be able to get less swayed by those advertisements. How are you feeling about all the things that surround you right now? Do you truly need all of it? Or might you be able to donate some of those extra items that you haven’t touched in ages?

344 Everything that I owned in 2011 as I made my way from the Midwest to the West Coast of the U.S.

As always, please comment and share your thoughts with me, I love feedback 🙂

Take care, much peace and love! ❤

Mar 2 2017

Meditation Musings

My friend and I reached the top of the hilly incline to a viewpoint that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. The vastness of the ocean view and the sound of the waves was something to meditate on. I set my maroon colored water bottle on the ground beside me and sat down on a big boulder, asking my friend if she’d mind if I meditated for a few minutes. She gave me the go ahead, “of course not, that’s a great idea!” I closed my eyes and became aware of touch points–my bottom on the boulder, my feet planted firmly on the ground, and my right hand cupped in my left hand with the back of my hands on my lap. When I felt 100% grounded, I started focusing on my breath, the cold air gently moving up through my nostrils and the warm air moving out. After a few minutes, I opened my eyes again.

“Sooooo, how do you meditate exactly?” My friend questioned. I hadn’t realized that my friend of fifteen years didn’t actually know what I was doing on the boulder. “Do you just try to think of nothing?” She asked. I felt a surge of excitement in my belly and started telling her about all that I had been learning about meditation since I moved to Oregon six months prior. Moving to a new state without a job secured and not knowing a single soul was a pretty traumatic shock to my system, but had I not pushed myself to do it, I don’t think I would have landed on the path that brought me to a practice that has brought me the most healing in my life: the practice of meditation.

After stopping a tobacco addiction, an addiction to pills, and ending a long-term relationship with an alcoholic over the course of time between my sixteenth and twenty-sixth years on this planet, coming to Oregon alone was like a re-birth into a new life. I forced myself to join community groups and among them, found a meditation group that met every Tuesday. I had been reading a lot of self-help books about meditation and listening to a guided meditation CD that my mom gifted me with before I made my trek from the Midwest to the West Coast. At the Tuesday night meditation group, I learned so much more about meditation and am forever grateful for the veteran teacher that created the group.

I explained to my friend about what I do during my meditation, that I constantly pay attention to my in-breath and out-breath (I do the Vipassana technique, one of India’s most ancient techniques of meditation.) That thinking about nothing isn’t the purpose of my meditation, the purpose is to become aware. Stories, ideas, to-do lists, what someone said to me earlier that day that hurt me, someone that I need to contact later, and many other things will come up in my meditation. The point though is to not get stuck or attached to any of those things, to just be aware of them and continually coming back to breath, to presence. Eventually, with a daily practice, you truly become aware of the nature of the mind and how easy it is to come back into the moment of NOW with the breath.

The practice of meditation has helped and healed me so much, layers upon layers of my self have been coming off. Just when I think that I have come to the deepest aspects of my soul, of consciousness, new ideas and concepts come to me. Out of all the travels that I have done, meditation has been the most intense journey out of all of them. It hasn’t been easy picking up this practice, but I can definitely tell you that it has been worth it. I want to help people bring this healing modality into their lives, so anytime a friend asks me about….it’s guaranteed I will turn into a motor mouth and this blog is another avenue in how I want to help people with this. If this post has helped even just one person in getting interested in meditation….then I have done my job. 🙂

Mar 1 2017

Waking from the Dream

“Ever drifting down the stream
Lingering in the golden gleam
Life, what is it but a dream?”

–Lewis Carroll

Jul 28 2016

My Three Go-Tos

I was on a date recently where the guy goes, “so, are you like a health nut? Like….do you drink green smoothies and run five miles a day?” I had to pause and think about it until it dawned on me that yes, I actually have become the health nut-type. When I was a teenager I used to make fun of the health nut-types and I thought a lot of them might have a stick up their butt, but come to find out….looks like you can become what you hated, hehe. It took some years to catch onto it, but now I completely understand why there is a hype to creating healthy habits. The high vibration I feel after downing raw veggies, fruit, and nuts daily, the endorphins that get released after I go on a long run, and the way anxiety floats away after meditating all feel really good.

During the hustle and bustle of life and ever-changing moments it’s so easy to get caught up and lost in it that we forget to take care of ourselves. Between busy work schedules, commuting, remembering to call friends or family on their birthday, getting back to text messages, and so many other things that come up it’s so easy to forget about ourselves. Extremely stressful times seem to be when we are most prone to forgetting about caring for ourselves. Divorce, break-ups, losing someone close to us, moving, starting a new job, raising a family, and whatever other major life change we are going through can test our limits and push us to the brink of insanity. What has helped me for times of intense life debacles is what I call my “Three Go-Tos.”

My “Three Go-Tos” are the three things that I try to do on a daily basis without any hesitations or reservations. When life is going really well, things are going smooth, and I am managing time well is when it’s most important to do my “Three Go-Tos. ” These times are the most important because I definitely notice that healthy habits seem to slip through my fingers when things are going so seemingly well for me. It’s so easy for me to think “accccckkkkk, I am feeling good and things are grand, I can skip my 20-minute morning meditation today…” and then those kind of thoughts can easily become a habit of their own. When things are going nicely in life, it is most important to keep up the healthy habits so that when life does throw those curve balls we can stay strong and remember the sources that help us.

So everyone’s “Three Go-Tos” are going to look differently, but my three that I don’t even think twice about anymore would be: having a protein-filled vegetable and fruit smoothie daily, meditating for 20 minutes in the morning, and running daily. I have noticed in the last year how clear-minded I have felt and how focused I have become with these daily habits. They have become so ingrained into me as daily activities that I feel weird if I skip one or two on any given day. I do try to give myself a break if situations come up, it’s best not to become so strict that you end up becoming a “Go-To” robot, but it is great to keep in the habit.

^^^ One of my fav go-to smoothie recipes^^^

Do you have some daily “Go-Tos” that have been getting you through this crazy journey of life? What would be three of them if you had to choose? If you can’t think of anything off the top of your head stop by this post to see if it helps to get your brain juices spinning: Never Underestimate the Healing Powers of… I would really love to see what helps you guys and get some new ideas so that maybe I can switch up my “Three Go-Tos” from time to time.

Thanks for reading 🙂 Peace!

Aug 4 2015

The Meditation Continues…

It has been a long time since I have written a post! I never wanted this blog to become one of those stagnant websites you come across where you check to see when the last update was and it states it was years ago. The only way I would let that happen is if I were to pass away, then it really will be a website locked in time. Although, the website address might change if I were to pass, as I am paying $18 a year for my website name (let’s be brutally honest here hah…) So here it goes, I am feeling the inspiration and flow to get some words out again.

I have been a bit silent lately because I have been dealing with some life changes and anxiety (those two really go hand in hand don’t they?) Old destructive thought patterns have been coming up for me again and I caught myself on the teeter totter of desiring past addictions, but fortunately as time passed the cravings vanished. I kept remembering that just because in one moment I was craving a past addiction, it doesn’t have to become a big story. It was just one moment, one passing thought, one passing craving and the next moment starts anew.

My meditation practice has been the same (20 minutes on most mornings), but with that I have felt that I reached a plateau and haven’t gotten as much out of it as when I started a few years ago. I guess I had some fantasy when I first started practicing meditation that it would lift me up fast and that life would be like heaven every day. While there has been some amazing transformation within me since first starting meditation, life as a human is still exactly that. I have to feed this body, excrete stuff from this body and care for this body……honestly, it’s a lot of work!

The other fantasy that I had about starting a meditation practice was that I thought it would help me to elevate my consciousness to such a degree that all my dreams would come true and that everything would be happily ever after. Hah! Just typing that out makes me crack up, because in reality it did the complete opposite. It shattered the idea of my dreams, it made me realize that a lot of my dreams were actually never even mine to begin with. It ripped apart the idea of what I thought I was supposed to be and do in this life.

Meditation has quieted my mind and has helped me to focus in on what my true desires are. It has helped me in becoming patient with what is in any given moment or situation, be it blessing or a curse occurring. Meditation has shown me many things that I need to work on and many things that I have avoided for a good majority of my adult life. It has made me realize that you can shift everything around in your outer life all you want to try to find happiness, but truly….everything is actually discovered when you go within.

I actually just made three major changes in the outer circumstances of my life, so I am being a little hypocritical with the above statement, haha. However, I feel that meditation helped me to focus in on what I truly want to do with my life, so I have begun taking the steps and signs have come along with that informing me in a synchronous matter that this is the path that I need to be on right now. I’m sure that some uncomfortable things will come up on this path too, but that will give me the experience I need to keep on my path of following my bliss. I am excited for this new path and am going to try to post more frequently!

Jan 17 2014

Aside

I never want fame, nor fortune. I just want people to know something and spread messages in a cosmic tidal wave. I want people to know that they have the power. It never was anyone else’s fault.

I don’t want a successful career, I don’t want to own a house, I don’t want 2.5 kids and a white picket fence, I just want to be a light for a little while, until I dim out.

This is all I am, this is what I do.

This dimension has been really tough and dense, but I am in it right now, so here goes….

It’s time to stop busying myself, and time to share.

Everything in my life, the “good” and the “bad” has come together full circle, into this wheel of life. I am realizing it all had to happen, for me to come to this moment of now…where I am sharing parts of my soul that I feared ever sharing before, in hopes that it will help someone, even just one person out there who might be feeling alone.

I have been addicted to cigarettes, addicted to pills, addicted to lovers, addicted to technology, addicted to caffeine, and after putting a halt to each addiction, I come back to that same empty hole. The hole is felt in those spaces in between. The spaces where you feel all alone, where you feel bored or hopeless. The spaces pass though and if you face those spaces and “holes” within, you move up and above to a buoyant space where it all makes sense.

I am coming into my power and nothing can stop me now.

Walls Crumbling Down…

Jan 4 2014

What Your Soul Sings

Don’t be afraid, open your mouth and say, say what your soul sings to you.
Your mind can never change unless you ask it to. Lovingly re-arrange the thoughts that make you blue.

The things that bring you down only do harm to you and so make your choice joy, the joy belongs to you.
And when you do, you’ll find the one you love is you, you’ll find you love you.
Don’t be ashamed no, to open your heart and pray, say what your soul sings to you.
So no longer pretend that you can’t feel it near, that tickle on your hand, that tingle in your ear.

Oh ask it anything because it loves you dear. It’s your most precious king If only you could hear.
And when you do, you’ll find the one you need is you, you’ll find you love you.

–Massive Attack