Notes To Myself — SpiritScout

2020

‘One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.’ —Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When the energy for this piece finally arrived, after a long Covid-induced drought, this quote was the first page I opened to in my ‘Notes To Myself’ journal. I think it’s inspiring and timely, and it gave me the courage to hit ‘publish’ on this post, despite the low-grade anxiety and confusion I’ve been feeling about everything, ever since March.

I’ve kept a series of my ‘notes’ journals for most of my life. The journal serves as my soul vault, protecting all of the words that are precious to me—quotes, thoughts, jokes, wisdoms—things I never want to forget. The idea for it came to me as a fourteen-year-old, when I read Hugh Plater’s ‘Notes To Myself’ in 1971. Besides the Susan Polis Schultz inspirational poetry cards that I adored as a teen, this was the first spiritual book I ever read, and I felt so comforted by it. It was my first solid lead that I wasn’t alone in my curiosity about a spiritual realm that wasn’t steeped in Catholic ritual and rules.

My ennui-infused notes are a hot mess because I have simply not had the mental energy to write anything that felt like it even matters this summer. Everything just feels so illuminated, and intense, and extreme—what could my mental musings really contribute? After playing chicken and receiving some tough-love admonishments, I finally managed to cobble them into something of a cogent theme for this post. Bear with me please, dear readers.

I’m living in Vermont near the Kingdom Trails, arguably the finest singletrack network on the East coast, and therefore super blessed to be doing a lot of mountain biking. With very few riders visiting, it’s been bliss out there in the forest. I’ve found myself riding in a Zen-like flow, in the zone, so often that it’s actually become essential to maintaining my sanity and good health. During my last ride something really clicked for me and made it into my journal notes.

The most important thing to know about mountain biking is that the rider must always remain ‘mindful in the moment’. (It’s the same premise for skiers, and it takes practice.) If your mind wanders, then disaster—on some level—is pretty much guaranteed to follow. So, it becomes a challenge of my sport—and the main payoff as well—that I remain in a state of mindfulness for a good portion of my recreational time. This flow state is the healthiest mode for the human body to function in. It is medically proven that stress levels and blood pressure plummet, cortisol secretion decreases, immune functioning increases, and levels of depression and anxiety decrease when we practice mindfulness—just to name a few of the benefits. These benefits are not exclusive to risk; they can happen for anyone doing anything that hyper-focuses attention and kidnaps the ego for a while—painting, cooking, walking, reading, listening to music, playing with a child—it can be anything that gives one the feeling of flow, of time suspended.

By the calendar I’m clicking off Covid in 80-day clusters; we are now in Act 3 of a bad play with no intermissions: August 28—November 17th. In the first two Acts of Covid we have practiced living ‘one day at a time’. We’ve had no choice—no planning options to speak of—and I think it has been a revelation to many of us that this a possible way to live. For Act 3 we are gearing up for one hell of a wild ride: all of us on a collective mountain bike with roots and rocks, rumbling and rolling through the most incendiary election cycle that we have ever witnessed. We are going to have to embrace mindfulness—group mindfulness—like our lives depend upon it (and it is not hyperbole to say that it does).

What does this spiritual practice look like? It means doing the things we love to do, or have to do, with even more focused loving intention. It’s having the difficult conversations with people we don’t agree with, it’s encouraging people to vote, it’s being kind to someone who doesn’t yet understand the value of wearing a mask, it’s speaking our truth—it is taking humanity’s high road. It invites us to step out of the Covid fugue. To resist just going through the motions and begin to find ways to infuse everyday duties and interactions with richer injections of mindfulness—more loving commitments that can ignite energy and joy within us and spread the message to others.

A.O.C.’s notes to self created her blisteringly magnificent address to Congress about the importance of speaking truth to power against sexism in July 2020. Her fearless delivery sent ripples of empowerment through the global consciousness.

It is not happy people who are grateful, but grateful people who are happier. When we are full of grace, we cannot be full of fear. It’s basically choosing to jack the juice—to up the ‘A’ game attitude—to the collective consciousness, especially now, when our energy and spirits feel threatened, cranky, and bored. It’s a way of gathering our brightest light, our humanity, and shining it so that other struggling souls can catch it.

As the writer and Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield puts it, ‘We have the privilege of the lavender color at sunset, the taste of a tangerine in our mouth, and the almost unbearable beauty of life around us, along with its troubles… We can either be lost in a smaller state of consciousness —what in Buddhist psychology is called the ‘body of fear,’ which brings suffering to us and to others —or we can bring the quality of love and appreciation, which I would call gratitude, to life.’

The beauty is that we get to shine our light in our own preferred way. It does not need to be public or proud, it does not need to be grand or gracious. A practice of mindfulness can be something totally private, yet so filled with goodness that it simply permeates the atmosphere and ripples its incandescent energy to others. An example for me is gardening, which I love, but it can also feel like a chore sometimes.

Taking a few moments to infuse this task with mindfulness looks like this to me: I am filled with gratitude: I can move my body. I get to be outside in nature. I am surrounded by beauty and miracles. Bending and lifting are my yoga. I reiki my plants as I nurture them. I cherish solitude. I love to get dirty. This acknowledgement of gratitude puts me in the zone: all of me combined in the moment—a beautiful symphony of humble human expression bundled with the divine to create more light.

‘Resist rehashing the past or rehearsing the future, just live each day, each moment, with as much joy and grace as possible.’

Even during this pandemic, it allows me to appreciate what I have rather than what I am missing. I’m finding that I can easily slide into negative thinking or sarcasm much easier nowadays—it’s the constant vigilance about all things safety that wears me out and makes me sloppy. Mindfulness helps me to reverse that tendency and keeps me moving forward. It sheds light on and shifts my energy towards the positive.

I try to practice mindfulness in almost every interaction I have—cooking, chores, people; with things I don’t want to do but have to do; and with things that I love because it makes my life smoother. My energy has more momentum to it, like a tailwind. In simple marketing terms, it’s called packaging and branding, but it is so much more in terms of enrichment. I have found it to be universally applicable and undeniably powerful.

I realize that there is a largess at work here; I am no longer running my business or raising my daughters; I’m not in the impossible bind of homeschooling children or struggling to pay my grocery bills—I get it. I am where I am. By sharing, I am simply shining a light: it makes me wonder what my younger turbo-charged decades of multiple commitments might have looked like if I had even known that such a thinking approach was possible, that I could have opted out on some things—some self-imposed expectations—and been more mindfully wiser. I am curious how this energy could become a positive contagion, how it could play out in our collective lives with grander aspirations, bundling all of our extraneous energies together for the greater good, to create something of real substance and lasting value post-Covid.

During Covid-Act 3 please extend extra kindness to your self-care practices. As nature’s northern light diminishes, allow yours burn brighter so that all of us can find your heart and catch your light. Be the light. One day at a time, one moment in time, it is all we are really built to do, the rest is simply overload right now. A final note to self: resist rehashing the past or rehearsing the future, just live each day, each moment, with as much joy and grace as possible. Namaste.