Confessions of a Confidante (Thoughts on Deep Listening)

“All sufferings arise from wanting to benefit oneself, and all the happiness arises from the thought of wanting to help others.”   – Shantideva

How can we help others? I’ve found that one of the best ways is really simple: by listening.

A wise person said, “What people really need is a good listening to.” Each of us holds a lifetime of stories, regrets, puzzles, and a-ha’s in our hearts—and we want to talk about them. But how often do we have a chance to speak freely, uninterrupted, uncensored, not judged, not advised?

An astrologist once told me that I’m wired to be a “confidante” – one who listens to the confidences and confessions of others. She said that in order to fulfill my gift, I simply need to listen, and that true listening is “like being a nurse who holds someone while they’re puking.” Forgive the crass metaphor—but talking to a good listener can actually feel like throwing up: cathartic, emptying, and even healing.

For the nurse, or the good listener, there’s not much to do. What’s important is being there. I wouldn’t want a nurse to be distracted while tending my sickness. As a listener, the challenge is to fully show up with nothing corrupting your full-on presence. Richard Moss said, “The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention.”

Deep Listening

I’m still learning how to be a good listener, and it’s a slow road. Recently a friend was going through a hard time, and we talked on the phone several days in a row. She was nearly inconsolable and I was flooded with the desire to help her. I offered suggestions, advice, reassurance, the usual Band-Aids. None of it helped. She was still in the quicksand of despair.

Finally, one morning when she called, I had no idea what to say; I gave up my Help Crusade. I simply listened. I said, “Mm-hm,” “Uh-huh,” “I see,” and “Really?” Purely a sounding board, I practiced mirror-listening and occasionally repeated what she said. Otherwise I kept my mouth shut. I listened for about an hour. I gambled that she could find her way through the crisis without my direction. And a miracle happened. By the end of it, she had talked her way out of despair. She sounded lighter, freer, unshackled. She was coming up with solutions! All by herself! I was shocked, relieved, and a little guilty because I’d hardly done anything. My only job (and, I admit, this is a hard job) was to get out of my own way, be quiet, and be present for her.

In my Sangha (meditation group), we practice “deep listening.” This is the art of listening to another person without judging, reacting, or interrupting. “Don’t even interrupt them with your thoughts,” someone once said. This means we’re being starkly, nakedly present with the person who’s talking. We’re hearing the sing-song of their voice, the stretch of a pause, the pull down into sadness, the hot sparks of anger, the bubbles of joy. We’re hearing the words and the river of feeling behind the words.

“Everyone Has a Partial Truth”

One of my heroes is Gene Knudson Hoffman. She was born in 1919 and passed away in July, 2010. I never had the good fortune to meet her, but I read about her and the movement she started: Compassionate Listening. Inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh, she wrote: “Some time ago I recognized that terrorists were people who had grievances, who thought their grievances would never be heard, and certainly never addressed. Later I saw that all parties to every conflict were wounded, and at the heart of every act of violence is an unhealed wound.”

Gene was a counselor who came to realize that non-judgmental listening was a great healing process. She titled one of her essays, “An Enemy Is One Whose Story We Have Not Heard.”

If you want to be a good listener, it’s worth reading an extended quote from Gene:

“Everyone has a partial truth, and we must listen, discern, acknowledge this partial truth in everyone—particularly those with whom we disagree.  …To reconcile, we must realize that both sides to any violence are wounded, and their wounds are unhealed. From my study of post-traumatic stress disorder in Holocaust victims and Vietnam veterans, I am persuaded that a great source of violence stems from our unhealed wounds. In 1980, I had a life-changing experience. I was on a world tour of peace centers to learn what new ideas I could bring back to the USA. Outside the London Quaker Meeting, I saw a huge sign which said: “Meeting for Worship for the torturers and the tortured”. I’d long known I should listen to the tortured—but listen to the torturers? I’d have to think about that. I soon realized that without listening to the enemy I could not make informed decisions. If I was an advocate for one side, I would never know the causes of the oppositions’ anger and violence, and I couldn’t possibly know the suffering they had endured. My choices would be half-ignorant ones. So when I arrived in Israel, I began listening to Israelis and Palestinians. I found it changed my perspectives on each. I began to practice listening to both sides everywhere I went.”

Gene traveled to areas of conflict all over the world, listening to divergent sides and sharing what she heard in order to promote understanding and peace. You can read more about Gene and her Compassionate Listening Project at www.compassionatelistening.org.

I dedicate this blog to my dear friends who serve as my “confidantes.” They know who they are. I am so grateful to them, my mirrors, my witnesses, showing their deep love by showing up without judgment. Like me, they are privileged listeners. They get to learn from my mistake-ridden experience. They get to keep the shiny little shards of wisdom that fly off of my machinery as I grind through the rubble-treasure of my life. They get to know me in all my grimy, sparkly, repulsive, adorable humanness, and maybe they see their own sweet paradox reflected. Maybe they see that it’s okay to be what we are. And give it voice.

A Heart Gone to Seed

Today my friend is laboring to bring her daughter into the world. As I imagine her breathing through the contractions, enormous belly compressed and released in an ancient rhythm that every woman’s body knows, I notice that my own body feels remarkably weightless and thin. I am one of those women who never outgrew my 16-year-old form; there’s no mama frame here. Today, as my friend’s voluptuously pregnant body makes itself into a mother, I feel the unmotherly lightness of my own being and realize what I’ve left behind: the desire to give birth.

For the first half of my life, I wanted a brood of kids—thirteen at least, I told my first boyfriend. He was alarmed, but he humored me. I saw us living on wide acreage, children running across the porch of a sprawling house, catching grasshoppers in tall yellow grass. I saw myself showing little replicas of myself how to sow seeds of cucumbers and melons. I saw the smallest girl squatting, splashing in a giant watering can, squealing with glee. I saw piles of children climbing onto our big bed for story time, cherubic and chaotic and crazy-good as a heart gone to seed.

What happened to that dream? I must have dropped it, child by child, in the sterile halls of academia. All the years I spent curled over textbooks, cramming for exams, editing essays until there was no breath left in them—those years must have drained the juice out of my mother instinct, dried up my uterus. I must have discarded the dream in Women’s Studies classes, where I learned the impacts of mothering and working and marriage and divorce on women. I wanted to avoid falling prey to the curse that afflicted my grandmother, my mom, my aunts. They were fantastic mothers who got short shrift when it came to creative expression, job training, and alimony. And when the kids and husbands left the nest, the nest became a poorhouse.

I set aside my vision of a family farmhouse and channeled my lifeblood into writing and art. I created stories, poems, articles, paintings, and the occasional quilt: progeny I could fuss over and present to guests. I poured my soul into two-dimensional offspring, molded them to my will and sent them into the world. I was disappointed when they didn’t live up to my expectations, ecstatic when they were praised.

My Zen teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, has said that whether or not we have children, we each continue in our actions and words. We live on in those who touch and hear us. I see this when I share my writing and find it quoted or shared in wider circles. And I know this when I spend time with my nieces—three adorable girls who run at me for tight hugs and let me hold their petite hands and tickle them and invent stuffed-animal worlds. We pile onto the couch and tell stories; the girls repeat what I say, making it their own, and I see how I will continue. I’m alive in them and in anyone else who takes my words in, or receives my touch, or loves me.

When the unborn mama in me longs for a child whose hair she can brush and braid—when she wonders if her hands and breasts will ever fulfill their true purpose—when she dreams of continuance more wet and visceral than words on paper—I will go and visit my nieces, or my friend who is laboring today, and her new baby girl. I’ll hold the little one for a while, gaze into her face, and rest in the bliss of pure goodness, where all is forgiven, in that place beyond longing and dreams.

Gems of Wisdom from His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Pema Chodron

Last week I had the extraordinarily great fortune to attend the Dalai Lama’s talk in San Jose, AND a weekend retreat with Pema Chodron! I’m still happily reeling from the brilliant wisdom of these two teachers, and the blessings of their visits to California. One of my other teachers, Jim, recently said that “service is when you encounter precious teachings and pass them along.” So I feel compelled to share some of the gems that were generously given by these bodhisattvas.

The gems were countless, and I’m only sharing a few, but this is still a really long post… so make yourself a cup of tea and enjoy!

The Dalai Lama

His Holiness was as humble, funny, charming, brilliant and wise as his reputation foretells. He taught an audience of 3,000 people about an ancient Buddhist text, “Eight Verses for Training the Mind,” which shows us how to practice altruism in daily life. He recites this text every day, and he likes it because he is lazy and it’s nice and short!

Highlights from the Dalai Lama’s Talk

* When our basic mental attitude is good, everything around us appears positive. When our mental attitude is not so good, everything appears negative. So the troublemaker is not outside us, but in our mind. It’s helpful to tackle the real troublemaker by understanding our minds through wisdom and reasoning. Enlightenment can only come through transformation of our own mind.

* Human beings always have a feeling of “self” and “self-cherishing.” However, a self-centered attitude is the key element of an unhappy society. We should choose not to cheat, bully, or exploit other people out of self-centeredness. Instead, we can choose friendship (we are social animals, so friendship is essential), and friendship comes on the basis of trust, which is based on honesty.

* Afflictions like anger and hostility always have an underlying condition. They start as something small, like a minor feeling of dissatisfaction. It is important to have a strategy to deal with negative emotions as they arise, at this underlying stage, and catch them at the beginning to cut their fuel out. Otherwise they get in the way of our wisdom.

* We need to pay special attention to people who are marginalized by society, like criminals and people with AIDS. We need to recognize their potential and give them a chance to connect with other human beings, because human nature is social. Through education and compassionate surroundings, negative people always have the possibility to change.

* When someone slanders or unjustly accuses you, don’t retaliate, but offer victory to the other side. (He likened this to the gospel’s advice to turn the other cheek.)

* When someone you’ve helped mistreats you, it’s conventionally seen as ungrateful and inappropriate. But, don’t give in to the temptation to respond negatively. Use the opportunity to further your practice of altruism. Appreciate the value of patience — and appreciate the conditions that give rise to patience, like the actions of this person who mistreated you. You can see them as a precious teacher.

* Make sure your spiritual practices aren’t tainted by materialistic concerns, i.e., wishes for fame, money, etc. Even the tiniest inkling of a thought like “maybe I’ll get a lot of money by teaching spiritual practices” will taint your practice. Our materialistic concerns arise from an underlying, distorted perception of the world, which causes us to grasp at things that are impermanent. The antidote is to cultivate the wisdom of understanding suffering and impermanence, and the wisdom of emptiness (dependent origination).

* Destructive emotions are the real destroyers of inner peace. When we train our minds and investigate our minds and emotions, inner peace can become a real part of our lives and our minds will be calm.

Pema Chodron

Pema Chodron, in a retreat titled “Smile at Fear,” shared a treasure trove of wisdom. She has an incredibly loving and compassionate, yet realistic, straightforward, no-BS approach. Like the Dalai Lama, she had an audience of 3,000, and she answered many personal questions from folks who were intensely suffering — including a cancer patient, a recent divorcee, a man with two violent autistic kids, a woman dealing with PTSD from a violent childhood, and people whose loved ones recently died. Pema commented on the amazing number of “unsolvable, unfixable” situations that were presented. She said that’s how life is — unsolvable. All the time. We just fool ourselves into thinking otherwise. Her advice is to befriend our fear. She said, “It’s useful to think of every situation in our life as unsolvable… we can ask, ‘Where will this take me?’”

Gems from Pema Chodron’s Retreat

* We are needed here on this earth. Let’s make a commitment to be of help to our families, our neighbors, the earth itself.

* Unavoidable uncertainty — that’s what it’s like to be a human being. When this fundamental uncertainty is our experience, it’s unnerving. It feels out of control, which can lead to fear. (Time reported: scientific tests have proven that people are more afraid of uncertainty than of physical pain.) When fear arises, we tend to go inward, armor ourselves, cut ourselves off from the rest of the world. We want to get away from the discomfort. We try to find something to hold on to. But when we do that, we set up a chain reaction, getting harder and harder, walling ourselves off. Then great pain arises — in the form of anger, prejudice, addiction, etc.

* Pema presented an “urgent invitation” to move closer to uncertainty and relax with our fear of it. The truth is, uncertainty is the background of everyone’s life because of death, change, impermanence. There is uncertainty because the nature of things is fluid and dynamic. When this primordial uncertainty (also known as vast, open, fresh space) is related to with courage, when we turn toward it rather than moving away, we can see it as a place that’s fertile with compassion. We find a place that’s tender and soft. We develop the quality of a warrior: tender-hearted bravery.

* The basis of our fear of uncertainty is doubting ourselves, not feeling good about ourselves. The first step in befriending fear is developing unconditional friendship with oneself. This means looking at ourselves clearly, staying with ourselves when we want to shut down, even when it feels embarrassing or hateful. This is the hallmark of bodhisattva training: in order to go anywhere in the world and help other people without shutting down, the first step is to look at ourselves with gentleness and kindness. Without a mask, without armor, we see everything about ourselves and don’t run away.

* Meditation allows us to see all of ourselves with gentleness and kindness but dead honesty.

* Smile at fear, taste fear, know fear. Engage — in a curious, wholehearted way — that which we’ve been avoiding our whole lives. Do this with gentleness. Do it “sip by sip.” Just touch in briefly. When fear arises in you, get curious about it for a few seconds: how does it feel in your body? Drop the story line, let the thoughts go. (Our thoughts add fuel to the fire of fear.) In the same way that many drops eventually fill a bucket, many “sips” cultivate our strength and capacity to be with our experiences. Eventually you develop confidence in your heart that you can dispel your own darkness.

* As you become more comfortable with yourself, you begin to see the world more clearly and to treasure it with appreciation and gratitude.  As your courage grows, you become more interested in fellowship with all kinds of people. You really feel the richness of the world. You can wake up in the morning and say to yourself, “I wonder what’s going to happen today!” (This is one monk’s morning mantra.)

* We have a nature of basic goodness (Buddha nature). This refers to the fluid, dynamic, unfixated quality of our minds and hearts, before we close down and decide that things are “good” or “bad.” Basic goodness is characterized by open-mindedness, and it manifests as curiosity, taking an interest in life. Everybody has the capacity to live from this place of openness. It happens when we don’t pre-determine what someone is going to do. We are open, drop our agenda, and go freshly into a situation, available to our world.

* Paradox and ambiguity — that is the flavor of life. We want it to be one way or the other. But the nature of this existence is dynamic and paradoxical.

* Joy comes from realizing that nothing is ever a dead end. Whatever is happening at the present time is the fruition of something, and the seed of something else. It’s always the start of something fresh. Rilke said, “No feeling is final.”

* Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche said, “Living with ourselves is like riding a fickle horse, but we can hold our seat.”

Wisdom

Wisdom is a small child spirit in a simple woman’s body. She walks leisurely and sings frequently. There’s nothing she needs to do. Her body is full and glad of sensation, and loves to float in water and rest under trees and stars. A long slow fire laughs in the dark of her eyes. She has a whole lot of grandbabies and contentedly holds them as often as she can. Not lazy, not impatient, she savors the doing of anything—hanging clothes on the line, trimming roses, sipping water, opening a door—without thinking ahead to what’s next. She lingers over flowers sprouting from sidewalk cracks, and feathers, and wooden beads, and cream soups. She thoroughly tastes, with her whole tongue, every bite. She enjoys folks as they are and takes a mind of compassionate wonder toward their problems. Has no interest in giving advice. Often wears an unexplainable smile. Can be sassy with laughter. Is fascinated by her body: its abilities, temperatures, sensings, scents, changes. “Look at this beauty mark,” she’ll say to her hairdresser, in awe. “It didn’t use to have a hair growing from it. What miracles we are.” The world is her discovery playground, always unfolding to her delight. She takes her sweet time, because time is simply the wonder of this instant, and therefore her dearest friend.

Aspiration

Life has been full of wonders–both painful and celebratory. A few friends are facing very hard times. A few others are leaping thresholds into sparkly new dreams. I want to be a good friend, and sometimes I struggle to stay on the greener side of the fence between true service and codependency. Is it healthy to cry for someone when she tells me that her infant son passed away? Is it right to give myself over to energy work for a friend who is sick from chemo? What do I do for a friend struggling with addiction? What do I do for someone in the throes of PTSD?

Fortunately I’m involved in a process called “aspiration.” It means I’m aspiring to take the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings (vows) within my Sangha (meditation community). Since I am an aspirant, I am incredibly blessed to have mentors, and there are four of them, and they are wise, caring, supportive, experienced meditators! They shine a compassionate light on my meditation practice and dole out wisdom that hits the spot.  One of them, for example, reminded me of a tai chi master’s words: “The great way is not difficult — for those who have no preferences.”

One of my mentors has done a lot of “inner child work,” exploring his own childhood trauma and its resonance in present day life, and coaching others. He is a compassionate warrior of the heart, fearless in the places most of us run from. He reminded me that whenever we get caught up in another’s problems, there is likely to be a big emotion in ourselves that needs tending. He asked, “When you’re looking at these dark emotions, what are you afraid of?” I realized it was a fear of annihilation. Which is funny, because from a Buddhist perspective, annihilation isn’t so bad. It just means lack of ego, lack of separate self, interdependence with everything. Real annihilation is actually a relief. But the idea scares the bezeejus out of us.

I realized that I’ve been caught up in my friends’ dramas because it’s a way of avoiding my own transitions, my own shape-shifting life and uncertainties. I’m grateful to my warrior mentor for inspiring me to invite the strong emotions in, to sit with them, opening the heart to the hard stuff.  As Rumi wrote:

Guest House

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Here’s to all the new delights, and the ease of annihilation, and May’s sunrise!

The Good Stuff

I’m blessed to live five blocks from the ocean. Sometimes as I’m waking up in the quiet of early morning, I can hear the waves. They sound like distant avalanches, coming down in a rhythmic procession.

This morning I woke up at 5:00 a.m. with a sore throat. I lay there alternately feeling sorry for myself and trying to envision healing energy soothing my throat. Then I noticed the waves. They were barely within earshot; I had to completely still my mind in order to hear them. They captured my full attention. After a few minutes I realized I hadn’t been feeling the sore throat at all. The waves had become my reality.

Where our attention goes, our reality is. I’m learning (painstakingly) to corral my attention and direct it toward the good stuff. When the mind rolls into its rut of self-judgment or poor-me or isn’t-life-hard, I’m learning to recognize that as suffering. And learning to transform the suffering by focusing on something else… like good deeds I’ve managed to do, or magical moments with my nieces, or Ellen Degeneres dancing.

Thich Nhat Hanh says, “The Kingdom of God, the wonders of life, are always available. But are we available to them?” Shifting our attention from gloom and pessimism to wonders, delights, enthralling ocean sounds, is a skill worth cultivating. Maybe the wonders are barely within earshot, but if we get quiet and make ourselves available to them, they make life a celebration.

Photo by Michelle Albert

World Water Day: March 22

In honor of World Water Day, March 22, here’s a little riff dedicated to the liquid that keeps us alive.

I remember drinking spring water in the Napa redwoods. We trekked up the creek, hopping stones, slipping in, getting wet, carrying our jugs far, far up, climbing a redwood-duff bank to an old pipe where spring water trickled out. We held the jug to the pipe’s mouth forever, watching the slow, slow fill, listening to the gurgling melody. Finally we lifted the jug to our lips and drank.  Oh, sweet, fresh, pure goodness.

Tasting that goodness, you know water remembers the earth that cradled it. And water is in our blood, swooshing the earth-held music we once were, before we seeped out of rock and bubbled up, before we knew of walking, talking, handshakes and bread. Water is our memory of mother, encasing, encircling, thrumming a gestation beat. Water in my eyes, remember our no-seeing origin? Water of my mouth, remember an untasted time, sheltered from soot, untainted by gasoline?

If only we could remember our body is water, know ourselves drenched in love. Every drink would be a meeting with our source. Every sip would tell us we matter. Every rain shower would sing up our worth, dance down our crystalline, mirror-drop core.

Let’s walk up to the spring. Leave your load on the bank. Take off your shoes, step into the creek, feel the cool water curling over your toes, licking your soles, lapping your ankles. Follow me to the source. Drink pure goodness. You’ve never tasted life like this, but you’ll remember it. It will make you cry and smile and ease wide open. Listen. It’s an easy, never-ending harmony – the song of water, nowhere but in you.

Learn about World Water Day (http://www.worldwaterday.org/) & send me your riffs on blue gold…

Ordinary

I agree with Eckhart Tolle when he says it’s good to be content being nobody. It’s much better to be nobody than to be famous or important. Famous people have too many people chasing them, blaming them, cajoling them for money or friendship, or forcing them onto pedestals that will collapse the minute they make a mistake. Just think of Tiger Woods.

It’s good to be nobody. To be ordinary. I’ve tried to be extraordinary—tried to get people’s admiration with straight A’s, nice hair, spiffy writing—but that game only gives me the worries and turns me into unpleasant company.

When I let myself be ordinary, nobody, nothing special, I get to relax. I can just be there, no push, no yank, no snarly voice in my head. When I’m ordinary, my shoulders drop and I really notice other people—the lines around their eyes, the breaks in their voices. I slow down, dallying over a pink-melting-into-white rose petal or the feel of a carpeted stair under my foot. It gets quiet inside. I lean back in my chair and witness. Nobody needs to be won over or changed; there’s nothing to prove. When I’m ordinary, my hair is just plain brown. But life is tasty and humming and full of rain and trees moving in the wind. Anyway, isn’t everything extraordinary? Those trees, the pink-white rose petal, my plain brown hair which no one else can grow? Isn’t everything extraordinary?

Tell me what’s extraordinary in your life…

Turning Pain into Poetry

“Well, while I’m here I’ll do the work — and what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.” – Allen Ginsberg

I recently attended a weekend retreat with my meditation group. One of our instructors was Maxine Hong Kingston, a wonderful, generous teacher, writer, and mystic. The retreat took place between Veteran’s Day and Thanksgiving, so the theme was “moving from war to gratitude.”

Maxine told us about a group of young soldiers who returned from Iraq and Afghanistan and formed a writers’ group. “They had faith that writing would bring them home,” Maxine said. She showed us a little book they had compiled, whose cover was a rough, handmade paper, thick as cardboard. She said the veterans had cut up their uniforms, boiled them, and used the remains to make paper covers for their books. The green-grey-white cover was scratchy and knuckled as the bark of a tree that has withstood every kind of storm and keeps on growing.

Collectively, creatively, these soldier-writers transformed their suffering into art. Their painful memories became poems. Their war clothes became book jackets.

Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) has said that he wouldn’t want to live in a place where there is no suffering, because there would be no compassion. I’ve had to sit with this idea a lot. Usually I (and most people I know) have a knee-jerk reaction to pain and suffering — it’s “get me out of here!” We want to run away from anything that itches or ouches. We want to get to happyland, where it’s all fun, sun, and money. Yet we also want love and compassion. And Thay says in order to have love and compassion, you’ve got to have suffering.

Suffering is the mud. Compassion is the lotus that needs mud in order to grow.

It’s no fun to sit with suffering. But it brings the heart to life. I remember the time I sat in the emergency room with a friend who had an abscessed tooth. And the time I held another friend’s hand as she wept after her husband died. And the time I helped a Hospice patient sort through boxes of cards and letters from her loved ones; she was crying as she decided what to do with these before the end of her life. I remember these moments vividly because my heart was wide open. I was deeply alive, acutely feeling. This open, unguarded aliveness is where humans connect. It’s where we know we are neither alone nor separate. It’s the truest place to abide if we want to be of use in the world.

May each of us take our uniforms, our weapons, our resistances, and stay with them closely, lovingly, with mindful attention, so that their sludge and mud will feed the flowerings of our art and service.

Befriend A Tree

We are nature. Our bodies aren’t separate from the earth. We instinctively know this, although we forget sometimes. We know it feels restorative, calming and healing to spend time in nature – away from roads, buildings, computers, phones, and deadlines.

Give yourself ten or fifteen minutes to enjoy this exercise.

Find a tree or a grassy area. The farther you get from pavement and traffic, the more pleasant it will be. But you don’t need a nature preserve or a park. You can do it with just one tree, or a small patch of grass under the sky.

Sit or lie down next to the tree, or on the grass. Become aware of the earth beneath you. Feel her texture and temperature. Feel her wide, vast presence. Remember how enormous she is, how solid and abiding. Feel gravity connecting you to the earth. You’re a part of her, made of the air, water, and plants that keep you alive.

Let your mind quiet down. Listen to the sounds around you – wind shaking the leaves of your tree, voices of birds, water, people. Spend time with the clouds.

It only takes a short time to befriend a tree. Nature heals us because it doesn’t want anything from us, and it shows us the ease of simply being.

Come back and write me a note about what you noticed!