insight arising

During my heart practice this morning, something our teacher offered stuck with me.  She said, "Learn how to cultivate trust in the mystery of the unknown."  I've been reading a book about the mystery of the dark moon and her healing powers. Over the past year, I've spent a lot of time staring at la luna. I've become so curious about her energetic dance with darkness. The book has brought clarity to my own experience with darkness and its healing ways. Late last year, I had noticed a significant shift in my relationship with physical darkness . It was unbelievable to experience this change, which seemed to happen so organically, given how terrified of the dark I've been most of my life. I can't help but speculate that my increased comfort with darkness is connected to my deepening trust with the mystery of life.  In a week, my spiritual being turns 34. And literally, in a week, my life could look completely different from how it does today, or maybe it...

Have you ever experienced something and thought... this must be what it feels like to be in a loving mother's womb? Seen...  Heard... Felt... Held...  Protected...  Nourished...  Loved unconditionally... This was my felt experience of sitting silently in community with over 100 Black, Indigenous, People of Color for 7 days. It changed me in profound ways.  Precious karma brought me to Spirit Rock's 21st Annual BIPOC Retreat. It was hosted by an utterly brilliant and wiseful teaching team, whose wide-open hearts, gently interlocked, created the most tender field of energy to hold with quiet grace, the ocean of collective grief, sorrow, anger, pain, joy, courage, and hope, that was so palpably felt, even across our virtual platforms.  Especially given the state of America and its continued brutalization and massacre of Black and Brown lives, whether in the form of broken healthcare systems leaving more Black, Native, and Latinx people to die of COVID19, or in...

At the end of 2016, after returning home from a perspective changing retreat in Ecuador about financial freedom, I started a weekly gratitude practice. At this retreat, we learned that practicing gratitude regularly was one sure way to cultivating longterm happiness (aka the longterm goal of financial freedom). I had attempted daily gratitude practice a few times before but it never stuck. The retreat talk emphasized the value of a weekly practice. The happiness research was totally right. Every single Sunday for almost 3 years, I would wake up, usually with a cup of tea, and write for a few minutes about the things I felt grateful for. The practice brought me great joy and showed me a short list of the things I really needed in life: meaningful connection and relationships, being in nature, thoughtfulness and care from others, and solitude. I was proud by how easeful the practice came to me. It never felt like a chore.  Towards the end of last year, my gratitude practice came to a...