This past weekend I taught the midday yoga at the Achieving Optimal Health Conference at Georgetown University sponsored by GUWellness (where I work!) and BB&R Consulting (Therese Burch, Doro Bush Koch, Patricia Reilly Koch and Patrice Brickman). Beautiful, inspiring teachers offered deeply healing but accessible practices to align our bodies, minds, actions and lives with our hearts and our purpose for being here.

I could listen to Tara Brach all day (and do! On podcasts, on meditation retreats!). She read a poem that so resonated with me and I want to share with all of you.

Clearing
By Martha Postlethwaite

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is yours alone to sing
falls into your open cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to the world
so worthy of rescue.

“…create a clearing in the dense forest of your life…”

We live in a culture that is “go, go, go.” It values hard work that fries our nervous systems and drives us into the ground. It sells us on looking to things outside ourselves for wisdom, for a sense of being ok, for happiness.

Often it is only when we reach a breaking point – a serious diagnosis, lose a job, lose a partner, a dear one dies – do we pause and literally stop. Stop our futile hurrying about. Stop our running from one activity. Stop looking for happiness, home, or belonging in things that are outside ourselves. Stop and see the need to turn inward. Turn inward and finally, finally be with what is here within us – what we have been running from, trying to keep hidden or down for so long.

Why wait for the diagnosis or the death of someone you love to stop and pause?? To stop and pause and come home to your own self?

I tell parents again and again and again that you can try any child behavior management tool or strategy you want but nothing truly shifts for the long term if mom and dad are fried, reacting, running, operating in stress mode, don’t know how to “tend and befriend” their own selves. And anything can shift when mom and dad decide to turn inward and find a sense of deeeeeep rest within themselves. Essentially coming home to our own selves.

Whatever you think you want – to lose weight, a better job, a deeper connection with your partner, to not yell at kiddos, get along with your family, eat better, build a business, write a book – …learning to pause, settle and arrive right here in this moment, and have compassion is the foundation for making wise choices that enable us to live how we want to live.

Learning to turn inward, to greet ourselves with deep regard and kindness.
Learning to to look within for a sense of belonging, inspiration, purpose, and rest. Learning that nothing outside of ourselves can make us feel “at home.”

Put down the parenting books, the self help books, the nutrition books for awhile. Your answers to whatever question you have are right here within you. Yes, yes they are.

It all starts with following a Taoist adage: “when in doubt, do less.”
Take a Sacred Pause in your day.
Slow down and check in.
Still your body and listen.
Listen to your breath.
Watch your thoughts, the sensations in your body, the waves of emotions.
And have compassion for yourself.

Every day a few times a day. Just do it and keep doing it. Before you get out of bed. As you are in the shower. As you eat a few bites of breakfast. Before you begin your commute. As you sit in your office. After you drop off your kiddos at school. You get the idea.

Consider learning to meditate – in the morning and at night – bookending your day. There are now thousands and thousands of studies that talk about the benefits of meditation.

Learn to do this – two minute sacred pauses in your day and the longer meditation pauses in your day. And I tell you – the right answers, the right path, the right action to take all arrive on their own. Our relationships shift. You begin to feel more at ease in your own skin. You softly smile. You begin to taste freedom.

More and more, I am learning to do even less and less. Slowly. I am learning to turn inward – to settle my nervous system. To shift this outward focus of trying to find any redemption, answer, way of feeling like I am good and enough and whole outside myself…and sit quietly. To come home to my own Heart – in a comfy chair, prayer book in my lap, hands open. I believe what a wise teacher told me: meditation (and prayer) heal everything. It is in meditation that we find our soul song and are then prompted to go back out into the world and sing it.

** Find beautiful guided meditations to support and nourish you, your nervous system and your life for download on my Shop.

Blessings,
Lisa A. McCrohan
MA, LCSW-C, RYT
Compassion Coach

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