Release the timeline

A couple months into living in Venice Beach I had this moment, biking home from a friend’s on a Sunday evening along boardwalk, then turning on Speedway and pulling to my alley (mine! this was now home!) when I realized, like really realized, that I lived at the beach.

I’d always wanted to live summers at the beach growing up, have a home there, a place to stay rather than day trips in and out to the Jersey Shore. I was, I am, grateful for that, yes, and still, I craved languid summer nights with melting ice cream cones and slow sunsets and friends from other school districts, could feel the little bliss of what it’d be like to wake up to walk in the sand. Now, all these years later, but not a moment too late or too early, I was here. I am here.

Release the timeline. Because, the time is always divine; the timing is always right. (And maybe, sometimes it’s a boomerang?)

Exhale first

My friend Lilian recently completed a yoga teacher training, just for herself, just to learn, just to go deeper, just to have.

A few weeks later, she led 7 of us in a Vinyasa flow during a long weekend trip to Joshua Tree and the Yucca Valley. Exhale first, she gently guided us. Exhale, and the inhalation will come. It’s the exhale, the letting go, that is what begins to calm us, to level us, to bring us down into ourselves and where we need to be.

Exhale first. Let go and create the space. Then, receive what comes. Trust in it.

*(In fact, if someone is experiencing altered breathing from anxiety or a panic attack, it’s best to have them first exhale, Lil also shared.)

Intuition is a voice that grows stronger

…the quieter I get, the more I go within with meditation, the more I honor it and validate it by following it, the stronger the voice of intuition gets.

All the voices, all the noise, and, there are differences. This one is different. It’s quieter and more resolute. It comes from a deeper place, one within the core of my being, and it’s unwavering. That’s mine, and maybe, because yours is yours, it’s different for you. I hope you get to know it, because it’s really such a fulfilling relationship.

I’ve found honoring intuition in small ways, like through following charm in little daily moments of play, makes it easier to follow it in bigger ways (the little things are the big things), to step into it when it maybe feels scarier. Yes, this, too, is right. And it is all right.

Intuition is a voice that grows stronger—like most things—with belief and honor and love.

It's all right

The other day I was thinking of the term “all right,” or “alright.” Broken down, it’s “all” + “right.” Everything is right.

Except, we’ve somehow made it mean, essentially, “OK.” Like, fine, I guess. “How are you?” “I’m doing alright.” When a friend says that to me, I’m going to follow up, concerned.

What if, instead, I thought, I used this to start to think of things as “right,” always right, all right, even when they just seemed OK? That everything is always perfect as it is; that in every moment, any situation, I am having the exact right experience I am meant to be having. Try it, alright? All right. Let’s.

Even when things are OK, they are, it is, all right. Correct. Alright, all right.

The difference between 4 miles and 24 miles

Is actually nothing, except creating the space for it.

I had this thought during a recent 4.5-mile Wednesday night run with Venice Run Club. I ran the Los Angeles Marathon in late March, blooming into spring, and since then, I’ve enjoyed flowing back into a more varied fitness routine, which usually includes running about one day a week. I was pushing at that point in that run, calibrating to keep myself at that intersection of personal challenge and ease + enjoyment, a space where I’d found much to come in the past and consider ideal. It felt like so many moments of so many other runs in that all it felt like there was, was that very moment. It didn’t matter the length of the run it was part of.

In it, in that very moment, and all we have ever is this very moment, whenever and wherever that is, this actually doesn’t feel any different from any other run. Four miles, to fourteen miles, to 24 and more. You just prepare differently, and create the space. Train up to it, know you can do it, take the time to do it. And when you’re in it, you’re just with it.

I’ve heard a similar recommendation in relation to thinking about wealth, or financial abundance: It’s just about creating the mental space for it. In that, the deservingness for it. $80k and $80m is a different scope/ It takes up different space, and still, it’s all money. How do we prepare for it? ( “What if” positive thought play is a recommendation, especially for women, because women are socially conditioned to do this much less than men, of thinking and playing in the space of financial abundance. So, what if, I receive a financial windfall, X amount? What would I do with that? How would I manage it? What would I want to do with it?)

I wrote some additional things about running and the marathon, and the whole process (writing, running, all of it) felt expansive and cathartic. Posts are:

The luckiest person in the world

The other day I decided I was the luckiest person in the world.

I decided I was the luckiest person in the world, because “the” world is just my world, and your world is yours. I hope you’re the luckiest person in the world, your world, too, because you deserve to be.

When I decided this, I began to affirm it, in writing, in saying, in thoughts and self-talk throughout the day. I almost dropped that—caught it. Lucky. The light turned green. Lucky. That meeting got moved. Lucky!

There’s science around how and why things like this work: It’s related to our Reticular Activating System, which layers between the conscious and subconscious and decides what gets through to us, and what gets filtered out. (More here from Entrepreneur.) When I started to think of myself as lucky, I pressed play on the little program that generated all the proof I needed to believe that. And in that process and proof, perception becomes reality.

It’s been such a fun way to play, and to reframe my days. So, wishing a wonderful day to the luckiest person in the world. You, me and all of us.

I have compassion for my past self

A couple months ago, happily nested in my Venice Beach apartment, I kept finding myself being so critical, so hard on myself, for the life I lived in my Brooklyn apartment.

It was specifically about living in that apartment, too. I felt claustrophobic thinking about how I spent day in and day out cramped in a studio, how that whole wall of window bore sunlight into my soul every morning, how I was ungrounded on the 14th floor, on display for all of Brooklyn on that terrace. (Even in writing this, I feel a tightness start to form; I feel the need to shake it out.)

The truth is, I felt none of that when I was there. In a session with my healer and friend, Ryan Glassmoyer (whom I see for guided meditations and healings through her Abstract Therapie program biweekly, 10/10 recommend!), she reminded me of how special and important that home, that time, was for me. I moved, often dancing, through my days in the fluidity of a studio space that spilled into the outside that was licked by sunlight most days, welcoming to rain on others, collecting snow in winter. I spent evenings on the rooftop patio watching the sun set across the Williamsburg Bridge, Domino Park, Manhattan. I jumped rope and hula hooped on my terrace, gleeful at the amount of outdoor space—in NYC—that was all mine. I had friends over and re-thought my prior assumption of self that I didn’t like to host; instead it was about having a space that made it feel easy, inviting and comfortable. I could walk the water, bike up to Greenpoint, strut Berry Street every evening with a friend who lived just across the way. We had a gym. There were grills. I made friends in the building. I had an in-unit washer and dryer! (Re-writing my memories now from the more recent above, I’m rediscovering the joys, rest and rejuvenation that life, and apartment, gave me.)

It was a cocoon for me, and it gave me everything I needed. It was in that time that I moved that I started seeing butterflies, too. Monarchs. Far more than I ever had in Manhattan. (Out there in the wilds of Brooklyn..) Now, in LA, I feel like I see even more than I saw then; they lilt in the front yard of my building; they pause near the palm tree outside my balcony. And it makes me smile and remember, how big and special that all felt then, and how big and special this feels now.

I needed that then, and I loved that then. It took that for this, a West Coast move, and I deserve to give myself gratitude for that time, and to remember that time for how much I appreciated it, and how proud I was of myself for all of it.

I have compassion for my past self. Where she was got me to where I am now. Who she was informed who I am now.

And thank you, to 325 Kent. You really were a dream.

I trust my future self

I started saying this to myself, at some point back when I was in Brooklyn, as a way to come back to the now. To keep from falling into a spiral about a hypothetical future, from experiencing what I’ve sometimes heard referred to in the Vedic community as “future suffering”—suffering in the now (which was really a nice now, back then, and now, too!), mucking it up over a maybe.

“I trust my future self.” Even when I thought I wasn’t ready, for that big opportunity, that other thing I didn’t see coming, I really had been. I had received it, and I had come to believe in the innate rightness of it, even if it didn’t happen right away. I had a decades-long track record of things really working out. Future me deserved the trust of past me, and the now me. So, I let it go. Let her go.

As I started saying this to myself more, I was giving myself even more reason to believe. I’d go to add something to my Calendar and see it was already there. I’d open my phone to write something down, and it was done. I’d think of an email I meant to respond to, and I’d already sent it. Future me really didn’t need to prove anything else, but I guess she wanted to. Notes to self; jokes on me, and jokes for me. So, now I do more (less) to just let her be.

For Kelly, with whom I found deep trust in myself (we both did!) in those early and formative professional years, and with whom I formed a deep and formative friendship.