​This meditation is for everyday people who may find themselves, suddenly, sharing close quarters with others with few opportunities for    to get quiet and still.  Working from home, schooling your kids, trying to figure out what this new normal is - there’s a lot here to work with, so let’s get to it. 


Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, without putting yourself or anyone else in danger, just begin to notice - let’s start with our body - if you’re cooking, feel your hands as they tend to your task, be aware of the textures, smells, and sights before you. If you’re sitting or resting back, feel the chair or couch against the back of your body - notice if it’s hard or soft - if you’re working as you listen, feel the temperature of the room around your body and notice the sensation of your breath as it enters your nostrils.  Notice if there is any tension in your face, jaw, shoulders, chest, or tummy. 

Whatever you find as you pay attention to your body, let it be what it is. 

Next, feel your breath fill your body, feel your body respond to your breath. Whatever activity you’re engaged in - notice if your breath is jagged or smooth, if it’s shallow or deep - are you holding your breath? In these times, we are aware that each breath is a gift - so feel your breath fill your body, feel your body respond to your breath - nothing to change, fix, or have be different.  Allow your body to be breathed and observe.   If an impulse arises to deepen or slow your breath arises - allow that to happen without pushing, or straining. 

Whatever you find as you pay attention to your inhales and exhales, let it be what it is. 

Next, notice that as you’ve been listening, your brain has continued to offer thoughts - just as your heart has offered beats and your lungs have offered breath, it’s quite possible that you’ve even missed some of what I’ve said because your brain offered thoughts that swiped your attention away from this exercise.   That’s normal.  We live our lives immersed in an almost unending cognitive onslaught of thought - but just as you observed your body and your breath, you can observe your thoughts. 

Take a step back from your thought stream, calmly watching them as if they were cars passing by as you sat safely at a sidewalk cafe, savoring your favorite treat with a beloved friend - you wouldn’t climb aboard each vehicle that passed, allowing it take you away from where you intended to be - and you don’t have to ride your train of  thought away from the present moment.  Notice if your brain is offering thoughts that have to do with the future - planning, aspiring, hoping, rehearsing some imagined conversation or encounter.  Notice if your brain is offering thoughts that have to do with the past - remembering, longing, wishing things were like they were before.  Perhaps your brain  is offering thoughts about the present - analyzing, criticizing, making a list of things you do and do not like about right now. 

Maybe there will be a bit more space between your thoughts,  maybe not. Nothing to solve, nothing to figure out. Just watching your thoughts come and go. Notice what your brain is offering in this moment, and whatever state your mind is in, let it be what it is.

Next, turn your awareness toward the emotional truth you bring to this moment. Say to yourself, “I feel,” and then name what you notice. If your sentence goes “I feel that this is a total waste of time or the best meditation ever” that’s not a feeling - it’s a thought.  I feel happy. I feel sad. I feel frustrated. I feel peaceful. I feel numb. I feel fear. I feel grateful. I feel guilty. I feel hopeful.  Notice that emotional truth is often complex - you can hold two seemingly opposite feelings at the same time. Name them as they arise - and just as we don’t have to immerse ourselves in unblessed or troubled  waters, notice that you can make your emotional truth without being swept away.  If you feel overwhelm and cry - it’s okay. Be with the tears. If you feel joy and dance - let yourself dance. 

Whatever you find as you pay attention to your emotional truth, let it be what it is. 

Now, without effort or drama, get curious - who is it there that is able to notice the body, the breath, the thoughts, and the emotions? What aspect of your consciousness is able to observe, name, and notice these phenomena as they arise?  This is your wise observer self - your steadfast witness, who is able to discern without judging, to allow what is without adding a narrative, story, or reason to that which is observed.  This is the part of the self that can let things be what they are, and be present with them - aware, awake, and alive.

This observer is available to you at any time - at any time you can stop and notice your body, your breath, your thoughts, and your emotions - and know, with great certainty - that you are in your body, but you are not your body.  You rely on thinking to navigate your commitments, but you are not your thoughts. Your feelings give you important information about the world around you, but you are not your emotions. 


Get curious about who, then you are - feel for a moment the vastness of yourself, your soul - that part of your that can not die because it was not born, who you were before your parents met, that which is holy, sanctified, and connected to nature and All That Is. 

And at the same time - here, vulnerable in this body and in this world. 

Go back to whatever it is that needs your attention - and notice that, perhaps, there is more space, grace, and allowing. 

Whatever you notice next, let it be what it is. 
​​

When we reach out for help and support, we don’t always get the responses we deserve. Forgiveness is not about making bad behavior okay, but finding liberation from the adrenaline-saturated reactions that come in harm’s wake.

In this episode, I’ll offer a nervous system-based definition for forgiveness, answer a question about making time for meditation, and tell you all about my first  therapy session ever.
​ 
You can use the player below or you can also listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or  Stitcher.

Forgiveness can be a pretty charged word. For me, I can’t help but go back to Phillip’s Temple CME church, voices echoing through the sanctuary as we asked the Lord to forgive us our trespasses as we forgave those who trespassed against us. I was educated in a fundamentalist Christian elementary school, and my ideas about forgiveness are shaped by that experience - forgiveness is something I, as a worthless sinner, should ask God for on a daily basis. 

In psychology, forgiveness  is not dependent on any outside source or deity, and forgiveness isn’t something given to the offender - it’s for the person who has been hurt, betrayed, or injured and is suffering as a result of unskillful action.

​It’s a decision to release negative emotions and resentment. It’s an  expression of resilience in the wake of not getting what we hoped for or what we deserved.
So I propose we look at forgiveness through the lens of the nervous system, where it would begin with stress management -  a process of working with your fight, flight, flee, or feign reactions to an event or person who’s hurt you until you’re able to access emotions other than fear, rage, avoidance, despair, and other adrenaline-saturated reactions to being on the receiving end of wrong-doing. 

Dr. Leo Deon, who’s deceased - but I changed his name anyway - gave me lots of time and practice to approach forgiveness this way, and taught me the importance of finding medicine that works, especially if the cure that’s initially offered feels worse than the disease. 

Listen to the rest of the story...

Read more about my yoga teacher training, yoga foundations training for mental health professionals, yoga therapist training & get notified when registration for my upcoming retreat for women of color goes live. 

In this episode, I’ll talk about how setting limits is essential to being a loving person, the specific yogic and Buddhist principle that helps us balance compassion for others with respect for ourselves, and I’ll fill you in on how hard creating healthy boundaries can be when you grow up with a parent who is severely mentally ill. ​ You can use the player below (please keep this browser window on top to keep it playing smoothly) or you can also listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or  Stitcher.

Just a heads up before you listen -​ I believe stories are medicine, but medicine has to be dispensed at the right time, in the right amount,  to the right person. My work frankly addresses childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, scenarios involving people living with severe mental illness, and other themes that might not be healing for you right now. I also talk about joy, liberation, and redemption, - but if the other stuff leaves you too charged up, these stories will be here if and when it feels like a good time to listen

I’d appreciate you taking some time to subscribe, rate, and review my work on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your listen on.

 A woman with severe mental illness gave birth to me, and a different woman with severe mental illness raised me.
“Of course, we had to tell the children’s home all about your mama’s nerve problems, ” my dad told me. 
That’s what my family, and a lot of other black families, called mental illness. A white doctor once demeaned and shamed Marlene Faye for saying she took “nerve pills” when he asked her if she was on any medications. 
There were times she was well and stable, sure, and despite how raggedy and sad things got, we did laugh a lot.
​
Enmeshment is the opposite of having a healthy boundary with someone.  
It’s a concept in psychology and psychotherapy introduced by Salvador Minuchin to describe families where a lack of healthy personal boundaries and over-concern for others leads to a loss of autonomy and healthy development. An emotional fusion happens, psyches get entangled, and patterns for later relationships develop. 

I was tying to work all this out in therapy - again - in my late 30s, and had just done that awful thing you have to do when you go to a new therapist and have to tell your whole story over - again, and when I told him about my past and truthfully reported some of my self-destructive behaviors, he cut me off mid-sentence and indicated I should stop talking by holding his finger to his lips.  “Boundaries. BOUND-O-REES -  it’s clear you really don’t have any, for you - It’s all about the boundaries, baby.”  He sat back in his chair all satisfied. Our time was up. 

​I found another therapist - even though it meant doing that awful thing all over again. Boundaries. I was learning. And I still am. This is a life-long practice.  

​Listen to the rest of this story on Spotify.

Read more about my yoga teacher training, yoga foundations training for mental health professionals, yoga therapist training & get notified when registration for my upcoming retreat for women of color goes live. 

In this podcast, I’ll tell you all about Buddhist near enemies and apparent friends, a most unexpected death-bed confession about the first time I was on TV, and tell a story about compassion in action. You can use the player below or search for my podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and most other places people get their podcast listen on. 

Outside my Dad's  Hospice Room at the VA,  Dayton Ohio 

In Buddhism, there are these wholesome emotions we cultivate as our practice grows, akin to the fruits of the spirit in Christianity. There are four, called the Brahmaviharas: loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. Compassion is a resolve to be present with suffering - both our own and that of others, in a skillful and engaged way.  It is empathy in action - a vow to maintain contact with another being’s humanity, even when they act from their own wounds and ignorance.  Self-Compassion is believing in our own light,  even when fear obscures our best self and we act from damaged places ourselves. It is a commitment to work toward extinguishing that suffering, planting seed to  transform it into wisdom. 

Compassion, or Karuna, is what motivates some flavors of Buddhists to make a promise to work toward the liberation of all sentient beings, called Bodhisattva vows. Spiritually speaking, we go big. Until every last one of us is free, none of us are.  

Now, I’m an agnostic Buddhist with a pretty complex relationship with Jesus, so I’m not going to make any definitive statements about whether reincarnation and rebirth are literal or not, but in theory, Bodhisattvas work our asses off to get freedom from the endless cycle of suffering, death, and rebirth only to turn around, come back into a human body and start over - again and again and again - until every last one of us is on the Nirvana bus. I took Bodhisattva vows in 2009, and candidly there are times I’m not sure what I was thinking.

​Because compassion is hard.

It takes a lot of work to arrive at a point where you really and sincerely want people who hurt you, who disagree with you, and who move through the world in ways that upset you to be free from suffering.  

I learned a lot about this from my father, who was not an easy man to love - you can listen to the podcast to hear the story.

You can use the player below or search for my podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and most other places people get their podcast listen on. ​

When I think about all the conversations I've had in therapeutic contexts, both as a client and as a clinician, I realize that the majority of the work has been about getting comfortable being human. We are both deeply flawed and brilliantly fabulous beings, and we don't come with instruction manuals.

What we do have is a tradition of connecting with sources of wisdom via teachers, elders, philosophers, and others who've committed to making their own journey from wounded to liberated — taking notes and creating field guides for those who follow. The variables and wisdom containers (e.g., yoga, religion, psychology, evolutionary biology, etc.) may change, but the basic axioms and truths stay the same.

To be human is to make mistakes, to be at the mercy of our hormones, social structures, egos, and our deep longing to move though life with ease and abundance. Our lives have periods of learning, growing, loving, maturing, and sharing what we've observed with others. Sooner or later, we leave our physical bodies — none of us gets out of this alive. Getting comfortable being human and cultivating an awareness of the arc of our whole journey is critical to having a more enjoyable ride through life. 

There are a lot of tools and approaches we can use to get comfortable being human, and I've launched a podcast to explore them. You can find the first episode here on the Anchor.FM platform and wherever else you get your podcast listen on. I'll post new episodes every other Friday starting January 3, 2020. 

If you have questions or reflections, I'd love to hear them. You can send me an email or leave me a voice message at Anchor.FM. I look forward to all of us getting more comfortable being human together. 

The heart's job is to beat, the lungs to breathe, and the brain to think. All are necessary for you to function, and they do so with no effort on your part.

As the brain does it's job, you can sift through the thoughts it offers, being careful to notice when those thoughts form chains, and when those chains of thoughts start to create stories about yourself and the world around you.

You can choose to be curious about the validity of those narratives, being especially cautious if they are bitter, hostile, mean, or toxically critical.

Be especially skeptical if you are weaving narratives of hate, blame, and disdain toward yourself.

Stories, by their nature, change as they are told and re-told. As you move through your wholeness journey, part of the work is to observe the stories you've constructed about yourself and others as they  shift. 

​As you recognize your wholeness, those stories begin to move from critical to compassionate while maintaining healthy boundaries and balance. They become more authentic and emerge from a state of emotional stability and presence. Perhaps they are  informed by fear, sure - but  they are not controlled by it.  

Cultivating abiding authentic presence with ourselves, connecting to consciousness & taking a break from mind, and making space for curiosity and compassion to replace the constant critical voice is essential to finding emotional freedom.

Those brain-beats we call thoughts - especially when strung together to conclude that you are something other than capable and lovable - can be noticed and then allowed to move along. Again and again and again - until you are able to  just notice them without being consumed or creating a story.. 

Imagine a weaver, carefully selecting threads to go into fabric for a  fine garment - be just as patient and vigilant as you sift through your thoughts to create your beliefs. 

We live in a demanding and complex world that conspires to keep us moving too fast and doing too much. The impact of the pace and demands we face is evident in the numbers of people who live with chronic stress, emotional overwhelm, and persistent low moods.

Heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, and obesity  greatly decrease our quality of life and are slowly killing us. Stress makes each of these conditions worse, and in addition to these physical illnesses, our lifestyles put large numbers of us at risk for developing mental illness, too. 

​Depression is the number one source of disability world-wide. Many more people live with sub-clinical despair or anxiety, and there are not many organized options for preventative and whole-person complementary care.

This is where the emerging field of yoga therapy comes in - both as a source of support for addressing concerns before they blossom into diagnosable conditions, and for rounding out care that is focused on only one aspect of a person's health concern. 

Finding a qualified yoga therapist can make the difference between surviving and thriving, and one of the first places to check about the credentials of a yoga therapist is the International Association of Yoga Therapists - they maintain a searchable database of yoga therapists who have gone through the stringent certification requirements to become a C-IAYT.

There is a big difference between a yoga teacher, who typically can become eligible to register with Yoga Alliance after anywhere from 14-21 days of training, and a yoga therapist. The training to become certified in yoga therapy takes at least two years. ​

It's equally important to look for what other qualifications and training the certified yoga therapist has, including advanced degrees in a health-related field and clinical training in a discipline related to their specialty.

Content for sessions are tailored to each client's needs. A yoga therapist may include physical postures, breath practices, lifestyle changes, encouragement of social connection via involvement with a yoga community, guided self-inquiry, meditation, and a clarification of a client's values and life intentions as part of an overall personalized yoga practice plan they develop for you. Each yoga therapist works differently, so it's important to ask questions and be clear about expectations and limitations of the work they do.

Yoga therapy provides a pathway to hope for people who sense that they need to engage the whole-person to achieve balance and optimal health, and certified yoga therapists are working hard to bring awareness to our field and to the resources we provide.

 My yoga therapy practice is currently full, but you can contact me to be put on my waiting list. My practice is housed primarily at Ease Mountain Yoga & Nourishing Arts in Ben Lomond, California, but I also work with people at a distance via video conferencing and can help connect you with local teachers, classes and other yoga therapists as needed. ​