This past Tuesday was my birthday, my first in my new homeland of the Northern California coast. I kept the day deliberately unscheduled. I woke up not knowing what I would do, but trusting that if I followed my emergent impulses, beauty would unfold. This is my practice these days—listening to the moment. Sometimes I’m better at it than others. Moving here, letting go of everything I had known, and shifting from leading my life from my mind to following intuition has been my greatest teacher.
Most of us who are devoted to transformation have a bad habit—the habit of making ourselves wrong instead of right. We come by it innocently enough. It isn’t born out of laziness, or weakness, or a desire to “self-sabotage” or “upper limit” ourselves, but out of a deep commitment to our own growth. But […]
I have a confession to make: I still have a paper calendar. I’m not a luddite per se, I just like the physicality of it, and being able to see the whole month at once, and the pretty orange inkblot design on the cover.
I have a ritual that I perform every January. I go through my calendar and map out what’s important to me. I put in my vacations, my yoga classes, my self-care time, the days I’ll be working on my dissertation, the hours I’ll be with clients, and the weekends I run my trainings. Of course I leave room for spontaneity and the element of surprise as well (who knows when I might be whisked off to Brazil by a new lover :)). But there’s something about attending to the structure of what’s important that relaxes me and creates space for the magic to unfold.
