My favorite mindfulness resources

Oct 19

Dear Coronavirus, I've kept my sh*t together most days, despite your pummeling.

I've tried to make the best of it. We've baked, braided Barbie's hair, fixed up the house, painted rocks, searched for bugs in the woods, written letters to the grandparents and talked with friends and family over FaceTime.

But a few days ago, I screamed at my kids. I wanted to crawl out of my skin and go somewhere, but had no idea where that somewhere was. (I can't even go to the grocery store since I'm high risk.) I dream of wandering the aisles at Target with a Starbucks in hand. I considered driving around I-270 in a full loop just to see a different view.

I've meditated. Done yoga. Read books that are good for the soul. Practiced deep breathing. Slammed doors. Sat outside in the grass. Cleaned and organized. Busied myself.

Still, there are times when I want to scream.

Thankfully, my husband is very patient. He look the clue on this recent, difficult day and created a reason to take the kids out of the house and give me some space. It'll pass, I try to tell myself. But between the loneliness and the worry: worry for my health, worry for our collective health, fear for our economy and businesses, sorrow for the children of the world...some days it's a lot.

Right?

I post a lot of smiles and stories that encourage and celebrations and happiness. Sometimes, though, I want to scream. Don't you?

Presence and acceptance

These two words sum up the collective lessons I've learned on this topic. If you can remain present and learn to accept, you'll stop resisting. Resisting is the cause of suffering and pain. Sometimes, I am not present. Sometimes, I refuse to accept.

But here's the thing I've learned: acceptance doesn't mean you're validating what's going on. It doesn't mean that illness or job loss or even death are okay. Acceptance just means you consciously recognize that this is what's happening, and being present means you can choose how you respond to it.

Being present and staying there as long as possible means I can more easily roll with the proverbial punches instead of suffering from or resisting what’s happening in the current moment.

This has been a huge lesson from the mindfulness coach I worked with a couple of years ago. (If you haven't met Juan Alvarez, and you are at all curious about this topic, I encourage you to explore a relationship with him. You can get a taste of his style by attending his free, daily quarantine meditations live on Instagram).

Because I practice gratitude daily for what good things came my way that day, I (usually) take situations in whether they're bad or good and stay focused on the right things. I consciously work to keep storytelling at bay, limiting my instinct to go straight to the negative, make every situation about me and let my ego run away with itself. Some days it comes easily, some days I look like the picture above.

We're all a work in progress, right?

Let's all be pilots

This is an anecdote Juan shared to help me take control of my mindset and stop littering the cockpit with expectations, and it goes something like this (Juan, please forgive me if I butcher it):

Imagine you are piloting an aircraft. You have mapped out where you are, where you want to go and a course. You've checked all controls. And—here's the part where I go all wrong—you don't get too wrapped up in a plan because you can't predict the wind.

Pilots are trained for course correction and how to navigate through the unknown and anticipate along the way. If they hit strong winds they don't feel like they failed when they get to the destination. They got to the destination.

"Plans are a fantasy," he said. "The resistance and suffering around it is created in the mind. That's the ego doing its thing."

The point is to safely arrive at the destination, not to judge the turbulence you hit along the way. Why is it so hard to do this?

Because, inevitably, you will have to navigate those pockets of bad weather, issues with altitude and poor conditions you couldn't have predicted.

Rather than never seeing a rain cloud, a pilot's whole journey is about navigating and overcoming as they go. You don't get to the destination as a pilot having overcome those things and think you failed because it didn't look exactly as you thought.

But we as humans, and especially as business owners, we harshly judge that journey all the time.

Why?

Because we set expectations and then we evaluate against them. Being the pilot requires you to let go of those expectations of having a perfectly smooth journey and, instead—mindfully—course correct along the way while keeping the destination in sight.

So, in today's world, this is what I'm trying to remind myself: Be the pilot be the pilot be the pilot...

Having a go-to list of resources as well as daily practices have been a huge help in grounding myself in presence and acceptance.