A yogini at large

BLOG 163
June 22,2026

THE ROAD…

Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: “I don’t much care where —
The Cheshire Cat: “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

One of the little excitements of my day is when I see a hummingbird darting in and out of the container plantings on our fourth floor deck. Our condo lines up with some of the taller trees along the Ambleside sea wall, giving us a bird’s eye view (pun intended) of the local avian world — generally crows and seagulls, whose activity consists mostly of dropping seashells or worse on our outdoor furniture. So you can see why a hummingbird visits are a welcome attraction.

This is the first year we’ve intentionally planted flowers known to draw hummingbirds (and bees, inadvertently), such as scarlet sage, petunias and firecracker plants (that I thought were fuscias but which still do the trick). So as I said, it’s a great event to spot one of these ruby throated friends. This morning there were two hummers darting in and out of the scarlet sage, but not, I note, amiably. One or the other would drive off the intruder quite aggressively, which bears out what I’ve read on the internet. Hummingbirds are extremely territorial, known to dive bomb bees, and even bigger birds that get too close to a food source. All this I observed while chanting by the window this morning, and reflecting on the question: “what are my next steps?”

For what it’s worth, my intuition or subconscious offered what I’d read somewhere previously: “if you don’t know where you want to go, any road will do.” Duh. I realized that nothing and nobody is going to magically spell out my next steps, perhaps on a steamy bathroom mirror, or know better than I what I might reasonably hope to achieve with the time left to me.

Bearing in mind the example or legacy I wish to leave for my family, I researched what criteria were required for creating a version of the “Blue Zones” in my own “back yard”. Researched by Dr. Michel Poulain and Dr. Gianni Pes, and popularized in media by Dan Buettner, the Blue Zones were a handful of world regions where people are said to live exceptionally long lives. As the list of original regions expanded, the question of what causes extreme longevity in these places remained. Was it a matter of genes? Or exceptionally healthy life habits? Ultimately, nine criteria were identified:

“The “Power 9” are nine shared lifestyle habits and principles identified by demographers and researchers in the world’s “Blue Zones” (regions with the highest concentrations of centenarians and longest life expectancies).

“These principles focus on building healthy, natural environments and social structures rather than strict diet or fitness regimens.” (AI Overview)

Of particular interest to me was:

“Sense of Purpose: Knowing “why you wake up in the morning” can add up to seven years to life expectancy”. A further pair of principles sequel nicely into my idea of legacy:

“Loved Ones First: Placing family as a priority, including keeping aging parents/grandparents nearby and committing to a life partner…and

“Right Tribe: Cultivating and maintaining strong social circles that support and encourage healthy behaviors.

With a view to cultivating and maintaining strong family and community bonds, I asked myself what seeds I have already cultivated in my life? Who and what am I now hoping to attract? For example, being relatively new to West Vancouver, I want to attract friends with common interests. So how might I do that? In what ways might I better engage with my surroundings? Join a fitness group? A choir? A charity? And do I really want to, or am I just trying to fill my dance card so I’m not forced to be alone with my monkey mind? And in the event that I find answers to these questions, or at least devise strategies to meet my perceived needs, how am I going to set goals and track my progress?

One thing I know for sure is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. For the moment it is sufficient to know that researching the blue zones is giving me a sense of purpose, as is sharing my discoveries with my valued blog ohana (especially those of you who bother to read it!!!)

More to explore…

Blog 162
June 11, 2026

SPEAKING OF…

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
(“Cool Hand Luke”, Film 1967)

The above iconic line was delivered twice in the film “Cool Hand Luke”, first uttered by a cruel prison boss, and a second time by Luke himself, pushing against the authorities to his last breath. In fact, the entire film pivots around just how far off the rails communication can get between adversarial parties.

Communication has been topical for me since a misunderstanding with a loved one reminded me just how alienating my own way of expressing my ideas can be. My motto, “you must ask for what you really want” is not always compatible with other styles of communication — or not communicating — as the case may be.

But there’s another, equally important facet of communication that has to do with the stories we tell ourselves. It’s too easy to figuratively crawl under a rock and tell myself just how unfair or insensitive another person has been, without taking time to reflect on their message and learn something about myself, perhaps a hard truth that can be embarrassing to my ego.

Swami Radha writes:

“Communicate within yourself well. If you learn to communicate with yourself, you will also communicate well with others. The communication between your mind, even your doubting mind, and the Most High in yourself, is a very fruitful and rich communication. Don’t choke it.

“In other words, in your communication even with your most beloved, be honest. But you can’t unless you are first honest with yourself. How much do you want to give? How much are you really trying to get? Unless you know where you stand, on which end of the pole, you cannot meet with your beloved, whether it’s a human being or the Divine. You cannot meet in the middle, in the centre, unless you know who you are.
You do not find yourself by going somewhere, by leaving your house, because wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”

It comes with the territory of leading an examined life that, if honest with myself, I am confronted with traits and behaviors that don’t fit with my self-image, or the image I wish to project to the world. In other words, it’s important to acknowledge that, when I’m pointing the finger of blame at someone else, three fingers are pointing back at me. In order to accept this reality, I need sufficient courage and self-confidence to work with what some psychologists describe as my shadow side. In fact, the more perfect I think I need to be, the more power my shadow (aka flawed-human) side has to sabotage me. So there’s obviously a need to balance my self-image with humility, with the courage to admit that, after seventy-five years on the planet, I’m still learning and (hopefully) growing.

In a way, I find this encouraging. Once a certain level of comfort or “worldly” success has been achieved, it’s too easy to fall into a kind of ennui; having no illusions to pursue, or nothing compelling to do. Perhaps it was this ennui (read complacency) that compelled me to expand my horizons, literally and figuratively, in my recent travels. The only drawback being that one does have to come home, eventually. Hence in the last two or three blog-less weeks I’ve been doing a lot of processing. I’ve had to accept my relative insignificance in the whole scheme of things. The world does not revolve around me or my wants and needs.

This is being brought home even more profoundly now, as I resume writing while sitting at the foot of my son’s gurney in the hallway of the surgical unit at VGH. Though he is deemed in urgent need of gall-bladder surgery, he’s been bumped by six other, more urgent-urgent surgeries. (And this not counting the higher priorities that bumped him all day yesterday). Other than elevate my blood pressure or alienate the only people who are in a position to help him to at least get a room, (all the kind of non-starters that my recent lessons in communication have taught me) I am left at the mercy of the vicissitudes of health care delivery in Vancouver, B.C. No better way to find out just how insignificant one can be.

The only viable option available is to count my blessings. One of which is having my husband and Ian’s dad (one and the same) come to relieve me of this ringside seat to a steady parade of people in worse misery than me or my family. And beat a hasty retreat, back to my escapist TV.

Om Namah Sivayah
PS speaking of asking for what you really want, what I really want now is a Pisco Sour.

BLOG 161
May 25, 2026

YIN AND YANG

“You may recognize the feeling — the inner knowing that arrives without explanation. It may come as a tightening in your belly, a dream that lingers after waking, or the sudden sense that you should call someone, take a different road, say yes, say no, or pause before stepping forward. Some call it an empathic or psychic ability. Others refer to it as intuition. No matter the name, it is the same ancient language — the soul speaking from within.”

(Daily Om, May 22, 2026: “Connecting with Your Intuition”)

As I woke this morning I was awed by the massive gray bulk of the église across the street, silhouetted against a deep royal blue sky. Behind the feminine contours of its ancient domes, modern skyscrapers, their sharp angles of glass and steel stretched up like modern day Goliaths, lit from within by the energy of industry.

The contrast, as you can see by the photo, suggests the yin and yang of the human psyche. We are not either/or. We are both/and: reason and feelings, logic and intuition, masculine and feminine, and the challenge is not for one to prevail over the other, but to cultivate the strengths of each, to live in harmony within ourselves and with our surroundings.

From the angle at which I sit, the church blocks out most of the buildings, its copper roofs long-since verdigrised to a nostalgic sage green (spellcheck seems to think “veridigrised” is not a word) and I wonder if it might be metaphorical for how my focus has shifted from the more outgoing pursuits of my youth to the focus on self-growth and evolution of consciousness that now preoccupy my seventies. This inner focus might help explain why my interest in travel waned so greatly since COVID locked us all into our particular bubbles.

Rightly or wrongly, it was COVID’s “isolationism” that prompted our move to the condo, with its incumbent clearing out of years-old memorabilia, souvenirs of trips taken decades ago, a file cabinet unopened since I know not when, textbooks and course materials from my years of studies in yoga and transpersonal psychology. Things I meant to revisit and never did. Now shredded and forgotten once again. A type of material catharsis or rite of passage between my old life and the new. What prompts one to make certain moves that alter, however slightly, the course of their lives?

If not intuition, what prompted me to break out of my comfort zone, to do the thing I thought I couldn’t do, as Eleanor Roosevelt would say, and get on a plane to Europe after a multi-year hiatus?

While in France we rented a car to tour around Bergerac and Cognac, and most challengingly, to drop our daughter and grandson off in Bordeaux to catch the train to Paris for their flight home. We hadn’t counted on the GPS navigation being in French. It wasn’t the language barrier so much as her obscure obstructions that stumped us time and again. We eventually learned that “Tournez à gauche” meant stay in the left lane and the actual turn would come shortly. One wrong turn landed us in a construction maze at the train station, glad that we’d allowed plenty of time for just such enervating screw-ups.

While we’d long-since backed up our car’s GPS instructions by using the Waze app, when it came time to return the car, Jim announced that he’d figured out what the French navigator was saying, and, sure enough, we breezed into the rental return without deviation.

Cultivating one’s intuition is also a matter of learning how this inner navigator, or soul, speaks. As Hollis explains, we set up our own “language barrier” by needing proofs, guarantees, incontrovertible evidence regarding our next steps. Fear and lethargy being chief among these inner saboteurs. Needing to know how everything was going to work out — and imagining worst case scenarios — nearly foreclosed on my going away in the first place.

Now my intuition tells me that I’m about to embark — or already have — on another transition, perhaps less tangible or overt than traveling or moving to a condo, but a new chapter nonetheless. By simply resisting what resisted in me, I broke through the force field of habit and complacency and am now primed to let my intuition guide me.

To heck with certainty. It’s the road less traveled for me! 🦩

May 17,2026
BLOG 160

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

“…does our encounter with the rich mystery of life repeatedly call upon us to reframe our understanding of self and world? If it does not, I submit that we are less linked to certainty than stuck in constriction, locked into an emotionally contained, imaginatively stunted partial view.”

(James Hollis Living an Examined Life)

My reason for coming to Europe was very much to liberate myself from a potentially “constricting, emotionally contained and imaginatively stunted” POV. But, with a steady flow of novel stimuli it’s been hard finding time to marshall my thoughts, let alone formulate them into a semi-coherent blog. By the end of this trip we will have stayed in four different places, or five if you count the second time in Paris, after visiting two very different towns in the southwest of the country. Or somewhere else. Each change creates a kind of jet lag wherein my psyche, the part of me that relies on a sense of structure and security, has to begin again. Simple questions become the order of the day: “where is the bathroom?” in the pitch dark of night, or “on which side of the bed do I even sleep?” Or “where did I pack my refrigerated prescriptions that require refrigeration?” Yes, I have meds that need a consistently cool temperature. And God forbid I should leave something essential behind somewhere, bad enough that I lost track of my favorite pajamas somewhere along the way.

Much to feed a compulsive worrier.

And all threat of the latter confusion became a powerful saboteur when I contemplated going away in the first place.

I can attest that certain habits are what keep me grounded, calm, centered; if I do my mantra practice every morning I feel more centered than on transition days when it gets missed in service of catching trains, planes or automobiles. Missing a physical habit, such as my “daily” swim, also takes a toll. Familiar faces/physical places offer reminders of who I think I am, at least in those specific contexts. In other words, in travel, being “out of my depth” or “in over my head” takes on a very tangible reality. A reality I am currently facing as I begin a new day in yet another unfamiliar place.

I remember seeing the expression of near panic on the face of our then thirteen year old son as he burst into the arrivals hall at YVR after going on a youth theatre exchange to Japan. I watched the relief flood his face as he took in the familiar setting and his eagerly waiting family. “They eat fish for breakfast!” was one of the first things out of his astonished mouth.

At times a part of me also yearns for that relief of familiarity, ie. my “blankie”, which makes it that much more important to have invited a change of scenery into my peaceful, well-regulated (aka rut of a) life. Yet I know if I were to instantly teleport myself back to Vancouver, I’d soon wake up with that nagging feeling that something is missing. With the restlessness that suggests there’s more to be done, more to explore in my one precious life, as Mary Oliver wrote. Or, as Hollis put it:

“…were there no psychopathology, no restlessness of the soul, why would we ever question these received, limited, fractal frames?” In simpler terms, why question our comfort zone?

And he continues with…

“Yes, we know that having to reframe our concepts, practices, understandings, and even values generates anxiety, but a mature spiritual position will oblige us to tolerate more anxiety than we wish. An authentic journey will ask us to embrace contradictions, suffer ambiguity, and not fall into either-or thinking, which is so characteristic of the immature or the frightened mind. A mature spirituality will be one in which we encounter more mystery than is comfortable. After all, the things we can understand, tolerate, fixate in concepts are surely not the mystery. The mystery will always transcend our desires for clarity and certainty. But how much of that can we tolerate?”

As I write, I watch the ebbing tide reveal the banks of oyster beds that carpet the floor of the Bay of Biscaye. The tidal swings here are so extreme that the water begins by lapping against the retaining wall of our hotel and then receding to expose a vast stretch of sand much greater than low tide on Vancouver’s Spanish Banks. As the beach expands it becomes dotted with day-trippers primed with buckets and shovels, prospecting for clams or whatever treasures are otherwise submerged for hours at a time.

Is this what Hollis is getting at when he suggests that we delve deeper into the rich mystery of life, perhaps to discover our true purpose on earth?

Today’s tidal choreography speaks to my question of how much exposure to this “mystery” can one tolerate? It suggests a time of reaping from the sea of consciousness, the ebb tide, and the equally important “flood” tide of rest, of integration, letting things evolve in the unseen, as do the oyster cultivators leave their small charges to spawn and grow undisturbed in the nutrient-rich mud at the bottom of the sea.

With that in mind, it’s time for this little oyster to burrow under the covers and hope my dreams produce pearls of insight and inspiration. Or simply a solid eight hours sleep!

Bon nuit!

May 1,2026
BLOG 159

IGNORANCE IS BLISS

“It’s not about what it’s about.

“What you see is a compensation for what you don’t see.”

(James Hollis: Living an Examined Life)

On April 28 I wrote in my journal:

“Feeling anxiety about my trip to Europe. So much so that I’m doing little about it. Which compounds the anxiety. I think this is abetted by my binge watching a violent tv show at bedtime. Not sure what my fascination is with this show, except that the bad guys always lose and justice prevails in the end. [While watching] I looked up suggestions for what to wear in Paris in the springtime and believe ideas are percolating in my head even as I try to escape into mindless tv.”

For all my efforts at developing self-awareness, autonomy and personal authenticity, the above journal entry (and my general state of anxiety) is embarrassingly revealing. It reveals that I am as much a prisoner of my conditioning, or hostage to the old programs wired into my psyche, as I have ever been. At best I can observe my behavior with the relative detachment offered by journalling, and try to make independent choices based on what I know of myself in any given moment. Right now I know that I am ruled by the aspect that lives in fear of getting it wrong, in this case, compared to the notoriously fashionable Parisian women. None of whom know me. Will ever notice me. Or likely ever see me again. So who or what is driving me to create a “trousseau” of a wardrobe that I’m too panicked about to even pack?

If it’s not what I think it’s about, then what is this about? I imagine that what I wear could be some form of compensation. What better cover for insecurity than to dress impeccably? So I googled: “Why do I think I have to dress to impress?” and this is what came up:

“Dressing to impress is often a way to boost confidence, feel worthy, or secure social acceptance and validation, according to Fashion Is Psychology”… “It is a way to present an idealized social self, signaling competence, respect, and self-worth to others. It may also be a way to “trick” oneself into feeling in control.”

Ah, now we’re getting there! Travel brings up so many unknowns that I feel vulnerable in the extreme. Especially in the current socio/political climate. And with a body that isn’t what it used to be. Walking any distance is difficult for various reasons. Jet lag knocks me back far worse than in the past. Different languages and currencies, and navigating airports and train stations are all intimidating. So why the heck am I doing this???

Because my current level of anxiety is telling me I’m getting too set in my ways. My brother once famously quipped to his bouldering buddy who wanted his “blankie”: “It’s important to scare yourself once in a while.” And of course Eleanor Roosevelt offered: “You must do the thing you think you can to do.” Biking in the Lavaman relay was last year’s scary thing. This year its resisting what is resisting to travel, in me. Preparing for this trip, while simultaneously studying Hollis, has shown me things about myself of which I’d been blissfully unaware. It’s pretty hard to change a habit if I don’t know I have it. Hollis offers this:

“Under each stuck place there is a wire, so to speak, that reaches down into the archaic field and activates a field of anxiety of which we are largely unaware but that has enough power to reinforce whatever complex has been holding the line against change.”

So now I know, as G.I. Joe would say, and knowing is half the battle…

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of leading an examined life! From Paris, no less!

April, 2026

BLOG 158

ROUND 2

“Ironically, psychopathology is one of the signs of the larger imagination of the psyche, or soul. If we had no soul, that is, had no organ of meaning, our adaptations would be our reality. But the soul protests and registers its protest through our body, our troubling dreams, our affective invasions, such as depression or our addictive, anesthetizing self-treatment.“

(James Hollis Living an Examined Life)

The above passage reminds me that I am on an evolutionary or soul journey. And that some of the ways my body, emotions or mind “act out” are not to be suppressed or ignored, or even modified to better keep me in line, but rather to be taken as the soul’s protest against not living up to my potential. That is, the potential to be a fully evolved, enlightened human being.

James Hollis suggests that the “soul” is synonymous with our “organ of meaning”. Moreover, the “adaptations” he writes about are most likely an individual’s attempts to tick all the boxes, to survive in the world and in one’s own eyes, according to a script that has been dictated, largely by external influences — institutions, authority figures, media, etc. and only tweaked by the individual’s particular circumstances. In other words, most of us have “drunk the Kool Aid” from a very young age.

I find it reassuring and motivating to consider the part of me that asks questions, studies, chants and reflects on life events to be aligned with my soul, the aspect that has never been content with pat answers, or satisfied with the status quo. But I’d be guilty of hypocrisy if I said it didn’t matter to me whether I was liked and accepted, appreciated, even admired and respected by the people around me. We are, after all, social animals, and fear of rejection by our particular tribe is a dominant factor directing our lives.

Like a protective parent, a part of me monitors what I think or feel, do or say to ensure my behavior aligns with that of the “tribe”, or, as Hillevi Ruumet puts it, the social matrix into which I was born. To see my discomfort with or suspicions re: the status quo as protests of my soul brings up some interesting questions.

Hollis frames his questions as follows:

“While most of modern psychiatry and psychotherapy prefer to work around these protests and thereby drive the internal conflict deeper, the psychodynamic understanding of symptoms, dreams, and behavioral patterns is rather to ask: Why have you come? What is it you are protesting? What is the desire of the soul (as opposed to the desires of my environment, my complexes, my history)? These questions do not bury the issue, try to bypass it, or medicate it into numbness, but rather approach the soul with dignity and ask, as we might of any stranger who knocks unbidden at our door, “Why have you come? What do you want? How might we converse?”

And these, my friends, are the six million dollar questions. Actually, the first of many. Should we choose to ask them, we usher in what Hollis calls the second half of the journey:

“The second half of life is not a chronological moment but a psychological moment that some people, however old, however accomplished, however self-satisfied in life, never reach. The second half of life occurs when people, for whatever reason — death of partner, end of marriage, illness, retirement, whatever — are obliged to radically consider who they are apart from their history, their roles, and their commitments.”

I suspect the second half of my life began in my mid-thirties, first with the loss of a loved one, the serious illness of a child, followed by the loss of our income, our home, and a break from the security and certainty of life as I’d known it. Looking back I can see a grand design in all that happened. Two major moves and the acquaintance of a spiritual seeker set me on a different trajectory. One I am still trying to honour with what T.S. Eliot calls just enough “light to secure the next foothold”. The light cast by Hollis and a host of teachers who have gone this way before me.

Now how to get off this heavy jag with some levity. How about I promise to go lighter next week? Tomorrow is Monday, and this is all I’ve got.

April 19, 2026

APPLES AND ORANGES

“We are living in a material world,
And I am a material girl…”

(Cindy Lauper)

After three months of establishing a satisfying routine in Hawaii, I resisted returning to West Vancouver for fear of having nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to meet. The opposite ended up happening. Since landing on Tuesday I’ve been swept up in a flurry of activity — physical workouts, medical appointments, year-end grandkids events, an unanticipated funeral (as I suppose most are!) that, combined, have left me reeling. So, on a solitary Sunday morning, I sit, regrouping and reflecting on my first week back in B.C.

For starters, I note how unnecessary my anticipatory anxiety has been. Rather than fearing having nothing to do, the reality is I have planned almost more than I can handle. But I’m starting to register the difference between keeping busy for business’ sake, (aka apples) and doing things that add value in some way (aka oranges). I also register how averse I am to doing nothing, to waiting for the bread to rise, which is what it takes to await inspiration or cultivate the imagination. I hear my mother’s admonition that “an idle mind is the devil’s playground”. Fear seeps into idle moments and stirs a fierce desire to escape its grim litany by any means.

In rereading James Hollis’s Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the second Half of the Journey, I resonated with this simple message: “Life’s two biggest threats we carry within: fear and lethargy…Fear says, “The world is too big for you, too much. You are not up to it. Find a way to slip-slide away again today”…While “Lethargy says, “Hey, chill out. You’ve had a hard day. Turn on the telly, surf the internet, have some chocolate. Tomorrow’s another day.”

These are the same kind of messages that have sabotaged my good intentions re: blogging. When a friend asked me to collaborate on a study group focusing on the second half of the journey, I was inspired to resume blogging as an adjunct to our studies, as a way to expand on the themes Hollis is discussing, while at the same time restoring something that has given me a sense of value, of purpose and meaning, namely leading an examined life. Blogging served to focus my thoughts and studies on the big (and many small) incidents and issues that arose in my life. It helped me get my head around confusing or contradictory information, and prioritize what actually pertained to me, as well as discern what I could reasonably hope to achieve.

I’ve learned that my inner “material girl” (closely related to my maniacal inner roommate) can distract me with the equivalent of the telly, internet and chocolate, letting this too-big world pass me by, or, by contrast, enlist my inner spiritual seeker to take an active role, doing what I can, with what I have, where I am. And contribute to the collective well-being of the people/world around me.

After a nine month hiatus, to resume blogging has been, for me, an enormous test of will. A combination of fear that I’ll have nothing worthwhile to share, combined with the seductive power of lethargy was almost overwhelming. I find I am not alone, as Hollis writes:

“While it is natural to expend energy on managing our fears, the magnitude of this effort on a daily basis cannot be overemphasized.

“On the other hand, lethargy takes so many seductive forms. We can simply avoid tasks, stay away from what is difficult for us, find ways to numb our days through the thousand soporifics and analgesics the world provides…”

Welcome to my life…

P.S. Please pass the remote and the peanut butter cups.

Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026

THE FIVE YEAR PLAN

“We all enter situations where something irks us, and for a couple of days we may have all sorts of mental conversation about it. If you can put these insignificant things aside without being disturbed in your peace, your sense of harmony and your sleep, you will have taken a great step toward conquering yourself. Many of the things which bother us are very insignificant. We give them a big importance from our sense of perfection, but most of the time our idea of perfection is insignificant. It really doesn’t matter.”

(Swami Sivananda Radha: Time to be Holy, Ch. 34)

 What I needed, as I sat down to record this blog, was an antidote to the kind of toxic emotions that come up unbidden when something upsets my inner equilibrium. Something was done that got me triggered, and, once triggered, I have a hard time, as they say, getting the horses back in the barn. One comment, one gesture, and suddenly the whole herd is off and running: old injuries, fresh outrage, the familiar inner script about being misunderstood or disrespected.

Sensing a need to dissipate that uncomfortable energy, I went straight to the pool. For the next half hour or so I tried to release whatever energy was pumping through my body, and prompting all kinds of snappy comebacks — things that I wanted say or do that might convey how deeply offended I’d been. Stroke after stroke, I could feel the arguments composing themselves in my head, all the clever ways I could put the other person in their place, let them know just how inappropriately they had behaved.

As I continued swimming, I suddenly had the epiphany: what might happen if I fast forwarded to five years from now? Would any of this matter in the least? This thought cast a whole new light on the present. It was as if the sun had come out. It probably did — we’ve had a cloudy day — but nonetheless, I was struck by the idea that if I could just transport myself to a future time when this petty little irritation was long forgotten, then I could save myself the time and energy that went into wanting to express my indignation or my hurt feelings or whatever emotions were prompted in the moment. Just that single shift — five years out — and the whole drama shrank to size.

Since then — and this strikes me as miraculous — I have not given it another thought. The mental replay stopped. The speech I was rehearsing simply evaporated. And the best part? I have no lingering energy around it. No simmering, no tightening in the chest, no imaginary re-litigation of the scene while I’m supposed to be doing something else. Empty space where the grudge was starting to build.

I believe that this shift is credit due to the teachers and the teachings that taught me to at least count to 10, taught me to take ownership of my thoughts and feelings, my reactions, and be responsible for the trail that I leave. These tools come from years of studying Eastern psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, Western psychology, all kinds of resources that people have shared throughout the ages. Because guess what? ALL of us  have moments that severely challenge our best intentions. Times when we want to believe or feel or do or say things that are absolutely NOT our ideal behavior. The point of all the years of spiritual study and practice is not that we never get triggered; it is that we learn, little by little, how to steer ourselves back toward the enlightened, compassionate and understanding people we have the capacity to be.

So this is my offering today: the five-year plan. Think about anything that might have you triggered at this moment, or has been a recent trigger — and ask yourself, five years from now, is it really going to matter?

PS If that doesn’t work, try remembering what you were thinking, feeling, doing or saying five years ago. Not much there, huh? So we know the five year plan works. We just have to play it forward! 

Sent from my iPhone

April 6, 2026

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR…

“There is actually no more dangerous solitude than the man who is lost in a crowd, who does not know he is alone, and who does not function as a person in community either. He does not face the risks of true solitude or its responsibilities, and at the same time the multitude has taken all other responsibilities off his shoulders. Yet he is by no means free of care. He is burdened by the diffuse, anonymous anxiety, the nameless fears, the petty itching lusts, and all the pervading hostilities which fill mass society the way water fills the ocean.”

(Thomas Merton: New Seeds of Contemplation)

As I sit to write, and this only after several minutes of mindful breathing, I see slate-gray storm clouds piling up to the east. They evoke the same sense of urgency — in this instance to cover our outdoor furniture — as my roiling thoughts evoke in my mind. And, in my imagination, I see a mouse, threatened by the shadow of a cat, dashing to and fro in a desperate attempt to escape a macabre fate.

My first instinct is to phone a friend and vent, find some way to dissipate the nervous energy. With great effort I sit with it and observe mind and body. My hands flutter around and my heart rate speeds up.

My respiration becomes shallow. Fight, flight, or freeze hormones course through my body. My mouth is dry, my gut is currently in spasm, and I feel in desperate need of a nap.

I went for a swim instead.

In short, I spent an hour or two, if not more, at the mercy of my amygdala, or reptilian brain, flashing DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!

Leading the relatively quiet life of a retired homemaker, yoga teacher, wannabe athlete, I have successfully avoided most forms of stress in what one son calls my “room of ignorance,” a vacation home on a tropical island a couple of thousand miles from my real life. So when a brilliant AI professional set me up with a program to jump-start my blogging, I found myself wanting to flee from the responsibility of putting my money where my mouth is — literally.

I can now dictate my ideas to a computer (though I didn’t this time) and presto chango, the program gives me back a first draft in my own voice, only better. Using a half dozen AI agencies, it matches my spoken words to the closest examples in all of my earlier work, so that I not only have an extra pair of hands — vis-à-vis not having to do all the writing — but also an extra pair of eyes that happen to be smarter than mine.

The prospect of this brave new era in my blogging life put me into full-on panic mode  Whereas, so far as I know, the computer is emotionally inanimate, I apparently have several psychological hurdles to surmount before I can get on with the program.

To be perfectly honest, one of the main reasons I quit was the pervasive inner voice that said, “Who actually “gets” this? Who wants or needs this? In fact, who even reads this?”

One can only argue with the inner judge and critic for so long, until finally all motivation — not to mention inspiration — is gone.

Luckily for me, a late afternoon swim helped calm my emotions and dissipate the nervous physical energy, until a small inner voice piped up with: I need this. That’s all it’s ever been about, really — a way to extend the spiritual conversation beyond the confines of my monkey mind. Like a message in a bottle, I floated out weekly messages in hopes that they reached sympathetic souls. I wanted to offer an alternative to “the pervading hostilities which fill mass society the way water fills the ocean”.

The antidote, according to Merton, is this:

“To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others, is absolutely necessary if one is to remain human. But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless.”

While life on a tropical island may seem like the isolation-from-reality that Merton describes, it actually gives me the time and space to observe human nature, including my own, up close and personal. Taking time to read and reflect, to journal and study, helps me see the consequences of my words and actions and make changes accordingly. Even if this means seeing how far my inner saboteur will go to keep me safe in a room of ignorance. 

P.S. Can you imagine what would happen to my nerves if I won a lottery?

June 30, 2025

OUT ON A LIMB

“Wisdom begins when you realize you don’t know what you think you know.” (Socrates)

The other morning my quiet time was disturbed by a minor ruckus in the nearby Jatropa tree. What I first took to be a particularly clumsy mating dance turned out to be two fledgling sparrows trying to get a foothold on the tree’s spindly limbs. That accomplished, they settled their puffed-up feathers for a few minutes before launching on a wobbly course to the rooftop opposite, and thence out of sight. A few minutes later I spotted a third fledgling hopping around nervously on an adjacent roof beam, seemingly working up the courage to dash to the same tree. Which it did, momentarily. And, after similarly gathering its composure, suddenly darted off in the direction of its feathered friends.

This little scenario got me thinking of the stops and starts on the spiritual journey — how one flounders around, hopping from one tract or thesis or teacher to another, searching for a spiritual home. It has lately been easier to track my own spiritual trajectory by rereading passages from the memoir I wrote a few years ago, and that a friend recently returned to me. After skimming over a few chapters, my first observation was: “If I had to write this again, I wouldn’t.” Then, rather than be embarrassed for having committed to print what was really just a passing phase in a lifelong process, I gave myself kudos for admitting that I no longer know what I thought I knew!

The thing that best sums up where I see myself today, some four decades after starting my spiritual journey, is a comment David Brooks makes in his “Moral Bucket List”. He describes an end goal on the road to character as having “achieved a settled philosophy about fundamental things.” In terms of my own philosophy, I’ve learned that tolerance, acceptance, compassion and understanding go a long way to keeping me balanced and happy.

I’ve learned to trust my inner compass. To place greater value on time spent with friends and family than on personal goals and achievements. (Though I’m inordinately proud of having biked in this year’s Lavaman relay…) Meaningful dialogue means a great deal to me. But I’m also better at enjoying my own company.

More importantly, I’m not so in thrall to my big important story. I’ve just begun to understand what Socrates meant by: “Wisdom begins when you realize you don’t know what you think you know.” Unbeknownst to my ego, I’ve made a shift from wanting to teach what I know to wanting to learn what I don’t know. Ruumet calls this the “apotheosis of the ego.” It is a time when so much of what mattered to me when I was younger — particularly how I was perceived by other people — no longer motivates me. I no longer daydream about being a famous artist and/or influential writer. Instead, what now motivates me is to start my day in a mood of keen attentiveness and profound gratitude.

Most days begin with a journal entry, jotting down whatever thoughts or feelings come to mind as I’m waking — sometimes I’ll also analyse a dream — all in an attempt to start my day with maximum clarity. Then I chant the mantra that was given to me in 1993 by Swami Sivananda Radha Saraswati, to dissipate any residual emotional energy. Not many people I knew in the early ‘80s were “into” the things that intrigued me; Kundalini and Dream yoga, Vedanta philosophy, Buddhist psychology, and other esoteric teachings. The latter disciplines and practices better prepared me for the time we lost most of our possessions, money and sense of security in the economic downturn of the early ‘80s. After losing most of our possessions and money (including the family business) in that downturn, I realized that the truly important things, my marriage and family, were still standing.

This was brought home even more clearly when, at eighteen months of age, our youngest child contracted meningitis and was hospitalized for close to a month. Such a health scare brought my priorities into sharp focus, and now, four decades later (and despite having felt out of step with my surroundings for much of that time), I’m reaping the benefits of having committed to a spiritual path for the better part of my adult life. As twenty-one of my nearest and dearest gather to celebrate my 75th birthday, I look around with wonder, and immense gratitude for all the experiences we’ve shared, all the hills and valleys we’ve surmounted, all the ways I’ve learned to live more consciously in the context of family and community.

Socrates also said: “The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” I did not win the Nobel prize. My face never graced the cover of Time Magazine. My paintings didn’t break records at Christie’s. I was never featured in O magazine, nor hosted my own TV show. And I never had huge crowds paying blind homage to me.

Thank goodness for small mercies.

And Happy Birthday to me!