Mystical Meditations and Hedge Trimmers

Meditation, like you've never heard about it before.

Dear Kula diaries,

Something that I’ve learned to do over the past few years is this: I’ve learned to be OK with what I didn’t know for most of my life. Those years were not wasted - in fact, those years are what ultimately opened my eyes and heart. But sometimes, I still look back and feel sorry for that version of me.

I apologize for the things that I didn’t know - the things that I forgot. I apologize for ‘falling asleep’ through my life - only to wake up one day and to wonder how I got where I was. I apologize for trying to change everything outside of me - while neglecting and hurting the one part of me that could change everything.

I didn’t know that in order to change my external world - I needed to start by looking within. I spent most of my life - like most of us - in a permanent game of whack-a-mole… trying to fix and change everything outside of me in order to find the elusive ‘promised land’ of happiness, ease, fulfillment and satisfaction.

This is not uncommon. In fact, it isn’t even bad or wrong… because it is the way that the consciousness within us will ultimately ‘wake up’ from the dream of separateness - and bring us into contact with what is real: the beingness within us.

In one of my earlier posts, I talked about the 6 tiny things that I started doing every single day after I had my own near death experience. I cannot possibly describe the impact of these 6 tiny things on my life - and now that we’ve ‘laid the foundation’ of the Kula Diaries, so to speak … it’s time to dig a little bit deeper. Please keep in mind that I’m sharing my particular journey and I want you to imagine that my words are simply ‘trail blazes’. You are ultimately the hiker of your own trail… and your journey will be uniquely your own. However, as you will also discover - trail blazes along the way will begin to ‘point’ you in the direction of the truth. This happened for me… and it will happen for you too, if you are ready. And… if you’re reading this… chances are, you are ready.

Meditation: Easy to do and Easy Not to Do

Meditation is this strange thing, because it feels like ‘nothing’ - but it’s actually something really important. We humans have been conditioned into ‘doing’ - and we feel like we aren’t being productive if we aren’t doing something all the time. We rarely pause to simply be - and we are tied in knots in our brains almost permanently. But, remember the ‘space between’ that I keep mentioning? The space between is a place that you can start to find when you start a meditation practice - but you have to invite it in first, in order for it to start to arrive. Meditation is that invitation.

In my AMA last week, I talked about my 1 minute meditation practice that I started doing every day - and I am not overexaggerating when I say that it completely changed my life … and continues to change my life. Today, for instance, felt like a bit of a doozy for me - and it’s easy to get into that obsessive ‘doing mode’ where I am immersed in a potent cocktail of overthinking, ruminating, imagining, stressing, and feeling agitated all at the same time. Our thinking mind wants us to ‘get after it’ and fix the situation - believing that the more we push into it, the better it’ll get. When, really… maybe what we need to do is drop our shoulders a little bit… close our eyes… take a deep breath… and look inward.

So, actually… we are going to that right now. If you’re listening to this on the audio voiceover - fantastic… I’m going to read a short meditation now and you can close your eyes and follow along. If you are reading this on your own… you can find the audio for the meditation below. The words are written by Thicht Nhat Hanh and the music is original improvisation by The Musical Mountaineers:

Welcome back.

Even though that tiny meditation was only 3 minutes long - I hope that it gave you a sense of something beyond yourself: something beyond your to-do list… something beyond your fears and worries… something beyond the things that you are stressed out about. I hope that it gave you a tiny little glimpse into a peace and stillness that lives within you. That, my friends, is the secret of meditation.

The best description I’ve ever heard of meditation, is that it is the practice of ‘coming back’ to ourselves - over and over again. It is a practice of remembering and opening our eyes to something beyond the thoughts in our mind. As the song Amazing Grace says, “I was lost… but now am found… was blind… but now I see.”

In a moment I’m going to tell you a story (that I’ve rarely shared) about a meditation that I did several years ago that opened my eyes to something that I’ve never been able to fully describe… but first, let me tell you a brief history of my meditative life.

I did not always meditate. Like, ever. In fact, I thought it was a waste of time. When people mentioned meditation, I’d scoff at it a little bit: “I’m not good at meditating. I don’t have time to just sit and do nothing!”

I still remember the very first time that I did a meditation. I was 10 years old, and it was at my church (I was raised Catholic, although I don’t attend church anymore). I was attending a ‘weekend youth retreat’, and the facilitator had all of us lie down on yoga mats and he guided us through, what I now know as, a ‘body scan’ meditation. To this day, I can still remember feeling a tiny glimpse of something ‘beyond’ my thoughts. A deep stillness drifted into my physical experience for a moment… and then vanished. As soon as the meditation ended - my thinking brain restarted itself … and so did the ‘story’ of who I was. I went back on auto-pilot mode for the next few decades - moving in and out of depression… drama… misery and internal chaos. It was exhausting.

In college, I randomly felt called to attend a meditation class again - and again, I had an experience that I couldn’t really describe - a sense of calm and peace that felt vaguely familiar, but also very distant. There was a tiny part of my brain that ‘told me’ that I needed to continue with meditation… but, again, I fell back ‘asleep’ and lived for the next decade or so completely within the confines of my own brain - creating imaginary stories, narratives and scenarios almost obsessively - and believing that they were real. Just when one thing seemed like it was getting better - something else popped up. I was the creator of a exhausting drama in which I was the main character - and didn’t even know it. As Eckhart Tolle says, “It’s just one damn thing after the next.” Ha!

After what I would describe as a ‘dark night of the soul’ during my divorce in 2011 and 2012, I finally sought out therapy in 2012 and began taking yoga classes. At the time, I was also a Railroad Police officer and I was experiencing a significant amount of trauma at work. My department didn’t have any PTSD protocol, so I decided to change that and start a peer support group on my own. As I started doing research on the best ways to gently approach trauma… and low and behold ‘that meditation thing’ just kept showing up.

Remember how I mentioned trail blazes at the start of this? Isn’t it weird that the same things keep popping up in our lives… over and over and over again? It’s almost as if they are trying to tell us something! It’s almost as if they are little clues trying to get our attention by saying, “COME THIS WAY!! CAN WE MAKE IT ANY MORE OBVIOUS FOR YOU?!” Well, eventually… I started to pay attention to them.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I started my meditation practice in earnest with a 1-minute per day morning routine that involved taking 7 intentional, conscious breaths. This practice was the first time that I started to experience a tiny bit of space between my thoughts… and ‘me’. And when I say ‘me’ - I am not referring to, ‘Anastasia who has this particular life story’ … I’m talking about what Eckhart Tolle calls, ‘The Deep I’ - this is the ‘me’ beyond the story… the conscious awareness that lives within my body… the watcher of my thoughts. As I began to meditate, I started to realize something profound: I am not my thoughts.

And of course, that begs the question… if I am not my thoughts… than who am I?

No drugs involved - I promise

The first time I told this story to somebody, she looked at me and said, “Anastasia, people take a lot of drugs to experience what you did.” At the time it happened, I definitely was not taking drugs, I knew that I had experienced something profound - but I couldn’t quite articulate it. I don’t have a degree in psychology or neuroscience and my pre-med Latin degree didn’t quite cover existential meditative experiences… so bear with me as I try to describe it in as much detail as I can. Maybe this story seems a bit ‘far-fetched’ - but I’m going to tell the story exactly as I experienced it.

In 2018, my husband and I went on a backpacking trip in Canyonlands National Park. Since I was well into my daily meditation practice at this point - I included a 10-15 minute meditation each day when we were on the trail. It was the last day of our hike, and we stopped high on a bluff overlooking the vast landscape of a windblown canyon. We both removed our heavy packs and sat down on the ground. I remember sitting down… closing my eyes… and letting my fingers lightly touch the earth.

I wasn’t thinking about anything - I wasn’t trying to have any sort of ‘experience’ - I was just there, focusing on my inhale and exhale and simply being. As I sat, I relaxed deeper and deeper into the moment and suddenly began to feel an overwhelming sense of peace and love flow through me - it was unlike anything that I had ever experienced in my life, and the intensity of it caught me completely off guard. Suddenly, (even though my eyes were closed), I could see threads of light radiating from every single cell in my body - and I knew instinctively that these threads of radiant energy were reaching out from me and connected to every other thing in the entire cosmos. As I sat, I slowly twitched my pointer finger and saw that the thread radiating from that finger tugged on something else in the universe. At that moment I knew: Everything that I do matters, because I am connected to everything… and all of it is within me, and always has been. Tears started to stream down my face and waves of love and joy seemed to come from within me and from around me. A gentle breeze started blowing, and I felt the space between my cells - as if I could have simply melted into the wind at that moment, whisked away as dust to become a part of everything. As the breeze began to die down, I could feel the sensation starting to wane and I remember wishing that it wouldn’t end. Gradually, the intensity of the moment faded… and I felt myself as a body again - just Anastasia, sitting on a rock. I had lost all sense of time and place and I felt surprised when I remembered I was in the middle of a desert on a backpacking trip. I opened my tear-soaked eyes and saw the world differently. It felt like I had been given a glimpse into the heart of the universe - and that understanding helped me answer the question: Who am I? Which, as I realized in that moment, is ultimately a question that can’t truly be answered in words - only in knowing, feeling… and with love.

Meditation: Not just a bunch of woo woo nothingness

You don’t have to have a transcendent meditative experience in order to know yourself as more than your thoughts or your physical body. You don’t need to knock on the door of the universe and peer inside to find the answers - because deep down, you already know them. While my experience in the desert is something that I will cherish forever, a mystical meditation isn’t required - and, in fact, most of my meditations are far from mystical. I’d venture to guess that the majority of the time when I meditate, it ends up being a combination of me getting distracted by my thoughts… my cats jumping up onto my bare legs and scratching me accidentally… or getting an itch and having to sneeze. Most meditations are just about coming back to myself and being present in that moment, over and over again. It’s about doing it every day, no matter what. The power of meditation is in the compounding effect of consistent daily action. So, doing a meditation one time is fantastic… but doing a meditation every single day… will change your life.

So, even if you don’t have a regular meditation practice right now - that’s OK. It’s never a ‘good’ time to start one - but it is always the right time to start one… because, remember… the only time that it ever is… is right now. Meditation can look different for every single person - so I want to remove some of common myths about meditation and hopefully make it more accessible to everybody.

A few myths about meditation:

• You have to be in a perfectly quiet environment

• You have to sit perfectly still

• You have to meditate for long periods of time

• You aren’t good at meditation if you think a lot

• Meditation is only for spiritual people

Some truths about meditation:

• You can do a meditation anywhere! Some of the most powerful meditations that I’ve ever done were in crowded airports, while waiting in line at the grocery store… or even sitting on a bench in the middle of a noisy city. You don’t need a spa environment to do a meditation.

• You can do a meditation in anyway that works for you: walking, dancing, sitting, lying down… meditation is different for each human on this planet. The important thing is that you are intentionally dedicating time to being present and connecting with the ‘Deep I’ of who you are.

• I shared last week that I started with a 1 minute morning meditation. Eckhart Tolle often recommends taking 4 intentional breaths as a meditation. You can find a beautiful 3 minute long meditation right here. You do not have to sit for hours to get the benefits.

• Meditation is for all humans, no matter what. You are worthy and you belong as you are - and we each deserve the ability to spend time connecting more deeply with who we truly are.

The hedge trimmer and some homework

I am particularly delighted that I started this post with a profound story of looking into the depths of the universe… and I’m ending it with one of my favorite analogies that involves a hedge trimmer. I promise, it’s all related.

So, this analogy came to me after my wild meditative experience… and it’s something that I come back to often - to remind myself of that eternal connection to all things. We’ve been talking a lot about being open to the infinite possibilities that exist in every moment - and I’ve mentioned (many times) that limiting beliefs cut us off from those possibilities. Being open is the beginning of having access to those gazillion threads of energy that are spiderwebbing across the universe - connecting you simultaneously to a kabillion + 1 possibilities. And when we (myself included) say things like, “This isn’t possible”, or, “This isn’t realistic,” or “I’m not a morning person,” or “Nobody will ever buy this”, or, “I’m not good enough,” … we take a GIANT SUPER POWERFUL UNIVERSAL HEDGE TRIMMER and we CUT OFF all of the radiant, loving energetic ‘threads’ that connect us to that infinite world of everything. And the reason that we don’t feel good when we do this… is because it hurts. The love within us knows that we are connected to everything - and so when we shear off those possibilities - when cut ourselves off from the infinite flow of love that exists within us and around us at all times… it’s really painful. Believe me - I have done it too… many times. And I still do it - but I’m getting better at catching myself. The good news is that the threads are never gone permanently - so, as you open your heart, those connections are always there for you.

With this unbelievable smorgasbord of words that I’ve concocted this week… we have gone on a journey from me lying on a gym mat at age 10… to me drifting into the everythingness of everything in the middle of a desert… to me starting my own universal power tools company (hey, that’s a good idea…)… and now here we are. And here you are. Sitting or standing or lying down - either listening to this or reading it… and simply being who you are.

While I absolutely do not consider myself an even remotely enlightened being of any kind (the truly enlightened beings in my life are definitely my three cats) - I do believe that my little peek into the universe gave me a gift: the gift to see the connectedness between all beings and the gift to see the unlimited potential that exists within each and every one of us. Friend, you are so important - and I wish that I could give you even a tiny glimpse into the love that exists within you at all moments - a glimpse into the wholeness that you are… exactly as you are. As Eckhart Tolle says, “You are here to enable the divine purpose of the Universe to unfold. That is how important you are!”

So, this week - without any expectations whatsoever, your tiny ‘homework assignment’ is this:

Thank you so much, friends for joining me this week for a surprisingly twisty dip into the beautiful world of meditation - the invitation to open the door for more presence and goodness and love to flow into your life. If there is one habit that I could wish for any human to add into their daily life, it would be the habit of meditation - in a way that works best for them. Looking within is the key to changing without.

I’m going to end our post this week with a poem I wrote called, Unpromised Gift. I hope that you love it and I hope that throughout this next week, you can feel a tiny bit of a sense of how important you are and how much you truly matter. You are a gift to the world - and I’m so truly grateful that you’ve chosen to spend a little bit of your day with me. Remember - we are all connected… and the ripple effect of our good knows no bounds.

Sending you all infinite love today. I’ll be back on Wednesday with another edition of ‘AMA with AMA’ - if you’d like to submit a question to be answered or a comment, you can do so anonymously at this form.

Love,

Anastasia

The Unpromised Gift

It was given to you
On the first day you existed
As you gasped your first breath
You cried, not in fear
But in awe at what you could see
Packed neatly in an invisible box 
Were all the beats of your heart
All the breaths that would ever fill your lungs
And in that tiny moment 
Just a glimpse
You knew the gift was there
You saw the beats and breaths just waiting to be used
You saw the life you could lead
The person you could become
The places you could go
The good you could do
With that currency of life
How should I spend it? You wondered. 
That’s up to you, you heard.
Along the way, you forgot
About that box
Like a long lost key that 
You knew you put somewhere
But for the life of you, you just can’t remember
And yet the gift never stopped giving 
Day after day 
Unconditionally 
It gave to you
Even when the beat of your heart
The air in your lungs
Was heavy with shame
Anger
Grief
Sadness
Day after day, you took from that gift
Mindlessly spending the beats and breaths in ways that sometimes did 
not feel good
In ways that did not make you proud
In ways that you wished you could take back
Until one day
When the time was right
As you sat on a mountain 
Or listened to a river
Or watched raindrops on a lake
You saw it again
Sitting beside you
Beat after beat after beat
Breath after breath after breath
Over and over and over 
Each thump
Each sip of air
A brand new chance to use that gift 
Which wanted nothing in return
Except for you to remember that it was there
Each pulse 
Reminding me that
I may not understand the depth of each snowflake or gust of wind or 
drop of water 
But that simply being 
Simply watching
Simply listening to their gentle tune
Is always enough.