Calories-In, Calories-Out: Common Sense or Nonsense?

Calories in, calories out is the most prevalent and “common sense” diet advice in our culture. Even books that have nothing to do with nutrition refer to it to make various points as if it’s an unarguable universal law. Unfortunately, just because something is common sense, doesn’t mean it’s true, wise, or helpful.

The theory goes that fat gain and fat loss is simply based in the laws of thermodynamics. If you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you lose weight. While it’s true that the energy we consume has to go somewhere, there’s a number of problems with this overly simplistic paradigm of how the body uses energy.

1. When we simply manipulate the amount of calories we eat or expend without taking hormonal factors into consideration, the weight we lose or gain from this approach can be either fat or lean body mass such as muscle and bone.

2. While we can do pretty well at controlling our calories in (for a short time), we cannot AT ALL control our calories out and our bodies will slow metabolism to maintain equilibrium, making it harder and harder to lose weight and easier and easier to gain it.

3. Inevitably after a period of low calorie dieting, our bodies will ramp up hormones to force us to eat, making us hungrier and more likely to go for high-energy foods. Will power is no match for your body’s survival mechanisms!

4. What our bodies do with the energy (calories) we consume is completely controlled by hormones, which the calories-in, calories-out model ignores.

As Dr. Jason Fung says in his paradigm-shifting book The Obesity Code, “Virtually every person who has used caloric reduction for weight loss has failed.” This is not because we are lazy, lack will power, or embody any other personal or moral failure. We simply cannot control the amount of fat our bodies accumulate by controlling our caloric intake.

So if we can’t control our calories for fat loss, how are people losing weight? Is there anything we can do if this is our goal?

What our bodies do with energy is extremely complicated and the truth is that even the most forward-thinking scientists don’t know exactly what’s going on, although we have a much better idea now than we did years ago. While we can definitely influence fat loss (and fat gain), we don’t have complete control. The amount of fat our bodies accumulate has to do with hormones, the gut microbiome, genetics, energy consumption and expenditure, and many other factors. But here is what we do know:

1. The body cannot tap into fat stores if insulin is too high. This is one of the primary reasons typical low calorie diets don’t work and cause metabolic problems instead. When insulin is too high from years of excess energy consumption or simply from eating all day (even if what you’re eating is low calorie!), your body simply cannot access its stored body fat for fuel and it’ll start going into starvation mode, ramping up hunger hormones and lower metabolic rate.

2. When we keep our insulin low by reducing how often we eat (intermittent fasting) and lowering the amount of refined carbohydrates we eat, our bodies are free to use our stored body fat as fuel, making us less hungry and reducing the amount of body fat we have stored.

3. When we eat whole foods, we usually won’t be able to eat enough energy to gain fat. The biggest contributor to fat gain is processed foods including refined sugars, flours, and oils, but also things like fruit juices.

4. Building and using muscle can be helpful with fat loss, not because of the energy expended, but because muscle cells don’t need insulin to take in energy from the blood. This means we can lower our blood sugar and keep our insulin low by allowing our muscles to become a place where blood glucose can go.

5. Subcutaneous fat can actually be beneficial metabolically, while visceral fat can be dangerous. Subcutaneous fat is the fat just underneath the surface of our skin - the fat you can jiggle and pinch. Visceral fat is the fat around our organs, which you can’t see or feel. If we are gaining fat, the greater ability we have to store it subcutaneously, the better.

While counting calories might be tempting or seem easy since we can do it with an app, it’s dangerous territory to get into. We don’t know how many calories our bodies need, and trying to starve our bodies into weight loss through will power and caloric control can be counter-productive, causing problems down the road.

It’s important to listen to our bodies and give them the nourishment they need, while not overloading them with energy they don’t know what to do with. This can take some practice and experimentation, working with the body’s hormonal environment to create healthy conditions for weight loss, if that is the goal.

If you’d like support unlearning diet rules and learning to work with your body rather than against it, schedule a free consultation with me.

Demystifying Macronutrients

Macronutrients are one of the most divisive topics in nutrition…possibly the most divisive. Low carb, low fat, atkins, and keto for example are all diets based on a macronutrient paradigm. Let’s try to demystify what’s going on here.

The three macronutrients are carbohydrates, fat (fatty acids), and protein (amino acids). They are all made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in different combinations and protein also has nitrogen.

There are no “essential” carbohydrates, but there are essential fatty acids and essential amino acids. “Essential” just means that we need to get it from our diet because our bodies can’t make it. People typically don’t become “deficient” in carbohydrates because our livers can make glucose through gluconeogenesis but many people feel best when including carbohydrates in their diet because going too low carb for too long can presumably affect our hormones.

One of the macronutrients is not like the others in an important way. While carbohydrates and fatty acids are used primarily for energy, protein is primary used as a building block for lean body mass as well as repair in the body. It is used for energy only in the rare case that you’re not getting enough energy from fat or carbs.

This means that high protein is NOT likely to cause fat accumulation while high carbs and high fat are more likely to cause fat accumulation. Typically in a high carb/high fat meal, the carbs will be used for energy and stored as glycogen in the liver while the fat gets stored as body fat. This is where the divisiveness comes from: Is it fat or is it carbs that causes fat gain and metabolic syndrome?

The truth is probably that they both can contribute to fat gain and metabolic syndrome, especially in high amounts (like when processed) and especially when consumed in high amounts together. This is why many people prefer to either do low carb OR low fat. Either way, you’re limiting the ENERGY consumed, which has metabolic benefits and allows you to start tapping into your fat stores to use some of that previously-stored energy.

The Plant-Based (Vegan) vs. Animal-Based (Carnivore) debate gets thrown under this macronutrient umbrella as well because plants typically contain higher amounts of carbohydrates and lower amounts of fat while animal foods contain almost no carbohydrates and a lot more fat. Both plant foods and animal foods contain protein, though there is a lot of debate about the bioavailability of that protein in the human body. Many people believe plant protein is not as bioavailable or not as plentiful in plants as it is in animals, and some of the debate comes down to how much protein we actually need as human beings.

There is also some research that a low protein diet can have longevity benefits, but this is tricky. Low protein could mean loss of lean body mass including bone mass, which could have detrimental effects. Part of the reason low protein is seen as beneficial is because protein activates mTOR, which I’m not super versed on but is said to contribute to disease when activated too much. However, it’s also known that insulin activates mTOR, so many people who promote higher protein diets prefer to lower mTOR through intermittent fasting and reducing carbohydrates.

Overall, macronutrients are energy and building blocks. Consuming too much energy (carbs and fat, especially when processed) can cause metabolic issues as well as fat accumulation in the body, both as benign subcutaneous fat as well as inflammatory visceral fat. Consuming too much protein will cause some of that protein to turn into energy. Not consuming enough energy (carbs and/or fat), especially when you either don’t have fat on your body or your body can’t access your fat, can cause your body to go into starvation mode, which can lower metabolism and cause all sorts of hormonal issues. Not consuming enough protein can cause low energy, weakened lean body mass, and poor tissue repair in the body.

The important thing to remember is that most foods contain a mixture of all or some of these macronutrients with the exception of things like butter and oil, which are purely fat. When eating whole, unprocessed foods, you’re not likely to over-consume energy, but it’s very easy to over-consume energy when eating processed, packaged foods, candies, pastries, and anything that is dumped in oil before you eat it.

I hope this helps to demystify macronutrients so that you can make more informed decisions about how you’d like to eat based on your goals (if any) and what you like.

Low Energy? Some Causes, Solutions, & Journal Prompts

Having low energy can be the result of many things and it can influence every part of our lives. Take the quiz below to find out the cause of your low energy and then get some solutions below!

Which of the following apply to you?

1. I eat a diet high in refined carbohydrates such as bread, pasta, and sugar.

2. I either don’t get enough sleep or I have restless sleep (or both!)

3. I eat a low calorie diet or am trying to lose weight.

4. I spend most of my time indoors and/or sedentary

5. I’m not happy at my job and/or I’m not engaging with any passions or hobbies

6. I’m overworked or going through stress, either at my job or with my family, friends, or health

7. I don’t have very many close relationships

8. I feel bored, depressed, and/or sad a lot of the time but I don’t know why

Find some possible solutions to your answers below.

1. Eating a diet high in refined carbohydrates can keep you on an energy rollercoaster when your blood sugar spikes and crashes.

   Try eating a diet rich in protein and fat or whole carbohydrates like vegetables and fruit, limiting whole grains and leaving out sugar entirely. It might take a minute to get used to, but your blood sugar will be much steadier, leaving you with better energy.

   You can also throw in some intermittent fasting! Try starting at 14-16 hours of fasting and working up from there if you like it.

2. Not getting enough sleep can really cause dips in our energy during the day. Try some of the following tips:

   • Journal and/or meditate before bed

   • No screens 30-60 minutes before bed

   • Stop eating 2 hours before bed time

   • Limit caffeine, or don’t drink it after noon

   • Make sure your room is completely dark or use a sleep mask

   • Take a magnesium supplement with dinner (magnesium glycinate recommended!)

   • Don’t eat sugar too close to bed time

3. Eating a low calorie diet while trying to lose weight can leave our bodies feeling hungry and malnourished. Make sure you’re eating enough during the day, including protein.

   If you’re eating a low carbohydrate diet, try adding more electrolytes to your water or salt to your meal, take a magnesium supplement, and if you’re still having trouble sleeping, try adding some complex carbohydrates to your evening meal.

4. If you’re spending most of your time indoors, try getting outside in the morning and a couple times throughout the day for some sun and fresh air. Even a few minutes at a time can really help. Also, make sure you’re taking a vitamin D supplement.

   If you’re sedentary most of the day, try getting out for a couple 10-15 minute walks whenever you can or take some stretching/movement breaks. You don’t have to do a full workout (though that would be great!). Just doing a little dance to one song, walking outside for 10 minutes, or doing a few jumping jacks, pushups, or a yoga flow can do wonders.

5. Doing something we don’t like all day can definitely zap our energy! So can suppressing or ignoring our creative impulses. Get a journal and answer some of the following journal prompts so you can figure out how to make a change.

   • Is there anything I do like about my current job? If so, what is it?

   • What do I love to do that feels fun, challenging in a good way, and/or energizing? Write down everything you can think of, even if you can’t think of how to make it a job or do it more than you’re already doing it.

   • What do I value most in life? (ie spiritual connection, relationships, accomplishment & ambition, making money, nice things, helping my community, learning, humor, etc). What are the values I’m acting on with my current choices? Do they match my top values or are they someone else’s values?

   • Provided there were no limitations, what would I do if I could do anything at all?

   • What did I like to do as a kid? What did I like about those things? Is there something I could do now that would fulfill that missing piece?

6. Overwork and stress in relationships or at a job can be really draining. Show yourself some compassion and care and know that this time will pass.

   Ask yourself if there is any way you can set a boundary for yourself, ask for what you want or need, or make some kind of change (ie setting limits on the time you give, turning off your phone at night, only checking email at certain times, asking for a raise, having an honest conversation with a relevant person about what you want or need, saying no to an event you don’t want to go to, etc)

   Brainstorm some ideas for ways you can take care of yourself (ie a long bath, a nice walk outside during a free moment, journaling or meditating, calling a friend to support you, etc)

7. Not having close relationships can be very stressful and can drain energy, especially if you’re someone who loves to socialize and connect with people! Here are some ideas:

   • Write a list of things you like and appreciate about the people you do know

   • Call or text a friend, even if you don’t know them that well, and ask if they want to do something like go to a movie or for a walk in the park

   • Take some kind of class like pottery, improv, painting, or yoga. Hobbies are a great way to meet people!

   • Volunteer with a local community group

   • Find a coffee shop or bar you like and hang out there during your free time. You’ll start to meet the people who work there as well as other regulars!

   • Invite your neighbors over for a game night or a meal

   Part of making new friends is patience. Not everyone has the bandwidth all the time to make new friends, so don’t take it personally if people don’t follow up or flake out on you. Try to stay positive and find things you like to do and you’re sure to start forming connections, even if it starts out slowly.

8. Sometimes we just get into a funk. Here are some journal prompts to follow (in order). Answer the ones that make sense and skip the ones that don’t. Don’t hold back and let yourself feel all your feelings! Don’t be afraid to bang a pillow against your bed if you start to feel angry, move your body, or cry. Let your feelings come up and out!

   1. How do I feel?

   2. Why do I feel this way?

   3. Where do I feel it in my body?

   4. What am I resisting or desiring?

   5. Am I judging this thought or feeling? If so, what is the judgment?

   6. What would happen if I let go of the judgment?

   7. How do I feel now? If I still feel bad, start again with question 1. If I feel better, go to question 8.

   8. Is there a lesson in this for me? If so, what am I learning?

   9. What do I appreciate about my current situation?

I hope you’ve found these solutions and journal prompts helpful. Sometimes it simply takes awareness to make a change. Feel free to come back to this assessment any time you’re feeling low in energy, especially if you don’t know why.

If you’d like to set up a call with me, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Is This Food Healthy? Deprogramming Diet Rules

Whether or not a food is healthy or good for you is one of the most common questions I hear and one of the most hotly debated topics. It’s a question that, no matter which food it’s being asked about, has an answer that seems to change from year to year, decade to decade, opinion to opinion.

I understand why people ask it. Food being either good or bad for us is the diet and nutrition paradigm that we’ve all lived under for our whole lives, no matter our age. It’s the way doctors talk about food, it’s the way nutrition experts talk about food, it’s the way the diet industry talks about food. We’re conditioned to believe that this is fundamentally the most important question to ask with regard to nutrition. Which foods are healthy and which are unhealthy? Which foods are bad for us and which foods are good?

But it’s the wrong question, and it leaves us confused about what to eat, thinking everything is going to kill us or make us fat or give us heart disease.

We talk about food and health as though it’s universal & absolute, but that is not the case. What determines this mysterious quality of “healthy”? Is it the sugar content? The saturated fat content? Whether or not it contains oils? High carb or keto? Vegan or carnivore?

And what does health even look like? How can we know when a food improves it or makes it worse?

The truth is, there are so many factors about our diet that contribute to health including food source, level of processing, macronutrients, micronutrients, experience/environment while eating, gut microbiome, hormones within the body, and so much more.

One person could feel great on salads, while another person could be left with gut distress. One person might thrive on dairy while for another it gives them skin issues. One person might love red meat while another person can’t stand the taste or texture. Someone with type 2 diabetes might do well abstaining from sugar, while another person might be able to eat it without any severe consequences to their blood sugar.

When we take all of these factors into consideration, asking “is this food healthy?” simply doesn’t make much sense.

Instead, pay attention to how different foods or combinations of foods affects you, personally. (And this can change over time! 🤪).

How do you feel after eating physically?

How do you feel mentally?

Do you enjoy the food?

Does it affect your mood?

What about your skin or sleep?

Sometimes effects are immediate, sometimes they occur days later. Sometimes they’re dose-dependent.

When we can let go of food RULES and turn our attention to the practicality of how food affects us, we are better able to find a diet that works for both our health and our lifestyle.

The Problems of Fat Shaming, Racism, and Colonialism in the Progressive Health Space in 2021

Since 2017 I have been deep into learning about physical health & nutrition. After years of being unable to lose weight (and keep it off), I found intermittent fasting and lost 30 lbs in one year and have yet to gain it back, 2 years later.

During that first year of intermittent fasting, I became obsessed with learning about health & nutrition. I listened to every podcast on intermittent fasting that I could find (which were two) and read as many books as I could get my hands on. I think it’s helpful, when we’re starting something new, to learn as much as we can about it. It helped me stay engaged, learn pitfalls and best practices, and gave me a community around something that was foreign and uninteresting to most people I knew.

I absolutely loved learning about the body and hearing doctors and researchers with opposite opinions make the case for what they thought was the “best” diet for humans. I feel extremely lucky to be living in a time where science-based nutrition books are easy to come by and easy to understand and podcasts even more so. But over time, I’ve come to see three “evils” in the modern health space that need to be addressed if real change is to take place in the health of our communities and if these doctors and researches that I’ve come to love, respect, and rely upon are to ignite and support the increased and widespread health they want to see.

Fat-Shaming

It’s a common sentiment among doctors in the progressive health space that obesity is not healthy. This may seem obvious - it’s in our cultural zeitgeist. The problem is that, regardless of what these doctors think about obesity, whether it can be healthy or whether it’s a symptom of underlying disease, it’s not up to doctors to decide the health of people who are not their patients.

I recently saw one of these doctors post a picture on Instagram of a magazine cover depicting a fat, vibrant woman with the words “This is Healthy” over it. This doctor’s comment was that this was NOT, in fact, healthy. Through one lens, this can seem benign. He doesn’t believe that a person with excess fat on their body can be healthy. But this is a narrow lens to look through. It doesn’t take into consideration all elements of health and it doesn’t give the woman in the photo, someone who did not seek out this doctor’s medical advice or opinion, the opportunity to decide for herself how healthy she feels. And what is the purpose of a healthy body if not to support our experience of wellbeing in life? It should never be up to a doctor, nutritionist, or health other expert to determine someone’s health who isn’t asking.

This problem is further layered by something that I never really knew until recently, after listening to the Maintenance Phase podcast with Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon (Your Fat Friend), which is that fat shaming is not just about thin people being mean to fat people. It's about fat people not getting jobs, being kicked off of public and private transportation, experiencing wage discrimination, and so much more. It's not just bullying that's the problem; it's discrimination. It's snap judgments that people in power are making about fat people that determine those people's quality of life and ability to live peacefully, comfortably, and abundantly.

Some of the doctors in the progressive health space have been overweight or obese themselves, or have suffered from terrible health problems. And I understand how this would make them feel that they have license to casually talk about obesity as a problem and rebel against the pro-fat body positivity movement. But because it’s a social justice issue, they do not get this pass. In addition, most of these doctors are men, and they don’t understand the unique discrimination that befalls overweight and obese women.

These doctors might object, saying that their rejection of obesity as healthy is done out of a desire to help, to bring truth to the discussion, and to give people the resources they need to be healthy. They don’t want people to start believing that obesity is, in fact, healthy, should they develop other health problems and ultimately become sick or even die. But this is nonsense. People who are sick or who do not feel optimally healthy know that they don’t. They feel it in their bodies. And they are free to seek out alternative lifestyles and knowledgeable doctors if they want to.

Racism

Something that is hard not to notice when diving deep into the mainstream progressive health space is how white it is. The reasons for this are, I’m sure, complex and nuanced and match the reasons any space becomes racially homogenous. These reasons could include but are not limited to access to education & funding, failure of white people with platforms to reach outside of their known, mostly white community, failure of white leaders to see or acknowledge the systemic racism in their field. I’m not an expert on this, and my knowledge of why spaces become so white washed is extremely limited. But I have, at least, learned to see when it’s happening, and it’s happening big time in the progressive health community.

A lot of the doctors and researchers in this community do have awareness of the injustice in our food system and the inaccessibility to good quality, fresh food that many people of color experience, but it isn’t at the forefront of the conversation. Because quality of food is such a huge factor in health, most of these doctors and researchers with big platforms hugely emphasize and promote eating higher quality food without much acknowledgement that for many people, this is impossible due to lack of finances or lack of local access to this type of food.

But even this doesn’t get to my main disturbance, which is that the overwhelming majority of leaders in this space are white. Where are the Black leaders and the Indigenous leaders in this particular progressive health space? Why are the incredibly popular white health experts with huge platforms not making more of an effort to have Black & Brown leaders on their podcasts? This is particularly disturbing to me because of the next problem.

Colonialism

Colonialism in the progressive health space might be the worst problem of all, or it might be the root of all the problems. What do I mean when I say that colonialism is taking place in this space? I mean that white doctors and researchers are learning and marketing principles and practices of health that were practiced by indigenous people not too long ago that were erased by white, European colonial settlers in favor of the systems and paradigms we have today. These doctors and health experts are not acknowledging this fact or making any sort of public attempt to include indigenous people as leaders in this space, let alone point to them as leaders.

Many of these white doctors are calling for a rewilding or a remembering, a return to indigenous practices that regenerate the soil and create delicious, nutritious food rather than the current, degenerative farming practices we have today that introduce toxins into the environment and cause a total degeneration of soil and nutrition in the food grown. To promote indigenous practices & viewpoints on health without including Indigenous Americans or Black Americans is ironic at best, and just more colonialism at face value.

While we all have indigenous roots if we go back far enough and we are all deserving of our innate health and wellness that comes from being an organism born from this earth, we can’t ignore the inherent and systemic racial power dynamics and injustices at play in our current world. White people are simply more likely to have money, power, and wide-reaching platforms than Black or Indigenous people, and they’re also more likely to have the resources to engage with and partake in the advice offered by these white doctors and health experts. And yet these experts act as though there’s a level playing ground and are either ignoring or are oblivious to their own colonialist takeover of indigenous practices and prinicples that make them tons of money and offer them fame.

If these doctors in the progressive health space are to create real change for ALL people, they MUST include Black voices. They MUST include Indigenous voices. They MUST acknowledge why our ineffective, pharmaceutical-run health system is a problem. It’s not JUST a grab for profit, which sounds greedy but not cruel. The capitalist system that has driven our country’s food and climate crisis is cruel. It’s embedded with racism. It’s built upon colonialism. It’s the erasure of people. And if we are to have a lasting, meaningful change, we can’t just dress it up in greener clothing. We must have systemic change. We must have deep awareness of the way the ills of our past inform and perpetuate the ills of our present. We must, as these health experts advocate, get to the root of the problem.

A Very Limited List of Resources To Get Started:

A Growing Culture
Chris Newman of Sylvanaqua Farms
Aubrey Gordon

A Life That Isn't Mine

Hi. I’m coming to you from my couch, and with a headache after a day of feeling physically and mentally unwell. These days, unfortunately, are frequent for me in recent times, or at least more frequent than I would like.

I’ve gained a lot of weight over the past year, after losing a bunch, which makes it extra sucky. None of my pants fit, and I’m forced daily to squeeze into skin-tight leggings with no breathing room. I know my body well after 6 years of experimenting with different ways of eating and intermittent fasting, or I thought I did. Right now my body seems to be in its own journey and I have no idea where it’s going.

I hate to complain, because I know I am so blessed in so many ways, but frankly I’m just miserable. Not being able to travel — or at least having too much caution to travel — living alone, being in a job that’s okay, that I like sometimes, but that ultimately isn’t how I want to be spending my time, and not knowing how I DO want to be spending my time, it all just adds up to the feeling that I’m living a life that isn’t mine. Sorry to be so depressing right off the bat, but I’m guessing a lot of people can relate, so I thought we could explore this together.

What does it mean to feel like I’m living a life that isn’t mine? The quality of it is a tugging, almost like a tug-of-war, as well as a deflation. I feel that while my dreams and desires — the life that does feel like it’s mine — is calling to me from somewhere in the future, my current responsibilities (which, by the way, are few) are tugging hard at my attention and energy to stay with them. I feel deflated, defeated, and stuck, not sure which way to go from here. I am seeking a kind of shedding of everything that feels like it isn’t mine, everything that feels like I’m letting others decide my life for me.

But is it realistic to live a life completely of my own volition? Surely some responsibilities are necessary and unavoidable; living selfishly cannot be the move. Or so I’ve been told. Have you been told this too? And how can we differentiate between those unavoidable responsibilities and the ones we can avoid or choose out of. How much agency do we really have over our lives?

I know that the way I’m living is not healthy for me. In a way, I feel like that knowing is enough for now. To acknowledge that we deserve to be healthy is not always easy and it’s something of a revolutionary act. To know that we can be healthy and that we want to be healthy and to know that we are not currently healthy is a great first step. I don’t know where health lives for myself. In some ways that’s the frustrating part and in some ways it’s exciting. I’d like to give myself over to adventure and exploration, to learning how to be well as a human on the planet. Here is where I’m starting:

1. Nutrition in the form of food. Nutrition is a passion of mine, and I know a lot about it intellectually as well as how it affects my body. In general, I know that eating whole foods that I cook myself makes me feel the best physically, although I have to make allowances for eating out socially, which makes my soul sing happy songs. Right now I’m experimenting with meat eating and low carb, which is new territory for me since I was vegetarian for 5 years and for most of the time that I was exploring nutrition.

2. Place. I live in LA. I don’t like it. I’ve learned to like some things about it and to look for the positive. It’s a lot of work. I’d rather just live somewhere I naturally liked being. I don’t know where that is at the moment, so I’ve stayed in LA, but I am reaching the end of my tolerance. Hopefully.

3. Friendship. My friendships have been rockier than usual the last few months. I know this is probably because of the pandemic that ravaged the world and kept us cooped up in our apartments alone and struck fear in all of our hearts. But nonetheless, it’s made me think about my friendships, noting which ones I’ve neglected, which I have fed, and how we all affect each other.

4. Community. Community is like friendship but I can feel in my bones that they’re different. I have friends, but I don’t have community. I don’t have people I can geek out about nutrition with. I don’t have a hub where my friends can gather to have fun, support each other, and just hang out. My life is pretty solo. It’s not great.

5. Nature. Oh, nature. What can I say? I don’t prioritize it, that’s for sure — but I’d like to. I’d like to spend my free time finding any little hike but it’s not intuitive to me. I get lost and end up driving around forever. These are excuses, of course. I must prioritize nature.

6. Contribution. The hardest one of all. Some call it “work” or “career”. But really it’s contribution. How do I contribute to a world I feel so disconnected to? How do I find connection so that I can find my contribution? These are the questions I’m asking.

This is a journey. These are my thoughts. So far, it’s felt circular, like I have these thoughts and want to make change, but can’t and end up here again. I hope it’s a spiral and that I’ll find my way out eventually. But for now, here I am.

Internal Housekeeping - Clearing Out Dogma

When we think of dogma, we often think of the bad parts about religion—the inflexibility, the rules created by “authorities”, a focus on ceremony and tradition at the expense of the essential. But dogma can happen to any of us at any time, and we can forget to watch out for it.

This year, 2020, has been a year of upending the status quo. We have questioned our belief systems, our economic systems, our government systems, our healthcare systems. We have faced the dogma in each of these, the inflexibility of physical systems as well as the inflexibility in our paradigms. We have seen enormous divisiveness in politics and how those political divides have separated us in so many other ways: whether or not to wear a mask to protect ourselves and others from a harmful virus, whether or not to impose or abide by stay-at-home orders with the same intention as the masks, whether or not to even believe that the virus is real, and more currently, whether or not to trust and/or take one of the vaccines that’s been approved.

As someone who has spent the last 3.5 years completely fascinated by health and the body, who has a history of feeling let down by doctors, who continues to wade into the waters of alternative and functional medicine, I think of myself as knowledgable about the body and good at listening and learning with a critical mind to a field that has vast differences in scientific outcomes and conclusions. For example, I’ve read books by doctors and researches who promote a whole food, plant based, high carb diet. Likewise, I’ve read books by doctors and researches who promote an all meat and animal protein diet, with none or hardly any plants. I’ve heard that fasting is great for you, that it’s not great, that sugar is the worst food in the world, that oil is the worst food in the world, that fruit has incredible health benefits, that fruit has too much sugar, and on and on. All of these experts are smart, accomplished, and well-meaning people, whose opinions about health are based in science, yet they all promote different opinions, different dogmas. My favorite doctors and researches are ones who limit their dogmatic thought, who remain open to varying viewpoints and new research, as well as to the possibility that each person has their own perfect cocktail of what is right for them and that it can change over time as our bodies change.

And while I try not to be dogmatic myself, I have noticed that this year I’ve slipped into dogmatic thought myself. I could feel that something wasn’t quite right, that I was feeling energetically stuck, that my thought became locked instead of curious, that I was beginning to seek confirmation rather than truth.

I think a lot of this comes from the climate of our culture right now. The vaccine conversation is particularly triggering and confusing for me. While some people are anti-vaccinations, I believe that most people who are labeled “anti-vax” are actually just people who think critically and don’t readily accept the status quo of current mainstream western medicine. I’ve noticed an inflexibility and unwillingness in many this year to hear anything outside the mainstream narrative. This is understandable. There’s a new virus that has spread globally, has killed many, and has caused bad and lingering symptoms in others. Most of us aren’t virologists or doctors and don’t understand how our bodies work. We’re under a lot of stress as everything around us has shut down, travel has been limited, and we can’t see our friends and family. It’s a lot to deal with, and I understand the desire for a leader (in person or in organization) who will help us get out of this and a disdain for anyone who questions the story that we think will save us. At a time of great uncertainty, more uncertainty isn’t always the most welcomed thing. In my viewpoint, this is a great disappointment and it makes me sad. When uncertainty reigns, I have always found it best to live in the question, to gather all the data, to be open to new wisdom, and to acknowledge the limitations in any one viewpoint. But clearly that is not how everyone responds, and as far as I can tell, most people have doubled down on whatever their beliefs happen to be.

This year we saw the bizarre destruction that Q Anon caused, leading people down rabbit holes and twisting the truth to create a satanic villain out of America’s rich and famous. It’s a nice and satisfying story, and it hints at some unspoken truths, but in twisting and spinning things in such a false and dramatic way, it actually took those who follow it further away from being able to solve the problems they’ve come to care so deeply about. But along with conspiracy theory, we also got a big dose of mainstream medical and pharmaceutical propaganda. If Q Anon was on one side of the river, those who bought completely into what we were being told about the virus, how to protect ourselves from it, and what the best course of action was to handle it were on the other side. To not question the authorities in power, who have something to gain and who are paid off by large and financially powerful industries like the pharmaceutical, chemical, and agriculture industries is as big of a mistake in my opinion as believing that Democrats drink the blood of trafficked babies to stay young. They’re both misinformed ways of engaging with the information, and they both require a paradigm shift.

While I am not against modern western medicine and feel that it’s extremely good at some things, I do recognize its immense limitations and downfalls. Viruses, in my opinion, are particularly tricky in this conversation because they fall somewhere in between what holistic functional medicine can offer and what modern western medicine can provide. On the one hand, it’s important to understand that our bodies are whole organisms that have the capacity, when healthy, to fight off pathogens. We might ask the questions: What does our body need in order to do that? In what ways are modern living preventing our bodies from being at peak health and how can we change these things to be in better health? These are enormous questions with complex answers dipping into everything from capitalism to agriculture to education to nutrition and beyond. But on the other hand, a safe vaccine could be incredibly beneficial and allow us to return to our lives and move out of this stressful state of fear and constantly being careful.

Since March, I have advocated for a more holistic approach, for taking a step back and looking at all the data, which, to be honest is kind of hard to find. I’ve listened to varying opinions of naturopathic and functional medicine doctors and of course it’s impossible to avoid the mainstream conversation. I’m wary of the pharmaceutical companies and keenly aware that our medical industry is a profit-driven business. So I’ve defaulted to the side of a holistic approach when it comes to the virus.

But about a week ago, as vaccines started rolling out, I started noticing my response to the news: skepticism, concern, mistrust. While I don’t think these responses are invalid, considering this type of vaccine has never made it to the market and we don’t have long term studies on safety or effectiveness, I began to recognize that dogmatic part of me emerging. I am not anti-vaccine, but I don’t know that much about them and haven’t looked into both sides of that argument. I’m not one to rush to take meds or to take a doctor’s word without doing some more research and getting multiple opinions. I’ve never gotten the flu shot. But I do hope the vaccine works and I do hope it doesn’t have many or long-lasting side effects. The truth is, we just don’t really know yet. But while my dogma has me assuming the worst, my curiosity has me, well, curious! And I think this is a more helpful way to be.

While this post was mostly about medicine and health, what I really want to drive home is the part about dogma. Dogmatic thought is something we have to constantly check in about, to clear away the same way we would clear dust or cobwebs that build up in our homes. We are all prone to our ideas solidifying in ways that keep us stuck, but we can always self-assess and return to curiosity and openness. This requires a great deal of humility and sometimes a bit of grief, but if we’re going to maintain our ability to adapt and learn, we must be willing to do what it takes to stay flexible.

The Real Work Of Loving Unconditionally

I am new to the conscious work of racial and social justice. I am newly awakened to my socialization as a white person in a society that values and was built on the paradigm of white superiority. It has been a huge and missing piece of the puzzle of my life and my understanding about the world, which I have largely felt at odds with. The Black Lives Matter movement has given me permission, guidance, and encouragement to think radically about the world I actually want to live in.

The world that I want to live in is one of mutual aid and mutual care, unconditionally. When it comes down to it, it is an attempt to embody an age-old holy grail: unconditional love.

The thought that some people deserve love, respect, care, resources, forgiveness, and compassion, quickly becomes nonsensical when you begin to give it any amount of thought because how could one possibly decide who is worthy and who is not? But it’s easy to philosophize about loving everyone unconditionally and quite a different experience to try and implement it.

Obviously, our American justice system and our government in general and our corporations do not love everyone unconditionally. That is quite clear, and what I’ve learned over the past few months is that we can’t wait for individuals to get on board with unconditional love - we need to create systems and institutions that care for people equally and unconditionally while we, as individuals, expand in consciousness to be able to do so as well. Systems and institutions are still somewhat mysterious to me, although I’m learning more about them every day. But what I do know a lot about is human consciousness and I do know that loving unconditionally is not easy.

Unconditional Love requires a lot of forgiveness, of others but ultimately of ourselves. Forgiveness means a lot of things to a lot of people, but the best way I’ve heard it described is like a bendable branch. A branch that has some bend to it is forgiving. It bounces back. A transgression does not permanently alter the integrity of the branch. A branch that has no forgiveness, no bend, will snap. It has no flexibility; its integrity is fragile. Unconditional love requires forgiveness. It requires flexibility and movement. Unconditional love is like a stream running through, over, and around rocks and stones. A stream does not get mad at a stone for being in its way; it simply goes around it, making a beautiful sound the way a stream does and creating beautiful texture in the water. Unconditional Love in its most unobstructed form is simply navigation. But when we’ve held onto grudges, when we’ve blamed and held resentment, whether against ourselves or others, we get stuck. We become less forgiving and more rigid. We become conditional in our loving.

Unconditional Love requires conscious choosing into loving, kindness, and compassion rather than choosing into quick judgment and control. It requires listening. It requires radical acceptance. We must be willing to accept that our lived experience is not the only lived experience. Our opinions are not the right opinions.

When we try to control things, we try to create the world that we want at the expense of the world as it is and at the expense of the world as others want it to be. But accepting the world as it is does not mean that we can’t change it. It is always changing, as we change. When we stay the same, it morphs into more of the same.

Unconditional love requires a sincere and unrelenting deconstruction of thought and paradigm, also known as curiosity. We must consciously and dutifully ease ourselves back into the unknown, question what be know, listen openly to others, and be willing to sacrifice our paradigms, no matter how tightly we hold them.

Unconditional love requires free fall into the unknown. We are creatures of habit and we are creatures of control. We like things to feel familiar. We like things to go as planned. We like things to fit into a box that we can tie with a bow. But the world, no matter how much we try to control it and predict it, is full of unknowns. At any moment, a pandemic. At any moment, a death. At any moment, a message from a loved one. At any moment, something unexpected can happen. We must accept that fact. We must step into it. We must embrace it and invite it into our narrative.

Unconditional love requires an immense amount of patience. We must be patient with others, but we also must be patient with ourselves. We must be able to breathe through imperfection. We must be able to sit in or work through the moment. We will not always be at our destination, whether that is political or relational or the perceived end point where we finally love ourselves without question. These things are unfolding. We must be present to them, or else we will escape into our mind, into our thoughts, into our judgments. Being present requires patience.

If we are to create the world we say we want, we are going to have to extend our love without conditions. We are going to have to grapple with what that means for us individually and collectively. We are going to have to face our individual and collective demons. We are going to have to love the worst of the worst in addition to the best of the best. We are going to have to seek understanding rather than persecution. We are going to have to find the places inside ourselves that we hate and love those too. It is not easy, but it is easier than conditional loving. It is easier than having to decide who to love. It is easier than having to hold polarities inside of us that keep us locked in paradigms of good and evil, in which we constantly have to strive to be good.

I will leave with my favorite poem by Mary Oliver, which I did not realize until just now is, to me, an expression of unconditional loving.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

From My Feet To My Knees And Back Again

I wrote the following blog post on March 6 of 2020, a full 10 days before I began quarantining in response to coronavirus, which was a few days before it was ordered by the state of California. It is wild to read this now, in mid-July, after so much has taken place in the world and in my own consciousness over the last 4 months. It has been a jam-packed year, to say the least. The grief and pain I felt in the early months of 2020 has been felt by everyone to different extents, personally and collectively. Many have felt it much more intensely than I have. In some ways, the fact that we are all experiencing it together, though in different ways and at different times and to different extents, makes it more comforting. In some ways it makes it more painful. The pain of the first couple months of this year, while it devastated me, feels minuscule now. But as I read back, I am reminded of how intense it was, and I share it now mostly just to share it and to give it a voice, but also for the learning, as a reminder to myself and others what good can come of pain. In many ways, I think those early months of pain and growth prepared me for what came next, and I’m grateful.

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The beginning of 2020 has started out rough for me, to say the least. The last two months have been utter chaos and devastation, bringing me to my knees again and again. The grief I have felt is reminiscent of the periods of my life in which I’ve experienced the greatest losses. Deaths and breakups. There’s been a lot of crying.

These last two months have been different though, than other times in my life in which I’ve experienced loss. These recent grievances and disappointments have been accompanied by incredible expansion. The pain has been condensed, intense. The growth has matched it.

Most recently I crashed and totaled my beloved Nissan Cube that I had for 9 years. This car has meant everything to me, has been a home when no building felt like one, a source of income when I drove for Lyft, a space in which I have bawled my eyes out, screamed at the top of my lungs in rage, danced, sang, explored. My car was weirdly shaped and felt not only like a box of metal that helped me get from place to place, but also like an appendage to my body and even like a pet. When I found out it was totaled, I cried for an entire day and paced around my apartment like a zombie, completely unsure of how to find any sense of normalcy without it. I relied heavily upon that car, and I loved it the way you love anything or anyone.

There’s something about losing so much at once - my car, among other things, changing relationships, the way I see myself, my entire sense of the reality of my life and how I relate to the world and the people around me - that has left me no choice but to surrender. Without a car I am forced to move more slowly, more intentionally.

Tonight as I lay in bed, I reflected on my life currently and I saw myself walking a labyrinth. For most of my life, I think, I have walked through life as if it were a maze. I was looking for the prize at the center, unsure of which direction to go, feeling lost, getting caught in the trap of hope and disappointment as I thought I’d found my way until a dead end revealed itself to me. It’s a stressful life, the maze life. But the last few months have felt more like a labyrinth. Just walking, while shit hits the fan. Going forward, feeling the pain, the anger, the grief. Crying and walking, yelling and walking, fighting and walking. The labyrinth only has one path; you just follow it. The maze is revealed to be only in the mind. As so much has fallen away and as so much has likewise emerged, I feel like I can finally see my feet, moving one in front of the other, just going. The fear is gone. The frustration has dissipated. The illusion that I have control over my life no longer fools me. I do what I have to do. I put one foot in front of the other. Where it leads me no longer feels like my business.

How To Use The Law Of Attraction In The Movement For Social Justice

Dear Friend,

How are you doing? If you haven’t taken some time for yourself in the last few weeks (or months!) I invite you to do so now. Take a breath with me. It’s been quite a year. Do not underestimate the strength you are exemplifying just by living through it.

As the intensity of energy and uprising following the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor dissipates a bit, I’m finding myself settling into the unfamiliar longevity of this movement to dismantle white supremacy. Even as the energy feels calmer and less active, the unlearning and relearning remains uncomfortable and my desire to engage remains strong. I find myself asking questions about my role in this revolution, about how I can be most effective in my efforts, and I also find myself grappling with my spirituality. These last few weeks have been the first time in 11 years that I have questioned the existence of a higher universal power. It’s been in these moments that I’ve had to muster faith.

Learning about and experimenting with the Law of Attraction has been one of my favorite and most rewarding learnings in this life so far. I also know that it is a principle that is widely misunderstood, and I myself have had to grapple with it as I’ve tried to apply it to this movement. But in my understanding, it is, was always, and will always be at play, and we might as well utilize it intentionally as we create the world we want to live in.

1. The Law of Attraction IS NOT “Positive Thinking”. It is not wishing, it is not hoping, it is not putting on blinders and ignoring the bad stuff.

2. The Law of Attraction IS two easy parts and one harder part: The easy parts are knowing what we don’t want and knowing, in contrast, what we do want. I say these parts are easy because they happen naturally, all the time, as we live our lives. The harder part is lining up with what we do want. It’s harder because it requires some focused attention. We humans tend to focus on the problem and what isn’t working a little more than necessary.

3. The Law of Attraction requires that we pay attention to how we feel. That means how we feel emotionally but also how we feel physically. How does a thought feel in the body? Does a thought make you constrict or does it allow you to open? Do you feel hopeful or do you feel hopeless? These are questions to begin asking yourself.

4. It’s not that we want to avoid feeling bad or constricted. The question to ask is, is this a doorway or a wall? Only you can know the answer to that question.

5. When we see things we don’t like - a mean and racist president say mean and racist things, millions of people without homes, clean water, or good food, white supremacy imbedded into the institutions of the country we live in, crowded bars devoid of face masks during a pandemic - we can usually have two “pushing against” responses. One response is to get lost in the pain, anger, and frustration. The other response is to have an “I don’t like this” reaction and then be inspired toward a different future.

6. If you find yourself lost in pain, ie complaining a lot, feeling anxious, feeling depressed, feeling hopeless, feeling angry - maybe give yourself a break. When we are overwhelmed by pain and suffering, we are likely to create and attract more of it. Give yourself a rest. Take care of yourself until your creative life force energy comes back to you and you can breathe again. Make how you feel in any given moment matter. Meditate. Breathe. Cry. Find something to be grateful for. Connect with a friend. Write in a journal. Watch something funny on TV. Do whatever you need to do to take care of YOU. When you start to feel your creative life force energy come back and you begin to be inspired, follow your inspiration. This is a cycle of healing and deliberate creation.

7. If and when you find yourself inspired toward a different future, let that guide you. Think about it. Draw it. Write about it. Talk about it. Meditate on it. Breathe it in. Breathe it out. Get excited about it. Live it in the world. Expand on it. From this place of inspiration, of hopefulness, of creativity, you are likely to create the change you want to make. You are likely to be inspired toward helpful action (it might not be the action you thought you should or would be inspired toward). You are likely to connect with others who are moving in the same direction. If you find yourself back in a hopeless or upset place, take care of yourself. This is a cycle of healing and creation.

8. Momentum plays an important role. When we’ve wanted something for a long time but haven’t gotten it, we have a lot of momentum in the direction of not having it. If we’ve had an easy experience with something, we are likely not to have a lot of resistant momentum to it. We tend to use our past experience as evidence of future possibility. If we have wanted something for a long time but it hasn’t come, we’ll use that as evidence that it won’t come no matter how much we want it. If we’ve gotten something easily throughout our lives, we’ll use that as evidence that it can come easily. I’ll spare you many detailed examples of this principle playing out in my own life for now. But in regard to racial justice for example, those who are just waking up to the pervasiveness and depth of pain of white supremacy and racism in America might be having strong reactions but likely don’t have a lot of resistant momentum on the subject, while someone who has been in the fight for a long time seeing hardly any change may actually have more resistance to change because they believe it won’t come, or at least won’t come easily. Try to remain hopeful in your activism. This will be harder for some than for others and that’s perfectly fine. There is probably a balancing act here of learning patience while still expecting and believing that meaningful change can happen quickly. It’s also important for white people to uplift, point to, check in with, and follow the lead of BIPOC voices rather than move actively and quickly forward in our resolve to end racial injustice. Our unconscious (or conscious) desire to prove ourselves, be good, and be worthy through our “important” action is insidious and we must watch out for it and not take actions from that place.

9. Law of Attraction is about you and only you. The only way to know if it works is if you work it. You’ll never be able to look at someone else’s life and judge whether or not Law of Attraction is working because you don’t know their story, their history, their point of attraction, their desire, their blocks to their desire, or anything else about them. It can be very tempting to try and look around at others to see if it’s working but all it will tell you is more about how it’s working for YOU. Sorry.

10. A lot of people think of anger as bad, wrong, un-spiritual, or simply not helpful. But coming from a place of disempowerment, anger feels like power. I say go with it. At a certain point, the anger is likely to feel unhelpful. At that point, switch it up.

11. Destruction is not always negative. Sometimes it is caring. Sometimes it is creating space for something new. Think confederate statues being taken down. Think the destruction of corporate property alongside the early protests. You yourself might not be called to destruct, but do not judge those who do. Be mindful. Zoom out a little. Be aware of balance. Be kind. Don’t hurt anyone. It’s all part of it.

12. One thing I’m grappling with is how intently to hold on to the revolution in a conscious way. Is the Law of Attraction responding to our desire for a better world even if we’re not consciously creating it or taking action toward it at any given moment? I am inclined to say yes. And yet, we don’t want to acknowledge the injustice and then ignore it or forget about it because we can. This is, in part, because it’s much more fun to consciously create a new world and to see the effects of your attraction than to ignore it and let it happen around you. I also think it’s because the more we ask, the more we get answers. Create an intention around your commitment to the movement and see what comes. Maybe you are being called not to focus so much on what’s happening in the world because you need some rest or because there’s no helpful action for you to take right now. Maybe in a week you’ll be at protests everyday or have a society-shifting conversation with someone you meet while you’re “not thinking about it.” The Universe works in mysterious ways.

I hope this helps you begin to consciously utilize the Law of Attraction in the movement for social justice. Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to avoid the hard stuff in order to attract the good stuff. Don’t let anyone tell you that taking time for yourself means you don’t care about the bad stuff. It is a flow. A healing and a creativity. We all have different capacities. We all have different roles. We all have different passions. We all have different points of attraction.

But my guess is that we all want a pretty similar world. A world in which we are part of, not separate from, the earth. A world in which everyone is cared for equally. A world in which all our needs are met. A world in which people look each other in the eyes and we feel like a human family. A world in which we support our earth, animals, and each other in providing us with food. A world in which everyone has shelter and clean water and clean air. A world in which creativity blossoms from every corner and expansion is celebrated. A world of music and art and conversation. A world in which every individual feels valuable and worthy of love just by being alive. A world in which our differences make life richer and more fun. A world in which we dance. A world in which we hug each other tightly. A world in which we contribute to one another in meaningful ways. A world in which we wake up feeling joyful. A world in which we don’t need permission to rest. I think this is the world we all want. If your ideal world varies from mine, that’s okay. There are worlds enough for all of us to have ours the way we want it.

I love you. I stand with you. I support your ideal world. Let’s create our worlds together.

My favorite Law of Attraction teacher is Abraham-Hicks. If you’re not ready to dive in and pay for anything, they have plenty of stuff on YouTube.

Love, Sarah

A Letter to the Love & Light Brigade About Racism

To The Predominantly White Spiritual Communities, or as my friend calls us:
The Love & Light Brigade,

I have a lot to say and before I begin I want to admit to you that I am new to the movement for Black lives. I’ve woken up recently and it is easy for me to feel like a fraud writing this letter to you because my knowledge on this matter is very limited. But I write it just the same. I do not write to you from a place of faux expertise in racial and social justice; I write to you from a place of expertise in the psychology of predominantly white spiritual communities. I write to you knowing I still have many blind spots when it comes to social justice and civil rights. So here we go.

I write to you as one of you. I have, for almost my whole life, been spiritually focused, spiritually conscious, and spiritually oriented. I was conceived during the year my parents got their Masters Degree in Spiritual Psychology. I later got the same degree when I was 23. I have gone to countless spiritual healers, counselors, and coaches, and I have tried my hand at some of these modalities as well. Since my very early 20s, I have been awake to a spiritual reality, to Rumi’s field beyond right and wrong, to the fact that I create my own reality, and to my role and responsibility when it comes to my own life, my actions, and my reactions. I went to a summer camp for personal development when I was 15. In addition, I have studied regenerative agriculture, soil, and nutrition, which has further led me to understand how important diversity is, how interconnected we are with our environment, and how perfectly beautiful and wonderful The Universe is at orchestrating everything and creating ongoing, evolving life. I know deeply that all of humanity is an expression of love and an expression of nature.

I was awake to a lot, but I was not awake to my whiteness.

Being immersed in spiritual communities for the last 10 years, I never understood why we got such a bad rap with political activists. Didn’t they know that sending Love & Light was actually doing something real? Didn’t they know their anger wasn’t helping anything? Didn’t they know they had access to wisdom and spiritual reality and that from this vantage point they could see how everything was working out perfectly, in God’s timing, for the highest good of all concerned? Why did they insist on putting their attention toward the negative? It was frustrating that they couldn’t understand spiritual truth, but ultimately, it wasn’t my problem. If they wanted to focus on disaster and destruction, that was up to them.

I was awake to a lot, but I was not awake to the fact that I was living a specifically white experience as a white person in a white supremacist culture. I know the words “white supremacy” are charged. Stay with me.

I had my first spiritual awakening when I was in college. I had my second spiritual awakening last week. While I know I still have a lot to learn and that this is a lifelong educational process, I call it a spiritual awakening because I literally went from completely not seeing something to the next week seeing it clear as day. I spent that week disoriented as I absorbed the content that Black people from all over America were putting out about their experiences. My known reality was wholly disrupted and dismantled.
But during this time I was finally able to take in, listen to, and really hear the stories and viewpoints of Black Americans in a way I never had before – their constant fear, their grief, their anger, their cry simply to be heard and cared for.
I was finally able to connect to and see white supremacy and my relationship to it.
When I woke up, after days of dizzying cognitive dissonance, I felt connected to my heart for the first time, as though I had just woken up from a zombie state to realize I was human.

It has not been fun. I have cried a lot. I have yelled. The pain has been immense. It has been uncomfortable, as I have wondered how a person like myself, who was so awakened to spiritual reality and so awakened to environmental reality could have been so asleep to my humanity, to my connection to and impact on others. And I know that if anyone had tried to tell me I was unconscious, I would have adamantly disagreed.

Why do white members of the Spiritual Community have such a hard time seeing their whiteness?

Seeing our whiteness is hard for any white person. White people being blind to white privilege in a white supremacist society is part of how the system maintains power. We are socialized, as white people, to believe that we are living normal lives and having unique individual experiences. The thought that all white people are having a white experience sounds inaccurate to us because we’re not socialized to think of ourselves as a race; we are socialized to think of ourselves as individuals. But I think it is particularly hard for white members of the Spiritual Community to see their whiteness because on top of the All-American assumption of unique individual experience, we have the added spiritual emphasis on Personal Spiritual Accountability.

Personal Spiritual Accountability means that everyone is responsible for their own creations, their own reactions, and their own experiences. Phrases that we commonly hear are “How you relate to the issue is the issue” and “Heal the place inside that hurts” and “Resolve the underlying issue.” The idea is that when we accept that our experiences have something to teach us and we do the work to heal our past traumas and limiting beliefs, we are better able to create the lives that we want because we aren’t held back by the unconscious underlying issues that were previously holding us back. This is a hugely important understanding and one that has served me extremely well. I have experienced the outer world changing miraculously in response to a change in my inner world. I have gotten out of patterns and cycles of creation in the areas of relationships, career, and money, all from changing how I related to my experience. I know you all have experienced this too, and I do not discount that. Personal Spiritual Accountability is very helpful. However…

This paradigm of Personal Spiritual Accountability, while an incredibly important and helpful part of the story, is incomplete. It is incomplete, which would be okay if it weren’t assumed to be the whole story. The rest of the story, which is largely ignored and even explained away, is relationships. It’s systems. It’s interconnectedness. It’s interdependency. Put another way, it’s humanity. I want you to hear this and to grapple with it, to feel your resistance to it, and to consider it anyway: We, the white Love & Light Brigade, have spiritually bypassed our humanity. We have chosen to engage with the world from a spiritual vantage point at the expense of a human one and this has been costly and harmful to both ourselves and others.

Think about this: the spiritual, personal development work that we do in these predominantly white spiritual communities is almost always exclusively centered in the past, even if the trigger is in the present. It is the work of healing past experiences, childhood misunderstandings, and past life or ancestral traumas. This work is fabulous and helpful; it’s just not helpful when it comes to systemic and institutionalized oppression. Why?

Because no matter how enlightened a systemically oppressed person becomes, they cannot choose out of their systemic oppression the way that they can choose out of a relationship or job that is no longer serving them. That is the difference. Sure, a Black American may find ways to take interpersonal racism a little less personally or to not let it bother them as much. They may even find ways to be compassionate toward their ignorant and often hateful white oppressors, and many have. I have been lucky enough to watch their videos, and their compassion, patience, and open hearts have been one of the major keys in my ability to wake up to my previously invisible “delusion of white supremacy” as Sonya Renee Taylor calls it. But Black people will still be systemically oppressed and they will still experience that oppression on many levels, regardless of their relationship to it. They will still be denied access to things that white people take for granted.

When we tell systemically oppressed people to simply not buy into their victimhood or to heal the place inside that hurts or to take responsibility for their feelings and reactions in regard to how they’re treated by the oppressor, we are ignoring and invalidating the current abuse they experience on a day-to-day basis and are not able to choose out of. People of color can’t choose out of their oppression any more than a young child can choose out of a relationship with an abusive parent. They do not have the independence or the political or economic power to be able to create a different situation, no matter how self-empowered and enlightened they become. I do not mean to compare people of color to children in any regard other than to point out the power imbalance between the white supremacist institutions that make up America and the people of color who are abused by them.

Let me be clear: we, as individual white people, are not the abusive parent in this analogy. We are the abusive parent’s other child. We are the favorite child, the star child. That same parent does not abuse us; they praise us and give us everything we want. When our abused sibling tries to tell us this, we feel sorry for them and assume if they just acted like us, they’d be okay. We assume the abuse is all in their heads. At our worst, we make fun of them, steal their stuff, say hateful things to them, or tell on them when they do something we don’t like. Typically, we ignore their story altogether because we do not experience it and so do not believe it to be true or significant. But what we really need to do is see and acknowledge the abuse. We need to stand up to our abusive parent and do everything in our power to stop them. And here’s the important thing: as it turns out, the abusive parent is white people collectively, like kids stacked on top of each other in a trench coat. We, the white collective, created, continue to uphold, and benefit from systems and institutions that were created under a white supremacist paradigm. It’s a machine and it’s working as it was created to work. That’s why sending Love & Light is not enough. We must actively dismantle the institutions that keep the system going and together, with all Americans, rebuild with new systems from a new paradigm. Racism will not end when Black people stop feeling like victims, as many people in our community like to believe. It will only end when white people, the people who hold the power and who benefit from the systems, take responsibility to actively change them.

Here’s a completely different analogy: Let’s say your neighbor down the block’s house was on fire. You would feel bad for them right? You would care that their house was burning down. You would empathize with them, sympathize with them, and send Love & Light to them. You would maybe even actively try to help. That is how white people have incorrectly been relating to the movement for Black lives.

Now imagine this scenario: Your house is on fire. The door locks from the inside and you, a white person, have all the keys. Your roommates who are a very diverse bunch, are yelling that the house is on fire. You’re wearing a fireproof, heatproof suit, so you don’t feel the effects of the fire. But you feel for your roommates. You feel sad that they feel sad. You love them and you wish you could help them feel better, and you try. You say, “If the house is on fire, why don’t you find another house?” They say, “We can’t get out, you have the keys!” You say, “Just think really hard about the key and you’ll have the key.” They say, “But you took all the keys and the house is on fire and we need to get out now!” and you say, “Stop focusing on the fire! You’re making it worse!” They look at you desperately as you spray lighter fluid over everything. What I’m saying is, your house is on fire, white people. Just because you can’t feel it doesn’t mean it’s not burning. And actually I would argue that you do feel it.

White people are miserable, are we not? Even if we are privileged economically, we are often medicated, sick, and depressed. White people in this community spend thousands and thousands of dollars on spiritual counseling sessions and workshops and healers to help us feel better. We have every advantage and yet we are unhappy. White supremacy, which is intrinsically tied to capitalism, is not good for any of us. It values competition over cooperation, which, if you were to study the natural world, you would find is very unnatural despite what we’ve been told about survival of the fittest evolution. While being white in a white supremacist society gives us comforts and conveniences, it removes us from our humanity; it removes us from our connection with the earth, it puts us in silos based on race, and it tells us that our value and worth comes from the amount of money we make and how special we become. We hurt other people on our way to the top and we feel this, even if we do it unconsciously. This is not a world that anyone wants to live in. Do not be fooled by all that you have. All that you have is nothing compared to your humanity.

We, as white people, have a lot of work to do. We must first learn to see the veil of whiteness that we have been calling “reality.” It is not easy or comfortable to wake up to the fact that our comfort and our normal is actually causing suffering to someone else. It is very, very painful to realize that. But luckily, as the Spiritual Warriors that we are, we have the tools to wade through that pain and discomfort. We must do the individual spiritual work to discover why it is that we choose not to take the suffering of our fellow humans on as our personal responsibility when we are the ones contributing to it and benefitting from it. We must discover why it is that we turn away from the pain, focus on the positive, and pray, rather than turning toward the pain, focusing on the solution, and taking action. I read a quote the other day from a teacher named Dwayne Reed. He said, “White supremacy won’t die until White people see it as a White issue they need to solve rather than a Black issue they need to empathize with.”

The Love & Light Brigade is being called upon now to join the movement for racial justice. We are well equipped to do the work that is required of us. We must dig deep inside ourselves to wade through the icky, unpleasant muck. We are good at this; this is what we have been doing for years. In this case, the icky unpleasant muck includes the shame of being wrong. It includes feelings of embarrassment for being unconscious. It includes disorientation and cognitive dissonance. It includes pain and grief and sorrow. It also includes the courage to be wrong and to admit our fault as we learn, the courage to have difficult conversations, the courage to be humble and follow rather than to insist on leading, the courage to acknowledge that we don’t know what we don’t know and that our blind spots are vast and that we’re not perfect. We can and we must do this work for ourselves and we can and we must hold space for others to do this work as well. We must use our compassion and psychological & spiritual understanding to reach the people in our life who are still asleep to the pervasiveness of racism. We must use our privilege to make changes in our communities, businesses, and circles of influence.

Let me be clear here: while it is tempting for white people to think we must hold space for and help the Black community, that is not really where our work is. We must listen to and learn from the Black community and humbly follow their lead, but our work is within ourselves and with our white friends and family. We must hold space for them to wake up. We must find openings for conversations about racism and white supremacy. We must speak up in the face of injustice and perpetuated racist ideologies. We must hear white people’s fears and resistance to the movement and let them know, with love and reassurance, that the dismantling of white supremacy is for their benefit as well. We must be courageous and we must walk diligently and without stopping toward the light of a new world.

I will leave you with some action steps and an excerpt from Layla F. Saad, who wrote a 2-part article called “I Need To Talk To Spiritual White Women About White Supremacy” linked below. She says:

“If I, as black woman, am making it a priority to do this work for myself, then you as a white person have an even greater responsibility to do this work.
It is your work to do.
Remember: Even if you hate the fact that you have white privilege and do not agree with white supremacist ideology, if you are white or a white-passing person, you are still a beneficiary of a system that oppresses non-white people. Racism is not a problem that POC created. And we do not benefit from it in any way. So you have a duty and a responsibility to use the privilege that this system has given you from birth to dismantle it - both within yourself, in your communities and in your institutions.”

Action Steps:

1.    Get Educated. Hear stories from people who don’t look like you and don’t have the same experiences as you. There are plenty of people sharing their stories online. Search for them and listen. Take them in. Believe them. Become disoriented so you can become reoriented to a more accurate reality of this world. DO NOT reach out to all your Black friends and ask them to educate you. Read books about anti-racism. Read books that tell the actual, terrible history of America. Listen to podcasts about police and prison abolition.

2.    Donate. There are many places to donate including Color of Change, NAACP, Black Lives Matter, Equal Justice Initiative, National Urban League and many, many more. Do some research. I need to do more research myself. Find organizations that you want to support financially long term.

3.    Buy from Black-owned and POC-owned businesses. Again, do some research. Pay attention to where your money is going and what effect that is having.

4.    Vote. When you get clear on what the movement is asking for, use your voice to call and email your local government and to vote. 

5.    Begin having conversations about racism and white supremacy with your white friends. They’ll be messy. It’s okay.

6.    Commit. Racial justice is a lifelong journey. It requires dismantling a lot of systems, both of the mind and of the state. Commit to it. Integrate it into your lifestyle. Integrate it into your business. Integrate it into your family.

7.    Lastly and most importantly, I could not have woken up without the help of compassionate, loving, patient, and open-hearted Black activists, coaches, and authors so I point you in their direction now. Learn from them. Let them wake you up. You will know what to do, once you awaken.

Layla F. Saad
Bestselling author, anti-racism educator, international speaker, podcast host
Me & White Supremacy (get it from a local black-owned book store!)
I Need To Talk To Spiritual White Women About White Supremacy (Part 1)
I Need To Talk To Spiritual White Women About White Supremacy (Part 2)
Layla’s Instagram

Ijeoma Oluo
Writer, speaker, internet yeller
So You Want To Talk About Race (get it from a local black-owned book store!)
Ijeoma’s Instagram

Sonya Renee Taylor
Poet, activist, thought leader, author, educator
The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love
Sonya’s Instagram

Janaya Khan
Storyteller, Organizer, Futurist. Co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada
Janaya’s Instagram

Ivirlei Brookes 
Business & Mindset coach and founder of Mavenelle
Ivirlei’s Instagram

Preston Smiles
Transformational Coach, Leader, & Speaker
Preston’s Instagram

Mazin Jamal
Leadership & Business coach and consultant
Mazin’s Instagram

Thank you for taking the time to read and check out the above leaders. I know it was a lot. Take it in. Read it again. Send it to your Spiritual Communities. Leave a comment. Reach out to me. Keep the conversation going. Wake up.

Love & Light to you all,

Sarah

What Positive Thinking REALLY is, and Why it Totally Works

Recently my friend posted a blog by a spiritual teacher that sort of debunked the idea of positive thinking. While I agreed with some of what he said, which I won't go into, I thought it was a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Positive thinking is one of the most useful tools we have as human beings, and it's often very misunderstood, so I wanted to go deeply into what it actually means.

When people talk about positive thinking, what they're really talking about, whether they know it or not, is the law of attraction. It's what The Secret is based on, although The Secret presented a somewhat limited understanding of it. The law of attraction basically says that The Universe will provide you with experiences that match your desires, beliefs, and emotional vibration. So, put simplistically, when you're happy and joyful, good things will come to you, and when you're sad and miserable, bad things will come to you. This is a huge reason people like to use positive thinking (as opposed to negative or sloppy thinking), but also the big reason people hate on positive thinking. Because of course, this isn't always the case. But that doesn't mean the law of attraction's not working, it just means that the process is layered. Stay with me. 

Law of attraction is always at work, which means it's been collecting your desires for your entire life. Desires could be things like having a nice car or a big house or lots of money or a great relationship, but it could also be things like ease and play and fun. The thing that blocks those desires from becoming realities, is us. We do it unconsciously usually. But there are things we can do to let the manifestation of our desires into our reality. This is where positive thinking comes in.

When we tell stories to ourselves that feel bad, it blocks good things from coming. If we have a belief that people are mean, for example, we'll find ourselves meeting mean people, not necessarily because that's all we meet, but because that's what we're focusing on due to our belief. If we have a belief that our life is hard or that nothing ever works out for us, we'll have that experience over and over as long as we keep telling ourselves that story. If we can switch the story we tell ourselves, we can switch our experience, and oftentimes it's super easy. Just find a thought that feels a little bit better. Maybe it's, "some people are mean, but I actually know some nice people too." And then, "well yeah Susie is nice, she made cookies for the office. And Bob lent me his pen. Those are nice things." Just find one incident that's the questions your limiting story, and you're golden. And once you find one, you'll probably be able to find more, if you keep looking. Or maybe instead of saying "my life is really hard" you can say "my life has been hard in the past, but I see that life doesn't seem so hard for some people, and I believe I can be one of those people." Or if that's not believable enough, you can say "my life has been really hard, but some things have come easily" or even "my life has been really hard, but I'm open to a new experience." Find a positive twist. It doesn't negate the hardship, but it changes your experience of it, allowing for a different experience to follow. 

The Secret talked a lot about the future. Vision boards, lists of things we desire, a $100,000 check pasted to the ceiling. And knowing your desires is great. It helps in making decisions. It helps to keep you focused on what you want. But what's even more helpful is acknowledging and appreciating the good things you have right now. Because sometimes you don't actually want the stuff you think you want. And sometimes you get something amazing that you never knew you wanted at all! For example, I studied abroad in Prague in my junior year of college, and it was the most fun I've ever had. But I didn't ever want to go to Prague. That would never have been on my vision board. I didn't even want to go abroad! I was living in New York and liked it just fine. But most of my friends were studying abroad, and I wasn't about to stay in New York by myself, so I went. It was the path of least resistance. And it was unforgettable, in the best possible way. So trust that The Universe knows what you want, and spend your time appreciating what you have.

When you can acknowledge the good things in your life, even if it's so small, even if you don't really want it and it's not ideal, it'll change your life. For example, maybe you don't have a lot of friends, and would like more. You can sit there and whine about not having friends, you can hope for friends, you can make vision boards with people laughing and eating and having a great time, you can complain about not having friends, you can blame the city you live in, you can blame your job, you can blame your age. But you can also find a sliver a hope and focus all your attention on it. For example, maybe you have a co-worker you kind of like, who says funny things occasionally. Appreciate that person as if they were sent down from the heavens especially for you. Be grateful that you have them in your life, even if literally everyone else sucks, even if you don't love hanging out with them, even if you don't really consider them a "friend". When you do that, guaranteed, you will either meet more people you like, or you'll start to like more people you already know. 

Are you starting to see how it works? The more you focus positively, the more you tell yourself positive stories and stories of hope and stories of gratitude, the better your life will become. Because The Universe wants to please you. The Universe wants you to have the happiest life ever. 

But what if you can't? What if it's so bad or what if you can't seem to get your mind off the bad stuff? One thing you can do is start communicating to the Universe and asking for guidance. For example, you could say, "Please show me how to get over this!" or you can ask "How can I feel happier or more abundant or more appreciative?" It's more effective to ask questions in a positive way such as "How can I feel happier?" rather than "How can I feel less sad?" But if you can't connect to "feeling happier" go with "feeling less sad." It's important to feel connected to the stories you tell and the questions you ask, because otherwise you'll be one of those annoying people who practices "positive thinking" but everyone can tell you're faking it. But really, just do your best! And forget what everyone else thinks.

The other thing you can do if you really can't get your mind off of something, or if something has been an unwelcome pattern for a long time, is seek the assistance of someone who can help you release your trauma. Oftentimes when we are really stuck, it's because there's trauma stuck in our bodies from a previous time that was really difficult to deal with, that we didn't know how to process at the time. When we let go of our trauma, we are cleared up to move forward in a way that makes us feel free and alive. You can also clear some trauma on your own by soothing the part of you that experienced the hurt, disappointment, abuse, betrayal, or whatever it was, and consciously telling that part of you a different story. But that's for another post.

So why does positive thinking work and why is the law of attraction even a thing? Alan Watts describes it perfectly: "Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected—and by physical relations of fascinating complexity."

Because we are all expressions of The Universe as a whole, the pieces are all working together based on what we are creating, and while we can create by action, we can also create by vibration, or energy. We call to us certain people, synchronicities, experiences, abundance, and also hardship, based on our vibration, or in other words, our emotional output and our belief system. And The Universe delivers because we are The Universe. We, in our physical bodies, are asking, and that greater part of us, The Universe, is answering. 

[And I want to just mention quickly that while the outer world does seem to change and bring us new experiences, it's really our perception of those experiences that dictates whether we have a good time or not. For example, two people could be sitting in the same traffic and while one person is cursing and angry and looking at his watch, the next person over could be singing and rocking out to his favorite song or thankfully receiving the extra time to have a conversation with his mom on the phone. While one person could be angry and fearful being let go from a job, another could look at it as an unexpected start to a new adventure or an opportunity to try something they've always wanted to try.]

So positive thinking and the law of attraction is nothing to be afraid of and it's also nothing to balk at. Positive thinking is a useful tool to consciously create the life you want, made possible by the law of attraction. You can experience it right here right now by focusing on something you really appreciate and then switching and focusing on something you hate. You'll probably quickly realize focusing on the thing you appreciate feels much better in your body. Take a negative story you've been telling yourself and add a little positive twist, even if it's just a slight one. Make it believable to yourself. If you can't make it believable, don't force it, just switch topics to something that does make you feel good. 

So that's the basics of it. And let me add quickly that your experiences are based on what you have attracted. You can't think positively for someone else. You can't blame others for how you feel. And you can't determine if positive thinking really works by trying to observe someone else doing it (though you can get an idea of it from someone who's having a great time using it!). You have to do it yourself. You can get inspired by others, but it's your game, played only by you and your universe. So have fun! 

You Make The Rules

Yesterday I was feeling super duper stressed. I get stressed a lot, especially on Mondays. I have a lot of projects going on right now, more than usual, which is a super great thing but also a very difficult thing for someone who isn't used to having a lot of projects. So yesterday I spent most of the day pacing around my apartment sighing really loudly until Morgan couldn't take it anymore and made me sit with him to piece apart the actual things I was stressed about. I wrote a list of over 10 things that were just bouncing around in my brain, some of which I needed to take action on and some of which I didn't, but they were all in there jumping and screaming for my attention.

As we were going through my list, determining which things I needed to take action on and what those actions were, I started feeling less stressed but still pretty overwhelmed. It started to seem silly how many things I had going. Why am I doing all of this stuff? I thought. I've gotten so caught up in the things I'm doing that I've forgotten why I'm doing them, and that makes the things I'm doing seem urgent, yet pointless. So I came up with a tool to help me get back on track.

I call it the INVENTORY OF GOALS and it's super simple, back to basics stuff, but something I'm realizing is very important to come back to over and over as I live my life. Here's how you do it:

Write out your goals leaving some space in between each one. There should only be like 5 things on this list, MAX. This is not a list of details, but rather a list of broad, overarching intentions that if you did or had all of these things you would feel happy. For example, my list was this:

Make Money
Be Part of a Community
Do Creative Projects
Be Healthy

These are my right now biggest goals. Some of these things are already true for me, but that doesn't matter. They're the things that are important to me, that I feel like do or will result in my overall happiness. 

Then, once you have your very short list with space in between each thing, go back and write a little bit more about what each one of those things means to you. In other words, WHY do you want these things? For example:

Make Money
I want a steady income, a big income, I don't want to feel worried about money, I want to feel abundant.

You could be more detailed here. Maybe "I want to be able to travel, I want to be able to buy a car, I want a bigger house." But it's important to get to the deep reason that you want it. For me right now it was I don't want to feel worried about money which, more positively put, is I want to feel abundant. So I knew that I wanted to make money because I didn't want that stress.

Be Part of a Community
Friends, laughter, fun, creativity, relaxation

Okay so you get it. Just a few things about what it is about your goal that is appealing to you.

Then, if you have a list of all the things you're doing that are stressing you out, check them against your list. Everything on my list of things to do fit into one of those four goals that I identified. It's helpful to know that because it gives each "to-do" new purpose. I could also see if maybe something on my to-do list didn't fit into any of my goals. And then I have to decide, is there another goal I forgot about that this would fit into? Or is it something I need to cross off my to-do list and never think of again? 

It can also be helpful, once you've identified all your goals and categorized your to-do list to decide which things are urgent. I know that I often feel very urgent about things that aren't actually on a time crunch, or that I can even put on the back burner for now if I don't have the time or energy for it at the moment.

Remember, this is YOUR life and YOU make the rules! There are a million ways to accomplish our goals, and everything we do is based on choices that we make, so it's important to know our purpose behind making certain choices, which requires knowing ourselves and what we want! 

Thanks for reading! This really helped me yesterday so I hope it helps you today or some day in the future!  
 

Soak the Cashews

I get a lot of ideas. I'm grateful for this, because I've gone through periods of time in my life when I got literally no ideas, ever, and that was terrible. But even though I get all these ideas that I feel super psyched about, going from idea to action feels like the equivalent of trudging through 4 ft of mud up a mountain while I'm wearing a backpack made of steel, filled with melting snowballs.

I don't know why it feels so difficult to make a move. I see people and read about people and watch people on TV making moves all the time. They wake up early, go to work, take care of their kids, cook dinner, workout, and still have time to write a book or start a business or travel to Greece or meditate twice a day. Meanwhile I'm in my bed or pacing around my apartment getting excited about making vegan mac n cheese, while simultaneously feeling agitated and anxious and unable to actually make it. 

My main excuse has been "but I have to soak the cashews for at least 3 hours." I've been wanting to make this mac n cheese for 4 days. I even went to Whole Foods to buy the nutritional yeast that will create the cheesy flavor. I want to make it, not only for myself, but because making vegan foods is literally so exciting to me that it makes me want to dance and I want to make cooking show YouTube videos about it. But first I need to practice my recipes. So I need to make the mac n cheese. But I have to soak the cashews, and that feels utterly impossible. 

It's things like soaking the cashews that stop me in my tracks, over and over and over again. With self-publishing my poetry book, it was trying to decide which ISBN option to choose. I sat on that question for at least 2 months and once I finally just decided to buy my own, I published in just a couple of weeks. With cleaning my apartment, it's usually just putting the clothes away, putting the dishes away, or taking the recycling outside. 

Inevitably every roadblock I encounter takes approximately 30 seconds to a minute to get through, once I start. There might be more steps that take a longer time after that, but the things that I'm dreading, the things that actually stop me, are so minuscule in terms of time and effort. Today I soaked the cashews. Do you know what it takes to soak cashews? One bowl, or in my case, tupperware container, a cup or two of cashews, and water. Not even a specific amount of water. Put cashews in a bowl, poor water on top. It's literally the easiest possible thing to do. 

But my kitchen was dirty, so I had to clean it first. Maybe that was it. Maybe it's the fact that it's new. I haven't spent much time soaking cashews in my life. I'm a creature of intense habitual tendencies. I hate new things, like really hate them. My dad's favorite story about me involves a new restaurant my family found and loved when I was probably twelve. They wanted to bring me to it, but I refused. I thought I wouldn't like it. I didn't want to try it. Under no circumstances would I go to this new restaurant. Except one day when it was my stepsister's birthday and she wanted to go there. So I had to go. And guess what? I LOVED IT. Obviously. It became my new favorite restaurant. I only ever wanted to go there. So this is my challenge. Or at least one of them. It might not be the whole cashew story, but I'm guessing it's at least part of it. Because now that I've soaked the cashews once, I feel that in the future, I could soak them again.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I don't know what the answer is, or how to get past this paralyzation that occurs at the prospect of taking tiny action steps. The only thing I can think to do is just to fucking do it. Just take the step, make the move. Because everything flows after that. But like I said, it often feels like trudging through 4 feet of mud up a mountain. So I don't know. But at least I know this about myself, so next time I can for say for sure "Ok. This thing I'm dreading/avoiding, just do it. It looks like a giant mountain, but it's really just a tiny pebble I have to step over." 

Anyway, here is the mac n cheese I made. It was crazy good.

The Happiness Compass

The first time I remember hearing the word “integrity” was at SuperCamp when I was 15. It was a camp dedicated to “making great kids greater” (real slogan) through teaching study skills, leadership skills, communication skills, the works. The camp was founded on what they called the 8 keys of excellence. Integrity was number one, not, I assume because it was the most important, but just because numbers go in order and something needed to be first.

It never made a huge impression on me, integrity. I favored some of the other keys, like “failure leads to success” and “speak with good purpose.” They defined integrity as when your values line up with your actions. We had a movement for it and everything - one hand values, one hand actions, bring them together and BAM: integrity.

I suppose I understood what it meant, but I didn’t really understand what it meant until literally this year, more than 10 years later. Because what are values anyway? How does one come to know his or her own values?

When you think of the word "values" you might think of something having to do with morality. The phrase do the right thing might come to mind. You might think loyalty could be a good example, or commitment. You might think success or religion or family or a hot bod. And you might think of some values that were instilled into you by your parents or siblings or friends or society. Our society values things like hard work and innovation, independence and money, marriage and family.

But here's the thing. Any of the values that you've acquired from these aforementioned places are probably not really yours. Some of them might be, yes. But I believe that values are deeply personal. In fact, I believe that they are to be found only by becoming intimately acquainted with the fabric of your own being. Because your values are what make you, you. Literally. 

I have spent a lot of time in my life trying to figure out who I am. When I was a freshman in college I stopped wearing makeup and straightening my hair in an attempt to "find my soul." I don't know where or how I came up with the idea of finding my soul. And I don't know how I came up with the idea that leaving the house au natural would help me do it. But I guess I had a sense that I was hiding who I was in some way, or that I couldn't be sure of who I was if I was to continue living in accordance with what I perceived as societal norms about beauty. I didn't want to be beautiful. I wanted to be myself. That’s a lie, I totally wanted to be beautiful. But I figured I would never know if I was really beautiful or not unless people saw me for who I really was.

And for some reason, those tiny actions worked. Or maybe it was simply the question, the wondering. Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? What is a soul? What am I doing here? What is going on right now? How did I get here? Who am I? I asked the question over and over to myself, consciously and unconsciously, continuously for 8 years. I experimented with Judaism. I experimented with drugs. I defined myself by my friends, by the city I lived in, by the job I had or didn't have, by the relationship I had or didn't have. I studied Spiritual Psychology. I tried to be an artist. I studied the Law of Attraction. I cried a lot. I tried to be a comedian. I tried to be a writer. I tried to stop eating sugar. I drove across the country and back, for goodness sake. Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? The search was incessant and seemingly without an end. But then something happened.

My amazingly gifted friend and mentor, Julie, asked me to do a simple exercise. She said, "Write down your values. These will act as your compass." I did it. Creativity, that's an easy one. Connection. Compassion. Sensuality. Ease. Nothing really happened. Then I lost whatever paper I wrote them down on and had to write them down again.  This time Beauty was included. Vitality. Simplicity. Joy. Magic. And at some point during the weeks I was working on this, it hit me. These values are my compass, just like Julie had said. These values are what guide me. And the reason they can guide me is because they are the makeup of who I am. Ah-ha! My makeup! But this time, the constitutional kind, not the kind I put on my face.

It was a total shift. Because before this, I had been trying to find out who I was by identifying my qualities. It might have gone something like this: 

Who am I? 
I am someone who is kind and compassionate. 
I am someone who is funny.
I am someone who is beautiful.
I am someone who is curious, creative, strong.  

Forever I have tried to define myself by my qualities. I was on a search for unwavering things about myself that I could latch onto and wear like buttons or tattoos or certificates for myself and everyone else to see and know. But the thing about qualities is that they’re like water. You can’t hold onto them. They change from moment to moment.

I’m usually nice, for example, but I’m not always nice. I can’t define myself as “nice” because that’s not who I am. And if I try to make it who I am I will always be disappointed in myself. I will always fall short. I will inevitably fall into people-pleasing. I will inevitably sometimes be mean. If I have to be nice to be me, and one day I’m not, then my identity is in question.

Maybe I’m funny. But I’m not always funny. In fact, I’m usually not funny. Because sometimes I’m sleeping. Sometimes I’m sitting quietly reading a book. In fact, I would say the percentage of time that I’m funny is maybe .01%. But people still call me funny. But that’s not who I am. And again, if I try to make it who I am, I will be disappointed and confused 99.99 percent of the time.

But values. Values are like big boulders. They’re solid and sturdy and generally unwavering. I could value kindness and it requires nothing of me, no question of my identity. I could value kindness and be mean to someone and all it would do is make me feel a little uncomfortable or guilty. It would probably make me question my choices. It would make me wonder if there was a nicer way to have handled the situation. But it wouldn’t leave me hating myself. It wouldn’t leave me questioning who I am. 

The difference between using qualities to define yourself and using values to define yourself is that qualities are things about you, while values are things you strive toward. As I said before, values are your compass. They dictate the choices you make. If you value money, you’ll make choices that you perceive will make or save you money. If you value commitment, you’ll make choices that will get you places on time, and you’ll organize your day around the commitments that you made. If you value humor you’ll probably find yourself with funny friends, watching funny movies, and finding the funny things in life. You might not be funny, or you might. If you value humor and you do things that make you serious, hang out with serious people, and focus on serious things, you’ll probably feel unhappy and dull, and this is what being out of integrity is.

When you’re living in integrity with your values, you feel alive and fulfilled and energized. When you live out of integrity, you feel icky and sluggish and sad, sometimes even guilty. But here’s the weird thing: we always act in accordance with some values. It’s how we make decisions. Our choices are always influenced by our values. This is why it’s so important to differentiate between our real, core values, and the values we’ve taken on from other people. If we know our values, we can always find happiness. If we don’t, we will always struggle to find who we are and how to live our best lives. 

Weekly Poems #2

1. THE INVITATION by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn't interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon...
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life's betrayals
or have become shriveled and closed
from fear or further pain.

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.

It doesn't interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
"Yes."

It doesn't interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.

2. HUG O'WAR by Shel Silverstein

I will not play tug o'war.
I'd rather play hug o'war.
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.

3. TRIPPING OVER JOY by Hafez

What is the difference
Between your experience of Existence
And that of a saint?

The saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God

And that the Beloved
Has just made such a Fantastic Move

That the saint is now continually
Tripping over Joy
And bursting out in Laughter
And saying, "I Surrender!"

Whereas, my dear,
I am afraid you still think
You have a thousand serious moves.

4. WILD GEESE by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. 
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - 
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

5. THE INFORMATION MAN by Buddy Wakefield

Weekly Poems #1

1. NIGHT LETTER TO THE READER by Billy Collins

I get up from the tangled bed and go outside,
a bird leaving its nest,
a snail taking a holiday from its shell,

but only to stand on the lawn,
an ordinary insomniac
amid the growth systems of garden and woods.

If I were younger, I might be thinking
about something I heard at a party,
about an unusual car,

or the press of a Saturday night,
but as it is, I am simply conscious,
an animal in pajamas,

sensing only the pale humidity
of the night and the slight zephyrs
that stir the tops of trees.

The dog has followed me out
and stands a little ahead,
her nose lifted as if she were inhaling

the tall white flowers,
visible tonight in the darkened garden,
and there was something else I wanted to tell you,

something about the warm orange light,
in the windows of the house,
but now I am wondering if you are even listening

and why I bother to tell you these things
that will never make a difference,
flecks of ash, tiny chips of ice.

But this is all I want to do--
tell you that up in the woods
a few night birds were calling,

the grass was cold and wet on my bare feet,
and that at one point, the moon,
looking like the top of Shakespeare's

famous forehead,
appeared, quite unexpectedly,
illuminating a band of moving clouds.

2. THINGS ARE SUCH by Rumi

Things are such, that someone lifting a cup,
or watching the rain, petting a dog,

or singing, just singing--could be doing as
much for this universe as anyone.

3. START CLOSE IN by David Whyte

Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don't want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people's questions,
don't let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another's voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don't follow
someone else's
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don't mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don't take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don't want to take.

4. THE JOURNEY by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried. 
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

5. THE TYPE by Sarah Kay

6. DETAIL OF THE WOODS by Richard Siken

I looked at all the trees and didn't know what to do.

A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.

Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.
I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon.

From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.

I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority.
Everything casts a shadow.

Your body told me in a dream it's never been afraid of anything.

5 Things You Might Not Have Thought To Do That Could Change Your Life, Especially If You've Tried Everything Else

If you’re a self-help junkie like me, you might be sick and tired of hearing about things that can make your life better. But you also might still be craving more (because you're a junkie). You’ve tried every workshop, read every book, done every diet, joined every religion, and maybe you’re happy or maybe you’re thinking, gosh there seems to still be something missing!

Well here are 5 things you might not have tried that could change your life, break up stagnation, or just be fun experiments.

1.     Sweat.

Sweating is one of my favorite favorite favorite things. I like it because it’s both healthy and easy. It’s my go-to, get-back-on-track activity. There are multiple ways to sweat. The sauna or steam room might be the most obvious. But if you have can afford it and live in the area, I highly recommend trying Shape House, an Urban Sweat Lodge. (Fine, I might be biased because my stepmom owns it, but it's the best, I swear!) There are currently 3 locations in Los Angeles, one in Santa Monica, one on Larchmont, and one in Pasadena.

Why sweat, you ask? Well for one, it releases tons of toxins. This is about the only fact I know about it. But it's a pretty good one, right? In my own personal experience, I just feel better when I sweat regularly. My skin feels softer. I feel lighter and less bloated. And maybe most importantly, it encourages me to do other healthy things like eating cleaner, exercising, and meditating. Plus, it gives me an excuse to watch every Star Trek episode that ever existed. Hold the phone, you say! You love Stark Trek? Me too! Or wait, no. You're just wondering how I get to watch Star Trek and sweat at the same time. Well it's easy! When you sweat at Shape House, you get to spend that hour watching TV, a movie, or listening to music. You can even watch Shakira videos on YouTube. Or any videos! It's just an example! See? Healthy things can be easy and fun! 

2.     Get your email inbox down to 0.

I’ve always been a fairly messy person. I grew up in a fairly messy house. My mom had open sliding drawers built for me in my closet so I could just throw my clothes onto them instead of throwing them onto the floor. De-cluttering has always been this kind of inexplicably never-ending process in my world. I read the Konmari book. I did everything she said and got rid of tons of stuff. And still, it seemed there was always more!

I don’t know why this works, and maybe it’s just coincidence, but one day I decided to get rid of my 700 unread emails and since that day I’ve been able to clean. I can walk through my bedroom without tripping on anything. My closets are (pretty) organized. I can sit on my couch without moving a pile of junk to one side. It’s not perfect. I still have more things than I need, and the apartment does get occasionally messy. But it’s closer to being consistently clutter-free than ever before, and I give credit to not seeing any numbers next to the word "inbox" in my Gmail account. 

Another thing about unread emails, for me anyway, is that it always makes me feel like I have something I need to do. At The University of Santa Monica, they call it “incomplete cycles of action.” To my "I need to always get everything done" brain, unread emails need reading, and that creates totally unnecessary stress, even if it's subtle or mild. I feel so much better, freer, and happier since deleting all my emails. Now all it takes is easy upkeep.

3.     Stop eating Meat

Ok Ok, I know. You’re either thinking “Yay! I already don’t eat meat!” or you’re thinking “Oh no, not this shit again. Next!” But just hear me out. It’s hard to stop eating meat all at once. It’s taken me almost 10 years to stop, and I still sometimes eat fish. So I’m not asking you to stop right now forever and be done with it.

My meatless journey began in my freshman year of college when I tried being vegan for 2 months. I got the idea because my RA was vegan and I had never met a vegan and I thought it would be a good challenge. And also, spoiler alert, I was passionately in love with said RA and was pretty sure this would make him fall in love with me, if not at least give us something to talk about.

And I was right! We did have something to talk about. But we never fell in love. And two months later I was drunk and eating Taco Bell in the hallway of the dorm and he laughed at me and said “Sarah, Taco Bell’s not vegan!” And that was the end of that. The veganism, not the crush. Also, Taco Bell can be vegan if you order your food fresco and with beans instead of meat. But I digress.

Over the next few years I was fully and unashamedly eating animal products, though I did have a lot of vegan and vegetarian friends. And then my first boyfriend was vegan. And I slowly cut out meat in an attempt not to gross him out all the time. And then I ate meat again. And then cut it out. Back and forth until finally it just stopped being good enough. Eventually, I’d only eat meat when someone really recommended it. “Try the burger, it’s phenomenal.” So I’d order it and eat it and every time, I’d think, well that was okay, but a veggie burger would have been just as good, if not better. And after a few instances of doing that, I stopped eating meat altogether. Except, like I said, for the occasional fish. But really, it’s rare!

Ok, so why do I tell you all of this? To say that look, I know it’s hard! And I don’t think anyone should force themselves to give up meat until/unless they are ready. You’ll inevitably give in and eat it again. Food is an extremely primal experience, and for some reason when asked to give up something we like, it can create anger and resentment, which seem like totally irrational and over-exaggerated emotions in response to the request, but it is what it is and I'm not here to fight that. But I’d say it’s worth it to at least investigate. There are a lot of good documentaries about meat production that will at least make you more aware of what you’re eating. Cowspiracy is my favorite. And there’s something that, while uncomfortable, is very freeing about enlightening yourself from ignorance in general. And I’d say that’s one of the biggest reasons I put this on the list. We make so many choices everyday based on pleasure and habit and when we take a look at what are choices actually cost us and the rest of our planet including its inhabitants, it can be extremely liberating because it actually gives you more control.

In my own personal experience, I feel a lot more connected to the planet since not eating meat. The more plants I eat, the more I can feel their nutrients absorbing into my body. I feel like I’m part of the earth instead of separate from it. And every time I choose not to eat an animal, I feel like I’m connecting with animals all over the world, showing compassion toward them, and choosing kindness, which makes me feel like I'm living with integrity. Animals are so awesome. I like them, and I feel that I'm showing them respect by not eating them. 

4.     Break gender expectations.

This one is mostly for the ladies, because I identify as one, and therefore have been subject to expectations related to females. I'm not as versed in the ones related to men, though we could sure use some male allies to support us in breaking ours! 

So here goes, ladies (and supportive men). Stop wearing makeup, stop wearing bras, and stop trying to get rid of all your body hair! 

I’ve spent an embarrassingly large amount of time worrying about body hair. When I was 12 or 13 I remember begging my mom to let me shave my legs. BEGGING, do you hear me? That seems insane to me now. Please let me change my natural physical appearance to fit today’s societal norms for beauty, please! Crazy, right? And I spent a lot of my high school and college years wondering how much hair to remove from my bikini area. Eventually I just started waxing all of it off because I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do and that’s what I was getting the most Groupons for. It hurt, but if I kept up with it regularly, it wasn’t so bad. (PS I was stupid, because a regular bikini wax is almost half the price of a Brazilian and not getting waxed at all is free).

But seriously, try to stop shaving your legs, armpits and bikini areas. I know it’s scary. It feels uncomfortable to go outside in shorts with all your leg hair just lazing about. It’s possibly even more uncomfortable to go out with hairy armpits. But let me tell you a story.

One day I was on a date with this guy I liked (it was Morgan). We were cuddled up on my couch reading love stories to each other from a book I’d just bought. I was wearing shorts and I remember thinking “Oh no, I haven’t shaved my legs! In weeks!” And then I thought, “Whatever. If he thinks I'm gross, we're not meant to be.” And guess what? Morgan became my boyfriend and a few months later he told me that he remembered that day. And his thought was not “Ew she’s gross.” His thought was “This girl is so chill.” SO CHILL! (I'm sure I'm paraphrasing, but no matter!) Not only did he not view my leg hair as a negative, he viewed it as a POSITIVE. Can you believe it? And there I was for years and years worrying about how much hair to wax off my vagina. But he didn’t care about my vagina hair or my leg hair or my armpit hair. In fact, we both currently agree that now whenever I shave my armpit hair it looks really weird. Because aesthetics have a lot to do with just what you're used to. You might be thinking, but Sarah! If I have hairy legs and armpits, people are going to constantly comment on it! Maybe they will. But in the 6 months to a year that I've stopped shaving, I've had exactly zero people say anything to me about it. So, Ladies, don't let body hair be another reason to shame, doubt, or hate yourself! 

And one of the best things about letting my body hair grow for awhile and getting used to it is that I now know what I like my body hair to look like, and don't really care about other people's opinions. I know that I like having armpit hair, but not too much or too long. So I shave about once every two or three months. And I like having leg hair, but sometimes I also like to have no leg hair, so I wax it off and wait a few months for it to grow back until I don’t want it anymore. And as for my hair down there? Well, there are some things a girl’s gotta keep secret! (But really, you can probs guess). 

I’m not going to talk about makeup because it’s the same thing. You’re beautiful without it. No one cares about you or loves you because of your makeup, I promise. And yet, makeup is fun and it’s pretty and I like it as much as the next person, but the point is to not be dependent on it, so if that means to stop wearing it for a month or two or a year until you don't feel ugly without it, then do it. 

Ok so what about bras? Eek! Not wearing a bra, especially if your boobs are fairly big, is really scary. Free hanging boobs are a rarity, and they honestly look kind of weird, but only because we’re not used to them! But really, not wearing a bra can feel a little too exposed. Sometimes I’m afraid that men will stare at me or say something rude and inappropriate. Are these real fears? I have no idea! Sometimes, probably, and this is one I still have to practice. I like to go out without a bra for short periods of time and then run home to safety. I’m trying to go out braless for longer periods of time and more often, but it takes getting used to. I don’t know why this is exactly. Something that can help is what I call a “reverse training bra.” This is a bra that doesn’t have an underwire or padding, so it still keeps the breasts contained while giving them a little bit more of a natural shape and feel. I never wear regular bras anymore, and in the recent past when I’ve tried them on, I think they feel weird and make my boobs look comically big. 

For more info on this topic, check out my friend Bridget’s video. She goes into a lot more detail as to why giving up wearing a bra can be so liberating and even healthy.

5.     Try Improvisational Comedy!

Ok you caught me, I saved the best for last. In my opinion, Improv comedy might be the single best and definitely the most fun self-help tool I’ve ever had the pleasure of trying. Here’s the thing about spiritually focused workshops and classes and books. They’re so great! But they can also be very limiting. You can easily get in your head when you read or do too much mental activity having to do with personal growth and spirituality. You run the risk of spiritual bypass, which is when you have so much spiritual lingo, concepts, etc in your brain that you can talk the talk but stop being able to walk the walk. Improv is great for at least 100 reasons, but here are 5:

1.     Every time you go into an improv scene, you have the opportunity to learn something about yourself. When I first started doing improv I learned as much or more about myself and healed more issues than I had in three years of therapy. Every time I had to do a scene I was faced with my own personal demons. “I’m gonna mess this up,” “I don’t want to make the wrong choice,” and “that person is stupid” are just a few of limiting judgments and thoughts my mind would inevitably start spouting. I realized I was thinking about improv and also the real world as this place where stuff was already created and existing and that I had to figure out how to fit in as a cog that wouldn't mess things up and keep them going perfectly. But that’s not how anything works! When you’re in an improv scene, nothing exists until you make it exist, so everyone is creating it together. You’re creating as much with your words as with your silence as with your action. And it’s the same for the real world. I guarantee you there is nothing that could have made me learn that faster than improv.

2.     You have to listen. Listening is something that is taught in many spiritual and personal growth practices. It’s one of the first things I was taught while earning a Masters in Spiritual Psychology from The University of Santa Monica. But when you do improv, you really have to listen. Or it doesn’t work. You have to listen so carefully that you don’t miss anything (you are creating your world after all, and listening might be your only way to know what’s been created!). You have to listen so carefully that you remember what you heard, and you have to listen so carefully that you can have an honest emotional reaction, which brings me to my third reason improv is so amazing.

3.     You have to react honestly. This is one of the hardest things that I’ve had to learn. A lot of times, I don’t even know what my honest reaction looks like, I’m so slow to have one. So many of us are conditioned to be nice, to be respectful, to follow social norms of behavior and conversation. But improv works best when you react honestly, when you say the first thing that comes into your brain, when you let yourself get emotional, and when you blow things out of proportion. We can't always be throwing tantrums in work meetings or telling everyone we love them so maybe this doesn’t fully translate to real life, but I think we’d all be much better off saying what’s honestly on our mind, or at least acknowledging it to ourselves, than cutting ourselves off short, which we often do before our true reaction even registers. 

4.     You have to stop judging. When I studied Spiritual Psychology, we talked about judgments every five minutes. Letting go of them, forgiving ourselves for having them. When you do improv, you have to learn not to judge or it doesn't work. Remember, in an improv scene, anything goes. The second you start judging your own or your partner’s choices, you halt everything. The show can’t go on if you squash it by thinking or saying someone's choice is stupid or wrong. And so it is with life.

5.     It’s fun and lighthearted. This is the thing that I find most missing from self-help books and seminars. Everything always tends to get so serious. I’ve worked SO hard to stop judging. I’ve worked SO hard to heal uncomfortable, sad, and even traumatizing things from my past. I’ve worked SO hard to try and love myself. And in the end, maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t, but I’m probably caught in what one of my Spiritual teachers, Michael Hayes, calls “The Great Path Of Becoming.” What is the great path of becoming? It’s basically when you get addicted to healing your shit. You’re always on the path to become better, more spiritual, more whatever, and you forget that you already are good and spiritual and whatever.

One of my best friends in college used to yell “Have as much fun as possible!” whenever we were doing pretty much anything. And that’s stuck with me as possibly the best advice I’ve ever gotten. Improv is fun and scary, which I feel is the best combination for growing, because the fun element makes you go back again and again to conquer your fears. And it forces you to actually do things that will push you to face yourself instead of just talking about yourself. You’ll also notice as you do and watch improv, that these issues that have felt so heavy will come up in a scene or a show and you’ll get to laugh about it, because life is ridiculous and silly and not very serious. And we all know that laughter is the best medicine. Besides maybe chocolate or a bunch of likes on a Facebook post.