This has a lot to do with my recent trip/retreat back home to Northern California and the inspiration to deepen my commitment to Zen Buddhist practice that occurred rather wonderfully and organically while I was there. It also has a great deal to do with where I am in my personal life as devoted mama and wife, friend and confidante, student and practitioner, writer and guide, and so on.

Yes, recently I have been truly consumed with not only the impulse but with the more profound long-term question of how I can in earnest aspire to and become a greater light.

How might I ripple and radiate out from the closest most interior circles to the nether regions of the universe as an ever more welcoming, beaming, and loving presence?

I believe this is an essential question that all us sacred creatures share and contemplate with varying degrees of consciousness over the course of our lifetimes, as it is fundamentally about unearthing, then thriving from our inherently sweet, warm, and generous natures.

I mean, don’t you think this is sort of THE life question when it comes down to it? How we can ultimately support, soothe, inspire, and ignite more love and kindness here in ourselves, there in others, and everywhere in and around us all?

Sounds grand and utterly lofty, doesn’t it? Yet there is some serious, subtle, and soft inside work to be done in making the big outside wow stuff happen!

I am convinced that accessing and living in alignment with our unique and meaningful vows is a huge part of it. 

Feeling stymied by this project? Here is a sequence of hints at how you might discover and live with your own positive declarations:

1. GET QUIET. Sit down and touch the stillness inside you. Open yourself to receive how in your heart of hearts you would like to live.
2. COMMIT. Take note of the phrases that you intuit to be your life commitments and privately declare them to yourself. They may me about being better to you, or being a more compassionate companion, parent, coworker, etc. What really matters is that the vows come from your truest center.
3. START SMALL. Let each dedicated vow arise in the simplest of acts, in how you speak to your kids or loved ones, how you cook your meals, mail a letter, walk the dog, or anything and everything else super mundane and everyday.
4. EXPECT NOTHING. Don’t assume or look to gain a thing from living in accordance with and abiding by your vows. Just be present and allow them to steer your every move, no strings attached.
5. RIDE THE WAVE. Experience the crests and falls of your life with your vows in place and observe how you feel.
6. DEEPEN. In other words, go back to go. Lovingly reaffirm and recommit to your vows often, and keep on surfing it all…

My teacher Norman Fischer writes in his fantastic new book, Training in Compassion: “We would all like to serve others, to feel for others, to love others with everything we’ve got. We would all like to be a light for the world.”

Vows are at the crux of and provide the blissful foundation for making this possible. They literally illuminate the way. You game?

In light and loving kindness,

Maggie

Every deep spirit teacher I come across writes in their own enlightened way about suffering and commonplace misery as stemming largely from fighting and resisting the reality of our life. Most all of the analogies boil down to banging our heads repeatedly and wailingly against the brick wall of the present day, while we get angrier by the minute with each resounding bang at the meanness, cruelty, and inflexibility of the wall in front of us.

What would happen if we stepped back, took a literal breather, righted ourselves and relaxed our reverberating heads for a sec? What if instead we gazed more openly upon whatever it is that we assume is blocking us?

Is the wall really so awful, so truly impregnable?

There might actually be some beautiful climbing ivy along one section of its bricks, or a fresh patch of dewy moss clinging to an area of the wall, or a striking pattern of pretty color streaming through another patch.

And maybe, just maybe, the wall that we have resurrected and believe in our hearts and minds to be the negative and inhibiting OBSTACLE to our happiness is quite ironically the very THRESHOLD to it.

Perhaps this curious wall is actually the doorway leading into the secret delicious garden of our life. True, the garden might be a little dilapidated or untended, because it has been so bogged down by the immensity of our struggle with the wall, yet it is hands down the jewel in the crown of the vast landscape in front of us.

With spring officially here—and all the energy, spark, and creativity that comes along with it—let’s nod to and celebrate the paradox of the brick wall and the secret garden it so lovingly protects.

How about we take a giant brave breath, soften our beliefs about the wall, and plunge ourselves headlong into the cultivation of the before-now hidden garden, aka our life as it is?

It’s actually quite simple:

Step 1. Stop all your anguished banging.

Step 2. Start seeing, being, and accepting your life as is, right here, right now.

Step 3. Let the song of your life arise before your tender, touched, and loving eyes.

You in?

With love,

Maggie

To match the demands of our worlds, we’ve grown super stealth at pushing, searching, and looking. Yet, how successful are we at not doing any of these things, at not being such darn good conventional action heroes?

Do we ever make room to not push and do? To conversely sit, get quiet, hold space, and listen instead?

Our toddler often yells out “Make room for me! Make room for me!” when bounding into our bed on weekend mornings. I love this phrase when she shouts it out. I use it as a reminder of what it feels like when God—and I use this term in the vastest and loosest sense, to encompass whatever the sacred and spiritual mean to you—says it too!

For me it always happens in the middle of the night, between about 1 and 4 am, when things are externally peaceful enough that I can hear divinity’s distinct call: “Make room for me! Clear space!” is the message. I get woken abruptly and sit upright, stock still in bed, until the sun rises, with both relief and in resign. Yes, it often takes just such a wake up call to open me to a dialogue with the great beyond.

I am not describing something so huge and far out, but rather a profound internal shift, a willingness to say hello with ease, ready to meet whatever comes back to me on the other end of spirit’s line. It is essentially the courageous act of showing up.

This most recently happened quite starkly on our family vacation a couple weeks ago. Some geographical locations are sacred to our wiring. Some places literally seem to blow the roofs off of our clenched existences, and this one small island in the Caribbean happens to do this for me. Whenever I visit this particular island, I am forced to stop, clear space as my biggest and highest action, and to read the sacred signs.

These calls, and our openness to receive them, are action enough. Even when we feel confused or unclear as to what the divine message is, we can still live in spirit’s glow without an actual state-by-state flight plan. We can radiate and perform all that is required of us, as if we’ve been cleared for celestial takeoff, on God’s runway with engines humming, poised to fly when the time is right. Please believe me on this. The destination is seriously and so totally beside the point.

What I am encouraging today is for you to believe in the simple magic and true exuberance that comes from making room and opening to a conversation with the cosmos.

Try it, or rather, surrender to it.

Go on. Just say hi…

Why? Because each time she asks my foggy nursing mama self, I am sucked directly back into the present moment, into the most immediate and direct experience of life at hand, as is, unadorned by fantasy or airbrushing. The most shocking thing about all this is that no matter how tired or crabby or overwhelmed I might be feeling, my answer is always yes.

Seriously, when I really absorb her three little words, when she’s found me daydreaming on the breast pump, or nursing Liam on one side while I write the shopping list or scroll through emails or jam a rice cake into my mouth with my free hand, it’s like I collide head, heart, and spirit with the jewel of the present, and inside this glowing jewel exists nothing other than love and glory and bliss at just being alive.

Given how much time I spend wandering around consumed by how stellar life will be once I lose the last 5 pregnancy pounds, get my book written, get the baby to sleep through the night, that to realize quite suddenly that I am happy right now is miraculous. It stops me in my tracks and completely dissolves the whole happiness with a capital H as being far off, over there somewhere.

Sound familiar?

I urge YOU now, in this precious moment, to stop for a sec and really look around. Receive what is deeply, intricately happening inside and outside of you. And do this multiple times throughout the day—if you want to use my daughter’s cue as a spark, go for it! Ask “Am I happy?” and pause, let it reverberate and guide you.

There are so many gems of happiness right underneath your, my, all our noses.

If you’re into journaling and I haven’t quite convinced you, make a list each day for a week of all the opportunities you come across to seize the inherent wonder and delight of NOW. I call this exercise Today’s Versions of Happy.

Here’s an example of one of my lists:

*Baby on belly, me bleary-eyed, legs unshaven, sun not yet up

*Kids drumming on bongos, Sesame Street on, TIRED, mug of coffee and hot rice milk

*Crazy workout, sweat dripping down and soaking through my clothes

*Falling into restorative yogic trance, blessed sliver of peace

*Huge salad and plate of garlicky greens on table just before digging in, THANK YOU

*Connecting with hubby about life and everything in middle of night, only pocket of time

Get the picture? For all you other happiness seekers out there, if we begin to document, to accumulate and pay attention to our little moments of bliss, we begin to see that 1. We are a whole lot happier a whole lot more of the time than we think, and that 2. We need not spend so much time imagining and pushing for something better down the road.

Letting go of all this searching for greener grass and replacing it with simply being is huge. It is a profound breakthrough into grace and enables us to commune with our deepest selves and with the divine, so big, so encompassing; and infusing of every single thing around and within us with a cosmic version of happy in the ever present.