Maia Toll's Blog, page 6
June 9, 2018
How to Find Balance, Nurture Your Inner Divinity, and Not Drop the Ball on Everyday Life
That’s why my first spiritual teacher— who insisted that I was a modern-day priestess— admonished me never to get married or have kids or dogs or even fish!
Okay, I’m exaggerating on the fish; I’m sure she thought some koi in the pond would be good for meditation. My point is she felt pretty strongly that I should avoid decisions which tempted the noise of everyday life to pull me off my center.
And let’s face it: even for the most grounded of us, the ups and downs of daily living exert their own gravitational force.
As modern-day wisdom-warriors, our primary fight is with our own wandering attention, keeping it focused so that our energy goes where we want it to and not to the gazillion other places that are happy to have an infusion of our light.
In addition to the push-me, pull-you of a normal day, we also need to be mindful of whom we allow into our world. New York Times columnist David Brooks notes that
… the brain is a malleable organ. Every time you do an activity, or have a thought, you are changing a piece of yourself into something slightly different than it was before. Every hour you spend with others, you become more like the people around you.
When you add all this up, it’s pretty easy to get discouraged and to feel like the modern world is no place for the spiritually-inclined. I’ve had plenty of moments when I longed for a hermit’s hut or cloister.
You don't need to retreat from the world to tap into your inner-wisdom; it's with you wherever you are.
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But, truth? While a hermitage might be good for my soul and might put me deeply in touch with my intuition, I would miss being able to run out to the coffee shop for a decaf cappuccino with a half-shot of vanilla syrup.
The challenge is finding balance: walking a spiritual path while still being deeply engaged with not only the world, but with the society— family, friends, work relations— around us.
We all have an inner wisdom that is ours to tap.
We are all witches and wisdom keepers and priestesses.
So… how do you connect to your inner G.P.S. on five minutes a day?
Find the times when you can squeeze in a minute or two for yourself and set the intention that that is enough.
Work in an office or have kids who need your attention? Grab an extra minute in the restroom!
When you use the restroom, spend an extra minute in the stall. Put a drop of your favorite essential oil on your palm and rub your hands together. Take a few deep breaths and picture the plant you are smelling sending its roots deep into the ground and turning its leaves toward the sun.
Spend a lot of time commuting? Use the red lights!
A red light is perfect for 3 deep breaths, feeling the air fill your belly. Blow out forcefully, expelling tension and negativity.
Race around all day and collapse into bed at night? Take two minutes for gratitude!
Keep a gratitude journal on your bed stand. You don’t have to write a lot, just note 3 things you are grateful for. Write in sentence fragments— I give you permission.
Where do you find a few extra minutes to nurture your spiritual self?
You don’t have to retreat from the world to tap into your inner-wisdom; it is with you wherever you are!
Hugs
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June 2, 2018
Our Best Medicine
Our best medicine is this original medicine: the spark you brought into this life that is yours and yours alone. When you live from this soul-space, you thrive, even when external circumstances are difficult.
Each of us knows, deep inside, who we are. But this sense of self can get buried beneath who we think we’re supposed to be.
Over a lifetime, you’ll have many manifestations of the same essential self.
Check out this poem I wrote fifteen years ago when I was teaching poetry to kids in Harlem. Can you see my essential self poking her head out?
Can you look back at your life and see the golden thread that runs from then ‘til now and continues on into your future?
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Your thread might be subtle or unusual in design. It may be woven from odd bits that don’t seem to hang together in anyone but you. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Your medicine is part of your unique essence. My medicine is made of mint and lavender, roses and writing and shooting stars.
Dream on yours so you can embrace your own best medicine.
I guarantee it’s there, just waiting to be rediscovered.
Love Poem
Behind my house the yard is cramped
with old foundations and crabgrass.
Laundry hangs limp and stray cats
scowl amongst the mismatched bowls
on the neighbor’s back porch.
I’ve learned to love small scale:
planted mint and lavender,
and trimmed the ancient rose
which used to own all ten
square feet of garden.
You came big
with fields and flowers and stretches of open sky.
Your fingers smelled of persimmons
and when you laughed
brooks babbled
and the crisp smell of rain overpowered
the lingering scent of last week’s garbage.
I thought I would know you at sixty…
at seventy…
at eighty…
thought those were the years it would take to explore those fields
and know their wild contours.
In far less time you were gone, slipping
between the morning asters, not understanding why
I chose to stay with laundry lines and pigeon shit.
I thought those fields were yours to take,
thought you’d roll them like a rug
and tuck the sky into your make-up case.
But as days and weeks have passed
I’ve been surprised to find
stretches of open field blowing
between the sheets and blouses
on the line, patches
of turquoise sky tangled
in the rose’s thorns, and
stashed beneath the crabgrass,
a tumble of shooting stars.
Hugs—
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May 16, 2018
Have You Ever (Really) Achieved Beginner’s Mind?
Beginner’s mind, you think, yes…
But thinking is not the same as doing.
Which is not to say the things you tell yourself don’t have an influence on your reality, but if you tell yourself something which you don’t actually understand, your consciousness has nothing to shift toward.
The beginner is The Fool from the tarot deck, merrily traipsing toward the next adventure.
People like to say The Fool has no plan, but how can that be true? She has a sack over her shoulder, she’s packed for the journey. Packing indicates intent, even if it’s a foolish one.
The Fool by Gregg Hierholzer www.gregghierholzer.com
It’s not the lack of planning that’s foolish, it’s the plan itself which seems pie-in-the-sky or ill-conceived to someone who “knows better,” who’s been there, done that or read every study ever written on the subject.
The Fool is in beginner’s mind. She knows nothing about what’s supposed to work and what isn’t… so she goes for it, one hundred percent.
When I was teaching second grade (many moons ago), I worked at a cool private school in Brooklyn, New York where we wrote our own curriculum. Not only were teaching degrees not necessary, they were actually discouraged. The Head of the Lower School believed teaching degrees were the death of the natural-born teacher.
And since I was deemed a “natural teacher,” I was given a second grade classroom and told to get to work! Because there was not set curriculum, I got to base my teaching on whatever topics were sparking my intellectual curiosity.
At the time, I was immersed in studying screenwriting and the arc of story as described by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero’s Journey.
And so I decided my second grade classroom would be studying the hero’s journey through both story and movie.
Our blackboard became a giant timeline where we mapped plots and arc of character development. We huddled on the rug watching Willow and Star Wars. Harry, Hermione, Ron, and Snape were psycho-analyzed.
The final coup d’etat: each child wrote their own hero’s journey story. The shortest was 40 pages long. Okay, 40 of those pages where the picture goes on the top and the writing on the bottom… but still: 8-year-olds happily writing 40 pages!
At a Lower School meeting toward the end of the semester each teacher spoke to what had been happening in their classroom thus far.
We’re studying the Hero’s Journey, I began.
Multiple faces gaped at me. Dana blurted That’s too complex for second graders. They don’t have the cognitive ability to grasp those sorts of patterns.
Maybe I looked startled, maybe smug, but my answer was Really? ‘Cause they already did.
And this is beginner’s mind.
Beginners don’t know what they can’t do.
They don’t base their decisions on presumed cognitive abilities or known physical constraints or assumed emotional intelligence.
Beginner's mind is more a state of the heart than status of the brain.
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Beginner’s mind is a space of having your heart is passionately wide open. You don’t have to do a risk assessment because risk is a concept of culture; it’s mental not emotional. You don’t check the studies or the surveys…
…You simply step merrily off the cliff.
In the Tarot deck The Fool is not card number one, its instead designated with a zero. Stepping off the cliff is the action which leads to the first step.
And I recommend doing it at least once a year.
What Fool’s journey have you been on this year? What journeys are you planning for the year to come? How will you return to beginner’s mind?
Watching and waiting!
Big Hugs,
P.S. My favorite flower essence for fear of the unknown: Aspen. It’s okay to quake a little as you move closer to becoming who you are meant to be.
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May 9, 2018
Soulmates, Sugar, and the Opportunity of Community
My mom picked up this tidbit back when she was studying for her Masters in Family Therapy. I know proximity is not as sexy as soulmates. But having watched friendships form and shift over the years, I think she might be on to something.
I’m a member of the Friends generation. The show supports Mom’s research. How else other than proximity would Ross, a geeky paleontologist, end up at the same dinner party as Phoebe, the eccentric masseuse?
My own life is no exception: I’ve bonded with neighbors over snow shoveling, power outages, and tick removals.
One of my teachers, a Cherokee medicine man, taught that in traditional culture the individuality that we so strive for here in America would have been seen as a sickness. You didn’t go tromping all over the globe looking for your like-minded friends. You were instead part of the greater whole of your village and they were a part of you.
But our modern concepts of friendship are similar to our concepts of romantic love: we’re searching for a soul match, a click, a tribe of like-minded folks. We create family and friendships of choice. And modern technology—from cars to computers—make it possible to search further than our neighborhood to find these relationships.
The gorgeous friendships that result, the friendships of the heart, sometimes root in the most outrageous soils. They thrive despite oceans and airplanes and the issues that distance brings.
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The friendships that happen over borrowed cups of sugar and porch-sitting through power outages are a bit like native plants—they can thrive through droughts and windstorms, strongly rooted to a specific place.
But these other friendships, the long-distance ones, are more like hothouse flowers. They can be oh-so-sweet, but they need a bit of water and fertilizer, a few extra minutes to text “I miss you” or to juggle the time difference for an afternoon chat.
And when you have a few friends, or a tribe of friends, at a distance it takes yet more work.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say they’re looking for their tribe. There is a pervasive loneliness in our deeply (and dearly) developed individuality.
And yet, there’s often a failure to acknowledge that finding and keeping a tribe of heart-bonded friendships takes a commitment. It means going into the hothouse a few times a week to not just bask in the glow but to do some watering and fertilizing.
In this way, community becomes a verb instead of a noun.
Recently, a Medicine Keeper wrote to me:
I am interested in doing group work with women around my age with similar interests but I’ve come to the conclusion that it needs to be a self-defined group, self-chosen, and cooperatively run.
I don’t know if this particular woman is psychically attuned, so she may or may not have received my high-fives! So many high-fives on this one!
For a community to function as a community, people need to be webbed to each other, not all turned to face a guide or leader.
When each individual takes personal responsibility for creating connection and collaborating with others, a true community can be born.
And, like a village, you’ll probably find that even amongst these like-minded folks, there are some with whom you want to share your deepest dreams and others with whom you don’t speak much until your car needs a jump and they happen to be the one who has jumper cables.
So what’s the lesson here?
For me it’s that each time I walk into a new experience, whether it be live or virtual, whether it has existed for decades or is just getting started, I am walking into a new opportunity.
If I want that opportunity to become community, then I need to build that for myself, one cup of sugar and hot-house flower at a time.
Hugs—
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May 3, 2018
Sneak Peeks, Gratitude, and Out-takes
I’ve been writing… drinking tea… writing some more. Book #2 (my oh-so-creative working title for this creation in process) is due in two months. Holy kamole.
(The tea of choice this week is jasmine green with a big dollop of wildflower honey and a splash of homemade cashew milk… and I’m drinking a ridiculous amount of it. I should probably keep a tea log ’cause the recipes get super-creative when I’m simmering new book ideas!)
The other day I surfaced from a long afternoon of writing and imbibing and realized I’m pretty much living my dream life… and that’s because of you.
Writers and readers have a symbiotic and dynamic relationship: I choreograph the words so that you can dance with them.
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This week’s batch of writing has focused a lot on words and finding language, which actually works to describe this wild and mysterious life.
Here’s an out-take. I cut this from the Introduction, but couldn’t quite get rid of it!
…Let’s start with yearning: never satisfied with the world I was given, I’ve constantly stirred the pot, allowing the full flavor of life’s richness to rise and mingle with my everyday awareness. I’ve stepped into curiosity (let’s be honest, sometimes I dragged my lazy and slumbering self into curiosity).
And since my exploration of the nooks and crannies of my life weren’t turning up any magic rings or secret doorways, reading became a constant: I’d read while eating, while walking, and even while driving, a book cracked on my lap as I waited for the rather long stop light at Morris Road and Blue Bell Pike to turn green. This compulsive reading habit expanded my imagination prodigiously and created an everlasting love of words, but didn’t get me any closer to experiencing the mysterious wonderment and expanding sense of self my favorite authors described.
Quintessence and serendipity. Esthesia and incorporeal. As I entered college and then grad school, I kept searching the words, looking for the ones which would help me transcend my ordinary life. I sought a language of the sacred in the built landscape (thus a few years of architecture school), in art (there was a year of art therapy training), in poetry (which I taught to elementary school children in Harlem), and even in the dreaming journeys of shamanism.
There were moments, sharp and fleeting, when something mysterious and powerful would grab hold of me: like when my breath would sync with that of the horse I was riding and we would become one being or when a dream was clearly more than a dream or when I walked through a ruins of an ancient town in Greece and knew with an uncanny certainty where the gardens had been and which of the surrounding hills had held watch towers…
As you can see, this book’s for the seekers! More to come!
Hugs—
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