Coffee and whales. And the words just flow.

For about a year now, I've been getting more and more into meditation and making it a regular practice. And yes, it hasn't gone unnoticed that everything I have previously scoffed at - cycling, meditation, social media - has now become a happy part of my life (even though it still makes me inwardly cringe to use the words "social media" in any type of reference). Sometimes I worry that this means I've become lame. And then I realize how happy I've been lately, and I tell that part of my brain to just shut the hell up about it.

So anyway. I've been meditating. A lot. Like exercise, there's a glaring difference in how I feel when I do it and when I don't. When I don't, I feel impatient, quick to anger, overly snarky, and oddly, really bored and unfocused. When I do, I feel centered, focused, opened up, hopeful, and...happy. Really, really happy. Not that fake, sugar-coated happy that people try to affect when they're trying not to think about or show how unhappy they really are (which I recognize easily, since I've done it a lot myself)...but that perfect, peaceful, jazz-hands-on-the-inside happy.

This is some hard shit, though, meditating. I started practicing it way back in the spring of last year, and then would drop it and pick it back up again about every other week. Then, late this winter, I decided to really try to make it a regular practice. I thought it was going really well because I would sit there, get quiet for a little while, and then suddenly I would either remember something important or get this great idea and I'd be up like a lightening-bolt, inspired and focused and back at work.

Now, though, I'm learning that that's the very habit I'm trying to overcome by meditating. It's my subconscious trying to prevent me from sinking deeper from the surface worries, thoughts, and ideas I've got running around in my brain, so that I don't risk the chance of coming across something that might make me uncomfortable or alter my finely-tuned and long-held perceptions (thus making a lot of work for my inner mind to rearrange and reinforce new habits, thoughts, and ideas).

So now I'm a lot like Dumbledore and his Pensieve....when those initial thoughts and ideas come up, I imagine myself drawing them out of my brain and onto a notebook for future reference until they're all collected, and then I concentrate on sinking down further. Sometimes, though, I don't know what's harder...suffering through that prodding gateway, or knowing that it - the subconcious, the ego, whatever you want to call it - is right in that, if I continue, I am going to come across something that's going to make me uncomfortable. Something that will force me to examine and investigate those things called feelings and try to figure out a way to rearrange them and myself now that light has been shed.

And has been uncomfortable, but it's also been pretty life-changing, when it happens. One thing I've learned to do is, when you're done with that part and your mind starts to get quiet, something that helps focus you is (as Jack Canfield calls it) "trying to tune into what your higher self is trying to tell you." And yes, the "higher self" thing is a little touchy-feely to me, but the idea of it I really like. I think we all have this vision or memory of who we are or who we can be when we're at our ultimate best (for me, it was the summer of when I was 21 and living and working at Riverside, right before the time of Hayward/Holiday Chick), and I like holding that up as an example of who I want to strive to be, every single day. And when I do that - when I try to "tune" in - it draws my attention to either the things that are holding me back from that or the things that could propel me closer to it. Sometimes, it's both.

You know those patterns that make you unhappy, and you try and try to figure out why you do what you do over and over when you already know it's bad for you? I feel like that with money, and have for a long time. The best way to describe it is that I don't feel like I'm in control of my money...I feel like, most of the time, it controls me, or that there's never enough, or that when I finally get enough, I end up losing it either through bad choices or bad luck. Then, during meditation this weekend, I was sinking down when I suddenly had a memory come up: I was in the 4th grade, sitting in the living room, and my dad was going over the phone bill and yelling at me. It was the time of Alyssa Milano's hotline, and I was a sucker for all things Alyssa Milano (she had dark hair like me and wore it in a french braid and she was 13, a real teenager...what more could I have possibly asked for in a hero!). Henceforth, I had run up a total of about $40 in hotline charges (which would be, like, $100 today). As punishment, my dad told me to hand over my birthday savings. It had been a banner birthday that year, and I had a pickle jar stuffed full of dollar bills. My stomach fell and then flipped with regret and disappointment as I watched myself hand the pickle jar to my dad. All that money, gone, and I would never see it again, all because I had been dumb enough to call that stupid hotline.

And I realized, during that meditational memory, that that was the first time I felt like money - what I had and what I lost - wasn't within my control. I also realized that, since then, there's been a glaring pattern of the exact same thoughts and actions. Whenever I make money, I fully expect that something is going to happen to take it all away, that I won't be able to hold on to it or choose what is done with it, so I either spend it as fast as I can or I inadvertently make choices that force me to part with it. But now that I know where that pattern comes from, I'm more equipped to change it.

Pretty radical stuff, huh?

But the thing I wanted to write about is this: For months now, when I try to picture my higher self and what that would really look like, the same things come back to me...coffee and whales. It's the weirdest thing, and I don't really fully understand what it means yet. But when I see those visions of myself, it always has something to do with coffee farms and whales. I've been interested in sustainable development and Fair Trade as it relates to coffee farming for a really long time, but I didn't even give a crap about whales until about a year ago. I know the two aren't related in the sense that they come together - I'm not being called to teach whales how to coffee farm or anything like that - but there's something about the two that my mind keeps trying to tell me. My heart sings when I think about whales (I don't know what it is. It's really, really weird, especially since, like I said, I could've cared less about them a year ago...but now it's like, if I want to feel happy or peaceful or in wonder and I need a quick fix, I think about whales and suddenly I'm like a 7 year old girl, plastering posters of horses and kittens all over her bedroom walls), and learning, talking, and thinking about Fair Trade coffee farms gets me really excited for some reason. Not as excited as the thought of Garrett Hedlund seducing me in the world of TRON, but it's up there.

So I guess this means I'm becoming a hippie, you guys.

Oh! And the other thing? I started to do this thing where I do a short meditation/visualization before I write every day, and honestly? It's like magic. I'm totally serious: The words just flow, and when I look back on them the next day with fresh eyes, they're good words. It's incredible and ridiculous and it kind of scares me a little, but I'm just gonna go with it.

Hopefully I'm not just actually going crazy, being up here in the woods. Let's all cross our fingers over that one.