Category: Uncategorized

Yesterday was a big day for me. I birthed my new vision of my soul-aligned work into the world. I know some of you aren’t on Facebook, so I wanted to share the video I made introducing my new body of work The Nature of Soul. It will continue to evolve and grow, just as a seed planted slowly grows into the shape of the tree it will become. If you are on Facebook, you can check out my new page at: https://www.facebook.com/The-Nature-of-Soul-105371504247882/

I eventually will create a new website to be the home for this work, but for now, I’m taking it one baby step at a time. Thank you for all your support thus far. Writing this soul journey blog has definitely played an important role in this process and I plan to continue writing as well as developing other forms of sharing and expressing myself.

One of my deepest desires has always been to feel like I belong. Probably because most of my life I have felt the opposite – not belonging, not fitting in, somehow always being on the outside. I’ve made up tons of stories to explain this feeling of not belonging – my parents are refugees, I’m the new kid in school, I’m shy, I’m sensitive, I’m an introvert, I’m really picky about who I get along with, I’m not living near the ocean, I’m different, I’m special, I’m unique, I’m not here to fit in. The list could go on and on, mirroring every stage of my life journey. But they are all just stories I told myself to soften the wound of not belonging. The truth is I’ve always longed to belong.

I recently hired an intuitive business coach to help me tune into the “soul of my business,” to really tap into what wants to come through me as a true expression of myself in service to others. She asked me what is the biggest block I keep running into. I told her that it was my self doubt around visibility. Most coaches will tell you that the best way to deal with fear around visibility is just to start getting visible. Get out there, give a talk, post a video, but I sensed that there was more to this block than just stage fright. I didn’t realize it, but my fears around visibility were linked to my core wound of not belonging, of feeling like I never had a clear place in the world, where my particular existence mattered and what I had to contribute would make a singular difference. My longstanding pattern of dealing with these feelings of not belonging were to just blend in, slip away, retreat, not be noticed. I am tired of this pattern. It is not who I am.

Yesterday, without even expecting it, I received a powerful healing for this wound from my business coach/healer. I have found that the most powerful healings usually occur on an energetic level when I can access very young parts of myself that still need tending to. We tuned into the energy of this block in my body. Even after clearing my energy chakras, I still kept feeling a residual discomfort in my throat. It was more than just a blockage around me “speaking my truth.” As I allowed my body and unconscious to communicate to me through imagery and intuition, I was shown the image of an infant hungry for her mother’s breast milk. I’m not sure how long I was breastfed for, or whether I even was breastfed at all, but here was this deep, aching longing in my body to be held at my mother’s breast, to feel like I belonged in this world, that my life mattered from day one. When the lump in my throat persisted, my coach invited me to re-imagine my own birth, from the time of my conception to the moment of my birth, in exactly the way I wanted it to be – the place I wanted to be born, who I wanted to be there, what I wanted it to feel like. I could re-write the story of my beginnings into this world. Our imaginations are powerful tools that are underutilized as a healing modality. We allow the habitual stories we tell ourselves to run the show of our lives without realizing that we are the authors of our own lives who can literally start living a new narrative.

In reality, I was born in a Kaiser hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, likely in an air-conditioned room under sterile lights, possibly with a window whose curtains were presumably drawn. This is not the way my soul wanted to enter this world. No wonder I didn’t feel like I belonged here from day one. I wanted to be born in a forest, under an open sky and a canopy of trees. I wanted my three mothers present – my birth mother, my grandmother who was like a second mother to me, and Mother Earth herself. I wanted them all to catch me as they welcomed me into my life. I allowed myself to imagine my birth unfolding in exactly this way, under a blue sky, to the sound of birds chirping and the soft wind rustling the leaves, and me being held in my mother’s arms at her breast for as long as I wanted. I looked into her eyes and my grandmother’s eyes and knew that I was loved. This is the deep belonging I have always longed for, a knowing deep in my bones that I belong here, in this body, on this Earth, in this life. That I have always had a place here on this Earth that is uniquely mine. That this place belongs to me and I belong to it. It is a place that no one can ever take away from me because it belongs to me. Of course, I want to belong to my family, to my friends, and to my community, but this belonging to myself and my place in the world is a belonging that precedes and transcends all others. It is a belonging to oneself, a belonging to one’s own life, a belonging to this Earth, a belonging that can never be taken away, even as outward relationships and circumstances change. It is a belonging that is my birthright. We all belong here. We all are loved. We all belong.

It seems like almost every client I see in my psychiatry practice these days, whether they are an 8 year old elementary school student or an 80 year old retired professional, or any age in between, they all are experiencing anxiety. Anxiety about self-worth, performance, success, failure, health, money, relationships, the state of the world, the past, the future, the unknown, etc. Everyone is very very stressed out. What is going on here? The prevalence of anxiety disorders seems to keep increasing. It’s good that more people are seeking help for their symptoms, but the cultural anthropologist in me is curious about what is happening on a collective level that is causing so much anxiety in the world.

As someone who has experienced anxiety throughout my life, this is a topic that has been close and personal for a long time. I have been following my thread of anxiety upstream for a long time, trying to find its headwaters so that I can better understand it. And this is what I’ve discovered. One of the root causes of our anxiety epidemic is our false experience of separation. Separation from our own divinity, separation from one another, separation from the natural world, separation from the greater forces of the universe. The world can feel like a big and scary place if we have to navigate it all alone, as individuals, especially if we believe we have to compete against one another for limited resources. There is a lot to “do” in order to “achieve” what society has deemed a “happy and successful life.” No wonder people are feeling so much pressure. It would cause anyone anxiety.

But what if our experience of separation is false? And that one way to alleviate our individual and collective anxiety is to remember the truth that we are all part of something bigger than ourselves? We are all part of a larger web of life, interconnected and interwoven as one tapestry, we all belong to Earth, and we all are a part of the one universal energy field that has always been working to divinely orchestrate our individual and collective evolution as a species and planet. There’s a larger intelligence at work, and this intelligence exists inside each one of us, because we are a part of that intelligence. Would knowing and trusting this soothe some of our anxiety? Not that anxiety can or should be entirely eradicated anyway. If we all are a part of the whole, then there are those of us that hold and feel the anxiety of the world more than others, just as there are those of us that hold and feel the depression, sorrow, and madness of the world more deeply than others. How monochromatic would our world be if we all felt the same narrow range of emotions all the time?

Everyone has their own timeline of awakening to and remembering the truth of our unity. And sometimes people need to experience a crisis or extreme distress as part of their process of arousing from slumber. Perhaps the rising anxiety people are currently experiencing is one measure of the collective awakening occurring all around us. The next stage of human evolution can not occur while we go on living and believing in a false sense of separation. Our rising anxieties are a clarion call for us to wake up to and remember our unity consciousness so that we can step forward into the next stage of our evolution.

I’ve been feeling in a funk the past few days, and observing how I respond to my funkiness. First, I noticed myself feeling a little more irritable than usual, which by itself there is nothing wrong with. But my mind wanted to make it into something wrong. My mind wanted to know why I was feeling more irritable so that I could do something to get rid of it. Was I eating more sugar than usual? Should I meditate more? Was I uncovering yet another layer of shadow work to integrate? As you can see, being on a spiritual journey doesn’t prevent you from being human and vulnerable to the craziness of the mind and its deranged workings. The mind is deathly afraid of feeling. It will do everything it can to try and avoid it, through distraction, fear, shaming, criticism, or even telling you to feel the opposite of what you are truly feeling. (You feel fine, when you don’t, or You should feel worried, when you really have no reason to). I have been down this rabbit hole many times now to recognize that allowing my mind to have its way with me doesn’t go anywhere useful. If anything, observing over and over again how my mind works, how it continues to fall into the well-worn patterns that no longer serve me, helps me to climb out of the ruts faster (I still fall in them!). I have a strong perfectionism program that my mind knows to kick into high gear as a scare tactic. My mind starts judging me, telling me that I’m not “doing enough” or not “doing something well enough.” In this case, my perfectionism program was trying to tell me that I wasn’t doing a good enough job at taking care of myself or releasing negative emotions if I was feeling irritable. How ridiculous! The mind can be so absurd when it tries to get us to suppress our authentic experiences.

If my goal is to embody a full-spectrum, multidimensional life that honors and expresses ALL aspects of myself, then why would I not expect or allow myself to feel the full spectrum of feelings that a human is capable of? In fact, with this perspective, I was able to recognize that the word “irritable” didn’t even accurately capture the experience I was having. As I have allowed myself to feel more fully and deeply, my sensitivities have been enhanced. I now recognize my emotions as just one part of a complex, layered, multi-sensorial, full-bodied experience that can not be reduced to a single word. My first instinct was to instead associate my experience with a color. I intuitively knew that what I was experiencing was somewhere in the deep red spectrum, but I wasn’t sure what the color was called. I googled the color wheel to give me some ideas. Maroon and burgundy came close to what I was feeling, but they still weren’t quite right, mostly because what I was feeling wasn’t monochromatic, or even just a color. It was an achy heaviness, a bloody, visceral, oozy sensation that coursed through every cell of my body. I couldn’t move too fast or do too much because it felt like I was immersed in and swimming in a sea of pomegranate seeds. Once I allowed myself to surrender to the experience, not fighting, resisting, or judging it, it flowed right through me, leaving me intrigued by the experience.

It’s no coincidence that I was on my menstrual flow this week. My body has been communicating with me on a multi-sensorial level what that experience feels like through sensation, imagery and poetry, even though my mind couldn’t make the conscious connection until I wrote this blog. My “irritability” was just a scratch on the surface of a larger process happening inside and outside of me, part of a larger rhythm of life and intelligence that synchronizes the moon, the tides and the seasons of nature. What if we approached our emotional and physical sensations this way, as a window into what is possible to experience as humans, part of a larger tapestry of interconnected life, not as something to be suppressed, diagnosed or pathologized. Like the waves on top of the ocean are a part of something much vaster, whose depths we have not even fully explored, so are we a part of something much bigger than ourselves. What if we trusted in that truth? Perhaps then, we could truly surrender to what Albert Einstein said when he wrote that “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed.”

It’s not an easy topic to talk about, but I’d like to continue the conversation about wounding. I know some people are triggered just by the word wound itself. The word can be loaded and associated with feelings of being less than, incomplete, defective or needing to be fixed. I view wounds differently. I hold them with tenderness and compassion, and an opportunity for greater wholeness. I have come to see a wound as any pattern of experience that causes people to contract around, close off, or lose contact with a true part of themselves. Wounds come in all different shapes, sizes and forms, but I’d like to focus on a particular wound that I know I carry, and I suspect many others do too. It is my creative wounding. Somewhere early on in my life I decided that I wasn’t a creative person, and I shut down a whole tributary of myself. Even writing that sentence brings up a well of emotion and sadness in my heart. There’s a lot there.

It’s taken me a long time to even recognize it as a wound. For most of my life, I just accepted the story I told myself that I wasn’t a creative person as a truth not to be challenged. I did allow myself to be viewed as a writer, but there was always an underlying doubt in my ability to be truly creative. Acknowledging that I have this creative wounding could lead me in a whole host of different directions. I could tell myself it’s too late to tap into my creativity now, that I missed my window of opportunity as a child to really nurture and develop it. I could focus all my efforts at giving my children those opportunities instead. Or I can reclaim my creative identity and start anew, being as patient and forgiving with my own budding creative process as I would with a young child. I observe my children producing their endless drawings and songs without the pressure of it needing to be any certain thing. For them, creating is more about the process rather than the outcome.

I now know the truth that we are ALL creative beings. Creativity isn’t just about having the ability to produce beautiful works of art. In fact, the greatest expression of our creativity is in how we choose to craft and live our lives. Healthy ecosystems are characterized by diversity. Mono-cultures of invasive species strangle the delicate balance and harmony of a thriving habitat that can support a wide range of species. In many ways, our current model of “modern life” is proving itself to be an out-dated and suffocating mono-culture that is crying out for more imagination and creativity. One of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves, future generations, and the ecosystem that is our communities is for each of us to reclaim our creative channels and let them flow freely into the expression that is our lives, and to allow our children the freedom to do the same. Your life doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. It doesn’t have to meet the approval of anyone except your own truth. In fact, the world desperately needs you to live your authentic life to restore health and diversity back to the planet. We each have ultimate creative control over the artistry of our lives. Let’s see what we can create!

During one of my client sessions today, my client and I were having a very lively discussion about how it seems like every human has some trauma or wound to heal from, that no matter how great their parents were, every person emerges from childhood with some sort of emotional or psychological wound to heal from. My client used this fact (somewhat facetiously) to make the argument that humans should just stop procreating and causing more suffering in the world. In that moment, I had a flash of insight that our very species is defined by our wounding, that no one escapes it because it is a necessary step in our development into full adulthood. Our wounding doesn’t occur just because of bad luck, bad genetics, or bad environments, but because our species is inherently designed to experience wounding as a part of our development into our full potential. Whoa. This means that all of us can stop asking ourselves why we have the wounds we have. We can stop blaming ourselves or others for our wounding. We can embrace that our wounds were uniquely designed for our own unique unfolding and development and that they hold the seeds of our greatest potential.

If we can embrace the truth that all humans emerge from childhood with hurts, losses, traumas and injuries as a part of our developmental trajectory, then we get to decide what to do with those wounds. My client lamented how painful it is to revisit these old wounds and how he has lived much of his life up to this point trying his best to ignore them by pushing them under the rug, even though a part of him has always been aware that they were there, shaping his every life experience. I validated that exploring our deepest childhood wounds is difficult, painful work and that many people do choose to pretend they don’t exist and move on through life with their wounds buried under the surface. But there is a cost to that as well. Our wounds hold the seeds of our potential, they serve as portals and pathways to exploring the depths of who we are down to our very roots and core truths. It is nature’s ingenious way of safeguarding the most precious treasure of our own existence. The gift of our own soul identity will only be revealed and rewarded to those who have the courage to keep following the tracks of their pain and wounding. The Sufi poet Rumi wrote, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” Our wounding and the light that infuses our very creation are inextricably bound and interwoven.

I became a psychiatrist so I could learn how to make sense of my wounding and to learn tools to heal myself and others. The further I travel along this journey of exploring my wounding, the deeper I have ventured into my own soul, into a space beyond where my psyche tries to organize human experience into concepts of wounding and healing. I have found myself unknowingly stumbling into a vast realm of mystery, an expansive, infinite territory of potential, where nothing is as it used to be, but where anything becomes possible. Our souls know the way here, but there’s no short cut around our wounding, in fact, following our wounding is the only way to the place beyond our wounding. It’s how we were designed.

Growing up on an island, I have always had a strong affinity for water. I love water. Water soothes me. Water embraces me. Water nourishes me. Every chance I get, I want to be near water, in water, on water, playing with water, touching water, studying water. This past weekend, my fascination with water led me to a watercolor workshop. I’ve dabbled in watercolors over the past 5 years or so, but I haven’t devoted much time to the practice.

When I received an email from my beloved watercolor teacher Kathrine Lemke Waste sharing her recent work “Yosemite Sunrise” and announcing an upcoming watercolor workshop on wildflowers, my soul stirred again. As I admired the sunrise painting, something inside me also woke up again, nudging me to pick up my watercolor paintbrushes. With no other rational reason besides my soul stirring and my inner compass telling me to do so, I purchased the print and signed up for the workshop. Now when you only pick up a paintbrush every few months (or years) rather than regularly, you clearly stay a beginner, but it doesn’t matter. Even if I never get “good” at it, there is something about watercolor (and riding waves) that keeps drawing me back, something that I will keep returning to as long as I can. The water channels inside me long to merge and interact with water in its various forms on this Earth.

Over the weekend, our teacher Kathrine kept repeating the mantra “Let the water do the work,” over and over again. There are techniques and skills to be learned with watercolor, and observing how water behaves on paper and what happens when you introduce color to water in different ways allows you to become more proficient at producing a result. But the magic occurs when you surrender to the water and let its own properties lead the way. Furthermore, when I allowed myself to internally surrender to my own creative channels and dropped my body and consciousness into a liquidy flowy space, there was no separation between what was inside me and what wanted to flow through me onto the paper in front of me. Granted, it didn’t quite land on the paper exactly how it felt inside me, but that’s besides the point. The process of opening up your own inner channels and finding a way to express it into the physical world is liberating. The product or result of this process will likely evolve with time and practice, but opening up the channels in the first place is key. Water will keep flowing once you open up a channel for it to do so.

If I already worshipped water before the watercolor workshop, after the weekend, I felt even more humbled by this amazing, powerful element. My enchantment with water has taken on an entirely new dimension. More than just admiring its beauty, or enjoying the recreation it can provide, I want to understand it on a deep level so that I can fully embody and activate its properties. I want to live like water. Our planet is made up of 75% water. Our bodies are made up of 50-75% water. There is no doubt that we are watery beings existing in a watery world. I want to know water intimately in every water-filled cell of my body. The poet John O’Donohue writes, “I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.” I could spend the rest of my lifetime devoted to being a student of water. In certain traditions, a teacher has to accept to take on a student, if they deem them worthy enough of the wisdom the teacher has to bestow. Water, I bow before you, in awe, reverence, gratitude, and humility of your power, your beauty, your grace, and the life you sustain. I will follow you where ever you take me, I will surrender to the current of my inner and outer life, like a river, navigating its way home to the ocean. Water, will you accept me as your student?

In Hawaii, there is a saying “Malama ‘Aina” which means to nurture and take care of the land. But it is more than just a saying, it is a deep understanding that humans live in symbiotic relationship with the land, and that taking care of the land is essential for our own survival. I have spent the last several weeks in Hawaii with my family, reconnecting with the beautiful land where I was born and sharing with my children the importance of taking care of our environment.

One day, I took my kids snorkeling at Hanauma Bay, a marine nature preserve that is also a very popular tourist destination. We floated amongst the shallow underwater reefs, and my children excitedly pointed at all the colorful fish that were swimming around them. Even though I have been there many times, it is always magical to re-immerse myself in the underwater world that exists literally inches below the surface of the water, and especially to share the experience through the eyes of young children. Snorkeling invites you to become a part of the natural landscape around you, to experience yourself within it and not separate from it. As we explored the reef, I felt a loving energy emanating from the fish and the ocean. They were happy to welcome us into their home and share its beauty with us, almost as if they were saying, “See how great life can be underneath the ocean?” I felt a renewed connection and commitment to the ocean and the life it sustains (which includes us). My kids quickly got tired so we went back to the shore to play in the sand.

But something had been stirred inside me. I wanted to spend more time in the beautiful bay, communicating with it, expressing my love for it, and making my commitment to do my part in taking care of it. So I decided that I would return later that week, right when the park opened at 6am for a sunrise snorkel, when the bay was less crowded, to have another encounter with it. As with nurturing any relationship, I have discovered that meaningful encounters with nature are mostly about setting an intention, and creating time and space for the encounter to occur, without any expectation for what might actually occur. Nature has a way of reflecting back to us exactly the experience we need when we open ourselves up to it. It is her way of sharing her wisdom with us.

I love waking up before dawn and witnessing the soft beauty of sunrise gently rouse the day. But I was also tired. I hadn’t slept well the night before, probably in anticipation of the encounter. But I had made a commitment to myself and to the bay and I was going to keep it. I walked down the paved trail to the bay and made my way to the water to say good morning to it. But before I got to the water, something else greeted me instead. Trash. Lots and lots of trash. All along the shoreline, there was a plastic ribbon of debris perfectly outlining the curve of the bay itself. Plastic bottles, caps, toys, utensils, dental flossers, and millions of little pieces of plastic. The ocean was clearly returning to us what she could not digest and displaying in full view what we humans had given her that she did not want. I was horrified and filled with feelings of sadness, anger, and overwhelm at the situation. Even though I was someone who clearly cared for the environment, I didn’t know what I as one person could do about all this trash. So I didn’t do anything about it. I walked around it, and stepped over it to enter the water. I started snorkeling again, but this time my experience felt different from the day prior. I couldn’t shake the residue of my encounter with the trash and looking back now, I honestly probably felt a little guilty that I had just walked by it, trying to ignore it, but unable to control its lasting effect on me.

Then I heard the lifeguard announcing something over the loud speakers so I pulled off my snorkel gear to listen, in case it was a safety warning about water conditions. In a way, it was. The lifeguard was asking people to help pick up the trash they saw along the shoreline. He didn’t make a big fuss about it. He didn’t launch into some environmental diatribe about how we needed to make less trash or be more mindful about what we do with our trash. He just said, “People, look at the trash. Help us pick it up. The ocean and its inhabitants will be thankful.” And so people started picking up the trash. They pulled trash cans down to the shoreline and started cleaning up the trash. It was a beautiful sight to behold. Humans working together to help clean up the environment. I quickly returned to shore to join in on the efforts. It was impossible to pick up all the little pieces of plastic, but still, we made a good dent. Of course, the realist in me couldn’t help thinking about how we needed to address the problem further upstream with our production and consumption of plastic products to begin with, and how very soon, hundreds of visitors to the bay would soon come pounding down the pavement for another day of more trash production. But I also didn’t want to minimize the significance of what I was witnessing. Humans want to do the right thing. We just need guidance, permission, and support to do the right thing. Yes, it’s true that not everyone on the beach participated in the clean-up, and most people stopped picking up trash after a few minutes. But there were enough of us on that beach who continued the efforts, to inspire me that we can make a difference.

I believe it starts with cultivating a loving relationship with nature, the Hawaiian concept of “Aloha ‘Aina” or love of the land. Just as I was inspired to return to Hanauma Bay for more snorkel time because of the love I felt for the ocean and the love I felt the ocean had for me, I believe that people will naturally want to take care of an environment they love. People take care of people, places, and things they love. Falling into feelings of guilt, shame, despair, sadness, anger, and hopelessness about the immensity of our environmental problems might be a necessary first step as we look at the reality of the way we treat our planet. But staying in those energies will not help us move forward towards creative, sustainable solutions that promote a loving relationship with the environment. The energies of inspiration, faith, and love will. Taking care of the land starts with loving the land and experiencing the love the land has for us. Even amidst all that trash and the crowds of people that visit her, Hanauma Bay does not respond with anger or shaming. She stands proudly in love and beauty, patiently waiting for us to awaken to the love she has for us, so that we can restore our relationship to her. In Hawaii, everything begins and ends with aloha, the Hawaiian word for hello, goodbye, and love. I’m leaving the islands returning to my life in California later today, but my time here has renewed and deepened my aloha for the islands that I love and the beautiful planet we all share as our home. Aloha.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver

I will tell you what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life. I will continue my love affair with the natural world. Since coming back from the river, I have been in a honeymoon phase with my newly rekindled love for Gaia. Like passionate lovers who think about each other all the time and can’t stand to be apart from one another, I want to be outside in nature’s embrace all the time. Water has especially been calling to me. When a friend mentioned that she has a place near Bodega Bay where the Russian River meets up with and flows into the Pacific Ocean, I knew I wanted to be there. So we stole away to the coast and spent 24 uninterrupted hours soaking up the sea, the river, sunshine, sand, wind, and salty air. My body felt so nourished, alive, and happy being in those elements.

At one point during our rambling, continuous, free-association conversation that also felt like a natural flow of energy, my friend asked me if I was familiar with the work of the late Stephen Levine, who wrote the book “A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last.” I told her that I wasn’t. She went on to explain that consciously thinking about death helps one to live more fully. At first, I didn’t believe her. I told her that I rarely think about death, that I know it will happen at some point, but that I would rather focus my attention on life and living. My friend was patient with me. She didn’t try to hammer home the point. She just offered it as invitation, something for me to consider. The more I let this idea organically grow inside me, the more surprised I was at what a profound effect it had on me.

I couldn’t deny the universal truth that of all of life’s mysteries, the two events that every human being will experience are that we are all born and we will all die. We can’t know for sure, or agree on, when those events will occur, or what happens before and after them, but no one can deny the certainty of life and death. With that framework, each moment of being alive takes on so much more significance than I previously acknowledged. If I really don’t know when I will die, but I know for certain that I will die, what will I do with all those precious moments of my life while I am still alive to experience them? I suggested to my friend that we both spend some time with the question, “If I knew I had one year left to live, this is what I’d do….” As we watched the sun set into the death of another day, we used the question as a writing prompt (if you have any interest, I suggest you try this exercise yourself and see what comes up for you).

These are some of the answers that came up on my list that night: spend part of every day outside in the sunshine, thanking the Universe for another day to feel the sun’s warmth on my body, snuggle with my kids every chance I get, eat delicious food, travel the world, write every day, words will last beyond my physical death, love everything about my life because I’m alive to experience it, not waste any time worrying about the past or the future, just be fully present in the moment, tell my parents thank you and that I love them, visit friends and spend 24 uninterrupted hours with them, grateful for our time together, read poetry out loud, paint, get a stand up paddleboard and explore the waterways, see beauty everywhere, even in the pain, watch every sunrise and sunset I can. I am curious to continue to ask myself this question over and over again as I move through my days, to see what changes and what remains the same. In a way, life and death are always presenting us with this question. You know you are going to die. How do you want to live today? How do you want to feel moment to moment? What do you want to focus your time, energy, and attention on?

The next day, back in my office, I get an email newsletter from 1440 Multiversity sharing an interview with Frank Ostaseski about what death can teach us about life. This is not something I would generally click on, but given my conversations about life and death in the previous 24 hours, it is no coincidence that the Universe is curating this next lesson in my curriculum. I read the interview, and am inspired to order his book The Five Invitations, which arrived in the mail yesterday. I started reading it last night. I will be curious to share with you what lessons emerge from this dive into death. I already can attest that consciously thinking about death over the last few days has made me so much more grateful for each moment of my life. Everything seems so much more precious. Even the difficulties I encounter can be held with more appreciation, simply because I am alive to experience the full range of life. We are each given this life to embody the unique expression of ourselves. There is, and there will only ever be, one person exactly like us. What will you do with your one wild and precious life?

I am still soaking in the after-effects of my time on the river and reflecting on what I learned from the river and its consciousness. I was a part of a group of 9 others on the river together and was humbled to experience how the river served as a skilled grief worker for many of us. It’s not new news to me that the natural world is a potent healer. But I am only starting to dip my toes into directly observing and experiencing the unique healing gifts of the diverse elements of nature. The element of water has so much to teach us. We come into this world immersed in water in our mother’s wombs. Water courses through every cell of our bodies, through the rivers of our inner circulatory system. I grew up near the ocean, but rivers carry a different energy than the ocean. Water eventually makes its way back home to the ocean, but rivers themselves chart the paths to the ocean, a reflection of our own life journeys as we course through the landscapes of our lives to find our way back home to ourselves. There is something about constantly being on or alongside the banks of the flowing waters of a river that helps to crack open previously dammed up inner tributaries of unexpressed or forgotten emotions, to restore flow within ourselves.

Grief encompasses the complex physical and emotional responses that one experiences after a loss. Loss is an inevitable part of the human experience. One can not go through life as a human without experiencing loss, and invariably grief. Grief is the natural response to loss. However, in our modern society we have forgotten how to grieve. We no longer recognize, allow, or honor the process of grief, and it gets dammed up inside of ourselves, blocking the natural flow of energy within us. I am always caught off guard when I unearth a new level of grief in myself, which speaks to how well concealed our grief might be, even to ourselves. Chellis Glendinning, an eco-psychologist and social activist, writes that the primary wound or trauma that most humans in modern civilization share is our separation from the natural world. For so many of us, this loss, this separation occurred many generations ago, before we were even born, a historical event so far removed from us that we have no conscious recollection of it. But our bodies remember. When we experience the reunion of ourselves with the natural world, a dam breaks open inside us and a flood of grief and relief spills forth at the same time. To feel in my body the forced separation between me and the natural world, that was unintentionally imposed on me since my very first breath in this modern world, broke open inside me an aching cavern of sadness and anger. It was a separation and loss from my Great Mother, the Ultimate Mother. It was a trauma I didn’t even know existed, until I was reunited with her bosom and able to suckle at her milk, that my body could cry for what it had been deprived of for so long.

My time on the river gave me a deep long drink on the nipple of Mother Earth. After tasting the sweetness of her nourishment and sustenance, not as a child, but as a conscious adult, I know that I will need to keep returning to its Source to feed me and sustain my very life. Maintaining my own health depends on maintaining the health of the Mother that provides for me. The state of health of our planet reflects our own state of health as individuals and as a collective species. Restoring humanity’s health will require us to restore our connection to Mother Nature, and vice versa, restoring the health of our planet will require the human collective to return to a state of greater health and harmony within ourselves. Our futures are intertwined and reflected in one another. The caretaking of our own inner landscapes will occur simultaneously and in conjunction with the restoration of our outer environments. It is not a coincidence that the current dire state of our ecological planetary health mirrors the inner imbalances and disharmony that many humans are experiencing. We can no longer afford to ignore the inner dams erected within us or the physical dams that wreak havoc on river ecosystems. It is time to truly feel the pain and grieve the loss of our connection with the natural world, so that we can take care of Mother Earth and ourselves as one, and not separate from one another.