Day 40: Sustain
Day 40! We made it! YOU made it!
Today, I give you all my secrets and send you out into the world for a lifetime of practice!
Just kidding. Kind of.
I was talking to a friend the other day (well, voice memo’ing, because isn’t THAT the way elder millennial women communicate these days? And, I’d argue, women could probably could turn the whole hurt world around with a week’s worth of voice memos back and forth!), and she said, “You strike me as someone who’s folding in moments of pleasure and beauty throughout your day. Not just one source, not just one thing (sex! money! power!). But moments of pleasure everywhere.”
And I was like — “DAMN. YOU’RE RIGHT. And THAT is 40 Early Mornings!”
I really do think that is the whole essence of this thing — 40 EM and daily practice in general. Everyday moments of beauty, pleasure, and at its essence: presence.
It runs directly counter-cultural to the stories that so many of us grew up on that go something like this: “Work hard! Harder! Faster! Martyr yourself to care-taking and success and achieving and ONE day, you’ll arrive! You’ll be a happy success! But for now … just keep going with the self-flagellation, the beating yourself up, the working yourself to the bone, the negative self-talk, and the burning yourself out, I promise — just a little longer. Keep going! You can find pleasure, joy, and presence … “one day, when…”
So many of us are waking up to the idea that we don’t want that (or bless, you’re here: so you’ve already woken up!). It’s not worth it. And it’s not true.
To paraphrase Mary Oliver, we’ve got “one wild and precious life,” and I don’t think it was meant to rush or hustle or grind through!
So what’s the alternative?
A space of immense possibility opens up when we trade in an old script for a new one. (That’s that concept of “liminality” we explored a few weeks back!).
And I believe daily practice meets us in that space and asks us to spend the time, the attention, the energy, and the imagination to re-write our own stories. Only we can do it for ourselves. And only if we carve out that time with consistency, with devotion, with grace, with beauty & even pleasure.
Which is why, to me, practice feels both essential (“I can’t NOT do it.”) and like a luxury (“I can’t WAIT to do it.”) EVERYDAY.
It’s the daily bread and butter that is both nourishing and vital and can also be, not just … quotidian in a boring way, but STUNNING, if I let it be.
And, of course, this sets the tone for finding pockets of pleasure and beauty throughout the rest of my days — because as we remember (from Krista Tippett): “What we practice we become.” And from Annie Dillard, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
I’m always looking for confirmation of my own work in the work of other’s.
Of course, 40 comes directly from my own integration of information and lived experience (that’s wisdom, btw: wisdom = information + your own lived experience. So, you have boat loads of wisdom too!). But when I see pieces of what I’ve arrived at as theory and methodology and practice in other places, I can bet that there’s some kernel of universal truth I’m tapping into. That I’ve opened myself up as a conduit to pull this truth down and share it out into the world.
I first discovered the book Meditation Secrets for Women: Discovering Your Passion, Pleasure, and Inner Peace about 10 years ago. It was originally published in 2001, and it came to me at the suggestion of my mentor, Debra.
In it, Camille Maurine (who also works alongside her husband, the meditation teacher and scholar Lorin Roche), absolutely blows open the conception of meditation practice as something monastic, disciplinarian, self-sacrificing, serious, or masculine.
She shows its sexiness, its sensuality, its power to seek and find and enjoy pleasure, beauty, and our own inner wisdom.
So I’ll borrow Camille’s list of 10 SECRETS of meditation practice for women, and tack on a line or two of my own reflections. You can write down another line or two of your own reflection in your journal today.
That way — each of us keeps building this new story, one day, one practice at a time.
Because daily practice on a collective level is POWERFUL and we’re very much in this together.
As Camille says at the end of HER book:
“Just as beings have incarnated at crucial points in human development (Moses, Buddha, Jesus), so too She is being born — not as an individual woman but as a knowing brought forth through us all. The entire globe is vibrating with change; the contractions have begun. What revelation is dawning now as women are awakening? What needed energy is coming into the world? If you think this sounds radical, you are correct. It is a radical departure from the known, a radical plunge into the mystery within us all. It is up to women now to take on the quest, to share this vision that is ours to discover and unfold. We are at the frontier of consciousness; we are explorers, and it’s exciting! Let’s be surprised. Let’s be shocked. How much freedom can we stand?”
25 years later, we’d open that “women” definition up to include any and all beings who seek in this way too. And that includes YOU.
Here are all our — shared — secrets of daily practice:
“Celebrate your senses:” Our senses are the surest way into the present moment. A direct route to meditation in the Real Life Wild of your own daily life. Any time you get carried or distracted away. Take a moment. Take a breath. Look up and around and within. Use any sense as a way in. Be. HEAR. Now.
“Honor you instincts:” Our whole lives we’ve heard stories of how someone else knows better for us. And all along, we knew this wasn’t true. We know our truth in our guts. It gets buried. We are taught not to trust it. Practice is the way we reclaim our truths and let own own instinct be our best teacher. Practice is how we start living from the inside out and not the other way around.
“Claim your inner authority:” You are your own best teacher. Remember, wisdom comes from information and knowledge you’ve received from outside that gets integrated by your own lived experience. That’s your wisdom. Move from that place. How we move through the world is how we lead. How we lead is how we live our lives. There is no separation. Embody your life. Embody your work.
“Be tender with yourself:” Grace is just not being so damn hard on ourselves all of the time. Tenderness. Gentleness. Rumi’s “gradualness.” Mary Oliver’s “soft animal body.” There are many ways to be kind to ourselves each day. And honoring our own daily practice commitment as sacred devotion to our own highest self is a pretty tender way to start each day.
“Dwell in your inner sanctuary:” We are DONE with the need to chase other people’s shiny objects. Just pause for a moment (I am too). How much energy and time do we lose by getting lost in the scroll of someone else’s feed? Of someone else’s priority. There is a JOY and a quiet ecstasy to spending good, quiet time with yourself. Enjoying your own company. Following the lead and the muse of what you love. Discover it, daily. Go all the way.
“Answer the call:” You now KNOW the way back to yourself. And I assure you, you will forget again and again and again. (I do, at least 1-100x /day). The key is to remember. Find your way back. Sound your own alarm. Prioritize your own remembering. As often as you forget, allow yourself to remember.
“Ride your rhythms:” Golllly, none of this life is linear. (Well, except that we all end up at the same inevitable finish line.) Contrary to what graphs and charts and spreadsheets and wearable tech want us to think, we are circular and cyclical and seasonal. As living, breathing, organic beings we were never meant to operate at optimum speed or peak performance 100% of the time. We were meant to rest and play and thrive and run and hunt and jump and dance and love and create and wax and wane. Allow yourself to flow (and ebb!) throw it all.
“Say yes to every part of yourself:” When we actually let ourselves feel and be with our whole selves, inevitably we find parts that are surprising or annoying or disappointing or maddening. Classic meditation instruction tells us “This too belongs. This too belongs. This too belongs.” We belong to ourselves. Every last part.
“Rest in simplicity:” Let it be simple. Let it be stunning. All you need for practice: your attention, your breath, your devotion, your Self.
“Do not fear the depths:” Just as practice isn’t meant to be a self-improvement plan, there’s also no guarantees it will make you a calmer, nicer, more well-rested person. As we become more of who we already are, we’re bound to encounter some dark moments and hard truths. Stay safe, take good care, get the help you need. But don’t fear the depths.
“Love your Body:” Remember, at its essence, practice is paying attention on purpose to the present moment in, the present moment, without the filter of judgment, story, good, bad, right or wrong. Sub out “moment” for body and there’s perhaps step 1 on the way to loving our own bodies.
“Live it up:” Ok, one last Mary Oliver for the road: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” What a WAY to live this one wild & precious ;)
To these 40 Early Mornings and all the rest to come. Walking this path of practice with you and cheering you on, always —
Cath xo
Meditation: Choose from one below. Your practice. Your choice.
Reflection: Write your own short-form daily practice plan and decide on your next practice container for it. We built our way up from about 20 minutes to let’s call it 40 minutes each day of this template: inspirational reading + meditation + journaling / written reflection. You can stick close to that or make it totally your own. Maybe it’s 20 minutes of journaling, daily through the end of the year with some grace around the holidays and travel. From today on out, you make practice your own. BONUS if you leave a comment with your new and next commitment or share it with me in the Week 6 Questionnaire :)