TOTAL READ TIME: 3.5 Minutes

A snapshot into the Insight Timer phone app, which has been instrumental in developing my daily meditation practice.

We blinked and are now over halfway through the decade.  This ten-year cycle began so painful and jolting that we don’t want to mention it.  I met a woman last week who referred to 2020 simply as “The Pan” and I love it.  I’m going to adopt it because I’ve been wanting to eradicate the word “pandemic” from my vocabulary.  Besides, the number 2020 deserves to retain a positive connotation. It means clear vision, after all.

At the start of The Pan, I spiraled deep into fear’s trap.  I became glued to the news, watching two red dots on the map explode into uncontrollable blobs overtaking land masses.  It was more accurately a measure of fear uprising than case count rising.  Erratic thoughts overtook my mind and body.

Then a miracle occurred.  I didn’t like the coursing sensations running through my body, so I made a choice:  I turned off the news and went inward.  Instead of opening the media I closed my eyes.  I learned how to meditate.

Do you remember the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie?  It is a cute story of how one action leads to another (here’s a short video of the book read aloud).  That is what happened to me after I started meditating at just two minutes per day.

Every morning started in my houseplant-filled sun room, with coffee in hand.  I used a phone app called Insight Timer to hold me accountable to my new practice.  After my meditation time completed, I read a passage in the book A Course in Miracles to take me deeper into stillness. Then one day, a nearby plant started talking to me.  The next day, another plant.  Some told stories of my ancestors, while others shared lessons from former pets, once-in-a-lifetime trips, or impactful friends. They spoke louder and louder, and eventually I had no choice but to write them down.

I began sharing these short stories on social media in a series entitled “Plant Diaries.”  Every few days, I would publish a new vignette inspired by one of my houseplants.  There were over thirty in the series.  (Yes, I have over that many houseplants!)  Friends found it uplifting and encouraged me to keep going, which has led to this 2 Minute Lift blog format.  I’m grateful to have a faithful email following and am featured in print publications across the continent.

This regular practice has extracted and healed deep wounds such as old regret, resistance to what is, and lack of forgiveness.  I’ve now given myself permission to live in a fuller expression of who I am. For example, I’ve dove into my innate gifts around healing with energy medicine.  I gained the confidence to step onto this path and have trained in modalities such as Holy Fire Reiki® and shamanic medicine.  I’ve trained as an end-of-life doula and started volunteering with a local hospice organization, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for over two decades.  I’m not making a career change, rather I’m simply living more authentically, in the signature of who I really am.  I’m prioritizing the life I want to live versus waiting for the distant “someday.”

You can start to see how this is a sliver into my real-life version of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.  

Here’s my official version of this classic story:

  • When The Pan floods you with fear, you decide to turn off the news and start meditating.
  • When you start meditating, you realize that you are safe.  You were just feeling the external world, not yours.
  • When you realize you are safe, you have the courage to go deeper inside of you.
  • When you go deeper, you realize you’ve never gotten to know yourself.
  • When you embark on the quest to truly know yourself, you start seeing areas where you are not aligned to You.
  • When you start living in alignment to your own authenticity, life expands with a richer color palette. You switch off auto-pilot and become more present, because you are curious about what else you will discover.
  • When you become more present, you notice there is a lot of life to love.
  • When you start living from this place of love – you realize fear was a required illusion, with the goal of catalyzing you to make a choice to go inward.
  • When you go inward, you realize this is where peace lives.

Then, all you have to do is sit down and say hello.