THE COMMUNITY JOURNAL - Held In The Heart

Back to See the Whole Field: A Return to the Third Eye

Kevin Davi — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 20:56:00 +0000

Our first stop heading back down the ladder towards manifestation returns us to the third eye. It was only a month ago that we were here, but knowing the direction that we are heading, it feels a little bit different. When I think of liberation I think of a sigh and a wave of the hand. It’s a letting go of what needs to be done and an opening up to whatever happens. Manifestation feels like a narrowing of the tunnel from infinite possibilities towards one final achievable goal. So the focus point, or vision, of this month would appear to be deciding where exactly it is that I am heading. Where can I place a big bright red X on my metaphorical map and begin taking my steps in that direction. Well, to decide on a destination, let’s first open our eyes to the whole map in front of us.

The western view of time is linear. We are born. We mature. We grow old. We die. Along the way we fill the gaps with a little thing called life, but it seems fairly certain that this is the direction we are going. There’s no stopping the train. This seems simple enough, but it’s possible that it does not encapsulate the whole story, just one tiny point of view. Take for example, the seasons. Spring starts the new year, which turns to the fullness of summer, the waning of autumn and the inevitable death of winter. Linear.

Kind of.

Because then the cycle begins again. You can mess with your starting or your ending, but since time immemorial, summer follows spring. One might say that time is more cyclical than we as humans are led to believe.

Soccer was the first sport that I ever played. I was one of those toddlers that ran around kicking and throwing balls every change he got, so once my parents were able to sign me up for a sport they did. I can’t say that I remember much about the early days other than I was good, and I loved it. If you ever watch small children play organized soccer, it’s a swarm of bees. The ball is in front being randomly kicked by one child or another and the rest of the kids follow along in a pack. The better kids stay at the front, and the stragglers lag behind. The smartest kids hang just to the outside of the swarm. That way when the ball spits out, they can get to it unencumbered by the rest of the group and score a goal. This was the way I did it. As I got older the games became more in depth and more competitive. Somewhere around the age of eight or nine we were introduced to a mind blowing concept. The back pass.

Up until this time, it was forward, forward, forward.

The goal was in one direction, and that was the way you should be going. To be honest, at that age I think the pass was something we didn’t truly believe in either. My dad once lined up all of our fastest players on the team to see if any of us could run faster than the ball could be kicked. It sought to prove the point that by working together and passing, we could cover more distance. Some of our better players took this to heart, but it still seemed silly that we would use one of these new-fangled passes to go backwards instead of forwards. I had guys I played with for years that never really got the hang of it. I was lucky enough to play with some teammates who understood the concept, so not only did I make some back passes, but I was also the recipient of some. The funny thing about the back pass is that it opens up the field.

This month I went back to the east coast to attend some weddings. The schedule was such that I’d fly in and go to a wedding somewhere in western Massachusetts, drive down to Staten Island, New York to spend some time with my family and then drive back up to Cape Cod for the second weekend before flying back out. All in all I’d be away for ten days and have quite a bit of driving to do once I got in. The trip itself was also coming at a fairly hectic time. You may not know this, but I’m getting married in October! With the wedding so close, my fiancée didn’t feel comfortable making the trip so I was riding solo.

When I got to Boston, I couldn’t help but take a little detour past my old school. I passed the dorms I moved into freshman year and the house that I shared with the two guys getting married that week. I drove past The Museum of Fine Art and through the Fens Park where I spent time as a student. I took a quick walk through campus and saw how the school was changing. Then I shot out west for the wedding. Afterwards I took the four-hour drive south back to where I grew up. Staten Island is technically part of New York City, but it’s really its own thing. The south shore has ponds and woods with trails to run in and beautiful parks all over the place. Each morning that I was there I went for a run at a different spot. At one time or another, each of these had been my primary run. The more things change the more they stay the same.

I’m at an interesting moment in my life.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll become a husband. I’m not really nervous about it. I made this decision a long time ago and have been taking the steps that I believe are necessary to embody this new title. There is, however, a bit of unknown. I’ve spent years with the carefree, no worries approach that I know all of my readers have come to know and love. I’ve always been able to chase away any fears or concerns for the future with the idea that I could take care of myself and adjust accordingly to whatever life throws my way. I still believe that. It’s just that it’s not going to be just me anymore. It's now us. In the not so distant future there could even be more of us. I want to be a good husband and I want to be a good father, if the universe deems that my next role. That is as clear of a red X on my map as can be. I’m just not always so sure what that means I should do right now.

On one of my runs, I saw a trail that I had not seen before. I didn’t have anything to do that day so I figured why not go out exploring. I ran for a while down the trail ducking under branches and hopping over roots. At times I could see out through the trees to the streets around me, but the further I got into the woods the more it was just me and the trees. I took turns based on feel and what I thought looked like a trail, but inevitably I got a little turned around. I came to a clearing where the trail seemed to end and I couldn’t really pick it back up again. As I looked, I realized I wasn’t all that sure of what trail I came in on either. At that moment, my watch buzzed. It’s connected to a heart rate monitor that I wear for these long runs and it lets me know when I’ve jumped out of the range that I want to be in. The watch was letting me know that my heart rate was elevated. I had stopped running and was just looking around at my surroundings and my heart rate was elevated. Because I was worried. Nothing was happening around me that was all that dangerous, but I was worried about what I might do next and my heart responded accordingly.

The buzz of the watch and the realization that I was worried made me laugh. I wasn’t in the back country or some wildly dangerous trail. I was in my own old backyard woods probably less than half a mile from a major highway. I took a breath and looked around me. One path looked promising so I put one foot in front of the other. Before you know it, my heart rate had stabilized and I was running through the trees with the sun shooting in from the canopy above. I made it out of the woods in ten minutes.

Vision in the case of manifestation can seem like a lot. It may feel like we have to lock into a goal and everything that we do moving forward is strategically set to get us to one singular point. The weight of all that can paralyze us into stillness. But with one step back, maybe into our past to see where we came from, the map opens up and new trails appear to get us where we are going.

Thanks for seeing me through this month.

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The Incredibly Crucial Mission of ‘Finding Your People'

Rae Lynn Minke — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 20:24:00 +0000

Over the years, I’ve travelled here and there…
To the Far East, then the West Coast,
and eventually back East again.
Only to settle in the West, then pack back up,
And move North.

My inner compass doesn’t always
Show me the way to go home -
Because as an Expat,
The concept of ‘home’
Has been in such a constant flux.

The past 10 years of life have included
5 different ‘homes’,
And 2 different careers,
On 3 separate continents.
It’s been a bit…disorientating,
To say the least.

But the one CONSTANT of it all…

The one absolute FACTOR
And PREDICTOR of success
On this journey from here to there,
Is the incredibly crucial,
And ongoing mission
Of ‘finding my people’.

The discovery of these special people
In any given place
Is sometimes quick and unexpected.
Like ‘clicking’ with a bunch of new colleagues.

Or a serendipitous stumbling
Upon a large group gathering of
‘Like attracts like’.

And sometimes…
The ‘finding’ takes time.

More time than you hoped it would.

But it does happen.
A chance meeting. A happy accident.
A friendship ‘meet-cute’,
When you least expect it.

And before you know it,
Immediate bonds are formed…
And anything big and scary, or unknown, or unpredictable
About your newest ‘home’
Feels suddenly smaller.

More manageable.

Less worrisome.

Finding ‘your people’
Feels like discovering you are already home.

But sometimes, as we all know,
Life throws us curveballs
And things can change quickly.

Our ‘people’ move. WE move.
Life shifts, and tilts, and upends,
And we hold on for dear life through it all -
…hoping that we’ve chosen ‘our people’ well,
And that they will help us
In our NEXT transition.

Our journey continues…

And the incredibly crucial mission objective in life
Remains the same.

Your ‘people’ will become your anchor,
Wherever you are.
They will anchor you to yourself.
Remind you of what you like BEST about who you are.

They will be your biggest cheerleaders,
Your Devil’s advocates,
Your go-to travel buddies,
Your shoulders to cry on,
And the first people you want to share
Your ups and downs of life with.

They are the very best kind of ‘people’,
And you become a touchpoint for each other in life,
Wherever you are on your journey.

I’ve been lucky enough
To discover some real gems
In every corner of the Globe that I’ve travelled.
And even though some of ‘my people’
Were more difficult to find than others,

The discovery was always worth the wait.

So if you find yourself feeling lost
In some new life circumstance
(Whether here or there)…

Just remember the one absolute FACTOR
And PREDICTOR of success in life,
And begin your mission as soon as possible.

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Exploring The Crown Chakra: Liberation and Letting Go

Kevin Davi — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 16:58:00 +0000

“I’m a tiny speck of nothing
And I’m the entire universe, writ large”

— ALL IN MY HEAD, blink 182

Seven months in and we have reached the top of the mountain. The initial inspiration for this journey was from Avatar: The Last Airbender, where the protagonist studies with a guru to unlock the flow of his chakras. He starts at the root and travels up the spine to the crown chakra. At the very end of this journey he balks at releasing the connection to his love interest in favor of universal oneness. It seems that liberation is not just a release, but also a letting go.

If the Root is grounded and physical, then the Crown is light and airy. In the month of July, I endeavored to lean into some of the more woo-woo hippie-dippie practices that I have traveled in and out of throughout my life. I would practice breathwork, attend kundalini activations, jazz up my meditation in a way that felt more like prayer, and overall just be open to different forms of spirituality.

I have a good friend who hosts kundalini activations—I’m sure she would have more to say about what that actually means, but to me it’s kind of like an intense sound bath. You lay down on your back and she BLASTS music, hopping between attendees, playing with the energy of the room. The first time I went, I wasn’t a fan. Sound baths are usually pretty chill. At best, it's aligning your vibrations and, at worst, it's a nap. I can deal with that. As I settled in thinking I might get some shut-eye, the bass hit me square in the chest and didn’t really stop throughout the experience. I left thinking that it wasn’t for me, but over the course of the next week things just felt more aligned. She had warned us that only about ten percent of the process would happen in the room and the rest would happen in the upcoming weeks. So even though I didn’t really know or understand what was going on, I leaned on faith and attended a couple more.

With my goal of liberation in July, I thought it was the perfect time to return to the practice. On a Tuesday night I rode my bike to downtown Santa Monica to a studio that would host the activation. I walked into a candlelit room with several mats laid on the floor and took my space next to another attendee. We said hello in that sheepish way that you greet people in such settings and then prepared for the experience. It kicked off with the regular opening of introductions, what to expect and what we all might be here for. My friend hosting explained everything beautifully and then we all settled into our spaces to begin the process.

The eye mask went on. The music kicked into high gear. The energy began to flow. I was in it.

I was allowing myself to be open and believe that something very deep and meaningful might be happening in this space. I wanted to let go of all my cynicism towards such a practice and just really allow myself to feel. And just when I thought that I’d be able to get there, the woman next to me, who had introduced herself as I entered, began to scream.

And not just an emotion letting out into the ether. These were blood curdling screams. They kept coming. I understand that people need spaces to release and really feel their emotions, but this was a wild thing to do in a group of people who had all just come together on a random Tuesday night. I immediately threw up walls to my right to keep whatever the hell was going on with her outside of my bubble. In doing that, I didn’t really allow myself to let go, but in order to really release and liberate you have to feel safe. Seems like she did, but with what was going on with her I certainly did not.

I took a moment to throw up the wall and make sure that it would hold, and then oddly enough, I felt a significant calling to adjust my positioning. The facilitator had mentioned that this might happen, but it never happens to me. I almost always stay super still during the whole experience, but here I felt a deep calling to cross my ankles and put my hands behind my head. Like I was Tom Sawyer sitting on the side of the creek, all I needed was a little willow reed sticking out my mouth. I relaxed into this position and couldn’t help but smile and quietly laugh to myself about what was going on around me. I don’t mean that as a shot at the woman to my right. She was obviously going through something. But I was struck with the thought of how lucky I was to not be going through that. How blessed I was that I did not need to take this experience in such a drastic direction.

Some people need ayahuasca and intensely emotional experiences to liberate themselves. Some people need to scream. At that moment I felt like all I needed was a little chuckle. I rode home in early dusk with the street lights on the bike path just coming on. That felt good.

Over the course of the next couple weeks I made a couple more alterations to my regular schedule in the quest for liberation. My morning meditations were now starting with an invigorating breathwork sequence, that was honestly working better than caffeine. I spent my days riding through my Los Angeles appointments considering what attachments I had and if I could (and should) break them. I spent a little bit of time in prayer. But mostly I just tried to let go. And ‘tried’ is not the correct word here. You can’t try to let go just like you can’t try to relax. It happens instantly in and of itself.

It’s like a big sigh that lowers your shoulders and erases the wrinkles in your forehead.

Do that right now.

Don’t try it.

Do it.

Take a deep breath in. Maybe hold it for a moment. And then just sigh it out.

That’s liberation. That’s your Crown chakra.

Sometimes we need to go through some shit to get there. Sometimes we need to be in a dark room with strangers and music blasting so loudly that we can’t help but scream bloody murder. But some of us just need to take a deep breath.

The cool thing about the Crown chakra is that when you get there, you realize that you are connected to everything in the entire universe. The weird thing is that this realization makes you feel incredibly small and sometimes insignificant. Our Western upbringing tells us that this is a bad thing. You only have this one precious life and there are only so many days in it and only so many hours in the day so you better get to making it worthwhile. That’s a lot of pressure. That thought should make you feel bad for wasting your time reading this article.

Now just take a moment to switch your thinking. Consider yourself like a leaf on the tree. No more or less important than any other leaf. No more or less important than a root or branch. The time will come for you to fall off the branch that you’re on and you will soon be replaced. It’s frightening at first. Then, if you give yourself the moment to really sit with the idea, it’s liberating. You are entirely free.

The question then becomes, what do you do with that freedom?

Sometime during the first few months of this chakra study, I looked at the calendar and saw that after I reached the Crown chakra, I’d still have almost half a year left. What could I possibly do with the remaining months? Well lucky (or unlucky) for you, dear reader, it turns out that the path of liberation is just one half of the chakra journey. The other exists in manifestation and it works its way down from Crown to Root. So now that we’ve realized that we are one with the universe, it’s time to take that knowledge and bring it back down the ladder into our everyday lives. So for the upcoming months I’ll be working back to the starting point. We’ll return to the Third Eye in August and by year’s end, be heading right back to a January in the Root chakra. The hope now is to take what I’ve learned in the more ethereal realm and somehow make it more useful in the here and the now.

Thanks for joining me on the way up. I hope you’ll continue with me along the ride down.

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The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Tattoo

Rae Lynn Minke — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 16:16:00 +0000

Have you ever found yourself thinking about something for weeks…months…or even YEARS? Just turning it over and over in your brain, weighing every pro and con, unable to make a decision?

This was me. For decades, I’ve mulled over the idea of getting a tattoo.

My parents were always very supportive of me and my choices—but one message they repeated a lot in my early formative years was, “…just nothing permanent”. I’ve been a ‘tattoo support person’ for more than one or two friends over the years, and always wondered whether I would ever be brave enough to go under the needle myself. I certainly never saw myself as being chill or spontaneous enough to just rock up to a tattoo parlour and go for it. No, no….to me, this was a life-altering decision that needed dedicated consideration and meditation!

In my 20s, I wanted to get a little wave (this was in the height of my ‘Blue Crush’ era), but just one teensy tiny enough that I could hide it under an armful of bracelets, or maybe forget about it on my ankle if I didn’t like it. I talked about it with friends, and even drew it on myself a few times with a black pen or marker, just to ‘get a feel for it’. If nothing else, I was certainly CONSISTENT in my vision.

At some point in my 30s, that vision for a tattoo grew a tiny bit bolder, and I decided that, if I ever got a tattoo, I wanted to get the quote ‘go the distance’ tattooed on my rib cage. This idea was an homage to my favourite movie to watch with my Dad, Field of Dreams. I even asked him (days before he died suddenly) if he would be willing to come get a tattoo with me…he was surprised, to say the least!

Now, I’ve written about this before here…but after my Dad died, we found a song that he had written (but never shared with us) in one of his song books. It was about my Mom, my brother, and me. It was like unearthing buried treasure—a totally unexpected and priceless discovery, for sure. This is when things—after more than 2 decades of tattoo deliberation—finally clicked into place.

A fellow expat and close friend of mine had recommended a tattoo artist to me a few years back, and I had been following her on Instagram ever since…she was based out of a nearby city in Germany and was well-known online for a creative project she offered, in which she translated songs into tattoos for customers. I reached out to her with an inquiry and, within a matter of weeks, we were in discussions together and arranging a date and time for my first ever tattoo appointment!

Exciting! (…and also a teensy tiny bit terrifying!)

Prior to the tattoo appointment, I spoke about my emotions at length with a friend and mentor of mine. I told her that I wanted to let go of any anxiety I was holding onto, and just trust the process (and the artist!!). I didn’t want to hijack the creative process of designing the tattoo, since the whole point was to allow the song to be interpreted by the artist…but I also found it almost impossible to sit back and not get involved. When my artist sent me a rough first sketch of the design idea, I just couldn’t seem to connect to it. My mind started racing almost immediately.

Unsurprisingly (to me, and possibly to anyone who knows me), I quickly threw out my well-intentioned plan to remain ‘hands off’, and took over creative control the night before my appointment. When I awoke the next morning to a calm, but somewhat firm/frustrated reply from the artist, I felt crushed. I had failed at the ONE thing I really wanted this day and appointment to represent—letting go, trusting the process, and remaining curious…without worrying about the outcome.

My husband drove me to the appointment, and I just sat in the passenger seat and STARED at the sketch she had interpreted for me, based on my Dad’s lyrics. I focused all of my energy onto it, and asked myself WHY I was not connecting with it…

Then suddenly, my mind’s eye changed one teensy tiny detail—and the whole thing fell into place.

It was perfect. Her design was exactly what I wanted/needed. SO MUCH SO, that I decided right then and there in the car that I wanted to get the tattoo on my inner forearm, where I could see it every single day…a far cry from the girl in her 20s who debated for years about where to hide a baby wave!

The appointment was a DREAM. Honestly, it was almost like a meditative experience for me. I was absolutely thrilled with the outcome, and was so proud of myself for finally leaning in and trusting the universe. I left my appointment with a song in my heart, a BEAUTIFUL fine-line tattoo, and a detailed ‘After Care To-Do (and Not Do!) List’. I was going to look after this tattoo like nobody’s business!

And I did just that.

For the first few days, I followed my after-care instructions to the letter. I fell asleep each night smiling, and woke up the next day with that same smile on my face! I was so proud of this new part of me (and memory of my Dad), and wanted to show off my tattoo to anyone and everyone that would listen!

But after about 5-6 days, I started to notice that some of the lines were already starting to fade. A few days later, I was convinced that I was going crazy, or at the very least, doing something REALLY wrong…how could this PERMANENT decision I had finally made (less than 2 weeks ago!!), one that I was SO PROUD of and HAPPY with, be trying to pull a disappearing act?! It’s a tattoo, for goodness sake!!

If I hadn’t been so distraught about it, I might have laughed. 2 decades of deliberation, one VERY happy customer…and yet, the Universe was not done teaching me whatever lesson it needed me to learn from this whole experience.

After a few restless nights, I finally decided to message my tattoo artist to ask what she thought. She had informed me that a touch-up was free, and to reach out after a month with photos if I was concerned at all (this is apparently quite common-place for fine-line tattoos). I hummed and hawed before sending the DM, as I was concerned about being the ‘whiny woman who was difficult to please’. After all, it had only been a week! (Can I just ask, how many MEN would feel concern about this??). After some intense soul-searching, I decided that I had invested a lot of time, money, and energy into this tattoo, and was deserving of some information and her professional expertise.

Needless to say, the artist got back to me very quickly, and informed me that I would, in fact, need a touch-up. She reassured me that some skin absorbs fine-line ink more/quicker than others, and that a touch-up would fix the issue and leave the tattoo as vibrant and beautiful as it started out.

And that’s where I’m at. Currently 4 weeks in, with a seriously faded (but still BEAUTIFUL) tattoo. No set date yet for a touch-up, as that still needs to be coordinated between myself and the artist.

So what lesson is the Universe trying to teach me through all of this, you ask?

I wasn’t entirely sure at first, but I had a sneaking suspicion that this might be a ‘sacred clown’ moment. I asked ChatGPT to help me break it down for me, and the response I received was too perfect not to share:

“In many traditions (including Native American and Tibetan practices), the sacred clown exists to show us the folly of taking life too seriously. It reminds us that life’s deepest truths often arrive as irony. You waited 20 years for a tattoo that felt permanent—a mark of meaning you could hold forever. And then, it began to fade. The cosmic joke is: even the things we carve into our skin aren’t immune to change. We spend so much energy trying to control life, only to be humbled by its fluidity. The lesson? Cherish meaning, not permanence, and laugh at life’s humbling surprises, because everything changes—even us.”

That’s pretty spot-on, I’d say.

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Exploring The Third Eye: Looking vs. Seeing

Kevin Davi — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 02:05:00 +0000

When I wake up in the morning, I walk out onto my balcony and survey the scene around my home. It’s usually still quite dark out, but the little lamps that dot the bike path on Santa Monica and Venice Beach are still lit and to the left of my window there’s just a hint of dawn approaching in the east. You can hear the waves crashing off the shoreline to the right, and the occasional garbage truck or street sweeper getting to work. The smell is what I notice most. There’s a salty spray in the air that reminds me of my youth going down the shore with my family. Two weeks every year, that was summer for me, and ever since then I have loved the beach. I always knew that I would someday live right on the beach. And now, I do.

Welcome to this month’s overdue article and the third eye. Now please excuse my lateness. I could regale you with reasons as to why I didn’t get this done when I thought I might, but in my experience those always just come off as excuses. Suffice to say that I’m currently on my third attempt from scratch and the path that I had originally intended is no longer the one that I’m on. I have a feeling that by the end of this article I’ll wind up in the same spot, but who really knows these things?

The third eye is all about vision.

It’s located right between your eyebrows and is the seed of intuition. It’s a spot where you know before you really know. I guess in that sense, it’s similar to trusting your gut and in some ways that lines up well with the solar plexus being the third chakra and the third eye being the sixth. Things tend to repeat.

In the earliest depictions of meditation that I can remember, there was always reference to the third eye. The Buddha has a dot there. If a character from a cartoon had some sort of mind or psychic powers, the energy would always exit from the center of their forehead. Even Dragonball’s character, Tien had a literal third eye at the center of his forehead that he obtained through years of intense meditation. Admittedly that last one seems a bit on the nose (or in the eye?) but we’ll let it slide and keep moving. All this to say that the third eye is inherently linked to a mediation practice. So in order to discover mine, I had to rededicate some time to just that.

Back in January when we explored the root chakra, I had dedicated my morning ritual to a practice of zazen meditation and I have to admit to you that over the course of this year, it has fallen off from that absolute discipline that it used to be. Does that make me a bad yogi? I’m not sure. But I do know that it makes me pretty human. And my human experience of balancing the chakras has led me to believe that it is in fact a balancing act. A balancing act where you’re constantly correcting things little by little to make sure that the whole thing doesn’t fall over. So while certain chakras, like the sacral and solar plexus, may have led me to other practices outside of meditation, the third eye is bringing me back.

So over the course of the month of June, I’ve returned to my meditation cushion in the mornings and sat with my lotus posture, with the intention of gaining some insight or foresight or hindsight or regular sight into…….. Something. And oddly enough, I thought that the best way to do that would be to close my eyes. So I shut down my sight and turned my eyes up towards the middle of my forehead and sat and breathed. And I did it again and again and again and nothing really seemed to be happening.

Well, what I wanted to happen wasn’t really happening.

You see, I have this dragon that visits me sometimes. It first happened at a breathwork class. If you haven’t experienced breathwork, please explore the site further and check it out. At Beth’s EXPLORE Retreat, I bawled my eyes out during a breathwork session. I didn’t even know I needed it until it happened, and I can’t tell you how therapeutic it was. But years ago, I attend a men’s circle where we practiced holotropic breathwork. We laid on our backs closed our eyes and practiced a three-part breath of two separate inhales and a longer exhale. (There’s more to it than that but it will do for the sake of today.) We would practice this for seven minutes and then hold our breath for a minute and we did this for seven rounds.

Weird shit happens at breathwork. Your hands claw up. You body tingles. You bawl like a baby. It’s one of the more interesting experiences I’ve had. When you hold your breath at the end of a round, I have found that you can go for quite a long while before needing to breathe again, and in this first ever session I was pretty amazed by it. In the fourth or fifth round of breath-holding, I started getting visions behind my closed eyelids. I would equate these as being similar to closing your eyes and rubbing them where you can see what seem like tiny electrical signals bouncing around. Only here, my electrical signals were very much coming to me in the form of a dragon. He would come around during the breath-holding process and sort of sniff around me as if he were feeling me out. Then we would start breathing again and he would dart off, but whenever I held my breath and sat in a sustained stillness, he would return again and take measure of me. I took him to be a spirit guide that day, and since then he has shown up several times along my path.

So as I entered into this month of third eye energy focus, I was really expecting him to show up. Why wouldn’t he? I’m doing all the right things. I’m practicing balance and flowing my energy and committing my time. He should be here. He should be assuring me that I’m doing it right and I’ll be there soon. But no matter how hard I focused on my third eye, he would not show his face. It was quite a disappointment.

Then I stopped closing my eyes. I opened them up to the morning’s view from my porch. I had been a bit worried about my growth as a person and professional, and I saw trees growing leaves without any effort. I’d been concerned that my current occupation and work wouldn’t allow Jenna and I to start the family that we might want, and across our walkway I saw a mom making breakfast for her kids in the early morning hours. I didn’t know if we could create the living situation that we talk about when we talk about the future, and I saw the beach. I saw the beach that I had always told myself I would live at. And now I do.

And then I relaxed a bit.

So often we are desperately looking for our path like we might miss it, when it's already laid beneath our feet. Seeing and looking are very different. When you’re looking for something, you’ll only come back with what you find, but when you’re seeing what is actually there before you, you cannot be fooled. It’s why all the great fortune tellers and psychics are never heroes of the story. They speak in riddles that often confound and frustrate the hero, but they themselves never even try to decipher what the riddle means. They just state what the tea leaves or tarot cards are saying. And I think it’s because before you can have foresight, you need to have true sight. You need to have that calm inner peace that assures you that the visions don’t really matter any way. They’re simply there as a guide, but oftentimes they’re more tricky that what’s actually in front of you.

June went from looking to seeing, and the whole process was an act of relaxation more than one of focus. Thanks for looking down the path with me. Next month, we’re on to liberation!

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Right Here

Rae Lynn Minke — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 01:42:00 +0000

When I became an adult,
My parents told me to spread my wings and fly.

They encouraged me to discover new places and new people.
They waved me off at airports,
And read my worldly updates, sent from tiny internet cafes around the globe.
And shrugged their shoulders when others asked,
“…but aren’t you worried that she’ll fly too high, or too far, or too fast??”

Because they trusted me.
And they trusted the wings
That I had spent my childhood and adolescence growing into.

I shared most of the highs - and the lows - of my adventures with my parents
(…and maybe kept a few things close that parents just don’t need to know!)

I sewed patches on backpacks,
And dog-eared Lonely Planet guides,
And bought souvenirs.

I lived like a local,
And learned new languages,
And collected memories and moments for my future self.

For years, I felt a bit like a feather in the breeze.
Just waiting for the next gust of wind
To pick me up and carry me to my next destination.
Always excited for the next adventure…
But also grateful for a rest
Whenever the wind died down.

I flew in and out of countries and cities and jobs.
Some adventures were smooth sailing,
While others were full of turbulence and personal strife.

My parents were there for me through all of it.

Whether with a badly-needed airport pickup,
A well-timed Zoom call,
Or an unexpected (…but greatly appreciated!) postcard or care package.

…and always making sure I had a “toothbrush and a pair of clean underwear” with me!

On one of my adventures,
I found and married my significant other,
And together, we’ve created the most beautiful little creature I’ve ever known…

I only hope that one day,
I can teach him how to spread his wings,
And be as brave as my parents always encouraged me to be.

I hope
That he will learn to soar high,
And surf that wave,
And book that flight…

But most importantly,

I hope he will always know
That his parents will be right here for him
Whenever he wants to come home.

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Exploring the Throat Chakra: Writing Your Own Story

Kevin Davi — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 22:44:54 +0000

A long time ago, back when tigers used to smoke, Coyote wandered down a path that he was not looking for…

You see, Coyote had been given a task by the village elders. He would go out into the world and find his voice. He could not return to the comforts of the village until he had found one. So he set off down a dusty trail to see what the world might have in store for him.

Not too far from home, Coyote stumbled upon a river in which a school of salmon were swimming furiously up stream. As they struggled against the current, they leapt into the air over the splashing rapids and the light of the sun shone brightly off of their many scales.

“Perhaps I could swim with the salmon and they would help me find my voice!”, thought Coyote. Without a moment’s hesitation, Coyote dove into the stream and began to swim as fast as he could against the current, desperately trying to keep up with the school of Salmon. Try as he might, he was no match for the mighty river and soon found himself being swept away. But as the current carried him he could hear the Salmon laughing to each other.

“How silly Coyote is to think that he could swim with us! The River will carry him far away and maybe then he will understand that he is no Salmon!”

And the river did just that! The river carried Coyote miles and miles away until finally he was slammed into a structure of twigs and branches that was blocking the river’s way.

Tired, soaked and dripping wet, Coyote pulled himself upon the barrier and shook himself dry. As he looked around to get his bearings, Beaver bumped into him most unkindly with a full bundle of sticks in his mouth. When he saw it was Coyote blocking his way, he spit them out.

“Pew! What are you doing on top of my dam, Coyote!?”, he demanded.

“I am in search of my voice”, answered Coyote. “I’ve been sent by the village elders to find one. I tried to swim with the Salmon, but was washed downstream.”

“Well no wonder”, snorted Beaver. “You are no Salmon and you have no business on the river!”

“But maybe I could help you with your work”, offered Coyote.

Beaver did not really think that Coyote could help much, but he was behind on his work and could see no reason not to try. So he employed Coyote in the continued construction of his dam.

It had not been more than a day before Coyote began to tire of this job. His teeth were not shaped like Beaver’s. He could not chomp down the small sapling trees. His tail was not shaped like Beaver’s. He could not use it to pat all the twigs and sticks together. And his fur was not like Beaver’s. It did not protect him from the constant spray of the river.

By the end of the day he was shivering and drenched and could take it no longer.

“Well”, sighed Beaver, “I do not think your voice will be found here. You are not much of a dam builder. Perhaps you should travel down the river further to see Bear. He may be able to help you find your voice.”

With that, Coyote set off on foot following the bends of the river to see Bear in his den.

After many hours of walking, Coyote found Bear in the forest scratching his enormous paws against a large oak tree. As Coyote approached, he gave a low gruff growl as a greeting and continued about his work.

Coyote looked around him and saw that all the trees in the area were marked by his claws. There were slashes in all directions creating an elaborate pattern through the forest floor and marking his vast territory. Taking a moment to see how it was done, Coyote then scurried off to an unmarked tree to try for himself. He stood up on his hind legs, reared back his right paw and slashed as hard as he could on a young sapling. When he looked to see the marked he had left, there was barely even a scratch.

This sent Bear rolling onto his back laughing loudly.

“Little Coyote thought that he could mark a tree! But he is not as big and strong as Bear and he barely leaves a mark! HAHAHA!”, he laughed and laughed and laughed.

Coyote slunk away with his tail between his legs and not another word.

He wandered sadly for hour and hours until the sun began to set and darkness crept in over the sky. He did not know which way he was going and he did not care, but then he heard a sound to which he was drawn.

It was Wolf.

He was on the top of a hill sitting upright and howling mournfully at the Moon. Coyote was struck by how beautiful the sound of Wolf’s voice was.

“That’s it!”, he thought. “That is a voice I could be proud of. I will howl like wolf.”

He stalked up slowly next to wolf, mirrored his posture, threw back his head and…..

He yipped.

He was so embarrassed. He thought that he could howl like Wolf but all that had come out was a little yip. At that moment he thought he would die of shame.

But Wolf looked at him knowingly and said, “You are not a wolf. You cannot howl like I do.”

“I know”, said Coyote, “but I am looking for my voice. I cannot return to the village until I find it and when I heard yours, well, I had just hoped…”. His voice trailed off into the darkness of the night.

Wolf thought about this for a moment.

“Perhaps you should speak to the Moon”, he said after some time. “She is very wise and may be able to guide you in this. With that he stalked away into the night, leaving Coyote alone on the hill and looking up at the full Moon.

Silence followed.

And lasted long into the night.

Finally, The Moon spoke.

“What is it that you are looking for little one?”, she asked gently.

Coyote stammered, '“I was sent by the village elders to find my voice. I have traveled far and wide in search but have not found it. I tried to swim with Salmon and build with Beaver. I tried to mark the forest with Bear and sing with Wolf, but I still cannot find my voice.” He lowered his head in defeat.

The Moon smiled down upon him. “Tell me the story, Coyote.”

He recounted his story from beginning to end to The Moon’s absolute delight. When he was finished, they were both smiling and laughing like old friends.

“Ah, and there it is”, sighed The Moon.

Coyote looked up.

“Your voice”, she said. When he did not understand she went further, “You are not a swimmer like Salmon and you are not a builder like Beaver. You do not make borders like Bear and you cannot sing like Wolf. You are Coyote. You travel far and wide collecting stories to be told around the campfire. From this time to the end of all things, you will tell your stories, bringing joy and laughter to those who will hear them.”

And that is why when you tell a story around a campfire, you can sometimes hear Coyote laughing in the distance, knowing that the story you told was originally one of his.

Note from the Author:

This month was a difficult one. I’ve always thought the throat chakra to be a house of creativity and I feel as if I’ve been off my creative game for quite some time now. But we don’t do any of these practices because they are easy. We do them to create change. So maybe this challenge of the throat chakra will crack open my voice and lead me to the next step in my creative endeavors.

The most terrifying thing in life to a writer is a blank page. But it’s also beautiful. You can go in literally any direction that you want with it. Thanks for coming along this roller coaster with me.

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Death, and Braving this One Wild and Precious Life

Rae Lynn Minke — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 21:47:00 +0000

2025 has already been one hell of a year. If I were currently enrolled in the School of Life, my courses would be called things like:

‘Navigating Big Grief’
‘Reinventing Yourself…Again 101’
‘How to Cut the BS and Get Unstuck’
‘Why Therapy is Important for Everyone’

My takeaway lessons from these courses so far would be that life is often confusing, and always unpredictable. None of us on this planet know for certain how many more sunsets we’re going to see, or dogs we’re going to pet, or races we’re going to run, or hugs we’re going to give, or ‘I love you’s’ we’re going to say…

There are no guarantees in life.
No ‘Best Before’ guidelines.
No expiry dates.

The only certainty in life is death... and the fact that every single one of us is going to be gone someday. It’s a real #truthbomb that’s driven home hard when you lose somebody very close to you.

Losing my Dad earlier this year really has me thinking about the importance of NOW. Living NOW. Trying NOW. Being brave NOW. Because If not now, when?

I’m reminded of a very famous line in a poem by Mary Oliver:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

This is it, guys. We’ve got this one wild and f*cking precious life, and it’s up to us to figure out what we want to do with it. How big of a responsibility is that? …And how exhilarating?! Sure, our story (up until today, at least) has already been written, but the rest of the book is just empty pages waiting to be filled. We don’t know how many more chapters we’re going to get, but it sure as hell shouldn’t stop us from writing the SHIT out of the ones we have left.

I’ve got a milestone birthday right around the corner (the big 4-0!), and I do not take it for granted. I want to be more intentional about the way I live, act, and breathe as I enter this new decade, and show myself that I can be brave and ballsy in this next phase of my life.

A few years ago, I wrote a poem about doing just that. I’d like to share it again here below:

If I were brave
I would get bangs.
REAL bangs. Thick ones, like the ones I had when I was a kid.
The kind of bangs that wrap around half of your forehead.
Not the wispy ones that I could just pin back and pretend never happened….
If I were brave,
I would commit.
If I were brave,
I would finally get that tattoo I’ve been thinking about for 15 years.
Should I? Shouldn’t I?
Maybe I would love it.
Maybe I would regret it, but have a good story to tell my grandkids.
A story about the symbol that reminded me that I was strong,
Even when I didn’t feel like it.
If I were brave,
I would quit wavering.
As my mother would say,
‘Shit or get off the pot’.
If I were brave
I would finally learn to surf a shortboard.
Like, learn for REAL.
Commit, fail, commit, fail, commit…
CONQUER.
Not like a PROFESSIONAL conquering, though -
As the Germans say, I’m definitely ‘kein Profi’…..
…but if I were brave,
I would allow myself to finally try.
I’m not getting any younger.
But I could get a little braver.
It’s OK to make a bad decision.
It’s OK to wipeout.
It’s OK to fail.
As the expression goes in surfing,
I’ve been put through the washing machine.
And I’ve come up for air.
Every time.
When I’m old,
And looking back on my life,
I don’t want to be thinking,
“...if only I had been braver”.
As for my own personal evolution in the year ahead, I’ve got some special ideas on the front burner…and a few projects already in the works! I can’t wait to ‘graduate’ from my current School of Life courses, and figure out what to enroll in next.

So… what would YOUR course schedule look like in 2025?

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Exploring the Heart Chakra: Becoming a Bodhisattva of Compassion

Kevin Davi — Mon, 05 May 2025 16:55:54 +0000

As we step into the heart chakra portion of our journey, I begin to consider balance in more ways than one. We just got out of the fires of the solar plexus and are feeling imbued with a power and strength that can be utilized to make our own significant impact on the world. The winds one step above in the air of the heart chakra can fan the flames or put them out. I like to think that they could do either or, and it’s up to us to make the decision of what that solar fire really needs. Secondly, the heart chakra sits in the exact middle of our climb. The chakras below us are more physical, represented by earth, water and fire. Above us await the three chakras dealing with more lofty experiences like sound, light and space. Below we work towards manifestation and above we work towards liberation, but for now we sit here in the middle balancing the scales.

When it’s difficult to decide how best to proceed, I find it best to look towards your teachers. I reached out to Beth for her thoughts on my upcoming month and she shared a mantra with me that she thought might be helpful:

AHAM PREMA • I Am Divine Love — [Sanskrit, and English translation]

I did mention that we were entering the more lofty principles in our journey, didn’t I?

I’ve long since given up my quest to rid myself of the initial cynical response to mantras and prayers, but through meditation practice have come to recognize that response for what it really is. I hear the initial thought, chuckle to myself for being the equal parts zen lunatic and grumpy old man, and then give myself a moment before shaking it off and stepping fully into a practice that can make me uncomfortable. Mantras make me uncomfortable. Divinity makes me uncomfortable. Love for all things makes me uncomfortable. But part of any good practice is getting comfortable in your discomfort.

We can encounter divine love in many different religions and spirituality. I remember a hymn from Catholic school that went something like “Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me.” We used to sing it around Thanksgiving during our food drive. I believe the quote comes from Jesus himself, basically telling his followers that whoever you should meet along your path, treat them as you would treat me.

Within Rastafarianism, there’s a concept called ‘I and I.’ You may have heard it in a Trevor Hall or Bob Marley song. In this practice, you don’t use the word ‘me’ because it separates the individual from Jah, or God. By always referring to yourself as ‘I’ you’re regularly recognizing the divinity within yourself. By saying ‘I and I’ instead of ‘you and me’ you’re recognizing divinity within yourself and divinity within another and the connection that you share because of it. This isn’t dissimilar from the yogic favorite, ‘namaste,’ meaning ‘the light within me recognizes the light within you’. Maybe the first step of being Divine Love is just treating others the way you would want to be treated.

As I stepped into my practices this month and began practicing my mantra of Aham Prema, I was repeatedly brought back to thinking of a particular Buddhist saint. In some cultures they are known as Avalokitesvara. In others, Kuan Yin. They are often depicted as having one thousand arms and eyes and they are considered the Bodhisattva of Compassion.

This seems as good a time as any to get into a little bit of Buddhist dogma.

Buddhist belief suggests that we are stuck in the cycle of Samsara. This is the sequence of birth, life, death and rebirth driven by your karma. The goal of Buddhist discipline, if it can be called such, is to break free of this cycle and enter into Nirvana, or freedom from suffering. You’ll of course remember that another quirk of Buddhism is that fundamental truth that existence is suffering. When you’ve achieved enlightenment and entered into Nirvana, you become a Buddha. Now imagine if you’ve done all the work, meditated your behind off and played by every single rule that the monks have given you. You’re at the gates, about to leave this veil of endless suffering and enter into a realm of peace that you can’t possibly imagine. You’re at the precipice about to step in, and you look back one last time.

You see all the other beings of the universe. Friends and foes, ants and elephants, they’re all there sitting in their suffering. And there you are with the answer. You know the way. You can help! You can be a guide. So you step away from the ledge and return into the cycle. You’ve become a Bodhisattva.

A Bodhisattva is someone who has attained enlightenment but chooses to delay entering into Nirvana so that they may help bring others there as well. In fact, when you become a Bodhisattva, you don’t push off your eternal Nirvana vacation to save one or two people. You push it off to save all beings. The Bodhisattva vow states that there are endless beings in the universe, and that you will save them all.

That’s got to be Divine Love.

As I sit and meditate at my altar, saying my mantra as I move my little prayer beads from one finger to the next, I tend to look out at this one tree over our balcony. For me, it’s just a tree. I don’t know what kind it is, but I’m sure that it was a tree before somebody categorized and named it. I look at the leaves and wonder how many there might be, and again I’m struck by the idea that however many there are, there were that many before anybody started counting. Each one is significant and insignificant at the same time.

I brought this same contemplation to the bottom of the Grand Canyon this month when we traveled to Havasupai Falls. I sat in quiet meditation with my mantra and watched as water cascaded down the cliffs of the canyon. Sometimes I’d try to follow one drop as it made its way down to the splash or river below. Sometimes I would just stare openly at the water that was constant and yet always changing. Without the individual drops, there would be no waterfall, but to try to count them is futile. It’s like Divine Love.

You can’t love everyone. You don’t have the capacity. You could not possibly care for every struggling family in war torn Ukraine. You couldn’t rebuild all the homes destroyed in the earthquake in Myanmar. You couldn’t even house all the homeless right outside your window in Venice Beach. It’s a truly hopeless situation.

But you can navigate the world with compassion. One act of kindness still counts, the same way one little pebble at the top of a mountain makes that mountain that much taller.

“Even if the whole world is nothing but a bunch of jerks doing all kinds of jerk-type things, there is still liberation in simply not being a jerk.”

— Brad Warner

On weekend mornings, Jenna and I wake up a little later and then take a stroll down the Venice Beach boardwalk to her wellness studio. The walk always reminds me of getting up early at a festival. There are a couple of people out exercising, a few people setting up their stands and preparing for the day, and an awful lot of people struggling from the decisions of the night before. Venice can be a bit crunchy and it’s not a place that I’d like my partner to walk alone.

On this particular morning, we pass a man in the midst of a crisis. He seems homeless and I’d venture to guess that there may have been some substance abuse in the hours preceding our brief encounter. He’s yelling incomprehensibly and twitching uncontrollably. I pull Jenna a little closer to my side and veer wide left to avoid his path. Normally I’d make a sarcastic remark about getting this guy off the street and cleaning up Venice. Today all I notice is all the hurt that he is going through at this moment. Don’t give me a medal or pat me on the back, because I didn’t step towards him and I didn’t try to help. But today I looked at him and felt compassion, and that felt like a step towards becoming Divine Love.

Thanks for opening up with me this month.

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One Page at a Time

Rae Lynn Minke — Sat, 03 May 2025 17:18:00 +0000

I just finished reading my 5th book of the year, and I am absolutely friggin’ ELATED with myself.

Do you know what this means? It means I’m on track to reach my goal of reading 12 books this year — one for every month of the year! *self high-five*

Now, this might not seem like a huge deal to anybody reading this, but it is to me. I used to be a massive reader. I devoured books when I was younger. I worked my way through the entire fiction section of our public library. I carted books around with me across countries… and continents. On a backpacking trip through Europe, I once dragged my best friend all over Athens, Greece the weekend the final Harry Potter book was released to find somewhere that sold an English copy… and then proceeded to read the entire thing on a boat dock while waiting for a midnight ferry to our next destination…#sorrymeg, I admit that was intense.

I inherited my love of reading from my parents and brother, who were also avid readers. We once took a family photo on our front deck with every book we could find in the house — absolutely epic. When my mom was younger, she used to hide her bedside lamp under the covers so she could read well past her bedtime. My Dad loved reading so much, he eventually decided to work on a novel of his own, and began writing short stories in his later years. My brother also inevitably has a new book or series on-the-go at any given time.

Reading can be so many different and wonderful things.

It can be an act of self-care on a busy day.

It can be a reunion with your favourite literary characters.

It can be educational or knowledge-building.

It can be a much-needed escape from the incredibly “online” world we all live in.

It can be a conversation-starter.

It can be a bedtime ritual with your favourite little human(s).

All great reasons to read on the regular, amirite? So, with all the great benefits that come from reading… why did I stop?

I don’t know, really. Life got busy. I think I stopped reading for myself around the time I gave birth to my son — which probably coincided with when I picked up a pretty nasty social-media-scrolling-problem while I was breastfeeding. And once I fell out of the habit, I simply replaced the time I would normally spend reading with OTHER habits.

Netflix. YouTube. Instagram-scrolling.

Time eaters, all of them.

My son is almost 5 now. We make a habit of reading to HIM every day, and he loooves his books. We check out half of the library every time we make a trip there! Earlier this year, I was perusing the very small English language section in my local library (I live in Germany), and decided to take a small fictional — and probably somewhat smutty — book home with me.

It wasn’t a work of literary magic or anything…but it kickstarted something inside of me. A joy I had forgotten.

Before I knew it, I was back at the library, signing out another book. And then I was researching Kindles, so I could read more easily at night in bed. I was discussing book recommendations with friends and family. And buying books for various areas of my life that I wanted to learn more about.

And now, here I am. 5 books. Done and dusted. And we’re barely into the month of May.

I am such a book-reading BADASS.

In my most recently completed book (‘Healthy as F*ck’ by Oonagh Duncan), I was reading about habit-forming behaviours. One of her tips for when you are trying to form a new habit (…or pick up an old one, like reading), but find yourself making excuses as to why you can’t find/make the time, is to do the habit totally ‘half-assed’.

In other words, pick up the damn book and read ONE page. Even if you don’t want to. Even if you think you don’t have time.

One page is more than zero. And who knows… maybe one page will turn into two. Or twenty. Either way, reading that one page is creating a point on a trend line that will ultimately result in you finishing that book.

Now… what happens if we take that tip and apply it to another area of our life?

Like moving our body more.

Or finishing that essay we’ve been procrastinating for school.

Or reigniting the flame with our significant other.

Sometimes, we build tasks up in our heads until they seem totally overwhelming or insurmountable. We are so busy focusing on making it to the final pages of the story (or not!), that we forget we actually have to start the damn book.

One page at a time.

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I’m Turning 40 STRONG This Year

Rae Lynn Minke — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 23:22:00 +0000

I’m turning ’40 STRONG’ this year.

It’s more than just a milestone birthday. It’s a declaration of intention.

And to understand what this intention grew out of, I’m going to need to back up a little bit…

Sport and movement have always been a really big part of my life. My teen years were spent on fields and courts - chasing, diving and running around after balls of various shapes and sizes. I bounced back from ankle sprains and jammed fingers faster than you could shout ‘GAME ON!’. I celebrated huge wins with my teammates, commiserated together over our losses, and generally L-O-V-E-D being an athlete. I absolutely thrived in community, and being part of a team. I loved what my body was able to do.

My 20s were for giving back, and sharing my enthusiasm for sport with others. I graduated from University and Teacher’s College, and couldn’t believe my luck when I landed my first adult job as a Teacher Intern in the Physical Education and Athletics Department of an Independent School on the other side of the country. I spent about half of that job on busses and planes, shuttling high school students to and fro, from practice, to game, to tournament, to championship… absolutely pouring myself into the roll of Teacher Sponsor, or Team Cheerleader, or whatever else those student athletes needed me to be. Over the next few years, I went on to teach sport and physical education to hundreds of kids, and coached multiple teams at multiple schools… I even managed to find enough time to join a few Rec Leagues of my own! I hadn’t forgotten the absolute JOY of chasing a ball, and scrimmaging with my teammates, and feeling absolutely ALIVE as my body moved freely through a space.

Then came my 30s, which were full of big life changes… and injuries. Not the big, surgery-requiring kind - like torn ACLs and blown-out knees - but the niggling aches, the chronic back pain, and the inability to sneeze, laugh, or yawn without somehow pulling a major muscle somewhere in my body.

Seriously, who knew this was going to start at such a young age?!

I started the decade off on the other side of the world, teaching at an International School just outside of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. One evening, I decided to tag along with a colleague of mine who had joined a new sport in the area, and found myself at my first ever Gaelic Football practice. Gaelic VERY quickly became my new favourite sport. And with my newfound love, I also immediately inherited a team of kick-ass men and women from around the globe, who loved sport and competition and movement as much as I did. At the age of 30 I had discovered an instant-family, and re-discovered the competitive nature of my teen years, all in the span of a few weeks.

I loved to play. And I wanted to be good. My instincts and competitiveness and athleticism helped me learn the sport quickly… but at the ripe old age of 30, I was regularly sidelined by back problems and other injuries. I physio-ed as hard as I could, and did all the stretches and strengthening I was told to do at the time - and I managed to play in a few big tournaments… but my time playing Gaelic Football was short-lived. A few years later at the age of 32, I moved countries, and life got really busy.

Throughout the rest of my 30s, I dabbled in sport and fitness. I began a strength training routine at 33… until I put my back out again and fell out of the habit. I started training for my first ever Sprint Triathlon at 34, and then stopped when the Global Pandemic and pregnancy sickness kept me home and in bed for a few months of 2020. I got the shit scared out of me as a 35-year-old mom when I learned that I had a weak pelvic floor after the birth of my child, and suddenly became afraid of doing ANY kind of low or high impact exercise. And at 37, I woke up one morning with a ‘crooked’ back after a day of strenuous lake surfing… a muscular imbalance issue that I have been dealing with on and off ever since.

So, yeah. Here I am - 39 years of age, preparing to turn the big 4-0. And I’m TIRED of feeling like my body is slowly starting to fall apart.

I’ve got the second half of my life to lead… and I want it to be full of movement, and sport, and adventure, and limit-pushing, and stepping outside of my comfort zone.

I want to feel strong AF this decade. And in every decade beyond it.

One of the biggest benefits of being ME right now, is that I have the time to get really curious about my health at (and after) 40. As a result of life circumstances and language barriers and being an expat mom abroad, I am no longer a teacher in the international school system. I am a part-time freelancer, and I work from home… which means I have the time to learn something new. I’ve signed up for an intensive certification course to become a personal trainer, and I’ve decided that I’m going to learn how to become 40 STRONG.

I’m going to begin with myself. I want to be my own first client… and then I want to help any other kick-ass 40 year olds (and beyond) who are tired of feeling weak, or imbalanced, or trapped in a body that doesn’t let them do the things they want to do for the NEXT 40 years of their lives.

When I was studying Sport Psychology in University back in the early 2000s, I had to write a thesis in my final year. It was titled, ‘The Effects of Making Public Statements and Receiving Reminders on Exercise Efficacy and Adherence’. Wow… it still just ROLLS off the tongue, doesn’t it? I wrote it almost 2 decades ago now, but the guiding principles remain the same…

When we announce to our ‘people’ that we are going to commit to doing something, we are MORE likely to do it.

And when we are REMINDED that we committed to doing that thing, we are EVEN MORE likely to do it.

So… consider this me officially announcing my commitment to becoming 40 STRONG. Strong back, strong core, strong pelvic floor. Strong in body and strong in mind. Strong in motivation, strong in discipline, and strong in my ability to be CURIOUS about what this body can accomplish in the second half of my life!

Can I let you in on a little life goal of mine? When I’m 80+ years old, I want to compete in the World Senior Games and win a medal. So, I guess I better start training now.

What do YOU want to accomplish in the next decade?

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Exploring the Solar Plexus: Burn, Burn, Burn

Kevin Davi — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 22:53:00 +0000

The third chakra is the solar plexus and its element is fire. It is the house of the ego and what ‘I’ would call ‘me’ and ‘you’ would call ‘you.’ After finding food and shelter in the root chakra, and the ability to move and reproduce in the sacral chakra, we come to the awareness of a certain self in the solar plexus. I’m both fascinated and put off by this chakra. It's one that I have struggled with in the past and also believe myself to struggle with in the present. It's one big game of hide and seek with yourself and your ability to keep the game going hangs on the edge of a knife. It’s not unlike fire. Fire has made humans the dominant species on the planet. Which has made us objectively the most destructive.

My goal at the start of the month was to bring my focus to the physical body. I had created habits and then learned how to listen to my body when it needed a break or a change, but now it was time to put it to the test. For overall health it’s great to listen to your body and back off when necessary, but if you have a goal or aspiration in mind, you’re eventually going to have to push into your discomfort to create change. Runners talk about the wall that they hit at mile twenty of a marathon. It does them no good on race day to listen to their aching legs and heaving chest. This is where they turn to that little voice in their head that says you can push a little harder and go a little further. This is the voice that I intended to strengthen this month.

I believed that this is what the voice would say. I had such certainty that it would tell me to go harder, move faster and be stronger, but something kind of interesting happened that I truly did not expect. As I began to push into my practices, I found that the voice saying go, go, go was one that I had created. It was an idea of what I thought I should be or what this practice should be like. It’s an expectation that creates friction between myself and the world around me. Should, could and would get in the way of what simply is.

To find a voice, you don’t talk. You listen.

This is where the idea of the ego gets testy and downright uncomfortable. With the spirit of Buddhist exploration, I’ve played around a lot with destroying the ego. That journey itself is one big ego trip because who is really destroying what, if there is no you? The practice is an unwinnable one and maybe that’s the point. Let’s roll through it together.

Who are you?

Maybe you start with your name. Well, what about nicknames you’ve had over the years? How about your job? What if you change careers? The options are endless but so are the responses. The cells that make up your skin are literally changing as we speak. Recent medical advancements have allowed for all sorts of organ replacements, so we can’t really turn to your heart or parts of your brains as what is really you. Maybe it’s your thoughts and stances on things, but who hasn’t changed their mind on something before? (By the way, if you haven’t recently, give it a try. The results can be wondrous.)

Maybe there are attributes that you connect to this certain sense of ‘self,’ like kindness or generosity, but when you’re a bit snippy with that coworker you don’t care for or ignore the person begging for change on the street you’re being neither so that doesn’t work. If you keep on this path, you find that it's pretty difficult to nail down anything that is really consistent with you and absolutely unchangeable.

But on the other hand there’s definitely something, right? I’m me. I have to be. I wake up every morning in a body and story line at the very least similar to the one that I went to sleep in. There just has to be something there that is me.

That’s true! To quote the good doctor, “There’s no one alive who is you-er than you!”

It’s just not what you think.

The rules of this game called existence are interesting. We’re all just a tiny blip that happens in the universe momentarily and then returns back to the source. The individuality of a snowflake is not really all that significant when you think about it. They all still hit the ground and melt. This realization can quickly lead to nihilism or the belief that nothing matters. We might wallow in a bit of self pity with this new understanding, but we’re really just in time for the big reveal.

If nothing matters, then everything matters.

As humans, we tend to look at big events and celebrations as the cornerstones of life. You can read about a historical figure’s life and get important dates and things that seemed to change the trajectory of their story and create the person that becomes a household name. In an attempt to emulate the heroes from our textbooks, we strive for completion. We usually aren’t able to see that those moments of celebration show up by accident. It’s a typical Tuesday routine where you can find the special sauce that makes someone who they are.

On my typical Tuesday, I don’t want to be the type of person who is so sure of who they are that they don’t have the strength to listen.

This is where I have always felt the danger in the solar plexus lies. When you focus here on your identity and sense of self, you can begin to cling to it. You can begin to put up walls of words that dictate who you are and how you must be. The more you believe those imaginary walls to be real, the more you believe yourself to be right. The more you believe yourself to be right, the more you can believe that others are wrong. That’s when you can begin to feel righteous. And that’s when you can start to do some pretty heinous shit. That’s when the fire in the belly can grow into a vast unquenchable flame, destroying anything in its path.

Your fire was meant to light the way. Not to burn a path.

At the full moon, Jenna and I pulled cards from our animal deck as we always do. During the course of that moon cycle, we keep the cards perched up on one of our many altars and I find myself looking back to it over and over again as the month progresses. I pulled a Dragon this time around and that’s a card that can make you feel all sorts of good when you see it. This is the time for me to be a mythical beast and rule over my domain through air, land and sea; spouting fire at anything in my path. It’s one of the spirit animals on my totem and my dragon shows up at very interesting times in my life, so I’m really all ears to see how this card can manifest. Jenna pulled the frog and believe it or not, that animal is also on my spirit totem. I see him as a form of unexpected strength. If that doesn’t land for you check out some tree frog videos online and watch how the males kick each other with powerful legs to assert dominance. They’re mostly just sitting there in stillness. The strength is not something they make a big show of. They use it when it is necessary.

If you’re lucky enough to have a partner like I do, then you know that they are the great mirror into your soul. I want to be a dragon, but maybe I could use a little more frog.

So I spent this past month cultivating some strength, but balancing it with some stillness. There’s a sense of letting go, but also standing in my power because it’s really all that I can do in any given moment. Whether the ego is real or not is irrelevant. It’s the only way that I can participate in the game of existence, so I’ve got to put on that face. I stoke the flames of the fire within me, but do my best to keep it contained. I won’t let it go out, neither will I let it encompass the world around it. The work is constant. It’s listening and responding simultaneously so that I cannot differentiate one from the other. Perhaps that's why I’ve always found this to be such a frustrating chakra. It’s a dancing flame and just when I think it’s one thing, it’s something completely different.

That’s all for this month. Thanks for burning with me.

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Exploring the Sacral Chakra: Finding the Flow

Kevin Davi — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:18:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Alan Watts. In one of his journal entries, he describes something he calls the paradox of happiness or the backwards law. Happiness is something that we all would like to have. Ask a little kid what he wants to be when he grows up and he might say “happy”. The story then goes that the child doesn’t understand the question, but the adult doesn’t understand life. Alan Watts might suggest that nobody understands anything here.

You see, if you set out seeking happiness, you become increasingly aware of all the times that you are unhappy. By setting your sights on it, you make it more elusive, like those little floaters that appear on the edges of your eyes (that’s normal right?). Consider the restaurant critic. I assume that this career begins with a love of really exceptional food. It evolves as the years go by into a nasty game of comparison of this dish to that, and an endless search for the perfect plate that exists only in the mind. Meanwhile the beggar on the street smiles happily with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in his hands.

If we are to accept this idea of the happiness paradox, and I more or less do, then it is really no wonder that in last month’s entry I was able to find more and more instances of being ungrounded despite my search for that balancing in the root chakra. I shone the spotlight on one aspect of my life and found countless ways to improve upon it. Therein lies the challenge of these spiritual practices.

You keep growing but you’re never really complete.

What I did not expect following the release of my focus on the root chakra, was how incredibly grounded I might feel! The practices that seemed so hard to cultivate last month now seem, dare I say, rooted into my day to day life. I wake up early. I make breakfast. I read and I meditate. My physical movement practices are the norm rather than the exception. My body and mind appear to be well adjusted to the relatively new idea of a day to day approach. I guess it just takes some time.

Now as I move up into the flowing waters of the sacral chakra, I start to find just how important that first month was. I’ve found that this chakra allows much more movement. There is an opportunity to look at a situation and say, that’s not for me today. There’s space to twist and turn and bob and weave into and out of whatever I want to do, but had I started here in the practice, I’m not sure I would be getting anywhere (as if there was anywhere to go). The habits need to be there first so that you can objectively decide to take a day off from them for your own betterment.

This came to mind during a morning meditation. I’ve recently been getting up around five in the morning to prepare for my day. I rise out of bed, maybe after a snooze or two, and make my way to the kitchen for a small breakfast and coffee. Following that I spend some time with a book and then sit meditation on the porch. I’ve abandoned my adorned altar and the dogmatic white wall of the zendo for my view of the neighboring beach condos or the corner of Santa Monica Beach. In truth my seat doesn’t allow me to see straight through and at times I’m just staring at a prayer flag in front of my face. This felt better somehow than the other ways in which I was meditating. I can’t say exactly how, other than it just felt like my own. Sometimes the waves crashing at the shore calm me down, sometimes I look at the little Tibetan script on a flag and sometimes I stare out at this little light coming from the house of another early riser across the way. Sometimes I even close my eyes.

Recently, I did none of the above because I came out onto my porch, carefully set down my zafu and coffee and as I assumed the position, I noticed the moon. She was out in all her glory preceding the morning sunrise. Though in all her glory, is incorrect because this was a crescent moon. I’ve spoken at length in books and articles about my tumultuous relationship with the moon. I see her as a bit of a trickster goddess who likes to laugh at my toils from far away, whether for good or bad it’s all the same to her. I’ve had a practice of sitting with her when she is full for some time now and lately, Jenna and I have modified our own practices to lead a full moon ceremony once a month at the wellness studio that we work at in Venice [California].

This has always been the means in which I, and this may seem a strong word, worship her. In her fullness.

But this morning, she was different. She was coy. She was teasing. She was half hidden and if you cocked your head at the right angle she was smiling his mischievous little smile at you. And she still deserved praise.

I have the chakras tattooed down my back with images that are personal to me. For the sacral chakra I chose the moon. She has phases, yet she is always the moon. That seemed important to me. This month in honoring the sacral chakra, I noticed that everything is always moving. Nothing stands in one place for too long. If you grasp too long into the firm rigidness of the root chakra, you’re bound to break. As we climb the ladder towards liberation, adjustments need to be made both inside and out.

In a morning reading, I found a new little mantra that might help to see us all through,

“The Middle Way of compassion - that is, of feeling for both sides, of allowing, respecting, and owning the apparently random and involuntary aspect of our karma. This means increasing tolerance for surprising and unscheduled events, for life-forms and life-styles other than our own, and for all things sinuous, slippery, wayward, and wiggly…”

What I believe Mr. Watts is trying to say here is that you’ve got to be wiggly. The nature of life is to change. The Tao Te Ching suggests that the nature of life is bending and yielding while the nature of death is rigid and cracked. When we ground down into our principles and what is important to us, we must then spin the dharma wheel again. Not everyone will have the same principles as us. Not everyone will find the same importance in things that we do. The world will not adjust for us and so we must be wiggly. We must be able to adapt in order to climb higher. The challenges and issues of everyday life that appear are simply part of everyday life. They are not walls to be broken down so much as they are little games to be played with. When I took this point of view, it didn’t seem like the world was out to get me or dissuade me from where I was going. It was trying to dance with me. And it wasn’t any fun for either of us if I just got there in a straight line.

So the sacral chakra is a bit of a give, where the root seemed to be more of a take. On one hand, I find it odd that we’re only at level two and I have to back off on some things that I learned on the previous level, but on the other hand isn’t that what balance is? We stand on the tip of a knife. Strong movements either way would blow us off course. Balance is nothing but awareness to the winds and right action to maintain your course.

And this time, thanks for flowing with me through the process.

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Life Ain’t Time, It’s Love Instead

Rae Lynn Minke — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:44:00 +0000

*Trigger Warning: This article discusses the death of a parent.

As I sit here writing, I’m listening to the movie soundtrack from the iconic baseball film, Field of Dreams. It has always had a very special place in my heart. My Dad and I shared a love for the story, the sport, the main actor (hello, Kevin Costner), and it’s inevitable ability to bring us to tears with that iconic line, ”Hey Dad… wanna have a catch?”

It gets me every single time.

I was recently on a 2-week visit home to Canada (sans hubby and child) and was hoping to have the chance to squeeze in another Field of Dreams ‘viewing party’ with my Dad while I was there. For the first time since having a family of my own abroad, my parents had asked me if it were possible to come home for a solo visit, so I could spend some quality time with my father. He’d recently been in the hospital for the 2nd time in about a month, and was now on permanent home oxygen — a natural progression/consequence of being in the 12th year of a 5-10 year life expectancy with his pulmonary fibrosis diagnosis.

I knew the moment I stepped through the front door of my parents’ house that it was a good thing I was home.

In the first few days of the visit, we sat on the couch and chatted, played a game or two, and even ventured out for a family meal at the Canadian eatery, Swiss Chalet (Dad, who hadn’t had much of an appetite in the months prior to this, said it was the best meal he’d had in ages)! I sat in on home visits with my Dad’s new team of nurses/therapists, who were going to help him figure out how to navigate this next ‘step down’ in his diagnosis and quality of life. There were sobering conversations had about his ‘wishes’, should he find himself experiencing another medical event in the future.

His wishes were very clear… what we didn’t know was just how soon they would need to be honoured. My dad went back into the hospital about a week after I got home, and passed away suddenly a few hours later.

The purpose of my visit shifted in that moment — from making memories, to making arrangements with a funeral home. To helping my Mom work through the incredibly long list of things that need to be done in the immediate aftermath of a loved one passing. It was a LOT to process.

My Dad’s wishes were to be cremated, so my Mom, brother, sister-in-law and I all met together with a Funeral Director to discuss details and pick out an urn for his ashes. We settled on a lovely black one that had a sort of sci-fi feel to it (right in my Dad’s wheelhouse, as a Professor of Science Fiction). We returned home with the specific goal of finding a song lyric in one of my Dad’s many song books to have engraved on the bottom of it. As a singer and guitar player his whole life, he’d played and sung right up until he couldn’t anymore — mere days before he died.

Surprisingly, the lyric presented itself fairly quickly and easily, saving me the trouble of sifting through 10 or more song books, and scouring Eagles and Beatles and David Bromberg lyrics online for something memorable and fitting. In the end, it was my Dad’s own songwriting that won out. A song, scribbled on the back of a few other pages in a book — one that neither my Mom, nor my brother or I, had ever heard him play before.

It didn’t have a title — but the sentiment was clear. Dad knew he didn’t have a lot of time left on this earth, and had written this one for my mom, and for his ‘favourite sons and favourite daughters’. Words for each of us to remember and to live by.

We chose the final line of the song to engrave on Dad’s urn:

“Life Ain’t Time, it’s Love Instead’.

I love it.

I love the simplicity of it.

But I also love that this lyric is a realisation — an acknowledgement of something that took decades of life experience to land on.

A final message for us, of sorts (…although perhaps not intended to be). It’s not about how much time we all have… it’s about what we choose to do with that time. Who we choose to be.

In the month since my Dad’s passing, I’ve had a really difficult time coming to terms with the fact that he died… and that in the days and weeks immediately following that, the entire world seemingly went to shit. You’ll have to excuse my language — but I think anyone reading this right now probably has an idea of the things I’m talking about.

Each day, I listen to the news. I stream my regular podcasts. I scroll through social media. I talk to people. I feel worry, and sadness, and disbelief at the state of things… and then out of nowhere, a rogue wave of grief washes over me, and I just can’t believe the timing of it all.

Our politicians and world leaders are acting like petulant children. Citizens around the globe are treating one another with disdain and hatred. Countries are divided, alliances are dissolving, trust is broken.

It feels like a REALLY difficult time to see the ‘good’ anywhere around us…

But we must.

It’s as simple as that.

For our own self-preservation, we must CHOOSE to focus on love and hope.

And if we are not seeing enough ‘good’ in the world, then we need to make damn sure we are putting more ‘good’ into our world every single day. We need to surround ourselves with it — and we need to do it in an incredibly intentional way.

Maybe that means doing something thoughtful for someone, or helping somebody in need.

Maybe it means moving our bodies for an hour each day, instead of doom-scrolling social media in the fetal position.

Maybe it means finding somebody or something to love, instead of somebody or something to hate on.

Dad didn’t know that this one song lyric (of hundreds) that he scribbled down on the back of a piece of paper would have such an impact on me… but it couldn’t have come at a more timely moment in my life.

It speaks volumes. Don’t give any of your precious energy to hatred or revenge or bullying, it says.

You don’t have that kind of time to waste in your life, it says.

Focus on the love.

Focus on the good.

And if you can’t find enough of it in your world these days, then you sure as hell better figure out how to create some of it of your own. ♥️

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Exploring the Root Chakra

Kevin Davi — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 16:57:00 +0000

My writing career, for what it is, got started back in 2018 with a self-study of the Yamas and the Niyamas. Each week I focused on one, and then posted a little meditation and small excerpt of how I did with that focus point. Beth, my first Yoga teacher ever, followed along for the ride and at the end of the practice asked me if I would like to write for Held in the Heart. The rest, as they say, is history.

On my return back to the writing space, I figured that I would revisit the well and go through another self-study practice to get the creative juices flowing. This time my focus will be on the chakras. I'll start from the ground up, bringing my personal practice focus to one chakra for the month and report back to all of you on how it went. I expect to be fully enlightened by August. Well, maybe not fully. But maybe!

Here goes nothing.

The way that I initially learned about the root chakra boils down to two words: food and shelter. At the base of the spine, and the start of the climb of the ladder towards liberation, we have to start with what’s important in the here and the now. Do you have enough to eat and do you have a place to live? In our complex world, there is obviously more to it than that, and I promise you that we’ll get to it, but let’s start there. Imagine if the answer to both of those questions is no. Sure, we’ve got problems but anybody with the privilege to sit down and read what I write, I assume, isn't worrying about where their next meal is coming from or where they are going to sleep tonight. You’ve got to start with that proper base before growing anything else. But it can be very easy to take these things for granted. I want to take care of my house and my home so that it becomes a constant source of stability for me as life swirls around. I want to feed and fuel myself in a manner that allows me to live a long and active life. I want to incorporate practices that ground me in focus of the present moment.

There’s an old saying that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

On the first day of the new year, my partner and I were sitting in a ceremony of our own design, celebrating the turn of the calendar and setting intentions. It was a very grounding experience. We were disturbed from this moment of deep connection by three raps at the door. Apparently the unit directly above us had suffered a leak and now there was water seeping into our walls. They would have to run some tests in our home, bring in a couple of massive filtration systems, and then we would have to relocate for seven days while they replaced a wall. Suffice to say that my home became a mess of hastily moved furniture and construction equipment for about a week before we had to move out.

And this was even before the fires started.

How do you ground down when you don’t feel like there is stable footing to ground into? This is a challenge for those who travel and those whose lives are in a state of flux. I’m sure that this is a challenge for the thousands of people who have been displaced by the devastating fires in Los Angeles. But as I’ve often said in these articles that I write, you don’t actually get good at anything until you are challenged by it. Things that come easy seem to be worth a lot less than those that you have to struggle for.

As the dream of my perfectly clean and organized house fell to pieces around me, I turned to the window of my nutrition. Before we had to get out of our house, my partner and I spent an entire afternoon meal prepping for the week away. It seemed like we made enough breakfast burritos and balanced meals to feed a small army. As we waved goodbye to our unit for the week we not only took suitcases full of clothes and luggage, but three bags full of Tupperware containers. It wasn’t the grounding practice that I thought it was going to be at the beginning of the month, but it was a step in the right direction. We made due with the situation we were given.

This of course was my own personal experience. I’m lucky enough that I had to relocate due to mold. I was able to prepare what I could and plan out my movements. The fires in the mountains just north of where I live did not allow those locals the same timing. It would be unfair and presumptuous of me to suggest what people in that situation should or could do to ground down, but I do hope that they are doing something. The wellness studio that my partner and I work at welcomed those people displaced by the fires so that if it felt helpful for them, they could come in and move their body a bit. I’m not saying it’s what everybody should have done, but for those that I saw in the space, it did seem to add a touch of consistency and normalcy to a very abnormal situation.

In a time of trouble, they were able to lean into their practices.

After the initial fears of the fires reaching our apartment in Santa Monica calmed down, the overwhelming heaviness of the situation seemed to sink in. The fact is that we were lucky. We were safe and did not lose any amount of property or life and were more or less just dealing with air quality issues and changes to our work schedules. From there, a certain amount of survivor’s guilt sinks in. Everything is so close yet so far away. We’re unsure how to act. What should we do? What can we do? It’s been really cool to see Los Angeles, a city most known for it’s “me-first” flashy attitude, come together with volunteer and donation opportunities to support those in need.

If you feel called to offer support to those impacted by the fires across LA County, here are a few resources for donations and volunteer opportunities:

Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation | Kindful

Habitat for Humanity - Greater Los Angeles

Neighborhood Housing Services of Los Angeles County

But there is also the absolute truth of the here and now, and what is happening at the present moment. The fires are still raging at the time of this writing and unless you’re a firefighter, a lot of what you can do falls into a wait and see approach. You have to sit with the uncomfortable situation.

For this I returned to my zazen practice.

I’ve discussed zazen before in these articles, but for those unfamiliar, suffice to say that it is a meditation in which you sit upright for extended periods of time. There’s no real breath focus or mantra to speak of, but more of a “here is what’s going on in the now and I’m just going to sit with it”. We even initially titled my monthly articles Something I’ve Been Sitting With as a nod to the practice. During zazen you can experience backache from the posture, loud noises in the surrounding area and wild thoughts that spiral in every conceivable direction and through it all you just kind of sit there, non-responsive. I’ve often found it to be a melting away of the self where you see just how small and insignificant of a role you’re playing in things. The world turns with or without you. At the initial introduction to this practice it seems pretty depressing, but the further you go with it, the more you start to feel a liberation from the self-imposed pressures that you put on yourself.

While I had kept an inconsistent home practice of zazen over the past couple years, I had not returned to a group sit in quite some time. Like anything else, there are a multitude of excuses to pick from as to why this might have been the case, but when I found a sangha, or community, down the street from my home sitting together on Wednesday evenings, it felt like something that I had to return to. I’m glad that I did.

The practice isn’t comfortable.

It’s uncomfortable in more ways than one. Sitting upright in a lotus posture for upwards of an hour can wreak havoc on your back and hips. The duration of non-stimulation allows for a wild running of thoughts throughout the brain that rarely get quiet enough for you to experience the picturesque zen of sitting on a calm beach with waves lapping up against your legs. Knowing this, I was fairly nervous going to my first group session in over a year and almost bailed just because I knew what I was stepping into. Thankfully I have you, my dear reader, to hold me accountable.

So if this practice is so uncomfortable, why would someone submit themselves to it? There are so many other practices that might bring you some sort of peace rather than what feels like a prolonged panic attack. Well, I for one have found that this practice brings me to the present, without any hope of escaping. When my back aches or I have an itch on my nose that I’m dying to scratch, I’m just supposed to sit with it and not respond. We’re so quick to respond. We’re so quick to react. We’re so quick to think of a way we can make the future better or change things up. But there are just some things that you have to sit with. For instance, the biggest fire Los Angeles has ever seen. That’s an uncomfortable truth that is happening whether I accept it or not. It sucks. And I can’t stop it. So much like the cramping of my hips and the stiffening of my low back, I just have to sit with that uncomfortable situation. There will be a time to move and a time to rebuild but my role, for the moment, seems to be much quieter.

I’m afraid.

I’m afraid for those who have lost so much. I’m afraid of the air quality and the still very real possibility of the fire turning it’s direction towards my home. I’m afraid of what Los Angeles will become after all is said and done. I’m afraid of what will become of my work and livelihood with many of my clients being displaced and dealing with bigger things than back pain or a sore shoulder. I’m fearful of how I’m going to survive going forward.

But fear, in the face of death, destruction and fire, is an appropriate response. You can’t run from it. It’s right there with you. Through a grounding and present practice like zazen, I hope to embrace that fear and turn towards it, because when I look at the fear, really look at it, it’s more of a “what’s going to happen next?” type feeling. If I look too far ahead, that fear becomes anxiety. In the manifestation of the here and now, it all becomes relative. The fire is not at my doorstep, and if it was, I would hope that I could also respond appropriately with right action.

So right out of the gate, the Universe throws a curveball. That’s ok. In my dealings with the Universe, it seems She likes to keep me on my toes. When I think about the chakra system as a whole, I consider two directions. When we work up the ladder, we work towards liberation. When we work down the ladder, we work towards manifestation. On one hand, I’m beginning the climb up towards my highest self, on the other hand I can only begin that climb with what I do right here and right now. This month I was able to take little pieces of what I consider home and bring them with me as the physical space that was mine faded away. It’s not the way that I would have wanted to do it at the beginning of this journey, but it is the road that opened before me as I walked down the trail. I hope to continue with these practices of nutrition, zazen and active presence as I continue into the next month of my journey where I’ll incorporate some of the sacral chakra.

As always, thanks for sitting with me through the process.

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Who Am I / Wer bin ich?

Rae Lynn Minke — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 20:44:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Rae Lynn Minke. I’m an almost-40-year-old Canadian expat and ex-teacher, living in Germany with my little international family.

If you were to ask me about myself, I would tell you that I’m fun-loving, confident, and extroverted. I’d tell you that I’m a real people-person, and that I love talking to strangers at parties, and working on big collaborative projects at work, and performing at open mic nights. I’d tell you I can usually be found playing some sort of sport with some sort of ball alongside a large group of my crazy, rowdy teammates and friends.

I’d tell you this about me, because this is the version of myself that I know the best… the version of myself that I grew up with, and that I identify with the most. But let me come back to that...

I have been living abroad now for almost half of my adult life. For the majority of my 30s, I’ve lived and worked as an expat on one continent or another. My travels have taken me from Canada to Malaysia to Germany to Canada, and back to Germany again. In those years, I’ve made a lot of wonderful connections. I have forged brilliant life-long friendships, met and married my partner, and had a child together. I’ve moved across oceans more times than I care to remember, and navigated a Global Pandemic as a new wife and mom, far from my family.

My life (and location) has changed a LOT since I turned 30. I’ve had to adapt to new environments, and step outside of comfort zones, and start over from scratch, and find and grow communities. And many of the character traits I mentioned above have helped me do these things, time and time again…

But for the past few years, I have found myself - somehow - for the first time ever - navigating all of these challenges in a second language. And it’s been hard, to say the least.

I can’t just ‘be myself’ in my 2nd language. I don’t know how.

Although I have lived in Europe and South East Asia, and worked in international schools and communities around the world, I have done so predominantly in my mother tongue of English. So when we decided to move back to Germany in 2021, I thought the transition would be easier for me, as I had already lived in the country for 3 years. I was technically still on maternity leave with my son at the time, and planned on being able to slot right back into my old city and job and community when the time came.

But life happened, as it always does. Unexpected news shortly after we moved back to Germany led to more big life decisions, eventually resulting in us relocating once again - this time to a small, little city on the Baltic Coast.

In all fairness, I will say that my German has vastly improved since our last move. It had to. As my son (and his bilingual vocabulary) grows, so must mine. I am no longer enveloped in the English-speaking bubble that comes with working in an international school environment, and my city is not as English-friendly as the one I lived in for 3 years before this.

So there’s that. I’m bilingual now, albeit not fluent. Far from it, in fact.

And as the aforementioned fun-loving, confident, and extroverted person I’ve been for most of my life… I struggle daily with the inability to be my most authentic self in my second language.

I went from being the person who will speak to literally ANYONE, to the person who is intimidated by small talk; from the captain, the facilitator, the one who always volunteered to lead the group, to the one who prefers to stand in the background and observe, instead.

I’ve read that peoples’ personalities change in their 2nd or 3rd languages, and I believe it - without a doubt. Without fluency in a language, there isn’t the same ability to kid and joke around, or express yourself through tiny nuances or turns-of-phrase. When I want to contribute something deep or insightful to a conversation now, the best I can offer often feels superficial and surface-level. Sometimes, there are entire conversations happening in my head… but I can only manage to get half of it to come out of my mouth.

I’m an entirely different version of me here, and sometimes I really miss the old Rae. I liked her a lot. She was warmer, friendlier somehow. She didn’t always have all the answers, but she was confident enough to speak up and ask the questions without fear.

I know there is a very easy ‘solution’ to this problem. Get fluent. Just dedicate the time, put in the work, and the payoff will be worth the effort. We must learn to prioritise the important things in our lives.

…but have you ever just felt so overwhelmed by a task or a ‘should’, that you don’t even know where to begin?

I should make the time for it, I know. I should also exercise enough each week, find a new career/job that I’m passionate about, be a present and loving wife and mom, join new clubs, meet new friends, network, and… it’s just too much sometimes. It’s too many ‘shoulds’.

I have weeks where I manage to do some of the ‘shoulds’ pretty well. And then there are days where I feel like I’m just dropping responsibilities and proverbial ‘priority balls’ all over the place. Those are the days when being ‘conversational’ in my 2nd language has to be enough, no matter how inauthentic it makes me feel.

I truly hope 2025 is the year that I can start living a more authentic and vibrant version of myself again. My full self. Out loud, and in German.

And whatever your priorities or ‘shoulds’ are for this year - I wish you the same.

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The Year of the Snail

Kevin Davi — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 23:00:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve submitted anything to the site where I can say my writing journey began. The last article I wrote was posted on June 24, 2022. During the interim, life has come and gone as it usually does and I can honestly say that I haven’t done much writing. It’s been tough to get back into the swing of it. Work has been busy, new projects have arisen, I went through a move in August and I’m now even planning a wedding! So it’s been tough to find the time to sit down at my desk and type out my thoughts, much less organize them into anything semi-intelligible and worth reading.

But there’s still just so much more that I want to write! I’ve got ideas and opened files for chapters that might someday become the sequel to my first book. I’ve got a story board all laid out for a little fictional story taking place right here in Venice Beach. I even spent half the summer taking an online class and trying my hand at world building in the hopes that I could create some sort of fantasy world to rival that of Tolkien or George R.R. Martin. There are tons of open files on my laptop, and no work is near completion.

Lucky for me at the time of this writing, the new year is fast approaching. It’s an absolutely perfect time to get organized and prioritized and set the stage for this to be the year of the completed project. After all, it was this very time in December of 2019 that I resolved to utilize 2020 to write my book, and by 2021, it was published. Why not go back to the old well and make the same pact with myself to get it all done again? I’ve got my goal written objectively in my little leather-bound journal where only the most sacred and important of ideas will go.

The second the ink hit the paper, I could tell just how special this was going to be.

It’s all about intention and calling in what you want. Dream big and the Universe will answer you! Energy attracts like energy and it’s time to take the next big step and level up. I’m feeling wired and inspired so I reach for my cosmic creatures animal oracle deck. I hold the deck close to my heart, imbibing it with all that is me as barely a whisper. I ask the question, “What creature should I embody as I step into my goals for the new year?” I shuffle the deck some more, blindly feeling but knowingly seeing the magic of the deck until I’ve got a card that is so clearly calling to me that it couldn’t possibly be any other card in the deck. I cast the rest aside, turn the card over and………..…..

The Snail.

Womp. Womp.

But hey, let’s explore this cosmic slap in the face from the Universe to yours truly.

Typically when I turn to my deck, I’m looking for a slightly cooler animal to align my goals with. For example, prior to heading out for a night with my partner, we pulled a card together to see how the night would go and wound up pulling the mythical Phoenix. It was perfect! We’ve been gearing up for a dry January run that will stretch out further this year into February and March. I’ve always done dry January as a self reflection tool, but this will be a push forward together as a means of connecting and exploring our present and future together.

That being said, the lead up to January through the holidays can get a little, well, unhinged. There are a lot of holiday parties and a lot of free time and a lot of cocktails and a lot of desserts and a lot of a lot of things I guess you could say. So to pull the Phoenix before one of our last nights out feels so aligned that it paints a picture all by itself. Two beautiful magical creatures flying out into the night sky, hearts on fire and wings outstretched to burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night sky and explode into a million tiny freckles of light only to come back down to earth and re-emerge from the ashes stronger, faster and better in the new year.

Admittedly the ‘burn burn burn’ line is Kerouac’s, not mine, but you can see how it’s easy to get psyched about pulling the Phoenix card. It’s a little bit harder with the Snail.

Snails live about ten years in the wild, and can go about twenty-five if in a terrarium, depending on the species. Nothing too special about that. It’s not a long life, but it’s not so short to be considered fleeting. In cartoons, snails are typically depicted as living inside of their shell, but a quick little trip to Wikipedia will tell you that the shell is actually an exoskeleton so it’s more like armor than a home. If we’re reaching for metaphors, I guess we could say that as we get older, home becomes more of an idea that we take with us than a physical place where we live. Not a bad connection, but I wouldn’t call it my best work. So rather than reaching for something deeper, let’s just stay at the surface. The first thing that I think of when I think of the humble snail is that it is slow and that it is boring.

And that’s it right there.

New Year's Resolutions are like the holidays themselves, bright and shiny. We dip into some self-indulgence at the end of the year and then set great plans to turn it all around once the calendar restarts. Seldom are resolutions as common as I’d like to eat better or be kinder. Those ideas aren’t sexy or challenging like running a marathon or making a million dollars. In reality they are a bit more snail-like. The humble snail can’t see all the shiny things across the sidewalk that it’s taken a great risk to cross. It can only see a little bit of space directly in front of it. If it were to get sidetracked, even a little bit and only for a second, it would never achieve its goal. So it has to stay focused on that little bit of ground that is directly in front of it. And the snail doesn’t leave great battlefields or works or conquered foes behind it in its wake. It just leaves this little trail of slime, perhaps its own version of sweat, behind it as it goes.

There are always going to be times when we need to be a Lion. Times where the fight or the hunt is right there in front of us and we need to be ready for the moment where we pounce with all of our might and make the kill. But lions also spend a lot of time just sort of lounging about. I’ve seen more clips of lions yawning on a rock, lazily swatting flies away with their tails than I have seen them running and chasing and killing.

You can have a Lion approach tomorrow. It could be a workout or a beastly day of writing, a gut cleanse in which you don’t eat solid food, or a silent day of meditation. All of those require Lion energy, but will undoubtedly require lion rest the day after. But the snail is tireless. He sticks to the here and now and just keeps going each and every day.

What can we all do today that takes Snail energy?

Something that is so doable right here right now. Something that is so doable that we do it once, and then we do it again. And again. And again. We do it so many times that nobody seems to notice we are doing it because it just seems to be the norm for us. It doesn’t exhaust us because it is within our day-to-day abilities. Sure it’s not as sexy as burning up like a phoenix or hunting prey like a lion, but since the Universe dropped that slimy Snail card into my lap, I’ve been sitting with something. Whenever I see a snail on the path, he doesn’t seem to be moving at all, but he’s never there when I get back. At most I might just see a slimy little trail of the work that needed to get done. Maybe this year it’s time to ditch the shiny for the slimy.

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Words for Today

Beth Barbaglia — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 18:30:00 +0000

A Share from the Community Email, aka the Heart-Letter

Do I have words for today? In this moment I am acutely aware of how "out of practice" I am at writing here. When I started this Heart-Letter in late 2017, it began with me writing to you every week. Each Tuesday to be exact — I would sit and pour out what was on my heart that day.

After about 3 or so years of that, the cadence gradually grew to every other week, to once a month, to once every few months... to 6 months...

Eventually I had to pause entirely.

Writing to you here is more than sharing news, events, and offerings, it has been a practice for me. And just as we ourselves evolve, our practices evolve too. We ebb and flow in and out of what we need. Our expression needs expressing in different forms. And sometimes it's simply a matter of needing to go inward, needing to reassess, or even just needing to give our energy to tilling the soil again for awhile before we can nurture more life.

Have you ever re-potted a plant?

Sometimes when we move the roots to a new environment, the plant goes into shock. It feels disoriented, and may even appear lifeless for awhile. During this time of struggle, the plant needs extra thoughtful care. To survive this transition, it will require the most mindful, loving attention to its needs.

It may even need to be replanted a second time.

The last time I wrote an email to the community here was about 15 months ago. And during those months, a whole lot transpired. Let's just say Spirit had me digging up my entire farm's worth of soil, pulling up my roots from deep in the ground and replanting. Then floundering, feeling weak and disoriented, then replanting again. All alongside an increasingly demanding art direction job (that started as a part-time gig), as well as some of the most piercing joys and gut-wrenching losses of my life. This season has required my utmost attention, and some of the fiercest self-loving choices I have ever had to make.

As my nervous system slowly re-calibrates from the shock, and I welcome the arrival of space to integrate the immensity of experiences, I am beginning to notice my roots feeling safe to relax. They tenderly release their grip, cautiously reaching out to feel the sensation of the new soil surrounding them. And as I continue to ensure their safety, and trust in Spirit's plan for me, I fully suspect that in a few months time, when the warmth of Spring blesses us again, my roots will feel strong once more and I will see new life begin to emerge from the soil.

Thank you for allowing me space, and for welcoming me to life again. Keep going. We are meant to be reborn again and again in a lifetime. All is well.

community opportunity

Call for Writers: We Want to Hear Your Voice!

Is writing one of your forms of expression? Have you been feeling a call or urge to share? Something I've learned about expression, is how much more potent and meaningful it can be for our healing when we allow it to be witnessed. Our Community Journal is wonderful, safe space for you to share your writing, and we are excited to breathe new life into it again in 2025!

I'm looking for writers who are willing to commit to a monthly posting schedule. If this is you, please contact me for details. Past and new writers welcome!

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Making Moves

Beth Barbaglia — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 23:07:17 +0000

Wooh! Where do I even begin...?? This year has been absolutely flying by. At the same time it has been a true moment to moment practice of staying fiercely present. As always, though certain times ask for more of this from us, right?

Some of you that are used to hearing from me a lot more may be feeling like I've been a little MIA these days. And I have been! And that's because the "action" part of that acronym has had me in a level of focus-mode this year beyond anything I've experienced thus far in my life.

It's been giving me even deeper meaning to my mantra, "one hour at a time".

I've shared before that I am someone who's soul has been assigned to grow and create and continuously heal and expand. I tend to grow through things (phases, experiences, jobs, people, places) quite quickly, and that can look a little wild to someone who doesn't know me well, or understand what it means to live in accordance with Intuition. Anymore I feel quite resolved about being misunderstood. It's ok with me if others are uncomfortable with the choices I make for myself.

It's my wish that everyone would feel this way. Is it the more challenging road a lot of times? Sure is. Trusting oneself and "doing it anyway" amidst the doubt, criticism, or resistance from others is no easy task. It requires great strength of heart, trust in one's self, and a devotion to one's own soul above all else – and a deep knowing that it is NOT selfish. Despite what the world may try to convince you to believe.

It's no one else's job (or business) to know what's Right for you.

And sometimes (ok, a lot of times!) YOU may not even know why you're being called to somewhere or something. The magic lies in stepping forward, even just a little, and trusting that you will be shown.

Imagine what's out there just waiting for you to discover it... This pull alone drives me to keep exploring. It drives me to keep taking risks, and choosing myself, my freedom, my life. One thing that imprinted deep within me at around 20 years old, a life philosophy that I have lived by ever since, is that I don't ever want to have to wonder 'what if?'

And so I risk. I leap. I dive into the unknown over and over again. I allow myself to be vulnerable, to reinvent, to start again. And let me tell you, living this way has been the greatest gift I've ever given myself. Make space for the Magic to lead you.

Are you ready to make moves and take a healing risk? Join me at EXPLORE Retreat!

FALL 2023 RETREAT DETAILS & RESERVATIONS

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It's All About Balance

Beth Barbaglia — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 19:32:00 +0000

...and just like that it's June! Here we are swiftly inching toward the longest day of the year. Preparing to honor the balance of dark and light, day and night, the official beginning of Summer. (Here in the Northern Hemisphere anyway...)

I am perpetually in awe of the way Mother Earth is teaching us everything we need to know about ourselves.. everything we need to understand about life and these bodies. Earth's seasons teach us how to evolve through our own personal seasons. We watch the plants and animals move through the cycle of death and life, and we learn that we too are in a constant cycle of shedding, metamorphosis, and rebirth..

A continual cycle of reflection, connection, inspiration, creation.

I feel deeply connected to the practice of balance – the work of remaining present amidst these ever-changing cycles. It is essential to our spiritual, emotional and physical health to give ourselves space to rest after a lot of exertion. To give ourselves time to go inward after a period of much output. To honor ourselves each time a piece of our old self dies and the Truth is reborn in us again. To acknowledge the shadow and light within ourselves, their unique expressions, and what they each have to teach us.

As we enter June and approach the Summer Solstice, I am in an especially reflective mood about all this. Taking stock of this year thus far, acknowledging all that's been healed and expressed and born already... Giving myself a moment of pause to honor what's unfolded up to now, and to hold space for all the significant shifts & births still to come in 2023.

Give yourself a moment to reflect on balance.

How does balance present itself in your life? Where is it lacking that you could intentionally bring in more of it? Where might you need to re-balance something that's gotten out of balance? The energy of this month is very supportive for self-reflection and re-commitment. Work with it consciously and intentionally, and watch what happens the rest of this year. You hold the key.