Do you feel connected to your truth? Meaning, do you feel in touch with what personally and authentically makes you tick? And if so, are you living in accordance with this deep truth?

So much of the time we resist whom we intimately know ourselves to be, by burying who we are and what we believe in. That we expend tremendous effort veiling and basically resisting our own truths seems downright bizarre, don’t you think? And exhausting to boot! But then again, exposing what we’re really all about is SCARY. It means thrusting out our necks, putting ourselves on the line, and setting ourselves up to be seriously seen.

In the last few weeks I’ve had the gift of extra contemplative time. In this quiet alone space, I’ve been pressed so closely up against the truth of my life—my struggles and triumphs and the emanation of what and who I essentially am—that there were spells when I literally couldn’t catch my breath, so overcome was I at the enormity of it all.

There was nowhere left to hide, cover up, pretend or fend off my truth, the unadulterated essence of me, moment by moment by moment. Of course riotous feelings swirled up in threatening gusts and I had to work even harder to stay right there, to stay stable. But you know what? It was worth it. You know why? Because I have emerged so much clearer, so much stronger, so much more keen on this wildly shifting panorama of life.

The three questions that came up out of this steady beholding of truth were:

1. Now what?

2. How does this inform my day-to-day life?

3. Is how I live aligned with my truth?

And these three questions are the same ones I encourage you to ask, and to ask yourself a lot! The first thing to do however is get in touch with your profound truth, and to commit to touching it over and over again. Let it direct you as you move in one direction or another along your path. Let it be your ultimate guide.

If you are, like me, devoted to your own joyful evolution, there is no other way. Why not start now? Not tomorrow, or the next day, or the next…

It might at first feel weird, this digging in. But sooner than you think, the beauty and relief of living in truth will completely overtake you. Then you’ll see the sky really is the limit.

In sweet truth,

Maggie

Ever since my teens, and because I had such a rough and turbulent childhood, I have found great solace in the act of looking inward as both a healing mechanism from early suffering and as opportunity to develop and celebrate a rich inner life, free from baggage and my seriously messed up history.

Fast forward 20 years and I have grown more and more rooted in this sense of the private and interior—meditating and yoga-practicing—me. What I have also experienced recently is how often divergent my private, peaceful, wise, and profoundly accepting self is from the more overwhelmed and erratic, frequently anxious and in a flutter person I tend to be in public. Can anyone else relate?

Fresh off the coattails of a heavenly and seriously illuminating retreat, I have been staring a lot at the incredibly strong divide between my deeply private self and my more overwhelmed public one. And, I have to say: this divide really bothers me!

In a time when social media expectation and cultural trending require more and more disclosure, more and more revealing, I think there’s been major backlash, and not in the form of others having too much information, but rather in that the representations we end up putting out there match less and less with the essential nature of who we are internally.

Now that I am back in the throes of New York City and more hip to how I protect my retreating self from the glare of the public eye, my question to you is this: Where are you happiest? When you are your most private, intimate, and peeled back, OR when you are intentionally not?

Next question: Do you think it possible to live as your deeper private self more of the time, by letting the light of who you are shine through and dropping the armor and disguise? I certainly do.

The best place to start is in getting to know the traits of both your private intimate self, and the buffering traits of your public persona—I’ve even diagrammed my two selves. Once you’ve really studied your inner and outer apparitions, then the practice of the slow integration of the “real” you into all that you do can begin. Make sense?

To me, this merging of private and public is key to soothing our suffering. Similar to “what you see is what you get,” I love “who you see is who I am.” No B.S. No act. No veil. Just the pure beautiful emanations of who we essentially are.

I’m in. Are you?

In sweetness,

Maggie

Every April, I go on private retreat. It has become something of a ritual and something by which my internal clock is deeply, critically regulated. The feeling that begins to creep up right about now is that I’ve spent the entire year, from one April to the next, intensely committed to navigating and celebrating life on the outside, and am ready, I mean really ready, to blessedly turn up yet again on the other coast, my childhood coast, for 7 blissful days where my job will be to simply turn inwards and in essence return to myself.

I spend most of my time on a meditation cushion, though this is certainly not what everyone else does. I also laugh and share with dear friends, seriously commune with nature, harvest organic vegetables for my delicious meals, get some strong massage, journal, and do loads of restorative yoga. Still, it’s not so much about the activities we do, but about the quality of what happens when we give ourselves over so fully to self-care, which in my case happens to translate as a whole lot of introspection.

Luckily for all, there are myriads of retreats from which to choose, spanning from silent and serious ones, to nature or yoga or cooking or creativity-oriented ones. The main thing about retreat, versus a splashy or culturally steeped vacation, is that the culture being investigated is not some fabulous city or ecosystem, but rather YOU.

The boon of retreat comes from embarking on one that is aligned with what makes you tick and that is equally capable of setting the stage for you to receive what you profoundly need. Sometimes you won’t know if this is the case until you’ve actually come back to the “real” world, and experienced the shifts in you.

Some solid questions to ask yourself after the fact might be:

1. Do I feel rested, refreshed, and rejuvenated?
2. Do I have more energy to face and steadily handle whatever life throws my way?
3. Am I clearer about who I am, what I am doing, and how I might contribute?
4. Are there changes I now know I need to make in my life?
5. Am I ready to make those changes?

These are the ones that immediately come to mind, though there are many others that will surely arise for you.

I am of course writing this on the eve of my journey—not yet there, but close—and tune up here I come! Doesn’t it make perfect sense for us all to dive into this kind of regular maintenance? I obviously think so. What about you?

For now, let’s just say, I’m falling off the grid.

Next post coming in May, folks!

In sweetness and peace,

ML

The magic of the new season, daffodils, cherry branches, and all, has definitely hit. I am again marveling at how like clockwork it is for us all to go into major makeover mode this time of year!

It’s like there is something so beautifully rich and rooted in the nature of spring, that all us earthbound creatures impulsively want to shed clothes, toss clutter, empty closets, detox our bodies, and dust the cobwebs off our seemingly unpolished lives.

This go-round, though I am still intensely supportive and all in favor of clearing away debris, I am also thinking differently about the rite of spring cleaning. I am thinking beyond it, or rather, emphasizing the accomplice to what it is really all about.

In other words, I am profoundly considering what this innate desire to free ourselves from dirt—both inside and out—is essentially for. In my mind, it is to welcome abundance, transformation, inspiration, and thrill into our lives. Sounds simple and obvious, yes, but can be awfully hard to remember, don’t you think?

We get so bogged down by the work of diligently casting off our garbage, that we lose sight of the jewels in the proverbial rough that are always right here, pulsing and gleaming, and ready to be revealed.

These jewels are essentially our very own vibrant and already whole selves.

Just as poet e.e. cummings in his beloved ‘in Just-spring’ reminds us of the play and delight so reflexive of the season, I am also here to remind and cheer you in celebrating while you work the freshness and wonder of the more and more beautifully peeled back YOU.

From my truest and deepest heart, here’s to Spring Cleaning!

In sweetness,

ML

How often do you feel exuberant and intensely loving of your life? Is this way of being the norm or is it a sensation you merely touch upon in particularly happy moments?

I am a huge supporter of, and have in fact devoted my life’s work to inspiring others and myself to love being alive, and to be equally grateful for these specific lives each of us has so graciously been given.

This personally hasn’t come easy, and ironically has arisen from feeling for the bulk of my 36 years decidedly less than in the life-I’ve-been-given department. Yet, quite miraculously, and since a profoundly catalytic spiritual experience at age 33 while on holiday in Cabo San Lucas, I have pledged whole-heartedly to LIVE.

What I mean here is not just to exist by keeping my head above water, but to fully embrace and seriously love all the experiences—up, down, and upside down—of being alive. Or, as Zen great Suzuki Roshi puts it much more succinctly, “The only way is to enjoy your life.”

Believe me, it hasn’t all been a cakewalk. Still, my internal acceptance of and awe at what has and continues to happen as I step authentically along my path has made it pretty wonder-full.

How so? I was urged in my Cabo experience to deepen my understanding of what it means to be alive. Since then, I have prioritized fostering an ever-evolving rich interior life, namely through meditation, affirmation, and visualization practices, and too, very quiet yoga. Secondly, and almost more convincingly, I have worked hard at cultivating a more intuitive, fulfilling connection to the things in the outside world that bring me joy, and too, have changed and sometimes even muted my relationship to the things that create undo stress.

Now I won’t pretend to sit here and know exactly how you should go about seizing the day and loving your sparkling precious life. Only you know what thrills and depresses you, and so much of this comes from tapping the seriously wise voice inside.

I do however hope that my words spark you enough to open up and allow for that spirited inner light to beam and guide you into discovering and manifesting your own unique and celebratory way of being.

Here’s to LIVING and LOVING your life!

In sweetness,

ML

Sometimes in this great wide world, it is hard to keep alive in our minds our connection to spirit. So mired are we in the chaos, the demands, and desires that lay claim to the bulk of our fixative thoughts, that our divinity, yes, our own true sacredness, appears lost.

Let me be one more supportive soul to tell you (and me) that no matter how far away or blunted our lives feel from the emanation and presence of a deeper consciousness and energy, spirit is always at work and play within us. What is blunted is not at all its holy presence, but our trust that it is still or ever there, especially when things feel icky, horrible, stressful beyond imagination, or just so busy we can’t get a breath in edgewise.

This has never felt more extreme than when I was intensely sick in 2007 and 2008. It seems strange now to be writing this, but day after day for those entire two years I felt such a blanket of burden from what my body was going through, and such a profound soul loneliness, that my will to live was basically gone. What’s also uncanny about my illness was that I inaccurately thought that I was being punished, that there must be no divinity at all, when in fact, spirit was doing everything it could, using all its glorious power to get me to actually wake up, pay attention, and to finally heal and transform my life.

Guess what? I eventually, blessedly did.

One great exercise to practice cultivating your connection to spirit can happen before you get out bed in the mornings. This is actually a prime time to connect with your divinity, when you are still not yet fully consumed by the small, limiting, ego-driven mind that embroils us in suffering so much of the time.

1. Stay horizontal, and with your eyes closed, experience yourself breathing in bed. Feel the calming and elemental nature of the rise and fall of your breath. Either out loud or within yourself, send out a soft hello. Literally send out a greeting to the essence of spirit in and around you.

2. Acknowledge—and this has nothing to do with whether you are single or not—that you are not (and in fact) never alone. Appreciate that you can always live supported by, and if you allow yourself to be, guided by the presence of spirit in everything you do.

3. Reinforce your commitment to living as fulfilled and as authentically as you can, without trying to control the journey. In understanding that it is often best to give up the reins, and in putting your trust in something bigger than you, the space is cleared for a much stronger, more outright emergence of spirit.

4. Thank yourself and the spirit within you for the precious time you have initiated at the start of your day. Open your eyes and begin to really wake up, more conscious, more secure, more at ease than is typically the case. Repeat the next morning.

I know there are some mornings where it feels close to impossible to give yourself an extra split second, between alarms going off, kids needing attending to, better yet, sick kids needing attention, and all the strains of what might have happened the night before adding to your urgency about what hasn’t yet gotten done.

But try, just try to give yourself this sweet little sliver a few times a week, and then, perhaps this pattern will stick. Perhaps it will become the norm, where this quiet, simple connection to the divine marks the beginning of a long, deep, slow, and beautifully unfolding interior relationship.

In sweetness and spirit,

ML

I’ve suffered a lot in my life. From a young age, I was so busy figuring out how to survive, that looking compassionately—with love, warmth, and kindness—upon myself was simply too hard to come by. When I was introduced to Buddhism at 16, I began in my brain to grapple with healing from within, and started to believe, intellectually at least, in the power of compassion to soothe life’s hurts.

Oh how I loved this idea of compassion! Finally a way of living and understanding the world that spoke to the truth of my existence! It was like a huge light bulb flashing on in my brain! Still, no matter how hard I tried, I could only narrowly find the feeling of compassion for others, and even less so for myself. As I continued to sit in meditation over the years, it became glaringly clear that knowing, adoring, and believing in compassion in our heads is totally distinct from feeling and experiencing it in our hearts.

I wasn’t hard-hearted, but sad-hearted, and closed off as a protective measure from all the hurt and difficulty I’d seen. Not only had I shielded myself from reliving the agony of my pain, but I had also shielded myself from the possibility of awakening deep joy and kindness within. Precisely because of this, precisely because I couldn’t point the arrows of compassion inwards, my ability to fully point them outwards was also thwarted.

It took almost 15 years from my first exposure to Zen to actually feel compassion. I credit this exclusively to having my first child at that time. Giving birth to my now 7-year-old son Gavin was indeed the moment when I actually understood what compassion was all about, namely letting our hearts crack open enough to feel the pain of others while simultaneously committing to loving and doing everything in your power to save them, no matter what. When I stared down into that sweet, needy, born small, and a little early face, wow did the compassion-blocking chains on my heart burst apart.

There really is something magical about one’s own child, or anyone else for that matter incredibly reliant on our tenderness and care, to elicit compassion in our hearts, especially when we haven’t had the greatest track record of feeling it for ourselves.

There is also no right way, no one-way ticket to experiencing compassion. Some feel it for themselves first, then for others after, or the feeling for another opens the floodgates inwards and then pours it back out. It honestly doesn’t matter, so long as over the course of our lives, we soften to compassion, and observe this sweet negotiation between its loving flow in and its loving flow out.

The essential point is that we drop out of our heads, and awaken compassion down below, or in other words, that we experience in wonder how compassion ultimately flowers open and sets free our hearts.

In sweet compassion,

ML

There’s nothing quite like getting sick, and being forced to rest with a capital R, to remind us of the power of quiet. I am coming off 10 days of this exactly, sparked by—thanks to my two sick kids—an intensely sore throat, massive congestion, and a full-fledged bout of laryngitis.

But, and believe me when I tell you how much I loathe being sick, this taking to my bed has been a blessing. Besides seizing every possible opportunity to nap, I’ve also spent a great deal of time staring out the window at the trees in the park outside, experiencing the whimsy of each singular breath, and steeping myself in hour upon hour of lovely quiet.

When we pay attention, the magic of imposed quiet is that what is happening in the external world begins to deeply impact and shape our willingness and ability to tune into the infinite silence of our internal worlds. In other words, getting quiet on the outside enables us to experience the meaty depths of the quiet inside.

This might sound weird or even threatening, and this is so totally understandable given the fast-paced high-volume tempo of our modern lives. At first stepping inside quiet might indeed prove uncomfortable, with our wild minds scampering for anything to drown out the loom and mystery of what lies beneath the surface.

Yet, once we open to the possibility of living sans iPhone, sans video, sans chatter and barrage, if even for 5 minutes, the peace and sense of knowing that arises is incomparable.

Shall we try it now?

1. Stop whatever it is you are doing. Unplug, turn off, and disconnect all the noisemakers in your immediate distracting world. Now close your eyes.
2. Take a moment to connect with your breath. Notice it. Whether shallow or slow, simply accept it and allow your observation to draw you into the present moment.
3. Appreciate this sensation of now, and let your ears accustom to the quiet you have created on the outside. Experience this outer silence.
4. Let the quiet on the outside enable you to sink deeper into your essential self. Appreciate the quiet and serenity here, within you. Stay for as long as you like.
5. When you are ready, bring your awareness back to your breath and the subtleties of the room around you. Open your eyes and absorb what’s just happened.

Well? How was it? There’s not much more to say, other than that I am a huge fan of practicing quiet. You’ll be amazed by the questions answered, the malaises put to rest, and the fears that are tamed in this enveloping space.

More than anything, add this simple quieting exercise to your daily toolkit. Awakening to the wonder of silence in you is like hitting the jackpot, and I promise you, a whole lot more valuable.

In sweet quiet,

ML

I am SO grateful for this miraculous life. I can’t explain exactly how I’ve been thrust into such an evocative and openhearted place of gratitude exactly, but wow am I feeling open, sunny, and joyful, and just so totally appreciative of the wonder of this all.

I won’t lie. There are days when this grateful place feels far away, like on the other side of the world. Today however just doesn’t happen to be one of them.

I am also practiced enough to know not to hold onto this vibrant feeling for dear life as we all tend to do when we are having a particularly happy moment and don’t want it to end. But I am basking in the gratitude right now and saying thank you for the feeling of thanks itself, and also fully absorbing the adage that the more we feel grateful, the more there is to be grateful for. It’s like magic this wildly generous energy!

Gratitude’s self-generating quality reminds me of the children’s book The Funny Little Woman that I read to my son and the magic rice paddle the little woman ends up with. When she stirs rice with the paddle, it turns one grain of rice into two, and continues to multiply the rice into twice of itself, until the woman has made the most rice dumplings in all of Japan. Talk about abundance!

Without further ado, and inspired by the power of this incredible self-multiplication attribute, here is my of-the-moment gratitude list, shared with you in the hope that it might inspire more and more lists to pop up and sprout from your very own pens or keyboards.

Here goes:

I am grateful for the peace, pleasure, and openheartedness of this lazy Sunday.

I am grateful for The Grateful Dead concert blasting on Sirius radio.

I am grateful for the bright sun streaming in the windows and for the park outside.

I am grateful for and beyond blessed with my amazing sweetheart of a husband.

I am grateful for my two beautiful happy children, brimming with vitality and life.

I am grateful for the wonderful enveloping bed that I am resting on as I type.

I am grateful for the green apple, cashew butter, and brown rice pasta sustaining me.

I am grateful for not having to be anywhere, do anything, or meet any deadline today.

I am grateful for the Buddhas, roses, books, and photos sitting on my altar.

I am grateful for my sweet restorative yoga and meditation practices.

I am grateful for my body, this so sacred vessel.

I am grateful for the divinity in this day, this life, and in us all.

That’s my list for the moment you all, though I feel like it could go on forever. But why would I ever do that, when this would take time away from you jumping in and getting going on yours?

Happy Gratitude.

In sweetness,

ML

I have a special place in my home, one that is filled with love, safety, and all the makings of the most serene of havens. It is my meditation and yoga space, a small strip of wood for my mat and props, nestled beside an intimate corner of the rug in my bedroom, both of which face onto my altar and beyond that the park outside the windows.

Over the years, this space has grown into the sturdiest, steadiest of harbors where I have opened to incredible joy and also taken refuge in times of intense difficulty, when everything feels like too much.

It is where I am at once most connected to the heavens, and too, most rooted to the earth. In other words, it is my go-to spot.

Where, do tell, is yours?

In the work I do as a holistic lifestyle consultant, I spend a great deal of time supporting my clients in creating their own sacred and deeply personal spaces, as emblems to eventually lead them into the divinity within themselves. This might sound obvious to you. Yet, the slow and deliberate process of building sanctuary, the careful laying down of one’s most precious nest is much like the work of a bird with twigs clenched in its beak, whose efforts are not only single-minded but downright devotional.

The human search begins with finding all the tangible stuff with which to decorate our special harbors—figurines, cushions, messages, photos, flowers, candles, or whatever else is meaningful. In time, after repeatedly dropping anchor in our newly created lairs, the training wheels come off. We come to realize that our swaddling spaces are there to ultimately support us in dropping anchor into our blessed selves.

Though we, like in all love relationships, at times rebel from our sanctuaries—too intense, too exposing—we tend to always circle back to them in the end.

I remember being on bed rest in 2009, in the third trimester of my pregnancy, and not being able to sit in my practice space. I would brush by it on my way to bed, and from there appreciate the truth of what it had to offer. Even when empty, the mere presence of my dependable nest provided me with that sense of original haven, and reminded me that no matter where I was I could always tap the peaceful place of worship inside.

This essentially is the nature of sanctuary, don’t you think? It teaches us that wherever we are, with or without prop, we are all already home.

In sweet sanctuary,

ML