that just might be the one that would launch her. When Gwen wasn’t auditioning, networking, or exercising (to keep herself camera-ready), she was writing material, making videos, and submitting them.  And when she wasn’t doing that, she was waitressing and bartending to pay rent on her tiny studio apartment in a bad neighborhood.

Gwen was tough on herself, too.  If she ever wanted to take a day off or just skip an exercise class, she would attack herself: How do you expect to get there if you’re not willing to do everything it takes? You’ll get a day off when you make it.  In her mind, unless she chased every carrot, no matter what it did to her in the process, she would never make it to the top, and worse, she would blame herself for not being willing to do what it took to get there.  But living this way was difficult and painful; Gwen was not only utterly exhausted and overwhelmed with shoulds, but also suffering at the hands of her own internal critic.

After a decade of pushing, her career had stayed at basically the same level.  And yet, her level of exhaustion and suffering had gotten far worse.  Ten years of never saying no had left her weary and bordering on bitter.  And deeply disappointed.  The story she had always told herself, that her time would come, was wearing thin and feeling less believable.  Most importantly, she was growing tired of the life she was actually living — her real one, not the imaginary one that would happen when she was famous.

With a lot of hard work and tears, Gwen was finally able to admit to herself that she didn’t want to keep living such a grueling life, under the whip of an internal slave-driver, or to keep living it on the fumes of a dream.  She wanted a life that she wanted to be living—now.  Her present experience had finally become something that mattered; she had become someone who mattered.  At last, Gwen chose to hang up her comedian’s hat and enter graduate school.

For the first time in Gwen’s life, she wasn’t striving every minute to try to get somewhere else, to become someone else who was more important.  She liked herself and felt at peace for the first time.  She even discovered that she positively loved puttering around doing very little, which, in her previous incarnation, was something she had never known or allowed herself.  Mostly, she was deeply proud of herself for having had the courage to step off the treadmill of striving for success.

And then she met Brendon.  Her new boyfriend was a jet-setter, a successful entrepreneur on the fast track to big things.  Filled with ambition and talent, he also never missed an opportunity to attend an event, network, or just go the extra mile, whatever was needed to score the deal.  He was always chasing after something and usually getting it.  As Gwen described it, Brendon was the male version of her old self, but a winning one.

Shortly into their relationship, Gwen started talking about needing to get back into comedy.  She began making casual references to herself as boring.  Her coursework, which had been fascinating just weeks before, was now dull and mediocre.  For the first time since she had left comedy, she was feeling disappointed in herself.  She felt inadequate, a failure.  The life that had been enjoyable, hard-earned, and courageous, and most importantly, one that finally belonged to her, was now empty and unexciting—far too average for Brendon.  And indeed, she imagined that she herself was far too average for Brendon.

Just two months into her new relationship, the self-worth and pride she had earned in the very difficult process of changing careers, letting go of a dream, and building a new identity, had, for the most part, slipped away.  Gwen had lost connection with what her life meant through her eyes and was now seeing it through the lens of what it would look like to her boyfriend.  How she felt about herself was now defined by how she imagined Brendon would perceive her.  The respect Gwen had built for her own journey was gone, reduced to a few judgments by which her new boyfriend would label it.

As women, this is sometimes what we do—to ourselves.  We ignore, dismiss, and throw away our own experience, what our journey means to us, what we know to be true about ourselves, and replace it with other people’s definitions and perceptions of our life.  We do this habitually, without even knowing we’re doing it.

If we want to break this self-abandoning habit, we have to first become aware of it.  We have to become conscious of our willingness and compulsion to sacrifice our own experience in favor of others people’s versions of it.  Once we can see ourselves giving away our truth, see the suffering it causes us, and see the absurdity of it, then we can stop doing it.  But first, we have to get good and fed up with giving ourselves away.  With awareness and a lot of practice, we can learn to stay connected to our own experience, to stand in our own truth, to define our own journey, even in the face of other people’s opinions, and those who see us differently than who we know ourselves to be.  For now, start paying attention to how and when you give away your own story, and let others write it for you.  Practice taking back your own authority, whatever that means to you.

The post How We, as Women, Give Away Our Power appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment, on purpose, and without judgment, according to Jon Kabat Zinn, a leader and teacher in the mindfulness movement. While we can easily define it, it seems that being it is not so easy. Despite all our talk of mindfulness, studies indicate that most people are only here, paying attention in the present moment, 50% of the time.  That said we miss out on half our life, with our attention somewhere other than where we are.

Rather than take the usual, culturally-accepted model and suggest another thing to go out and become, get, do, study, buy, or otherwise accomplish in order to attain mindfulness, perhaps it’s wiser to turn our attention into ourselves and investigate what gets in the way of our being present.  What are the obstacles to being here now?

The first and most obvious obstacle to being present is distraction. We’re in a constant state of motion, busyness, and getting to somewhere else—using our devices, substances, entertainment, chatter, and anything else we can find to avoid here, now.  Doing is our first line of defense against being present.

The most treacherous impediment to mindful attention however, even more than busyness and activity, is thought. The mind, maker of thoughts, is forever chattering, distracting us, telling us stories, beckoning us to not be where we are, but rather get involved in the tickertape of plot twists it’s creating.

When it comes to avoiding the present moment, we tend to employ a handful of habitual thinking patterns.  First, we keep ourselves safe from now by narrating our experience as it’s happening. We follow ourselves around, perpetually commenting on our own experience.  “Oh look, I’m having a good time here, this is going well, they seem to like me” and so it goes, the voice over of now—soundtrack to our life.  All day and night we tell ourselves the story of ourselves, story of our life.  Sadly, we live the voice over but not the life itself.

So too, we disappear from the now by continually packaging our experience as it’s happening, preparing the story that will later tell the tale of our current experience.  As our present moment is unfolding we’re preoccupied with transcribing the now into a summary or narrative, ever-readying the now for some future explanation or presentation for others or perhaps just ourselves.

And then come the big three: the thought patterns that are always running in the background of mind, subtly or actively pulling our attention away from here.

How Thoughts Block Us From Being Fully Present

Boots on the ground mindfulness: removing the obstacles to being here now.

Posted Aug 11, 2018

Source: Val Toch/Unsplash

If just one word were to go in a time capsule to represent our society right now, the word would have to be “mindfulness.” Mindfulness is in every book title, workshop, conversation, idea, and everything else we now encounter.  We’re a society obsessed with mindfulness.  So what is this thing we’re all talking about and presumably trying to create? And how do we do it—become mindful?

Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment, on purpose, and without judgment, according to Jon Kabat Zinn, a leader and teacher in the mindfulness movement. While we can easily define it, it seems that being it is not so easy. Despite all our talk of mindfulness, studies indicate that most people are only here, paying attention in the present moment, 50% of the time.  That said we miss out on half our life, with our attention somewhere other than where we are.

Rather than take the usual, culturally-accepted model and suggest another thing to go out and become, get, do, study, buy, or otherwise accomplish in order to attain mindfulness, perhaps it’s wiser to turn our attention into ourselves and investigate what gets in the way of our being present.  What are the obstacles to being here now?

The first and most obvious obstacle to being present is distraction. We’re in a constant state of motion, busyness, and getting to somewhere else—using our devices, substances, entertainment, chatter, and anything else we can find to avoid here, now.  Doing is our first line of defense against being present.

The most treacherous impediment to mindful attention however, even more than busyness and activity, is thought. The mind, maker of thoughts, is forever chattering, distracting us, telling us stories, beckoning us to not be where we are, but rather get involved in the tickertape of plot twists it’s creating.

When it comes to avoiding the present moment, we tend to employ a handful of habitual thinking patterns.  First, we keep ourselves safe from now by narrating our experience as it’s happening. We follow ourselves around, perpetually commenting on our own experience.  “Oh look, I’m having a good time here, this is going well, they seem to like me” and so it goes, the voice over of now—soundtrack to our life.  All day and night we tell ourselves the story of ourselves, story of our life.  Sadly, we live the voice over but not the life itself.

So too, we disappear from the now by continually packaging our experience as it’s happening, preparing the story that will later tell the tale of our current experience.  As our present moment is unfolding we’re preoccupied with transcribing the now into a summary or narrative, ever-readying the now for some future explanation or presentation for others or perhaps just ourselves.

And then come the big three: the thought patterns that are always running in the background of mind, subtly or actively pulling our attention away from here.

-Why is this present moment happening?

-What does this now say about me and my life?

-What do I need to do about this now?

Our tendency is to experience the present moment through at least one and usually more than one of these thoughts.  Rather than being where we are, we busily attend to the who, what, where, when and why of where we are.

And then there’s fear.  Thoughts are a way the mind tries to manage its fear of and lack of trust in the present moment.  Rather than risk diving into now, into the river of life, we stay on the shore, using our mind to manage, control and make linear sense of our present experience, in the hopes of steering now in a direction we design. The mind doesn’t believe that we can relax into the unknown of the present moment, show up fully where we are, experience now without controlling where it’s headed. It doesn’t trust life to take care of us, but instead imagines that it must make life happen, and direct our path at all times.

In reality, the present moment doesn’t need the mind to make it happen; now is unfolding without the mind’s help.  When we live the present moment without thinking it, the mind is left without a task, without something to do, figure out, or solve.  It has no bone to chew on.  For this reason, the mind vehemently rejects the now, using this moment to generate ideas and issues that will require its own attention and input.

Furthermore, the mind subsists on the past and future; it alternates between turning now into a projection into the future and a narrative on the past. The now, however, is a space poised between the two locations or concepts, past and future. The present moment is a gap between the two.  In truth, it’s always now–now offers a vertical eternity. When we dive fully into the present moment, we step out of the linear timeline altogether. We are liberated from the shackles of time.  In response and rebellion, the mind grabs hold of now, through thought, and places it back into a timeline, thereby re-orienting itself in a way it can understand.

It’s often said that we avoid the present moment to avoid ourselves.  But in fact, when we dive fully into the present moment, are fully engaged in our experience, as in the flow state, what we discover, paradoxically, is that we lose ourselves.  We disappear, and that’s precisely what makes it so delicious and makes us want to return again and again.  In full presence or flow state, we don’t experience ourselves as separate, as the one living the experience; there is only the experience of which we are a part.

We’re always running from the present moment, not to escape ourselves, but to escape the absence of ourselves.  The battle with the present moment is an existential battle for the mind; the flight from now is its fight to exist.

Living the now, without a narrative, requires a death or at least temporary letting go of mind. When the mind stops talking to us, there’s nothing there to remind us of our own existence, we’re left unaware of ourselves, in a state of void.  That said, the mind abhors the present moment just as natureabhors a vacuum.

But in fact, when we have the courage to drop out of mind and into the present moment, what we find is the opposite of a void.  We find wholeness, an experience without an experiencer.  We encounter ourselves as presence inseparable from life, rather than a person who is living, directing, managing, and controlling this thing called life.  In the process, we discover liberation and something as close as I’ve ever found to the end of suffering.

To begin practicing this paradigm shift, start small.  Every now and again, glance around your surroundings and just look, see what’s there without going to thought or language to understand or name what you’re seeing.  Experience your environment without using mind to translate what your senses are taking in.  Simply allow your awareness to be aware without interpretation.  So too, if you ever meditate or spend time focusing on your breath, try paying attention to the spaces between breaths as well. Feel the sensations occurring in the gaps between the inhalation and the exhalation. This simple practice can offer a direct taste of the present moment without the interruption of thought. And finally, every now and again, invite yourself to stop and drop. Deliberately unhook from the storyline going on in your head and shift your attention down below your neck into the silence and presence in your own body.  Experience being as its own place, without thought.

These and other simple pointers can escort us into a radically new experience of living; they can be used as portals to a serenity that the mind, no matter how much it wants to be involved, cannot figure out or create.  When we’re fully present, living now directly rather than the mind’s interpretation of it, a palpable peace unfolds—a peace that surpasses all the mind’s understanding.

The post How Thoughts Get in the Way of Being Present appeared first on Nancy Colier.

I immediately flipped open my laptop and started researching. Researching what?  Everything, anything, something that would interest me, something to do, something to fill the space.

After distractedly surfing through movie schedules and museum exhibits, I had a thought: “sound baths.” Within seconds, Google had delivered a page of options on the new auditory class that meditation and yoga studios now offer. I inattentively skimmed through several descriptions and testimonials on the bath experience, as well as schedules for five or six studios that offered it. Rapidly scanning the pages, I wasn’t able to find a class for the day at hand. In the process, however, I bumped into a link for the 10 hardest workouts in New York City. Wouldn’t that be a great idea, I thought, and so I flitted through a whole host of kettle ball, circuit training, and boot camp options, none of which sounded remotely like something I wanted to actually do.

I am not sure what happened next, but I found myself inside a list of vacation destinations with direct flights from New York. Seems I had followed a link for “easy family holidays that won’t break the bank.” Inside one of the hotel write-ups was a description of a garden that sat on the sea, which reminded me of a neighborhood park that I had read about, but not yet visited. I found the park online and superficially perused its history and hours for visiting. But then I remembered that I needed a new pair of sneakers. And so I sped over to the Nike site and discovered that there were so many new styles, all of which were so fabulous that I couldn’t decide. The only pair I investigated further wasn’t available in my size. At this point, I went back to movies, because I had a thought about a documentary on a runner. But it turned out the film was only playing way downtown and that didn’t appeal. What then followed was a speed train through hot yoga studios, great city walks, dog parks for shy dogs, independent bookstores, places to buy cooking supplies, and kirtan performances — which is when I woke up.

I shut my computer and took a deep breath, pulling the air down into my body. “Stop,” I said to myself. “Just stop.” I looked at my watch: I had been down the rabbit hole for two hours. Two of my five free hours were gone. I felt agitated, anxious, and paralyzed, entirely overwhelmed with possibilities, but unable to move on any of them. I was “twired” — tired and wired at the same time. I put my hand on my heart and felt the simplicity of stillness.

“Come home,” I said to myself. “Be here.” I then unhooked from all the ideas of what I should or could do with my time and just felt into my body, felt my own physical presence. I took a few conscious breaths and invited myself to relax and land where I was, now.

What happened next was that I felt an immediate sense of relief and peace, to be allowed to be where I was and to not have to do anything at all, nothing other than pay attention to what I was actually experiencing.

I became aware of a longing to call a particular friend. I also felt the desire to take a walk, to be with myself and to be outside. That’s what came to me, organically, when I dropped into my body and now.

One of the problems that technology is creating for us is a feeling that we should be constantly taking advantage of every opportunity available to us —and that if we’re not, we are somehow missing out on life. We believe that there is something somewhere inside Google that will make this moment complete, someplace else that is better than where we are, something more that we ought to be doing. We no longer ask ourselves, or let ourselves discover what we want to do. Rather, we ask Google what’s possible, or what we can do. The thing is, what we can do is often very different from what we want to do. We find frequently that what we want to do is much simpler than what we can do. And also that when we listen in to what we actually want, from the body, the answer is clear and without ambivalence or confusion; it has a sense of “Oh yes, that’s right” — unlike the “can and should do’s,” which leave us feeling murky without the clear “Yes” that comes with truth.

Technology creates an infinite number of choices. We can do anything at any time.  And yet while we may delight in the idea of choice, research shows that when we have too many choices, we actually end up unhappy, deadened, overwhelmed, fatigued, and immobilized. With unlimited choices, we frequently end up making no choice at all. And if we are able to make a decision amid the mountain of choices, we generally feel less satisfied with our choice and more concerned that another option would have served us better. Unlimited choices also cause us to shut down our creative thinking. When presented with too many options, we often revert to the simplest one, or consider only one manageable variable in making our selection. The more technology beckons with possibilities, the more we humans pull the covers over our heads and find ourselves frozen in a perpetual state of both too much and not enough.

The issue, too, is that we are looking outside of ourselves for our own truth. When we have a free afternoon, we look to the internet, hoping to find something that will generate interest in us. When we cook dinner, we go surfing on Instagram to find a picture of something that will tell us what we want to eat. When something happens in our life, we post the experience to find out what it should and will mean to us.

We have forgotten that we can know things through our own experience. We have forgotten that the process of knowing can happen from the inside out and not the outside in.

Source: logoboom/Shutterstock

The next time you find yourself with a chunk of unscheduled time, even just a little (e.g., standing in line, riding public transportation), try living it in a new way  — or, at least, differently than I did — and create a new habit. Instead of immediately searching outside yourself, on your phone or computer, to find something that might interest you, something to fill the time, drop into yourself, into now. Feel your body, the sensations arising, how you are in that exact moment. Pay attention inside; notice if there is a natural longing or interest already present. If nothing comes, that’s fine; just stay still and keep attending. Practice not doing, not filling the time, not habitually forcing something into every open space as soon as it appears. In so “doing,” you are, in fact, turning yourself, now, into a destination and a place to be.

The post Why You Should Stop Asking Google What to Do With Your Life appeared first on Nancy Colier.

I developed a 30-Day Tech Detox after a woman I know and respect — someone I consider wise and aware and thus immune to tech addiction — literally begged me to…

Read more: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2017/01/04/try-the-30-day-digital-detox-challenge/#33e660717dbe

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This is a meditation to help you remember where home is.  You are always here, in your heart, closer than a breath away.  Your heart is always awaiting your presence, awaiting your attention, awaiting you.  Know that your refuge is always available to and inside you.  Come home to you.

The post Meditation: Coming Home to Your Heart appeared first on Nancy Colier.

And then I went home.

I love my family, my work, and so much about my life.  I am so lucky and I know it.  But as re-entries go, the instant I walked in the door on Sunday afternoon, I was immediately catapulted back into the “normal” world.   Tasks, responsibilities, groceries, broken cell phones, dishes… all the usual stuff that is modern life, hit me like a major league pitch to the head.  And with that too came the always present (blessed) need for my attention, from everyone.  I needed to be caught up on what I had missed while away.  The overpowering truth that I had lived over the past three days, on the other hand, was unsharable, at least in language.  And certainly I could not expect those who had not experienced it to “get” it in any real way or, for that matter, be particularly interested in it.  Life at home, regular as it is, needed my attention—now.  In an instant, I had left the place for bathing in the ineffable profundity and meaning of existence, stoking awe for this human experience, and steeping in gratitude for getting to be alive.  Back in everyday life, it was no longer about the meaning of life, it was about the doing of that life.

It was a painful re-entry, not because I wasn’t thrilled to be with those I love, but because it felt like a loss, like in order to re-enter life, I had to give up my beautiful connection with the Divine, as if I had to come back up and swim at the surface when I had been down deep in the beauty of the timeless.

The experience got me thinking a lot about whether it’s indeed possible to feel awe and gratitude for being alive—all the time?  Can we stay connected to the profound when living the mundane?  Can we hold onto the sacred in the midst of the regular, stressful world of living—stay tethered to what really matters when doing what needs to be done?

It turns out that there’s good news and bad news.  The bad news first: it is not possible (unless perhaps you’re enlightened and I’m not so I can’t vouch for it) to feel wonder and awe all the time.  While self-help gurus tell us that we should be in a continual state of astonishment that we can walk, or bliss because we can experience the color blue, in truth, if we have always walked and always seen blue, it isn’t always possible to see these experiences as mind-blowing or particularly fabulous.  There is nothing wrong with you if the activities of normal life do not evoke a sense of great reverence.  Sometimes, after someone has died or we have lived through a trauma of some kind, we, for a time, crack through the window of the sacred.  We get what it means to be alive, and to have this gift of incarnation.  And then, usually, that sense of awe at being alive closes and we return to the everyday with perhaps just a slight scent of the sacred left behind.  The truth is, we have only ever known ourselves to be alive, and so the fact that we are alive doesn’t always feel like the incredible coup it’s supposed to feel like.  And really, how could it?

The good news: we need contrast to feel what we feel.  We need to live without a sense of the unbelievable-ness of life so that when it does appear, we can really experience it.  If it were here all the time, we wouldn’t recognize it as something remarkable.  More good news: gratitude does show up when we stop demanding that it appear; grace does present itself when we stop expecting it to be present all the time.

While our connection with the sacred is not something that must be or can be be front and center all the time, and not something that we can control, nonetheless, there are certain things that we can do to encourage it to appear—to invite awe into our everyday life.  And, since most of us want to feel a sense of wonder at being alive and gratitude for the opportunity to have experiences at all, to “get” to live, it is worth laying the internal groundwork from which awe can grow.

In order to feel gratitude, we need, first and foremost, to be in our life, that is, to be present now.  The surest way to feel gratitude is to pay attention to how we are and where we are at this moment, so that when gratitude does appear, we are here to notice and feel it.  While some experiences contain a beauty that can render irrelevant any tangle of thoughts in which we are lost, for the most part, noticing grace when it arises relies on our being awake and aware to what we are living inside and out.

As we cultivate our own presence, we can also, consciously, move our attention and point of reference from the contents of our life, the thoughts feelings and sensations that are appearing, to the presence that notices the contents.  That is, we can make it a practice to not just focus on what is happening in the relative world, the dishes we are washing, as the determinate of wonder, but rather on who or what is aware that it is all happening, who or what is inside the lens we call awareness. This slight but enormous paradigm shift, from what is perceived to what is perceiving, can instantly put us in touch with a sense of the miraculous.

It is also worth reminding ourselves that all experiences appear and disappear without exception.  While it is human nature to grasp onto those experiences we enjoy, like awe and gratitude, to try and make them stay, these too are subject to unending change.  Imagining that awe could or should be permanent is like imagining that we ourselves could be permanent.  And to remember, as a final paradox, that it is precisely in its impermanence that its grace exists.  One without the other could not be.

Copyright 2015 Nancy Colier

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There is a story I once heard of a five year old whose mommy had just given birth to a new baby. The little boy kept asking to spend some time alone with his new sister. When his parents asked him why he wanted this alone time with the new baby, the five year old said that he needed it because he was starting to forget God.

It seems that we come into this world with an innate wisdom and knowing of our infinite and spiritual nature, but through our conditioning and just life as it unfolds, we forget who and how magnificent we really are. You could say that we get smaller, and begin believing that who we are or what we are made of is just a resume of the roles we play, our successes and failures, the opinions we hold, and the problems we need to solve.

So what gets in the way of our knowing who we really are? What untethers us from our truly infinite and spiritual nature? The long answer to such questions is complex and multi-layered. But since this is a blog, I’ll go with the short answer. The number one thing that makes us forget our true nature as spiritual beings is thought, or more specifically, our fascination with our thoughts. From the time we are very young, we devote most of our life’s energy and attention to our thoughts. And truth be told, most of them are not that interesting, or helpful.

Because a thought appears in our awareness, we assume that must believe it. Because we are conditioned to believe that we are our thoughts, we assume that we must pay attention to every thought that occurs. But this is a false assumption. Thoughts appear and we can choose to believe them—or not. Thoughts just happen; we don’t actually choose to think them. Rather, we are the witness of our thoughts. It is up to us how we want to be in relationship with the thoughts that vie for our attention. This fixation with thoughts causes us to be lost in a trance most of our lives—not actually where we are. Put another way, it causes us to abandon our bodies. With our attention focused on the stream of thoughts we are always hearing, we become disconnected from our senses. This is important because it is the senses that are the portal to our own presence, our basic being, our spirit.

Coming into the body, feeling the breath, the sensations that are happening right now—this is our gateway into now, and it is only through this present moment, now—sensed directly—that we can remember ourselves as the infinite and spacious presence that we intuitively know (but forget) that we really are. The mind turns “now” into a bundle of thoughts, a concept, something to talk about, a place we need to get “to.” But in truth, “now” can’t be talked about, can’t be a destination. “Now” can only be something we are, something we melt into. As soon as we talk about or think about “now,” it becomes something separate from us, a possession, a notion, and a goal. “Now” can only be experienced directly through the body, the heart, the senses. While thoughts have tremendous value for many aspects of life, if what we want is to know ourselves as spiritual beings on a human journey, thought is not the path.

We can’t know our true and infinite nature through thought. In fact, our fixation with thoughts obscures us from this knowing, this timeless wisdom. The body holds this intelligence, this memory, deep in its cellular structure, as if the body itself remembers from whence it comes, the stardust out of which it is made.

Right now, in this moment, invite your body to feel itself, from the inside out. Right now, in this moment, allow your body to arrive—here, where you are. Don’t consult your mind for what it thinks of here. Don’t send your mind down into your body to notice what’s happening now and come back up and tell you. Simply tune into the sounds reaching your ears, feel the sensations happening inside you, experience the breath as it enters and exits, and the gaps in between. Allow yourself to land inside, and to fill up your whole body with your own presence, to sense your being. Feel what it feels like simply to exist.

When we feel the moment directly, through the body, who we are as thought, ego, a “person,” disappears. Our individual “me” agendas fade and we are just now, life—not separate from life, from our spirit, or our true nature. Check it out for yourself; don’t just take it as an idea from me. Use your senses as your portal, experience the boundlessness that your body contains, and you will come to remember yourself as the spiritual being on a human journey that you truly are.

The post Spiritual Beings On a Human Journey: How to Remember Our Stardust appeared first on Nancy Colier.

In my communication with these parents, I suggested that we establish agreed upon limits on the technology, “time out” periods that would be the same for everyone in their tight group of friends. This way, none of the children would feel they were missing out on something when they were off technology, as everyone’s else’s phones would also be dark. I also recommended that we open a dialogue and create a united front on this issue, as the grown ups in this life situation, the ones in charge, perhaps to talk about what we can do to help our children develop the skills to be well in a world that is teaching them to be absent from where they are, absent from themselves, and to need perpetual entertainment just to be okay. What I wrote to the parents of my daughter’s friends was really a plea to take this issue seriously, to employ our greater wisdom and experience as adults and not allow our children to disappear into the virtual vacuum–to step in and protect our children’s ability to live in the present moment—the basis of all wellbeing.

I sent out six pleas. How many responses did I receive back? Zero.

I write a lot about personal technology and invariably, every time I do, I receive a similar comment in the feedback. The comment, boiled down, is this: technology is here to stay; get over it or learn to live with it. The fact that technology is here to stay is probably true, but the idea that we should get over or learn to live with it, regardless of what it is doing to us, to me, sounds like glorified passivity. The reality that not one parent responded to my note sounds like we have settled back into a kind of hopeless acceptance of where we are heading. Does the fact that technology is here to stay mean that we should allow our children and ourselves to disappear into a distracted unconsciousness?

The fact that technology is here to stay is precisely why we need to pay close attention to and make real choices about how we want to live with it and teach our children to live with it. As the human beings who are using this technology (not the other way around), we need to decide and enact how we want to incorporate technology into our lives, not just accept whatever is happening because it’s happening. Our purpose should be to take care of our own wellbeing, and not just assume that if we surrender, technology will protect our wellbeing. Learn to live with it should really read, learn how you want to live with it. We can’t and shouldn’t be passive, not when what’s at stake is how we live and who we are.

The post Have You Lost Your Child to the Smartphone? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

My 10-year-old was invited to a party this weekend, a camp reunion sleepover, given by one of her closest friends. Unfortunately, this same weekend, she has an event that she can’t and doesn’t want to miss, a competition for which she has trained diligently and for many months. The other little girl is very angry with my daughter and has accused her of being a bad friend and bad person because she won’t give up her event in order to attend the party. She wanted to know why my daughter was doing this to her and purposely spoiling her event.

While it is age-appropriate maybe for 10-year-olds to feel and behave this way, many “grown ups” behave in a similar fashion, which is not age appropriate. I was recently at a party with a friend. Knowing that I had to get up early for something important the next day, I left the gathering by midnight. My friend, a woman in her 40s, was furious that I could do that to her. She was having a good time, had met a man she was interested in, and didn’t want to stay there on her own. She felt that my leaving was unkind, and that I should have stayed longer as a form of support for her. In another example, some years ago, after sitting for a whole day with an ill friend, I decided to go for a drive, to spend some time with myself, which I desperately needed. To this day, my friend tells me that I left her in her time of need, and wasn’t willing to stay with her unconditionally. The fact that I also needed some self-care was and still is experienced as abandonment and an aggression against her. The 10 hours spent with her that day, as far as her internal world is concerned, never existed.

It is very difficult for some people to see anything as happening separate from and not in relation to them. People who suffer with this view of the world experience everything as a reflection and commentary on who they are, an abandonment or affirmation of themselves. Whatever it is you do, even those things that have nothing whatsoever to do with them, somehow, are either for or against them. Such people simply can’t see anything as not being tethered to them. Sometimes it can be quite baffling to even figure out how your action could possibly be related to them, for or against, but through this kind of lens, everything you do is indeed about them, even when it makes absolutely no logical sense. This form of narcissism is in fact quite prevalent in our culture, and very challenging to know how to handle in close relationships.

A painful aspect of being in relationship with this kind of person is that since nothing can be about you and your life, you end up feeling not seen and not known, invisible, except as an object that they use to make themselves feel better or worse. The experience is that you don’t really exist at all, and simultaneously, that you are continually invalidated, not permitted to be a separate being who might actually have her own experience. Why you might make a particular choice, for yourself, is viewed not only as untrue and absurd, but yet another aggression — against them — that you could dare to think that you have your own internal world, and separate life. Imagine! How could your choices possibly be about you when you don’t really exist?

It is nearly impossible to feel truly cared for when the other is not interested in knowing you in any way other than how you make them feel — about them. You might feel liked when your behavior is interpreted as favorable to their self-worth, but this is not the same thing as feeling genuine friendship or love. In relationship with this kind of narcissism, it can feel like your life and very self are kidnapped — dis-allowed by the other. In truth, your very existence separate from them, is the ultimate betrayal, and what they seek to obliterate. Related to as an object that needs to be either controlled or obliterated, love is a difficult and unlikely endeavor. As a result of all this, such relationships are fraught with profound loneliness, grief and raging frustration as you fight desperately to be visible and known for who you — genuinely — are.

Some time ago, I gave a memorial for a close family member. As I was shopping for cookies for the gathering, I reached for the vanillas because my kids enjoy them. Immediately, my mind shot back with the thought that I was choosing vanilla to punish this relative, the one who had died, since she would have chosen chocolate. I waved hello to my old thought tape and bought the vanillas.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of a relationship with this kind of narcissist is that you come to experience your own life as actually being about the other. You lose touch with your own intentions, as if their narcissistic lens, pointed at you, gradually corrupts even your knowing your own truth, and simultaneously, steals the dignity that comes with that knowing. You not only start changing your behavior, morphing yourself into a deformed system, refraining from doing things that (while not about them) they will experience as about them, but also, you stop believing in your own experience and intention. The fact that your actions are for and about you, not them, stops being completely clear. You begin to doubt what is really true for you, as you are no longer quite connected to your own truth. In this way, their narcissism acts as a toxin to your connection to self. You may defend that what you are doing is about you and not them, but some part of you stops believing this fully, and the strength behind this knowing is lost. While you may go on fighting to be seen accurately and truthfully, the other has taken away your ability to own and believe this accurate and truthful version of yourself. Your truth (being true) comes to depend on their believing it — being able to prove it to them. Even the struggle for you, they eventually own.

Most important in this sort of relationship is to stay in touch with your own intentions. Rather than defending yourself, proving your own truth (as if you should have to), be that separate entity that they refuse to acknowledge. A simple, “I am sorry that you are experiencing what is about me — to be about you,” can suffice. Chances are you are not going to get this other person to see you clearly, without an umbilical cord between you. Let the attempt to be seen accurately go, if at all possible. The more you try to be known, the more you threaten your own connection to self. We all have the right to be the keepers of our truth and no one has the right to determine or corrupt our intentions, to turn our being into an extension of them. With each moment that you are misunderstood and your truth distorted, spend two moments confirming and marinating in what is so for you, your actual truth, uncorrupted. And think too, carefully, about whether you want to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t want to or have the capacity to genuinely know you, as a being unto yourself. Ask yourself if this kind of relationship strengthens your sense of dignity and self-worth, encourages your authentic nature, makes you feel known, understood, loved, or just plain good about yourself. If the answer is no, then what is the best choice for YOU, the choice that is in line with your wellbeing? Sometimes the only way to honor your separateness is to make the choice to separate.

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