On The Daily

The Beginning of The End

There’s all of that! You know those days where you get up, rubbing the crust from your face, needing the five minutes for the water to boil for your first coffee to go quicker.. Another day. The job feels….like work! The kids are getting older and so are you. All the relationships are dicey at best. Partners and kids, nag and get nagged respectively - you can tell your eldest is only just refraining himself from telling you to fuck off. Your lack of self respect is mirrored by all. You’re feeling strapped for me time let alone them time. Time. Never enough. If only you could buy some back. Quick bacon and egg roll, double bacon with BBQ sauce. The boss is a prick. The woman on reception at the gym too gives you toxic looks. You know your breath smells, let alone your armpits. You haven’t breathed deep for years. It’s Monday morning.

Unto Death Do We Boil

Generally speaking there’s a stuckness. The feelings are so numb that you’re not sure anymore if you’re over caffeinated or in profound grief. Your nervous system is shot. Your eye’s are swollen from life but don’t weep with tears anymore. The worries are a dominant force that feel like spider legs constantly scurrying across your mind. Everything is like Monday morning, even Saturday’s hangover from celebrating Friday’s end of working week milestone reached. At best happiness, contentless is fleeting and almost never experienced organically. Like boiling frogs we call it resilience, forging ahead for the days that having paid off the mortgage and semi retired, we can finally chill. But we’re boiled frogs with spiders all over us that won’t go away. Instead we die!

Descension

To temper the waters, and to become free of the arachnids, I practice contentedness. It’s paradoxical, a catch 22!. I premise the foundations of my practice with felt wisdom that has proven me so far that where my mind goes the energy flows. Or where I place my consciousness, and unfortunately anything that sits within my less conscious, dictates my reality. So the more I exist within a given paradigm, the more something is present for my experience of being, The more I think about it the more it becomes me. For better and for worse. When I think about how tired I feel the more tiredness becomes the theme that defines my existence. So what’s paradoxical is the nature of the mind to manifest a negative reality (like the Beginning of The End above), the more we focus on the negatives, even if it’s our anxieties that are attempting to figure out how to be free from them. It’s that slippery slope - the further we slide, the faster we descend. By practicing contentedness and practice the changing of our negative thoughts, the more we can turn slide into an onwards and upwards trajectory.

G Reated

When I wake up, I don’t bolt for the espresso hit, I practice gratitude for the unique day that I’ve been born into. The gratitude practice continues throughout, and I’ve still got so far to go. When I get gifted a beautiful wave, and experience the great joys of sliding across the surface of it’s divine majesty, I pay my gratitudes. Focusing on my footsteps across the rocky shelf that takes me to my car, I pay my gratitude and respect for the ancestral custodians and their deep connection to this place. For the friends that I share all of this. For my healthy body. For this epic environment - pristine water, the tall eucalypts, the dolphins, the breaching whales, the shorebirds, the dogs running around the carpark. My van. My healthy lunch. My kids who are still bizarrely presenting as adhering to the system of remote schooling online from home. I’m grateful to not necessarily know their truth that they too just skipped three classes and surfed for 4 hours straight. To the woman that beeped me for going too slow on the way home. I have gratitude to her for reminding me of the work I’ve still got to do. I’m grateful for the awareness I’ve developed to catch myself reacting before making it stick. The list goes on. Gratitude for gratitude. It’s endless!

When The Going Gets Tough

But it’s easy to be grateful for the good stuff. It’s the hard stuff that’s tricky. So I incorporate a sneaky hack on of that, and refocus my awareness. That starts in the morning, that I’m so grateful to be alive for, on the yoga mat, and then the cushion. With small achievable goals of hitting them both on the daily, but keeping it fluid depending on how I feel. I aim for no more than 5 to 10 minutes of each at the least. It’s achievable and usually I’m energised for more once I start.

Breath Mother Fucker

I practice being present with just my breath, and my body. And then I practice emanating the feels that I want to embrace and embody. The love, the joy, the peace. Compassion. In essence, I tap into those feelings, and I practice sitting with them as long as I can. I layer that cake with an icing of intention that is to become more of these feelings, that essence. And the cherry on top as my dedication of everything I can become to the serving of others. That’s where the juice is at. Simply, giving to you makes me the happiest version of myself!. Every present minded breath reminds me of this. I practice as much as I can.

Aligning Stars

So when I feel myself sliding, like we all do at times, and when I think of Monday mornings as dark as they can be, I come back to the practice. Time and time again. And I know that I can’t climb that slippery dip that quickly necessarily. Every one of those impactful thoughts has a reality to manifest still right. The rebalancing in favour of peace can take time. But it’s the only way! It doesn’t have to be Yogic, or Buddhist, or new agey or wankey, it might just be you knowing that you deserve to be happy and sitting with the inner knowing of how good that feels. Maybe it’s the joy of a conversation with a beautiful friend that warms you inside that you give yourself the opportunity to indulge in, and contemplate how much more you’d like to experience that. Practice treating yourself to what feels good, and knowing that you deserve that! The manifestation of your reality will facilitate more of it!

Together Unite

And know too that you’ve got shit that needs to be worked through. We all do. And there’s nothing wrong with sharing that with someone you trust. We’re all unique but we’re also so interconnected. We’re here for each other!. To love, and support in all of this together. To ascend into a time and place where Sunday’s and Mondays and every day feels like the best day of your life. Isn’t that what growing older and wiser is all about.