Mindfulness

You may have noticed that Wisdom Well has been graced by a few consecutive guest posts from great MEA alum writers this past few days. That’s because I was blissfully offline for a week in mid-Baja, the Sierra de San Francisco mountain range where Baja’s only on-land UNESCO World Heritage Site exists.

As Americans become more and more drawn to traditional and integrative methods of healing as well as to altered states of consciousness, I believe we are poised to embrace a variety of dreamwork practices as methods for growth and healing.

I’m thinking of beauty and artistry, in its many forms, and how the simplest things that inform our soul, mind, and mind’s eye when there is space and presence to do so.

As MEA alum Douglas Tsoi told me recently, “Loneliness may kill, but solitude does not.” His prompt led me to create a poll on the MEA Facebook group with the following question:

We all carry this unimaginable life-force that wants to come out into the world. And it will whip us around, if we are not grounded. When younger, my own creativity was such a force. I could be so intoxicated with it that I would follow that voice anywhere. It would say to me, “Keep going! Don’t stop! You don’t need to eat! You’re so close! Isn’t this great?”

Living part-time in the American Southwest liberates me. The roads are wide open, the “legal” speed limit touches 75, and, let’s face it, I like to drive fast.

Merry Christmas! My first weeks of college - long before my other Stanford freshmen classmates were to join me on “The Farm” - were spent in “hell weeks.” It was five or six hours per day in the pool for weeks trying to keep up as the slowest freshman on the national champion college water polo team.

“How do we know when to speak up and when to withdraw? As a privileged person, how do I not turn a blind eye to the cause of justice but also not lose myself in a fog of screens, noise and distraction?

I've been fascinated with the digital nomad phenomenon since my early days at Airbnb nine years ago. I noticed that there were a growing number of Millennials (mostly) who weren't looking for a "home away from home" when traveling experience. They were looking for a "home instead of home" experience.

I love this day for all kinds of reasons and am excited to be spending it with my family here in the Bay Area. But, I also love this time of year and appreciate that MEA alum John Anderson shared this lovely quote from inventor and writer Lin Yutang on the beauty of autumn: