BE: Curious

My dad used to say, “If you are always curious, you will never be bored.” So when I was a kid, if I ever said I was bored — or acted bored — my loving dad suddenly turned into Vincent Price.

“B-O-O-O-R-E-D?”

“B-O-O-R-E-D?”

The famous eyebrow would arch and he would fix me with a stare.

“Boredom,” he would pronounce with Biblical authority, “Boredom is the eighth deadly sin. Living in a world like this, so full of wonder, how could ANYONE possibly be bored?”

Now that I had been relegated to the bottom of the human barrel, you would think I would feel terrible. But this was the difference between my mom and my dad. My mom’s lessons were often fear-based. But my dad’s were based in Love.

He loved being alive. He loved the world. He loved learning. He loved being human. And so what he always did next — wherever we were, whatever we were doing — was show me everything and anything there was to be curious about! Be it rocks or paintings. Be it a hamburger or an opera. Be it a street sign or a book. My dad taught me that if we are curious about life, we will always feel alive.

Much of the world is deep into a period of deep stillness. And many people are struggling with it. With the fears that come knocking daily — through phone calls or friends or through the media or a glance at our bank accounts or financial services that don’t offer much financial service. With the lack of distraction, diversion. The sameness. The isolation that can lead to loneliness. Or living cheek by jowl day after day with people who can’t leave the house.

Alcohol sales in the United States are up 200%. Protests are increasing. We are not a nation that knows either how to sit still or how to deal with much outside of our collective comfort zones.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been sharing some of my heart-centered practices for dealing with fear and leaning into the healing power of Love. Today I share one of my dad’s go-to practices: BE Curious.

Take this opportunity to learn about something, someone, someplace, yourself.

Or when you feel at odds with yourself or others or the world and unsettled in your own soul, just look around you. Look out your window. Take a walk and look at everything you see. Give yourself permission to be curious. And then let yourself follow the trail of curiosity to wherever it leads.

Boredom is an illusion. Boredom is simply an indicator that we have inadvertently turned our engines off, and need the electricity of curiosity to jump start our joy in living.

So try BEing curious today as your heart-centered practice. My dad swore by it. So do I. It reminds us just how alive we are — and how grateful we can be for our world!

If you’d like to listen to today’s blog, here you go. . .

BE: Resilient

A friend’s mother used to tell her: Life can be a roller coaster or a merry-go-round. It’s your choice.

When we’re younger, who wants a merry-go-round? I mean sure the horses are pretty and sometimes you grab the brass ring, but basically what younger person wants to think of life as going round and round in circle? Isn’t a wild ride gonna be way more fun?

But as we get older, we realize that going round and round in circles is exactly what life does. And that making life a into a drama-filled roller coaster of way ups and whooshing downs isn’t actually as fun as it sounds.

These days, however, aren’t we all experiencing roller coaster moments every days — for reasons that seem outside our control?

The main culprit, of course, is fear.

Sometimes fear comes tiptoeing in on the coattails of bad news and suddenly the heart bangs, the head squawks, and whatever state we were in just one minute earlier, our whole world is suddenly topsy turvy.

And sometimes fear comes blasting in like an supervillain through the news and the headlines, through social media posts and advertisements — turning our whole world upside down.

Most of us have developed heart-centered practices to shift out of fear. Favorites from my and my friends’ quiver of practices are deep breathing, making gratitude lists, prayer, meditation, walking, and reminding ourselves that right here and right now everything is actually okay.

Today I want to add to that list resilience.

Last summer I filmed a documentary about roller coasters — so I rode six coasters in one day. All kinds: Old-fashioned wooden coasters, giant steel behemoths, ones where your legs dangle, and others where you corkscrew and twist and turn upside down, and even one where you raced another coaster in tandem.

My favorite coaster by far was the tallest and steepest and fastest. Now I’m not particularly fond of heights and this one went up up up up up up up. On a very narrow track. (I couldn’t let myself think too hard about that.) But when it when down — straight down so steeply that it almost felt like it was going underneath itself — it just took off so smoothly that all you felt was the fast! It was so much fun. Probably the best coaster I’ve ever ridden. After that, on all the other coasters, I felt jabbed and jolted and whipped and slammed. They were less steep, less fast, but also way less fun — because they were unpleasant in the extreme.

A lesson in life from rollie coasters: It’s the banging back and forth, the rubbernecking, the whiplash of the dance between fear and Love that is the unpleasant part — and we can do something about that.

We can learn to be resilient.

We can recognize that right now fear is throwing its arsenal at us — in big and little ways. Nuclear blasts and guerrilla warfare. We know it’s happening. How we deal with it determines our daily experience.

Resilience is choosing our response to our response.

In other words, if fear gets past your first line of defense, and suddenly you realize it’s taken up residence and is banging away at your heart and screaming in your ear, what do you do? Berate yourself? Give in to fear?

OR do you recognize that fear is merely fulfilling fear’s job description. Yes, it got in. But now you can bounce back and firmly escort it out.

And then keep doing it again.

I look out on a big grassy field. There are beautiful tall grasses underneath tall trees. Allie often walks through the edges of that field. Sometimes, when she does, a whole stand of beautiful grasses appear to get trampled down. But the moment she walks away, back up they pop.

Fear will keep inviting us on its roller coaster. Sometimes we’ll be deep into the third loop-de-loop screaming in terror before we realize we never agreed to this.

Time to BE: Resilient.

Go back to the heart-centered practices that get you out of fear and leaning into Love.

Don’t berate yourself or beat yourself up.

Don’t worry.

Really.

I mean do not indulge worry. Escort it out along with fear.

Breathe in Love.

Walk in Love.

Talk in Love.

Feel in Love.

Whatever you do to invoke Love, do it.

And when you do, remember that Love is like that grassy field. It will always grow back. It will always bounce back. It will get mown, it will get peed and pooped on, it will get eaten by animals, it will get covered in snow and rain and sleet. And it will always be resilient. That is Love.

Love is the Source of our resilience.

We just have to practice.

Today let’s practice together!

BE: Resilient!

#LoveViral

To listen to today’s Be Resilient practice, check out the video below