It became clear, once again, that this is the request of genuine practice: to wholeheartedly abandon the notion of transcendence and embrace our wildly imperfect, earthly hereness. As  a dear teacher likes to ask: “What’s actually happening right now?”

Embodiment is a gradual rediscovering of our bodies, which we may have abandoned to a degree. It is a reunion with the felt sense. Embodiment is learning to engage with the external world from within our physical form. Just as we would not attempt to drive while keeping our head outside of the sunroof, embodiment teaches us to navigate our daily life from within our one true vehicle.

One of my dear teachers liked to emphasize that healing and transformation never happen without chaos. I am finding how essential it is to orient towards the potential of humanity to awaken to the truth of our non-separateness and interdependence—and to notice how the chaos unfolding in the world is a symptom of our growing pains towards that, our resistance to letting our fear-based egos dissolve. 

Recently, I was lucky enough to teach in a beautiful, ancient forest on the big island of Hawaii. I do not travel much, I had never been to any of those islands, so this trip felt quite different than my “normal” life. As a result, I felt a call to stay a bit longer—two solid weeks! My colleagues and friends and I stayed both on the big island and Kauai as an attempt to fully immerse in what continues to feel like a truly magical, otherworldly place. 

When we notice the ways in which the practice is changing us, and we see the evidence of fruition, we feel more faith. Faith really matters. We become motivated to continue to show up for ourselves and the unfolding of our lives as it is in the here and the now. The fruition is subtle, quiet, yet undeniable.

On a windy, mountainous ride home from one of our weekend retreats, I felt an irrefutable tug to pull over and take in the vastness, the beauty, and the impermanence of the scene pictured here. There was no question—I had to stop for this. It struck me to such a profound degree that I wondered about staying there until darkness fully consumed this little part of the universe. There was an unmistakable expansion in my heart and a deep connection to this experience, to my place in "the family of things," as Mary Oliver has written. 

Have you ever taken a drive, parked your car, and realized you have very little memory of the ride? You can picture it if it is a familiar route. Yet the details from that ride are absent. The ride happened and you arrived safely, but the experience of the event itself seems murky or even non-existent. It’s as if life happened but was not registered in consciousness. It was not quite lived.