Status Updates From Hope Leans Forward: Braving...

Walking seems to “solve” whatever might be holding me captive in the moment. Walking is a way to cultivate wisdom grounded in the body and alive to the environment in the moment.

One of the most beautiful ways that I know to come home to myself is through walking. Often when I am wrestling with choices and challenges, with a sense of purpose, direction, and meaning, I go outside on a long walk. I put the worries and choices aside to allow them air to breathe, to rediscover the wisdom that is already here that I cannot see or feel.

Many of us confuse goal-setting with life purpose. Having a sense of purpose contributes to meaning in life, and meaning is about what matters most to you. It guides the direction of your life, which changes over time. Living purposefully is living your values—to reflect, understand, and align your values with your actions.

You belong to you. Like ocean glass, you are formed by the world around you. You belong to the community of humans, plants, and animals that share this planet. Allow everything that comes your way, like the wind and waves that shape glass to a frosted, polished surface, to reshape your heart until you become a fuller, richer, more alive expression of you.

To belong to community and with others, we must first belong to ourselves. Accept yourself. Find yourself. Be kind to yourself, and then find others to share the feeling.

To practice equanimity is to reorient toward our strengths and find what supports us. It is about attending to painful life events and reshaping our stories of loss into stories of meaning. It is about moving from what bad thing happened to you to who you choose to become because of it.

A soul-centered life may not always feel good, but it always feels real. We reach out and keep reaching out with our uncertainty, our ambiguity, and our unresolved longing. And when we offer acceptance of that which is hidden within us, of our longing, this is like a seed in the wind that finds a fertile place to take hold. Risking your heart, risking again and again to love, reveals the soul.

A powerful metaphor for the spirit or soul element of living a genuine and authentic life sits on my desk: matryoshka dolls, sometimes called Russian nesting dolls. They speak of the ever-deepening quality of spiritual and soulful awakening, of layers revealed. To explore spirit is to risk those layers becoming visible: there is always a part of the inner journey we are not fully awake to or aware of.

Sometimes we can get attached to or stuck on practicing meditation to achieve enlightenment or some other goal. Mindfulness is deeper than striving for goals, even great goals. Instead, a foundational element of mindfulness is nonjudgmental awareness. We reframe our stance to one of openness and curiosity, non-attachment, non-clinging even to a goal.