As we dive into the longest night of the year here in northern California, I’m honoring the memory of my dear friend Janice Gates, who passed away in October.I know many of you have practiced with the two of us on yoga and meditation retreats and trainings. In my last message to you, I wrote about our joyful self-retreat together last June on the northern California coast. If this is the first you are hearing of her death, I’m so sad to bring you this news.For almost 20 years, Janice and I celebrated the winter solstice together at my home [...]

Dear Friends, I just returned from a self-guided, weeklong meditation retreat in a cabin on the Northern Califonia coast with a dear friend and fellow mindfulness teacher. Over the past two decades, Janice Gates and I have taught dozens of meditation and yoga retreats and teacher trainings together, while raising our children like cousins in the same small town. So we’re comfortable gliding spontaneously between meditation in stillness and movement, in silence and speech. We’ve seen each other come undone at the seams many times—and helped stitch each other back together again. As we drove up to our retreat [...]

Dear Friends, On New Year’s Day, I hiked through a redwood forest along rain-gorged Lagunitas Creek, hoping to spot Coho salmon swimming upstream to spawn. The migrating salmon have been abundant here in northern California this year, as winter storms have filled drought-depleted rivers. I didn’t sight any that afternoon, perhaps because they were hiding from the (also abundant) holiday hikers. But I knew they were swimming nearby in the shadowy currents, making their pilgrimage back to the nest sites where they were hatched. Each January, I try to distill my intentions for the coming year into a single [...]

I’ve carved out more than a month this summer for a personal writing retreat-- just before I lead my next Write Your Way Home women's daylong, The Power of Place, online on July 10. But for the first week of my retreat, I deliberately didn’t write a word. Instead I spent six days meditating in silence at an almost-deserted beach on the northern California coast. I spent hours each day just walking barefoot on the dark, gritty sand; watching the waves that tumbled turquoise or grey in the shifting light; delighting in seals bobbing in the surf and the [...]

“I feel like the world has just gotten a little smaller and my heart has gotten a little larger.” As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps the globe, I keep remembering that comment from Luciana, an educator and small business owner in Brazil, during the first online meeting of our small, mindfulness-teacher mentoring group. One of the great gifts of my teaching life over the last few years has been my role as the director of mentoring for an online, international mindfulness teacher certification program led by Buddhist teachers Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. As a mentor, I meet face-to-face via [...]

Right around the time my now 19-year-old son turned two, he became obsessed with a collection of thumb-sized bottles of essential oils that sat on a wide, tiled window ledge in our bathroom. They were already dated even then, their labels smudged and oily—the remnants of two different aromatherapy kits that had been sent to me as promotional packages when I was an editor at Yoga Journal in the early 90s, many years before my son was born. Back then, I had brought them home to the hilltop house I rented with three other 20 and 30-somethings. I had planned [...]

In the last week of December, I went for a walk with a few of my beloveds around nearby Lake Lagunitas, one of my regular nature refuges. As we squelched through puddles under the redwoods (careful not to step on the wandering, mud-colored newts), we reflected on our intentions for the coming year and how we might distill them into a single word—something we could carry with us as a reminder like a river-smoothed stone in a pocket. One of us chose “expand.” One of us, “stability.” Another, “centered.” My word was “simplify.” I want to have less on my do-list, [...]

The winter rains have arrived here in northern California, and the creeks are rushing again in the hills and canyons near my home. As the shortest, darkest day of the year approaches, I’m grateful for the chance to put on rain gear and hike through dripping redwoods and madrones to sit on a boulder by a waterfall. Last month, we went in just a few days from red-flag fire danger to flash flood alerts. During the three days of my "Telling Our Stories: Meditation and Creative Writing for Women" retreat at Spirit Rock, we were in the middle of a [...]

This spring I dropped the ball for a while on my New Year's resolution to free up my singing voice. My first excuse: I spent nine days teaching in Germany, where I didn’t want to bombard my hotel neighbors and meditation students with my arpeggios and sirens. Back from Germany, I went straight into teaching another retreat at Spirit Rock. Then came a book deadline, a family visit, a week of online mentoring for a mindfulness teacher training—and suddenly I couldn’t connect with my original inspiration. There were just so many things on my to-do list that felt more urgent [...]

In my newsletter last month, I announced my new creative project for this year: learning to sing! In the weeks since then, my daily assignments in the Fear of Singing Breakthrough Program have gotten me doing a lot of things I definitely wouldn’t have done otherwise: Breaking down the musical theory behind “The Happy Birthday Song.” Leaping up and down in front of my computer, an invisible mic held to my mouth, as I mimic YouTube videos of David Byrne (“Life During Wartime”) and Blondie “One Way or Another.” Singing arpeggios while sounding them out on the piano. Driving down [...]

"Say 'Eh!'” commands my new voice teacher, Pollyanna Bush. She’s slim and elfin, with huge dark eyes and a waterfall of red hair that tumbles past her hips. She’s seated at a piano in her Fairfax studio, MusicWorks. I’m standing facing her, a space heater blowing warm air at my knees. “Ay!” I repeat, obediently. “Louder! Shout it! Like you’ve just seen someone on the other side of the parking lot trying to break into your car.” “AYYY!” “You’re saying 'A-ee.'” Make just one sound, 'Eh!'" “EHHH!” “Better. But you’re putting too much air into it. Louder, but no air!” [...]

I just finished my first week of  "The Fear of Singing Breakthrough Program,” whose slogan is “Learn to Sing Even if You Think You Can’t Carry a Tune” (that would be me). The teacher, Nancy Salwen, starts at the absolute beginning, which is perfect for me. The daily online lessons are short, just 5 to 10 minutes. We spent the first couple of lessons just singing “drone notes,” simple aaahs and ooohs and eees all on one long monotone. Then we moved on to exploring the voice by “sirening” up and down the scale. All the principles she’s naming [...]

Dear Friends, Here’s my New Year’s resolution for 2018: I’m going to start singing. I pretty much stopped singing in sixth grade, when my elementary school music teacher eviscerated me in front of my entire class because my off-key warbles were ruining our rendition of “The Happy Wanderer.” (That’s a horror story I’ll tell you another time, if I’m brave enough. Let’s just say that I still shudder at a merry chorus of “val-deri, val-dera ha ha ha ha ha.”) I’ve endeavored over the decades to regain some confidence in my voice, to the point where I can now [...]