Stop Missing Your Life

Last week I wrote about Cory Muscara’s book Stop Missing Your Life and how it’s been helping me manage my anxiety. But I neglected to tell you how much that book can help a person show up for her life. It’s something I’ve been thinking about all week.

Because showing up for life is important.

Because it’s way too easy to miss.

Because being there, really there, is sometimes a lot more difficult than it should be.

Why does this happen? (especially to women)

Because we often have too much going on in our lives, too much information beeping and dinging in our faces, too many people needing too many things from us every waking moment.

Because the good stuff can feel too good to be true and the hard stuff somehow too much to handle.

If that happens to you sometimes too, I hope the short meditation below helps you show up this weekend with your people a little more. I know you wouldn’t want to miss it for the world.

When the house is quiet, the only sound a crackling fire in the wood stove and floorboards creaking under toes,

I am here,

When the night is cold, the winds raging, and tears of gratitude come because I’m safe and warm,

I am here,

When the pain of loss, regret, and heartache is a discomfort I can’t explain and I know running from it won’t solve a thing,

I am here,

When we lose power and the only light I see is the flicker of that still-burning fire in the old wood stove,

Still here,

When I have to hide three baskets of clean laundry in the closet because everyone’s sick and I’m the only one still standing,

When I know I’m not giving my best moments to my partner although I truly want to,

When projects and emails pile up day after day,

When the house is loud, chaotic, a mess,

When all is right and everything is warm and bright,

When I need to make a change and I’m still figuring out how,

Here

Here

Really here

I wouldn’t miss this for the world.

I wrote this short meditation for my email group on Friday, and just a few hours after clicking Send, just as I was diving into all kinds of Christmas preparations with my very favorite people in the whole world, the gale force winds of winter storm Elliott blew down tree after tree on the tiny island in Maine where I live and we lost power in our home.

For the next 48 hours, I huddled with my kids and husband by our wood stove. We ate snacks to have meals that didn’t require cooking. We put the contents of our freezer and refrigerator in a tub on the porch to keep them from spoiling. We fetched water from the creek for toilet flushing. We used our small camping generator for making coffee and heating up dinner on the grill. We drank room-temperature water from the reserve bottles in the pantry. We slept without showering for two straight nights.

It wasn’t fun.

I wasn’t happy.

I felt myself start losing the ability to be present.

Then, I remembered this meditation I had just written. I smiled at the irony of having written about losing power in a storm and savoring the quiet just hours before our longest and scariest storm and power outage since moving to Maine. And my heart settled in for a learning and growing kind of stretch.

Just then, a friend sent me a meditation she’s been drawing strength from lately:

All shall be well.

And all shall be well.

And all manner of things shall be well.

It’s a prayer written by Dame Julian of Norwich that we both pulled from the book we’ve been reading together since the end of last year — Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach.

The perfect reminder to be present, to trust the process, to stop missing my life even in its challenging moments. And the perfect reminder to go back to Cory’s book and dig for more wisdom about staying present. When I did, here’s what I found — a few quotes I had underlined for such a time as this ⤵

“When we give ourselves permission to experience the full range of our humanness,

we experience a kind of wholeness and peace that can only come from staying open to life.”

➳

“Imagine a life of turning away, closing down,

and presupposing danger at every turn.

You can probably see how that would cause us to miss our life.

So, if fear leads us to missing our life,

curiosity is our bridge to being deeply present.”

➳

“We all have a lifetime of experiences and conditionings that both make us uniquely us,

and also can prevent us from living the life we most want.

It may be tempting to try to avoid looking at these aspects of ourselves,

but all that will do is keep us subconsciously anchored

to a version of ourselves we no longer wish to be.”

Needless to say, I highly recommend Stop Missing Your Life by Cory Muscara. If you’re interested in purchasing a copy of your own, here’s where you can find it.

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