Best Summer Yet

I love these words by Abraham Hicks, spiritual teachers I’ve been following for several years; “mining the moment”. This phrase helps me both understand and explain why summer 2022 has been my richest, most amazing summer yet. I had this very conversation with a friend today, so I’m feeling inspired to share in Inspire.

It’s true that this summer was full of big, important experiences for me. It was also the first summer since covid that has felt normal, and this alone is huge for obvious reasons. However, it’s easy to put a “great” stamp on summer by removing masks or taking a fabulous trip. Those things are a big deal but so what? Actually FEELING into the joys of summer on a moment to moment basis is very different than doing cool things. Doing and being yield very different results, an idea I first learned when I took up yoga, and that took me time to understand. I have come to learn that what makes things feel truly wonderful, rich, gratifying, satisfying, expansive, and momentous is directly tied to how I am honestly relating to each moment. Think about the term “momentous occasion”; it describes the enormity of a situation using the seemingly small measuring stick of a moment, which is often used synonymously with a minute. This is a tremendous teaching about the vastness that can be found in the smallest of moments. We so often think things need to be huge, epic, exciting etc in order to make an impact. This is very tied into the American culture of “more, bigger”, and it breeds the disease of never being satisfied since there’s always more, larger things to chase and acquire. This conditioning implies that situations are only worthy of being memorable if they are massive in some way, usually in such a way that makes us feel a version happy or important. We tend to equate the success of a moment to how pleasurable it makes us feel. Statistically, America is particularly known for obsessively hunting happiness and pleasure (which is not the same as deep joy). We are taught to be averse towards anything that we don’t enjoy, be it people, places, experiences, food, movies, anything tied to sense experience. Sickness, aging, and death, what we are often most averse to, are so natural and inevitable but we don’t like them so we run from them. I am admittedly very averse to aging, a topic I explore in my zen practice with my teacher. Of course, the alternative to aging is death and I’m averse to that too, though it’s most certainly going to happen at some point. Contemplating death is seen in the West as depressing and macabre, superstitious even in certain (Jewish) spaces. I used to feel this way, even literally biting my tongue to ward it off, an old shtetl superstition. I always marvel at how intelligent, educated people find false safety in the craziest superstitions. There’s something I find cute and endearing about it in a very Fiddler on the Roof way. Since entering into Buddhism where death is openly talked about with reverence and acceptance, I have come to feel that death, aging, and sickness contemplation has genuinely made life much more joyful and meaningful. We exist in a dualistic world where opposites are abound and intertwined. Simply put, death is the best reminder of life and what it means to be actually and fully alive. This is not lofty bullshit. Death, the greatest inevitability, is begging us to not squander our lives. Since life is comprised of moments, then a wasted life is made of wasted moments. It is that clear. Easy, no. Clear, yes. No excuse in the book, and making excuses is an excellent time waster, can lessen this truth. I find that when I mine the most innocuous moments for gold (not pleasurable gold, just gold) then that’s when life in real time feels the fullest. And gold is the truth. It’s facing the honesty in each moment instead of running from it, ignoring it, or trying to change it into a more acceptable version of reality. This takes tremendous mindfulness and practice. It’s a commitment to appreciate what’s here now. I strongly recommend reading Be Here Now by Ram Dass, one of the West’s most influential Buddhist spiritual teachers. This book changed millions of lives, and Ram Dass has been a hugely important part of my own path. I have no idea where I’d be without his teachings and wisdom. When I was introduced to him by my first yoga teacher, it was the first time I had felt I’d come up for air. There’s a scene in a documentary on him in which he’s at the Western Wall in Jerusalem (Ram Dass was Richard Alpert, a Jew from Boston who was a Harvard professor) and a hassidic Jew tells him how Be Here Now completely changed his life. It’s so important to be open to what other faiths and paths can teach us. I find that the people most grounded in their religions are the ones with the most opened minds. Pushing away other ideas simply because it’s from another religion speaks to a shaky relationship with faith; if we are strong and safe in what we believe then another ideology won’t imbalance us. True faith is spacious and open, like God.

So why was my summer the best yet? I had incredible DJing gigs that took me to the Hamptons for a fashion line, to one of the hottest clubs in New York (Stefan from SNL!), and to Coney Island for a 5,000 person Jewish comedy festival (the Chosen Comedy Festival), in addition to my residency at Empire Rooftop. I went on a weeklong silent retreat with my zen Buddhist community, where I was thrown into a new service role by playing an instrument that’s integral to Japanese Soto Zen. At first I was terrified, which is exactly why my teacher assigned me to do it; we must face our fears and work through them to mine for what’s underneath. Mining, always digging. We get to know life by getting to know our most uncomfortable layers. To avoid and hide sucks up a lot of precious energy, as well as leading to living half a life since half of life is super uncomfortable. I took my kids on the trip of a lifetime to the South of France (see last week’s post). I enjoyed my friends. I worked on creative writing projects with my writing partner. I went to incredible concerts and comedy shows. I loved and appreciated all these things, but even this isn’t fully why. What truly made my summer magical was noticing, pausing, and receiving what was alive in each moment, whether it was huge in the form of DJing or simpler in noticing how the light hit the trees, how the water felt on my skin, how the breeze moved, how my koi heard me coming to feed them, how my food sounded as I cooked it, how my daughters were home. I enjoyed sitting in my backyard and enjoying feeling held by the nature that’s always been here, that I didn’t have the capacity to previously appreciate. Even noticing and allowing for moments of melancholy, rage, overwhelm, fear, and human loneliness contributed to the rich landscape of summer 2022, since I realized I have created inner space and tolerance for uncomfortable truths and I also know they, like summer itself, are transient. I gained clarity and acceptance over certain emotional situations, thereby inviting in more layers of letting go. When we let in we let go, when we let go we let in. Life is a constant cycle of gain and release. The soul gains a body at birth, knowing this body will one day be released. Life is always recreating this dynamic in various forms and manifestations. It’s no accident that the mining of the gold in the small moments is exactly what creates the bigger moments (I don’t mean big and small in regards to importance). As my zen teacher says, “just practice and the rest will come”. Being aware of my breath, and being aware when I’m not being aware, is the baseline. Awareness and mindfulness begins with the most natural and first thing we do: breathing. We cannot live without it physically, nor can we live well and fully if we don’t pay deep attention to it. Learning how to be with my breath has taught me how to be with life, no matter what it contains.

It feels so good to say I had an amazing summer and really mean it. I used to panic when summer ended but that stopped several years ago when I learned how to be with life all year round. We cannot be with Life unless we learn how to be with ourselves, namely the dark parts we have such a hard time facing. Mining for gems in the depths of darkness and danger teaches us how to mine in each moment, and to appreciate the gold that’s always around us and inside us. Sadness and sunsets coexist. Life is many things at once. Only we can determine how we relate to it.

As I better to learn how to hold myself and to hold life, I am able to receive how life is always holding me and loving me, too. It’s this knowing and feeling that has come to define my bejeweled moments.