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Mindfulness and the Life-Changing Magic of Opening Up

Focusing on progress with mindfulness practice is not without its risks. It is easy to get sidetracked from the daily work of practice by obsessing about one’s growth and all the benefits practice has bestowed. If taken too far, this could lead to frustration and impatience or, on the other hand, arrogance and malaise.

Even so, it is worthwhile from time to time to consider progress and growth. As a blogger, I have intentionally celebrated milestones whenever possible to maintain my own motivation. I started this blog on my own and, though it has certainly helped me develop community, the daily work of writing can be a lonely business.

A Confluence of Milestone Moments

For this reason, I was fortunate over the last few days to have a confluence of milestone moments. Much like the recent eclipse, the conjunction of all of these things lining up together made me stop and take notice. So what were these milestone moments?

The first one is that this is the 200th post on the blog. As my fav Peloton instructor might remark on a milestone ride, nobody does anything 200 times by accident. This is a meaningful recognition for me since most of my experience with this blog felt like an experiment.

I enjoy building things. I’m meticulous by nature and I am comfortable going step by step. When I launched this blog in December, 2020, though, I didn’t have a clear idea about what I was building. At the time, the blog was an act of celebration and an acknowledgement of how much I enjoy writing.

An image with a quote about milestones and making habits, including mindfulness, a part of your life

Celebrating 200 Blog Posts

All this time, I have managed the blog while raising two girls, managing a law practice, and teaching mindfulness and compassion. Given this context, managing to generate content consistently often felt like a game of keeping a helium balloon in the air. I had to keep tapping away or the balloon would fall.

In fact, for a period I let the ball drop so that I could focus on writing my first book. Getting to 200 posts feels good because I was able to get back in the game. I’ve often been worried that life would happen and my writing would stop. Now I see that my writing is part of my life.

A Blast from the Past

The next item that spurred reflection was not truly a milestone, but instead a blast from my past. In 2020, just a few months before I launched the blog, a woman named Janice Windt profiled me for her blog about working moms. In the post, I shared about my history with postpartum depression and how cultivating self-compassion helped me heal and thrive.

Janice reached out last week to check in because she was reactivating the series. I checked the old post and saw the date–August, 2020. I immediately recognized this as the time just before I became certified as a meditation teacher and launched the blog.

It was pretty fun to catch up with Janice and send her an update on all that has happened in the last four years. Sometimes we don’t know how small steps might affect our lives when we take them. It was nice to have a chance to think about how much can come from putting a little energy and time into a new idea.

An image with a quote about how big change can from putting time and energy small practices like mindfulness

Sharing My Story with Friends

The last milestone moment is my favorite because it was celebrated with friends. I got to deliver a dharma talk for my local meditation community this past weekend. For those who aren’t familiar, this is lecture about Buddhism in community, similar to a homily at mass.

Since I don’t profess to be a teacher of the dharma, this is not something I have ever done before. I usually teach about mindfulness or meditation practice and my talks are usually much more practical. With this talk, I got to share my story about the winding road that led me to become a meditation teacher.

I was nervous to give the talk since I had been only an occasional visitor to the community and wasn’t sure how someone with a variety of influences might be received. As I spoke, though, my fears vanished. The group was engaged and we had such good discussion afterward.

The Call to Help Others

And what do you suppose was the theme of my talk? It was called “Stumbling onto the Bodhisattva Path.” It was inspired by The Way of the Bodhisattva by Shantideva, a classical poem that is well worth a read and in-depth study.

A bodhisattva is someone who trains in mindfulness and compassion in order to alleviate the suffering of others. Many of us who are brought up in the Christian faith may hear this and think it is essentially a saint. The point of my talk is that helping others is more ordinary and available to us all than we may think. It can even come as a surprise on the journey of life.

An image with a quote about opening up to oneself through mindfulness and others can be life-changing

What does this have to do with opening up?

As I was driving home from the talk, I was feeling an emotion that was hard to identify. I left the radio off so I could sit with it without distraction as I drove. There was a sense of connection, satisfaction, and well-being. And the title for this post, a playful rif on Marie Kondo‘s famous work The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, popped into my mind.

Opening up can indeed by life-changing. To an overthinking, perfectionist introvert like me, it can feel like magic. Mediation helped me slowly learn to open up to myself. Then writing and teaching mindfulness helped me learn to open up to others. Both have had a huge impact on my life.

With this post, I am celebrating progress because hard work and dedication deserves a celebration. I won’t let this reflection distract me for too long from my daily work, though. The daily work of meditation, teaching, and writing is where I have found the connection that is my biggest reward.

An image thanking all the readers and followers of the Brilliant Legal Mind blog which offers teachings and resources on mindfulness to lawyers

Want to learn more about mindfulness and compassion? Check out my new book, How to Be a Badass Lawyer, for a simple guide to creating a meditation practice of your own in 30 days. And to share mindfulness with your little one, check out my new children’s book, Mommy Needs a Minute.

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A Holiday Gift for Readers: New Law Practice e-Book

It’s that time of year when you may be getting winter coats and clothes out of the closet. If you are lucky, you may find a dollar or too in a pocket of one of your coats. Recently, I had the writing equivalent of that experience.

I was perusing the blog’s pages to check on links from guest posts I had written to see if they were still current. I saw that my old posts for Ms. JD were no longer available on their blog because they revamped their website. As a teacher of mindfulness, it was an opportunity to reflect on impermanence. Apparently even aspects of the internet are temporary.

I was sad for a minute and thought “wow, has it really been 5 years since I wrote those posts?” Indeed, it has and it’s closer to six for the early ones. But then I remembered something awesome.

In 2020, when I first started experimenting with Canva and just before I decided to launch this blog, I had created an e-book with my Ms. JD posts. I had originally intended it for another group, MothersEsquire, with which I had been involved and wrote for previously. Then I got invited to write a chapter for the #Networked book, started my meditation teacher training, and launched the blog.

In short, I forgot entirely about the e-book and just let it sit. That’s how writing projects sometimes go. You set them aside for a while as you focus on something else. It’s been a great three years and, with the publication of 2 other books and the continued growth of the blog.

Though all of these wonderful things may have provided an excuse to forget about the e-book, they also presented a wonderful opportunity to celebrate. I started writing for Ms. JD almost 6 years ago and had no plans, no goal, and no confidence that my writing would go anywhere.

Many lawyers and other professionals ask me about writing frequently. They express that they want to write more but are afraid to get started. I’m sharing the e-book for any people who might want to see how a single blog post a month can add to something bigger.

In addition, the e-book has some good things in it. It is aimed at young women lawyers because that is Ms. JD’s mission and the focus of their blog. However, it may have some ideas, practice tips, and humor for any lawyer or working professional. It addresses topics like:

the best career advice I ever received;
work-life balance and dispelling the “how do you do it all” myth;
dealing with microaggressions as a female lawyer;
establishing fitness and meditation habits;
networking; and
leadership and mentorship.

To download and read the e-book or share it with someone else, you can find it here. While you are there, check out the other free downloads on the resources page, including the Meditation Habit Worksheet, Heart of Loving-Kindness Practice Guide, Pause and Begin Again e-book, and Personal Well-Being Worksheet.

Happy holidays to all!

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Can You Be Enough and Still Want More? Celebrating 100 Posts and 2 Years

I have been watching the clock today because I know I am supposed to write a blog post to be published tomorrow. It’s my 100^th blog post and tomorrow (December 27th) is the second anniversary of the founding of the blog. You’d think the words would flow like the bubbles from a bottle of champagne, but they haven’t. After publishing my first book this November, I think I am a bit celebrated out. And, I have a work-related project that is occupying my mind.

As I was praying for an idea to come to me, one of my LinkedIn contacts did a post reminding the world in this season of goal setting and resolutions that we are all “enough.” It was a beautiful post with a message I endorse but I immediately thought “Rude! Not helpful.”

As I have written before, I am a self-doubter. On a normal day, I would have liked the post and said something encouraging. But on this day, when things were not going as I had planned, the post made my mind start to churn. “Wait,” it posited, “am I letting myself be enough by struggling to get this post written just because of some arbitrary numbers?” When I couldn’t answer the question immediately, it sensed weakness and roared “Were you letting yourself be enough when you started this blog?”

I bet you’re hoping that I refuted the voice with a bold assertion of my self-worth, but I didn’t. Instead, I did what I’ve learned to do when my mind is noodling away on a problem that seems unsolvable: I did nothing. That is to say, of course, that I meditated.

Over the years, I have learned that it is the best way to take care of myself because it lets the thoughts have space and bounce around until they settle down on their own. This may sound painful; at first it was. But experience has shown that it works. Have you ever had to get a knot out of a necklace? You don’t do it by pulling tighter on the knot. You do it gradually and gently by opening the knot up.

And when I sat with my mind in a jumble, it opened right up. Yes, the uncomfortable thoughts bounced around. Yes, my doubts danced before my eyes. But eventually they drifted away, and I was left with a few moments of clarity. In this lull, came the commonsense notion that being enough and pursuing goals aren’t antithetical at all. In my case, I didn’t start pursuing the goals that mattered just to me until I had realized after years of struggle that I was enough.

Though it takes effort and sometimes causes frustration, this blog isn’t an albatross of work for me. As I have written before, it’s fun, it lets me explore some silly and hilarious ideas, serves as self-care, and has helped me develop a community I never would have had without it. In addition, I didn’t start the blog to prove some point. Instead, I did it to celebrate getting certified to teach meditation and because I know my struggles with anxiety, overthinking and depression aren’t unique.

Beyond this, I don’t think there is anything that declares “I am enough” more than creating work of your own. Like a magician, you get to wave your wand and make something appear in the universe that wasn’t there before. Like a brazen, unruly woman, you get to boldly take up space on the internet and declare your truths to the world. And, like any parent who fiercely loves the beautiful, imperfect child they made, you beam with pride even as you share your story full of missteps, screw ups, fears, and misgivings.

Of course, I have had to remind myself that “I am enough” by occasionally slowing down. I have republished or repurposed old content for weeks when I felt uninspired. I have learned tricks to create content quickly to just get the job done. I have learned to have faith that an idea would appear when I needed it. I looked to pop culture for inspiration to keep things lively. And, I even took a two-month hiatus from writing new posts when life changes and the creation of my book left no space for extra writing.

To my surprise, getting through those hard weeks didn’t make me feel less than. They inspired confidence and helped me reflect on the vast difference between progress and perfection. They reminded me that I am enough, not because everything comes easy to me, but instead because I don’t give up as soon as things get hard.

As we head into 2023, I hope that you are reflecting on the fact that you are enough. I hope you know that you don’t need to accomplish huge goals or amazing resolutions in the new year to be enough. But when you’ve got being enough down, I hope you celebrate it and share it with the world. I hope you let yourself thrive and take the weird paths your soul asks you to take. That’s what I have done these past two years. I’m so grateful I had enough faith in myself to do it and to all of you for celebrating it with me.

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Abundance Is Something You Can Create

This week is Thanksgiving, so it may not be all that surprising that I have the idea of “abundance” on my mind. As someone who loves to cook (and eat), Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. When I was a kid, Thanksgiving meant cooking all day for my mom’s large family and then eating all night. This is the traditional (and maybe American) view of abundance: having so much that even when you share it with a group you still have too much.

But you know that abundance doesn’t only mean a glut of stuff at one time. There’s another view of abundance that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. It’s the idea of abundance that is not dependent on the amount of stuff we have at any given moment. Instead, it’s the idea of being abundant ourselves: being enough so that we are willing and able to share. As many of us Americans regularly experience, this kind of abundance is much harder to come by than a perfectly cooked Thanksgiving turkey.

You’ve most likely heard of the term “scarcity mindset” to refer to those times when we can think of ourselves or our lives as if we do not have enough. For lawyers, this mindset is most likely to come up when we start to think about our time. If, like me, you are in private practice, your time is literally your livelihood. When family obligations are added to the mix, it can be difficult to feel like there is any time at all left for growth and prosperity because so much of life is consumed by surviving the grind of work.

To be sure, vacations and time away are essential to managing work as stressful as law practice. But, for me, it’s not necessarily weeks off or trips to exotic locations that have helped me find a sense of abundance in my life. Rather, my life began to feel more abundant, more prosperous and open, when I began consistently devoting small pockets of time to my passions.

I am celebrating these small pockets of time this week because this is the blog’s 50^th post. I remember when I launched the blog worrying that my writing wouldn’t be consistent. Somewhat stuck in a scarcity mindset, I worried that things would get too busy. I worried that I’d run out of ideas. I worried that I would decide it was too much work. I worried that nobody would care. In the end, as it turns out, none of these worries born from the idea that my time and I weren’t enough ended up being true.

My writing was not always consistent but that was not actually a bad thing. Some weekends, I could crank out blog posts for the whole month, so it didn’t matter if I didn’t write for a few weeks. Life was very busy for much of the year. My law practice was hectic and I did a 500-hour yoga teacher training. This life craziness, however, inspired me to write rather than keeping me from it and fortunately some friends pitched in with guest blog posts too. And, while none of my 50 posts have gone viral, the blog has some followers and I still love writing.

Now, at this point, you could say I have written an abundance of blog posts. Indeed, this year I’ve written about the same amount as a short novel. But I didn’t need all the things my mind in its scarcity mode told me that I needed. I didn’t need unlimited time, freedom from all distractions, and a group of fans cheering me on to keep writing. Instead, all I needed was my laptop and some bits of time, when my law practice and kids allowed it, to deposit a few words here and there.

These little bits of time helped me produce a sizeable body of work and remember that I have enough time to live and work and also reflect on it occasionally too. They helped me remember that I can not only produce, but also create. In random, sometimes stolen and rushed, bits of unbillable time sprinkled throughout the year, I found abundance because I learned it was always possible to make something new to share with friends.

This Thursday, as you celebrate the abundance of the season, remember that the bounty on your table is the product of small acts done consistently over time. Abundance is not just something you can experience, but something you can create. This Thanksgiving, I wish you abundance in your celebrations and that you find it in yourself.

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