Leeza, Leeza. They Were Only Guidelines
“So… Leeza, how is your meditation going?
Are you doing the meditations?” asks the Balinese high priest I am sitting virtually with over Zoom. (Simple but tech savvy, I love it.)
“I knew you were going to ask me that,” I say a tad sheepishly, because truthfully, I have been a little stuck in a meditation slump. So I am extra grateful to be sitting with the high priests and getting a little nudge.
I explain to them how ever since Bali, and learning the meditation practice they taught us, I’ve actually been feeling a little stuck and confused in my practice. What was it again? Did he say this mudra? Hands go this way while I breathe into my belly? At which point exactly do I close my eyes? Do I have to say the exact chant as him because that was Sanskrit and I still don’t have it memorized?
So many new details to integrate into my long-standing meditation practice! And I’ve been meditating since my 20s. I’m 51 now. One week with the priests in Bali and I’m all mixed up now lol!!! How did that happen? Wasn’t it supposed to deepen my practice? Ugh.
“Leeza, Leeza,” he says. “These were only guidelines I teach you. It’s not a sect. If you have a routine and you have done your own research over time for what works for you, then that is your practice. The important thing is not what or how you do it, but that you DO IT.”
AH HA.
And suddenly I realized I’ve kind of been doing this everywhere lately.
Getting lost in the details. The nitty gritty. The minutiae. Getting overwhelmed by things that, when I scale out for a minute, don’t actually matter all that much.
Earlier that day I had been complaining to my coach about her new system and her new platforms and how I couldn’t find my way around anything anymore. She very gently asked me, “So I’m just curious, what’s here for you with this?”
I wanted to kick her in the face through the Zoom screen, but she wasn’t wrong.
There IS something here for me.
I have been laser focused on the minutiae and have momentarily forgotten how to scale out. It’s that delicate balance of dealing with what is right in front of you without forgetting the big picture.
These last couple of weeks, as my kids have gotten back into the school routine and I’ve had to get back into it too, I’ve actually been doing it pretty peacefully while at the same time feeling very agitated underneath. Agitated at the way the system works. Agitated at the inflexibility. Agitated at the overwhelm and the ridiculous hours of a school day. I just don’t subscribe to so much of it anymore.
If it were entirely up to me, I probably would have homeschooled my children.
I say that like it wasn’t up to me, but there are three different people involved here and I’m pretty sure I’m in the minority. So here we are.
Breakfasts have to be made. Dinners have to be made. Forms have to be signed. Back-to-school nights have to be attended. Emails have to be answered. There are schedules and platforms and passwords and a million tiny things that somehow become VERY IMPORTANT, and suddenly we are so hyper-focused on the stupid details of life that don’t truly matter that much that we forget the big picture.
And I think that’s what has been agitating me. Because the big picture, to me, is joy. Being present. Being silly. Being playful. Following our passions. Following our desires. Actually being in our lives instead of constantly managing them.
Which brings me right back to meditation.
Time and time again, I keep coming back to my meditation practice.
It is truly the ONE solid thing I feel like I have in my life. Maybe consistent is a better word. It’s consistent even when it’s not constant lol. I am a pretty regular and dedicated meditator. It’s my devotional practice, and it has evolved over the years.
And then I went to Bali and sat for a week with someone I now consider a spiritual teacher of mine—a guide, a guru, I’m not quite sure of the exact relationship yet. He is a high priest in Bali, and I spent a week sitting in an intimate group with him and his wife, also a high priest. Talk about majestic and magical, while also being extremely humble, grounded and simple people. What inspirations.
And somehow I came home and took the very thing that has been mine for decades and made it complicated. I got so focused on doing it “right” that I stopped doing the thing that has always worked for me.
Maybe that’s what I needed to remember, not just about meditation but about everything. I can get so caught up in doing something the right way that I forget to actually do it. I can get so buried in the details of a life that I forget to live the life.
There will always be breakfasts to make and forms to sign and platforms I can’t figure out and schedules that make me want to scream. There will apparently even be moments when I manage to turn meditation—the thing that has grounded me for most of my adult life—into another thing I think I need to get right.
Leeza, Leeza.
They were only guidelines.
Just do it.
If this resonated, I recorded a video this week that goes hand-in-hand with this post — a simple walking practice for when you're feeling buried in the details and need to widen your perspective again. You're always welcome to watch it here.
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