Lots of cultures around us influence us: corporate culture, medical culture, family, state, church, and country culture, just to name a few.

What will your new normal be? What do you want to bring into your life? What do you want to leave behind? Who do you want to be now that nothing will ever be the same again?

We need each other. We always have, but now in the times of lockdown our need for support and camaraderie is probably more important than ever.

In my lifetime I’ve attended dozens of silent retreats and meditation sabbaticals; I’ve engaged in voluntary isolation retreats in order to listen to the quieter voices of my heart. Lockdown is different.

In these times of fear, it’s natural to want to be close to our loved ones. It’s a natural survival response to want to huddle together, bring our family and friends close, call to them across the globe and bring them home.

I lived in a naive binary which equated to something like this: either love unconditionally and therefore keep people in your life; or don’t love them and therefore don’t have them in your life.

Something about the combination of family, obligations, politics, secrets, loyalties, gift buying expense and stress, alcohol, and unresolved tension creates a toxic cocktail for drama.

Guess what? All these narratives, all these stories, ideas and beliefs that are floating out there, embedded in the daily news, agreed upon around the family table––are merely thoughts. That’s it. That’s the sum total of their substance.

My hope is that our natural enthusiasm for peace, freedom and joy will not become irrelevant to society because we did not insist on the spiritual transformation of McMindfulness.

You were born as a creative force. And you are creating every day—either deliberately or not. What you focus on expands. What you tell yourself, becomes true. The narrative you believe and surround yourself with, manifests.

When clients are with our EQUUS herd, the horses do not differentiate in the way we might imagine. They do not think, ‘Those two-legged creatures are not horses, therefore they are not part of the herd.’ Once the herd establishes a person or people are safe, then it is incumbent upon them to ‘bring them on’ as a herd member, and teach them herd ways. Otherwise, their presence could be a detriment to the herd

Imagine—just for a moment—if we were to select our leaders based on these principles. Imagine if our schools, our government, our financial institutions, our Fortune 500s, selected leaders based on their ability to be caring and profoundly present, to serve safety, connection, peace, joy and freedom – for the whole.

‘I’m so tired of apologizing,’ sighed a friend recently in her final defeat-by-inbox. I dramatically rolled my eyes in solidarity, while scrolling through all the text messages I had yet to respond to.

For me, container building is an active, constantly evolving, creative way to show care in form and in action. I am constantly learning how to refine and improve the various environments in my care. Have fun thinking of ways you can create deliberate containers for your team, or family.

It’s no wonder that when the proverbial clock ticks fifty today, and we feel that impulse to take the emerging less-traveled fork in our life’s path, we completely freak out.

We just may be witnessing the extinction of politics as we know it, and the dawning of a pure democracy. And in that synergistic space between the young people courageously taking to the streets, and the highly evolved companies creating wisdom-informed policies, we may be part of the birth of a true Age of Enlightenment.

Once you give yourself permission to question everything — every label, box and edict in our culture — then life becomes a lot more interesting. And a lot less stressful.

Right now, in the wake of many global challenges, a dramatic change is on the wind. People are waking up.

Modern life has dis-placed us. Not only are we alien to the earth, we are alien to ourselves. We are stranger to the deep sense of rooted quietness as offered by a tree. Our ears are deaf to the ancient stories of our own indigenous heritage as first peoples who tended the soil of our original homelands.

May we be closer to our kindest humanity this holiday season. May we listen more, speak less, inspire more and control less. May we be joyful. May we evoke joy in others.