Ten Best Life Hacks

Feeling lost and adrift? Out of sorts? Cut off from the things that used to bring you joy? Does it feel like a stranger has taken up residence in your own skin? Here are ten life hacks that will quickly get you back on track toward your own best life.

1.    Get up earlier

Instead of dreading the alarm clock and pushing it as late as you possibly can, try reclaiming the calm, quiet, sacred hours of the early morning. Stop intoning the lie that you are not a “morning person” as if that was even a thing. People are not cast in stone. They can change their patterns. Get up early and watch your happiness, self-esteem, productivity, and sense of calm increase.

2.    Turn ordinary activities into rituals

You’re already doing them every day anyway. You might as well turn them into meditative, conscious, reflective rituals. Grinding coffee with gratitude for the Central American farmers who lovingly tend their trees. Pouring that first cup with the focused intention of a monk in Japanese tea ceremony. Brushing your teeth, shaving, bathing, and dressing with deep appreciation for the magical mystery of the mind-body, and the creativity and ingenuity of those who design and make our clothing. This way, your very life becomes a temple, and everything holy.

3.    Move more

An unused door hinge rusts shut. An unexercised body closes down. You don’t have to do anything crazy. Just walk for an hour. Do yoga. Bicycle or swim. Take the stairs. Rake leaves. Whatever you have access to. For tens of thousands of years human beings walked for miles and miles every day. We were made to move. Not only will your body start functioning and feeling better, but your mind will too.

4.    Meditate

Finally commit to a real meditation routine. Not just a dabble here and there, but a commitment as consistent as eating and sleeping – because it’s damn near just as important. Meditation unlocks the mind-body’s hidden restorative powers. Wellness happens if you let it. And unburden your meditation practice of any silly and overblown expectations. Forget about enlightenment. Let the stillness and glow of meditation be its own reward. The rest happens by itself without your interference.

5.    Eat real food

Food guru Michael Pollan famously reduced all of his books down to one line: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” What he means is, eat real food – food as close to the source as possible. Ditch the margarine. Switch back to butter. Just eat less of it. And when you look down at your plate, it should be 75% plants, 12% protein, and 12% carbs. These aren’t hard numbers, but guidelines. Infuse your shopping, prepping, cooking, eating, and clean up with gratitude and presence. Let the miracle of food become a sacrament. Shifting your eating habits will awaken strength and restore equilibrium throughout your mind-body processes.

6.    Find some new music to fall in love with

Ludwig van Beethoven said that “Music is a higher truth than philosophy,” and he was right. If you’re not mindfully, deliberately, deeply, and consciously listening to music on a regular basis, you are at real risk of soul-starvation. Find new music. Ask around. Look up artists you like on YouTube and let the algorithms lead you to similar artists you’ve never heard. Indulge in satellite radio or commercial free streaming subscriptions. When you find artists you like buy their music so they can afford to keep making it.

7.    Fall in love

You can’t snap your fingers and make love happen. But it’s always hovering nearby waiting to be born. And let’s not limit this to romantic love exclusively. I’m talking about love in its broadest sense – that feeling of deep, liberating, exhilarating, and dizzying interconnection with everything. The way a bird loves the sky, a sailor loves the sea, or a singer loves a song. There’s an unbridled zeal within all of us longing to emerge. Don’t be coy. Get out of the way and let your love find its mark. To love is our deepest calling. Be still enough to hear it.

8.    Work in service, not self-interest

Sure we work to eat. We need money to live. That paycheck really matters. But there are deeper currents in motion. When we work we turn our time, talent, and energy into goods and services that help other people enrich their own lives. When we pull back and see the bigger picture, all work is service – an opportunity for us to participate directly in the healing of the world. When you begin to see your work in this light, everything shifts. Your self-esteem increases, your anxiety about outcomes abate, your depression reduces, and your enjoyment expands because you finally see your work for what it is – not a simple quid pro quo for money, but a tether that connects you to the tapestry of all energy, all matter, and all consciousness. It is through our work that we affirm our oneness. Our work is a ritual that sanctifies our life and the lives of all it touches.

9.    Mari Kondo your condo

Get rid of most of your stuff – you don’t really want it anyway, and mindlessly holding onto it is clogging up your life. Take a few days, empty every closet, hold each item in your hand and ask yourself, “Do I really love this, I mean really love this?” Kondo’s animistic Shinto spirituality asks us to feel the energy of each item. It will “tell” you if it should stay or go. If it vibrantly belongs in your life, keep it. If it doesn’t, say “Thank you” and graciously let it go. Place the items you are keeping back in your closets and drawers one piece at a time. Give the rest away. When you are done, your home will feel free, clear, and full of light. And so will your mind. Read Mari Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up for guidance.

10. Ask for help

Maybe we don’t ask for help because we want to maintain the illusion of invincibility. We don’t want anyone to see how lost we are. I get that. But get over it. Ask for help. Delegate. There are people all around you who know way more than you do about just about everything. And they’re grateful to be useful. (They hunger for self-worth and validation just like you do.) When you ask for help you are giving them a gift – the opportunity to turn their work and their love into service. And you too are brought home to the truth that none of us does any of this alone. It’s a win-win.

            When you adopt these ten life hacks you’ll soon see changes happening within. You’ll see your old problems with new eyes, and feel reinvigorated enough to withstand them. You’ll shift from negativity to gratitude, from scarcity to abundance, and from fear to fullness. But don’t wait. Seeds don’t grow in a jar on the shelf. You have to plant them. Ideas alone don’t shift us, only actions do. Begin now. You do not have forever to begin living the life you were born to live.

Connectivity

I’m walking from room to room holding my phone aloft like Lady Liberty holds her torch, waiting for the 4G icon to flip back to Wi-Fi. The video I’m streaming keeps buffering, buffering. Then suddenly there it is. The video resumes.

            Whether it’s in our tech or in our soul, we all want better connectivity.

            The word “religion” comes from the Latin religare, meaning “to bind or connect.” We turn to spiritual practice and our faith-communities to come out of isolation and return to our fundamental oneness. It’s lonely out here being a raindrop, longing for the sea.

            So how do we return to oneness? How can we reestablish our fundamental unity? Maybe it isn’t as difficult as we think. What if we never really lost that primal connection, we only think we have? After all, how can one sever an inseverable tether? The 20^th century teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj put it this way: “You are universal. You need not and you cannot become what you are already. Having never left the house, you are asking for the way home.”

            When the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir came to America he was only a boy. His father schooled him in a strict form of Christianity, forcing him under the penalty of the lash to memorize and recite the entire New Testament. After spending a few meandering years at the University of Wisconsin Muir left with just enough scientific training to organize his life-long love affair with the natural world. Eventually winding up in the American west, Muir stumbled into the sacred valley of the Yosemite nestled high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Yosemite was his burning bush. After that, nothing would be the same – not for Muir, and not for the young country his work would inspire.

            Muir often wandered Yosemite alone for weeks at a time with a bag of tea, a loaf of bread, and a volume of Emerson’s essays. Emerson’s neo-Vedanta philosophy, born from his immersion in the Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita at Harvard University, seeped into Muir’s pores and softened his strict fundamentalist upbringing. He began to distance himself from the small, impoverished God of his childhood, calling it “as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a half-penny theater.” Muir found his God in the luminous Sierra Nevada Mountains, calling them his “range of light.”

            Through his writings and advocacy, Muir’s nature mysticism shaped American consciousness, leading to the National Park system and the preservation of wilderness for its own sake – one of the boldest ideas in the American experiment. When Emerson, thirty-five years Muir’s elder, visited Yosemite and met Muir, he offered him a professorship at Harvard. Muir turned it down. How could he leave this cathedral of stone, these hallowed woods, this sacred light?

              Muir found his connectivity in the mountains of California. But we can find it anywhere. God is found wherever the eye falls, at the tip of our fingers, in the sound of each other's voices, in the shimmering sun on the water, in the prescience of our hearts. Finding our connection point is as easy as slowing down, slipping into the eternal presence, and knowing that there is nothing but connectivity. Nothing stands alone. "When we try to pick out anything by itself," Muir wrote, "we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

[This piece first appeared in my "A to Zen" column in the September/October 2019 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Wash Your Bowl

There’s a Zen story about a young man who wants to become a monk. He wants to become enlightened.

            The Master accepts the young adept into the monastic order, and another monk leads him to his tiny room. No one says much. They pretty much leave him alone.

            He’s invited to the all-day meditation sessions, and he does his best to keep up with the arduous practice. But no one’s explaining anything to him. He has a lot of questions.

            One week goes by. Then two. Then three. Finally, the young monk can take no more. He storms into his Master’s office. “I came here to learn about Zen. I have been here three weeks and no one has told me anything about Zen!”

            The master gazed at the frustrated adept.

            “Have you eaten?” the Master asked.

            “Yes.”

            “Then wash your bowl.”

I often return to this story when the complexity of life threatens to overwhelm me. I wonder if I, like that young monk, am generating a lot of agitation by asking too many questions, by trying to channel the immeasurable sea of experience through the tiny intake valves of my own limited and limiting thinking. What if, as Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced?”

            And how best to experience it? The Zen story suggests that when we return to the ordinary activities of our everyday lives, the immediacy of life draws us into a renewed intimacy with its mystery. Instead of chasing that so-called peak experience, instead of spending a lot of time and money on exotic travel or high-end gurus, maybe the portal to our best and most authentic life is right here at our finger tips.

I imagine that young monk standing at the kitchen sink, running his fingers around the inside of the bowl in the warm soapy water, returning it to its pristine state through humble action. An insight beginning to rise up through the suds – that maybe we ought to think less and do more, ask fewer questions and take more chances, trusting that if we walk with integrity, humility, and loving-kindness, the road will rise to meet our feet and the path will follow the swale of the land to a place where wisdom and bliss find us unbidden.

            Religious people call it faith. I think of it as trust. If we let go of the illusion that we have to figure everything out, that we have to have all our questions answered, and that we have to manage life, then something simpler, cleaner, easier, and more beautiful begins to emerge. Life becomes something we receive rather than achieve.

            And it is in the everyday objects all around us that the mystery is made manifest. “No ideas but in things,” wrote the poet William Carlos Williams. His poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” exemplifies this with startling concision: so much depends/upon/a red wheel/barrow/glazed with rain/water/beside the white/chickens. (Read that slowly, silently to yourself three times and see if something doesn’t begin to stir.) Williams is drawing us down out of the fog of abstraction and into the real world of things here and now – their shape, their shimmer, their texture, their color, their smell, and heft all serve as harbingers of the emerging awareness of our own immediacy, our own significance. The thought-world could never do that for us.

            And wheel barrows, like bowls, are for something. They are utilitarian. They are containers. They help us get what we need. Look at how wheel barrows and bowls transcend paradox, how they manifest a synthesis of somethingness and emptiness, being and non-being. 2,500 years ago Laozi pondered this same polarity in chapter 11 of the Dao De Jing: “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want…we work with being, but non-being is what we use.” How can I better arrange a beneficial balance between the polarities of my own life, between the paradoxes of empty and full, busy and idle, assertive and withdrawn, deliberate and spontaneous? Noticing how the processes of nature synthesize and transcend paradox yields a wealth of wisdom.

            I recently returned from a two week journey upriver on the Rhine through the heart of the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Switzerland. I took 714 pictures. But my favorite picture took itself. I was fumbling with my iPhone on streets of the old medieval quarter in Strasbourg one afternoon when I accidentally snapped a shot. I only discovered it later that night, back in the room, editing photos. It was an image of the cobblestone street. The roughhewn square stones of many hues and colors, each painstakingly laid in place by a mason centuries ago, spread out before me in an interlacing, mesmerizing fan pattern – pure visual poetry. My imagination opened like a book. The feet that had touched these stones – a crucial errand, a sacred pilgrimage, an aimless saunter. The commerce, the trade, the wealth, the poverty. The wooden wheels of wagons bearing the dead of the Plague, the clattering tracks of Nazi tanks, the tires of air-conditioned motor coaches full of tourists. The nobility and vulgarity, the heroism and cowardice, the centuries of blood and wine and tears and hay and horseshit, all washed away by sheets and sheets of summer rain, and in the morning after the storm, rain-wet and shining in the new light of day. These stones, drawn from the earth and hammered into shape, set by hand in a bed of sand by men on their knees, brought my own journey into focus – the ingenuity of humanity to carve these villages out of these valleys, and the endurance of what remains in the ceaseless flow of ephemera. In this way, a simple thing – a cobblestone – came to stand as a cipher for everything else. Just an ordinary, extraordinary cobblestone. No ideas but in things indeed.

             
          When life gets to be just a little bit too much, resist the urge to find solutions in the mind. For all its wondrous usefulness, the mind isn’t always our greatest ally for one simple reason – it’s rooted in the past. By its very nature, mentation hovers and orbits in repetitive cycles. Ordinary consciousness consists of habitual patterns, and all too readily imposes those patterns where they don’t belong. And yet this next moment presents us with an arrangement of elements never before seen. If we rely on the mind it will simply hammer this fluid reality into a familiar pattern instead of seeing it for what it really is. It would be far more fruitful to reach out with our hands and simply touch the things right in front of us, meeting them where they are, as they are, without ornamentation or conceptualization. The Zen Buddhists are right. Sleep when we are tired, eat when we are hungry, and wash our bowl. The universe will unfold on its own terms. And we will find our way through it unhurried, and unspeakably beautiful.