Amy Holt, Author at AlrightNow

About Amy Holt

Amy--a massage therapist, blogger, herbalist, yogi, E-RYT 500 yoga instructor, and girl from Maine--is the author of Herbal Goddess (Storey Publishing). Amy is the curator of This Quiet Earth, an online space focused on bringing the separate parts of our nature into balance in order to empower ourselves from within. She's a sucker for mystery novels, hot chocolate, anything yoga, anything green, long winters, and wild weather. She is a teacher and a constant student and believes that, with enough practice, anything has got to be possible.

Eternity in an Hour

Following tragedy, any tragedy, eternity and mortality become close companions. Anyone who has been through trauma—any trauma, however defined—will understand how an hour, a minute, a day can seem like an instant or an eternity. In those moments we are lifted so far out of ourselves that time ceases to have meaning. Even in retrospect, those moments take on the outside-of-time quality that they first possessed. This time travel, if you will, is not a superhuman feat, and it’s not a phenomenon belonging solely to tragedy. Think of the best day of your life, think of the anticipation of that day. One flew by, the other dragged on interminably. Here’s the thing: we can cultivate this ability to time travel. Meditation gifts us with the ability to stay solely in the moment so that there is neither eternity nor fleeting flash of time passing. Everything is eternity; everything is a flash of time passing. The first time you sit down to meditate and the ten minutes, the hour, whatever, flies by as if you had just closed your eyes is an experience almost beyond belief. It hasn’t happened to me all that often (probably because I’m constantly trying to replicate it), but when it does, it reminds me so clearly and so sharply of my own mortality. The experience of time in and of itself is a crazy, exhilarating meeting of expansion and contraction, of assumption and perception. It’s what cues you into the idea that your reality is just one eternal moment which can stretch or snap, depending on where you put your attention. And here’s where it gets (even more) interesting. When you have this insight in meditation, you suddenly see both how fragile and how indestructible everything is—all at the same time. You are going to go on and go on and go on until you don’t. When you realize this, when you are aware of this aspect of mortality, then you become aware of how important your choices are. Tragedy teaches this, but meditation does it with less violence. Suddenly we wonder why we’re wasting our time with road rage, with people we don’t like, with people or situations that don’t support us. Why are we squandering even part of this eternal moment on backbiting, gossiping, boredom, or anger? Horrible, heartrending things are going to happen. But we don’t need to choose anger, frustration, hatred. We have the superhero-like ability to step back from the monkey mind, always swinging from branch to branch, and choose how to react to any situation. I can sit in traffic and I can allow anger to build, wasting all of this valuable life energy, or I can choose differently. I can choose where to put my focus. This eternal moment in which we spend our lives really does go all too quickly. Why do we choose misery? Why, when I get home, do I look around to see what chores are or aren’t done? Why [...]

2018-01-17T19:03:00-08:00By Amy Holt|

Be the Change

We all talk about change all the time. But what does change really mean? And can we really change? I mean, really change? I think we mean well, we talk big, but changing is much harder than we realize. The question is, once we know what it takes to change, will we really want to? Think about it this way: you want to change a habit (quit smoking/eating sugar/drinking coffee/complaining/etc.), so you start baby-stepping your way toward a more liberated (in your mind) life—healthier, cleaner, simpler. What happens, almost immediately? We begin to feel pangs of loss for that habit we’re trying to oust from our lives. We don’t realize how attached we are to the identity of that habit (identity of smoker, cynic, chocolate connoisseur, etc.) until we try to leave it behind. Suddenly, we’re Wile E. Coyote, hanging in space and, with the realization, plunging to the canyon below. Here’s what I think. We all vibrate (metaphorically or literally—depending on your philosophical perspective) at a very specific, single note. Our true, core selves are like a single guitar string that, when played, possesses a crystal clear and individual tone, unlike any other tone out there. But to hear this tone? That takes time—time with yourself, time meditating, time alone, time without the distraction of computer or television or music. And, man, that’s hard. When we feel the urge to change, I think it’s because we’re starting to hear that note above all the other noise; suddenly we want to silence everything else and let that note play. But once you begin to do that, you realize how fragile that single guitar string seems (even though it isn’t really fragile at all), how vulnerable it will be hanging out there on its own. That’s the moment when we give up; we decide quitting x or y is just too hard. We’ll try again next week, next year, or never. So what do we do? I don’t know, exactly. Listen to yourself, for starters. Imagine if we all began to listen to ourselves, our single note, blocking out everyone else’s noise. How inspired would we be to be true to ourselves, to let our note be heard? Then think of the people you’d invite into your circle. You’d decide by listening, right? Because you’d only want to include those notes creating interesting or harmonious chords when paired with your own true note. That’s when change—individual, local, and global—will happen. We all want to make music, but first we need silence; and then we need to listen. ~Amy Holt (originally published in elephant journal, writing as Amy Jirsa)

2018-01-16T15:52:19-08:00By Amy Holt|

About Amy Holt

Eternity in an Hour

Be the Change

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