Finding Calm in Challenging Times: Mindfulness Hiking with Sean Fargo

Alright, so here hiking in Yosemite across from Halfdome. El Capi 10 is close by. It's a 10-mile day, 50 pounds on my back. I was on a long road trip with my daughter to see family, and my wife's been out of town, and it's been a long eight days. Each day I keep trying to remind myself to surrender to however this moment happens to feel and just not to resist whatever I'm feeling. And for the first four or five days, it was pretty easy with uh like 12-hour road trips, hiking 10 miles up and down mountains, carrying a big backpack, not getting much sleep. It's a little trickier to surrender and just sense into however I'm feeling. It's easy to get caught up in thinking about how things are adding up, or they feel intimidating. Feeling anything, and you keep craving, or I keep craving either good food or naps or some form of entertainment to distract myself. But it's really good practice just to release all that and open and allow myself to feel what I'm feeling. Yeah, there's a really sore knee, really sore shoulders, tiredness in the brain. There's also a feeling of energy through breathing hard that feels good. Surroundings are beautiful. I feel like I'm getting stronger in the body and in the mind. Keep trying to remember what's most important in terms of staying kind to myself and to my daughter, my family. Just kindness, kindness, kindness, release, softening, allowing this to be however it is. And by not resisting it, I tend to find more ease much more quickly. Because I'm not fighting with reality. I'm just being here, finding presence in the midst of action and stimuli, acknowledging the birds, different scenery, paying attention to how I feel, scheduling in some self-care and downtime meditation, and kind of practicing, you know, making proper choices around food and drink and company so that I don't get caught up into temptation, this feeling into this. Oh, there's a cute little squirrel. Oh, what a cutie pie. I'm climbing up this mountain right now. I don't know if you can see that, but it's pretty pretty big. Oh man. There was a swimming hole down there. Dunk my head in. Felt like it was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. So refreshing. I ran out of water halfway into my journey today and just luckily happened to remember that I packed a water filter. Not because I thought I would need more water, because I'm carrying three liters, but because I just wanted to put stuff in my bag to add weight to it. I have a uh big bag of sand from Stinson Beach in my backpack right now that I obviously don't need to be carrying, but it's great training to have a heavy backpack. Because next week I'm going on a four-day backpacking trip with two of my best friends outside of Seattle in the Olympic National Park. We're gonna be carrying our tents and our sleeping bags and our food and all that stuff. It'll probably be raining, which will be interesting. But that's another practice opportunity. Hiking in the rain. This is that feels like hiking in the mud. But you never know, maybe it won't rain. It'll be however it is. Just allowing myself to be with whatever presents itself. And that's our invitation as mindfulness practitioners is to invite that courage in ourselves to surrender our resistance and to feel the flow of energy and feeling, and as mindfulness teachers, we encourage that courage in others. Just inviting people to see if they can continually notice their experience very gently, very, very gently. These gentle baby steps. And all we can do is take one step at a time, sensing into this breath, this sensation, this emotion as it unfolds. It's about the journey, as my dad says. So let's enjoy it and soften resistance, even if it's really hard. Even if it feels like it's a long journey, we can do it together. We can keep inviting each other to practice this with kindness. So I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. If you're seeing this, it means that I got back to civilization, okay? I love you all. I wish you well.