by Bridgett Hart | SELF
I spent a lot of my 20s thinking about what I wanted in my future. A husband, kids, a big house. Not the picket fence, but you know what I mean. Everything felt transitional back then, like I was waiting for life to happen.
In my 30s, I spent a lot of time thinking about my past, and how it had shaped who I was, even while I was actively building my future: marriage, a kid, a mortgage.
Now, in my 40s, I'm finally starting to understand the present of the present. Not just the season my life is in, but the actual physical and spiritual experience of inhabiting this exact moment, regardless of the circumstances I happen to be in.
What I'd Tell My 27-Year-Old Self
A lot happened along the way to teach me a few things: I can never be "enough" for "them." The path I plan is lovely, but it can change, die, explode, or shift in one minute, with or without much help from me. I'm always either going to be okay, or I'm going to die. Even then, it will be okay.
If I could give one gift to my 27-year-old self, it would be stillness. Being fully in the present, on a consistent, reliable basis. There's nothing as powerful as what Eckhart Tolle called the power of now, and I wrote this originally with her specifically in mind: I'd just come out of a very unhealthy, abusive relationship, several years of it, and I was in a daze. What did I do? How did I end up there? I was putting my life back together, finally starting on my own path, but everything still felt transitional.
Throughout that week, people kept reaching out to me about similar situations, their own or someone they loved. So this message is for you too, whatever you're going through, but especially if you're in something hard right now. An abusive relationship. A toxic workplace with an abusive boss. Abusive parents or siblings. Anyone can be abusive, whether they're blood family or not.
It's not as easy as it sounds. My mind runs a million miles a minute: lists, shortcomings, family, money. The secret is, you're already perfect for all of it. There's nothing you need to do first. Everything that brought you to this moment, everything still coming from you, everything your ancestors and legacy hoped for, is already in you, exactly as it needs to be. All you have to do is be.
Why Being Present Matters
Being connects you to everything else that is, and everything that isn't. When you pause and actually notice your blood moving through your body, carrying oxygen from the trees to your heart, you remember something. And as you remember, you connect wider and deeper than you'd expect.
It's part of why people become monks and nuns. Once you feel the divinity that's accessible in stillness, in just experiencing being you, nothing else really compares, and definitely not whatever capitalism insists we need to be chasing instead.
Seven Ways to Practice Being Present
Meditation. Prayer and meditation are related, but praying is usually an output, meditation is a state of internal silence, openness, and receptiveness. We should've learned this in kindergarten. We didn't. It's simple and genuinely hard, because we're conditioned to constantly be doing something. Apps like Calm and Brain.fm offer guided meditations that help get my mind and body into that state. It usually starts with focusing intensely on my breath, my body, and my surroundings. Deepak Chopra also has a lot of good guided meditations if you want a specific practitioner to start with.
Nature. Being in nature is its own form of meditation, you don't need to lie down or go still to engage with it. Connecting to this part of ourselves makes it easier to be present everywhere else too. The natural world is full of examples of divinity, if you're paying attention.
Art. Letting art flow through you while you're in a meditative state gives you a tangible representation of the experience of being present. It looks different for everyone. That's the beauty of it.
Movement. Yoga and dance teach you to focus on your breath and the flow of your body. Feeling how your breath and thoughts affect your physical body is one of the genuinely fun side effects of yoga.
Sound. Sound has measurable frequencies, and so do our bodies, which means sound can help shift us toward a state we're aiming for. There's early research suggesting that 528 Hz music, sometimes called the "love frequency," can lower cortisol and reduce measured anxiety in small studies. I want to be honest about what that does and doesn't mean: it's not proof of DNA repair or of some ancient, handed-down healing tradition, those specific claims aren't supported by what's actually been studied. What I do believe is that just because Western science hasn't fully mapped something yet doesn't mean it isn't real or working. I hold both of those at once: stay honest about what's actually been measured, and stay open to what hasn't been studied closely, or at all, yet.
Smell. Essential oils can help you focus and block out distraction while you're learning to be present. Different oils carry different effects too, lavender for calm, lemon or orange for energy.
Ritual. Different cultures carry rituals built around connecting to this moment, to breath, to the physical form our spirit inhabits. These can function as meditation when you focus on the intent and meaning behind the symbolic act. They also connect you to what was, what is, and what will always be true about the experience of being present.
A Guided Exercise
If you want to try this with me, find a safe, comfortable spot. Seated or lying down is fine, just not driving, and not somewhere you could fall if you get too relaxed.
Close your eyes. I like to have my palms touching, that's just me feeling my own energy, you don't have to do that. Get safe, get comfortable, close your eyes.
Clear your mind. Take a few deep breaths, and blow out all the stale air. Then take a few intentional breaths: in deeply through your nose, out through your mouth. Sigh if you want to, or keep it silent.
On your next breath, follow the air. Notice it entering your body, passing through your nose, down into your passages, into your diaphragm, all the way to the lowest part of your belly. Follow it back out through your mouth. If your mind wanders, don't worry, just bring it back. Let the thought pass. Hello, thank you, thought. Let it fly away. Back to the breath.
That alone is enough to give you a real moment of presence. If you want to go deeper, keep breathing slow and easy, and start scanning your body. Begin at the top of your head. Scan your face, notice any tension, relax it. Your ears, your neck. Deep breath in, release whatever you're holding. Keep moving down your body the same way.
As you go, you might start to notice a tingling, blood moving through your fingers and arms, the quiet, ongoing magic of your body simply working. Take one more deep breath.
I'm not a meditation guru, so I'll let you find what works best for you from here. But the point is, with five or ten minutes, you can access the present of being, no matter what your outside circumstances look like right now. And as you do, you'll start to hear the voice inside you that gives clear guidance. I've been there. I know what that guidance sounds like. The more present you get, the more you'll be able to distinguish it: what your next step should be, how to move, what to do, where to go, who to seek out, what kind of help to get.
Recommended resources:
Calm
Brain.fm
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Question of the day: How do you get still and engage with the present moment? What gets in the way?
by Bridgett Hart | SELF
I'm so glad to have you here again today. As promised, here's part two of my deepest, darkest secret.
Part one was that I've used cannabis most days for the last 25 years. I quit during pregnancy, breastfeeding, and through a few jobs along the way, but generally speaking, it's been part of my life for a long time.
Part two is harder to talk about. Harder to admit to. Harder for other people to hear. At the end of the last post, I asked if you'd still love me after hearing that first secret. Some of you told me you would. Let me be honest: a lot of people don't. It's hard for people to accept, especially openly, because once someone says "that's okay with me," they start wondering: wait, is it okay for me? For the people I love? For that person I judged harshly, or treated poorly, because of that same thing? Do I still love them? It brings up a lot of questions.
An Interracial Family
Many of you know my husband is Black. Our daughter is Black (American from the 1600s and Nigerian) and white (Polish, German, British, and Scottish). We're an interracial family, married ten years next month, together for years before that.
But if you'd known me as a young person, especially through college, you'd probably have known me as someone with a lot of Black friends, maybe even more Black friends than white ones. I thought of myself as progressive. I liked Black folks, that's who I spent my time with, and I didn't think much more about it than that.
It wasn't until I started building The Hart Habits that I really began looking closely at everything I was carrying, everything I had shame around, everything I still needed to work through. One of those things, coming up both in the wider culture and in my own life as I became a soon-to-be mother to a young Black woman, was racism. Was I racist?
Starting From "I Am Racist"
I've told this story before: the way I started learning about racism in America was to begin with the premise that I am racist, and go looking to find out if that was true. Starting from that premise, not from "I'm probably not," but from "let's assume I am and see what I find."
Here's the deep, dark secret: it didn't take long at all. Within moments of saying, " Okay, I'll just say I'm racist and see what comes up", I knew for certain that I was.
A lot of you would ask more about that, because if you knew me, you wouldn't have thought of me as a racist person. I was the person you'd have described as liking Black people more than white people, and honestly, that was true for a lot of years of my life. I've since landed somewhere more nuanced: humanity is humanity, different cultures carry different strengths and weaknesses, and there's a lot going on underneath all of it.
Redefining What Racism Actually Is
When I said "I'm racist," I expected to find evidence that I wasn't. I grew up in North Idaho, home of the Aryan Nations. I was used to defining racists as the overt ones: the KKK, the skinheads, the ones with the regalia, talking about white pride and white Christian brotherhood and not wanting to be "diluted" by Black or brown blood.
I was around a lot of very overt racism, which made it easy to separate myself from it. Obviously I'm not one of them. I don't hate Black people, I love Black people, I thought.
What I found, over time, is that racism isn't an admission. It's not "I don't like Black people." It's not a confession of feeling negatively about a group based on their race. Racism is an omission.
Racism is redlining policies that kept Black people out of neighborhoods that were growing and succeeding. Racism is when Black Americans make up 13% of the population but average only about 1% of a white American's core social network, per research from the Public Religion Research Institute. Racism is when Black Americans are roughly 13% of the population but around 32% of the sentenced state and federal prison population, per the most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics data. That's an omission. It's an omission of the people who should be at the table, consulted, listened to, advised with, on how to actually fix these problems, and instead, they're simply not there.
Racism is air blow dryers in public bathrooms that don't register dark skin, because nobody in the room designing them was Black, or in a position to say, this doesn't work for me. Racism is the school-to-prison pipeline for young Black kids. Racism is suspension and discipline rates 30 to 40 times higher for young Black girls than white or Asian girls.
That's racism. Omission. The omission of people from decision-making and power-holding in our own society. Bigotry and prejudice are their own separate things, and I found plenty of those too, in my own mind, my own heart, my own life, and ultimately in the society around me.
Deep Dark Secret Number Two
I am racist. I'm working actively to be anti-racist. But the only way to actually do that was to start in the mirror first: deal with my own prejudice, my own bias, my own defense mechanisms that would go up to keep me from hearing truths that were hard to hear.
There it is. My deepest, darkest secret. I am racist. I don't want to be anymore. I don't want you to be either.
If you're someone who's thought to yourself, well, I'm definitely not racist, drop a comment and say it out loud, or tell me you'd like to learn more. If you're ready to drop the defenses and see what might be under the surface, in your own mind, your own life, your own sphere of influence, either way, know that I love you, just like I love myself, just like I love my white father, my white brother, my white mom and sisters. We will create a new world together.
Question of the day: What would it take for you to start from the premise that you might be wrong about this, and see what you find?
by Bridgett Hart | SELF
Yesterday I talked about how our imperfections are part of what makes each of us perfect, in our own particular way. Today I want to show you how to actually move with those things, by sharing the deep, dark secret that kept me hidden and held back for years.
There are layers and nuance to this, so parts two and three are already brewing. But first: do you still love me after hearing my secret? Do you think the people around you would still love you, if you shared yours?
Doing Everything "Right"
Rewind to when I began the work that's now The Hart Habits. I was about 30. I'd done all the things I was supposed to do, and hadn't done the things I wasn't supposed to. College degree. Graduated high school first, then college. Never got pregnant. Stayed in church, wherever I was, for years. I wasn't an alcoholic. I'd checked every box.
By that point I'd also been through a lot of trauma. I'd been raped, and I spent the five years following it in an abusive relationship. I worked my way through those things. And in doing that work, I gave up one of the tools that had actually helped me survive them, in the way that made sense for the life I was living at the time: cannabis. It helped me work through the trauma of the rape, through the abusive relationship, through getting out of it.
A Decade of Believing It Was My Fault
Once I got to the other side of all that, I believed the bad things that happened to me were my own fault. I genuinely embraced that. I believed there was something else I wasn't doing right, and that was what kept bringing the bad things to me.
Around that same time, I started drifting from organized religion, from church. I'd been using cannabis the whole time, in and out of church, though it always had to be a secret part of my life, kept carefully put away. I'd quit for stretches, for different jobs, whenever it was worth quitting, and it was never a big deal to stop. But it was something I genuinely enjoyed, something that genuinely helped me. I liked having it in my life. And I felt a lot of shame around that, because of every message I'd absorbed about what it meant to use it.
Note: if this brings up shame for you around your own choices, on your own path, I'd point you to Brené Brown's work, especially Daring Greatly, for more on shame specifically. It helped me understand mine.
So I got to this point and decided: I need to put cannabis away for good. I also quit having sex outside marriage, because that was my other greatest sin, or so I believed at the time. That was it. My two deepest, darkest secrets, at 30: I smoked cannabis regularly, and I'd had premarital sex, though I already believed I'd been punished for that with the rape.
I want to be very clear: that belief was not true. It was the story I told myself for years. But it's what I believed at the time.
Four Years of Checking Every Box
Fast forward, and I was in complete ruin. Four years with no sexual contact with anyone. No cannabis in my daily life. Church, regularly. Checking every box there was to check. Good job. Good money. My own home.
And I was lonely. Devastatingly lonely. Every single person I'd ever been with had cheated on me, church or no church, it didn't matter. I felt broken. I was broken, honestly.
So I asked myself the real question: how could I have given up all of it, done everything by the book, exactly the way Christianity told me to, and still be suffering like this? Still struggling? Still, honestly, feeling suicidal?
If you're feeling suicidal right now, please reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. You can call or text 988, anytime. You matter, exactly as you are, right now.
The Love Chapter
I decided to dig into the one source I knew at the time: the love chapter. Love never fails, it said. I wanted to know how to actually get that. The next sixteen years were the journey that followed, though I didn't understand at the time how deeply the two threads, the cannabis and the church, were tangled together.
In that moment, I decided I was choosing cannabis. And since the church I'd known my whole life wasn't going to be sympathetic to that, wasn't going to be open to me being honest about it, I was going to have to move away from it. There was too much shame built into that environment, too much judgment placed on something I'd now had four full, sober years to actually, objectively evaluate. I understood what it did for me, what it meant in my life, by that point, better than I ever had using it thoughtlessly.
So I moved away from church. I moved toward love instead. Sixteen years later, here I am.
The Secret I Kept From Everyone
This was the thing I hid from almost everyone, including my employers. I worked in the education system, where getting caught meant real consequences. I wasn't doing drugs. I was using cannabis, for my own mental wellness. But the stigma around it was strong enough that I kept myself segregated from a lot of my life because of it, and missed real opportunities along the way. More on those stories another time.
That's my biggest secret. I've been using cannabis for 25 years now, just about every day. How does that land for you? You can be honest. Tell me how you feel, because we're going to need to actually talk about it. Not everyone's going to be fine with this. People have strong opinions. So tell me, what's yours?
by Bridgett Hart | SELF
Last time, I talked about how your imperfections make you perfect, and shared two of my own deepest, darkest secrets. I know that raised a real question: how does knowing your weaknesses actually make you perfect? And what good does it do to know your imperfections, especially after I just told you how important it is to know your strengths?
This is about turning your faults, your imperfections, your deepest secrets, into your superpowers. I'll walk you through the exercise. Follow along.
Two Things I Was Hiding
For me, the two biggest ones were cannabis use, and later, discovering racism I hadn't examined in myself.
At the time I first went through this, I was a CEO and executive director at a large agency, overseeing people running 24-hour care facilities. The question was: how would speaking openly about either of those things, cannabis use or unexamined racism, have actually helped me, or anyone, in that role?
It's a fair question. What would've happened if, as CEO, I'd announced I was pro-cannabis, that I used it every day, that I was a health equity advocate for cannabis access and research? At the time, over a decade ago, it wouldn't have helped. I would've lost my job. I would've lost my fingerprint clearance card. I wouldn't have been able to do most of what I was doing in that role.
Authenticity Needs Wisdom Too
Authenticity always helps, but it needs wisdom alongside it. Would discovering my own racism have helped me in that CEO role? Yes, absolutely. I could have used that position to work toward eradicating white supremacy inside the organization, to uplift and empower the people I worked with, to run an anti-racist corporation from the top down, if I'd done that work and been willing to sit with it.
Unfortunately, I didn't have that awakening until long after I'd already left the CEO role, because of the cannabis, not the racism. But that circles back to the real point: how did any of this actually help me?
What the Discovery Actually Gave Me
Discovering how important cannabis was to my life helped me make an authentic decision about the direction of my life. I realized that climbing the corporate ladder, being CEO, being executive director, wasn't actually the journey I wanted for myself. I was there. I hadn't ended up there by accident. But I didn't actually want to be there, and I wasn't motivated to stay on that path. So I pivoted, because I'd authentically embraced what I believed, at the time, were my imperfections.
Once I could embrace those things honestly, I was able to evaluate what I actually wanted. Not just what I didn't want, but what I wanted to build, and what I wanted to contribute to the community around me. I used that imperfection to navigate my way to where I am today.
If I weren't open about my cannabis use now, it would genuinely be harder to do the work I do. A lot of the people I work with, in business consulting and in coaching, also use cannabis, and it matters to them to be able to say so openly with the people they work with, instead of being dismissed, or assumed to lack the wisdom or mental capacity to do extraordinary things, simply because of the stigma attached to it. Because I'm open about it, we can work together in that same authenticity, and build something new, together.
Cultivate Your Strengths at the Same Time
The flip side of embracing your imperfections is cultivating your strengths. I've written before about how to figure out yours using the Clifton StrengthsFinder, based on four decades of Gallup research. You take a short assessment, or it comes with the book, and it tells you your top five strengths.
At the same time I was making this transition in my life, I dug into my own strengths, and started figuring out how to actually work within them. It made all the difference. Using cannabis daily became one of my superpowers. And discovering the racism inside me became another one, because now I can talk to white people about how to recognize and unlearn it in themselves. I've already been through that work. I'm still on it. But I'm glad to share what I've learned.
Connect With People Who Share Your Values
The last piece: connect with people who share your values, your strengths, or complementary ones, and your imperfections too. That's where the real magic happens. You are love, manifest in human form. Exactly as you are is exactly as you were meant to be, and you are perfect. Once you can remember that about yourself, it gets a lot easier to remember it about everyone else too.
Question of the day: What's one thing you've been hiding that might actually be a strength, once you stop hiding it?
