How to Ground Yourself in a Crowded City

I just got back to the states. It’s really strange.

The only way I can describe this phenomenon is like having a favorite restaurant to eat. 

It’s the best place in the world and it’s where everything is just right. The homely smell coming from the kitchen, the family pictures hanging on the wall, the owner who knows your ‘usual’ and makes you the stuff that’s not on the menu.

Then you move away. 

Years later you come back to the same old restaurant and suddenly everything you once loved are replaced by sight of trash on the ground, oil stains on silverware… and Tony who is always yelling at customers and inevitably spitting all over the food.

What the hell?

That’s what it feels like for me to be back in the city.

A nostalgic, but unsettled feeling.

On Thursday I went back to my dental school to visit my teachers.

At the school, I was asked to check in with a computer. It took 30 minutes to complete the process because I was asked to scan my ID, which I’d left at home.

After the visit, I came out to find my car getting ticketed because I was 20 minutes over.

I ran to the woman in uniform, desperately explaining my situation. 

She kept shaking her head and told me to go to court over a $32 ticket..

Disgruntled, I tossed the ticket in the cup holder and headed to meet my friend for lunch.

I attempted to speak Spanish to the waiter and he looked at me with great offense. Dead in the eyes, he said: I speak English. I apologized to him profusely and explained I just wanted to practice Spanish. I was really taken back. Had I just racial profiled him? 

I felt so ashamed.

On the way home, I went to the gas station to find out as a 30-year-old woman I was not allowed to buy a lighter without an ID.

C’mon, stop playing with me. You don’t think I look over 18?

He kept shaking his head and put the lighter back on the shelf.

I went back to the car in disbelief.

I felt so small, on edge and isolated. Like an empty bag floating down the street without anchor. Getting into all sorts of trouble at the gust of wind but never belonging anywhere.

I noticed the trees in the parking lot are blooming.

It’s spring.

On the island, it’s warm year round. The same vegetation lives on and on — a never ending paradise.

There seems to be no death nor birth.

Here, the trees are fully engulfed in bright colors this time of year — pink, blue, orange, purple.

As if they’d waken up from a long slumber and are ready to live their best lives.

It mesmerizes me.

It doesn’t matter that for a better half of the year, the condition does not favor their growth.

It doesn’t matter that when they wake up, the city had gotten more crowded, polluted or difficult.

Where they can grow, they will do so with full resilience. And they will bloom as vibrantly as they would have anywhere else.

I have so much to learn.

All my previous visits have always turned into wasted time that I regret. I stop all of my habits. I don’t even write. I get high all the time and eat horrible food.

Then I would come back to the island in despair that I’d lost so much progress.

But this time, I realize it has always happened because I was trying to do too much.

I enter a new environment and I expect myself to keep up with the same routine. Which always leads to failure and I give up.

I was result-oriented.

It’s how I lose myself completely into the pace of life here.

So for these next 6 weeks, the only practice I will prioritize is grounding myself.

That includes: 

• 30-minute meditation

• 15–45 minute yoga session 

• writing the morning pages everyday.

I know now that the most important thing for me to do here is not to be productive amidst the chaos. But to be grounded like the trees.

It is the root that will nurture all subsequent right decisions.

And when I find myself getting caught up in the eye of the city, I will look to the trees, follow my breath and remember that I, too, can blossom in a crowded, harsh environment.

Your practice doesn’t have to look anything like mine. 

But if you live in the city, you have to be even more disciplined about it than I am.

Our society, the majority of it, is moving towards a direction that does not favor an individual’s well-being nor inner growth. I don’t want to say too much about it now. I will write my next article on this topic.

From this letter, I just want to tell you:

As someone who lives on an island, meditates and journals daily, camps once a week and dedicates to many other practices, I still have a very hard time being here.

I find myself getting violently tucked and pulled by thousands of thoughts.

I find myself comparing to others and getting trapped in the race.

I find myself wanting to win a game I don’t even enjoy playing.

You really have to take care of yourself.

Not just for you, but for me.

And for others like us who are struggling to find connection in a crowded city.