be a hummingbird
The other day, I asked myself what would I write my next article about. As often happens, I thought about it for a while and came up with nothing. A few clients called and I did a few sessions. Later, when I went out on my balcony to enjoy the lovely view and the fabulous spring weather, I was greeted by a beautiful ruby-throated hummingbird. Now, when I say greeted, I mean that we were pretty much eye-to-eye, or rather beak-to-eye.
Btw, here’s a tip for bird enthusiasts: if you’d like to see a hummingbird at really close range, try standing still in a high place, thinking about anything but hummingbirds, and wearing red sunglasses.
I stepped back, a bit freaked out by the close encounter. The bird, who clearly had no fear of me, hung out in the air in front of me for a few moments longer before accelerating upward, hovering at a great height over the canyon, then going up another 20 feet and chilling at that altitude for a while.
I thought back to two of the sessions I had done earlier, both for clients who were overripe for the next opportunity in their careers, and I realized that the topic for my article had been literally staring me in the face.
I had said the same thing to both of these clients: If you want something that is bigger and better than anything you’ve ever had before, you have to raise your energetic vibration in order to the same energetic level as that opportunity.
The analogy I had used in these sessions, and one that I use regularly, was that one can either be a hummingbird or a pigeon. Most people live more like pigeons, only reaching the higher vibrational levels, which are attractive to all of the good things that they say they want, for brief periods of time before coming down to peck at the ground. A pigeon can’t stay at a high level for very long. It might miss something in the dirt.
Hummingbirds, on the other hand, are all energy and grace. Yet their hovering, usually very high off the ground, seems effortless. Midair is their comfort zone. When someone has authentically attained a high level of personal success, they are, whether accidentally or on purpose, vibrating at a consistent high level like a hummingbird.
One of my clients is an actor who wants to reach the next level in his career. He wants to get a meeting with a certain casting director who has attained a high level of success. But he isn’t getting this lady’s attention. She’s sitting in her high-rise office building, surrounded by successful producers, directors and stars, yet she can’t see this struggling actor. His picture crosses her desk every few months, and is all-but-invisible to her. She probably speaks to his agent often enough, but he’s still not getting in the door. Forget about doing lunch. If he crosses this lady’s mind, it’s very briefly as she leafs through headshots, quickly discarding his. And of course, if this casting director isn’t calling, it stands to reason that others on her level aren’t getting in touch either.
“Should I get a job as a pharmaceutical rep?” He asked me in despair. “Should I move back to Ohio where I can afford to live? Should I jump off a bridge?”
I told this client—very delicately, of course—that he was behaving like a pigeon who could not maintain high levels of energy for very long periods of time.
“You have to be a hummingbird” I said. “You have to live and breathe your vision. You have to make how you feel your first priority. When you find yourself taking a nosedive, or even having pigeon-like thoughts about something on the ground, you have to catch yourself and come back up.”
How does one do this? You may ask, especially when things are happening that are not exactly conducive to hummingbird thoughts?
Well, there are several ways. The first, as you’ve probably heard me say or write a few hundred times, is to meditate, and to do mini-meditations throughout the day. These do not have to be closed-eye meditations, just mindful breathing. If you keep yourself centered in this way, things will flow more smoothly.
Another way is to become very present whenever your internal well-being is challenged from without. Stressors such as traffic, rude people, unexpected bills, and the like are external challenges. Even your own unconscious thoughts can fall into this category. If a random thought threatens to take you down to ground-level, it’s connected to a judgment, and therefore doesn’t come from your internal truth.
So when you have a thought that tries to pull you down with the pigeons, go into hummingbird mode and hover above the thought, detaching from it. I like the phrase “Isn’t that interesting?” for observing random pigeon thoughts. I like the practice of using the very same thought that threatens to take away my presence—whether it be a worry or a judgment or a daydream—as a trigger to become even more present. Try this. Then try it again. Sometimes the thought will succeed for a brief time, and navigate you back down into pigeon territory. Just notice. With practice, the thought will show you what it’s made of (which is nothing) and evaporate. And you’ll feel lighter.
And of course, I advocate that you have or develop a strong vision, and that you keep that vision in front of you as you move through your day. Your vision needs to be your primary focus. As you’ve probably heard me say, most people focus more on—and live more in—the crud than the vision. This is easy to do, but it’s ultimately not very rewarding.
I don’t know how a hummingbird feels when it hovers above the canyon at seemingly impossible heights, then decides very casually that just because it can, it wants to go even higher. But I imagine that it’s a very meditative, centered feeling. The word joy comes to mind. And the word peace. This happy contentedness is the state in which I believe we are meant to live.
Of course it wouldn’t be any fun if we truly knew this. So we created a few obstacles like bad traffic and anger just to keep the game interesting. And pigeons, perhaps as a reminder. There’s nothing wrong with pigeons, of course. They’re cool with who they are, and obviously don’t want to be hummingbirds. But you, my friend, if you’ve read this far, you’re probably more of the nectar-sipping type. Which just means that what’s in the sky is more interesting to you than what’s on the ground.
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