FINDING CALM IN THE LAND OF AWARENESS

When Heather Land was fifteen, she read the book Natural Cures, and it changed her perspective on “everything.” She doesn’t claim to have perfected the juggle of parenthood, marriage, and self, but she has evolved to a much calmer state.

ARTICLE BY VANELIS RIVERA | PHOTOGRAPHY BY KELLY MOORE CLARK

There’s more land than homes where Heather Land and her family live. A simple country cottage with a deep wraparound porch lined with rosemary greets me as I pull up, as well as her friendly Aussiedoodle. The interior is beyond aesthetic; it’s intentional. Natural light permeates the first floor thanks to two industrial glass garage-style doors—one in the kitchen, the other in the living room. Heather sits in an upholstered club chair, exuding comfort in her loose Thai fisherman pants, tank top, and knitted open cardigan. “The last few days I’ve been feeling anxious,” she confesses. “I haven’t been feeling this way in a long time.” She was afraid it wasn’t the right time to do a lifestyle piece that would assume she had her life all together. “I feel like a wreck right now. But then I thought, ‘That is real life.’” From the outside looking in, Heather’s life appears perfect. Even her Instagram account looks like a magazine spread. But just because it looks easy, doesn’t mean it always is. That’s why two of her favorite words are intention and awareness. “I intentionally practice quieting my mind,” she says, focusing on practicing “tiny meditations” throughout her day in order to find grounding. “Like the anxiousness right now. You know it’s irrational, but sometimes you get these anxieties and you get fixated on them, and you can’t really move away from it,” she admits. The only thing that keeps her grounded is coming back to the center of calm.

When Heather Land was fifteen, she read the book Natural Cures, and it changed her perspective on “everything.” Even though she was the kid eating at Sonic every afternoon after drill team practice in junior high, she always felt led to natural alternatives. “I was always the wise old mother hen of the group,” she says. She never stopped enjoying fast food, at the time. She just became more aware of how and what she ate, keeping herself open to different life choices. “Since I was fifteen until now [forty years old], I’ve slowly, methodically tried to figure out how to keep a balance between all of it.” She doesn’t claim to have perfected the juggle of parenthood, marriage, and self, but she has evolved to a much calmer state. “I feel more myself. I feel like the person I always felt like I was,” she says.

Heather grew up in a high anxiety home, but she quickly realized she didn’t want to be on any prescription. Rarely paying visits to the doctor as a child, homeopathy was a very natural direction for her to take. It wasn’t a decision based on going against the grain for the sake of it. For a while, she felt that she fought against being herself: “For a fifteen year old who thinks outside the box, in a place that is very much a box, I spent many years of my life trying to change myself to figure out how to fit. I got to a point where I became aware of that,” she says, adding “Once you do that, there is so much freedom and liberation, and now I do things how I want to do things.”

Heather “burnt the candle at both ends” in her twenties. “I think that’s probably a rite of passage. I thought that being busy made me more successful and made me more worthy. I wanted to do all the things and do them well.” She learned the most by making mistakes, and encourages others to do the same. “You have to learn what it feels to be burnt out before you can appreciate a slower pace. Otherwise, if you were to do that right now, you might feel that you were being lazy, not a go-getter.” By her mid-thirties, she realized she began to evolve, a growth she attributes to motherhood: “Having kids has been my biggest lesson. All the things that I preach to them, it’s like putting up a mirror right in front of me. In teaching them something, I’m the one who gets it. It has really made me evolve into the truest form of myself.” Motherhood wasn’t always that way. When her family made the transition to their modern farm, she struggled at first. “I latched on to just being a mom. I wouldn’t allow myself to breathe or do anything else. And I was miserable and isolated,” she says, recognizing she had lost her identity. Now, she enjoys getting older, because each stage of awareness makes life clearer. “I feel like a kid, who has just been given some kids and a house. I feel like I’m just tapping into a better version of myself, constantly,” she says, affirming that when it comes to going in a different direction than the world, you have to be brave.

Heather found crossfit in the midst of mom-burnout. It was a random discovery, because she had no idea what it was. She sought a grueling activity out, when she realized she was more mentally exhausted than physically. “There’s something wonderful about sweat. I needed something to wipe me clean, because my body was anxious long after my head was,” she claims. One mindful decision led to another, and she picked up yoga again to counteract the intensity of her crossfit workouts. For her, the core of yoga is the connection that grows within yourself on the mat: “Everything that you do on that mat translates into life, side by side. It’s the moving physical example of our life.” Allowing yoga to groom her for life has allowed her to let go of her ego. One day of practice she may feel like the “bomb dot com” and another she can’t catch her balance. “I’ve literally fallen to the ground and just laid there on my back. I allowed myself to do that. I give myself permission now to not have expectations,” she says, making the connection between body work (crossfit and yoga) and mind work (meditation).

Heather uses meditation as a tool to bring herself down from the fluctuations of life. Too often she has felt “crazy, like you’re over it, like you have no control.” That one hour a day she dedicates to a mind-body practice is not just for her, but for her family. Knowing that her mental state crashes into the people she loves forces her to make time to keep herself “sane and focused.” For Heather, enjoying a cup of coffee is a meditation in “life happening in real time.” That’s why she eases into her mornings. She guards her time for the sake of serenity. Some of her favorite moments with her husband occur over a cup of coffee. “That is very ritualistic for us. It’s time that we’ll sit and have great conversation. We take that time to be present,” she says. The older she gets, the more she understands the significance of quiet. Her meditation practices have revealed to her that we have all the tools to fix ourselves at any given moment. “We are enough,” she proclaims, but there must always be awareness: “We avoid so much discomfort. Everything snowballs from discomfort. If you have a little bit of awareness, you can sit back and see it more clearly.”

When thinking about how her atmosphere ties to the person she is, she remembers her parents. They were polar opposites, she says. Her mother, an extrovert and serial worker, would wear her emotions on her sleeve, but always created space that “enveloped you with warmth and comfort,” while her father, an introvert, was very personal and mysterious. These yin-and-yang personalities became the framework for her parenting style. A cornerstone particularly stemmed from her father’s ability to sit with her as a child, listen to her ideas, and encourage her to be open to the ideas of others. Her two girls’ — Stella (12) and Beverly Jane “Bird” (10) — exemplify that nurturing foundation, centered on self-reliance through homeschooling. The family practices open communication, allowing conversations to range from personal struggles to finances. “The difference is, we get to talk about it and walk beside them doing it. I don’t want them to believe what I believe. That’s the easy way out. I want them to figure it out for themselves,” she says. Even though she knows that her parenting and teaching style does not guarantee the people her children will become, she is creating a foundation to teach them to listen, be aware, and stay tuned in. “I don’t want them to get fed into the rat race.”

A lot of the time we spend is wasted on the “busyness of nothing,” she says, but Heather and her family live on a different time frame, one that aims attention at slowing down. Time does pass without thought at Heather’s. Out of nowhere 2 p.m. suddenly became 6 p.m., and still Heather sat unfolding her thoughts. An interview quickly became a conversation, an exchange of life experiences, then confessionals. Between recommending the Untethered Soul and letting her dog inside, she revealed one of her fears was not feeling worthy about speaking of alternative lifestyle choices, but she promptly reined it in: “It’s a true paradox. Just because someone appears to move gracefully doesn’t mean they aren’t vulnerable or sometimes messy, and just because someone is real and vulnerable and messy doesn’t mean they cannot carry themselves in grace.” Balancing life is a workout, and though you’ll get knocked off of your horse, some falls become easier to recover from with practices that strengthen the mind, body, and soul. “It’s a constant fine tuning,” she affirms, with emphasis on constant. But Heather Land has given herself permission to make up her story and choose what her life looks like, proving that being true to yourself, only works if you know who you are.