I’ve been tripping on a secret, over and over, for the last many years. And it’s so profound that I shake as I try to put words to it. I’m that moved.

It’s all about our egos, and how they’re like the Wizard of Oz. Only instead of a powerless guy behind the scary facade, there’s something vast and spacious. Something that feels like floating on clouds and being utterly safe and fearing nothing at all. Dropping the facade terrifies the facade itself, and that terror drives all of us to do everything in our power to keep it up at all times.

But those glimpses beyond it? Those unexpected moments when we step to the side of it and feel our whole chest open up and the knots that are ALWAYS in our guts release and that cloud of chatter and worry and questioning quiet in a strength that feels more spacious and profound than anything we could ever hope to shore up or protect? Oh dear lord. Please, give me more.

I’m thinking a lot about spirituality these days, and about life paths (whether they be spiritual, relational, vocational, etc) that have turned out so differently from how we might have wished or expected that they would. And about how hard it can be to admit to ourselves that we aren’t on that path we used to be…or expected to be…walking, but are instead on the one that we’re on. That’s such a huge move, truly, to admit where we actually are.

But then there’s the move to admit that to other people, which can be hard enough on it’s own, depending on the audience. But all the more difficult when doing so has implications for choices and commitments we’ve already made. What if you’re a pastor and you admit that your concept of God cannot be integrously molded into anything your church could warm to? What if you’re engaged and you know deep down this person isn’t who you want to marry? What if you jumped through more hoops than you can count to reach a dream – sacrificed lots and gave years of your life to the work – and you realize once you’ve reached it that the dream was actually empty, or at least is empty for you?

The Wizard of each of our Oz’s shakes. It quakes. And tries to scare us into doing WHATEVER it takes to avoid the truth that we deep down know. To avoid the awful, awkward conversations required by it. The gut-wrenching choices that’ll have to be made. The fissures in relationships and chasms that’ll surely form in some of them.

“Doom and Gloom!!” our Wizards say. “Every last bit of it!!!”

But here’s where *I* quake and with something other than fear. I quake with the force of conviction.

You are not your Wizard.

Your ego is only a mask. It’s only a scary, boisterous story. And the actions and words you know you need to do or say are only dangerous and foolish and awful in the constricting world of that story.

Outside of that story, such things are LIFE – with enormous, capital letters. They’re freedom and flight. They’re you honoring what’s deep and beautiful and true, and connecting yourself with the growth and the learning that such honoring inevitably opens for you.

There are details that will have to be tended to. There are tough decisions that will have to be made. Relationships may break or need to be arduously mended. I don’t want to belittle any of that.

But I want to say with all the spacious, potent power within me that when it comes to listening to your soul and honoring the truth you hear it whispering, being a fool in your ego’s eyes is ultimately the safest, most hopeful, life-improving, trust-inducing move you could possibly make.

I’m cheering you on, with my pom-poms out for me, too, and all the ways all of us fear feeling foolish and try, with faltering steps sometimes, to dive into LIFE anyway.

With so much love,

P.S. This song might be something you need to hear (lyrics below).

I’m not sure how often or even clearly I was fed this line, but somewhere in childhood, I came to believe that I could not be attractive without bangs. I believed this through my early 20s, suffering the torments of rain, wind, fog, and humidity for the sake of looking my best.

Somewhere after college, however, that line began to wobble, and I felt constantly hidden and frustrated by the bangs I had worn for so long. I wanted the freedom to walk in the rain without worry. I wanted to get up in the morning without my eyelashes catching the strands that would reach them after sleep. I wanted the way I looked on the outside to more closely resemble the freedom I was coming to feel internally (my fine hair required bangs to be coaxed and sprayed into place).

So I grew them out.

Can I just tell you I still feel giddy, to this day, about that decision? It was a move toward something I wanted, rather than away from something I feared.

Fast-forward to last summer. It’s hot out, and the kids and I are going to the beach. In addition to spider veins, my legs have developed full-fledged varicosities, bulging masses on both of them. My height and accompanying history of feeling watched has made me self-conscious about wearing short shorts anyway, but add these veins to the mix and I’m sentenced to a lifetime of skirts and capris every summer, no matter the heat.

But on this particular day I’m so hot. And my swim suit bottom is actually made as short shorts. And I know that in addition to wrangling two intractable preschoolers, I’ll be carrying so much gear from our car to the sea that the thought of wearing capris over top of my swimsuit, as per my usual practice, makes me want to faint.

And a slow, sheepish smile creeps across my face as I realize that no one really cares what my legs look like. (Why have I not thought of this before?) I’m not trying to win beauty contests here, anyway. I’m not trying to trick some unsuspecting man into loving me for my looks. And considering the company I’m keeping on this day, and the bags of sand toys and sun block and tupperwares of snacks, I’m probably not eye-catching material for anyone, regardless of my physique.

So by god, I wore my swimsuit shorts without covering them up. I walked down the street with my gaggle of kids and gear, white, veiny legs blinking and glowing in sunlight, exhilarated by the freedom I’d just discovered.

I made a move toward something I wanted, rather than away from something I feared.

And I’m wondering: do you have lines like I’ve had in my life…like I continue to have…about what you surely can and cannot do with your body? Ways you simply must wear or color your hair, colors of fabrics you have to avoid, cuts of clothing or shoes that can’t ever be worn by you?

Or maybe your lines are about activities that are off limits for you and your size/shape/race/athletic (in)ability: dancing; yoga; sports; zumba. Or how about swimming in public places? Revealing that tattoo you had done in your youth? Oral sex with your beloved?

How does it feel when you bump up against the fences that these lines create around your living? Do you ever look longingly past them to the other side? Do you ever daydream about actually wandering out past them, shudder at how it would feel or come across, and dutifully obey the lines another day?

Here’s what I want to tell myself and all of us about such things:

Those lines you’ve always believed about your body and what you can and cannot do with it? They aren’t set in stone. They may not even be true! And the more you’re able to live into the life you want, rather than live to avoid the shame you fear, the better all of us are for it.

The more we can peer out from our hiding places (long pants, padded bras, full-coverage make-up, slimming undergarments, hair dye, eyelash extensions, too-busy-to-take-that-dance-class-excuses, et al) and see people comfortably embodying their actual size, shape, color, texture, and (dis)ability, rather than working to stifle or cover it all over, the more freedom we’ll all feel to step, as we are, into the light of day. Or, as it were, the beautiful darkness of night.

Want to try a baby step beyond your lines already? I’d love to hear about (almost :) any steps you take! Large or amusingly small, I will celebrate whole-heartedly with you!

P.S. I love the way this song flips lines about wrinkles on their head (click here to listen if audio player doesn’t appear below). Surely songs like this could be written about all of the “lines” that we carry!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You guys, I’m so tired. Moving is hard work, and as much as I wish I could do it without skipping beats, my beats have gone totally missing. I feel much more like curling up in bed than thinking deeply or creatively about anything – let alone unpacking more stuff!

But this is what bodies do, right? They hit up against their limitations. They get tired and over-stimulated when they don’t get enough sleep and have way more decisions to make than they normally do and way less time alone. They think they can do more than they can sometimes, too, and then have the shocking wake-up or slow, torturous dawning that no, actually NO, you cannot just keep trecking on like what you’re doing is nothing.

I found the following song a few years ago when a friend introduced me to kids’ singer Tom Hunter, and return to it, if only in my mind, whenever I need the reminder and reassurance that I’m not alone – that when it comes to having physical and emotional limitations and getting pushed, often reluctantly, up against them, we’re all in the same boat.

The chorus says,

Everybody has to eat
Everybody has to breathe
Everybody poops and pees
Everybody loses teeth

…but I always swap out lines for whatever physical or emotional thing I’m facing (and, quite honestly, sometimes with tears of feeling so comforted).

Wanna play too? I’d love to hear in the comments what line you might add to this song today.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(Click here to listen if you don’t see the audio player above.)

Here’s a mind-bender:

What if the help you most need right now has nothing to do with the physical or emotional or psychological or financial help a person or book or job or institution might offer you, but rather is all about the motivation behind your acceptance or rejection of that help?

It could be that rejecting some form of help is the most important thing you could do. Maybe your most pressing lesson right now is all about stepping into your power, owning your capacity to make choices, being comfortable making mistakes or looking foolish. Doing it yourself.

If this is your lesson, and you sense it as a resistance to or a digging-in against well-intentioned and even wise and seasoned council: bless you! Reject help for the time being! Step into yourself and do this thing your way, knowing full well that your way might not be the most efficient or effective or mistake-free way possible. Efficiency and effectiveness and grace aren’t your Big Lessons right now. Stepping into your power is.

It could be, though, that your Big Lesson is all about humility and about peeling back the layer of your ego that has huge signs all over it that read “Help is for losers” or “I should be capable enough to do this on my own by now so just buck up, self!” or “My job is to GIVE help, not receive it.”

Peeling back this layer enough to see your wide open field of possibility for both giving AND receiving; the utter freedom you have to be weak without shame – to be actually lovable and beautiful right in the midst of your weaknesses; the blessing you have from the universe to step into your rightful place of need – no matter how big or small this looks to you in comparison with others’: this may be the Biggest, most Important Lesson that’s yours right now to learn.

And if it is: open up your hands in whatever ways you can. Maybe literally, as a morning or evening practice. Maybe figuratively by saying no to helping someone else when you know that what you need more in this moment is to rest or be comforted or listened to well.

Maybe you need to back out of a commitment for the sake of this lesson. Maybe you need to step off the grid completely. Maybe you need to have the hard conversation with your partner or parents about putting money toward therapy or coaching or detox or some other form of help or healing.

Maybe accepting or rejecting help is, for you, right now, the Most Important Thing.

+++++++++++++++++

P.S. Need some inspiration for one of these directions? Here are a couple of songs that might help (those reading via email, click here to see both songs).

This one is all about the first lesson. And for the record, in my book, power and greatness aren’t synonymous with efficiency, effectiveness, and making no mistakes. They’re about your inherent identity and the gift you are to the world – in your strengths and weaknesses, both.

If your Lesson right now is about receiving help, consider this a serenade from the universe. Or better yet, a serenade from the person or program or people whose help you most need.

As I continue my dives into this topic of starting new things I’m bumping into something repeatedly. It feels huge and important and worth exploring thoughtfully. Truly, it feels like a key to a new world for all of us.

One of the driving ideas of this site is that force and coercion are not the most effective means of addressing fear. These can take the form of bullying ourselves into doing things that scare us; encouraging friends or coaches to “kick our butts” into doing what we know we want to do; literally or metaphorically shouting at ourselves alternative “truths” to the things our fears are telling us (i.e. I’m just fine! There’s nothing here to fear! I’m good enough, smart enough, and doggonit, people like me!!).

These methods get things done, but generally cause fear to go underground where it continues to wreak havoc – and often worse havoc than when it’s allowed the light of day. Their efficiency is in outer results, but when it comes to achieving a peaceful inner world, they slow down or even stall out that process entirely.

Instead of force and coercion, then, I advocate a gentler approach to addressing fear. I advocate a daily practice of cultivating trust.

This practice can take any number of forms and reach into myriad arenas, but the heart of it, the seed, is this: fear naturally loses its power the more our trust takes root. And by trust I mean the sense that I’m okay no matter what happens; that learning is always possible; that there is no need to prove my worthiness of love; that my outer achievements are not benchmarks of my worth; that I can say yes and I can say no; that there isn’t any shame in changing my mind; that age and youth do not disqualify me from joining the conversation; that I can take risks and can also wait for ripeness for such things.

You get the idea.

But here’s the thing I keep bumping into: masculine energy. Like feminine energy, it’s everywhere, and this irrespective of gender. And generally speaking, public life in the western world has long been weighted far more toward masculine energy. It’s characterized by light (think: sun), action, assertion, direction, focus, and logic. Conversely, feminine energy is characterized by darkness (think: moon), receptivity, emotion, creativity, and intuition.

To me, the work of tending trust aligns more readily with feminine energy. It’s a revolutionary contrast to the more popularized, and masculine, methods of dealing with fear.

And yet.

It seems to me, in all the thinking I’ve been doing about starting new things this month, that a balance of masculine and feminine energy is every bit as important in the work of tending trust as it is in the work of running countries, corporations, and firms. It seems inseparable from the capacity to listen to and honor fear (feminine energy) and not be immobilized by that listening, but motivated to strategize and take helpful action (masculine energy) in response to it.

Case in point: I have felt so vulnerable this month. I’m working on an interview series with writers and thinkers and entrepreneurs whose resumés are book-length tomes. I’m finishing an ebook that I want to share with you soon. I’m brainstorming projects that feel at the heart of my calling and well beyond my bank of experience.

These are all good things that I want to be doing, but I’m vulnerable as I do them. There is lots in me that wants to stall, to zone out, to avoid the discomfort of them all. And I’m noting that to heed these impulses would be to dwell in my feminine’s shadow.

I’m clear, however, on my current calling, and recognize a ripeness for all of these goals. So when my kids get sick in the midst of them all, and I’m left without my normal hours for work (as has happened this week), I’m discovering my capacity to lean into energies that don’t rejoice at an excuse to stall (hello, personal history!), but at the chance to face a challenge with greater determination. I’m recognizing that for me, to tend trust in all of this newness + my current week’s setbacks is to tap into my masculine strength and press forward, into the late hours if (since!) need be, to do the work I know is mine right now to do.

So here’s a question for all of us: As we start new things and simultaneously wish for grounded, peaceful inner worlds, how are our masculine and feminine energies being balanced? Where might we need to lean into one or the other to reach more effectively for the lives – inner and outer – we most want?

My hunch is that the vast majority of us could use more feminine energy to counter the forceful, coercive voices that keep us blocked and/or running doggedly after outer achievement. But maybe there are some of us whose positive, masculine energies need to be tapped in a greater way…whose trust could actually be nourished by the doors this energy takes us through.

If you’re in this camp, here’s a song for you (Tom Petty’s Won’t Back Down):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And if you’re in the other, here’s one with wonderfully feminine inspiration (Trish Bruxvoort Colligan’s What If from her album Splash – highly recommend!):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

May you know when to rest and when to press ahead. May clarity about the work that’s yours to do right now come. May you find, even in your unknowings, the power that flows from the masculine and feminine sides of you.

One of the lessons of nature that has simultaneously tortured and buoyed my heart in the last decade has been the lesson of seasons.

My second pregnancy was definitely a winter for me, where everything I had come to identify as being “me” lay dormant in the soil of a pregnancy-induced heart condition + trying to simultaneously care for an active 18-month-old.

When that second baby was born, I mistakenly assumed spring had arrived and I would finally get back to my old “normal”: writing and exercising regularly, engaging in public life, feeling in touch with my family, friends, and inner world. Winter hadn’t finished, though, and I often looked longingly out across miles of “snow”, completely consumed by the tactile tasks of caring for kids and trying, often unsuccessfully, to get just enough sleep to stay sane.

I’d compare myself with other parents through that time, wondering why I seemed so snowed under by my role by comparison, why I couldn’t just push through and produce!, return emails!, be creative!, have FUN! So much about my life felt like bare branches and leafless, underground bulbs – completely foreign to the “me” that I liked and longed for.

I’m not in a winter anymore – I think I’m in spring – but I’m noticing that as I look out at other people’s lives, especially people in full bloom, I feel similar things to the way I felt a few short years ago: envious and mystified and wondering whether I need to be ashamed of my lack of full bloom, or somehow resigned to a whole life of fewer blossoms than others seem to have.

And I wonder, as I look toward next month’s theme of Starting New Things, whether any of you are feeling similarly. Are you content when you’re in winter? – when your circumstances have you holed up in a long season of private, maybe a season of intense inner work, or intense parenting, or study, or some other block that prevents you from pursuing Life as you ultimately wish it could be?

How do you respond when you feel good things stirring in you, too – new buds getting ready to open – and you look across the lawn at someone else that’s fully flowering? Maybe they already have the skills you wish for, the business, the connections, a circle of supportive friends. Maybe their shit is more together than yours and you wonder whether yours will ever be anything close to that.

I’m wondering whether it might serve our trust well – yours and mine – to realize how unhelpful it is to compare our lives to others’. To compare seasons.

Your life is uniquely yours. The blocks that you have, the wounds that you carry, the challenges in your circumstances; and conversely, your heart, the gifts you have to offer the world, the things that bring you great joy or spark your deepest wonder: these can’t be helpfully compared with any other person’s because there isn’t anyone else that’s YOU.

We can’t know how long our winters will last, or how quickly they’ll switch to spring. Sometimes the very day you’re most convinced that snow will last FOREVER is the day new growth pokes through. And in your own or others’ most colorful, flamboyant successes, none of us can know what inner or outer circumstance will plunge us back into dormancy, privacy, darkness.

Maybe the most trust-inducing thing we can learn from nature’s seasons is that they turn, and the most helpful thing we can do with that information is to apply it not to some combination of us-and-the-person(s)-we-most-want-to-be-like-when-we-grow-up, but rather to ourselves alone.

Let others’ lives turn as they will. Let your winters and the buds and blossoms of your summers and springs – in quantity, color, and type – be the miraculous, holy things that they are. In their very own right.

***********************

This Weepies song, Hideaway, was a light for me through the winter of my earliest years of parenting. Though its metaphor isn’t seasons, it just as well could be. (If you’re reading this via email, click here for audio.)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’m struck this week by the moon. By its brightness and constancy. By the power it has to move oceans. By the ways it pulls at them, and us, in ways we often don’t notice, even when its light becomes a sliver and our nights are so dark we can’t make out the shape of our own hands.

And I’m struck by the sweetness and the strength that I’ve been gaining through conversations with people about Japan. Even in our fear and our restlessness and all the ways the events there and elsewhere, too – sometimes inside our own homes or circles of family and friends – make us feel small and vulnerable and aware of how little we can know about what tomorrow holds, let alone whether we have the inner or outer resources to deal with such things well: these connections have made a real difference in the courage and hope I’ve been able to find. They’ve given me more patience with my restlessness and more motivation to offer what strength and trust I do have for the strengthening and en-courage-ment of others.

So I’m thinking today about how connected we all are, and how our words and actions and demeanors – whether within our own homes, or in public or online spaces – both for good and sometimes ill, are like the moon’s light. And the sun’s, for that matter! They pull and shine on all of us. They have the power to do great harm, but also to heal and nourish and light the way of all.

I’m particularly struck by this as I go about my mundane tasks: preparing food, dressing and bathing children, interacting with store clerks, talking with folks at the park. I do these things, and I follow my heart and hands in this online space, and am amazed and a little wobbly-kneed and teary eyed by the thought that my life, my vulnerable, tenuous, minuscule existence is a moon and a sun. Is a light that is made bright by all of yours and that pulls on and is pulled by the suns and moons that all of you are.

Thank you for the ways that you’ve strengthened me this week. Thank you for the ways you’ve showed love to people around you and courage when you’ve had courage to give. Thank you for doing what you can to live peace, and grow trust, and learn a thing about love.

And if you’re gasping for peace and trust right now, may the moons around you pull you quickly and safely back to shore…whether they or you know that’s what they’re doing or not.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Moon In My Body, by Cyprian Consiglio, from his album Compassionate and Wise

(Those reading via email, click here for audio.)

*This post explores the ways that nature heals us. Recent events in Japan are a dark reminder of the ways it can push us to need healing. I hope to write about that next.

During my mid-twenties I went through an excruciatingly dark season. The catalyst was an unraveling of some of the religious convictions I had held to that point, but the more I pulled and untangled those threads, the more I felt personally unraveled. My self-understanding and life trajectory were being transformed and, looking back, I see that the shock and anger and despair and, eventually, the lessening of all of these things, were stages of grief that I was moving through. Responses to significant and disorienting losses.

Toward the end of that season, my husband and I moved to the San Francisco Bay for my husband to begin doctoral work. At that point I was out of tumultuous waters but new on my land legs, and healing, still, from all that had happened in the years prior. Once each month for a number of months I made the 3 hour drive back to where we had been living to meet with my therapist. Then, freshly encouraged to continue on my Way, I got back in my car and drove home to the bay.

Those late afternoon drives over California’s Coastal Range – a sea of soft, rolling hills, green in Spring, golden otherwise – healed me in ways I never planned or anticipated. The softness of those hills, and their constancy, soothed parts of me that, though cognizant that I had made it through a dark season, had come to fear because of it that life was only sharp edges and jarring change.

And the sun on those hills – the sun! It made me weep sometimes. I’d crank up Sting’s Lithium Sunset and put it on repeat, letting those words and the images out my window seep into my bones. After so many hours of therapy and so many journals filled and so many conversations with myself and my husband and close friends, it was the silent presence of those hills and that sun that I needed. They were a prayer and an answer, both.

I wonder whether that song, and a poem I wrote about those hills after driving through them one day, might spark your own consciousness of the ways the earth is healing or has healed you. Maybe ways it might heal you yet. I wonder whether you might see or even just imagine the ways the sun or the seasons have spoken hope or blessings on you already.

I hope that if you’re in a dark or painful night right now, you’ll find some comfort here.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Lithium Sunset, from Sting’s album Mercury Falling. Lyrics here.

(For those reading via email, click here for audio.)

*******************************

Silence Speaking

I take a day trip through California’s Coastal Range:
rolling hills golden with dry grass
scattered with crumbling rocks and gnarled trees.
It’s late afternoon and everything
bronze in the lowering sun.

I love these hills –
the softness of their curves,
the vastness of their open spaces,
the constancy of their presence,
holding me, enfolding me,
enfolding all of us in our little metal boxes,
winding our way through them.

Looking up and out, my instinct is a surge
of gratitude.
“Thank you. Thank you,” I say inside,
not knowing to whom.
A stripe of pain streaks through
the wonder in my soul
as I think on this.
Is God a conscious being
as I was taught?
Or an impersonal force?
A construction of human minds and yearnings?
Every option is riddled with
things I want
and don’t want to be true.

“I’m here,” I hear, my gaze on golden hills transfixed.
“We’re here.”
What can I make of this singular? This plural?
Mysterious reassurances.

Ahead the gentle curves are
penetrated by an enormous chunk of
earth from deep below,
its horizontal layers turned
vertical in their thrust toward air
and light.
Something far more ancient,
yet here, also new,
confronts the weathered hills’ monotony.

A picture of the movement
in my soul?

Windmills spinning where hills meet sky
speak more to me of movement
in the otherwise stillness
of the landscape.
Around a bend a power plant
converts their wind to that which
lights and warms and energizes:
the blood of cities,
pulsing through miles of wire veins
that start here:
in the golden wasteland
of silent, stolid hills.

Barrenness –
suffering, yearning,
wounds, confusion, losses,
the silence of a Holy
I’ve wished more deeply than life itself
would speak –
this barrenness, the windmills whisper, can be a spring,
life-sustaining blood at pulse from its center,
its heart.

I assent, but not gladly.

The hills in my rearview mirror are pink now
in the setting sun
as the freeway lanes multiply
and all around are overpasses
skyscrapers
airplanes crisscrossing the darkening sky.

In a sea of crawling taillights I feel strangely held.
You hem me in, behind and before
instinctually rises.
Golden hills now only inner rollings,
soul enfolding,
I inch my way toward Home.

Today is the last day of February, and the last day of my month-long orbit around love. Thank you all for your heart-felt comments this month, and, to those who’ve watched from the sidelines, for your quiet presence. Both have meant the world to me and made me feel a warmth in this space that’s truly caused my trust to grow. I hope the same has been true for you, too!

I want to close this month with a love song that I wrote for you. Though musically inclined, I have never self-identified as a singer, and, as you will hear, have no vocal training (let alone training in recording technology!). But I feel so much love for all of you that I’ve found myself singing this to you in my mind all month. The words are these:

May your fears find rest
May your body know peace
May the things you need [in order] to heal, draw in near

May it be so!!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(Those reading via email, click here for audio.)

With so much love,

My most trusty tool for learning to live beyond fear is mindfulness – practicing getting conscious of what’s happening inside and around me. This week I was conscious of the stars aligning perfectly for a vulnerable, freaked-out inner world, and true to form, my inner world delivered. I was a wreck for a good couple days.

Being on the other side of those emotions now, I’m noting a couple more things.

First, I feel ashamed when I feel really vulnerable and afraid and ashamed (yes, shame about shame!). Or at least part of me does. There are parts of me that trust deeply that all my emotions are fine and that it’s normal, in fact, to experience fear and shame and vulnerability. But parts of me are convinced that I should be able to apply these very beliefs in a more sweeping, feel-good way all the time.

Which of course could only work, as far as I can see, by suppressing a lot of what goes on inside.

The other thing I’m noting is a type of fertile ground in being-a-wreck-ness. When people come to the end of their rope, to the end of what they know to do to help themselves, to the end of their logic-mind having any say in how they feel, sometimes there’s a vulnerable humility that happens. A surrender. A release of all hope of control.

I hardly have words yet for what I’m intuiting here, but something about this place of raw humility strikes me as holy. Maybe the most sacred thing there is. A ground so fertile for trust to grow that I want to bow before it.

This is where we see our most raw need. This is where our hopes of paying for, or performing for, or being clever enough for, or achieving enough for, or being mature enough for – of having our sh*t together enough for – love are crumpled up and folded back enough for us to see the real heart that pulses underneath: the wish to be loved just as we are.

This is where the potential arises, too, to turn our eyes outward to recognize the unearnable, unloseable, unbearably real lovableness of everyone else, too.

However briefly our efforts at earning love stay crumpled, and whether these crumplings are met with recognizable love from others or not, I wonder whether it could transform our lives to see them not as evidence of failure or weakness or immaturity, but as moments of pure gift. Cracks in a facade that’s not nearly as lovable or relateable or hope-inducing as the vulnerable, helpless, bleating heart at pulse beneath.

*******************

This Ben Taylor song, Surround Me, could be sung by such a heart.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(Those reading via email, click here for audio.)