You Don’t Need to Change
You don't need to change. You don't need to improve anything. Just love the world and love yourself as a beautiful part of the world.
Mary Oliver opens her exquisite poem, Wild Geese, with these words:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Fundamentally, you are perfect just the way you are. That might sound trite. It might sound tired. Nonetheless, it’s truly the greatest message I could ever offer. That and I love you. It’s true. I may not even know you very well. We may have never met. But you’re a human being with dreams and emotions and hopes and dammit, we are all here working out our existence the best we can, struggling and loving and learning to wake up to the power of our own existence. There’s something very beautiful about that. That beauty exists within me and it exists within you.
Loving yourself is to love the Universe
Now with over 100 pages in Yoga Nidra scripts!
To learn to love the world you gotta first learn to love yourself. The world—the entire Universe— is a projection of YOU. What exists outside of you also exists inside of you therefore, the best way to learn to love everything is to love yourself. You know, “be the change” and all that? Well what that means is that everything in the Universe comes from Source including you so by effecting yourself you effect everything else. Loving yourself is to love the Universe.
There’s a great irony in loving things just as they are because as you allow yourself to simply be just as you are, devoid of the shoulds and the what-ifs, it actually gives you freedom to recognize exactly the ways in which you are programmed to grow.
It goes back to something I’ve often said which is:
In order to get there you have to be here and here is always changing.
Truly we exist as the love child of the Universe: that which is pure spirit, which just is, which needs nothing to exist and that which is finite, imbued with form, subject to change and death. There is only now. There is only HERE. But “here” is a treadmill at our feet.
The entire Universe is involved in some dance between presence and movement and I suppose we need to simply join the dance. Get dressed up and fu@#ing join the dance!
Holding Space
We practice deep compassion as we extend this same privilege to other people and things around us and allow them also to simply be, especially those things that would easily turn our hearts bitter.
As we practice yoga and meditation, we cultivate and practice understanding our own being. Doing so helps to reduce the suffering known in the ancient Sanskrit wisdom traditions as Dukkha, that suffering which holds us back from experiencing our highest self.
One enormous act of compassion is holding space by being with a person or thing and allowing them to be just as they or it is. I'm thinking of a friend who is sick or experiencing something mentally or spiritually challenging or (heaven forbid), holds a different political view or opinion about what’s going on with COVID. Simply being with that person (6-ft. apart of course) and holding space for them, without the need to fix or change anything, just being with them, allows a deep compassion to exist between the two of you. Perhaps one of the greatest acts of love is to truly see a person and allow them to simply be how they are. To love them as is.
Practice making room in your heart for that which would sooner canker your heart toward someone or something or make your mind fester with shoulds and what-ifs. Holding space for someone or something, doesn’t mean you have to invite them over for dinner or send them a card on their birthday. Rather you simply offer compassion toward them (or it) by not becoming sour. Sometimes that means practicing not having an opinion about it (read: Lionel Richie is my Guru). And by so doing, you ultimately offer your own heart and mind in the same compassion—the heart that flourishes when it feels abundance and love, not bitterness, and the mind that abounds when it is sheltered from should and what-ifs.
Here is a simple example of holding space:
World: The NYC 4 Train once stopped en route ultimately causing me to miss my flight home.
Me: Bought a NYC 4 Train T-Shirt as an act of holding space for the 4 Train.
World: Just as it is.
Me: Loving the world as it is.
This week, I invite you to practice holding space for things that you either don't understand or which bother you. May this be our daily practice. May love for yourself and the world be our eternal practice.
Please share this!