Creating Life

It’s been easy to lose a sense of oneself during the last 18 months. 

Dealing daily with new information, processing fast-changing and sometimes frightening news and information, adapting to meet new social requirements and negotiating with our (sometimes strong) feelings when we perceive someone else to be breaking the rules, or choosing a very different path through Covid to our own. 

All of this has been exhausting and required hitherto untested levels of compassion, patience and acceptance.

We’ve all done it and coped magnificently (nothwithstanding the occasional blip or meltdown – we are human after all).

Now, as we emerge from lockdown into something freer, but not quite free, we can ask ourselves what we want the coming months and years to look like.

If lockdown life showed us what we didn’t want any more, post lockdown life is asking what exactly you would like to put back into your days.

We are all simply human, but the way in which we choose to express that humanity is very individual and wonderful: we have the gift of creation and we create in myriad unique ways.

Rediscovering this side of yourself post lockdown warrants some of your time and focus.  Who are you?  What do you need to be happy?  How do you intend to express yourself over the next few years?

I find these much more useful questions than the classic What Are You Going to Do with Your Life? as it leaves space for so much more than the grand life-changes that in truth happen to us only once or twice in a lifetime.

Asking instead how you intend to express yourself gives you much more scope for the small joyful elements that make up a fulfilling life.

So along with your day job, you might express yourself by having a stronger, fitter body.  Along with being mother to young children, you might express yourself through writing that daily journal, or swimming every week.  You get the drift. You express yourself through whatever you bring to the world, whether that is a smile on a mountain top, a knitted hat, a cake, a safe haven for others, beautiful things to look at or being a good friend. It all has value and all it needs is that you know yourself and be yourself.

Perhaps, as I discovered last weekend, the essentials have not changed and it feels so joyous and restoring to be able to embrace them again.  I love mountains, looking at art, learning and the ocean.  To express myself fully I choose all of these things.  And now I am allowed to do them again.  Yippee.

The Not-Knowing

We like to protect ourselves against the not-knowing, because not-knowing makes us feel insecure and at the mercy of life. 

So we make plans and develop ways of living that we think insure us against chaos: a tidy home, some money in the bank, taking care of our health, a good education; but even so, sometimes life sweeps us off our feet. 

It is so hard to admit that we don’t know anything really and life is full of mystery. 

We trust the mystery when we look back, we say, “That was a terrible time, but it taught me so much.”  Harder to trust the mystery going forward; we do so enjoy the comfort of fake certainties.

You do not know, you do not know, you do not know.

But sometimes you might hear the whispers of knowing.

And if you become very quiet and peaceful and give up thinking you know anything, then and only then, with the doors of yourself wide open, can the knowing fall in. 

It is not what you think it is.

An Undoing

Undo all of the tension.  Come to your mat, every day, every week; move and meditate and breathe in the way that you always should but rarely do.  Be alive inside your body and luxuriate in that.

Undo all the tales you have told yourself about yourself, all of the times you got angry or upset, the times you gossiped and were unkind, the hurts that still sting, the day that went wrong.  It’s ok, you are human: you make mistakes and you make amends.

Undo the harshness, the struggle and the striving.  The world can be a difficult place, you have had a lot to do and you have done it with as much grace as possible.  Rediscover your gentleness and vow not to let the hardness of the world work its way into how you live your life. 

Undo the limitations.  You alone set your restrictions (nobody else can do that) and you alone can expand them too.  Broaden your idea of who you are and what you can achieve (on your mat, in your life).  You will surprise yourself.

Undo the tightness in your body and brain: stretch out your muscles, flex your mind, remember how strong you really are, in heart and in body.  Move with grace and power, surrender and discipline – always that fine balance between the two.  Pay attention and you’ll know when you get that balance wrong.

Undo the judgement.  You are not too fat, too ill, too injured, too stiff, too weak.  There is a practice of undoing for every moment, for every season of living and there is a way of accepting all that you are with gratitude.

Undo the sadness, the disappointment, the little knocks that life will give you.  Release your own innate sense of joy and gratitude.  Your feet on your mat, your arms stretching upwards, the way you can move this way and that; there is beauty in this simple thing.  Sitting in meditation, you breathe and you watch your busy mind doing its busy thing and remember that you are part of something much bigger, perfectly small, yet absolutely integral to that great and wonderful whole.

Every day you are busy doing, accumulating stresses and strains as you go. 

So let there be a daily undoing: a practice in which you shed your accumulated tensions, stresses and judgements and find your whole self again.