Month: November 2021

Allow yourself to make mistakes. Give yourself that room. That open space of spreading out. And allowing for mistakes to happen. Mistakes are not what you think they are. They’re not something ‘wrong’ that happened. Mistakes are wonderful open portals to living problem-free.

We’ve learned that mistakes are bad, a sign of failure, a sign of wasted opportunity. This is the conditioning – it’s the language of stunted growth. A language that doesn’t know love. We whiplash ourselves with guilt, shame, hopelessness, powerlessness, despair every time a ‘mistake’ is made. Especially when money is involved.

How did we come to learn these things?

Who originally taught us that?

What were their motivations?

Did they care about growth?

Through our conditioning things were forced on us all the time. And saying no to this force was seen as outrageous. We don’t even know it’s happening to us half the time. The dynamic is so off balance that when things are forced on us, we think we’re choosing them. And when we do actually use our inner guidance and listen to our inner authority to navigate our own experience, it’s seen as questionable behavior.

Maybe even a mistake, a problem, a waste, a very wrong thing – outright rejected by those around us. Those who never question. Those who think mistakes are calamities. Those who don’t prioritize growth. Real growth anyway. Instead they prioritize ideas of right and wrong, good and bad.

And so, when we’re growing out of this old way of being and relating in and to the world, we have to start noticing how we’re relating to our experience. What’s my dynamic with ‘making mistakes’? What do I do to myself or others when I make a mistake? How does it affect my inner world? Am I stunted? Do I never want to try every again? Do I feel like a waste of space?

If we’re not aware, the world will tell us we’re making a mistake all day long. Our whole life is a mistake. And we listen because we’re innocent. Mistakes and innocence are close relatives. You have to have real innocence to be willing to make mistakes. To fuck up. To do everything wrong.

Do I fall into an ocean of despair when I make a mistake? Do I punish myself?

Maybe as a child, you weren’t allowed to make mistakes. You had to get everything just right to prove yourself worthy of love or even physical care.

Seeing how mistakes are handled in our psyche, in our body opens up new possibilities, a new way of living, of approaching life, of relating to our experience. It creates space for questioning whether I can live in another way. Is there another softer, gentler way to be with mistakes?

Can I give myself permission to make all the mistakes I can make and to love myself regardless? To not berate myself or punish myself for being human? For my innocence.

When mistakes are permitted, given space, given love, given understanding, given breathing room – then possibilities open up. Problems disappear. Life becomes fun. Just because. Not purposeful and heavy. But purposeless and light.

When mistakes are permitted, you can play. Play with everything. How you decorate your home, what to buy, how you spend your time, how you garden. There’s open space. So there’s no rush and no time limit. There’s just availability. Possibility. Beauty. Abundance. Rest. And trust.

Trust that all is well. That it’s okay. Everything is okay. Good. In flow.

It’s not tight, limited and suffocated anymore. There’s room, it’s airy. It’s cool.

There’s no limitation on anything. You don’t superimpose limitations on yourself anymore where there are none. You recognize the limitlessness of reality. The “I’m not up against the wall all the time” reality.

It’s beautiful to give yourself absolute permission to make mistakes. Then a whole old worlds falls away. The bottom falls off. And a new fresh world beautiful world becomes apparent. Obvious. Like realizing you were in a trance and you’ve snapped out of it with the snap of a finger. And you can breathe again. Breathe fully.

You don’t have to run around like a headless chicken anymore. You can take your time. Settle in. Include everything that’s happening in the moment to be porous to this is ok. This too. I’m not running away with my experience anymore, like a thief in the night. I’m bringing it in, reigning in. To this openness. This new world. This recognition.

You can leave things unanswered.

You can leave things unfinished.

You can leave things hanging.

Unresolved.

Unmet.

You don’t have to leave yourself anymore.

For anything.

For anyone.

Move your body in the unmet, unresolved, unanswered.

Move it and shake it.

Do a silly dance.

A kiddy dance.

To shake off all the seriousness.

To come back to lightness.

To unfreeze the frozen, stunted, deer in headlights.

Be unreliable.

Be irresponsible.

Be completely useless.

Be a kid again.

Hang back.

Hang back.

Hang in the unknown.

With no closure, no duty, no obligation, no responsibility, no need, no role.

No idea.

You have to be willing to let it all go. Don’t hitch your wagon to that which is unpredictable. That which requires contorting on your part. Conditioning will say, that’s arrogant. Everyone will try to scare you. Your own mind most of all. But you just steady on. It is much closer to reality living in not knowing than it is living in a make-believe world that everybody happens to agree upon.

Know that you are not alone. Remind yourself in times of doubt of the teachers dead or alive who’ve lived and are living this path. Know that you are alone in that ultimately there’s only you. And in your aloneness, you can trust.

But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

Rainer Maria Rilke

No contract is a guarantee.

No spoken word is a guarantee.

No unspoken agreement is a guarantee.

Stay in your own integrity. Not as a hard impenetrable action, but as a relaxed and open resting. Fluid, gentle, soft.

Put everything your parents (thus the world) have told you, taught you, imprinted on you in one of those little play boats and set it on its way downstream – never to be seen again.

And breathe.

Taking power back from the teacher, taking the “I don’t know, you know” power dynamic back and trusting yourself. Trusting your inner guidance and the subtleties of what its’ picking up in an environment or in another.

It’s not arrogance as the spiritual ego would have you believe, it takes great courage to take that leap. There’s great equanimity in that. It’s moving with the flow of what feels right for you without taking pre-existing relationship dynamics into consideration. Or past. Or who you were 10 months ago or 10 minutes ago. And trying to maintain an image of consistency.

No one is consistent. Not even the teachers themselves. Looking for consistency in them will only lead to disappointment. Consistency can’t be found in another. Not another person. Not another thing.

You can’t see consistency. It’s not a thing. Nothing is consistent out here. Not in a traumatic way. In a loving way. Your safety, your consistency is prior to all things, before anything. But it’s not the safety and consistency the mind imagines of something that never changes. Someone. Some teaching.

Consistency is invisible. It doesn’t look like anything. It is the openness in which all non-consistency can play out. It is that which directs your inner guidance to the microsecond – this is right for you now.

It’s the openness of knowing but not holding onto anything too tight. And trusting the goodness of not gripping onto things, people, circumstances or situations. The goodness in the expansiveness of it.

Look back on your life and notice situations where big change happened. Where something ended. Notice how expansiveness was the byproduct of that ending.

With the willingness to let go of the familiar, so much opened up. So many possibilities, avenues, experience, learning. It expanded your consciousness, your sense of openness, possibilities you couldn’t see before suddenly became available to you.

Not premature and not too late. Everything is right on time.

This isn’t stagnant. It’s not this idea that the mind has of stillness as non-movement. This is all inclusive. It’s completely spontaneous. Organized. Efficient. But not in a mental way. In an organic wholesome way which doesn’t require a horizontal movement of time.

It doesn’t need anything from anybody. It’s totally egalitarian without trying to be. It doesn’t need recognition nor approval. It doesn’t hold grievances either. It’s clean. Pure. Fresh.

It’s not a drawn out process of having to ‘sit’ so that…. It’s not horizontal. Not linear. But it is cohesive. Whole unto itself.

It reigns in any outward movement of need or want and brings it back to wholeness. It dismantles rushing. It has no ambition and no endgame because it is complete already and always. There’s no seeking involved.

It’s a cool breeze. The rustling of the leaves. Sunlight on the pillow.

If it could speak it would say, there’s nowhere to go, no one to be and nothing to do. It’s the opposite of everything you thought you knew.