"You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness."
- Eckhart Tolle
I was just listening to a podcast where the guest talked about being better than you were yesterday and that the goal is to set the bar lower than you think. This was so vital for me to hear. I, like most of us, am always expecting WAY too much from myself. The notion of walking the line between stretching your limits and not pushing yourself too far into overwhelm is a constant balancing act for everyone I know. I talked about this in my first month on Awareness – working with discernment, especially when it comes to honestly observing our own behavior and its outcomes, can be a tricky little thing to do.
I’ve been compelled, as of late, to spend less energy considering other’s impressions of me. Some people call it “giving zero fucks,” which I think is a bit of a misnomer. Caring what others think of us is a pretty natural inclination for social beings, but basing my decisions about what I wear, who I hang out with, opinions of my own self-image, and what I do with my time and creativity strictly on what other people think of me is illogical. It’s akin to the concept of not taking things personally because there’s no way we can control other people’s perceptions. We see this played out so beautifully in nature. We all know that a tree does what a tree does regardless of what anyone thinks about it. The circle of birth into death and back again is so keenly embodied in our ecology that it’s difficult to deeply observe the ebb and flow of a river or a plant through the seasons and not eventually absorb the lessons therein. We try, as humans, to master nature, to supersede the order of things and perhaps we even succeed up to a point, but the constant struggle to supplant our own state (we are, after all, natural beings,) is a denial of who we really are, creating a struggle that probably isn’t worth the stress it causes.
I often find myself in comparison mode with others and it’s these moments when I have the opportunity to remind myself to just concentrate on my own shit and work there. A lot of people are doing cool stuff and thank goodness, they bring their own unique magic to the world. “Everything’s been done, but not by you,” said someone wiser than me whose name I cannot remember. One beautiful lesson that has come my way a few times in the past month has been that I am enough just as I am right now. That the pursuit of self-improvement is a faulty one if my end goal is not based in altruism. Too often we long to be “better” so that we can gain approval of others or be recognized for our incredible genius. Of course we try to grow and get to a place of consistent contentment, but our intention must be bigger than just to increase the status of our own meat sack we’re walking around in.
This month I worked with a couple of concepts around self-care. At first thought I always thought of self-care as a very passive endeavor – getting a massage, taking a much-needed nap, laying in the grass, watching clouds and practicing my apophenia (dudes, that’s a word I had to look up because I knew there must be a word for looking for shapes in clouds and there is, it’s apophenia.) It soon became clear that self-care is so much more than that and looking at the active version of it was an important iteration of examining self-care. Self-care began to evolve into self-compassion, when for example, I didn’t write my blog posts on time; self-care also meant writing the damn post because I had made a commitment to myself to write it and keeping my word to myself was an active and potent form of self-care. The multi-dimensionality of self-care revealed, here I am writing the post and it actually does feel like I’m taking care of myself, after all.
When I think of self-care, I remember the analogy of the ambulance my meditation teacher told so many years ago. The ambulance is on the road solely to be of service to other people and as such, is the most impeccably maintained vehicle on the road. We are here in service to others, I believe that is our true sole/soul purpose, but we can’t take care of others if we can’t take care of ourselves. You are enough right now, what if you started each moment with that premise? Find the balance, keep flowing and take care of yourself.
