Tender and Squishy

Excerpt from Santa Cruz, March, 2011

It’s sweet to be tender with yourself at the start of something new – a new activity, a new place. When our sweet creaturey beings leave their circles of habit and enter into a new place, sometimes some of the most fundamental of our coping strategies get thrown off a bit. This is a great opportunity to see and meet what’s under our comfort-seeking habits. Up comes a feeling, an instability in the form of a question: “Do I belong?” or “Am I in danger?” or “Will I be liked?”

Don’t rush to skip over it, don’t rush to distract from it, don’t rush to do something to “get comfortable” or establish a reference point. Stay at sea, find that raw one or that aching one and let your attention go right into the heart of that place. Excruciate. Because that pain is unconsciously what you are living out of instead of freedom and love in that place. We work really hard below our awareness to keep ourselves from letting these ones surface, so if one does surface, what good fortune! Let it be here, it gets to be here too, not banished.

This is how we grow solid legs under us, embodying freedom in the unknown, by staying right with the places that are wobbly. Because we are really meant to live here wide open! Softy, soft-hearted. Not sophisticated well-oiled steel machinery, but dorky, squishy and wide open. So open and softened that every nuance of living is felt all the way through the system, not paved over with asphalt.