How does a Year of Self Compassion begin?
Making appointments for body and soul is where this pilgrim started, the past need not define the future for the heart to find a new beat and rhythm.
Do you remember that feeling of being on a swing getting higher and higher, more light headed and giddy with of the movement as if you were flying? Pure joy. Self-love swinging yourself into your own bliss. I used to love being on a swing and would sing softly and loudly, compose melodies and lyrics filling the air with song going back and forth – an embodied metronome. I remember distinctly a couple of very joyful swings – one in the back of what was actually Ian Fleming’s home in the UK (author of James Bond and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – it was an education centre and my Dad ocassionally worked there) and the other at a country school location being turned into a camp site where my Mum and Dad were helping to get it ready for the next season. I think I would have been about 8 in the first one and quite old, perhaps 11 in the second memory. These childhood memories of singing to my heart’s content in complete abandon from the world. I was truly in a self contained exhilarating world, slightly expanding with the energy pushing forward, and contracting to slow down to a steady, more gentler pace before hopping off and back into the world again. I think self-compassion might be a bit like that – playfully making music in space and time in the deep security of knowing you are safe and your sounds wafting into the air around you and all whose ears could hear you getting a glimpse of the uncontaminated bliss of abandonment.
My year is beginning in song, but one I don’t yet know the name of or the tune, and, I am just warming up to the swing. The musical style of swing may well have a few clues, with its emphasis on the off-beat. The off-beat is always the weaker pulse in the music, the weakness is the reason it works.
Self-compassion is an invitation to love the weakness, that off beat, to make the whole sound swing. We’ve all heard swing with a soloist heading over the top of all the sound with an improvised voice of the melody overlaid. Making it up as you go along in the security of the pattern holding it all together. Just as I made up words and music as a child on those swings, and I am improvising now, having forms and knowing their functions to employ as they are thrown at me. The lesson of ‘yes and’ is a great teacher – there is no compromise – you must accept the offer and do something with it. You don’t have to like the offer, you just have to accept it.
Pages of pain are real.
Explicit. Nothing left to imagination.
All the soil has been shoveled.
The first of the choir arrives
Tall and slender in the hot bitumen
Striding down, missing me, calling me to come back.
Laying hands on me at the bakery.
Forecasting: This is your year.
The second arrives
Offering a centurion service
A kind of protective custody
Armed with weapons of mass distraction
In fast succession
Guardians, escorts, witnesses, wise counsellors (after all it is Epiphany)
The choir is now bursting at the seams
In harmony, each knowing their part
Yes, and … I surrender to the sound
Gabriel’s trumpet heralds a mighty day.
The choir of self-compassion is in session.
A self compassion discernment question is forming: Is this an action loving me into my self?
The offbeat…yes and… the gentle, grounded, earthy wisdom of your conscious living, Moira.
Thank you for such reminders. Meg
There are no mistakes in jazz improvisation as in life; you have shown us how to play that next note,and when to have a silent breath. Life is unpredictable but your whole hearted yes to sing your own song inspires those of us fortunate to hear your voice.
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Since reading about stand by me sung at the wedding and in one of your later posts , I cant get it out out of my head -loving it. Thankyou Moira