Year of Self-Compassion #43 #effortless

The high note was reached with the lightest touch as she plucked the last note on her instrument, Siobhan Owen is a gifted Celtic soprano and harpist. It looked effortless with a simplicity that only the most sophisticated can execute.  Labouring for decades with joy in her heart to deliver her gift to grateful audiences around the world, it was emotional, it was personal.

How do we uplift others with our gifts and make them visible? Some have an insatiable appetite to be seen, so the equation probably works in their favour. Just because something looks easy, doesn’t mean it is.

Finding peace in times of deep turmoil and making that peace visible is probably a sign of the emotional labour it took to get to that point to exude ease and calm. Nothing just happens, or if it does, it is rare. Most things happen because of years of effort, a few lucky breaks here and there, lots of losses, detours and inexplicable hurdles that have to be overcome.  Many of those hurdles require you getting out of your own way, applying a softer lens and leaving the ego at the door.

I do a lot of work in systems and automating, designing and adjusting systems is only a scaffold; and even the best of functioning systems work-arounds may have to be found for that exception or exceptional circumstance.  Growing, supporting, enabling leaders is where culture and therefore systems can change and the shift from by-stander to ownership happens.

So what has all this talk of leadership and change-making got to do with self-compassion? I can’t see without empathy, I can’t empathise without seeing. My losses have been great, but who do I think I am not to have losses? Some days it feels like a first world problem – that is not to diminish the real deep scars and sorrows that are within – but I have a roof over my head, there are always people willing to laugh and cry with me, there are birds and all kinds of creatures greeting me each day, I have friends far and wide – it is a rich and enriching life. It is a life full of opportunity and for all I know maybe the best is yet to come?

I have been sharing with a confidante the feeling of an empty bucket and I think there is a hole in it dear Liza.  Despite all kinds of treasures and goodness filling it up, it is flowing out just as quickly and this is where the self-compassion comes in. It is the glue and feathers needed to mend that hole in the bucket. The kindness to myself to catch myself out receiving (to pick up from last week’s theme); it is allowing the surprises in and being empty enough inside for the bucket to be made whole again.  I noticed that I have laughed heartily a few times this past week, it had been a long time.  I am taking that as a sign and a promise of more to come. I listened to Krista Tippett from On Being interview  with the co-founder of Illuminations, Mirabi Bush talking about how that business turned into a multi-million dollar enterprise almost exclusively on the back of the rainbow decals that became synonymous with the VWs in the late 60s. I bought a lot of Illumination products as a teenager and young adult – mandalas in particular – I gave them as gifts regularly and I loved the light shining through. It was a delightful memory and sunk me back to my roots listening to the interview. She helped establish Search inside Yourself mindfulness classes for Google!  It was so instructive to listen to her journey never really leaving the corporate world, an evolution and revolution traversing different market places, but actually just being where people were – in the 60s in their VWs and in the 21^st century in front of a screen.  I thought my life actually hasn’t been much different, on a much smaller and definitely less corporate scale, but essentially I have travelled where people are and from time to time tried to get a little ahead to make a path for others to trek.

Acts of self-compassion are acts of whole-heartedness, acts of liberation. I noticed this week, when completing one of my last projects in Seth Godin’s altMBA, I am acting with my wings no longer clipped. This is the most free I have ever been in my life, and I am such a beginner, I don’t even realise what is possible just yet. I am beginning too … this could be huge. It might even look effortless!

Do you remember this?

 

Year of Self Compassion #42 #receiving

This week I was asked a number of times if I enjoyed my party and the answer was a resounding yes. One of the things I have had to learn this year is to receive. I have been so unable to do so much so often, reception is what has been left. Bereft and broken, alone and fumbling around I have had to put down my arrogance and fear and be waited on more than once. Vulnerability and humiliation paired up to remind me I am human.  While I invite others to be together, to find the good in one another, to celebrate and extend generosity – I haven’t been so good at doing that for myself. Hence this year of Self-Compassion.  I still have my L plates on, but as a wise woman said to me this week – L plates is a good place to start.  And starting I am, and learning I am, and practicing I am.

Learning to receive is a practice all of its own.  I think the key is the practice …. like any discipline. I was looking up the history of the word receive and it is declining in its use over of the past two hundred years or so. It has Middle English and Anglo-Norman origins from back and take. I think there is a clue in here for me to think about receiving as giving back. In receiving you are giving back, by acknowledging the gift and honouring the giver. It seems to hold a promise and potential too. By receiving you are moving a relationship forward, taking another step in trust towards deeper intimacy.

Another clue to the power of receiving, is the opposite, the betrayal of a gift being rejected. Having spent yourself and given with joy, to have that thrown back at you is a hurt that creates a hole which is often hard to be re-filled.  You are greeting the good in the other when you receive as they give witness to the good in you.

It is not always easy to receive and so I am growing my reception muscles and my birthday has helped me in that fitness quest. Inviting other to give to me so I can receive is quite a big step. To receive random acts of kindness is a whole other level and to be impacted by a stranger or an invisible human seems to always connect me to the cosmic energy of the goodness in the Universe. Universal love is made visible in those random acts.

And then there is the receiving of what is around us everyday – the big blue sky, the pleasure of a cup of tea, the blossom on the trees, the little ants going about their business underfoot, the magpies calling me to the day and the majesty of the grey box tree offering spiritual direction from broken branches, peeling bark and a precarious nest being held halfway to the sky protected from the elements and predators.

Receiving is an art and craft. I find myself bowing to the giver so often, to recognise what they have done in their lives to make the gift and the cost that has been. The act of receiving is only possible because someone else has eeked out time for me, found and prioritised resources, knowing me well enough to match their giving to what my needs are.  This is call and response. And I know the giver receives as well, I know this better because I am good at giving, and learning to receive is what is opening up  … and I like it!  And may you too be blessed with good friends as John O’Donohue writes in this blessing from The Space Between Us and find your visible and invisible soul friends in many you meet on the road.

Blessing for Friendship

May you be blessed with good friends,

And learn to be a good friend to yourself,

Journeying to that place in your soul where 

There is love, warmth, and feeling.

May this change you.

 

May it transfigure what is negative, distant,

Or cold within your heart. 

 

May you be brought into real passion, kindness,

And belonging.

 

May you treasure your friends,

May you be good to them, be there for them

And receive all the challenges, truth, and light you need.

 

May you never be isolated but know the embrace 

Of your anam cara. 

Photo credit: Catherine Lawson 

 

 

Year of Self-Compassion #41 #garland

I had another fall this week on the night of my birthday and with great counsel and reflection have decided it is an exclamation point to end my 50s and to remind me I have landed, grounded into Act 3.  The road has come and gone on this pilgrim’s path and in places untrod by any other human before me, I have made new tracks across brambles, with pebbles that found their way into shoes ready to be liberated when the day is done. I have had sojourners and people along the way feeding me with food, ideas and wonder gifting me time and time again. I have been challenged to take roads so well trod it is a mystery why they are still needed for so many to travel on them, and now from vantage points and with new technologies, I can fly over them to new places and see them in new ways. I ended this week with a celebration of those roads with many who have travelled some of them with me. Maps I didn’t know I had inside of me and yet still arrived at Act 3 in tact.

A garland of gratitude was placed on my head and so begun an afternoon and evening of being celebrated. I highly recommend setting aside time to be celebrated, and get a glimpse of the addictive experience of celebrity and having fans. The birthday occasion brought joy and colour and with the flowers lovingly prepared for placement all of creation settled on my head. Heaven down to earth, landing me grounded in the beauty of nature and the truth that all things fade, loose their fragrance and come to an end – but not before the blossoming and adoration of their glory.

Entering into Act 3, as I have stolen from Jane Fonda, to begin this sixtieth trip around the sun, I wanted to pause and acknowledge a new beginning. I had forgotten in doing that, I was also recognising Act 2 was over. Three distinct decades and when reflecting on the great gifts of this time it was to the children and their gifts to me that I centred. I marked the moment by pivoting the song sung at their baptisms (Bob Dylan’s Forever Young) to be a blessing for them now and for all my friends and family as they enter with me, what I hope will be a generous Act 3.

I am weary and at times wandering around in fogs of ditheriness (if that is a word) where grief and loss try and fade into the wilderness of back recesses of my mind. The garland is going to be my kit of sustainability to remind of the beauty woven with strings of memories, rewired to land in a new way to hold my head together when it feels like it is wandering around in the dark.  The shapes and hues bursting out from the solid base that holds it altogether, yet remains essentially invisible is a delightful reminder of foundations that seem to keep me together, even when I don’t realise.

I am calling this my garland of gratitude for lessons learnt, harvested colour and beauty in my life, for the diversity and inclusion of a circle, for the giver and the gift, for the ability to receive and have a wreath laid upon my head, for the invitation extended and received to be crowned, for the fragility of life and how nature delivers time and time again on answers to questions formed and emerging.

Celebrated comes from the Latin and means to be frequently honoured and the kind reflections, offerings and tributes that flowed in the garden on this special occasion came often and I certainly felt honoured by everyone’s presence and for those who couldn’t be in the garden who sent messages of love. To all of you who are in my head and in my heart who travel with me and bestow garlands on me I bow with gratitude. This pilgrim’s way will have more moments to take in the garlands of gratitude that descend on me regularly and in an act of self-compassion I am going to roll around in that love more often. Looking to the horizon the road is stretching on.

Santiago

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside
hiding then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall,
and the way forward always in the end
the way that you followed, the way that carried you
into your future, that brought you to this place,
no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,
no matter that it had to break your heart along the way:
the sense of having walked from far inside yourself
out into the revelation, to have risked yourself
for something that seemed to stand both inside you
and far beyond you, that called you back
to the only road in the end you could follow, walking
as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice
that by night became a prayer for safe arrival,
so that one day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place
you had lived in before you began,
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise
that first set you off and drew you on and that you were
more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:
as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city
with golden towers, and cheering crowds,
and turning the corner at what you thought was the end
of the road, you found just a simple reflection,
and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back
and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:
like a person and a place you had sought forever,
like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;
like another life, and the road still stretching on.

— David Whyte
from Pilgrim
©2012 Many Rivers Press

Love you Mum Photo credit: Leanne Muffet Garland Mary-Anne Healy Kiss Luke Deslandes

Year of self-compassion #40 #longtimesun

A blessing for myself, my friends and my world sustains me where there is nothing else to hold me.  In a few days I will start my next lap around the sun on this little blue dot. It has been a year like no other. There are literally no words adequate to describe the process of pain, healing, reclamation, confusion, sadness, disappointment, celebration, loss. despair, relocation, affirmation …. processes have collided, subsided and arrived in gentle waves and in tsunamis.

This trip around the sun is one I had planned as a jubilee year, because my 50th which should have been a jubilee begun with devastating news of my love’s life limiting illness and I needed to prepare for being the sole bread-winner and calibrate my life around what was ahead. We thought it was going to be a sprint and yet it was a marathon, ending as my 59th year started. Jubilee is meant to be a time of celebration, harvest and letting the land lie fallow. In this biblical tradition it is the time when slaves and prisoners are set free, debts forgiven, and mercies of God manifest. Forgiveness is a pre-requisite for freedom. Mercy comes from the French for thank you which is hard to accept when the gifts and invitations to forgive are consequences of breaches of trust.  These are the sunk costs of relationships, the decisions made in good faith for good reasons and gifted with generosity – all good decisions although they didn’t end up necessarily with a good outcome.

In the Longtime Sun blessing, usually sung three times, the first time is for your self. Your Self and it is a blessing of Self Compassion. We are stardust – united in time and space, created literally in the heat of the moment, some kind of cosmic love unfolding in points of light made visible in our life force. We embody the blessing and wait for guidance, to be shown the way forward.  This blessing is my go-to when I have nothing else to give or receive. It brings me back to my essence and invites me to turn inward and outward with equal measure to the Uni-verse – the one voice – calling me to love and light, calling out my love and light and in being shone upon empowered to shine for myself first.

Long Time Sun

Snatam Kaur

May the long time sun
Shine upon you
All love surround you
And the pure light
Within you
Guide your way on
Guide your way on

Making the next trip around the sun with the intention of being a Jubilee experience may reveal new pathways and be lit from within and without.  With insider knowledge about what has been before and with out some of the heartache of the past year.  With freedom and with forgiveness, with gratitude and mercy for myself is how I want to set out on my Jubilee journey.

Making another trip around the sun is a gift and one this pilgrim wants to make with more forgiveness of self. The “if only’s” and “why didn’t I’s” and the “how could I have missed” are not serving me they are sunken costs, good decisions made in good faith, even though they didn’t all end up the way I thought they would, they were still good decisions at the time. This is a lesson from my study this week too in Seth Godin’s alt MBA and  not one I am easily embracing … but it is a truth is … each decision is a new one.

I like the idea of blessing myself and being blessed to go forward and be guided in the knowledge that each decision is a new one. The stardust is the glow and never leaves you and as CS Lewis writes:  There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind. But it is Joni singing Woodstock that brings me to take another step in this pilgrim path full of golden stardust, song and celebration and gratitude for having a garden to get back to with family and friends along the path.

Woodstock

by Joni Mitchell

I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm
I’m going to join in a rock ‘n’ roll band
I’m going to camp out on the land
I’m going to try an’ get my soul free

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it’s the time of man
I don’t know who I am
But you know life is for learning

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden

© 1969; Siquomb Publishing Company

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash