I spent much of my life believing that if only I did the right thing, learned the right stuff, became the perfect person, then I would be okay. It took me a long long time to learn that there is no magic “fix” for life.
Do these words sound true to you?
“We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect.
— Pema Chodron, “To Be Continually Thrown Out Of The Nest
For me, that quote resonates with how I thought for far too long. One of the things I love the most about getting older is that I accept myself with all of my imperfections and contradictions far more than I did when I was young.
Life is…sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter
The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience.
— Pema Chodron, “To Be Continually Thrown Out Of The Nest“
As someone who has dealt with chronic health issues since early adulthood, I learned to accept myself the hard way. For decades I chased every different type of treatment, supplement, diet, and spiritual practice that might possibly help fix whatever was wrong with me.
And although I learned a lot and sometimes found practices or treatments that helped, nothing fixed me the way that I thought I needed to be fixed. I finally came to a place of acceptance with who I am and the reality that I live with chronic health issues that ebb and flow. But it took decades to get here. (Most days I accept — I still have days when like a reflex, I seek a fix for whatever it is that ails me.)
For years I told myself, “If only I could take 6 months off from work I know that I could heal all of my pain and digestive issues.” Then, when I was laid off from my job and decided not to go back to work for someone else, I discovered that that just was a story I had been telling myself. The reality was that about six or seven months after I stopped working not only was I not feeling all better but my pain levels and digestive issues were as bad as they had ever been. I became furious with myself and with life.
This big mushroom in our back yard looks quite magical to me. I wonder…
It took a long time for me to accept that…
Surprise! There is no silver bullet.
There is no magic fix.
If you scroll through any Instagram feed you would think otherwise. Scrolling through the posts today I see ads for the perfect set of exercises, perfect webinar to improve your business, perfect clothes, perfect diet, perfect supplement, and more.
This is one of the myths of the modern age of advertising and marketing. No matter how you feel there is something you can buy to “make yourself feel better.” There is the perfect magic fix for whatever ails you.
But trust me, there is no magic fix.
No matter who we are or where we live, we encounter difficulties and challenges. It’s as if each of us has a bag of rocks that we carry around through life. Sometimes we drop a few rocks and at other times we get a few new rocks to carry. But no matter what, there are challenges.
Some things that we do can lighten our load and make the challenges easier to bear. But there is nothing that will take away the challenges of life.
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that’s life.
— Pema Chodron, “To Be Continually Thrown Out Of The Nest“
No one lives a charmed life. Everyone experiences grief, pain, loss, fear, illness and discomfort some of the time.
So what is a person to do???
Things got better for me when I learned to practice presence
And even better when I began to practice self-compassion
Learning to accept whatever life throws at you is a life-long journey, one in which I am just a beginner. Accepting our feelings and what happens does not mean that we accept injustice or turn a blind eye to wrong actions. It just means that we make a space between events and our response to those events. And sometimes we say, “This sucks,” but we accept the suckiness of it as a part of life. (That doesn’t mean we like it, it just means we accept it.)
Practicing presence, self-compassion, and acceptance has not taken away all of my health problems, my anxiety or the daily trials and tribulations of being alive. It’s not supposed to. But those practices have given me tools to interrupt my knee-jerk reactions to life. And I’ve learned that kindness, to myself and others, is the greatest gift I can give to myself and others.
Raindrops on spider web beside the deck stairs
Yesterday I began reading Tara Brach’s latest book Radical Compassion: Learning to love yourself and your world with the practice of RAIN. In it, she describes a practice that helps one hold whatever is happening with genuine presence and care. It’s a way of saying Yes to whatever is happening.
The practice that she teaches in the book is called “RAIN,” and the letters of the word stand for:
- Recognize
- Allow
- Investigate
- Nurture
I am looking forward to working through this book slowly savoring each chapter.
If you were to ask me the one thing that I think the world needs from us right now my answer would be…
Radical Compassion…
When more of us learn to practice radical compassion with ourselves and others perhaps we can begin to imagine and create a new story of inter-being with all people, creatures and the earth.
May you have compassion for yourself, the earth and others today and always.
May you walk in beauty.
Note: photos in this post were scenes I saw around our yard yesterday. The puffy white clouds and blue skies were so beautiful!
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