Invitation to come closer to the breath, closer to your heart, closer to the core of your being. And to walk you that way, I'd like to tell you the story of meeting a drenched little baby bird who ended up coming home with me. At the bottom of this post, you'll find a 20-ish-minute (19:29) audio meditation that I've made. Its purpose is to take you to the level of connection to breath and heart and self that you may not visit often, if ever. My aim is to give you an actual experience, because ultimately this something to do, not read about: come to the breath with beginner's mind, as if you'd never been walked through conscious breathing before; experience the lived and felt act of dropping in fully to the place that's open to radical self-love—so that you might in fact drop in, drop down some more into deeper and subtler levels, and keep going deeper. Scroll down to the end (just above bottom pics) for this plus a second heart meditation for getting out of any self-recrimination (from the vague sense that somehow you're not doing it right to an acute bout of self-loathing) (21:14). Here's the first heart meditation meditation link now in case you'd like to go directly there. I invite you to follow that link when you're able and willing to drop in fully. I can imagine having spoken the exact same words here with so much silence woven in that it lasted 3 times that long. Or with nothing but silence. So if you're drawn to tend your heart by coming very close to it and simply steeping in love, requiring nothing of yourself or the love (not that these are separate entities), then I invite you to do it once all the way through; let in all the reminders and instructions. Then you may want to do such a meditation more often with or without me to talk you through it. I invite you, even just once, to follow it as is through the layering of instruction. Gently stay with it. Flow along. Then you might take yourself through at your own pace, in your own way, once you hear how this version goes. This could be the stuff of a grand experiment. Are you willing to come closer to your breathing than you ever have before? Are you willing to meet your own heart? How are you willing to meet your heart? Are you willing to pause to consider what it could look like to tend your heart? Would you do that just to test what's possible, not knowing how it actually works and not requiring yourself to figure that out on the first try? What if your heart were a baby bird you came upon on the sidewalk, that day in August when the rains were pounding so hard you wondered if suddenly monsoon season had messily blown over to Ithaca? Let’s say the bird was tiny and drenched and crouched on the sidewalk just off the curb in a wretched state, blinking weirdly and sometimes just closing its eyes like it was thinking about shutting down—though it kept accessing some powerful life force inside that allowed it to belt out some strong (LOUD) I-will-survive kind of bird chirps. (And hasn't your heart proven its desire to survive?) Let’s say you squatted down feeling dreamily dazed and confused, thinking, But feet stomp down here, and dogs go by who are more tuned in and quicker than their people--aw, sweetheart, little baby bird, this will not do. Maybe you spent an hour in the rain on the phone going from the chicken lady to the Cornell vet school, then to the rehab dude. Somewhere in there, you moved the baby bird over 20 feet or so onto some vines that crept up the side of Dewitt Mall bricks, and no matter how much that baby screamed out its sharp little (LOUD) cheeps, all the other sparrows just picked up the ground-level seeds under the feeder somebody once hung there and keeps stocking, but they did not come feed that baby. At some point you started using girl pronouns because you didn’t like how IT hit—wrong pronoun. You also decided (and you didn’t mean to be clueless or offensive) that she was a sparrow because of the company she kept. At some other point, it was the rehab guy’s best guess that this bird would probably die if you left her there. Later, he would shock you by telling you that even good-time squirrels—while it appears they're all fun and games and squeaky snacks—are not above eating a baby bird if no one's looking after her. But initially, Mr. Rehab was out of town for a couple of days, so yeah, what else, you ended up taking this soggy orphan home. You got to tend her long enough for her to dry and fluff up and generally clean up quite nicely, except for that one weird feathery spot on her head that kept sticking up. It suddenly flashed in on a random bolt of lucidity (day two) that the effects of the rain were long gone and this couldn't be bed head. You followed the impulse to google baby cardinal, and what came up was a picture of her. Didn't your heart grow three sizes that day? It was kind of cool that she learned to fly in your living room and office, going from here to there pretty gracelessly, landing on cords and chair backs and stool rungs and the upright top of the laptop when you were using it. There was the occasional awkward attempt to land on your head, something you weren't that cooperative with perfecting. She seemed to appreciate the sticks you shoved into mason jars and vases and the brass bell when it struck you there was a serious dearth of perches in your home. She appreciated the red, yellow, and green cat pellets drenched to sogginess and shoved into her beak. (Is it sad you no longer remember her favorite color?) Then Rehab dude came around and took her away to care for her the right way and reintroduce her to the wild. Thanks to Facebook you learned about the cardinals who kept coming 'round to visit, during the phase in the outdoor cage when she was outside but still closed in, who claimed her as one of theirs when the doors were left open, ready or not. You got to see the video of her flying away. And hey, turns out you were right: she was a she. What if that sweet baby-girl cardinal were your heart? What if you valued that heart of yours whether or not you knew for sure it would end up yielding some amazing reddish feathers that allowed true flying? What if you never gave up on it? What if you could stop whatever you were doing, just let it all go and stand there in the rain, because that heart, whatever else it needed in general and for the long haul, at least seemed to want your care, your arrested attention, your focused gaze? I didn’t mean to write about this little bird. I wasn’t going to. I didn’t even want to. But I did find myself using her as a metaphor when talking to young people who were looking away from their own needs because—too busy tap-dancing for others. And she snuck into unscripted meditations I was narrating, as if a blinking baby bird made any sense there at all. And when I tried to forget about her, somebody who lent me their office for the day at Cornell had a little cardinal tchotchke sitting on the windowsill. And then that evening, the dog I was walking crossed the street for seemingly no reason (Marigold instantly wanted to cross right back over), and in the place where we landed momentarily before boomeranging back, two red feathers asked to be picked up. (I added them to the planter I'd already gifted with volunteer blue jay and starling feathers.) I’ve gotten so serious about coming close to my own heart. I want to invite you to the same: come close to yours. I made a meditation to walk you there if you want a guide just for a moment—not because you need one, but maybe because, like me, you just like someone to hold a structure for you sometimes so you can drop in easily and see what happens. Maybe you like to be surprised, as on that day when the upstate New York monsoon came down hard on trees and nests and nestlings, and you were just trying to walk from point A to point B but had to stop. Because, oh, wow, what? Baby bird? So drenched, so lost, still screaming out a vote for survival. I don’t know about you, but I love to heed the call. Love & blessings, Jaya Here's the same Calming Heart Meditation linked above, which you can listen to right here by clicking on the arrow to the left: Here's the second Heart Meditation for Clearing Self-Reproach: You can also find the second meditation by following this link: Heart Meditation for Clearing Self-Reproach.
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Who Are You to Ask Yourself Crushing Questions? No such thing as a stupid question? Maybe not, but in the realm of self-talk, questions can certainly be most unkind. Sometimes I tell my clients not to ask themselves disempowering questions. Notice the question is disempowering (self-demeaning, deflating, discouraging, unkind) and DROP IT. Approach what you're wondering about from another angle. But another interesting tactic is to answer the questions you ask yourself—especially when they're mean-spirited or sarcastic. Unanswered, they may leave you feeling stuck with the defeating messages they imply. Who does that? Someone told me recently about staying too long in an emotionally abusive relationship, making one excuse after another for her partner. She didn't want to give up on him or to declare him unworthy by leaving, so she hung in there for the ongoing manipulations and verbal attacks that eroded her own self-worth. “Who does that?” she bemoaned. Uh, short answer? Lots of people. Pause for a quick brainstorm, and you'll find more plausible answers in no time:
Better, right? Leaving Who does that? unanswered only leaves in place the clueless loser who obviously fills in the blank. Answer it, and self-compassion comes in—and even points you to growth and healing. What was I thinking? You've asked yourself this one, right—in the realm of work or love or parenting? It's another self-scolding question that can invite kindness and bring insights—but only once it's genuinely answered. This question is interesting in that it's actually more helpful to answer it in the negative. That is, consider what you weren't thinking, or what you didn't have in view.
Just a few answers shed a kinder light already. Now you can better see how to course-correct—make amends, invite deeper communication, forgive yourself. Do I get to have my cake and eat it too? My client Marie asked me this recently when she feared she was being entitled by quitting a sought-after job (in which she felt her dignity was at stake—quitting was actually a great call). And now, here she was wanting an even better job! The question itself clearly reveals it's not okay at all, in her current mental framework, to want so very much. For questions like this, drop the metaphor and consider what's really being asked. Try answering these instead:
Marie's loaded version is a great example of how questions to the self can reveal the deep, unresolved stuff people carry around unconsciously. She'd gotten repeating messages in childhood and beyond that life requires working hard, making sacrifices, accepting that you can't have it all, and so on—until she couldn't want more than two things without calling herself unrealistic and entitled! It's so useful to dig this stuff up, give it a good look, and consider what else is possible. You won't get to the good stuff by leaving a question hanging, though. Are you kidding me? How's that working for you? Take a breath, please, and take a moment to answer the question. You just may land in kindness and clarity. Love & blessings, Jaya P.S. My last example leads me to this: I highly recommend The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks. This book brilliantly addresses the Upper Limits Problem--those unconscious places where we think we've got as much as it's okay to have in any realm of life; where we get uncomfortable and start to sabotage the expansion and integration seeking to support our ongoing journey of healing and evolution and of becoming all that we're here to be! “I KNOW IT INTELLECTUALLY BUT …”
But? But your heart can't rise to such lofty thinking? Your gut's in a wad, like it just got punched, and won't let the message filter down? I'm fascinated to watch people push the logical mind away from matters of the heart, as if head and heart don't speak the same language. In fact, they do. I want to invite you to bring them both to the table for parley. You're out of whack when you feel this divide, and it's important (and actually not that hard) to realign. SAY THE WHOLE SENTENCE. When someone bringing me active pain launches some “I know it in my head” sort of statement, I often hit the pause button and have them find what they're actually saying—and actually say it.
THERE'S NO PROBLEM WITH HEAD-HEART LAG. So what that you know the truth but you're not feeling it yet? You'll get there. Feelings do come along later—have you noticed? Nobody says, “I know in my heart that it's okay she died peacefully in her sleep at 85, but my head just can't wrap around it.” You're right on schedule if your wounded feeling self is limping along (even dripping a bit of blood) behind the seemingly cold, antiseptic facts. Those facts could actually support your emotional self in its healing (I'll tell you how—read on). So really, truly: there's no problem. YOU COULD MAKE IT A PROBLEM, THOUGH. Don't use head-heart lag as an excuse not to budge. When coaching clients tell me, “I know it intellectually, but ...” they're often starting to argue for limitations or declare that they're stuck stuck stuck. Okay, so you see you're not fully aligned with the truth of your situation. Good to notice—actually useful to take in. But don't stop there. Having noticed, now move toward alignment. WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T PUT YOUR HEART IN CHARGE HERE. If the heart leads the head, you'll just get more out of whack. I'm not talking about distrusting the heart or making the head more important. In this specific case, when you know something to be true that the heart has not yet gotten behind, you'll just make trouble if you decide for the uncertain, hurting heart and disregard what you understand as true for you. Have you ever watched in horrid fascination while someone you love talked themself back into the bad relationship? Ay, bolstered by the beating bruise inside the chest, they listed reason after reason why this (perfectly normal, if harsh) pain meant they must hurry back to Way Wrong. What you watched them do was yank the mind into alignment with the heart. Anyone can find or fabricate reasons those strong, compelling feelings must be telling the truth. The mind is adept at digging up evidence for any idea, true or false. (Remember your high-school self in speech class compiling proof for both sides of the debate?) But you're going the wrong direction if you try aligning head with heart, and this could mean a costly detour. Go the other way. How, again? DO USE YOUR HEAD TO SOOTHE YOUR HEART. Make soothing yourself a priority, especially when feelings are raw. If you put your head in charge, this doesn't mean you have to shove down feelings (bad idea!) or treat them like they don't matter in the face of sound logic (odious self-invalidation). Instead, you can actually use your capacity to reason to gently bring the heart along. (It actually wants to catch up.) Tell your feeling self anything you can believe that's actually true. Let's say you made the short list of job candidates but didn't get the offer. Tell yourself: I was one of three seriously considered out of many. I got their attention. The interviews went swimmingly—I even had fun. I presented well. This is good news, not bad. My experience is solid—I feel great about my resume. It doesn't mean I'm not good enough if someone else was a better fit. That won't keep me from the right job for me. I even see why this wasn't the one (and name those reasons specifically). … Do carry on. Keep using what you know intellectually to speak sweetly to the heart, and be sure you tell only the truth. ONE CAVEAT! Here's a trick: Don't expect what the head comes up with to make the heart instantly stop hurting. You're just soothing the heart—not fixing it, not making it all better. You're being there for yourself, letting the wiser part of you help you scooch from wretched to bearable, and eventually to total healing. Allow the journey, and trust it. Trust your knowing. What you know intellectually can help your heart find its way to alignment. TRY SAYING THIS I know it intellectually and I'm holding my heart kindly while it catches up to the facts. I know I don't need to rush this, and I'll review what I know to be true often so I don't start telling myself lies or yanking my tender heart in the wrong direction. I trust my process and intend to make it as kind as I can. Love & blessings, Jaya |
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