YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE GOOD

so get on with aiming for your well-being instead

Mary Oliver said it best in the poem Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Many of us, most of us—whatever our upbringing, however steeped in or removed from religion--have concepts of being GOOD in place that we benefit from undoing. Unlearning. Consciously rejecting. Consciously reworking and rewiring.

Lots of ideas of being good that we were taught were based on lots of wrong thinking—boundary-less-ness, codependency, values that keep us striving and never getting there (like, anything you want, you must work VERY HARD to get it), a mistrust of our wanting, a fear we’ll get too big for our britches, etc, etc.

This good and bad stuff is so deeply wired. Probably because it gets infused with so much identity: you’re good, or you’re bad. Maybe for some areas of life, you’ve more fully unplugged from what you were taught, having already fully (or more fully) recognized it as based in wrong thinking.

I won’t give examples. You know what you’ve rejected that your parents, teachers, or most of culture around you were spouting as something you HAD to go along with to be sensible. Right? You know the shit you were taught about gender and bodies and how you get your worth and racial bullshit and unboundaried kindness that was really codependency, and so on. You know that you’ve learned and keep learning, over the course of your lifetime, which things your were taught as absolute truth aren’t true at all. And you keep finding what feels truer. What feels better to believe or experiment with believing.

It can feel tricky or sticky or treacherous for folks to undo the concepts around Good. We often don’t even fully have in view—or in conscious awareness—what we’re still considering good that maybe objectively, inherently, is not that.

People sometimes fear that rejecting concepts of goodness will mean they’ll suddenly be bad. Or indulgent. Or selfish. They won’t check themselves but will just somehow be caught in some momentum of badness. What?? How does that follow?

Try this on: Whatever is ACTUALLY good is known to you in your innermost being. You’re already living it—some of it, some of the time. You know it in your bones, in your gut. You know what feels off when it feels off. You know when you’re clear and aligned and solid and when you’re confused and off-kilter and unsure.

You even know when you’re trying to think about something in some way that’s right and good but you feel BAD or mean or righteous or judgy or victimized or wounded while you’re thinking it!

YOU KNOW THE DIFFERENCE.

So … I’m not asking you to reject ACTUAL REAL OBJECTIVE goodness.

But little is actually objective about good. You are the only one who can define what good means to you. And please don’t.

I mean, don’t define it in some fixed way, as a concept you have a firm grip on and can just keep applying to any and all situations and with any other being you encounter and have dealings with. (That’s what those who taught you wrong were doing. Don’t just turn that around with slightly or even radically different definitions of good.) As soon as the concept of Good gets too fixed (kind of like the concept of God), you get a religion, and right slides into righteous. Don’t have GOOD as a concept you could give a TED talk about or explain to your class or to your rapt audience on social media.

Loosen your grip on your understanding of (or needing to understand) what good means. Define it now and now and now and now, as THIS MOMENT reveals it to you and calls you to something else—calls you beyond what feels not-good in this moment.

Be in a dynamic relationship with your own inner being. Be consciousness dancing with consciousness. Right now, the music playing now, the soundtrack of this moment, tells you where to place your foot as you let it ripple through your being. As you let it move through the soft animal of your body.

Okay, let’s get more clear about the RAMIFICATIONS of not being clear about this goodness thing.

If you think you need to be good, and you seek to apply what’s still in there that got inculcated into your being early and reinforced for years, then

• you’ll also need to be worried about being good
• you’ll also need to fear you’re not good
• you might have to protectively go into denial when you actually do stray off your own aligned knowing of goodness
• you’ll have to feel guilty, maybe often, maybe perpetually
• you’ll use guilt to keep yourself on track (even though that doesn’t ever ever ever work)
• you’ll believe others when they accuse you of not being good
• you’ll be a great target for manipulation
• you’ll have to defend your goodness (because every part of you—e.g., the most ego-based part of you, and your inner child, and your innermost being—KNOW you ARE good)
• you’ll have to feel misunderstood (and again, defensive) when others think you’re bad
• you will be disempowered
• you will, as victims do, lose track of where you have choice … and of your power to create your life … and of your power to create your inner feeling state

When I got to this point in the writing, I checked on my daily message from Abraham-Hicks. It began like this:

The one factor that has been unknown by most humans, that is understood by the beasts, is that Well-being truly does abound; and that you are blessed beings who live in an atmosphere of grace; and that unless you are doing something to pinch off the Well-being, it will be yours.

What Abraham did NOT say: unless YOU DO SOMETHING BAD or if you do something to pinch off your goodness! Your goodness is NOT what allows to flow to you or disallows well-being from flowing to you.

Mary Oliver gave us the soft animal of your body and Abraham brings in the beasts. Can you let things be more simple? Could you trust, or play with trusting, your inherent, implicit goodness so you can bring your focus to other things? Like, to aiming for your well-being?

It goes without saying. You’re good. The animals aren’t worried about this. Find your animal self who simply aims for well-being.

Hey, also, it’s not a merit-based Universe. You don’t have to collect good points and earn your well-being by being good. Well-being is meant to be yours. You don’t lose points when you know you’ve strayed into what feels off to you.

In fact, that’s partly why you’re good, if you need a why. You have a compass. You have a guidance system. You know when something’s off. So when you notice you’re off-track, just course-correct. As Mary O says, don’t walk on your knees 100 miles repenting. Just get back on-track. Or even aim for what feels more on-track, and trust your capacity to keep course-correcting.

Metaphor time: Abraham talks about the rumble strip that your wheels register on the highway when you edge out of your lane while driving. (You even feel hitting the rumble strip in your body. It registers in your own senses.) You don’t need to feel bad or guilty. Just get back in your lane. You don’t need to sit around ascertaining and reviewing and worrying about how bad you are for hitting the rumble strip or vow to never hit it ever again. Just course-correct and think no more about it.

If the rumble strip calls you to pay more attention in the moment, to bring more consciousness to driving, or whatever you’re doing now, marvelous. That’s a call back to presence, and presence will always serve you.

Note that when you’re paying attention (when you’re present), you ARE cultivating well-being for yourself and others. Check it out if you don’t believe me. In fact, don’t believe me. Just watch yourself. Witness. Notice that you’re aiming for well-being. And when you bring in concepts of goodness (NOT GOODNESS ITSELF, but concepts of goodness) to inform your well-being, you confuse yourself and go off-track again. Or you create misery where you were doing just fine and you were sufficiently on track to keep moving and course-correcting as you go.

It’s really no problem when you go off-track again. Your inner rumble strip will rumble and call you to the next course-correction.

Do I need to say you’ll course-correct more swiftly, even seamlessly, if you never have to crawl through the desert repenting???

Rhetorical. I know you know.

Love & blessings, Jaya