There is a crack running through the cement in our backyard.
Awhile ago, a little plant sprang up from it. Although I know this should be seen as a nuisance, as it will only cause the cement to deteriorate further, I couldn't help but feel awe and wonder over how this plant so effortlessly brought life to a place where it seems no life should be. I looked closely at this little plant, wondering how a seed got in there in the first place. Did it fall from a bird in the exact perfect way so as to land right there? Did the wind blow it in, knowing that below this hardened surface was fertile soil? And how did the seed grow a plant right up through the crack? It's not like it had a map to the surface! As I looked at the crack it made me think about cracks within myself. Cracks from fear, cracks from anger, cracks from disappointment. There is an oft repeated quote by Leonard Cohen that says, "Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in". When I saw the little plant, I realized that cracks aren't just how light gets in, but also life, seeds, the possibilities we can't see. What I see as a personal detriment, like overwhelming fear, is really a crack waiting to show me something unexpected and beautiful. The very thing that makes me so afraid, such as a big, scary new career step, is the very place something miraculous and transformative can happen. To never feel afraid would mean nothing new was happening. It would mean I wasn't exploring, growing and reaching for new heights. And without that growth, which leads to the cracks of fear, I would never open up to seeds that come from places beyond me. Just as the seed in the cement came from an unknown place in order to bring the exact plant that was meant to grow there, I too can receive unknown gifts which come in ways I cannot control or plan. But it will only happen so long as I allow myself to stop trying to be shiny and perfect. I must give myself space to crack open to my inner depths. Fear and anxiety are some of my biggest inner blocks. But I am now realizing that they aren't bottomless voids holding me back. They are showing me hidden potentials. Within the fear is the potential for something strong to grow. Something so hardy and centered that it would not only not be dettered by cement, it would break through it, calmly and patiently planting itself deeper and deeper, growing bigger and bigger, until that which seems bigger and harder has no choice but to cede to the beautiful, life giving plant. The cracks of fear and anger and pain are not the things holding us back in life. They are places where the seeds of our courage and strength take root and grow, showing us the true meaning of persistence and the power to change the seemingly rigid and fixed.
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Fear is something I think about a lot. It's also something I feel a lot. Oftentimes when I tell people this, they're surprised, because fear doesn't seem to stop me from doing the things I want to do. But I will tell you a secret. Fear doesn't always show up as a massive blocking force, like some mountain in your path. Sometimes it shows up as an overwhelming terror that says DO NOW GO GO GO. It's the fear that tells me I'm not good enough, and I must go as fast as I can because if I stop and think about that, I'll drown in my feelings of inadequacy. Rather than asking myself why I feel inadequate, I put all my energy into outrunning the fear and insecurity. If you move fast enough, it all becomes a blur, and you actually don't have to feel anything. You can go so fast you convince yourself of a faux confidence, which says, I'm moving and hustling so I must be doing something right! The thing with movement is, it's not always accelerating us in positive directions. Movement does not always equal productive outcomes. Sometimes we're just racing towards a brick wall. If you ask me at any given time what I'm doing, I've always got half a dozen things on the stove top. I'm writing a screenplay. I'm revising another one. I'm learning calligraphy. I'm learning Spanish. I'm making a meditation. I'm making another meditation! I'm writing a blog post! I'm writing a podcast! I'm doing a 30 day challenge!!! I'm tap dancing while juggling chainsaws!!!!!! Okay, the last one isn't real. But pump me full of enough fear, and by God, I'd do it. Which is often times the exact opposite message we are told about fear. Most conversations around fear tell us it's the thing stopping us and holding us back. But for a lot of people, it's not stopping them at all. It's the thing shoving their foot down on the gas pedal, driving them 90 miles per hour through a treacherous mountain pass. Sometimes it causes us to become workaholics. Sometimes it causes us to try a million different things in an endlessly frantic state. Sometimes it gets us travelling all around the world, forever on the go but never addressing the inner void pushing us on. Fear has never stopped me from doing anything. In fact, it's acted like a fuel that's launched me at breakneck pace into all kinds of adventures. This probably sounds good, but it's not. I'm not doing these things because I love myself and I'm excited about life. I'm doing them because I'm too scared to pause and ask myself if I feel worthy when I'm doing nothing. Could I feel worthy in a state of nothingness? At this time, no. If I had nothing on the stove top, and I had to stand before you with nothing to validate my existence, I would crumble like a sandcastle in high tide. Here's the plain truth: my ambition is more often than not an armor to my inner vulnerability. We sometimes see people who achieve great things and think, wow, that person must really feel great about themselves! And they very well might. They very well might have healthy self-esteem. But they also might be like me, needing ever greater accomplishments to prove their worthiness. To try and feel worthy without anything but my own self makes me feel like I'm walking around naked. My need to overpower my fear and go faster and faster only creates deeper, more catastrophic fear. Without ever resolving the core issue, I'm just lighting the fuse to my inner TNT. I am so afraid I'm not good enough for the things I want that I leap before looking, not pausing to ask why I feel insecure, and never bothering to stop and check if there's broken glass in my path. The only thing worse than the thousand cuts I get is the inner pain of always shouting down my inner voice. Be quiet inner voice, I'm trying to be fearless, which is only making more fear, and I need you to shut up so I can concentrate on over powering all this fear and if I stop to listen to you I'll actually feel all this fear and I can't do that! I can even be found going at the speed of light when it comes to spirituality. I read every book I can on meditation, self-help, and divinity. And then I journal, reflect, and read more. Then I meditate for hours. I do yoga. If it sounds like it'll help me to heal, I'll do it. All of it. Except for the part where I just stop and breathe. My inner voice is constantly whispering to me, Please, just slow down. Just pause and breathe. Because all my fear is basically rooted in a fear of rejection, and I am now rejecting my own voice, I only end up digging myself deeper into the fear hole. I push down on the gas harder, knowing I'm going too fast, I'm losing control, and this is making more fear, and so I just go faster, until I either run out of gas or careen off the side. It's at this point, when I've been forced to stop and rest, that I begin "self-care". But it's not really self-care. True self-care is what we give ourselves far before we ever reach the point of burn out. Self-care and self-love administered when there's no other choice is more like crisis management. Real, heart based self-care and self-love is preventative, and not done retroactively. It's the thing you do that says, "I am valuable and I am worthy of my own love and attention. I don't have to go a thousand miles an hour to earn this nourishment. There is nothing to earn. I am valuable just as I am." Which isn't to say you shouldn't do self-care when you've reached burn out. We all have to start where we are. But learning to value and treat ourselves with respect before our inner world is burning down is something few have mastered. Including me. Maybe especially me. After all my years of meditating, studying spirituality, and reflecting on my self and my path, I have come to see I am still a beginner in it all. The facade I built that made me believe I know what I'm doing has cracked and broken wide open. I have so much to learn about myself and my inner world. I have an ocean of feelings that sometimes rise up like a tidal wave, reminding me of my own power, and what happens when I use that power in self-destructive ways. In the past, I have done things that literally made my legs and voice shake with fear. At the time, I felt like this was a good thing. I felt like if I didn't do this, life would pass me by. But what is life if it isn't about honoring and treating our own selves like precious cargo? Bullying myself into fighting my fear wasn't life. It was exhausting. I no longer see pushing myself so hard that I want to panic as any sort of positive quality. I just see it as fear based motivation, and nothing in my life that was fear based ever worked out in a positive way. I now choose to take action from a place of love. If I feel myself pushing too hard, I stop. If I'm tired, I stop. If I feel insecure, I tell a trusted friend (shout out to Susan and Rachael!). I give those negative thoughts space and let them know that there's no shame in having them. They are a part of me. I don't have to juggle a thousand plates in order to distract myself from their existence. I will get where I'm going. I will get there in my own time. I will rest as much as necessary on the way there. And when I'm there, I hopefully won't collapse from exhaustion. Rather, I will rise up higher, full of energy for whatever adventure lovingly shows up next. We live in a culture that really celebrates fearlessness. All the language around fear is this very Navy Seal kind of like 'Kick fear in the ass! Punch it in the face! Show it who's boss!' It so violent. And I know that anything in my life that I have ever fought, has fought me back. Anything. Anyone, anything that I've ever fought - it's like a rule - you punch and you get punched right back. Anytime I've ever tried to punch out fear, it roars up and reminds me quite thoroughly that it's stronger than me. And so, with fear, I approach it as a befriending. The difference between fearlessness and courage is fearlessness is "I feel nothing." And courage is "I feel everything and I'm doing this anyway." At this point, fear for me is an emotion where I'm like, "Hello old friend, you again? Come in, have a seat!" I just let it be there in the room. I allow myself to recognize that the reason it's there is because evolutionary development taught us that anything that is unknown might kill us. And creativity is always unknown. So anytime you embark on any creativity, you're entering into a landscape where you do not know how it's going to end. Your fear thinks, this literally means we're all going to die in a blood bath. You could be writing a poem and your fear is like "We're going to DIE!" And so there's a lot of tenderness that I have towards fear. I say to it, "just some trying some free verse. So far no one's died from this." But it doesn't know what it is, and so it just gets freaked out. What it needs is to be included and loved, and not fought. The term "monkey mind" has become synonymous with worrying, anxiety, and an addiction to business. It's essentially a mind at the opposite of stillness.
Ever since I first heard the phrase "monkey mind" I disliked it. For one, it didn't make any sense to me. Monkeys are by nature playful, curious, and spirited. When I'm spiraling down in negative thinking, the last thing I associate that with is monkeys. In fact, I would rather have a monkey mind, because I'd be far more likely to go play and stop worrying so much! As I was talking to a friend the other day, this expression "monkey mind" came up as I was about to say I was wrestling with my thoughts. Since I'm not a fan of the phrase, I got all jumbled up, and ended up saying, "I'm wrestling the monkey!" After I said it I began laughing. This, for me, felt like a much more apt metaphor for what I was feeling. I could see how when I'm wrestling with worry, what I'm wrestling with is something that is by nature care-free and happy. My mind, when not engaged with worry and doubt, is naturally playful and curious. All of ours are. We know this because we were all once playful and curious children. So when I begin obsessing over worrisome things, fighting with my anxiety, or thinking about all the things that happened ten years ago, and might happen ten years from now, I am basically grabbing a part of myself and engaging it in battle. All these thoughts want is to be set free and to be able to return to their carefree and curious state. Now, when I catch myself wrestling with my thoughts and feelings, I imagine I'm wrestling a monkey. This always makes me laugh, because it's such a funny visual. Once I get myself to smile, I'm already feeling better. Then I acknowledge that the thoughts don't want to be wrestling with me anymore than a monkey does. All the thoughts really want are to be set free, so they can play and find solutions in the way the mind does best - through feelings of ease, joy, and freedom. I don't know about you, but I've never solved any of my problems by wrestling with the monkey. The next time you find yourself obsessing over things you can't control, spiraling into negative thinking, or just feeling like you're fighting with your own well-being, imagine you're wrestling a monkey. It will hopefully make you laugh, which will break the tension. It will also put into perspective how hard it is to get perspective when you're fully engaged in the inner-battle. In the same way a monkey would get tired if you never let it rest and always wrestled with it, so too does your spirit. Your spirit is tired. It wants to rest. It wants to let go of all that stuff you're fighting with. So just let it go. Let the monkey go. Repeat after me. Do not wrestle the monkey. The monkey will thank you. And since the monkey is just a metaphor for your thoughts, you will thank you. You will return to wholeness. And you will find what you need, which is so hard to see when you're neck deep in monkey fur, trying to wrestle the poor thing to the ground. When it comes to getting through tough times, particularly seasons that can feel fraught with business, family stress, money stress, loneliness, or not enough time alone, it can feel like each day is a fight to the finish. We're relieved when it's over and wake up feeling heavy and uninspired. If you are at all feeling like you're surviving these days rather than thriving, I want to share something with you that has helped me a lot. Whenever you feel like you JUST CAN'T for a second longer, do this: imagine you are sitting before a toolbox. Visualize the toolbox in whatever way is appealing to you. Maybe it's shiny and new. Or maybe it's old and weather worn, like an old pirate chest. Perhaps it's ten feet tall, with multiple drawers of various sizes. Or maybe it's small with a handle, so you can carry it around. Whatever feels right to you, go with that. Now imagine you open the toolbox and inside are all of the mental health and well-being tools you've learned. Things that have previously helped you when you were stressed. For example, here's what I see in my toolbox:
When you look at that list you might think, 'Those things are simple! I have BIG, COMPLEX problems and I need BIG solutions! None of that will help me!' I hear you, but keep in mind, the tools that build beautiful, sturdy, long lasting homes are equally simple. A hammer and nails puts up walls. A small piece of metal puts up drywall. The tools that build homes are everyday items that anyone can learn to use. More often than not, we already have the tools we need to build, repair, and maintain our own selves. We just don't consider that they'll work because we sometimes don't trust that if something is simple and easy, it works. But simple and easy is the whole reason these tools do work! And if it feels as if you've opened an empty toolbox, and there's nothing in there, there's something you can put in there right now. It requires no experience, no classroom, no teacher, and no money. In fact, it's something you're doing right now! Are you ready? Here it is: BREATHEIf you saw the word BREATHE and thought 'Hoswash! If breathing solved my problems, I wouldn't be on your damn website!' hold tight - I promise this tool is more useful than it sounds.
First of all, it's possible that right now you're breathing shallow and tight. When we breathe in this way, it sends a signal to the body that something is wrong. It triggers chemical responses in us that say, "We're not breathing right! Something is wrong! PANIC! PANIC! PANIC!" This in turn builds on itself, making us feel as if we're right to be afraid, because we feel afraid, and we're breathing tighter, things must be getting worse... But if we would just take a few deep breaths, it would send an entirely different chemical signal through the body. Deep breathing soothes the nervous system, slows down the heart rate, and immediately begins to release tension. Deep breathing is a tool you have right now. Put it in your box and know that soon, that toolbox will be overflowing with a variety of other tools. Tools you will soon master and use with such efficiency, you'll feel like a master of your emotional and mental well-being. So remember, whatever's happening, you got this! You've got a toolbox, there's already a helpful tool in there, and as you face new challenges, you will naturally add more. I find this exercise to be the most helpful when I actually write it down. I write TOOLBOX at the top of a piece of paper, and then list all my tools, even the ones I'm just beginning to learn, below it. Once you start writing, you'll be surprised how many things you think of. If you're still not feeling better, and spiraling down in feelings of anxiety or overwhelm, you might want to try my Deep Relief & Emotional Healing meditation. It's specifically designed for when you can't stop intense, negative feelings. I would also suggest Surrender & Allow, which is so soothing it can also be used a sleep aid. Best of all, you can add these as tools to your already growing toolbox! Just because a leap of faith is small doesn't make it any less important.
It may, in fact, be the most important thing you ever do. Your leap may be so small no one notices but you. It may be so small it seems you're only a few inches further than before. But that's all it takes to shift your world. All you are required to do is love and cherish your courageous leap, just as you would this little frog, who also makes small leaps. But to her, they are the grandest leaps of all, because they are hers, and she knows each small leap helps her legs grow stronger. She must grow them now, because it will prepare her for when she's bigger. And when that time comes, she will effortlessly take the big, huge leaps that she can only now dream of. |