Tag Archives: Three Truths and One Wish

Three Truths and One Wish

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1. Truth: It’s not going to stop until I wise up. I was beating myself up the other day for eating so many lemon poppy seed scones in a single day, (each one is glazed and as big as my face, and I was having a hard week, somehow thought eating them was going to make me feel better, but feeling instead a mix of shame and disgust–this is how it always works). I was starting to get angry, why does this keep happening? why can’t I control myself? why can’t I stop? It was in that moment that I felt something snap and then soften, felt some measure of surrender, giving up, letting go, and I knew: this will continue as long as I deny myself, hide and reject who I truly am, what I really want and feel and need and am, and then it will be over. I realized that until I surrender to what life is really asking of me, give in completely, give up all of the habits and excuses that are stopping me, it won’t ever stop–I have to surrender to what is, to who I am.

2. Truth: I need to shift from a focus on growth to one of sustainability. The way I’m approaching my experience isn’t working, can’t be maintained, is happening at the cost of my health and my sanity. I’m not sure exactly what it should look like instead, I just know I can’t keep doing it like this. I’ll burn out, fade away. I’m attempting and accumulating, but it’s not sustainable. I’m craving space, hungry for stillness and quiet, wanting to clean and declutter, to nest, to rest. It’s the season, but it’s also the path I’ve been on (more like a German autobahn than a path), driving so fast and working so hard to get where, exactly?

3. Truth: Where I want to be, what I am longing to manifest is who I already am, just me, to be that. The card in the picture is on my desk at my paid work. It’s been there for the past year, even though it’s one from a set of 53. There it sits, day after day, giving me its wisdom, silently sending me its message, waiting patiently to be noticed, and I continue to be so busy, I don’t even see it. Until the other day, when I actually saw it, looked, listened, opened my heart to it, felt it whisper this is what I want.

One Wish: For simplicity and spaciousness. “We all want a sense of spaciousness and freedom, but we find we can claim that freedom, strangely, only by living out a focused, radical, courageous simplicity,” (David Whyte). That–a focused, radical, courageous simplicity–that is what I wish for today, kind and gentle reader. For all of us.

Three Truths and One Wish

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heart-shaped petal with a heart-shaped hole

1. Truth: the work of my heart is gentle, quiet and simple yet fierce. Spreading love and kindness, cultivating courage and joy, generating a sense of wonder and gratitude, allowing for play and rest, offering encouragement and inspiration, creating safe and open space where natural wakefulness can manifest, showing up with an open heart even when it’s hard and even when it hurts–easing suffering feels like my true calling.

2. Truth: the work of my heart may never be directly paid in dollars. I’m okay with that. It doesn’t need to pay my bills. I will get paid in understanding and awareness, connection and compassion, love and gratitude, joy and tender-hearted sadness. I will see and be seen. I will notice what longs to be noticed. I will be amazed and tell about it. I will be awake and alive, with my heart wide open. In this way, I will be wealthy, will have everything I need, more than enough.

3. Truth: the work of my heart softens me, scares me, makes me tender as it terrifies me. Sometimes it feels too big, too much, too hard, overwhelming, and I shut down, numb out or hide or run away, attempt to deny it, to escape. And yet, when I resist it, I suffer. I try to remember what Katherine Center said, that “you have to be brave with your life so that others can be brave with theirs.” I try to remember that this is what life is, both beautiful and brutal, and that to open my heart and experience all of it, pleasure and pain, is why I am here.

One wish: There is an aspiration, a mantra, a chant that Susan Piver has shared that I’d like to offer here as my one wish today, that we all know this to be true, practice it, embody it:

I possess basic goodness.
All beings possess such goodness.
Knowing this, my heart opens.
When my heart is open, the whole world changes.

P.S. Basic goodness is our fundamental, inherent, natural condition–awake, wise, and compassionate. “Our most basic qualities (those we were born with) are openness, intelligence, and warmth,” (Susan Piver, from her post You are Good).