Three Truths and One Wish

1. Truth: You can’t do everything. For starters, you have a body that has real limits, edges and absolutes, a soft animal form that needs breaks for rest, nourishment, and maintenance. Your mind cannot insist this frame, this figure, this shape do more than it can do–that only invites illness and collapse. Your mind needs breaks too, to revive it’s creative energy, to day dream and play, to get quiet and still, even though it doesn’t like to admit it. And your heart, bless your heart–it will let you break it over and over again with your bullying and demands, it will forgive you for each and every abandonment, but the unhealed grief that comes from that process will one day knock you flat.

Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. ~Steve Jobs

2. Truth: It’s okay to stop, to rest, to say no. In fact, it’s more than okay–it’s essential. The good work you imagine, the love you long to manifest, will never be fully realized unless you take care of yourself, stop smashing yourself to bits. You will shred yourself, turn to ashes if you don’t lie down and let go, calm down, slow down, surrender.

The love and good and the wild and the peace and creation that are you will reveal themselves, but it is harder when they have to catch up to you in roadrunner mode. ~Anne Lamott

3. Truth: Enough. It’s enough. There is enough. You are enough. You are doing the best you can, can’t do or be any more than that. Even if you never do another thing, it’s enough. You are already light, you are already wise and kind, you are already loved. You are. There’s no test, no goal, no should or have to, no destination other than here–there is only breath, and only this moment. You are medicine, magic, love manifested, precious and brilliant.

We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be. ~Anne Lamott

One wish: That we can all slow down, stop pushing so hard and insisting on so much, and that we, once and for all, finally know that we are enough, already and exactly as we are.

There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
“I feel this is right for me,
I know that this is wrong.”
No teacher, preacher, parent, friend
Or wise man can decide
What’s right for you–just listen to
The voice that speaks inside.
~Shel Silverstein

1. Truth: Pain is inevitable. There really is no way to be in this world, live this life without getting your ass kicked. Just showing up guarantees it. You can try what you might to numb yourself to the pain, but what you do to numb it only brings about more, which you then have to numb, which brings more, and so on and so on until you are dead. It won’t work.

Reality is brutal, and that’s the truth. You will get hurt, you will lose things, you will fail, bones will be broken, angry words will be said that you can’t take back, you will get sick and old, things won’t be fair, and a mess will be made. Your boss will be a jerk. You’ll get a dog, love it with your whole heart, and before you could ever be ready for it, before you’ve had enough time, he will die. Someone you love will get cancer, the treatments won’t work, and she will die too. In fact, everyone you ever love is going to die. The end.

2. Truth: Suffering is optional. So, yes, all these bad things are going to happen to you, but it is entirely up to you how to respond. Suffering is our habitual pattern, the way we’ve trained our mind to respond to pain. It’s the choice we make to wallow in our suffering, indulge our feelings of being a victim, cling to our tragedies and hurts, tell ourselves long and ongoing stories about how horrible everything is for us, obsess about all that is wrong in the world, catalog our complaints, feed our suffering as if it were a treasured pet.

It is absolutely appropriate to notice pain, to do what we can to address the situation (if anything), respond with wisdom and compassion, but then, if we don’t wish to suffer, it is necessary to let it go, not to reject it or push it way, but to open our heart and allow it to dissolve as it will naturally, to float away from us. Once this happens, we can shift our attention to something else, (suffering would require that we continue to dwell on it), we let go and move on. Depending on the pain, this process of noticing, letting go, and shifting attention will take on different forms, require different approaches, take varying lengths of time. Sometimes we can work through the whole process in minutes, other pain will require more, like water wearing away at a rock.

3. Truth: There are three root causes of suffering–ignorance, attachment, and aversion. In Buddhism, these are also referred to as the “three poisons.” Ignorance is actually the starting point for the other two, the center, the hub of all suffering. Ignorance is delusion, confusion, bewilderment, a basic misunderstanding of reality, a confused relationship with ourselves and our feelings and our thoughts and our bodies. Attachment is clinging, passion, greed, grasping for that which we think will please us or make us happy. It’s what George Carlin was referring to when he said, “Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.” And the third poison, aversion, is rejection, aggression, hatred, animosity, dread, dissatisfaction, wanting things to be other than they are.

One Wish: That we all would be free from suffering. You, me, all of us. It’s the wish at the heart center of every other wish I ever make.