Tag: self reflection

Paradise Is Here

Yvet Youssef

I bow down and kiss the ground in gratitude. Searching for something? Look around you. Touch the soil. Gently place your hand on the bark of a tree and close your eyes. Feel the caress of the breeze on your skin. Listen for the melodies rising from the Earth. We get to live here for a while. Does that not blow your mind?

How we have managed to live lifetimes of bondage in rigid social contracts of disconnection remains a mystery to me.

No more. I am done. I am done struggling for a false sense of belonging to a system I distrust. If it makes me recoil there’s something wrong with it. If it makes me expand it’s the right path. That’s my compass. And I will not settle for anything less to make others feel more “comfortable” – undisturbed in normalized states of perpetual covert depression.

Because Paradise is here. It’s all around us. So is hell; it is created in the human mind and projected into material reality under the watchful gaze of human suffering seeking to multiply itself. I have felt myself at times drowning in it. But if the trees can still bear fruit, if the seeds can still grow, if the desert can still produce flowers; so will I.

[This writing first appeared on my Instagram account (@yvet_youssef) in November of 2018. Sometimes I need to remind myself.]

A Dark Night, A Dawning

Yvet Youssef

Once, in a tense room, palpable dark energy, gloom and suffering surrounding us. Turmoil like a storm that just refused to pass. A room I had made for rest and sweetness, suddenly so heavy.

And in that unbearable weight I looked around me in disbelief. Looked at a person I loved more than I had ever loved anyone as the whirlwind of chaos seemed to spring from the ground beneath his feet. And the only words that I could speak: “This is not my frequency. This isn’t mine. This is not my frequency.”

He told me to leave. And at a certain point you just have to listen even if it’s not making any sense. At a certain point you just have to believe the frequency.

I took a long path down to the bottom of everything. I took my time. And all the way down there, what had appeared to be a solid impermeable ending turned out to be liquid. I stuck my hand through like they do at strange portals in sci-fi movies, baffled. On the other side was an open space, a receptacle of Everything that’s ever been and ever will be, and it was all Love. Just Love. So I began laughing through the tears. There isn’t anything to fear here.

That relief, like a secret, found in the depths of pain; it has forever changed me. You have to let your heart break first. You have to be willing to lose everything. Surrender to it. As the Sufi mystics say: You have to burn down your house, chop off your head, lose your mind. And then: Freedom. And there: Love. One has to chuckle at the simplicity of it all, and how torturous the path towards it can be.

I create from my experience. I take the tuning forks to my heart until I reach a clarity. This is my work. My only real work: To eradicate all barriers that prevent me from experiencing and expressing Love. It’s an ongoing journey. I don’t delude myself with thoughts about arriving somewhere. That’s not the point right now. My objective is growth. Evolution. That’s the frequency I want to harmonize with. To move. To keep my heart wide open and dance with whatever arises.

There is healing to be found in this world. I just have to release the palms of my hands from the tight grips of control to be able to receive it. There isn’t anything to fear here. Breathe easy for a moment. This moment. Plant a flag here. Mark it with highlighter and neon post-its and fairy lights. Adorn it with flower and song. Remember this.

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Speaking Words of Wisdom Without Having to Die First

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We tend to gobble up wisdom from dead 13th century poets. From deceased men we call philosophers whose work is nestled safely in the stone strata of our human history. We celebrate the wise sages who can no longer speak back. We like our wisdom antiquated, with a layer of dust that we can feel proud to wipe away before somebody else did. “Look what I found; a profound word, it’s so old!”

But wisdom, spoken from living mouths, feminine, passionate, creative, poetic, loud and confident, sensual and vital, alive – iiieeekkkkk oooh nononono… suddenly wise words evoke staggering, heals in sand, stubborn arms crossed, scorn, ridicule and judgement.

“Don’t you think you are a little arrogant for saying that?”
“You sound so sure of yourself, you think you’re all that?”
“I don’t like it when people speak like they know some sort of truth.”
“It’s not that you are wrong, it’s just that you think you are right that’s problematic.”
“Ugh, you sound so teacherly, it’s really annoying.”
“I am just so allergic to those vague spiritual terms.”

And so we float around in pools of ad hominem fallacies. The grand orchestra of silencing the living, so that they refrain from shining too brightly, too confidently, too much empowered. “Nobody shall at any point here think they have something of real value to add to the conversation,” as we raise our hands and take an oath of mediocre superficiality for the sake of all things mundane and undisturbed.

I suppose a dead poet’s words of wisdom have transcended the chains of personality, of character flaw; their words now live on their own in a timeless vacuum of abstracted knowledge. But, they arose in a living human, a real person just like you and me. Not a saint, not an exclusive-collector’s-item-edition of the human form, not a special rarity: A real person. A poet is a living being. A mystic is a living being. A philosopher is a living being. They are not separate from us.

Wisdom is not something anyone can own. It is something we can choose to tap into, to cultivate a relationship with, to grow towards. What name do you want to give it? Awareness, Consciousness, Presence, Loving-Kindness, Divinity, Spirit, Unconditional Love? Whatever word you want to use, it is never dispensed for the sake of personal gain… not if it’s true wisdom (because, again, nobody owns it!) That is not to say that people cannot earn a living from sharing wisdom, or that all philosophers, witches, sages, truth-tellers and mystics should live in destitute poverty in order to be taken seriously. Nah, that’s an old-school myth rooted in a paradigm of scarcity and lack. It’s time to move on.

The intention of sharing wisdom is always loving. Have teachers and gurus abused their power? Yes. Remove them from their pedestals. Obliterate hierarchies with a spirit of Radical Equality. That means you do not place anyone above or below you; it means you do not place yourself above or below anyone. That’s not to say we cannot point out when shit is messed up. Compassion is not coddling or infantilizing. It just means we recognize and respect the inherent worth of life in all its forms. Learn what you can from those who offer their teachings to you. Don’t dwell for too long in resentment around the wrongdoings perpetrated by human suffering. Inquire into the nature of that suffering, look it in the eye, see where it is coming from. Recognize that same pain within you so that you can make the choice not to pass it unwittingly along to others. The most honorable job in the world and, I believe, our greatest responsibility.

Understand that the age of esoteric exclusivity is over. You don’t need some sort of membership to an elusive secret society shrouded in mysterious shadows to know a thing or two about the grand scheme of things. No. The field of mystic knowledge is wide and open, and anyone can at all times choose to walk around there to touch its vibrant dancing grasses. We all have access to wisdom. It’s the very same source those deceased mystics and poets tapped from: A collective consciousness, a Universal Truth, simple, clear, all-encompassing: Love. That’s it. Do blockages to this Love exist within us? Yes. Do we sometimes stubbornly refuse to feel it? Oh, hell yes. Do we still have access to it if we are willing to open the window a little bit? Absolutely.

The reason why these living mouths, these luscious humans, these blood-pumping-sweet-hearts would even dare to speak words of wisdom, is to further the human cause. It’s for the sake of Evolution. It’s for the sake of Everything and Everyone. We need each other to grow and heal and evolve. That’s what I know I came here to do. And I want your heart-glowing-sparkling-wisdom, sweet one. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine. Let us infuse each other’s wise words, weave ourselves into the fabric of our shared existence. So we can Love each other and ourselves as fully and deeply as we can muster in courageous tenderness. I am not asking for much; just everything you are, just your soul-fire, just your reasons for Being. Thank you very much.

Love and Shadow Work

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“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

– James Baldwin

If I love you, I don’t want you to be stuck, I want you to grow. If I love you, I don’t want to get stuck, I want to grow with you, for you, for all of us. To me the very purpose of being in a relationship is to grow with someone. I have no interest in tranquility if it is housed on a gurgling cesspool of unconscious dysfunctional behavioral patterns. Such tranquility is a farce, it is not real, it is not peaceful. Peace can only ever arise from making conscious that which hides in the shadows of our being. Carl G. Jung referred to this as shadow work. And it is precisely in (conscious, self-reflective) partnership with another person that such work is particularly feasible. Why? Because when I see you – truly see you – day in day out, and if I am the slightest bit aware, those shadows of yours are going to announce themselves to me sooner or later. We all have them. In this inevitable process I will feel those shadows hurled at me with sharp clarity, at which point I can say: “Hey, you! Look at this. Here’s something to dig into because it hurts me and others”. And you, dear one, can do the same for me: “Your behavior is painful to me, let’s address what is happening here”.

And guess what happens through this type of relational labor? Peace happens. Peace happens within the awareness of the chaos. Peace happens within the acknowledgment of the pain. The moment we are conscious of our destructive and dysfunctional behavior, is the moment we can heal it, is the moment we can breathe a sigh of relief. That is what it means to me to be in a loving relationship; to trust someone to respectfully call out my bullshit because that person cares about me enough to see me do better. If we can lovingly do that for each other, Love will continue to grow, intimacy will continue to deepen, life will expand in richness and in meaning. To Love you is to see you and to support you in becoming the best possible version of yourself, which in turn helps me become the best possible version of myself. Such Love is evolutionarily, reciprocal, and regenerative.

Unfortunately, we are collectively pretty terrified of being uncomfortable. And if one thing can be said about shadow work: It is ridiculously uncomfortable. However, dismissing discomfort is much like closing the curtains to life. We have been duped by the sugary platitude of “Happily Ever After” to buy into the false idea that relationships are there to make us happy. As if it’s even possible to affix a transitory emotional state to a lifetime of perpetual changes. Philosophically we can likely agree that it is questionable whether it’s even possible to gain happiness through external acquisition. There is surely a correlation between wellbeing and having our basic human needs met, but there is a limit to how much joy can be derived from external goods and services. If happiness is an inside job, it should come to no surprise your new fling isn’t gonna give it to you. Yet in the realm of relationship we seem so addicted to this infantile storyline: “Godspeed ye innocent lovebirds carried into the distance on a sparkling carriage just smiling happily and chugging along ad infinitum towards an elusive horizon! Your coupling grants you entrance to the ranks of well-adjusted extras in a lifelong Colgate commercial!” Not only does it sound boring AF, it’s delusional as all hell. This is not fucking Pleasant Ville, you’ve got a life to live, buddy.

We are humans, we die, we lose loved ones, we meet sickness, misfortune, we grieve, we fail, we fall apart, we are wrong sometimes. Sometimes we are wrong a lot. Try to smile through that. Happy yet? What’s that? You are telling me you can’t sustain that radiant smile of yours for all of eternity? Is the denial starting to hurt? Is it beginning to feel weird? You see, I am not in this life to witness a staged performance of perpetual happiness. To be clear, I have nothing against ‘happy’ as an experience. Bless ‘happy’. I just believe we have been misguided to measure our success in life, as well as our sense of worth, on how long we can sustain a state of happiness. But happiness is not an achievement you lock into for life, it is a gift, and it arrives on our doorstep naturally when we align with our essence and learn against all odds to love ourselves fiercely and deeply. The only way we can love ourselves deeply is through a systematic dismantling of all of the places where we are in denial and full of shit. And yes, indeed, we can lovingly see each other through such a process*.

So, in lieu of a feigned smile, please give me your pain, your struggles, and your mistakes. Let’s work through the reality, the grit, the rawness, the really disturbing shadow of it all. Allow me to love you entirely and let’s be real about all the places where we have more work to do. Let’s dance through the truth of our humanness together. Let’s marvel at the messes we’ve made. Let’s shake our heads really hard. Let’s sit for a moment in how much it hurts. Breathe through it. That’s where freedom and laughter simply come to greet us on their own accord. It is such a glorious relief to surrender to the realness of it all. I am in this life for the remarkable joy of “Evolving Ever After,” instead.

* For the record, I am speaking from a perspective of personal relationships here, but this very same process holds true for our collective struggles as well. From the micro to the macro – everything is connected. James Baldwin has written extensively on the role of truth-telling in relation to racism and other injustices in our societies. True patriotism – the love for a country – thus resides in the people who dare to shine light on the horrible shadows of our nations, because only through such labor can we even start to imagine peace. Healing can only begin when we uncover the festering wounds of our collective past and present and start scooping the puss out. No, it isn’t pretty, but it is what Love does when it cares about something.

Guesthouses

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For 14 months I have slept in spare bedrooms and on couches, in hostels, in tents and on the occasional bus or balcony – relying on the hospitality of others, unable, still, to recreate what I lost, and establish a new home for myself. I know it seems strange to some people, but I also suppose most people don’t know what it feels like, so it doesn’t really matter what they think. I write this last sentence with relative ease now, but this understanding hasn’t come easy. We have to unlearn so much of our cultural and psychological programming to truly care less about other people’s judgements of us… I am still diligently working through it.

Since having been involuntarily uprooted and catapulted from one continent to another, I’ve struggled with a need for my own space, and I have wrestled with my dependency on others. It’s been a challenging time on many levels. But I have also felt a strong resistance at the thought of living in a new permanent residence by myself while pretending to be a well-adjusted independent single woman in her early thirties. As if I could lose home and hearth one minute and, without blinking an eye, feign having my shit together while painting the walls emerald green and millennial pink in some other house for me to occupy. As if it doesn’t hurt like hell. As if it hasn’t fucked me up. As if I am not still grieving a loss that extends from the material into the emotional and spiritual aspects of my being.

For years I had poured myself into the creation of a home-space and it got suddenly ripped away from me. My identity as a spouse, a stepmom, a homemaker, a caretaker of cats and plants, a maker of family meals, a collector of eclectic furniture; it all vanished one moment to the next. My hands left empty, entirely unsure of who exactly to BE now. To truly learn the lessons from this predicament, there was one message overruling all other sentiments in my mind and it sounded like this: STOP.

Stop. Stand still. Wait. Sit in this astounding agony. Be broken down for as long as it takes. Resist all external pressures towards “normalcy” – be wholly, repulsively, irritatingly, frustratingly “abnormal”. Not because you want to be recalcitrant, but because it is the healthiest thing you can do at the moment. However long it takes?

Yes. However long it takes.

The second message of equal weight has been ringing through the hallways of my heart repeatedly during this time: TRUST. Whatever this is, trust that it will bring you closer to yourself. Trust you are supported even in times of relentless turmoil. Trust the light will return. Trust your love and your vision and your intuition. Trust this path. You don’t have to know exactly where it leads.

And so I have been defying norms and convention, a full-grown adult, homeless, single and childless, without even a damned coffeemaker or vacuum cleaner or piece of furniture to call my own anymore. If life has a reset button, someone took a small pin to mine and relentlessly pressed it until the whole system was rebooted. Back at the factory settings. It’s confusing and torturous at times, yet when I look in the mirror I can look myself in the eye and say: “I Love you. I am so unbelievably proud of you, you sensitive, courageous spirit. You are doing so well with all of this”.

There’s a learning curve to losing everything. There’s a learning curve to accepting support. There’s a learning curve to living in proverbial guesthouses for a while. We are all guests, I guess. It’s just easy to forget when we crown ourselves rulers of our insulated Queen and Kingdoms of Domesticity. But do we truly own anything? The planet we get to live on? The bodies we move around in? These roofs, these couches, these cups of tea, these blankets? Take nothing for granted.

We are all reliant upon each other. We have just been taught that we can and ought to be in complete control of our own little private corners of reality, and that if we lose that control, we have somehow failed at life. We judge ourselves and feel the judgement of others. “I didn’t plan for this.” “This wasn’t supposed to happen.” Turns out we don’t really have that much control, not as much as we think we do by a long shot. Control is a rigidity that feels like strength at first, until it reveals itself as a barrier to a life blossoming.

I am, for the time being, experiencing life as a transient guest in other people’s houses, relying on the goodwill of those around me, family, friends, hospitable strangers and hostel hosts. I am floating through a vast stretch of liminal space, which I presume I have to learn to soar through freely now. To live with something I can only describe as a fluidity of presence. To receive gifts, over and over. Receiving is a difficult task for many of us self-reliant, control-freakish, independent creatures of habit. But it’s a powerful exercise. To say “thank you” again and again and again, until all uncomfortable fear-based-pride is pulverized, THANK YOU.

I know deep in my heart, there will be a time I will occupy a home-space to call my own again, with a coffeemaker, millennial pink walls, and a bunch of amazing rugs. I know that I will open that space for others who are then where I am now. To pay it forward. To give what I have learned to receive. To support others on similar journeys. I find solace in that knowing. And I trust it will happen in exactly the right place and in exactly the right time.

Evolving Consciousness

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I am not perfect. I get stuck and hooked and I trip over myself plenty. I don’t know everything. I do not have all the answers. There have been times I’ve felt shame around this. How can I be whole without being perfect? There are still moments where I think I should not speak my truth before it is perfected. Who am I to use my voice? To write about the Sacred? To point out the wounds of our world?

Then something in me goes: Wait a minute, that sounds like a tune that you picked up from our cultural command of unworthiness: “Don’t you dare think yourself worthy because it will mess with a system predicated on your perpetual sense of insecurity!”

But, dear one, worthiness already lives inside of us. It is a birthright, no matter how much our societies have tried to oppress or obscure it. Our work is to re-claim our worth, to stop hiding from it, to stop rejecting it, to stop repressing it. What are we so afraid of?

We are evolutionary creatures. Everything we do is a path, not towards a perfect destination, but towards growth. Beyond what we can now imagine as some type of destination lies still more path and still more possibilities for expansion of consciousness. My only job here is to commit to that path with reverence, gratitude and conscious presence as an evolutionary being who is always learning. That is how I serve the whole. That is the place from where I can legitimately speak. Not because I claim to have all the answers, but because we are all in this together, like links in a chain, connected. We grow towards healing together and we evolve together. When I stretch out my hand to reach for you and pull you up, you may accept it, just like I rely on the pointed finger of someone else to guide the way onward. We build ladders and throw out ropes and make signposts along the way because we need each other, and, quite frankly, this whole experience is a lot more fun with loving company.

How I Became A Vegetarian But More Importantly How We Change Our Hearts And Save The Planet

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For 8 years I was in a relationship with a hardcore vegetarian. During most of this time I did not identify as a vegetarian myself, but I cooked mostly vegetarian food in our house, and I respected and understood my partner’s vegetarianism completely. When he decided to also quit eating eggs, I admit I did some huffing and puffing because that seriously challenged my baking and cooking habits, as well as our sweet ritual of sharing meals in restaurants. But then when it came down to it, I couldn’t bear ever baking cookies that he couldn’t also enjoy, so I always ended up using egg-replacer anyway. See, I understood vegetarianism intellectually. It made a lot of sense to me. But I continued eating a hamburger every now and then when I was out.

Until one Summer when I was biting in a hamburger at a local diner, and all of a sudden it tasted disgusting to me. I was chewing on this meat and something about it just felt wrong. This glob of animal parts was (or plural, were…) raised under horrible circumstances and was (were) killed to become this mediocre dish on my plate. I suddenly felt shame and a disturbing sense of decadence. I was chewing on suffering. I was chewing on pain. And I was allowing that degradation into my body. How is that nourishing? It was in this moment that a shift occurred from understanding vegetarianism intellectually, to feeling it emotionally and spiritually. That’s when I stopped eating meat. I have had a couple of meat dishes since in other people’s homes as a gesture of gratitude for their hospitality, but when I get to choose, I always choose meatless options. When asked, I now identify as vegetarian.

It’s an interesting feeling, because once that shift has occurred – once that light switch flips over – you can’t really go back. You can go from unawareness to awareness, but you can’t go from awareness into unawareness again. That doesn’t work. You could go into denial. And there are a lot of ways in which I am in denial when it comes to the choices I make as a consumer in a capitalist society. Our societies are actually based on systems of complete denial, so it’s particularly easy to go along with that current. In fact, we are constantly stimulated to participate in this system of denial with every step we take in this world. Our supermarkets are neatly presented aisles of denial. Our traveling methods are meticulously streamlined networks of denial. Our wardrobes are eclectic messes of denial. Our electronics are such amazingly convenient apparatuses of denial. We are in the thick of it.

Now, I am not writing this because I am preaching vegetarianism to you. If you caught my drift, the idea is that such preaching is fruitless. My point is that knowing something intellectually will never be enough to generate change. This goes for everything in life. We have reached the absolute end-station of the intellect-train. To prevent this train from driving us all straight off the cliff of existence, we need to hop onto the train of emotional awareness. That means we have to personally and collectively look deep into the abyss of planetary suffering, and begin FEELING our actions on an emotional and energetic level. This is scary work. We have made a real mess of things, and it’s extremely painful to bear witness to that reality. But I believe that we can talk about climate change, and sustainability, and ethics, and racism, and sexism, and everything that’s wrong with our world until the end of time (literally…), yet nothing will ever change until we really FEEL it. That means we have to begin uncovering all the barriers in our lives that prevent us from feeling pain, discomfort, grief, sadness, and sorrow. And from that place, we must connect the dots between our personal and our collective suffering.

Changing behavior on the basis of intellect alone is never going to be enough. Emotionally disconnected action, even towards a righteous goal, will not prevail. We need an uprising of emotional intelligence, of open hearts and spirits feeling passionately into the reality that our intellect presents to us. Don’t get me wrong, the intellect is a neat tool. But like any tool, it has no ethical compass. A hammer can be used to build a home and to smash someone’s skull in. Our intellect can be used to build networks of connection and to methodically orchestrate genocide. If anything is going to change our world for the better, it’s going to be that emotional heart of yours, it’s going to be your capacity to really feel pain, to cry, to love. Cultivating, harnessing, and revering emotional intelligence is going to be the next crucial leap in our evolution. And since we are dangling on the precipice of planetary destruction, I’d say it’s about time.

Ode to Dancing

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When I look around in the day to day bustle of human activity, I sometimes find myself marveling at how organized and ordered everything moves. But also. How limited. I think of my body, how privileged I am to be able to move all of these limbs so freely. And how I don’t do that enough.

One of my favorite activities in this world is going out dancing. For something I love as much as I love dancing, it’s surprising how little it actually happens. To be clear, this is not about dancing “well” or having some slick choreography, this is also not about the gaze of another. This is about feeeeeeeling the music. I love the deep melancholic techno beats, the psychedelic electronica, and the ancient rhythms from all over the world just the same. If there is any depth to the sound, it invites us to dive into it. And once you’re in it, once you have shed the inhibitions and boundaries of your strangely conditioned mind, you just feeeeeel it. It just moves in you and you in it. You become one with the music. At its best, dancing is an entirely sensual and spiritual experience.

While dancing, I have been asked this question by an interrupting stranger on several occasions: “What are you on?” And I have replied: “A glass of water”. It is pretty obvious that more and more people have come to this false conclusion that the liberating experience of dancing can only be achieved through the use of substances, with jittering jaws and horrible hangovers. I have seen so many people standing awkwardly on the sidelines until they were wasted enough to let go of their inhibiting self-sabotage and finally free to move their bodies.

Now, I am no stranger to that feeling of shame or shyness. But I am here to say that it’s a waste of life to feel bound by some elusive social contract that instructs you to constrain yourself lest you can blame some external additive for your wildness. It’s a total sham. If you have a body that is able to move in one way or another, the only thing standing in the way of the meditative ecstasy of dancing is your own mind. You don’t need anything to reach that state. You just need to silence that thinking brain, breathe, and feeeeeeel. There have been many times that my sober body was way more energetic and alive at 5 in the morning than all of the drugged up bodies running on empty around me. That’s because dancing actually generates energy, whereas synthetic substances drive you to peak and then drain your energy. For the record, I am not anti-drug in principle, I am just pro-vital-life-force-energy. And you have that running up and down your spine by default. It’s yours to use.

You see, the music wants to move you. It’s what she’s here for. And when you let her, when you relax your body, close your eyes, and allow the music to guide you into her gorgeous mysteries, you learn what freedom means, what pure joy feels like, and when the music is exceptionally good, you might even get glimpses of God.

On Meditating Through the Mess

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I am living the cliché: The newly separated woman in her early 30’s seeking guidance from the realms of spirituality and psychology in order to make sense of the chaos that has become her life. You know, the woman who has just lost such large chunks of the identity she had eagerly been building for about 8 years of marriage and step-motherhood in a different country that she now – after being unceremoniously rejected by her partner – simply doesn’t know how to set one foot in front of the other. I have always been deep diving into philosophical quandaries and explorations of consciousness, so this is not new territory to me, it’s just all that’s left now. During this transition phase, I rapidly chartered the help of a Jungian psychologist; I regularly visit spiritual websites trying to find some solace for the godawful, heart wrenching pain I experience every single day; I visit stores that sell self-help books and chakra colored candles to inspire some kind of healing in this wreckage of a human heart. Needless to say: I’ve been having a really shitty time. As a diligent seeker of wellbeing I, of course, have been pointed to the power of meditation repeatedly by every single person who has had anything to say about helping oneself recover after such heartbreak.

Now, I am not an avid meditator. My biggest barrier during the slew of meditation and sound-healing classes that I have taken part in over the years has been my body. If I have to sit cross-legged, straight up, on a hard pillow for an hour, I get so distracted by the aching pain in my lower back that emptying the mind is virtually impossible. Yes, I hear you: Yoga, right? That’s what yoga is for, to train the body for meditation! Well, it is not trained for meditation, and it’ll take some years to fix that. So, in the meantime, I have been laying in bed with my headphones on, listening to a variety of YouTube’s guided-meditation-videos where the soothing voices of strangers lead me through imagined landscapes of lights and colors and energies, through the body and into the Universe. I don’t know if they help, but I can’t afford skepticism right now.

When my psychologist also implored me to meditate to clearly distinguish between my consciousness and the drama that unfolds around me in the shape of my life, I figured I should try to graduate from the kindergarten of mediation, to, well, let’s say 1st grade. (Not dissing the YouTube variety, I love everyone who invests time in making solid meditation videos – especially if they also manage to keep the notifications from their phones silent during the recordings!) So, I got the sage out that I had recently bought in one of those spiritual bookstores, I wrapped myself up in scarfs and blankets, and in the thick sage-smudge that filled my brother’s apartment, (which I reside in when he’s away because I am homeless – in the sense that I don’t have a home of my own anymore/as of yet) I closed my eyes and began to meditate.

Breathing in and breathing out slowly. Letting the thoughts arise as they may, and – without judgement – releasing them. After a couple of minutes of unhooking my mind from solid thoughts I marveled at the astounding variable density of thinking. As in; there are a lot of very obvious robust thoughts, but there also also very elusive thoughts that make themselves so thin and sheer that it almost seems as though they are not there. However, upon deepening your awareness, they sure are there, almost transparent, trying to have their moment! Sneaky bastards! There are bison thoughts, unapologetically barging in. There are mice thoughts, scurrying around in corners, difficult to catch. And there are chameleon thoughts, blending in with the backdrop of your mind so well you have to look very hard to recognize them. So, I sit there for a while clearing away these thoughts, and after some time of stillness I hear myself thinking: “This is going pretty well, I think I am not that bad at meditating” – and suddenly I begin laughing really hard.

I can’t stop laughing for a while and think: “Why the hell do you need to be good at meditating right away? Who is keeping score? What are you trying to prove?” Suddenly all these identities come rushing by, and this need to be “good”. I wanted to be the “good” daughter, never really rebelling, and always being home 10 minutes before curfew. I wanted to be the “good” student, even when basically impossible, I read all the assigned articles in graduate school – all of them – way, way, way too many of them. I wanted to be the “good” wife, making sure I had coffee and dinner ready for my partner exactly after he awoke, right before he had to leave for night shift, hoping to ease his stress, and hoping to connect with him in the unsustainable schedule we had involuntarily acquired. I wanted to be the “good” stepmom, so even when my stepson was pushing my buttons by arguing every single sentence that came out of my mouth relentlessly, I cleaned up his room so he could feel comfortable and at home. Fuck, I even wanted to be the “good” “other woman” to my husband’s ex by watching my stepson whenever she needed it during her scheduled days (nope, didn’t work!) And when I go to an institute for intuition and energy healing in yet another attempt to find some meaning in all of this mess, I get nervous, because what if I don’t have a “good enough” aura? Haha! What?!

As I am laughing at myself, I feel this surge of warmth rise up from my heart and I hear myself quietly whispering: “It’s OK, I already love you” – and tears start rolling down my face.

There is nothing wrong with acts of service, with care, with being responsible, and treating others with kindness and respect as much as possible. Those are wonderful qualities. But there is nothing to win there, there’s no approval to gain, no appreciation to distill from the hearts of others in an attempt to feel safe or accepted. The amount of love others are able to give is simply a reflection of the love they are able to give themselves. Therein lies our true work; to love ourselves. I am an amateur meditation practitioner who is probably going to fall asleep to another one of YouTube’s “guided meditations for empaths” or something along those lines. And each day, as a practice, I am going to love this sweet heart of mine so warmly that it will slowly heal, so that it will be able to meet others along the way with sincere love and kindness. And I will try a bit more “grown-up” meditation tomorrow, because, they keep saying it can lead to some real insights about yourself…