Meet Yourself Where You Are
Most of my life I’ve been a voracious reader, and the type of person who will plow through a book even if I find it uninteresting because once I begin I have to finish. In early January I shared on Instagram some reads I was planning to get through. It felt very new-year aspirational, yet here I sit in Mid-Februrary with exactly zero of those books finished. One these books is the beloved Bhagavad Gita, which I’ve read several times, so it wasn’t an unlucky choice of poor subject matter, but every time I picked up one of my books to read I managed about two pages in and everything I was trying to take in from the page became like white noise.
I talked myself into picking up young adult fiction book my friend had loaned me, and all the frustrating reading-block went away. In fact, I read my way through an entire short series of young adult fantasy in the first couple weeks of January. But I found when I tried to return more serious subject matter, I just couldn’t!
Last week, all of my classes were themed around this idea of meeting yourself where you are. (So often when I think I have a compelling theme for class, it turns out it’s because I was the one who needed to hear it). It can be a hard practice actually, because many of us are used to meeting ourselves not where we are but where we think we ought to be. That gulf between what is and what we think should be is a fertile ground for finding ourselves lacking or “wrong” in some way.
Case in point. I had set this plan for myself for 2022 that involved reading a pretty hefty amount of non-fiction. My inner critic was getting LOUD about the fact that I couldn't seem to get myself to finish a couple of books that many people I know have read and loved. I got a moment of clarity when I listed to Atomic Habits author James Clear on Brene Brown’s podcast Unlocking Us. I listen to podcasts every day when I walk my dog. I found I as I was listening that I was really engaged with the content. So what was the problem with just reading the book which had been staring at me from my nightstand for the past few weeks?
I started getting curious about it and tried to widen the aperture of what I was looking at beyond the issue of not being able to concentrate. A couple of things became clear to me very quickly:
My yin yoga teacher Leah Adams says “stress fractures memory and attention”.
Well. It’s no secret it’s been a stressful several years for many of us, and has been an extremely stressful couple of months for our family as we have been navigating a seemingly simple bathroom update that turned into mold inside an exterior wall requiring removal and extensive repair. So…..that.
Fifteen months ago, I took the first module of my 300 hour training to earn my 500 hour RYT certification. I’ve completed 280 of those 300 hours but in the meantime, I also completed an 85 hour prenatal certification, a 50 hour additional restorative CE with my teacher Judith Lasater (plus an in-depth final project), and have been planning tons of upcoming programming for 2022 and 2023. It’s been one of the busiest times of my life and I’ve taken in a massive amount of information.
Holding those bigger-picture pieces with a curious mind allowed me to realize that what was going on was simply that my brain is/was at capacity for absorbing new information in a visual format. I’ll admit that for years I’ve had kind of a weird attitude about audiobooks. I’ve always been a visual learner and I just didn’t really get it. I purchased Atomic Habits on audible and it was a game changer. Right now listening is where it’s at for me.
If I hadn’t been willing to wonder about what this seeming hang up was for me, it’s likely I would have continued to struggle trying to plod through some well-written books without really absorbing the messages because I felt stubborn and attached to doing things some certain way I thought I should be. Instead in this instance I was able to offer myself a different medium for the information, and it made all the difference.
True, there is much in life that is out of our immediate control. But how often, in refusing to look and acknowledge where we actually are do we keep ourselves resigned to struggling or feeling stuck? Figuring out that I could listen instead of read was a relatively simple, surface level problem. But the same holds true in many other places in our lives. How often am I listening from where I want to be or what I think I should be able to do versus what the present experience is actually communicating to me. Meeting yourself where you are requires an openness, a curiosity and a willingness to set aside our plans and expectations and engage with what is actually happening in the moment. I find for myself that quite often the sense of being stuck is pointing me toward something I’m resisting. There's a grace is giving over some of the holding tightly to just let myself, if only for a few breaths, have an experience of resting in “what is”.
This week I invite you to hold yourself with a sense of sweetness and much compassion. I invite to wonder: “where can I struggle less and support myself more?”. Meet yourself where you are. With kindness, with courage, and with compassion.
Be well!