Let yourself have this

This phrase of invitation, allowance and permission often comes to me when I first sit for meditation. I tend to fidget, wanting to find the “perfect” seat (reminding myself that “perfect,” is always; perfect is what we create, what we allow to be), something probably related to a pattern in our capitalistic society of wanting to, feeling like we need to, Always. Optimize. Everything. (Anyway!)

“Let yourself have this,” I find myself guiding myself in response. Just let yourself have this time to be in this moment, this meditation. Let yourself have this, whatever is pulling, whatever is presenting. If it is a slower week, if you’re desiring more rest, if you find something seemingly silly and nonsensical to be bringing you joy, or something feels good and makes this easier. (Like, I recently got a fidget toy to help me focus when I’m working!) Let yourself have it! You deserve it, all of it.

So, let yourself have this, too. Slowness, stillness, a burst of energy and excitement, or some other gift of emotion coursing through. Let yourself have minutes to space out and dream, to visit memories, other places in your mind and create other realities and timelines. Let yourself have this, whatever it is.

Release the timeline

A couple months into living in Venice Beach I had this moment, biking home from a friend’s on a Sunday evening along boardwalk, then turning on Speedway and pulling to my alley (mine! this was now home!) when I realized, like really realized, that I lived at the beach.

I’d always wanted to live summers at the beach growing up, have a home there, a place to stay rather than day trips in and out to the Jersey Shore. I was, I am, grateful for that, yes, and still, I craved languid summer nights with melting ice cream cones and slow sunsets and friends from other school districts, could feel the little bliss of what it’d be like to wake up to walk in the sand. Now, all these years later, but not a moment too late or too early, I was here. I am here.

Release the timeline. Because, the time is always divine; the timing is always right. (And maybe, sometimes it’s a boomerang?)

I trust my future self

I started saying this to myself, at some point back when I was in Brooklyn, as a way to come back to the now. To keep from falling into a spiral about a hypothetical future, from experiencing what I’ve sometimes heard referred to in the Vedic community as “future suffering”—suffering in the now (which was really a nice now, back then, and now, too!), mucking it up over a maybe.

“I trust my future self.” Even when I thought I wasn’t ready, for that big opportunity, that other thing I didn’t see coming, I really had been. I had received it, and I had come to believe in the innate rightness of it, even if it didn’t happen right away. I had a decades-long track record of things really working out. Future me deserved the trust of past me, and the now me. So, I let it go. Let her go.

As I started saying this to myself more, I was giving myself even more reason to believe. I’d go to add something to my Calendar and see it was already there. I’d open my phone to write something down, and it was done. I’d think of an email I meant to respond to, and I’d already sent it. Future me really didn’t need to prove anything else, but I guess she wanted to. Notes to self; jokes on me, and jokes for me. So, now I do more (less) to just let her be.

For Kelly, with whom I found deep trust in myself (we both did!) in those early and formative professional years, and with whom I formed a deep and formative friendship.