I have been struggling a lot lately with my internal ideas of what it is to be good - recognizing how much social and familial conditioning have primed me with certain unexamined morals and mores. As Mary Oliver says, "you do not have to be good, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." This morning I'm recognizing that in this process, I have often distorted Mary's message a bit to a stingy rebellious trying NOT to be good, which leaves little room for actually listening to that soft animal. And it leaves me feeling contracted, scared, and dead inside. The reality is though, I can still choose actions that are aligned with that social good, but for different reasons - because it FEELS GOOD.
A few weeks ago, I was skiing, and I was upset and stressed as I often am on the ski slopes - grappling with old family stuff that always comes up when skiing. My head and heart filled with my own pain and shadow as I skiied down the hill, I noticed a little girl below me who had just fallen and was struggling to get up as her parents watched from a bit further down the hill. Without thinking, I stopped to help her up, she said thank you and skied down to join her parents. It was maybe a 30 second interaction. But beyond measure, it was MY PLEASURE. It was her gift to me - I skiied on and my heart burst open with joy and my eyes with tears, a mix of a release of my brewed emotions and the simple joy of getting to be of service, to help someone, even in such a small way as offering a hand to a cute little bundled up starfish-like ski kid. It was an opportunity to feel my own humanity and my alive after all heart, and a gift of a break from thinking about myself. And in the smallness of the act, it was a gift also to feel the empowerment of true humility.
Over and over lately, I am seeing how humility is actually one of the most empowering feelings I know. To recognize how much I don't know, how little impact I can have - to pat the ego on the head, tell it it's okay, it's good enough already, and suggest that it relax it’s striving for a moment, and look at the bright blue sky. And from those depths of humility, something quite exciting happens: I brush up against my true self. An authentic impulse arises. I have found that when we strip away the striving, the shame, the fear, when we accept that there's nothing to prove and no one to impress, the heart begins to speak. Actions arise that actually come from the heart, from our unique flavor of life force, from that stream that, if we can find and follow it, guides us into a sense of meaning and clarity of our unique ability to be of service in this life.
Which reminds me of another story I just heard, which happens to be about real starfish [this from Rick Hanson]:
Two women are walking along a beach after a storm swept countless starfish up onto the sand, now dying in the sun. As they talk, one reaches down every few paces to pick up a starfish and flick it back into the sea. After a while, her friend points at the miles of beach and bursts out, "Why do you bother?! You're not making any difference!" Her friend replies, "It makes a big difference to the ones I touch."
See, this woman could be picking up these starfish because she thinks she should. But I don't get that sense from this story - I get the sense that this woman does this because it FEELS GOOD. She feels both the life and the vulnerability in these little five-sided creatures, and she feels compelled. And with every starfish she releases back into the ocean, her soft animal sings.
Now, I know some of you readers may be wondering: if that women cared about starfish so much, why didn’t she organize a starfish cleanup day and help save all the starfish! Why didn’t she found the International Starfish Storm Rescue Coalition? In addition to these little things moments of humanity and humility, many of us also have an equally beautiful and natural impulse to contribute in a big way. So before I close, with a little help from entrepreneurship expert Bryan Franklin, I’ll pose a question that may land better for the big thinkers among my readers.
Bryan Franklin, in his Tedx video “The Most Dangerous Question on Earth”, asks an audience of entrepreneurs what they would want to achieve if they had already “won” at life. He poses one question that he promises will terrify us, possibly ruin our lives as we know them, and perhaps help us begin living our deeper callings at the same time. The question? Suppose you took away all the shame, all the shoulds, suppose you already revealed all your dark and subtle secrets and had nothing to hide... If you had already won, already proved yourself, already been validated by all those you seek approval from... If you had achieved success according whatever metrics were driving you, and if you truly had nothing to lose... Imagine all that, and from that place, ask the question: WHAT DO YOU WANT?
…
We are posing some daunting questions here. First, what do you think it is to be good? Where did those ideas come from – family, schooling, your boss, the media? And then: If you could let go of those influences, what would your heart be drawn to do?
If you manage to find some of those magical moments where this disentanglement is possible, you may find as I have that some of those draws are actually aligned with the socially mores you so diligently rejected. So can you have the courage and humility to follow your heart anyway? Because – and this is what I’m really remembering and anchoring for myself with this post – it’s not about the what, it’s about the how. It’s about the place your actions are coming from – is your ‘good’ coming from that inner patriarch of shame and should? Or can you recognize being ‘good’ as an occasional side-effect for a person courageous enough to let themselves be led by love.
&#*@! That is, it’s not an easy path. I struggle with it every single day, for me the ‘social shoulds’ as I call them are sneaky little bastards that still guide me more than my heart does. But the commitment to honing my own inner compass of integrity is the difference, for me, between inner life and death. Between living from fear and living for love. Between feeling shut down and dead inside, and feeling terrifyingly, vulnerably, uncomfortably but joyfully alive.
A few weeks ago, I was skiing, and I was upset and stressed as I often am on the ski slopes - grappling with old family stuff that always comes up when skiing. My head and heart filled with my own pain and shadow as I skiied down the hill, I noticed a little girl below me who had just fallen and was struggling to get up as her parents watched from a bit further down the hill. Without thinking, I stopped to help her up, she said thank you and skied down to join her parents. It was maybe a 30 second interaction. But beyond measure, it was MY PLEASURE. It was her gift to me - I skiied on and my heart burst open with joy and my eyes with tears, a mix of a release of my brewed emotions and the simple joy of getting to be of service, to help someone, even in such a small way as offering a hand to a cute little bundled up starfish-like ski kid. It was an opportunity to feel my own humanity and my alive after all heart, and a gift of a break from thinking about myself. And in the smallness of the act, it was a gift also to feel the empowerment of true humility.
Over and over lately, I am seeing how humility is actually one of the most empowering feelings I know. To recognize how much I don't know, how little impact I can have - to pat the ego on the head, tell it it's okay, it's good enough already, and suggest that it relax it’s striving for a moment, and look at the bright blue sky. And from those depths of humility, something quite exciting happens: I brush up against my true self. An authentic impulse arises. I have found that when we strip away the striving, the shame, the fear, when we accept that there's nothing to prove and no one to impress, the heart begins to speak. Actions arise that actually come from the heart, from our unique flavor of life force, from that stream that, if we can find and follow it, guides us into a sense of meaning and clarity of our unique ability to be of service in this life.
Which reminds me of another story I just heard, which happens to be about real starfish [this from Rick Hanson]:
Two women are walking along a beach after a storm swept countless starfish up onto the sand, now dying in the sun. As they talk, one reaches down every few paces to pick up a starfish and flick it back into the sea. After a while, her friend points at the miles of beach and bursts out, "Why do you bother?! You're not making any difference!" Her friend replies, "It makes a big difference to the ones I touch."
See, this woman could be picking up these starfish because she thinks she should. But I don't get that sense from this story - I get the sense that this woman does this because it FEELS GOOD. She feels both the life and the vulnerability in these little five-sided creatures, and she feels compelled. And with every starfish she releases back into the ocean, her soft animal sings.
Now, I know some of you readers may be wondering: if that women cared about starfish so much, why didn’t she organize a starfish cleanup day and help save all the starfish! Why didn’t she found the International Starfish Storm Rescue Coalition? In addition to these little things moments of humanity and humility, many of us also have an equally beautiful and natural impulse to contribute in a big way. So before I close, with a little help from entrepreneurship expert Bryan Franklin, I’ll pose a question that may land better for the big thinkers among my readers.
Bryan Franklin, in his Tedx video “The Most Dangerous Question on Earth”, asks an audience of entrepreneurs what they would want to achieve if they had already “won” at life. He poses one question that he promises will terrify us, possibly ruin our lives as we know them, and perhaps help us begin living our deeper callings at the same time. The question? Suppose you took away all the shame, all the shoulds, suppose you already revealed all your dark and subtle secrets and had nothing to hide... If you had already won, already proved yourself, already been validated by all those you seek approval from... If you had achieved success according whatever metrics were driving you, and if you truly had nothing to lose... Imagine all that, and from that place, ask the question: WHAT DO YOU WANT?
…
We are posing some daunting questions here. First, what do you think it is to be good? Where did those ideas come from – family, schooling, your boss, the media? And then: If you could let go of those influences, what would your heart be drawn to do?
If you manage to find some of those magical moments where this disentanglement is possible, you may find as I have that some of those draws are actually aligned with the socially mores you so diligently rejected. So can you have the courage and humility to follow your heart anyway? Because – and this is what I’m really remembering and anchoring for myself with this post – it’s not about the what, it’s about the how. It’s about the place your actions are coming from – is your ‘good’ coming from that inner patriarch of shame and should? Or can you recognize being ‘good’ as an occasional side-effect for a person courageous enough to let themselves be led by love.
&#*@! That is, it’s not an easy path. I struggle with it every single day, for me the ‘social shoulds’ as I call them are sneaky little bastards that still guide me more than my heart does. But the commitment to honing my own inner compass of integrity is the difference, for me, between inner life and death. Between living from fear and living for love. Between feeling shut down and dead inside, and feeling terrifyingly, vulnerably, uncomfortably but joyfully alive.