Episode 198 - A Love Letter To You, At the Moment of Becoming

In the arc of change, whether personal or collective, there is always a moment where we wonder...

“What was I thinking?”

The hillside of change is steep.

The mountaintop feels unrealistic.

The binaries of throwing hope away or pushing forward to exhaustion seems like the only options.

This petit, ten-minute episode offers a ten-minute slice of something different.

It is a love letter to you from the pages of my journal.

Think of it like a handful of tasty almonds while on a rigorous hike.

Small and sustaining.

Nourishing and steady.

With love,

Mary

• Transcript. A Love Letter to You, At The Moment of Becoming

   Hello beautiful and welcome to the Come to Your Senses podcast. I'm your host, award winning certified feminine embodiment coach, licensed esthetician, and enthusiastic foster dog mama to animals across the land. Mary Lofgren. Here we explore how to bring more richness, radiance, peace, and pleasure to our lives, homes and hearts through the joy of beauty, the wisdom of the body, the warmth of connection, and the splendor of the senses. I'm so glad you're here. Pull up a pouf and let's dive in. Hello beautiful beings, and welcome to today's episode, which is actually a letter that I wrote to you from my journal on the art of staying with. So right now in the sanctuary, we are exploring a season all about the art of tending. Which is a way of nurturing the changes we wish to see in our lives more through lens of relationship and response than through willpower or dominance. And so this topic of staying with. So this topic of staying with has really been on my mind. And around the time of this recording. We're almost two weeks into the new year. And if you set New Year intentions, this is also around the time where the energy that may have propelled you through keeping your attention on those intentions may be waning as it fills with other things and the things of day to day life. And this letter is meant to be a little wisdom voice that sits on your shoulder in those moments where you meet yourself at a fork in the road. Where on one side it is doing things as they've always been done on the other side. It's powering through a change and where what matters in those moments is not so much which one you choose, but it's how you meet yourself in that moment. This is the art of staying, and this is the ultimate practice of tending, because we can organize all the little garden boxes of our lives perfectly and orderly, but without the actual force of nature that brings them alive, they will wilt. And similarly, we can make our tending plan and nurture new habits and all the rest. But without that quality of presence and ability to meet ourselves in moments of challenge. Like when the butternut squash catches on fire. The other night I was going to a gathering that is all about our relationship with time, and I'm like, okay, I am going to this gathering, I'm going to be early, you know? And I was making butternut squash and it totally caught on fire in the oven. And so when you find yourself having a butternut squash moment or any moment where you feel like the only roads that are open to you is an old, outdated way of being that you just fall into by default, or a new way of being that seems impossible. And like you're not sure if you're even up for it. This is a letter from my heart to yours. I think of you on this day, a little over a week into the new year. I think of your inspiration to set intentions like you stood on a ridge on December 31st, looking out at a mountaintop with joy. I see you as you start down the hill towards the valley. The sun is shining and gravel crunches at your feet. You start to sweat and every time the breeze touches your skin. You feel more and more alive. And slowly the path starts to get a little more steep. And then it starts to get really steep. Like you kind of sense humans aren't supposed to be down here. Kind of steep. The trees look a little meaner. The air feels a little sharper, and the insects look like they could kind of mess you up. You can't see the mountaintop anymore. And you wonder what on earth you were thinking going on this journey. You realize that what goes down must come up, and you think, well, I may as well just turn back. Because if it's this hard at the beginning, there's no way I can make it all the way. And so you start to consider your options. You consider pressing forward. Arriving at your destination, bloodied and ashen, like Frodo and Sam. You consider turning back and trying to convince yourself that you can settle for less than what you really want and need in this life. And then you remember that there is another way. The way of staying with. Staying right where you are on that hillside of change. Looking around. Feeling the air. Sensing the sun. You allow your heart rate to steady and your breath to slow. You stay until your muscles have recovered. And your mind realizes that down here is pretty much the same as up there. Just at a different angle. And when you look down at the remainder of the journey to the valley floor, you realize I can make it at least a few more feet. And then you get there and you stay some more. And this continues until you start to even prefer the exotic aroma of the oxygen down here. To the undefined air up there. At night, you look up and see the stars like a river between ridges, and you marvel at how you once thought the mountaintop was the point. That simply driving or taking a helicopter to that mountaintop would not be nearly as satisfying as every branch that caught you. When you reached out and grasped on the verge of falling, it would not be nearly as rich had you not gotten to know the new friends of Flora and fauna that met you along the way, and that introduced you to new friends, a flora and fauna within yourself. When you get to the top, eventually you look out and realize that it was not gridding that got you here. It was staying. And you have fallen in love not with victory, but with journeying and that which you saw at the start of the journey. That change, that achievement, is sitting beside you now on the mountain, but you barely notice. So entranced are you with this tapestry we call becoming.