change

setting out for change

Goddess

Mental health

‘After winter, must come spring/ Change, it comes eventually’ – Lauryn Hill

If you are stuck, you can be sure that change will come. If you are trapped, frozen, while the vagaries of life swirl around you, please know: change will come.

Change is a goddess, replete with gifts. She is the mother of the earth, she is vibrant, she knows shit. Unlike her name, she doesn’t linger on every upstream and downstream – she is the ocean. She doesn’t indulge whimsy; she’s solid. She’s not faint-hearted. She’s not gentle. She’ll come and get you if you hide from her. She’ll ask you nicely at first, but then she’ll get more insistent. She doesn’t give up. She will never give up on you.

Don’t be afraid of her. She wants you to grow. You are her child. She wants to feed you, and she is resplendent with the sweetest, most succulent fruit. It’s ripe. Take it – there is no poison apple in there.

Change will indulge you. She’ll let you rest under the covers for a while, shutting out the world. She will watch, always curious, her heart bemused by how you resist her. You will stumble and fall, just like a child learning how to walk. Change will be there to catch you.

Go to her. She loves you.

meditation makes you like a rock

Yet

Meditation, Motherhood

‘Answer the why, and we’ll naturally find more courage when it comes to following through on the how.’

Light Watkins wrote this and as soon as I read it, I wrote down why I needed to seek out a particular meditation teacher at a particularly inconvenient time. All the logistics were against me – I was still bruised from the birth of my third son, breastfeeding incessantly, the teacher was in another country, it seemed insane to pay someone to teach me silence, my husband was working 20 hours out of every 24 – but when I made the decision to do it, everything fell into place. Briefly, my life became like a Disney movie, where the heroine clicks her fingers and her desires appear in technicolor across the screen.

It was snowing and viciously cold outside, but I strapped my baby to me and got on a plane. The tiny, mewling little thing stayed cocooned close to me through the next three days, where I learned – through to my bones – how to meditate. Or how to stop telling myself that I was doing it wrong (there is no wrong).

An invisible cord attached to me umbilically, hauling me over to the person who made me understand the simplicity of meditation – and the complexity of what it could unravel.

Two years on, I found my why, scrawled on the back of an old bill. It says: ‘To be the best mother I can be to my children. To be a more loving and supportive person and wife. To love myself after so many years of not liking myself. To turn into a rock. In a good way.’

I’m not the best mother I can be to my children – yet. I’m not the most loving and supportive person I can be – yet. I don’t love myself after years of not liking myself. Yet. As for being a rock, I balance precariously on shifting sands, every day. But in time, I trust these things will happen.

So, what’s your why?