Seeing without Being.

 

Hello, Friends! 

Quite some time has passed since my last post, and I find that it has a lot to do with the quote above. In the past months, I have worked to be my own version of the sky.

So many unpredictable, catastrophic, and unprecedented things have happened in our lives already this year, and I noticed how easy it was for me to become wrapped up in all that I could not control.

I remembered this quote from one of my favorite people, Pema Chodron, and I let it sink in deeply, even sharing it at a staff meeting to reflect with others.

This world we live in can cause us to feel helpless one minute and hopeful the next. It leaves us doubting things will ever change and then, suddenly, making us wish we could hold on to normalcy when we get a taste of it.

Pema reminds us that so many of these events in life are the weather, and we are the sky. Though thunderstorms, hail, torrential downpours, and even devastating hurricanes come down upon us, we are still the sky--the host for the weather, not the weather itself.

How many times have you felt the swirling around you and believed the circumstances to be so consuming that you couldn't help but be swallowed up whole by them?

It's in those very moments that we need to pause, be still, take a breath, and visualize ourselves as the sky. As the sky, we can observe. We can look closely. We can question what is coming, and we can be thankful when it has passed. But we will never be the weather... and that is a critical distinction.

When we remember that we are the sky, we can remove ourselves from the chaos and take stock of who we are and what we do have. We can take a step back to see reality for what it is rather than becoming so lost in the madness that we, ourselves, can't find our way out.

The Afters--a great Christian band-- has a song that captures this idea so beautifully:

"Even though I'm in the storm, the storm is not in me."

It's a daily, and sometimes hourly, ritual that we can engage in to become mindful when we are in storms of struggle, anxiety, work frustrations, loneliness... and to separate our selves from the storm. That is the only way we can distinguish our experiences from our identity.

Here's to reclaiming who we are more often than we claim our situations,

Kristy