Lean Into It

Don't worry. There's no need to feel ashamed. Change is normal and natural and healthy. It doesn't mean that you have failed or that you - the core of who you are, your fundamental being - are wrong and not enough.

Stop. 
Soften.
Breathe. 
You'll grow into it.
Give yourself time.

You don't have to be perfect, know everything, have it all together and all figured out. Perfection was never the goal. Maturity isn't a place you arrive at that means no more growth or learning or changing. Quite the opposite. 

Wisdom begins when you realise how little you know.

It's okay to change your mind, position, beliefs, convictions, ideals. In fact, your life depends on it. The idea that you can attain a level of awareness that doesn't need to be open to transforming and becoming, shedding and letting go, learning and evolving, is damaging. Free yourself of this unrealistic benchmark, all it's doing is holding you back. 

Christianity has always been a spirituality of transformation. Long before a cross was the symbol of the Christian tradition, bread, fish and butterflies were. 

Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker explain in their book "Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire," that the cross didn't become one of the main symbols of Christianity until the Roman Empire adopted it a few hundred years after Jesus had been and gone.

For a colonial, imperial force, the cross was a useful tool for subjugation - Rome used it to justify the suffering they inflicted: "God made Jesus suffer. Suffering is part of a life of God." And thus, they didn't need to take responsibility for the pain they set in motion.

You were not made to exist in a cycle of suffering. Now, listen carefully, this includes every kind of suffering we come in contact with, from the suffering we receive to the suffering we inflict, whether we know it, or it. This includes the systemic racism and violence we are complicit in, whether we are aware of it or not. This is a cycle that keeps oppression and victimisation in play. It keeps the powerful at the top and the masses far below.

Christianity began as a spirituality of holistic wellbeing and connection - body, soul, spirit. In the micro, within the individual, all the way to the macro, in our communities, both local and global.

Jesus said to his friends: 

"Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal."*

Change. Transformation. Metamorphosis, becoming, blooming... 
This is why we are here; to continue becoming. 

Free yourself from the tyranny of perfection, from the pressure of knowing everything, and the slippery slope of owning the Truth. 

Give yourself permission to change, to become like a seed that's planted over and over again in the soil of your own life, in the ground of the world and the things that are happening all around you. Give yourself to the pressure of the earth of new information, of stories and lives that press up against you and make you open in new ways... open to new growth, unfolding to bloom like you never have before. 

Mindful Prompt: Is there change in your life that you resist? Why do you think you do? What's beneath the resistance? See if you can sink into the feeling beneath it. Forgive yourself for what you find there (if you need to), and open yourself to the idea that there might be a better way. 

*John 12:23-24