Very Little Changes

I found myself doing the dishes today, and halfway through washing them, I didn't want to anymore. So I stopped.

When we talk about authentic expression, when we talk about boundaries, when we think of ways to love ourselves, how often are we making it this mundane and microscopic?

Triumphs of empowerment are mundane and microscopic. This is a massive moment for my deconditioning, my unlearning of deep puritanical rites of suffering, material standards, linear processes. In this massive moment, a camera would catch a calm woman turning away from a sink with some dishes in it. Snooze.

But it is monumental, because the command that I do the dishes haunted my entire childhood. I had to have them DONE. I couldn't stop till they were DONE.

Then, looking at it with my own adult eyes, with real curiosity: What is the truth of the dishes? Are they EVER done?

Dishes and laundry are never done, so I, as an adult, can call them complete whenever I want to. I can be, and indeed always am, in the process of doing the endless chores.

I find a clean kitchen to be DELICIOUS. I find the process soothing, I consider my movement and my pacing and with that, cleaning the kitchen is almost a dance for me. So when I don't want to do it, I don't have to force it. I love the process and the result. I can trust my desire's arising and therefore obey its falling.

I don't want to.

That's a good enough reason.

I tell people, "do just what you want!"

they say "well, I wouldn't want to hurt anyone!"

I say "yes, see, look how trustworthy your wanting is."

they say "I wouldn't want to let anyone down!"

I say "yes, I found about 80% of my authentic desire is to serve other people."

they say, "but I have to do this thing!"

I say, "check again. Do you really have to? No? Then you want to."

These itty bitty moments make up the bulk of life.

The teachings I offer integrate immediately into your life because they are practical, sensical, enlightening, enlivening, efficient. A client said "it's like 'AHA!' and then it's like 'DUH.'"

We do indeed need to learn the simplest things. The most basic things. And we DID learn it all, much of it before we learned that learning was a thing.

These minute, automatic processes and ways of thinking offer astounding leverage over my experience of my life, and as I share them, I watch clients leverage their way into unimaginably pleasant ways of living each moment. They awaken to their empowerment, and very little changes in their lives, and what changes is very little.

But it makes all the difference in the world.