This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
~Rumi
Dear reader,
I write to you from the floor of gate B2 at the Queen City airport. I sit in double pigeon pose atop a carpet dappled with crumbs of processed food. I exhale the tension from my hips and the heaviness of the thoughts that always seem to arrive on a long drive. These thoughts originated from my yoga practice this week, inspired by words from my ever-wise teacher Jen.
There's a few words I haven't shared yet that I need to. They are lessons that are hard for me to learn. Lessons I've resisted learning, so they keep showing up. The lesson is for me to soften and remember that I do not know everything. I like certainty, and having a plan, despite knowing from my meditation practice, yoga, and lived experience that we make plans, and God laughs. And, seemingly contradictorily, I also love the gray areas and the magnificence of our bodies' capacity to heal, the mysterious and wonderful parts of the world we live in, like when someone you assumed hated you offers you love instead. Or when an injury you thought would never pass, a pain you had felt for weeks, disappears because you started thinking about it differently (and you wonder how in the world that is possible). Or when a man wearing a Trump hat tells you he donates his "Beer Fund" tip money each year to his Appalachian hometown, and last year he built a ramp for wheelchairs to access their mountaintop library. You know what I mean, dear reader. The moments that remind you that you don't know everything, and the moment you think you do, you are shown by the Divine that you are so, so wrong - and that while this world does hang in a precarious balance, light ekes out a win almost every time.
My Self has been asking for softening for a long time, but my brain is rather stubborn. I was told by my mentor today that I am an innovator. This explains why I feel so burdened by how different I am. How I can't understand how others in medicine don't also believe that healing the world starts with healing our food system - and how that work starts with the choices we make each day, fueling ourselves. That we, as healers, have a responsibility to heal by example.
Social diffusion theory explains why I elicit such strong responses from others. Most are afraid of the risk I represent. I'm unafraid of jumping off a cliff to see if I can fly because I can't un-see that we are already stampeding towards the precipice in full groupthink mindset. I'm a disruptor, which is exhilarating, but can be dangerous. All this energy can easily rot me, harden me to the realities of how hard it is to find wellness in our world. It can make me forget the years I spent trapped in my own body, over or under eating and over or under sleeping and trying to run away from panic attacks and my own thoughts and worries. The years before I found out that each day is an opportunity to experiment with how I might feel better; the years before I learned that I need daily movement, nutritious foods, no poison processed food or social media, only one cup of coffee and water all day long, and ideally also seven minutes of quiet meditation. This frustration I feel watching others engage in normalized American behaviors can make me self-righteous, and forget that the journeys of others are not linear. That my job as a healer is to be a cheerleader, a guide, not a fixer. My patients are not furniture awaiting my tools. All they need to know is that I am here when they are ready - and they already do know that I am here, because I have healed, by example, and I am visible. And the challenge for me, the challenge the Universe keeps asking me to take on, is can I love them, can I love me, even if the world isn't the way that I want it to be? (I laugh reading this out loud, as if the world ever will be exactly the way I want it.)
Rumi says each emotion is a guest. Even the ones that ruin your home. Rumi says greet each of them with laughter. Because hatred doesn't drive out hate, only love can do that.
