Allowing

My golden is my spiritual teacher, inspiring me to be ecstatically alive in each golden moment life effortlessly offers.

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Sunday. I awake to a day free of plans. I adore this delicious stretch of time liberated from a to-do list, schedules, commitments. The only guiding intention is to allow myself to receive the sweet pleasure and joyful restoration emerging from simply being.

Allowing is a curious challenge. My ego-mind is quick to attack days purposefully protected to hold rich space for non-doing: contemplation, feeling, musing, daydreaming. The ego-mind looms in hissing critique, comparing and scrutinizing my worth based on completed accomplishments and ideas ushered into fruition. The practice is to notice -- not be belittled and reprimanded, not to fight back – notice and come home to the vividness of the present moment.

I’m learning to trust my feelings and my intuitive guidance as the compass to necessary action. If I’m not feeling the inspiration to take action, then the energy that is essential to attain the envisioned results almost certainly will be absent and the course riddled with setbacks, miscommunication and unnecessary difficulty. The desperation, the force, the clouded perspective will be what’s transferred – through the email, the phone call, the text, the piece of writing, the yoga lesson.

“You don’t have to try so hard,” she tells me, and her words invite ease.

I don’t have to try to so hard at my job, my teaching, my writing, my relationships. When there is an allowing to be where I am, to be who I am, there’s an instant surrendering and softening into the moment, strengthening my trust to greet whatever arises from the situation at hand.

Trust the cycles. Trust the waves of feeling, of giving, and receiving. Do the work intentionally, wholeheartedly, and then, enjoy the harvest.

Sunday, I allow myself to sleep in. I wake early, am tempted by the inclination to rise and greet the day, but my body is tired, my head aches, and my eyes sting. I’m thirsty for sleep and daydreaming. I curl back into the folds of sleep. 

I float in the in-between space of pastel-colored daydreams and vivid sweeps of morning dreams. I rest in the flickering morning shadows, listening to the mischievous wind catching and pulling crimson leaves from the branches outside my window. Bursts of criticism listing all the things I need to do, all the plans I need to set into action interrupt this languorous state, and I follow these thoughts into the projected future, circling back into perceived failures of the past, and then like those leaves outside my window, I let go, or just let be. I sink a bit more into a fetal position and allow myself to go to back to sleep.

This is the practice: to continually return (kindly and again and again) back to the moment, reuniting with the breath and with myself.

Hours later I slip off onto the back porch to bask in this rare autumn weather. I honor a craving for a baked potato for breakfast and sit on bare floorboards and eat the plump baked potato with my hands. Butter coats my fingertips, and crystals of pink-hued Himalayan salt dimly sparkle in the afternoon light.

I indulge in big bites and savor. I watch the passing voyage of a hawk. Hear the leaves rustling as the wind blows. See my golden retriever surveying the yard, pausing to tilt his elegant snout into the breeze, to sniff and gather information and stories carried in the invisible world of scents, perfumes, and the language of the almost Halloween eve wind.

There is the quiet epiphany illuminating my contentment, and a deepening that allows me to open to the stillness, the simplicity, the raw beauty of the present moment.

Sometimes the practice is allowing the moment to be good, to be peaceful, and to lean wholeheartedly forward -- to receive and breathe in the wonder of simply being alive.