Integrity, humility and patience
navigating change with grace
Rumi famously wrote: “Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it. Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing, where something might be planted, a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.”
How often are we willing to empty ourselves enough to receive what we don’t yet know? How often do we impose ourselves upon the sheet of paper or spot of ground, rather than listening to what is unfolding with a tenderness and receptivity which allows us to dance with it?
These are changing times. Navigating change with grace can be especially challenging when its currents are strong and multiple. We’ve mostly been taught to respond to times like this by holding on or pushing away: imposing a fictional reality (whether a new one or the old) rather than dancing within and inside the truth that’s here. And when this holding on and pushing away brings suffering, as it inevitably will, we have been taught to either push and pull harder or numb and distract ourselves better.
So how do we move with the river of change, so that our gifts can be received and amalgamated as graceful currents in its flow, rather than swimming against it, thrashing to reach the shore or drowning inside its rapids?
I’ve been living with this question for a few years now. Just before the pandemic turned our lives upside down, I was blessed to participate in seven ceremonies in the high Peruvian jungle where (amongst other gifts) I received the seemingly simple reminder that the only tools needed to navigate change are integrity, humility and patience.
Integrity came first. I was shown that this moment isn’t happening to us or even around us, but that the universe is continually calling us to come into relationship with it. As if reaching out a hand and asking us to step into the dance. Yet to dance with the universe means to dance in alignment with love. When we’re not in integrity, caught instead in some form of greed, hatred and delusion, we are dancing only with the mind.
This invitation to live in integrity leads naturally to humility, because slipping up, forgetting and losing ourselves is both inevitable and necessary. We are here to learn how to swim with this changing river of life, and slipping up, forgetting and losing ourselves is exactly how we learn. Without humility infused with the softness of forgiveness, however, we can easily get lost in a story that it’s all about me. Whether getting it wrong or getting it right, doing badly or doing well: when it’s all about me, we forget that we’re being invited to remember something larger and more mysterious. We get caught up in the story of me and my trauma and spiritual growth, and lose sight of the hand reaching out, the whisper calling us to step into the dance.
Patience, too, comes side by side with humility and integrity: when it’s not about me, when I’m dancing with a universe in unending flow, there’s nowhere to go but here and nothing to do but respond. Without patience, it’s harder to feel the currents around and within us - and when we don’t feel, we’re unable to respond. What this means is we tend to force ourselves onto life instead. But beauty and mystery can’t be forced. We can’t force a flower to bloom. We can only participate in honouring and supporting its mysterious unfolding. Patience invites us to slow down, receive and honour, before we respond. It reminds us that everything has its own time and unfolding. The mind can be quick to create a vision or receive an insight, but embodiment follows its own sweet rhythm and grace.
It’s interesting to notice how effective our collective culture has become at distracting us from integrity, humility and patience. Together we find ingenious ways to get what we want as if we were separate from the whole. We strive to be someone and celebrate the ones who push themselves into the limelight. And we facilitate impatience, enabling quick fixes or distraction in ever more ingenious ways.
Yet I’m increasingly recognising that many decisions made and creative endeavours embarked upon are bigger than my mind is able to embrace. Something new is wanting to grow in place of the fussing, freaking out or forcing which might have come in the past. Life is forming me, not the other way around. I’ve been writing a book which feels like it’s growing me in order to bring it to life, rather than an inanimate creation belonging to me. I’ve become jointly responsible for some land which, when I listen, feels like it is teaching me how to caretake it.
I’m feeling more than ever a student of life. The moment any of this becomes about Me producing something Now (and getting it Right), I freeze. The less it’s about me or the rush of time, the more I’m open to receive and available to respond.
Magic happens.
Whatever is unfolding for you right now, I hope you create some time and space this summer to slow down and listen deeply. And I hope you allow yourself to trust what you hear. Acting with integrity, listening to the great mystery and responding with kindness and forgiveness are all given lowly standing in our goal and achievement oriented world. Yet they always birth something beautiful. And grow within and around us a resilience much needed in these changing times.
I look forward to seeing some of you in the autumn - I’m co-teaching a workshop which combines yin yoga with live medicine music at Love Supreme projects in London in September; leading a silent yoga and meditation retreat at the Moulin de Chaves in France in October; a daylong meditation retreat with London Insight Meditation in November; and another week of daily meditation with Sangha Live in December.
The dates and details are below, along with a poem called Look Nowhere Else But Here, which came to me bringing solace a few years ago as I felt myself stepping into a new unknown. I hope it holds you too.
September 23, yin yoga and meditation with live medicine music in collaboration with award winning music artist Shervin Boloorian, 1.30-4.30pm Love Supreme Projects, more information here and register here.
October 9-15, silent yoga and meditation retreat at the Moulin de Chaves, France, more information here.
November 25, daylong retreat, 10am-4pm London Insight Meditation, register here.
December 11-15, daily meditations online, 7-8am Sangha Live (mark your calendars: more information and registration will be available soon!)
Look Nowhere Else But Here
The path you are walking is perfect in its uncertainty and complexity.
Trust in the unfolding.
This moment is a web of many threads of which you are one, inseparably woven.
Watch for the pushing, my love, when it feels uncomfortable here and you search for resolution there.
Lean back as one who is empty, who listens deeply, courageously, to many threads whispering.
Dive in and find a universe here. Another web thickly woven, multiple strands creating one. Each thread that makes this moment’s weave contains a forest within.
The path you are walking is perfect in its uncertainty and complexity.
Trust in the unfolding.
You are loved more than you can know as you move into knowing yourself as Love.
Look nowhere else, but here.
Thank you so much for this ... I needed it x