“Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.” - Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step
How can we be the person we deeply want to be and realise the changes we yearn to see? No matter how much we want change, it doesn't happen overnight, at least not in a way that is sustainable. If you have been working on yourself and making your world a better place to be but feel discouraged at the slow pace of change, let this be a reminder to pause and accept exactly where you are. Acceptance is not defeat, it is a necessary acknowledgement in order to know how to best move forward.
Let this be your validation that it is absolutely ok to be excessively gentle with yourself, and take it slow on your journey in finding peace and making sustainable progress one step at a time.
Sometimes all we need to ask ourselves is - what is the next step? If you find yourself exhausted and still recovering post-pandemic, post the summer that never was, post many global and local devastations, let this be an affirmation that you are indeed making progress. We often reach our goals without even acknowledging them, just running onto the next one. Let this be encouragement to stop running towards an ever-elusive future. It is not only ok to take comfort in small, teeny-tiny, incremental changes but it is the very way to be at peace along the journey.
Being enticed by big transformational false promises is hindering our capacity for peace right now, real healing is in the small piecemeal efforts in our every day lives.
If you, like me, have been a spiritual-retreat-supplement junkie, you will know the kind of false promises I am talking about. I have hung my hopes on one-off life changing experiences and the latest fad supplements to magically make everything better. These things ultimately left me back at square one, once the oxytocin and dopamine levels subsided back to my baseline. That's not to say that our efforts are fruitless, but that there's no magic bullet. Following bold influencers and chasing transformational healing can be like following a false guru and feeding a drug addiction. There is no great transformation without a long period integration - back to life, back to reality.
Real transformation requires not-so-sexy daily disciplines and a responsive awareness to tiny everyday interactions.
There is no big transformational experience or supplement that is able to fix post-pandemic stress, anxiety, depression and exhaustion. In fact, in the wake of these experiences we can be left feeling even more depleted and defeated, because in reality (not on retreat) life continues to throw us challenges. The challenges we face are big, both personal and global, and they require sober, tangible, grounded change that happens one step at a time.
“The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.” - Heraclitus, ancient Greek philosopher
Listen to our latest STEP BY STEP meditation to encourage you to be confident in your tiny day to day progress. Let this meditation guide you through a step by step process of acceptance, slowing down and releasing the chase for immediate transformation. Fully accepting where we are at is the first step, putting both feet on the ground and finding that source of presence from which to enter into the world. Without this full acceptance we are running in the dark, let each step light up your world with meaning, purpose and belonging.
Being the person we deeply want to be, and realising the change we yearn to see, one step at a time.