”I think midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:
I’m not screwing around. It’s time. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go.
Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy of love and belonging, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever.
Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through you. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen.”
-Brené Brown
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Yosemite’s Grandeur
“Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.”
-Ansel Adams
“Down through the middle of the Valley flows the crystal Merced, River of Mercy, peacefully quiet, reflecting lilies and trees and the onlooking rocks; things frail and fleeting and types of endurance meeting here and blending in countless forms, as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures, to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her.”
“Words may help you understand something, but experience allows you to know. Never, ever trade your own experience for someone else’s words about anything that is really important. Like God, for instance. Or love. Or what is true about another.”
“Turn into the ocean of your unlived life, and bring the warmth of awareness into the hidden places inside you. Behold the forms of love as they reconfigure, and open to the unmet feelings, the disowned longings, and the split-off pieces you have lost contact with. Dare to see that they do not mean you harm, but have come longing for integration. There are jewels concealed in the forgotten pathways, awaiting discovery, filled with energy and information for the journey ahead.
But the substance which shapes these pathways is of the unknown, and is unbearably creative. It was never going to turn out the way you thought. Rather than seeing this as a mistake or cosmic error, you can find rest here. It is not the rest of the mind where everything is resolved, but the rest of the heart where everything is held and metabolized in wholeness. Love will never be pinned down or worked out. It is just too wild for all that.
If we do not meet, hold, and integrate the heartbreak, the fear, the rage, and the entirety of our essence vulnerability – if we do not provide sanctuary for the aliveness of the somatic world – we will inevitably place this burden on the others in our lives, to care for it on our behalf. While others can help us along the way, they cannot take care of this sacred material for us. For this is their gift to us.
It is an act of love to remove this burden from our lovers, our friends, and our families. And to take experiential, full-spectrum responsibility for its holding and its care. As we integrate the arising narrative, emotions, feelings, and sensations within the spaciousness of awareness, we become open, warm, transparent vessels for love to come alive here, and to seed this world with its qualities.
You need not postpone being fully here for another moment. This moment is the perfect place to begin.”
“I declare this world is so beautiful I can hardly believe it exists.”
