Are You Spiritually Lazy?
The hydrangea came early this year. I sat on a blanket and pulled weeds from the mulch at their base in my front yard. It’s a meditative task that brings a lot of satisfaction. But one weed had grown like a spiral staircase, twisting up and around the tall stalks of hydrangea in a way that was very hard to untangle.
I tried to yank down from the root but that only tightened its hold like a set of zipper teeth, closing and pulling up. It crushed some of the fat, green leaves growing among the flowers.
I tried to loosen it from the middle, where there was more give on the vine, but that only made the tangle worse at the other ends of the stalk.
Finally I took the time to find the end of the weed, which was coiled around a newborn head of hydrangea, and unwind it down to its beginning, underneath the mulch, tugging it completely loose from the earth at last.
How often have we tried to bargain with our healing? How often have we tried to yank instead of untangle? How often have we fallen into spiritual laziness or bypass, looking to check a box instead of undertake authentic transformation?
There are no shortcuts to wholeness.
Where does impatience come from? It comes from our Egos. Whenever we’re preoccupied with time, we’re in our Egos.
Not enough time; go faster = Ego.
So much time has passed, I should be further = Ego.
I need to slow down time and make the moment last = Ego.
We’re not bad or wrong for being lost in Ego. Our Egos are an essential part of the structure of being human. The point is, to notice how much suffering comes with living too much from/in Ego and to understand that we can choose to change this.
The moment we realize we’ve lost the balance between the Ego (which can only live in the past or future) and the Soul (which is right here, right now), we are given a gift. With that awareness we can nudge ourselves back into equilibrium, where both can exist, in their right place within us.
Impatience is a form of resistance and resistance is a form of fear. When we’re impatient, we’re resisting the present moment. We’re leaping into the future. We’re rejecting what is and striving toward the promise of what has yet to come.
The act of relaxing back into the seat of ourselves and the energy of the present moment is courageous and transformative. It’s not easy to be with the unfolding of life in real time. It’s much easier to distract ourselves with what’s come before or what is on the way. But our point of power is in the present and our powerfulness grows when we take the time to untangle gently, instead of yank hard, on whatever is trying to get our attention and set itself free within our lives.
Wishing you a slow, deeply healing week untangling the spiral staircases within and walking toward greater and greater inner peace + liberation.
