I’ve always been tidy. Growing up sharing a room with my sister you could see
this visibly. My side (of the room/dresser/bookshelf) would be clean, simple,
and orderly and my sister’s…less so.
Today, this continues. Several years ago, I devoured Marie Kondo’s book The
Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and
Organizing. I fell in love in love with many of her principles and embrace (with
moderation 🙂 the idea of keeping what possessions bring me joy and letting go
of what doesn’t.
However, this same quality often brings me heartache when I turn to what lives
inside of me.
My emotions, thoughts, longings, memories are often very messy and no matter
how much “ordering” of my mind I do (meditation, questioning my thoughts,
journaling) there is always more mess than order. My emotions and memories
pop up at inconvenient times and I seem to have an endless clutter of negative
thoughts that can arrive through the backdoor of my mind and create havoc on
an otherwise lovely day.
And most importantly the more I resist the innate messiness of it all, the more
mess I create. Kind of like when I tried to encourage (okay, coerce) my sister to
clean up her side of the room.
One of my self-compassion teachers said as much in a class. In her charming
accent (she’s from the Netherlands), she said, “We can’t konmari ourselves. We
can’t simply throw or donate what no longer brings us joy and put everything
else into pretty boxes, as much as we might sometimes want to.”
Our minds and hearts are a di
erent space than a closet.
So instead of trying to “clean up” my mind, I’m loving myself, despite the mess
and because of the mess.
The intention of self-compassion isn’t to solve the pain of life or to take it away.
(although many of us – myself included – secretly hope it will!)
The true goal of self-compassion is to give ourselves care, kindness, compassion
BECAUSE we are su
ering. So our aim isn’t to make ourselves less “messy” but
to “become a compassionate mess”.
What does this look like?
Well, messy 🙂
I’ll be honest, it is a work in progress, but the simplest way I’ve found is to just let
myself BE and then embrace my whatever is going on in my “beingness” with
compassion.
I just let myself BE lost, sad, irritable, scared, awkward…whatever.
This is hard, so I often call up the invitation that’s given at the end of many of the mindful self-compassion meditations,
“take a breath…let yourself feel what you feel…let yourself in this moment be just
as you are.”
And I infuse that with as much warmth, presence, and care as I can.
It definitely isn’t always pretty. And there is still an inordinate amount of junk
rattling around in my mind that doesn’t bring me joy, but I’ve found that my
“inner house” has become more spacious and it feels easier to hold the mess.
And in that, there is joy.
My invitation to you this week is to embrace the mess with compassion.
Find a moment to pause this week, take a deep breath and let yourself feel what
you feel and be exactly as you are…just for a moment. And embrace what you
nd with a little warmth and love just because it’s hard sometimes to live within
the mess.
❤
Jennifer