How to Trust Your Life
"Making the mess beautiful" makes way for inner fortification
Good morning! Here in California it’s a few days of blue sky and bright sun before another at least two weeks of rain. I had a solo trip planned for my upcoming birthday which I just canceled because Yosemite is closed indefinitely due to whiteout conditions (and even if it opens again by next week, I …don’t do snow), so now, it’s pivot time, and that’s a word that reminds me too much of the early pandemic days, but here we are.
I know it’s maybe silly to talk about the weather but in the almost twenty-one years I’ve lived here, this has by far been the strangest winter. Even though the rain is annoying, and my apartment is freezing all the time, it’s also a profound relief. The Sierra snowpack is set to break all kinds of records and the reservoirs are filling, some to overfilling, and after so many years of so much burning, after living my entire life under extreme drought, it’s hard to find the words to describe how wonderful it is to be truly saturated.
Now if only I can convince my landlord to replace these single-pane windows 🤔🤣
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Making the mess beautiful is a pretty euphemism for a mundane process, which is acceptance.
When you accept messiness as a life-long companion, rather than an enemy to be vanquished, you lay down the desire to rid yourself of your flaws. When you accept yourself as-is, including the dark and scary parts, the annoying parts, the frustrating and squirrely and maybe even actively harmful parts, what opens up is an expanded capacity to engage with your life in a more helpful and effective way. You are no longer constantly occupied with cleaning up messes. You are no longer ping-ponging between extremes. Instead, you are looking at reality with your eyes open. You are turning and facing the reality of your life, rather than clinging to an idea of it. There’s a gentle honesty. Eyes open, honest, you turn toward new behaviors and fresh actions that the blinders of perfectionism had kept hidden.
And contrary to what you might be thinking, acceptance doesn't mean you aren’t still moving toward changing, or evolving, or shifting your habits or your circumstances or your beliefs. You can still have goals, dreams, desires, grand visions and wild ambition. The difference is that when you accept yourself, the process1 of change is much lighter and joyful than it might otherwise be.
Not only is it much lighter and more joyful, but new information becomes available. Imagine what might open up inside the space that heretofore was occupied by efforts at controlling, micromanaging, predicting, wrangling, ruminating.
I mean, just imagine the opposites of those words. What would it feel like if you were moving through life from a place of surrender, allowing, ease, presence?
Even if you’re skeptical, which I hope you are, it’s a helpful thought experiment. Why not try? Everything that exists today started inside of someone’s imagination, so even if acceptance feels like a stretch, beginning to noodle on the possibility is a vital first step. Besides, I’m willing to bet that if you’re reading this, if you’re into this sort of stuff, you’re probably aware that your default mode of operating isn’t particularly helpful most of the time.
Imagine a river. Now imagine yourself observing the river. Something inside you—maybe the part of you reading this post—is nudging you to wade in, to let go and be carried by the river. But you’re a bit stubborn. You’re evaluating the river. You’re noticing all the ways the reality of the river falls short of your idea of the river. You might be dipping a toe in here-and-there, testing it out, keeping risk to a minimum. Or maybe you’re mostly submerged, clinging to the banks, wanting to let go, but that controlling part of you is bearing down more chaotically than ever.
The river, of course, is your life. The river is beautiful and it is also wild and flowing and not without its obstacles. There will be rapids, flash floods, drought. You will get stuck in aggravating eddies. The difference now is that you trust the river. And as you relax into the current, as you move with the water instead of fighting the water, you begin to trust yourself to navigate everything that is coming. You begin to trust your life.
Tunnel vision gives way to expanse. Free of your tendency toward micromanaging and control, you are present to so much more. As trust deepens, there is less grasping, less “figuring out;” instead, you relax into the unfolding. You allow life to reveal itself to you. Even in periods of chaos, you understand that chaos inevitably leads to order. You are learning to let life be what it is, and what it is is good. You accept your life, and you connect to the goodness that is always present.
🪐
Pretty metaphors belie the fact that learning to trust your life doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not a switch that flips.
Learning to trust your life is a process that takes years of deprogramming, redirecting, practicing. The annoying thing is that you do have to figure out patience (I told you there was nothing sexy or glamorous about any of this), and boredom, I’m sorry to say. And, there are steps you can take to encourage and nurture this process. In the spaciousness of acceptance, you must turn your focus toward inner fortification. I’m talking skin, muscles, bones. Rest, and relaxation. Nourishment and hydration. Movement. Support.
Most essentially, inner fortification means developing a relationship with your wise-self. You can call this part of you whatever you like—your higher self; the teacher within; intuition; gut feeling; the “one who knows;” your spiritual self; your best-self. What you call it matters not at all. What’s important is that you nurture and strengthen a relationship to this part of you. This is the part of you that has your best interests at heart. The part that can observe the squirrels running amok in your brain with calm detachment. The part that has you committed to discovering a new and different way of being, even when the process feels dumb and annoying and frustrating and interminable.
Images can be a helpful starting place. The river metaphor is helpful because you can ask yourself, “What is the health of the river today?” This can give you a sense of where you might place your attention on any given day, at any given moment, to bring yourself back to a state of greater ease and slowness—and who among us isn’t craving more ease and slowness?
Most of us have spent the majority of our lives cut-off from this relationship. Restoring this connection is the key to everything you desire. And for once in my life, I’m not being hyperbolic.
I know you are longing to tend to your animal body, to shut down the screens and rest your eyes, to spend time focusing on your breath, to eat and drink without rushing, to get sufficient rest, to fortify yourself so that you can stand, rooted in life, no matter how life-y it gets.
You still want commitment, faith, humility, a sense of purpose and a life of meaning. But may you fortify these qualities not so you can hurry up and know, but so you might bask in the process. May you be free from your obsession with figuring out. May you loosen your jaw, smooth out your forehead, relax your shoulders. May you unspool from the contortions of your past. May you imagine what it might be like on the other side of control, that place where you are forgiven, where joy and delight are just as present as everything else—what a spectacle, so unexpected—and you are radiant and at ease, more wild than ever, spine straight, skin soft, and oh, so this is it, this is what it looks like, this is everything you ever wanted.
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SELF MADE is a rebellious recovery community that empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and boldly step into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, founder, writer, Integral coach, and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA.
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Thank you.
Y’all know by now that when I refer to “the process” that it’s another euphemism, the one I call upon when I’m talking about life, yeah?
So needed to read this today - thank you!
Ooof. Wow. Another one that hit me in the feels, the heart, the gut. I'll be reading this piece again and again.