On Purposelessness
A prayer to help move through the maddening pursuit of worthiness
I’ve been away on holiday in Greece, celebrating a friend’s wedding and doing very little. Including my monthly Substack essay. Here’s a re-purposed piece of writing in lieu of that regular offering.
I hope it will help you - as it helps me - to get off the rollercoaster of grandiosity and low self-esteem and into the watery stream of what Jane Goodall called “the ecstasy of the mystic”1.
You have permission to read only parts of it, read it backwards or choose one or two lines that deeply resonate and let them integrate. Rebel and experiment in your approach as well as process.
Dear [insert your spiritual dialoguing partner here],
Give me the strength to release this demand upon myself to be extraordinary.
Release me of the hubris that keeps me stuck in the mud of my own ego.
Show me, first, how to see the truth of what has been given me in this moment, and second, how to accept and love this that is right here. And third, let this love grow so that I can drop the relentless envy and craving for what I perceive others to have.
Show me how to embrace the flavour of suffering you gave me. How can I hold the body dysmorphia, the history of addiction and depression, the loneliness, the self-violence, the perfectionism, the fear, the addiction to depravity and drama close to my beating heart and say: “I’m so glad you’re here, why not come sit with me whilst I make us some tea?”
Help me to see that moving to Barbados won’t cure my desperation to be loved. But it might be fun.
Help me understand that I can’t be all things to all people.
Help me to believe that when I let someone down, I can admit my wrongs and love myself at the same time.
Move my mouth to say: “I don’t care” when my energy needs to be redirected away from emotional labour.
Show me how to let the love in, to allow energy to flow through me, to show up for a job brazenly imperfect, to be honest when I feel unprepared, scared and as if I can’t do the thing I absolutely can do.
Remind me to take a break and listen to music. Maybe get a little funky with myself, dance around and let my body feel good.
Help me learn that losing those 10 pounds won’t do the work of healing the wounds of generations of women before me, who were deprived of autonomy and so enacted power over the site of their social value: their body. May I honour the stories of restriction, bingeing and starvation, the compulsive cooking for others. May I sit beside them as they cry in front of the mirror at their own reflections because it feels saner than crying in front of the reflection of the entire world, bent on the discrimination and exhaustion of certain bodies.
Show me how I am you and all the ways in which my body is more than its value, fertility, and status.
Let me feel my animalistic divinity, demand my right to pleasure, and get my feet and hands dirty in the soil, sea and sky.
Give me the courage to go to the party in the wrong shoes, taking along the feelings of sadness and overwhelm, and show up with a curiosity that is more interested in the fascinating lives of the strangers, friends and lovers around me than feeding the relentless monologue in my mind - the anxiety and self-criticism that masquerades as pseudo-intellectual commentary on ABSOLUTELY FUCKING EVERYTHING as if my POV were The Paris Review.
Help me to remember to return to presence again and again and again.
I pray for the energy to create without attachment to outcome or success.
Teach me how to build the conditions for safety so that creativity may flourish and then to recommit to protecting these conditions when I fall down, forget or get stuck.
Burn through this harness of civility and allow me to relate to the soft animal of my body in dance rather than fight.
Help me to let go of the dominating binary relationship of Tamed and Tamer, Primitive and Modern, Nature and Culture. Show me the first steps toward the equal playground of Beings and Beings.
Forgive me for all the years I didn’t listen. Continue to teach me the subtle, transformative art of listening.
As I listen to the more-than-human let it craft delicate, powerful questions within me to open doors and dissolve barriers.
Give me the grace to be nourished your wisdom by acting on my intuition and working deliberately through regret.
Let me relinquish the resentment stored in my womb from generations of women who put others first.
Let me surrender my compulsion to ‘rescue’ people from defeat, torture and insanity.
Let me know the truth of what my work is, so I can show up. And to say with wide, awe-struck eyes: fuck me what a beautiful, difficult, bundle of work.
Guide me with faith through the chaos, bring me back to my path when I become seduced with the messaging of the Healing Industry, with all its talk of arrival at a point of Myself. No amount of money can make this world make sense. But I have a sense from you that a disciplined practice of being silly and making mistakes might help.
Help me to laugh, really loud, as much as possible. Until my belly hurts. For no reason.
Thank you for all the unexpected marvels you gift me with every day. On the dark days, may I say these words, even when I don’t believe it: I am enough, exactly as I am, where I am, right now.
I ask you – what would you have me create with my one, wild and precious life today?
Heard this soundtrack playing from a beach bar. It’s a beautiful listen, enjoy :)
From A Reason For Hope, by Jane Goodall (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/135484.Reason_for_Hope)