Allowing for the Perfection
"ALLOW IT, MAN... JUST ALLOW IT."
It’s a saying I began to tell myself in prison, to maintain calm, peace, and sanity. In that place, I constantly had to endure things like deprivation, mistrust, alienation, and a shortage of love—things I deeply wished weren’t part of my life. Yet as ‘wrong’ as they were, I knew I was powerless to stop them.
They just were. Often predating my arrival—some storied and legendary, others mundane and mind-numbingly predictable.
Ultimately, of course, these challenges collectively made me stronger than I ever thought possible. And I wouldn’t trade my life’s difficult journey for anyone else’s.
In practical terms, I couldn’t stop the stimulus—only define my response. And in that response, and the attitude beneath it, lay the keys to my own quality of life. I could wriggle and resist and vainly fight the inevitable, or I could funnel my energy into working on my legal case, and into keeping my heart safe, healthy, and hoping—and allow what was, to be. At least for the present moment.
Not to agree with the correctness of it. But simply to ALLOW THAT IT WAS. Because anything other than a quiet, determined assent to thrive within what was—as well as I could humanly manage—would’ve meant harming myself, both immediately and long-term.
Since my release, life is obviously very different. Yet there are still moments when, for the sake of something greater, I have to endure discomfort. A colonoscopy. Dental work. Public speaking for a cause that matters.
When I’m approaching anything daunting like that—pain in the furtherance of gain—I remind myself of one word...
ALLOW
It always helps. A little or a lot. The moment I shift my attitude, my fears, resistance, and tension begin to fade. Everything feels better—because it is better. And a better attitude brings a better outcome.
I like to use the barfing analogy. It’s a WAY harder experience when we resist, as opposed to giving in, trusting the process as beneficial, and leaning into it. Always.
““If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to.””
ALLOWING contains trust as its foundation. When we create and exist in the reality that existence is not against us but for us (every bit as much as it is for anyone... and if they can have it, why can't we?) then we can and naturally do relax and let it happen, almost miraculously, around us. We can allow its perfection — with all its little seeming imperfections — to become our larger and larger reality.
Allowing, and knowing we are and have always been enough, are the perfect meditations for the anxious. We have ALWAYS been enough. For every single challenge that has ever come our way. What’s the evidence for this? The fact that WE ARE HERE. Alive, drawing breath, eating – all of it – with precisely the people and things we need with us in our lives.
Meditating on allowing calls on us to exist in the present, the only place that even exists. The past is gone; utterly inaccessible to a mind wanting to change it. All we can do, both logically and optimally, is to accept it; gently learn from it, appreciate it, then move back to the present where we best live.
Likewise, the future doesn’t exist yet. We can generally aim ourselves, but without becoming too attached to outcomes, because then life happens and we end up where we were supposed to be—almost always somewhere different than we thought we “should” be. This prospective point will not necessarily be our end point any more than where we are right now is meant to be our end. In an organic and perfect imperfection, we are now and will be then and always have been exactly where we are supposed to be. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been there.
Seeing perfection even in suffering, and having experienced suffering working perfection in the machine of my own life, is what makes it easier and easier for me to allow it all.
Uncomfortable periods are usually enormously powerful ones, too. The periods of the greatest growth in my life have often been attended by the greatest discomfort. And that power, when we are present to it, is where we can move mountains.
““Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings while the dawn is still dark.””
The space and the intention that I hold for us all during these powerful and often painful times, is that we will realize the answers which the silent stillness of our hearts already know, and that this will bring us the peace and the answers we seek.
