All That We Are Not

As you are receiving this in your inbox I am currently on retreat (in the beautiful place from my picture above) with some incredible people. I will share more on that next week. 

This past week I shared a reading by Mark Nepo called “All That We are Not.”  I have included an excerpt here:

Discernment is the process of letting go of what we are not. I can easily over-identify with my emotions and roles, becoming what I feel: I am angry…. I am divorced… I am depressed… I am a failure… I am nothing but my confusion and my sadness…. 
No matter how we feel in any one moment, we are not just our feelings, our roles, our traumas, our prescription of values, or our obligations or ambitions. It is so easy to define ourselves by the moment of struggle we are wrestling with. It is a very human way, to be consumed by what moves through us. 
In contrast, I often think of how Michelangelo sculpted, how he saw the sculpture waiting, already complete, in the uncut stone. He would often say that his job was to carve away the excess, freeing the thing of beauty just waiting to be released.  
It helps me to think of spiritual discernment in this way. Facing ourselves, uncovering the meaning in our hard experiences, the entire work of consciousness speaks to a process by which we sculpt away the excess, all that we are not;  finding and releasing the gesture of soul that is already waiting, complete, within us. 

When carve away the excess in the mind– the worry, the judgment, the inner critic, the ego- all the extra we carry that can block us from tapping into the “thing of beauty just waiting to be released”, we can connect to the beauty that is already there.

I have experienced this many times in my life; feeling so weighted down with the unsupportive thought loops that I struggle to touch my light; to connect to inspiration. Often it is in the challenge of carving away the excess, that the inspiration again shows itself.