This will be our final daily email until I’m finished my solo retreat at the end of the month. Enjoy 🙂
Slightly embarrassing, but true story:
It’s August 2014, somewhere around the final day of my first trip to Burning Man.
(a crazy art/music/creativity festival that happens in the desert every summer)
I’m laying in bed in the middle of the afternoon, curtains drawn, nursing what I can neither confirm nor deny is a thunderous hangover.
Streaming softly through my headphones is an old lecture from Alan Watts.
My attention is drifting in and out, sort of paying attention to his words but mostly just letting the sounds of his smooth English accent soothe the pulsing in my skull.
Until he says something that catches my attention:
“There is absolutely nothing you can do to improve yourself.”
My brain slowly pieces together the meaning of his words:
There…is…nothing…I…can…do…to…improve…
…myself.
Wait — nothing?
I can read books, lift weights, make money, meditate, go on wild benders in the desert at Burning Man with a bunch of hippies…
What is this guy talking about?
As if to read my vodka-soaked mind, Alan replies:
“I’ll say it again: There is absolutely nothing you can do to improve yourself — nothing.”
He explains:
What self-improvers are really looking for is not more book knowledge, or a nicer body, or more money, or relief from the consequences of mixing vodka into a pre-made Starbucks Frappuccino for breakfast.
(joke’s on Alan, I’m pretty damn sure I was looking for that last one)
We’re looking for what we think those “improvements” will bring us:
Self acceptance — the freedom to feel fully at home within ourselves, exactly as we are.
The trick, of course, is that complete self-acceptance is the only way to bring about the “improvements” we really wanted all along:
Ease and effortlessness of being, spontaneous self-expression, and the experience of being fully ourselves without fear.
But these aren’t “improvements” so much as an uncovering of what was there all along, only we were in the way of it.
And, full circle, how did we get in the way of it?
By feeling the need to change and modify and fix a self that wasn’t broken in the first place, which, hat tip Alan, is another way of saying:
“Trying to improve ourselves.”
But… why do all this “self-improvement” stuff, then?
For fun and profit, of course:
Not to fix yourself, but to express yourself, and the natural evolution of who and what you are.
And even then, only if you want to, because full self-acceptance needs nothing — it is complete as it is.
Just then, there’s a tug at my curtain.
An outstretched hand offers me a small handful of mushrooms.
I eat them.
– T
