A while back one of my teachers, Havi, wrote up some notes on what she didn't know she knew about nests, including a bunch of things that act as nests for other things. It's a good post, you should read it.
One of the nests she identified was ‘my heart is a nest for hiding and for being loved.’
One of the key qualities of nests is that they can be made and remade to suit the season.
These two ideas really resonated with me and set me to thinking....
Logical extension:
I can remake my heart-nest.
I can remake the way I experience shelter and love.
I can be sheltered and loved in one way, until I am ready and able to find a new way.
It doesn’t mean that the old nest, the old way I knew how to experience shelter and love, was imperfect or that the new nest is better. They are both part of the evolution of my heart.
The shape of my heart, the manner and means I have crafted in order to experience shelter and love, is what it is, today.
And it works as well as it does, today.
And I can always change it. Add some twigs, or fluff, or blue things, or start over on a radical redesign if I want to.
Any time I like.
For years I tried to 'hustle for worthiness' as Dr Brene Brown calls it: to be whatever I believed was required of me to be acceptable and worthy of love and belonging.
It wasn't always healthy. Long-term, none of it was healthy or sustainable.
The way I had learned to receive love and shelter had been by fitting in and trying to please. And I knew other people who had developed strategies that were even more screwed up than my own.
Brain said: But self-medicating, violent, dysfunctional ways of experiencing love that damage you CAN’T be deemed equally as “good” as healthier ways!!! What are you talking about???
Inner genius said:
All steps along the evolution are perfect to their time, space, capacity and resources.
You have been doing the best you believed possible and knew how to do. All things are perfect. You can change how you experience love, and that is perfect. You might never figure out how to change the nest, and that is equally okay.
The ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ is not inherent in the form, but in your experience of it.
You have power (always!) to alter the nest so that your experience inside it is different, but your experience lies within YOU, not within the form of the nest.
You have been feeling 'bad' inside your old patterns and strategies for experiencing love, but that was not always the case.
When you were two you changed your nest to exclude amnesty and incorporate a struggle to please into the way you knew how to experience love.
It worked as well as it did, based on the knowledge and skills you had available at the time.
You were sheltered and loved within a heart that couldn’t be rejected because you had already done that for yourself.
Pretty clever, for a two year old. Now, it no longer fits. Thirty long years have flown by.
You are older, wiser and you are changing your heart-nest to experience shelter and love with the qualities of freedom, acceptance and worthiness.
A nest where the cool breezes of sovereignty and radical responsibility can refresh you, while the solidity and security of compassion and self-love hold you steady and safe.
And this works better for you, is more pleasant, is stronger and more sheltering and fulfilling.
Your EXPERIENCE in the nest is better. The nest is not better.
The old nest was built with the same kind of love and good intention as the new one.
They are both perfect to their time, space, capacity and resources. Equal.
If, this season, there was a dearth of a particular type of twig you would use to construct your ideal nest, then this season's nest would be made without it. Those twigs were not there to be used.
So this nest, constructed without these twigs, is perfect for this season. It is the best nest you could construct at this time, in this space, with the capacity within you and with the resources at hand. The best nest.
'Best' is an absolute. You cannot better 'best'. This nest is as perfect as it could ever ACTUALLY be.
A 'better' nest, one closer to some sort of ideal, Platonic form of a nest, couldn't ACTUALLY exist because the ideal nest requires a bunch of twigs that are not there. Ergo, bettering the nest cannot happen and this nest, as it is, is as absolute an expression of the ideal nest as can be at this time, in this space, with this capacity and these resources. So: tell me how you could perfect it? You can't improve it. Those twigs are not there.
At which point my Brain fainted.
And I saw how I might be able to forgive myself for my culpability and dysfunction and co-dependent, facilitating patterns of
self-abuse and buying into love-that-was-not-loving…. For so long…. And
paying dysfunction forwards, backwards and down the generations….
Because in the end, hey, that was the best I
knew how to do at the time and I am trying over now which is as
much as we can ever reasonably ask of ourselves.
It is unreasonable to ask that we create a nest that includes those twigs that are not around to be used.
It is unreasonable to ask ourselves to do better than we can.
For example: if I have everything available to me to do [that which I want to do] but cannot figure out how to get motivated, then NOT doing [that which I want to do] is as good as I can do.
Motivation is a resource. Understanding what/why/how to motivate myself is part of my capacity.
If I cannot access that resource then my job at THIS time, in THIS space is not to do [that which I want to do] but to set myself to learning more about what/why/how to motivate myself.
So, Inner Critic Monster Who Is Currently Berating Me For Not Doing [that which I wish to do]: back off! We can only start actually doing [that thing] when all our resources and capacity are in order.
You're being unreasonable in thinking we can do [that thing] without it.
You can't grow a garden without plants. You can't write without words. You can't cook without food.
It is UNREASONABLE to ask us to do so.
And you cannot argue with REASON. You just look SILLY if you do.
So there!
