Let go of your strugglin' form and let the world flow through you as you flow through it. But remember, gettin' through still has a cost, and there is no living in a life with a heart still intact.
(Inspired by Hoizer-"Through Me (The Flood)" and "who we are", "All Things End".)
Reconnect and ground yourself as deeply and as often as you need and watch your life transform. Regulate your nervous system. Truly live in this moment—simply because it’s beautiful, even in its mess. See how lovely life is as it is. Be present because it’s good, not because it’s another box to check off or a task to force yourself into making time for.
Often, at first, it does start that way—and during the busier seasons of life, we have to prioritize it, so it doesn’t slip to the back burner. Taking care of ourselves should never be our last priority, but our first. If we don’t, the rest of life can’t be lived from that deep place of being within ourselves. It can’t be lived in the natural flow.
In simpler words: we flow only when we are present within ourselves—and then all becomes easy, even when it’s not. If you feel resistance to something, especially something you truly want, often that resistance is your body calling you to do exactly this.
Simply be. Simply live. And through this, as Rilke reminds us, we find many answers we could never find otherwise. (Direct quote I'm referring to:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
Foster your inner child. Hold them in the ways they have always deserved—because if you don’t, no one else will. Rebel in softness by listening to them, to that fragile and unshakable sense of awe and curiosity for curiosity’s sake, the very one the adult world tries so hard to snuff out.
I plead with you—do everything in your power to reignite it and keep it close, so close, because this is your true heart. Without it, we begin to drift, to harden, to forget the wonder that makes life worth living. And with it—everything changes back into the magical world we once knew, felt, and saw without comprehension. The Beauty has always been here, waiting patiently, but unless we choose to see with the eyes of a child again, we miss it. We stop noticing the shimmer in the mundane, the magic woven through ordinary days. This shift is everything—we no longer catch fleeting glimmers but live inside the magic itself. Life is fun again. It becomes a game we’re not battling against, but learning, joyfully, to play from wherever it is we are.
This—this is living in alignment. In harmony with every part of ourselves and each moving piece of the universe. We begin to recognize the constant flux within and around us as the natural pulse of life, not a threat to be controlled but to be embraced. And in that recognition, we open ourselves up to embracing each other’s growth as tenderly as our own, wanting only the best for every human we meet. Understanding becomes a reflex. Kindness becomes the air we breathe.
Slow down. Be with it. See yourself through it all as you would your younger self—softly, kindly—especially when you least want to. This is where real grace lives, the kind we cannot otherwise give ourselves, let alone others. It’s here that patience grows naturally, a patience that spills over into how we meet the world, how we hold people, how we let life be exactly as it is and love it.
Please—go out and live slowly, setting your own direction instead of being pulled by the frantic tides. Be present in the little moments which, when you are fully with them, you’ll realize are actually quite big… and kind of the whole point.
I truly hope you all find your way to tapping into the overflowing joy that lives in the everyday—in the living and loving of life, in simply being, in the presence of Nature, always waiting to give this to you. It is there if only you slow down—still and quiet enough—to feel it and embrace it, even alongside other emotions or tasks at hand.
This is the life you deserve—one forged in calm amidst all of life’s shifting currents, held in a love unconditional. A love that never asks you to be anything you are not, nor to do anything that does not serve you in becoming your best self. This love embraces you exactly as you are, celebrates your existence, and gently guides you toward truer versions of yourself. And the Beauty along the way does not depend on anyone else seeing it—it is revealed when your own energy shifts, when you step into stillness and hear yourself without the noise of the world or the weight of others’ opinions and take up the most wonderful task one has in life: of becoming yourself, unabashedly.
Embrace the life you have always deserved—one full of joy, love, and peace overflowing, even in the midst of chaos—allowing you to witness the breath-taking Beauty in All. It may not always be perfect or comfortable, but knowing that you deserve, at the very least, to reconnect with your own peace will allow you to weather anything and to reach heights you never imagined before.
To finish, here are some other Rilke quotes that've seen me through even my most turbulent moments back to a sense of calmness and acceptance of states of being as they are, so that I might come round to something more solid.:
“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
“Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.”
(This is a shortened version of a longer letter I'll link.)
“Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise, it will be too easy for you to look with blame… at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.” (Here's a good portion of the longer letter which has helped me in working with emotions and things as they happen:) "It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.
