“Your Task Is Not to Seek for Love,

but merely to seek and to find all the barriers you have built against it.” Rumi

I’d like to say that I land here first, but this is not the case.

I usually begin with irritation, frustration and indignance, followed up by self-doubt, self-loathing and self-flagellation.

BUT, I am happy to report after a few minutes or days (I have managed more and more to shorten my useless indulgences) that remember to embrace this incredible little piece of wisdom.

I replace ‘love’ with everything from ‘peace’ to ‘inspiration’ to ‘happiness’.

It does three crucial things for me:

ONE: Releases me from a feeling of powerlessness – reminds me that although the situation may be beyond my control how I handle it and what I do in response to it is entirely up to me and no one else.

There may be barriers that get thrown up but in the end it is my decision whether I allow them to prevent me from feeling love, peace or happiness.

I have the power to engage the flux capacitor of choice!

TWO: It encourages me to face MY fears. It’s easier to find the barriers that circumstances and situations throw up than to to look inward at the myriad of walls I’ve created from fear.

All the walls I’ve built to protect myself from rejection, abandonment, ridicule anxiety, anger and sadness.

Introspection is exhausting.

BUT, if LOVE is the payoff for looking at some seriously hard shit, sign me up.

It means deactivating the righteously hard-won self in honor of the possibility there is a deeper, stronger one available.

It means shifting focus from the thing that triggers me to the thing inside me that gets triggered. From the person saying or doing something that upsets me to the something inside me that gets upset.

It is internal, not external. And it usually requires a nap!

THREE: It inspires me to create a life more organically suited to who I am.

Many of us, maybe more so women, try hard to be agreeable and easy-going – to fit into whatever shape and size the culture, workplace, community or social circle requires.

But then we feel stifled, trapped, isolated, pressured and unhappy.

We assume everything is binary.

You either go to the parties or you are an asocial, unfun, potentially haughty, non-joining freak. You either work five days a week at the office or you don’t have a real job.

You are either abide by culturally accepted parenting guidelines or you are strange, alternative and possibly untrustworthy.

But nature begs to differ.

A tropical bird of paradise cannot grow in a New England garden. A wild trout cannot survive in salt water. Monarchs migrate. Sloths do not. And there is room for them all.

Dandelions do not seek to be daffodils.