Last night I was reminded of this quote by Bob Sharples:
“Don’t meditate to fix yourself, to improve yourself, to redeem yourself; rather, do it as an act of love, of deep warm friendship to yourself. In this way there is no longer any need for the subtle aggression of self-improvement, for the endless guilt of not doing enough. It offers the possibility of an end to the ceaseless round of trying so hard that wraps so many people’s lives in a knot. Instead, there is now a meditation as an act of love. How endlessly delightful and encouraging.”
It’s the part of the quotation about the “subtle aggression of self-improvement, for the endless guilt of not doing enough” that caught my attention the first time I heard this quote. Aha! Whoa.
At first, I looked at my library of books and felt dismayed, confronted by the thought that perhaps my insatiable curiosity and desire to learn was really masked as self-improvement and therefore a subtle act of aggression towards self.
I realize that the quote was specific to meditation. It is an invitation to allow yourself to show up to practice as a gentle way of giving back to self, as an act of love, to arrive without an agenda. In a world that wants more, want to get there faster than before, how indeed delightful it is to have space where you can just arrive.
So, my reading has not slowed down and my library continues to grow because for me, reading and learning is an act of self-love, an act of joy.
And it is always good to check-in and see what our relationship actually is to the things we love or habitually do.
