Wanting to fix things, believing we ought to be able to work everything out, are pretty familiar to most of us. But what if all of this really is OK? I love this post from my friend, and Serenity Retreat supremo Kim Bennett, on just allowing….

“About feeling dreadful. Sometimes we feel really really awful. Life feels tormented, difficult, unassailable, pointless and impossible. I remember speaking to a non duality teacher, Mandi Solk, on skype and telling her that I was having a bad day. She quickly picked me up for that – ‘no you’re not’ she said. Well I was pretty sure that I was and felt quite indignant about it. But then she went on: ‘you’re having a horrible moment, and then a dreadful moment, and then an average moment, and then a horrible moment, and then a moment of laughter, and then a miserable moment and then a satisfying moment’ and so on and so forth.

“She was absolutely right. I wasn’t in a ‘bad’ state all of the time. No state continues in exactly the same fashion. Every ‘state’ has its own landscape, entirely different, moment by moment. Doesn’t mean that it’s easy or that there are answers (not having answers is very difficult for the thinking mind which feels unemployed in moments like this and can sound louder than normal). But you’ll see that there is aliveness and life energy. Creativity can arise when we accept the shitness of how we’re feeling, stop looking for answers and relax into feeling tormented/dreadful etc without wanting to change it. That’s incredibly counter-intuitive in our culture of fixing things. And certainly not what most of us would want for ourselves. It seems to me, though, that that’s how it is. The only way is through and there can be some quite beautiful gold to be found. It won’t look like any sort of gold you’ve seen before though :)”