I, Art-Whole

I just got home from an all day yoga/breathing/raw food/meditation/dance retreat, led by the wonderful Maya Papaya. A wonderful experience from start to finish, especially because of all the kind, creative people present. I hope I stay friends with at least some of them, if not all. And the food! Oh, the food. I need to learn to cook like Maya. Who knew raw, vegan meals could be so complex and delicious?

At the beginning, we all shared a word or seed that we were working on internally (mine was balance), and near the end we all shared insights we received from the event, assuming we had something worthy of sharing. Some pretty awesome moments came out of this sharing, but one thing struck me as somewhat...off.


Many in the group, including myself, seemed to be working from a state of not-enough-ness. As in, we said we need to be more present, connected, accepting, balanced, silly, content, and so on. To be sure, these are good awarenesses to have, and certainly awareness is the first step to growth, but I see two problems with stating that we need to me more of one thing or not enough of another.

First, in doing so, we acknowledge that we're not good enough as we are, right now. That we need to work very hard to change who we really are in order to be happy or healthy or enlightened. Not so, if we are to take literally the messages from most every master or guru to ever walk the planet. Take Stuart Smalley, for example: "I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And doggone it, people like me."

The second problem is that when we state that we currently are one thing we don't want to be (e.g. out of balance) and that we want to be something else (in balance), we send the universe (god, the Force, the Flying Spaghetti Monster) a strong message of who we are: imbalanced. The universe says back in its best Yoda voice, "Very well then, imbalanced you are. Mm hm hm heh.", and proceeds to give us more of that experience. In short, the more we want something, the harder we push it away. The more we fight, the longer the struggle persists.

What would happen if we looked at personal growth in a slightly different way? What if we acknowledged that there is no endpoint to our evolution, that, even when we're as far down the path as Stuart Smalley and Yoda, we'll still be learning, remembering, growing, and changing? And what if we decided that, in the meanwhile, we're good enough as we are, right here and now? That none of us are broken, none of us need to be healed? That we're already whole and complete works of art? (We're such art-wholes.)

But maybe I'm wrong in this. Acorns aren't any less perfect just because they aren't yet oak trees. But is the same true for us? Should we go a little easier on ourselves? Or should we just keep pushing? Can we be content today? If not, can we ever be? Is god (heaven, enlightenment, Flying Spaghetti Monster) a verb or a noun, a process or a destination? Or is it just a big glowy tree composed of dead 12-foot tall blue monkey people?