Begin Again
I went to the synagogue begrudgingly one year, because my son was studying for his bar mitzvah. I had taken to spending the high holidays in my own celebration for years – honeycakes, apples with honey on Rosh Hashanah, and a day of no screens, just meditation and journaling for Yom Kippur – this felt holy holy to me.
There I was sitting in a stiff chair in a synagogue listening to the chanting (and if it is not Sephardic, it still sounds alien to me), and I was looking through the prayer book and reading the margins. In the margins, are quotes and words of inspiration. On this page, there was a quote from Elie Wiesel. Wiesel was a holocaust survivor and an author as well a Nobel Laureate. The quote said, “The gift that God gave Adam in the garden was not how to begin, but how to begin again.”
I could hang my hat on that one quote.
The struggle is often how to begin again, not could I begin again. And the knowing is deep inside me. I know how, I struggle because I’ve gone astray, I’ve wound up in a place where I’m circling the drain of flying monkeys, irresponsible eating, drinking, smoking – read: indulging in nonsense, or my favorite drain – the one where I spiral into believing I’m not good enough for what I want, what I want to do, what I believe is true.
I’ve been sitting back and watching my son who is nearly 16 years old work on issues of feeling not good enough and I want to jump out of my seat and yell YOU’VE GOT THIS. I’m not going to lie, I have jumped out of my seat and yelled, whispered, written and text him this message over and over. Alas, I’m a fixer and I’m trying to fix his brokeness, and what do we know about fixers – they need to fix themselves, right?
So I grapple with the I’m not good enough when I say to myself I don’t know how. I don’t know how to do what I want to do. I don’t know how to begin again. I don’t think I’ll ever write a word again. I don’t think anyone reads blogs anymore. I’m not sure anyone reads at all anymore. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t think I’m good enough underlines each of these thoughts.
I saw the Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama) speak to a crowd in New Orleans. I was thrilled to be there – imagine the Dalai Lama had come to the United States! What he said that struck me the deepest was this: when he first came to the West he was surprised to experience that we don’t have a lot of self love. He talked about how important it is to love yourself. He didn’t say but I read between the lines that he decided to dumb down his message of spirituality to love yourself because he truly believed that is what we need to hear in this country.
I brought this up at a retreat with a man who said he didn’t believe in loving yourself. “You have to love God first.” I stared at him. Yes, and?
One of the steps into vulnerability is loving myself. When I am not taking care of my needs – my rest, my nourishment, my heart, my spiritual growth, my emotional connections – I wind up masking this fear of vulnerability by telling myself I am not enough to deserve this care.
