Keeping Our Center ~ Day 93

I don’t like to make mistakes (not that it happens very often, mind you), but when I do, I excel at beating myself up over them. I know all too well that I’m not perfect and never will be. I’ve tried to get better about forgiving myself and being compassionate with myself, because being perfect isn’t the goal. The goal is learning and growing, but I forget that sometimes.   

Violinist Stephen Nachmanovitch tells a great story about giving a series of workshops on improvisation at Julliard. One group of students did amazingly well and eventually worked their way up to two amazing pieces of improvisational music. Then they played a third piece where they were out of sync and out of tune with one another. During the discussion of that last piece the young musicians were really hard on themselves, feeling guilty that they hadn’t done better. They were expecting Nachmanovitch to berate their miserable piece. Instead, to their surprise, he had them put down their instruments and walk around the room kissing their fingertips, contemplating and appreciating all ten of them.

Nachmanovitch wrote, “Kissing your fingers is a radical, transformative practice. It is not pretense that everything is good or that our mistakes don’t matter. They do matter. Finger-kissing is rather a celebration of our personal participation in the immense moment-to-moment labor of learning and evolution.”

The spiritual path challenges us to fully engage this transformative practice called life. Stopping to put ourselves down, wallow in guilt, or drown in anger toward ourselves or others effectively squashes any possibility for transformation. Perhaps today we could kiss our fingertips, expressing gratitude toward ourselves for continuing to risk and put ourselves into the fray of this beautiful, crazy, mixed-up awesome world. Perhaps today we can we can embrace our ability to learn and grow from our mistakes, gradually evolving into the persons we were created to be.

Love & Light!

Kaye