Open to What Is

Part 2: The quiet gift of unmet expectations and foiled plans.

Show Notes

As you hear, my voice isn't great. I'm coughing a lot, that is just going to be part of what this is.
This work is not polished, I'm not polished. This is not edited. Much of it is offered without context or explanation.

You might get clips and bits and pieces from before I got sick, and you might get some supporting dialogue around that, or it might just come in without explanation.

The intention is to offer the doing of something - the doing of a thing (creating and sharing content) in a way that I believed I simply could not do six months ago. I couldn't do this because I would've refused to do this.

Anything approaching this raw, unpolished, offering six months ago was not something I was willing to do.

I didn't even know that I wasn't willing. I assumed that I shouldn't be willing. And I missed out on the magic that only happens amidst uncertainty and letting go. 

What is Open to What Is?

This isn’t the podcast I was supposed to create.

I had something polished and impressive in mind.

This is more interesting.

You should listen to it.

A bit of background:
I’d already committed to publishing a daily podcast when I got (very, very, very) sick with Long (very, very, very long) COVID.

So, I had a choice:
I could give up, or I could keep my commitment and include my constant exhaustion, fever, foggy-brain, relentless cough —and do my best.

I chose the latter.

My “best” varies quite a bit according to how well or poorly I feel on a given day.

The episodes are raw, out of order, unedited, with uneven audio quality, You’ll often hear my Pekingese, Bija barking in the background.

Sometimes I talk to myself, sometimes I talk to you. Sometimes I have no idea who I’m talking to. It’s a true potpourri.

And it’s not just overhearing me wax poetic through a stuffy nose about new insights and the insufferable discomfort of upended plans. There’s more!

In between the fragments of thought, feeling, and utter nonsense, is a timely and universal story about expectations, meaning making, dropping all agendas, and discovering what’s possible when we Open to What Is.

Tune in.
Sample a few episodes.

See if you can drop all expectations and allow yourself to be surprised and delighted by something you didn’t know you were looking for.

... not part of my plans. So you know, that's given me a real opportunity to be with uncertainty to be counting, wrestling, playing tug of war, and then making friends with my expectations in ways that I hadn't expected, but there have been a lot of unintended consequences from, you know, maybe a little less optimal a set up than I would have liked, but many unintended consequences that have been really beautiful. So I'm going to talk about some of that. But as you can hear, my voice isn't great and coughing a lot, not just going to be part of what this is. So you know, this is not polished, I'm not polished. This is not edited, it just is what it is, as it is, and you might get clips and bits and pieces from before I got sick, and you might get some supporting dialogue around that, or it might just come in without explanation. But this is really about me just offering the doing of something in a way that I couldn't have done just couldn't have done this. I would not have. I would've refused to do this.

Anything approaching this six months ago, was not just not something I was willing to do.

I didn't know that I wasn't willing. I just thought that I shouldn't be willing.
And I had a lot of concepts about what was and wasn't okay, what I should and shouldn't be doing in order to be good.
And I knew I've had this opportunity to, to really watch my brain every single day in many ways while taking action and refining action and having things go according to plan and not so according to plan, and to kind of be in my own little iterative process of witnessing and refining and forgiving myself letting go of all those all those roles and and then fighting the letting go.

So this has not been a neat line. You know, I just spent a lot of comparing, judging and then kind of smiling, because that's all normal and human and then recognizing how unhelpful it is.
So anyway, that's a little bit about this. And I hope it is of benefit. if you choose to listen or to watch I would love my experience to be the a lighthouse to anyone that has struggled with, or is struggling with, some of these same things. And at the same time, I know that I have read a lot and seen a lot. There's no amount of information from other people that substitutes for your own wisdom. So maybe I'll talk about that next.
Being your own compass your own authority. Alright, thanks so much