It is Not Selfish to Strive Toward Your Own Awakening

I’ve been doing a lot of seeking through reading lately, and it’s been such a delight to watch the ideas I’m so excited about popping up again and again, in different words and contexts, but with the same heart.

This idea that is at my center these days is the one that calls us to tune in to our own inner selves (lots of names for that, like North Star, True Self, etc., so choose whichever works for you), and do the work to shed what culture has given us that is not actually ours, so that we can shine as brightly as our own selves as possible. This, of course, means something different for each one of us, because we all need to share our own unique self. By doing this, we light ourselves up, and that light ripples out and makes everything around us a little lighter.

This beautiful idea has come to me in so many voices and forms, including Martha Beck’s books, What You Want Wants You by Suzanne Eder, and the one I want to share a quote from today is Dr. Lisa Miller’s book, The Awakened Brain. In that book, which is a great one, especially for those of us who like scientific backing for the theories we have and believe that are less in the mainstream culture, but which we feel deep in ourselves and want to share with others, she says,

“Our individual health and flourishing depend on our choice to awaken. So do the health and flourishing of our schools, our workplaces, governments – and the planet. When we engage in our relationships, jobs, communities, and the environment with an awakened heart, we act in relation to a larger reality. If transcendence is the on-ramp to awakened awareness, a moral code is the off-ramp, the place where we take our spiritual perceptual capacities and merge them into our lives of service and contribution, making choices and decisions that reflect that we are guided and loved, that we belong to one another, that we’re all related in the family of life.”

Yes.

I know that some of us need to hear this again and again: It is not selfish to take the time and care we need to nurture our own awakening. It is not selfish to discover and then honor our true desires for how we want to be in the world and how we want to feel. It is not selfish. It is how we save ourselves and the world at the same time. It is essential work. As adrienne maree brown says in Emergent Strategy, “small is all.”