Let It Begin With Me
- the healing musician
- Jun 11
- 6 min read
As a true Scorpio, one wouldn’t be surprised to learn that my favorite holiday is New Year’s Eve, and my favorite season may very well be Lent. While I wouldn’t consider myself a very religious person these days, I have long appreciated the reverence and reflection of holy days (where we get the word “holiday”) and have resonated with the intention of Lent in particular. For years, I have enjoyed finding community along my wandering path among complete strangers of various denominations as we each consider our own actions and how they contribute to the world around us, both in repentance for the ways we fall short and in commitment to the practices we resolve to keep, the people we resolve to be, and the world we resolve to create.
Lent is about taking an honest, humbling look at ourselves, shifting our attention from the external to internal. And while internal work may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, it is powerfully significant, thanks to the reality that whatever exists “out there” always exists “in here”—that whatever exists at the macro-level also exists at the micro-level—and that any change or healing we generate within ourselves effects change and healing in the world around us. The words of the song “Let There Be Peace On Earth” (which you can listen to a children’s choir version here, if you don’t know it) have frequently run through my mind in since the start of Lent this year:
Let there be peace on Earth, let this be the moment now.
With every step I take, let this be my solemn vow: To take each moment and live each moment in peace eternally
Let there be peace on Earth and let it begin with me.
Although Lent is now long over, I’ve felt the necessity, more than ever, to ground myself in what I can personally control and contribute, which—as confirmed by Mel Robbins in her recently released book, The Let Them Theory—turns out to be limited to my own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. And as it also turns out, that is more than enough to keep me busy!
Viktor Frankl (Austrian neurologist/psychologist/philosopher and Holocaust survivor) is credited with the powerful quote “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” The fortunate reality of this truth is that we each have a great deal of power over our internal experience of any situation, no matter how harrowing. The unfortunate reality of this truth is that it can be a daunting process to sit with oneself long enough to enter and develop the habit of entering that space between stimulus and response. I’ve been recently reading everything I can get my eyes and ears on by Pema Chödrön (American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun) and have found the practice of “compassionate abiding”, explained in her book Practicing Peace in Times of War, to be a particularly healing approach for managing one’s own inner world. In this practice, one simply (or not so simply) sits with their own feelings of aversion by calling to mind an aversive stimulus (maybe a smell, sound, a difficult memory, or even a person), releasing the accompanying thoughts to sit with the underlying feeling, then ‘breathing the feeling in’ until we can relax enough to dissolve/release its energy:
this exercise of compassionate abiding, and in this case specifically, abiding with the experience of aversion, consists of breathing in the negative feeling and then relaxing outward. Then you breathe the feeling in and relax outward again and again. You could do this for five minutes or for hours or anytime, on the spot, when aggressive feelings arise. We do this for ourselves and all other people who feel prejudice and disgust and have no way of working with it so it escalates into self-denigration, into jealousy, and violence, and creates endless suffering all over the world. (p. 41)
As we become aware of our own reactions and defenses (if you’re curious about your defense type(s), you can explore a list of common psychological defenses here), it can be easy to lash out in some way against ourselves, as we might be tempted to do toward others we become impatient with. Pema advises us to be patient and gentle with ourselves, which in turn will help us understand the struggle of others and be patient with them, too.
when you're like a keg of dynamite just about to go off, patience means just slowing down at that point — just pausing — instead of immediately acting on your usual, habitual response. You refrain from acting, you stop talking to yourself, and then you connect with the soft spot. But at the same time, you are completely and totally honest with yourself about what you are feeling. You are not suppressing anything; patience has nothing to do with suppression. In fact, it has everything to do with a gentle, honest relationship with yourself. (p. 21)
It's also been important for me to realize that maintaining the space between stimulus and response is much easier for me when I’m taking good care of myself by addressing all 8 of the self-care dimensions listed (and linked) above. I recently listened to Dr. Julie Smith’s book Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before and was able to connect some dots around the fact that our physical states can trigger resonant emotion/thought patterns that may have no other stimulus other than our physical condition. She writes:
Not all low mood is unidentified dehydration, but when dealing with mood it is essential to remember that it’s not all in your head. It’s also in your body state, your relationships, your past and present, your living conditions and lifestyle. It’s in everything you do and don’t do, in your diet and your thoughts, your movements and memories. How you feel is not simply a product of your brain. (p. 14)
So, fellow traveler, I encourage you: be brave enough to sit with yourself, be patient and gentle with whatever comes up as you do, and take the very best care of your body that you can; it can change the world!
Food for thought:
Have you found yourself emotionally unsettled recently? If so, what has caused you to feel that way, and how did you respond? Would you like to respond differently?
Mood for thought:
I recently encountered the music of the creative and talented group, Twisted Pine, on an episode of one of my favorite NPR programs, Mountain Stage. I was so impressed by their musicality and storytelling (not to mention the rockin’ improvisatory flute playing of Anh Phung) that I took a listen to the entirety of their most recent album, Love Your Mind, and was delighted to find this first song resonated with this theme that’s been on my mind and heart.
👇 Scroll below the video for lyrics
You’ve got to just start runnin’ Baby, make up your mind: it’s time (it's time), it's time (it's time), it's time And you know, it’s not gonna change If you don’t look around and face the music playin’ It's hard (hard, hard) to get that close to yourself (it’s hard, hard, hard) To ask: how deep is the well? (hard, hard, hard) Yeah, it gets rough… You’ve got to start and not stop; you better look right at yourself You’ve got to start and not stop; you better look right at yourself You better start and not stop; you better look right at yourself Better start with you, start with you.
So what if it all sounds strange? I had an awakening from a distant daydream And you know, the truth comes knockin' The sooner the answer then you'll hear the sounds of freedom
It's hard (hard, hard) to get that close to yourself (it’s hard, hard, hard) To ask: how deep is that well? (it’s hard, hard, hard) It gets rough…
Better start and not stop; you better look right at yourself You better start and not stop; you better look right at yourself You better start and not stop; you better look right at yourself Better start with you, start with you, start, start, start, start
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