You Have Permission

We tend to wait for permission to lead the life we long for. I know I have. The lack of permission tends to be more a block in our path than not knowing what our path is. And we tend to wait for it to be offered by others, rather than ask it of ourselves.

It can feel dangerous to walk our own path, especially in the company of people who haven’t walked theirs. And we may wait for a lifetime before we do anything about it.

So, whose permission might that be for you? Whose permission are you waiting for?

It’s not just the life in front of us that we want validated, but the life behind us too, even, and perhaps especially, in all its calamitous failure.

“You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fixwhat’s broken, but to get what’s broken blessed.” - James Hillman

Yes, more than permission, it’s a blessing isn’t it? We need blessings, each others and our own. Blessings on the parts of us we’ve hidden, blessings on the longings we’ve been ashamed of - they want to be received, not corrected.

And one of the biggest blessings of all, could be the blessing upon all those cul-de-sacs we went down in search of approval and belonging that we never actually needed to. A particularly poignant one for me, this one.

Most of us, I believe, have not only had a script thrust in our hand, we’ve been told which theatre to turn up to. We can be forgiven for mistaking the paths laid out before us, as the only ones available.

So, what to do?

Bless.

Say out loud the words of a life that have only been a performance. The script; say it as a script. And not with the faux sincerity you have been using thus far. Say it to those who know how to listen - a therapist, a guide, a trusted circle, or the land itself. And then ask for what you really want.

There is something particular about speaking these things into the natural world alone. The land is old. It has heard it all before. And it doesn’t give a shit about permission. Here, especially in solitude, we can feel less alone.

We need to hear, too, our story in the story of other people. To feel less uniquely mistaken. To understand that all the ways we err through life, are actually shared.

This is where the masks start to crumble and we realise that the blessings we yearned for, were actually, always, all around and within us