There was a time when I would lament—and by that I mean cry like a baby—that I wasn’t a cat. It’s a running joke now, but I‘m serious. This was early on in my dark night of grief and burnout. I would look at these two magnificent creatures who wandered around my home doing whatever they pleased, and I wanted to be just like them.
“How lucky they are. They don’t have to work. All they do is rest and play and eat and snuggle, and they are perfect as they are.” They had, in other words, no pressure to do anything they didn’t want to (except go to the vet) or be anything other than who they already were. They had no pressure to find and embody their purpose in life, to fulfill their inner potential.
“You have that now,” my husband would tell me, but it took me some months to begin believing him, and years to really internalize and embody it. But slowly, ever so slowly, I began seeing that dark night for the gift and opportunity it was.
That was the year I started learning to rest deeply and let go of the guilt (that took a very long time). That was the year I started my Akashic Records studies. Then came flying trapeze—pure delight just for the heck of it, to no discernible end. Those twin obsessions took over and forged this surprising path before me, each feeding the other.
Yesterday I wrote about living without any pressures, and this is where it started for me: at home with my cats. Right here, right now I invite you to consider, just for a moment, all the pressures you are feeling in your life. And asking your monkey mind to step aside for a moment, be really honest about which of those pressures are self-imposed. Those are the ones you really have control over. Start taking yourself off those hooks.
You will be surprised, once you start releasing them, how many of the so-called “external pressures” are also internal to a great extent. As you continue to expand into your Brilliant System, you will shift your perception of inside and out. But you will also become very clear about the boundaries between your true desires and what everyone else thinks you should need or want for yourself.
When this happens, your unique path will begin to flow from you and you will dance along it to your own rhythm. That few others see, hear, or understand what is emerging from you is okay. All that matters is that you feel your wholeness. Integrity comes from alignment with the fullest expression of yourself. That doesn’t necessarily mean bigger, better, faster, more. It means being always already every ounce yourself—no more, no less—just like a cat, who cannot and would not conceive of being anything other than its glorious self.
Once I gave myself the permission to embody cat-ness is of course when I started to truly expand into my human-ness. So give yourself the chance to rest and play and love without guilt or inhibition. The world will not fall apart. You might, but that too can be part of the wholeness.
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