Lifeletter 105: Turtle Medicine: Don’t Be That Hare

Each one of us has something, a gift, a capacity, a brilliance, that is our natural medicine. It’s a gift that life gave to us in the very beginning. Often there is more than one. It’s amazing how generous life is with these gifts. There is no real lack of abundance in what we are given. If we believe that other people are more gifted than we are, we’ll suffer until we wake up from that story.

It’s just not true that we haven’t been gifted. What’s true is that we often have no clue how to care for our gifts. And we have to learn this, if we want to live an alive, creative, generous life. We have to learn how to hold and develop our gifts in a real way, like an adult does. Jesus talked about this in his parable of the talents:

“For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money.”

We all know what happened to the last guy. If you are not sure, Google it. It’s not a happy story. Jesus didn’t pull any punches with his parables. No wonder they gave him such a hard time. Here’s the truth that’s hard to face: a lot of us do this. We bury our gifts in the ground and then wonder why our life sucks. Or feels kind of empty, lonely and flat.

How then, do we care for our gifts? How do we learn to be a conduit for the natural medicine that wants to flow through us, that wants to bless us and others? How do we nourish and tend these gifts so they can flower and flow? I am going to tell you what I have discovered about this. I’d like to gussy it up a little, but I’ll be bold and follow along behind Jesus. I’ll just give it to you straight: the main thing we need here is commitment, persistence, patience, constancy. These are four words, all pointing to the same thing. What we are looking at here is not a word – it’s a very powerful quality, a way of being.

When I am teaching a course or doing a workshop, and I introduce this particular way of being called persistence or commitment, it’s quite fascinating to watch what happens. Over half the room goes to sleep. People get glassy-eyed, their shoulders slump, they sink down towards the floor. If we are exploring other qualities such as courage, compassion, curiosity, spaciousness, or playfulness, this doesn’t happen. They perk right up and lean into the energy. But not with persistence, not with constancy. Not with slow, steady small steps forward. Oh no. We don’t really like this way of being. Not most of us. And certainly not me!

I know how valuable this quality is because I have struggled with the lack of it all my life. It’s been very difficult for me to embody this way of being. It was like a bitter medicine that I never wanted to drink. Remember the race between the hare and the tortoise? I’ve been the hare all my life. I like to take big, glamourous, exuberant leaps forward. Working towards a long-term vision with slow, grounded, patient, persistent energy felt like being in prison to me. I wanted to fly–I didn’t want to come down to earth and plod along like the turtle.

It took me most of my life to really take the truth of this in: it’s the small, daily, persistent actions that create a beautiful life, an authentic life. These small actions, repeated many times, are what open the gates of our power, brilliance and creativity. These daily practices are what reveal our deepest gifts.

It’s not like I didn’t know this with my mind. All my life there have been so many people, including my beloved daughter, reminding me of this. “Turtle medicine, Mum,” she would say. “Remember the turtle. Slow and steady wins the race.”  I would hear her words fading away behind me, as I leapt forward into another hare-brained adventure.

But I am finally getting it. The goodness of life has been unrelenting in teaching me this lesson. One of my gifts, freely given to me in this lifetime, is writing. About ten years ago, I was starting my coaching/teaching business, after leaving India, where I had been for twenty-five years. Learning how to create my own business in the western world was quite a challenge for me. My coach at that time suggested that I start a newsletter. So I did. And as soon as I started, I knew, not only that I could do it, but that it was going to be a very good thing.

Right around that time I was looking for a second mortgage on my house, so I could renovate it. I went to see a man, John Brand, who was president of a local credit union, to see if he would give me a mortgage. The problem was, I wasn’t earning anything close to what is normally required for such a mortgage. The first time I sat with him in his office, he asked me what my work was. I spoke to him about my teaching and coaching, my enduring passion for awakening and transformation, but I could see it was pretty abstract for him.

“How about if I send you a Lifeletter, I’ve just written?” I asked him. “I think you’ll get a much better feeling by reading that.”

“Okay,” he said. “Send it to me today, and come back tomorrow morning.” I send him a recent Lifeletter, number five, going with an intuitive hunch that he might like it.

I walked in the next morning and sat down in front of his great big desk. He had his computer open to the Lifeletter. “You wrote this?” he asked me, “This is part of what you do?”

“Yes,” I said.

“This is fantastic,” he told me. “Can I send this to my son?”

“You can send it to anyone,” I said. “These Lifeletters are meant to be passed around.”

“Well,” he said. “I want to see more of what is in this Lifeletter going out into the world. So I’m going to give you this mortgage. Let’s sign the papers right now.”

And we did. I often tell people that the beautiful, light-filled house I now live in, with seven gardens, four porches and the seventeen trees we have planted here, all came from that one Lifeletter.

When I was signing the final paper for that mortgage, John leaned over and said to me, “Keep writing. Don’t give up.” That’s when I knew that he was a lot more than a banker. He was an ally. He was another free gift from the universe.

Since that day I have written ninety-nine Lifeletters. I have received more from my readers and from everyone who has responded to them, than you could imagine. But it’s really the process of remaining faithful to the writing that has served me the most.

That experience at the Credit Union was a direct teaching from the goodness of life, telling me clearly, “You’re on the right track here-keep going. You have something to give, don’t hold yourself back.”

It’s a miracle really, that every human being on earth has a gift like this, a small seed that needs to be watered by constancy, by slow, gentle persistent actions. By patiently, slowly, moving forward, one step at a time.

I would bless us all with this turtle medicine, if I could. May we all learn what it is to come down–down to the steady solid energy of earth. May we discover how to remain faithful to what we have been given, day by day by day.

It’s never too late to turn from a hare into a turtle.

If you want to read the Lifeletter that got me that mortgage, click here.

 

with love

Shayla