What if becoming who and what we truly are happens not through striving and trying but by recognizing and receiving the people and places and practices that offer us the warmth of encouragement we need to unfold?

When we surrender when we do not fight with life when it calls upon us we are lifted and the strength to do what needs to be done finds us.

Not doing is not about immobility or giving up in despair. It is first and foremost about being able to be with, to accept fully, what is in this moment.

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know whether you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. .I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, . and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout . . . "Yes." .I want to know if you can get up . weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done. .I want to know what sustains you . when all else falls away.

Loudly declaring our soul's desire can get the blood running and our passions blazing.

Within each of us there is the heart of a lion, the courage to simply be who & what we are regardless of others opinions or our own fears. Sometimes this courage has been buried beneath years of shaming that may have been so implicit or insidious that we breathed it in, unaware of how it separated us from knowing our own beauty of being. May we each know our own beauty & right to be today. May we drop down into the heart of the lion within & say to shame, when it rears it's head, "Not today!"