Day 24: Ignite

If you have managed to get to this point in your life and have never felt caught up on the hamster wheel of external validation and culturally-predetermined metrics of success, amazing. You can just drop out of 40 Early Mornings right now. You’re good.

For the rest of us, we can probably identify where we are in this moment with the “success loop.”

Some of us are stuck riding the carousel ride over and over and over again, reaching out for yet another brass ring, and wondering what it would feel like if we hopped off.

Some of us have made the leap and are looking for some direction — how do we rewire our brains, our efforts, our intentions & actions toward something other than the story we’ve been hearing from birth about success?

Well, the good news is that you’re already doing it! You’ve now spent 24 days in practice, listening for the sound of your own voice (instead of others’).

By simply BEING here, you are already reframing your approach to personal growth, transformation, and real “death-bed-life success” by focusing your gaze inward, and less so on the external narratives that are so loudly vying for our precious attention.

Rather than thinking of growth and ignition in terms of productivity, goal-crushing, or achieving external accomplishments, we can view this week as a chance to become more of who we already are.

Instead of framing growth as "getting better" at something or achieving more goals, we can think of it as increasing our capacity for our own "gradually growing our wholeness,” as Rumi invites us.

This is the opposite of a “self-improvement plan.”

Our focus shifts from external achievements to tending to and nurturing our inner capacities, qualities, and strengths through our daily practice.

The growth we’re up to here is more internal, less visible, but perhaps the deepest and most profound kind of transformation we can get up to.

Today, as always, you don’t have to DO anything more. Let yourself BE. It’s enough.

I’ll see you right back here tomorrow,
Cath

Meditation: Keep going with Nadi Shodana below. You can safely and wisely keep edging your way into more rounds and cycles. Remember, there’s 3 cycles of 9 rounds for 20 minutes of meditation below. Go at your own pace.

Reflection: If not “hard work” than what?