I Have What I Need

I’m part a small group with several dear friends of mine: Robin, Jennie and Rebecca. We meet once a month and talk about “manifesting our desires” — drawing what we want into our lives. We’re mothers with young kids who are in preschool and elementary school now, so we’re all in the process of figuring out just what it is we want next, personally and professionally.

We often begin with a guided meditation. A few months ago we did one in which we were to imagine sitting on a moss-covered bench in a beautiful, quiet forest. I’m not always good at focusing during meditation, but this one really drew me in for some reason. At the end, Rita, our facilitator, said to listen for a message. And mine came through loud and clear, without any effort on my part: “You have what you need.”

I was incredibly comforted by those words. Because it’s true — I do have what I need. Material things like shelter, food and water, of course, and also all the people I want and need in my life. I have so much love and support around me. But I also have something else: the strength, confidence and balance to handle whatever comes my way.

In my life before kids, and before I hit that brick wall after I had them, I went through the days with something inside me clenched. If everything was going all right, I figured something was bound to screw it up. If something bad or unexpected did come along, I got much more upset about it than it really warranted. It threw me off-balance when it didn’t always have to.

Now, after much work, I am able to find joy in the moment. I feel much more flowing and flexible — though I might not yet call myself spontaneous, I can roll with the punches. And most important, I have the tools to gracefully face whatever comes up, good, bad or catastrophic. I really do. I have what I need.

So I wrote my message down in my notebook after that meditation. The next weekend I was at my yoga immersion, a nine-month program I’ve been doing for a weekend each month for much of the last year, with Emma, the amazing director of my studio. (Check out her blog on my blogroll.) We were talking about tantric philosophy, upon which Anusara yoga is largely based, and Emma said, “You need everything you’ve got, and you’ve got what you need.”

I don’t believe in coincidence anymore — I think there really is energy in the universe that condenses into these connections. I got a chill when she said that, and when we took a break I showed her the words I’d written down the week before (I use the same notebook for both groups — also no coincidence). She thought it was as cool as I did. 

You could argue (as my husband does) that the message came from me, that I gave it to myself. And that may well be true. But tantric philosophy also says that the divine is in everything — we are all made up of the divine energy of the universe. So, me giving myself that message is really the same thing as the universe giving it to me.

This past weekend I was in a workshop with Phil, my other wise and fantastic yoga teacher. We did meditation with mantra, a word or words you repeat to yourself, an invocation. He gave us a few suggestions, but he also said that if there was a phrase that meant something to us, we could use that. So I used the mantra the universe has given to me.

On Valentine’s Day, it’s fitting to celebrate that I have what I need. It’s perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned in the last few years, that we are all already full — everything we need is with us. It’s just a matter of being able to find it, and really look at it, and really love it.

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