I originally submitted my application as a volunteer to
deepen my spiritual practice, to someday be formally in a position of providing
end-of-life care. Before attending the training, I knew from my orientation
interview that being a volunteer meant learning how to be present to the
individual’s grief, loss, and helplessness without trying to fix or solve
anything for them. When I began the training, I carried that expectation with
me, to learn how to not feel that I needed to have an answer. When I finished
the training, I had opportunities to learn and practice those skills, but more
importantly, I came face-to-face with my underlying beliefs.
Here’s the bottom line, for me: every time I say to myself, “I’m
insecure” as a rationale for not doing something, what I’m really saying is that “I’m giving myself a reason, an
excuse for being that way.” In my case, it expands to mean that it’s
okay for me to not like myself, to feel less than adequate, to not be good enough, to not, to not, to not. Even though it’s what I honestly feel, here’s
what happens: my judgment of myself means that it’s something I need to fix,
and that means that I need to do something to fix it. If it gets fixed, then it reinforce the idea that I need to be fixed, but if it doesn’t then, it’s a failed effort, and I end up right back
where I started.
As a volunteer, this has it’s downside. The more I try to
find fixes for myself, the easier it has gotten to also provide fixes to
everyone else, too. And, as I learned in volunteer training, that’s not what
the individual is seeking, they only want support, no fixes. If you get on the
fix-it side of the conversation, then in between the words what you end up
saying is, “you’re not okay, you need to be fixed.” That’s not compassion, at
least not the kind of compassion I want to demonstrate.
So, what’s the fix to the not fixing? For now, I’m going to
try to just say “I am enough.” I’m hoping that it’ll short-circuit the thinking
that something needs to be fixed. I’m hoping that it’ll be enough so that I can
just accept what is, without any rationalization, without any notion of what
should have happened or what could have happened. All that goes out the window!
All of it!
As a result, here’s what I hope happens. I am enough gives
me acceptance of myself and the situation. It derails the fix-it thought train.
Instead, I am left with being understanding and I cripple the excuse for
rationalizing and justifying my negative biases about why I act the way I do.
Instead, I accept the situation, accept myself, and just move on.
I didn’t expect to realize this type of insight for myself
in volunteer training. Now that I have, I realize that the opportunity that I
have to spend with whomever I am matched will be a tremendous gift for me to practice
being enough, and hopefully from that place, I will be able to have a
supportive presence for the individual, and maybe, just maybe, they, too . . .
(I almost wrote something that suggested that they needed to be fixed.) Ha! Got
me! To practice being enough. That’s enough.
