Trusting the Intelligence of your design

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves…

I’ve been thinking about this a bit… about this soft animal…

Have you ever noticed how often we make ourselves wrong? Fight ourselves, think that we should be different? Judge ourselves for feeling what we’re feeling? Think that there is something wrong with us, or that we’re broken, or at least shouldn’t be feeling the way we are feeling?

Trusting the intelligence of your design

That used to be true for me on pretty much daily basis. Then one morning, about to go into the usual sparing match with myself, I had a total shift of perspective. I started to wonder, if maybe what I’m experiencing might actually serve some purpose, if it might be part of the intelligence of my design. Look at the rest of nature, is it not designed with purpose and intelligence, to serve life? So what if I am too?

That’s when I stopped making myself WRONG. That’s when I started to inquire into my experience trusting that it had intelligence, and something to show me rather than believing it to be a flaw, a brokenness, a problem in need of fixing. I think of it in some ways as my soft inner animal, aligning me with life and getting me to pay attention.

So what if your being, your experience, your sense, is just that Soft Animal there to get your attention?  What if you could listen to that inner animal, trust it’s innate intelligence, stop fighting and just let it love what it loves?

What are feelings for?

One of the key concepts in Nonviolent Communication is that our feelings arise in direct relationship to needs that we have.  Our feelings are our needs-indicators. When we’re hungry we have a need for nourishment, when we’re thirsty we have a need for hydration, when we’re tired, we have a need for rest or sleep. We might push ourselves or not attend to the needs that are being presented, but for the most part we don’t really argue with them. So what if every feeling we have is also connected to a need? What if our feelings are just signals, alerting us to pay attention to some need we have? What if they are part of the intelligence of our design?

So the next time you start to feel something, start to make your being wrong for something, what if you stopped to listen and to understand what your being is wanting, what it is trying to communicate? What if you listened to your inner animal and trusted it’s message? What if you trusted your uncertainty or your misgiving as part of the intelligence of your design? What if you paid attention and used the information to align with your being?

Most of us did not grow up in a culture or even now live in one that acknowledges, let alone supports this way of being. But what if you could? What if you could trust your system, your design, your being to be your ally and align you with life? How would your life be then?

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

Mary Oliver