by Anitra Lahiri, RYT-500
The career you ended. The person you never called. The job you never applied for. The opportunity you never seized. The art you never created. The relationship you abandoned. The way you speak to yourself on a daily basis.
Your life — once smooth white clay, now shattered and sharp.
How many times you’ve wished you could simply rewind and start over, this lifetime.
A do-over without the stupid mistakes, the asinine decisions, the self-mutilating choices that led you to this moment — a potter standing in a cluttered studio, wondering how your life’s work could have turned out so disastrously messy.
I have stood there too, questioning how these hands pinched the clay of life into such disfigured porcelain. Like you, the moment I was conceived, I was gifted china clay and pottery stone — and the freedom to create a masterpiece. My mind interrogates me: You constructed this instead?
That is, until I place my little brown hand (the one I never look at with awe anymore)
over my still-beating heart, allowing the maternal warmth — my maternal warmth — to emanate, palm to endocardium, soul to ego, spirit to human.
In that moment, for that moment, I wake up. I see clearly my enemy-mind who has sabotaged me all these years, remnants of a childhood of being shaken, violated, and ignored. But wait, I can choose not to continue the chaos and self-loathing they implanted in me.
With one mindful breath, I honor my existence, relish my aliveness — this life that is mine to experience as I wish. And my eyes focus in on the bone dry sculpture I have masterfully created in spite of it all. My soul reminds me: This life is miraculous, and a future you can mold awaits you.
I implore you, dear reader:
Place your hand over your heart.
Pause.
Be still.
Take a deep breath.
Bask in your soul’s warmth.
Reflect on your heart beating (your precious and miraculous heart).
Notice what is good and right in life on planet Earth, in your life.
And then return to the world, one breath at a time,
this time shaping the clay as you wish and want and dream and deserve.
Anitra Lahiri 