I just heard the most charming story which goes like this…
An elderly villager walked to the river every morning and filled her water pots. One pot was smooth, perfect, the other was cracked. By the time she reached the village the cracked pot was half empty.
One day the cracked pot told her how ashamed it was because it could only hold half of what she gave it. The old woman told it to look at the path the next morning. Because the pot leaked she had sewn flower seeds along the path. Everyday the pot watered them.
We humans have a habit of measuring ourselves by our failures. By what we couldn’t keep. The relationship we couldn’t keep, the life that didn’t work out the way we hoped, the emotions we were told were too much.
The dangerous thing about shame is that it narrows your vision, you stare at the cracks so closely that you miss the flowers. You believe that your life only stands for what went wrong.
Maybe the part you’ve been trying to hide is not the part that makes you unworthy. Maybe it’s the part that made you more human, the things that you keep apologising for are connected to the compassion you now have, the way you understand things that you would never have understood if life had left you untouched. Some cracks were made by things you should never have had to survive.
The cracked pot measured itself only by what it had lost, but all the time something beautiful was growing. Maybe somewhere there is a row of flowers you haven’t turned around to see.
A friend sent me the link to this. It’s on a page called the_gratitude_mind and the lady whose page it is tells the story so beautifully. I’m sure there is a lot more comforting advice on there.
Best love
Amorah – Deb
As you should
Don’t be harsher on yourself that you would be on others
Deb Hawken - Amorah 