Lying on the massage table, hands working my feet and another set of hands on my head, I was in sensory heaven. For more than fifteen years I’ve been driving up to the beautiful Northshore of Oahu to meet with my naturopath, a deeply intuitive healer whose check-ups, at least for me, include bodywork. Because my appointment was at the end of the day, my naturopath invited a young acupuncturist who worked in the offices to join my healing session. (The “offices” were a cozy wooden building nestled on a lush 2-acre plot that included gorgeous free roaming chickens, luscious avocado and lime trees, and a flourishing organic garden.). Would I mind? Two sets of strong feminine hands kneading out my stress, delivering my muscles a taste of nirvana? Could it possibly get any better? 

But something happened in the middle of that experience that quietly rocked my world. I had a revelation. Not a conceptual one – not a good idea in the head – but a sudden and startling aha deep in my body. Eyes closed, I suddenly realized I was living too shallow, too surface – and I needed to live deeper.  It was such a quiet aha, floating within this delicious visceral experience, that I almost overlooked it. But as with any genuine realization, it cannot be overlooked or dismissed. It appears, like a burst of sunlight, illuminating something that has been sleeping too long in the dark.

For days afterward, weeks, and months, all I kept hearing was live deeper. 

So many of us live in the shallows, on the surface of things, where it’s busy and exciting and noisy and active and incredibly distracting. Being invited to drop down from that boisterous surface level - to go deeper where the waters are much stiller - where life moves so much slower - where it is so much quieter - that’s what was being asked of me, that’s what I was being called “to do.”

Yet “doing” can be the very antithesis of living deeper. “Doing” is often a means to an end, a goal-oriented drive. Busyness and doingness seem like happy bedfellows. For me they’re mostly filled with a conscious (or unconscious) frantic energy of distraction. 

 The question becomes… distraction from what?

When I think of living deeper, it’s about a willingness to sink into the depths of my life, of Life itself; to descend into “the silence beneath the sound” as Eckhart Tolle calls it; to the deepest part of the vast ocean, where movement cannot be rushed, where there is a visceral, sensory, womb-like pressure surrounding everything. It’s the depths where the biggest brains on the planet reside – the blue whale and the sperm whale. (The extraordinary photo seen here show sperm whales sleeping vertically!) If I imagine living as deep as possible, it requires a powerful slowing down of absolutely everything. It “requires” just being. 

 And I think for many of us (certainly for me) “doing nothing” or “just being” can be scary. 

 Our whole culture is built around busyness and pushing and driving and rushing and accomplishing. Practically everything we do is a means to an end. Rarely is anything at all just for itself. Sitting and listening to birds for no reason at all.  Folding laundry with no future (or past) agenda. Allowing the day to unfold instead of trying to make everything happen.

 It’s an ongoing invitation for me. The shallows can be so damn exciting.  Crashing waves, boats going by, birds diving for fish, swimmers splashing, sunlight, rain drops, thunder - the sensory stimulation is endless.

 Up until that moment on the massage table I didn’t realize I had been bobbing on the surface for so long. And I had no idea what it truly meant to live deeper. 

 But these days I’m having more and more moments released from an outer focus, released from the seductive siren-call of the splashy shallows. It’s getting easier.  And to be quite honest, I’m starting to enjoy it.

My mother had an outrageous sense of humor. I don’t know where it came from. Certainly not from the hardships she experienced as a small child in Poland; and certainly not from the brutal Russian marauders who attacked her village and sent her family fleeing to America when she was seven years old. Yet her contagious enthusiasm and wit were undeniable.

At 83, she traveled by bus one afternoon from Queens to Manhattan, along with hundreds of senior citizens, to fill up the studio of a popular daytime talk show. Before the show’s taping began, everyone in the audience was asked to fill out a form stating their name, age, and occupation. My mother, a retired bookkeeper from a Brooklyn pajama factory, neatly wrote down: Bertha Mager, 83 years old, retired hooker. 

Apparently the famed talk show host read her response and was so amused by it that he called her up on stage. Despite the intimidating wall of television cameras and a noisy, packed auditorium, my chubby little Jewish mother stood up, barely five foot tall in stocking feet, and shuffled nonchalantly onto the stage. Her lightning banter and comedic timing immediately won over the sophisticated host, producers, and audience. In fact, the host actually invited her to come back on the show as a guest. My mother politely refused.  

You see, the moment it came to celebrating her own unique talents, my mother’s humor instantly vanished. Underneath all that acerbic wit, she felt profoundly inadequate. Many times, over the years, I would ask her why she felt so bad about herself. Whenever I did, she’d always burst into tears with the same answer: “I made horrible mistakes raising you. I was a terrible mother.”

 Yes, my mother was flawed. Yes, we often had a strained and argumentative relationship. But when I finally became a mother for the first time at the age of forty-four, I discovered, to my surprise, a genuine empathy for her. Once, in the midst of an overwhelming day with my Energizer-bunny-like toddler son, I called her up. “Whatever you did to me as a child,” I cried, “I forgive you! And I completely understand!”

 Those honest moments brought us closer together. Yet my mother never conquered her insecurities. A few days before she died, as she lay on a hospital bed, an oxygen mask covering her mouth, I gently laid my hand on her forehead and thanked her, from the bottom of my heart, for everything she had given me. I thanked her for the best qualities in me that she had inspired. I thanked her for the enthusiasm and sense of humor she passed onto me that my own friends and colleagues deeply appreciated. But as I spoke, it was clear to me by the pained look in her eyes and the way she shook her head, fighting my words, that even at the very end, she couldn’t take in any acknowledgement; she couldn’t let in my gratitude. 

 This Mother’s Day, there’s one gift I wish for all of us. You can’t buy it in a Hallmark store or wrap it in ribbon or put it in a velvet box.  And it’s a gift that our hectic society gives no value at all.  Yet for me it’s the most precious possession anyone can own.  It’s what my mother needed most, what I need, what I believe all mothers need.  Self-Kindness. The ability to forgive ourselves easily and often; the willingness to give ourselves room to make mistakes; the daily decision to treat ourselves with the same gentleness we give our children.  

 On Sunday, look deeper than the roses and greeting cards. Reach for the gift my mother struggled to accept in the last days of her life. Give yourself a little tenderness…

Why is it so difficult to love ourselves? Why is it so hard to utterly accept our flaws, our mistakes, our imperfections? Sure, we want to love ourselves. Every self-help book and life coach and personal development course tells you to. But come on, let’s be honest. It just ain’t that easy to love the cellulite, the wrinkles, the flabby arms, the failures.

My whole life I’ve been trying, though. Against the mental non-stop chatter of you’re-not-good-enough, you’re-not-pretty-enough, you’re-not-really-a-good-writer, I’ve been trying to discover the secret doorway into real, unabashed, foot-stompin’ self-love. Over the years, I’ve seen it in a few people – very few – that authentic shimmering, a quiet, soft beauty, an almost palatable light, emanating from their skin. All I know is that it’s a process. But not the process I thought it would be. Instead of repeating a thousand “I love myself” affirmations, or creating a vision board crowded with images torn from magazines, it’s been a very, very slow dawning – a quiet awakening to a different voice inside – a different set of eyes that see a bigger, broader truth about me, about Life.

Yes, it’s a spiritual thing for sure – an ability to see beyond this sixty-inch tall Brooklyn-born form named Marcia – a capacity to see more deeply – to see through the incredibly confining prison of my opinions and thoughts and beliefs. There are moments - not quite 24-hour days yet – but genuine moments where I can feel, in my body, this exquisite beauty that I’m somehow part of – that you’re part of – that we’re all part of. And when that happens, no matter how rare, I’m no longer searching for self-love, I’ve become it.

Many years ago a poem flowed through me that describes what I seem to be talking about. It’s titled: Simple Instructions on How to Find the Buried Treasure. Happy hunting.

One of my all-time favorite quotes about the creative process comes from one of the world’s greatest painters, Vincent Van Gogh.

“Mediocre I do not despise at all. And one does not rise above that mark by despising what is mediocre. In my opinion one must begin by at least having some respect for the mediocre and know that it already means something and that it is only reached through great difficulty.”

Whether you’ve written for decades or are just beginning, Van Gogh’s insightful wisdom can take you far in your writing life. To be able to write badly - to be able to give yourself the freedom, the authentic permission to spit out words, sentences, and ideas that fall short of your expectations is an ability that will ultimately nourish your creative spirit.

Over the many years that I’ve worked with hundreds of writers, one of the most common myths they believe is this idea that “real” writers produce great first drafts – these blessed “others” just roll out of the bed in the morning, brimming with happiness and perfect clarity; and then they sit down and the words flow – brilliant ideas tumbling easily and beautifully onto the page – everything somehow coming out ordered and whole. Well, as we say in Brooklyn, that’s a whole lotta horse @&$!!!

The process of finding the perfect words, expressing that great idea, sculpting that magnificent paragraph is just that – a process. The bottom line is that we must be willing to initially (and maybe for a while!) write badly. We must be willing to put down on paper the mediocre stuff. But even more importantly, as Van Gogh urges, we must be willing to honor our own tender, imperfect efforts. If we don’t, we will ultimately undermine the entire discovery process. Writing a first draft is never about being an editor; it’s never about what your audience thinks or what your mother thinks or what the publisher thinks. Writing a first draft takes enormous courage because it is about leaping in, picking up the paints, and tossing them wildly on the canvas to see what colors stick. Writing the first draft is about listening to that nagging impulse, that gut feeling. It’s about breaking rules, not following them.

Did Michelangelo start chiseling away at the marble in search of David, only to throw his hands up after a few sweaty hours to lament, “This crappy lump doesn’t look anything at all like a man’s hand! I suck as a sculptor!” No, he worked tirelessly, draft after draft, willing to form “bad” lumps and bumps in that impossible stone, until one day something glorious emerged.

So it is with all creative processes. We must be willing to trudge through the slush of our terrible ideas, our clumsy words and awkward transitions. We must be willing to follow that goofy impulse down that dead end. We must be willing to explore that crazy idea no matter where it leads. In other words, we must be willing to give ourselves the spaciousness to write badly so we can discover what we’re looking for, even when we have no idea what that might actually be.

If we’re brave enough to honor our own mediocre attempts, here’s what Van Gogh promises:

“Your work is unbeautiful, alright let it be unbeautiful. It will grieve you but it must not discourage you… It is the experience and hard work of every day which alone will ripen in the long run and allow one to do something truer and more complete. You will not always do well, but the days you least expect it, you will do that which holds its own with the work of those that have gone before.”