Dear Reader, I Love You

Mouthfuls of mud and a new theme

I’ve been thinking about you off and on all day.

3689 of you are signed up to read my words. I’ve been remembering you with tenderness.

I wonder where are you right now. At the office, with tension clawing at your neck? On your phone, on a train or under a duvet? I wonder how you are doing, after the complications of the holidays. I wonder how your heart is.

I’m writing this from my sofa. Ralph is snoozing next to me, my laptop is balanced on my lap, our fairy lights are twinkling away in the fireplace. I cut the tip of my ring finger yesterday and it stings a little every time I type an ‘l’, an ‘i’ or a ‘p’.

I’ve been thinking about what I want to offer you this year. Not just thinking, with thoughts and intellect, but feeling my way into, embodying, chanelling, following a scent.

I think I have started to fall in love with a new theme for my writing.

I’m not going to stop writing about going gently. Gentleness is so important to me - especially the gentleness we everso slowly learn to offer ourselves. So many of us are trained in verging-on-violent striving. So many of us believe that we can start to enjoy our lives just as soon as we’ve improved ourselves a little, got rid of the debt, lost the weight. So much wasted energy.

And. I am zooming out. I am interested in the ground underneath our efforts to be kinder towards ourselves. I am interested in how we can open to rivers of abundance and sweetness so this abundance fills us up and naturally spills out onto and into others. I want to write about how we can access this impulse-towards-gentleness - both inside of us, and outside of us.

I don’t think we need to work on conjuring up or fabricating or purifying this sweetness. I believe that it is already there. I trust that there’s a vast reservoir of it deep inside of us, mostly hidden by our spiky self-protective parts. I trust that there’s an unimaginably bright infinity of it outside of us - Buddha, Gaia, other beings, Mother Sun, the Divine.

Love inside, love outside.

How we can we come to know it more fully? How can we strip away the barriers to the salvation it offers? How can we drink of it, and lead others towards slaking their own thirst? How can we take deep, deep refuge in it?

It’s been a tough year in many ways. My need to move out of community which fountained up in February and smashed against my spouse’s own needs. A painful situation with a colleague. The horrible emotional rollercoaster of selling a house and buying a house (frustration, impotence, fear) which I’m still, six months on, riding.

It has also been a year of teachings that have sent their tendrils deep down into my marrow. This year has re-shown me both the ferocity and the futility of my need to control. I have received the gift of Tosha Silver’s work, especially making offerings. I have watched our new stewards competently take over the Buddhist temple we founded ten years ago, and begun to trust that I don’t have to keep an eye on everything all of the time. I have released my iron grip on… well, just about everything. Just a little release, and a ginormous relief.

What’s next, for the 3689 of you who have honoured me with your time?

In 2025 I’m excited to explore the ways in which we can live good lives - not next week or next year, not as improved versions of ourselves, but now - just as we are. I’m excited to look at the mechanics of how we can open ourselves up, safely, to more sweetness. I’m excited to travel with you as we all mess up often, feel flattened or done in or done, appreciate tiny gifts, get to know ourselves, and are socked in the jaw by the beauty of this astonishing world.

Maybe you’ll come with me. I’ll point you towards some of the paths I’ve taken to the rivers of tenderness. I’ll listen properly to my own pain, and hear yours mirrored in it. I’ll let some of what I’ve received spill out, glittering and chaotic and gorgeous.

I’m remembering you, with tenderness. Thank you for being here.

Go gently,
Satya <3

PS I thought up various titles for this piece - ‘A Mouthful of Mud’, ‘Love Inside, Love Outside’, ‘Changes at Going Gently’, and asked my spouse Kaspa for their opinion. They sent me a headline analyzer to play with and all my titles scored between 0% and 14% 😂 I won’t always listen to the headline analyzer but on this occasion I think it did have a point and so I threw them all out and asked myself, what do I actually want to say to you? (It got a 40% score. I can live with that.)

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Over January I’m inviting you to make two gentle vows - the final free piece from this series will arrive next Tuesday. If you’re not joining me for that I look forward to seeing you again in February.

Here’s Ralph with a mouthful of mud which he wanted to eat on the rug. I did not let him in. He ate it outside and when he came in after I gave him lots of cuddles.