David Whyte

When you think about personal transformation, do you have a picture of who you want to become? Many of us unconsciously create an idealized image of our “awakened” selves ― and in doing so, reveals David Whyte, we undermine both the work and reward of genuine transformation. In What to Remember When Waking, this celebrated poet and teacher offers wisdom for building the essential disciplines that will see us through the difficulties of our human journey ― skills of trust, vulnerability, momentum, and courage in the face of the unknown.

The Disciplines of an Everyday Life

What to Remember When Waking

Laura Mei

while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,

you are not an accident amidst other accidents

you were invited from another and greater night

than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window

toward the mountain presence of everything that can be

In the life you can imagine for yourself?

In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

All of us have a doorway that is calling us through it, into a life we intuit for ourselves. Whether you believe there was a life before this life and that you've arrived to complete a work, or whether it's equally miraculous in your imagination that life itself would, through evolutionary powers, have arranged for you to live at this threshold in history with these powers, each of us has an intuition that we hold that conversation of life. We hold all those disparate elements that have gathered inside us in a particular way in which no other human being on this earth experiences. That whatever our conversation is, it has a particular coloration and tonality that no other human being shares and has never shared since the beginning of time, and never will until the end of human-recorded time. And so one of the great theological inherited understandings about an everyday human life is that it is absolutely and completely and totally and utterly unique, and that these forces, this particular tide, will never ever appear again. There will be other elements, other individuals, other incarnations, but this incarnation and threshold that you stand on  ̶  these qualities and difficulties that you bring – have never been bound together before in such a potentiality. I often think that if the rest of creation could actually speak, it would be looking at us wondering why we quibble about the details of living out our life when everything around us and everything inside is so utterly and totally unique.

Whatever you want from life will never occur in its entirety, but also whatever life or society demands of you will not occur either. What 

occur is a meeting between the two in which there will be a tremendous amount of disruption, falling apart, letting go of the conversation, picking it up again, and finally coming to some new kind of cohesion out of what you want for yourself and what the world demands of you. The world can be creation, what your parents wanted from you when you were a child, what your society asks of you, what your educational institution ask of you, what your spouse or your partner asks of you, or what your child asks of you.

If you’re paying enough attention in a deep enough silence to patterns on the outside, they elucidate internal patterns that are already there inside you. So what they do is allow you to understand what you know already but which you haven't allowed yourself to speak into the world. A good deal of life has to do with overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew in the world; of allowing yourself the revelation   ̶ allowing yourself to understand what you already know. Sometimes this onrush of internal revelation from the inside can seem as if it's breaking through an outer crust, and the internal revelation might be accompanied by a shiver in the body and the hairs standing up on the back of your neck, or in tears or a semi breakdown, because the meeting of the internal truth with the external life that you've made for yourself creates a kind of homecoming and a breakdown of all of this willful effort that you've been attempting to make on the surface. The ability to pay real attention on the outside is not just a measure of our practical competences in the world, but also a measure of how far an equivalent attention we can pay to those internal elements on the inside.

It's amazing how much the dynamic of being seen can actually sabotage us at the beginning, especially if we have very little confidence in ourselves. The act of being seen can be one of the most ultimate vulnerabilities of all because one of the corollaries of being seen is that you can also be hurt. When you're below the radar screen of life, when you can be mistaken or your life can be mistaken for any other persons life, then it can't be distinguished so much   ̶ you can't be found out therefore you can't be touched. There's a kind of immunity in anonymity. As soon as you stand up and speak out and say this is what I am or this is what I'm attempting to be, you do risk humiliation and the disappointment of all of your best hopes. But this is a doorway that must be walked through. But you also find out how serious you are. You find out the internal ground you must walk that is immune to all outside scorn.

One of the ways that friendship is kept alive is often through a continuous process of forgiveness. Friendship never really anneals itself into its deeper form until there has been a first falling out, a first alienation, and a first distress at the possibility of losing that friendship. It is the necessary generosity of either friend in remaking the friendship that brings things back together again and you could think of friendship as being a continuous discipline of forgiveness. It seems to me that the ability to keep momentum and direction in your life once you have started often has to do with the ability to forgive yourself again and again and again and to allow yourself to be forgiven by others for the trespasses on their life that your own work makes. That is especially true with family and close friends from whom we disappear and whom we disappoint through a particular internal dedication to our work that we might not be able to explain fully to them. It could therefore be that a good definition of a healthy relationship is that it becomes a kind of contest of generosity. A good friendship is one in which again and again you see, shimmering behind the outer surface of the person you're speaking with, someone much larger than even they have been introduced to.

What to Remember When Waking quotes

Join the club