Part of the series Working With Feelings: Data, Breath, Literacy.
Every Visitor Brings a Gift ·
Befriending Your Feelings ·
Emotional Fitness for Men ·
The Data Inside Feelings ·
The Breath, Our Silent Regulator
Some visitors arrive with music and wine. Others track mud through the hallway and don’t look you in the eye. Some you’d invite again in a heartbeat. Others you’d rather never meet.
It doesn’t matter.
Each one comes with something for you.
A truth. A challenge. A shift you didn’t see coming.
Even the ones who knock you flat are, in their own way, carrying an invitation to be more whole than you were before.
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
— Rumi
The gift isn’t always easy to recognise. Sometimes it hides under grief, anger, or shame. Sometimes you only see it after the visitor has left, when the dust has settled and you realise something in you has shifted.
But it’s always there.
Every arrival — welcome or not — is part of the long work of becoming whole.
Part of the series Working With Feelings: Data, Breath, Literacy.
Every Visitor Brings a Gift ·
Befriending Your Feelings ·
Emotional Fitness for Men ·
The Data Inside Feelings ·
The Breath, Our Silent Regulator
