The holiness of the unpolished now

We live in an age of upgrades. A new app to optimize your sleep. A better routine to sculpt your mind. A morning ritual to conquer the day, the quarter, the year. The promise is constant: the next version of you will finally be the one who feels complete. It’s an intoxicating story—and a wearying one.

There’s another way. Sit down where you are. Not after you declutter your desk, not once you solve your inbox, not when you finally “feel ready.” Right here. Right now. Turn your attention from the horizon to the hum inside your chest. Listen. There is wind in your veins: blood, breath, a current of life moving without your management. Before you fix anything, meet what’s already humming.

This is not a program. It’s a posture. You don’t have to become the saint you imagine. That imagined saint is made of comparisons and shoulds, and saints like that never arrive. What do arrive—again and again—are the textures of this moment: love, longing, fear, boredom, tenderness, irritation. They show up in your bones and belly, in your jaw, in the small restlessness of your feet. They are not the obstacles to your life; they are your life.

A quiet revolution begins when you stop trying to earn your own belonging. All of you is holy. Not because you’ve achieved purity, but because you exist at all—breathing and breakable and luminous in strange ways you may never understand. The cracks are not disqualifiers. They’re doorways.

This is the gentle heresy: you are already more and less than any story you tell about yourself. More than your achievements, roles, traumas, and talents. Less than your grandest ideals and your darkest fears. A person is a tide, not a statue. If you wait to love yourself until the tide stops, you will wait a lifetime. Better to stand ankle-deep in the surf and feel the cold rush around your calves.

The culture of self-improvement often sneaks in the back door of spirituality. We trade one ladder for another, one set of gold stars for a subtler set. We meditate to be calm, and then berate ourselves for being agitated. We practice compassion but keep a secret scoreboard. The truth is both kinder and more unruly: awakening is not a trophy. It’s a way of relating to the mess.

Relating how? With intimacy. With humor. With a body, not just a head. The body tells the truth in a simple dialect: tight, loose, warm, cold, heavy, light. If you listen, you’ll notice that anxiety tingles, grief sinks, joy expands, anger heats. You don’t need to analyze the weather report; you can step outside and feel the rain.

A few unglamorous, holy practices:

- Sit for two minutes and do nothing but feel your exhale. Not improve it—feel it. Where does it end? What softens afterward?

- Put a hand on your chest or belly when you’re overwhelmed. Don’t fix. Contact is the medicine.

- When a hard feeling arrives, name it softly in ordinary language: “sad,” “tight,” “scared.” Naming makes room.

- Notice one unremarkable thing with reverence: the sound of a refrigerator, the crease in your palm, the way light lands on a coffee cup.

- Once a day, tell the truth out loud to someone safe: “I’m lonely,” “I’m proud of this,” “I don’t know.” Truth loosens the armor.

These are not techniques to get you somewhere better. They are ways to inhabit the somewhere you already are. Paradoxically, that’s where change happens—because change is a side effect of intimacy, not a product of self-violence. A tense fist opens more readily when it recognizes it is a fist.

Letting go is often marketed as an act of heroism: a leaping release, a dramatic unhooking. Sometimes it is. Mostly, it looks like an exhale. The body lets go all day long, without fanfare: blink, swallow, breathe, sleep. To “let go” can mean to stop making an enemy of the present. It can mean to let be. You don’t have to throw the rope from your hands; you can let it slide until it’s simply hanging and you’re simply standing.

The world around you is not separate from the one within. The being you are is not just in your skull; it extends into the chair that holds you, the sidewalk that carries you, the tree that drips after rain. When you soften into this moment, the borders blur. The wind in your veins rhymes with the wind between buildings. You are at once contained and connected. More and less. Bigger and smaller. A human-scale mystery.

None of this excuses harm, numbs responsibility, or denies the usefulness of goals. You can study, train, apologize, grow, and still refuse to despise who you are. You can love your future without abandoning your present. In fact, tenderness toward the present is the ground that future you will stand on. Scorched earth doesn’t grow much.

If you need a place to start, begin with this ridiculously simple ritual. Breathe out. Feel where your body touches the world. Let one muscle unclench, even if it’s just your tongue or the space between your eyebrows. Notice what’s here. Say, “This, too.” If you want, add a small, almost-smile—not a performance, just a humane tilt. Then continue your day. Emails remain. Dishes remain. But you’ll be carrying them, not the other way around.

You don’t have to chase enlightenment down some far corridor. The door is ajar, now, wherever you are. Step through by staying put. Listen for the quiet song running through you. Touch in. Breathe out. Let go—by letting this be enough, for this one breath, and then the next.

Julie O’Hara

THANK YOU for reading my work. I am a global nomad/permanent traveler, or Coddiwombler, if you will, and I move from place to place about every three months. I am currently in Chile and from there, who knows – probably Argentina? I enjoy writing articles, stories, songs and poems about life, spirituality and my travels. You can find my songs linked below. Feel free to like and subscribe on any of the platforms. And if you are inspired to, tips are always appreciated, but not necessary. I just like sharing.

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