everything is okay

Last month a beautiful friend of mine lost her job, her position being discontinued within her company. The loss of a job is deeply upsetting and all the more so with a mortgage to meet and a family to feed. She appeared to be pretty calm, yet I knew how distressing this loss was to her. I listened to her, I held her for a moment, and then I quietly and slowly said to her, "Everything is okay."

She seemed surprised, and then responded, "Everyone else is telling me 'everything will be okay...' but you are saying 'everything is okay.' " I couldn't tell if she was making a pragmatic observation or taking comfort in my words, but she was quite taken by the difference between "everything will be okay" and "everything is okay."

I said these words carefully, and lovingly, as I know some are unable to hear such a statement (and even become hurt or angry). Over the years, though, I have discovered that at all times I have a place inside of me that is always okay. No matter the circumstances, this center point is unchanged, is always present tense, and is always okay. It just is. And when we touch this point, everything going on outside us and around us seems to find a way to sort itself out (it's the stressing out that messes us up...).

Less than two weeks after our conversation, this beautiful friend wrote to tell me her company rehired her, had created a new position to keep her on staff (she didn't even know yet what her title would be). She said "I kept telling everyone you had said to me 'everything IS okay...' and now I will remember this all the time. You should write a book entitled Everything IS Okay. Thank you for the support and good energy you sent my way. You don't know how much I needed it and what a difference it made." She had taken my words and had reveled in them, breathing them and eating them and drinking them (I can't call them my words, for she made them her own).

For whatever you are suffering, I sorrow for your sorrow. But experiences are just that...experiences. And know this, that at the center of it all, the real you is okay.

If you want to practice this as a meditation, be sure to bring the words into the feeling part of your being (and not simply say the words). And you, too, will know that everything is okay.

photography by permission
cindy lee jones