Hello, and welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscarra, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about why you do not have to be good.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

So, I'm going to read you a Mary Oliver poem. It's a popular one, so you may have heard of it, but even if you have, see if you can hear it with beginner's mind, and whether you have heard it or not.

See if you can really feel the sentiment of this and what it connects you to in yourself, especially this first line, you do not have to be good.

See if you can feel what that might be pointing to and what that might mean for you.

Okay, you do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile, the wild geese high in the clean blue air are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over, announcing your place in the family of things.

I think we exert a lot of psychological and emotional energy trying to be good and not in the simplistic idea of just trying to do the good thing, but trying to be right, trying to put on a good face, trying to fit in, trying to meet the status quo, trying to be good.

There's space for some of this, of course, but I think there's a lot more space for connecting to that soft animal of your body and starting to listen to what is it saying, what is it love, what does it want to connect you to.

So maybe today you spend a little bit of time stepping out of your ideas and strivings of what it means to be and trying to be good and instead just listen, listen to your body, see what it's saying, see what it wants to express and practice reconnecting to that and maybe even following it.

Thank you for your practice, I'll talk to you soon and until then take care.