The glow of a childhood friendship
Friendship is inarguably one of the best parts of life. I was flipping through one of my parents’ photo albums from the early 1970s and one photo stopped me in my tracks. It was taken at one of my birthday parties. A group of girls and I are clustered around a cake glowing with candles. One friend and I are leaning into each other smiling hugely mid-laugh. We are so happy to be together.
Looking at the picture immediately filled me with joy. “Rochelle Johnson,” I thought for the first time in probably more than forty years. “My lord I loved that girl.” As I kept looking, memories flooded through my mind. Running back and forth across the street from her house to mine all day long. Riding our bikes as fast as we could around the block. Trying to be quiet while we hid from our brothers. Curling up together in one of our rooms to do whatever it is that young girls do for hours.
The gifts of friendship no matter our age
What is it that makes a friendship glow like that? Is it the joy of being known? Is it the comfort of being understood whether you’re raging or overjoyed? Is it the security of knowing that you are totally accepted even when you’re a mess? Is it the easy shorthand that allows you both to break into laughter after only a fraction of a sentence? Is it the sense that together things are possible that would feel impossible on your own?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And yes.
Even better than all of these gifts that we receive from our dearest friends, is the ability to give them to our friends. To be the one who knows. To be the one who understands. To be the one who is always accepting, no matter what. To be the one who shows up to make a hard thing a little easier. Friendship makes it easy to believe that it is even better to give than to receive.
Making friends with ourselves can be really hard to do, but doing so is super important
It is easy to be kind, generous, understanding and forgiving to our friends. We love them, after all. Yet for many of us, it can be quite difficult to treat ourselves with the same friendliness. We think and say things about ourselves that we would never think, let alone say, about our friends. We hold ourselves to unforgiving standards to which we’d never hold our friends. We dismiss or ignore our needs when we would leap to meet similar needs of our friends.
And here’s the thing. Until we figure out how to become friends (or at least friendly) with ourselves, we will not be able to be the best friend we can be. Plus, we will always be a little discontented, a little unsettled, and a little adrift and apart. What we’re apart from is love. We need to sort out how to offer ourselves the same loving-kindness that we offer our friends. This takes a lot of practice.
“It’s OK, Sweetie. This is really hard for you.”
I was friends with Rochelle Johnson in those golden years of childhood before I was totally self-aware; before I’d developed an inner critic. Our friendship took root in those years before it dawns on you that you might not be good enough or that you might need to try not to embarrass yourself or that you even could embarrass yourself. In other words, I was still as close friends with myself as I was with Rochelle. This innocence gave our friendship the easy glow I glimpsed in that photo.
But, like most of us, my inner critic did develop and she can be pretty unpleasant. I’m learning to quiet her thanks (you guessed it) to the wisdom of a friend. This friend shared with me that she is learning to adopt a “sweet, grandma” inner voice when she catches herself beating herself up for a mistake. “Sweetie, this is so hard for you, isn’t it?” she thinks with an imaginary hand to her heart. Somehow this soft, loving voice is enough to shush her harsh inner critic, leaving space for her to feel accepted by herself just as she is.
This kind of easy self-acceptance – the kind that feels like I felt with Rochelle – can become a little fleeting as we grow up. Yet a yoga practice can help us to re-establish friendship with ourselves. On a yoga mat, we get opportunity after opportunity to treat ourselves with kindness (and maybe use our grandma voice) when we mess up. Off our yoga mat, we get even more chances to gently ask, “Sweetie, you’ve strayed a bit from your intentions, haven’t you?” In short, yoga and life offer countless invitations for us to be our own friend.
I’ve got a friend in me and I hope you have a friend in you
If friendships ground us, stabilize us, and help us to stay open to life’s joys and challenges, just imagine how transformative it could be to be your own friend! The wisdom of Toy Story might help you sense how comforting, hopeful and happy this could be. Go ahead, be a friend to yourself and take two minutes to listen. I promise it will make you smile. (Rochelle and I would have loved this song so much.)
And as the years go by
Our friendship will never die
You’re gonna see, it’s our destiny
You’ve got a friend in me
You’ve got a friend in me
You’ve got a friend in me
If you read my most recent essay about equanimity, you might recall that friendliness (maitri) is another of the four attitudes that we can cultivate in order to find lasting inner peace (Yoga Sutra 1.33). Whether we’re being a friend to another or to ourselves, friendliness always fills us with a clear and quiet joy.