Muscular Hope

A few nights ago, I sat out on my balcony with a front row seat to the crescent Moon and Venus hanging gracefully in the sky. It had been a tumultuous week, and I was feeling pretty hopeless in dealing with the fallout of a situation beyond my control. Soaking in that peaceful night sky brought such relief. It was a reminder that despite our human-made turmoil, I am part of a much bigger story — a universe of mystery, beauty, and possibility.

As I let myself feel my disappointment rather than fighting it, something shifted. I offered the whole situation up to that vastness and felt myself soften. There was tenderness in remembering how small I am in the face of such magnificence. Not small in a diminishing way, but in a liberating one: none of us can have it all figured out. Sometimes, despite our best intentions, things don't unfold as we had hoped. In that acceptance, there was also a kind of mercy — permission to stop carrying what wasn't mine to carry. And with it, space for hope to return.

We often think of hope as a noun — something we find or possess. But it might be more useful empowering to consider that hope is also a verb: a state we actively cultivate. When hope becomes something you do rather than something you have, it frees you to act even when you feel hopeless. I think of it as a kind of muscular hope — an inner capacity we can strengthen through practice, through our choices, and through our actions.

Mythologist Michael Meade speaks of two levels of hope. The first is the ordinary kind — our wishes and desires, how we long for things to unfold. It holds expectation and anticipation that can leave us disappointed when things don't go as we wanted. But it is often in that disappointment that we discover a second, more enduring kind of hope that remains when everything else falls away.

This is the hope that opens up to us in the spaciousness we touch in meditation. Sat — the yogic quality of unchanging truth — describes an eternal essence within us, and it is here that this more muscular hope resides. Unlike surface-level hope, it doesn't depend on things working out the way we want, our desires being fulfilled, or any certainty about the future. It comes from trusting that we are part of something much greater than our individual selves.

It is built through practice: in returning again and again to that unchanging ground of being as a reliable source of renewal, belonging, and support. When the mind quiets and we settle into that abiding awareness, it catches and holds us. And it is from this inner sense of connection — sensing ourselves as part of a larger flow — that this deeper hope can arise.

That night on my balcony, the problems didn't disappear, but opening to that awareness freed me from the grip of the situation and gave me the clarity and perspective to move forward.

This is why practice matters — it returns us to that deeper essence within ourselves, clearing frustration and reminding us that we can trust the deeper current of our lives. We may not have it all figured out, but we might find we no longer need to.