You Are the Sky (Midlife Edition)

You Are the Sky (Midlife Edition)

“You are the sky. Everything else — it’s just the weather.”
— Pema Chödrön

There was a time when I thought loving myself meant constantly working on myself. Watching my thoughts. Correcting my inner critic. Trying to be kinder, gentler, better.

What I understand now is simpler — and harder.

Loving yourself isn’t something you do.
It’s something that becomes possible when your system feels safe enough to stay present.

Midlife has a way of stripping away the illusion that we can out-think our pain. Hormonal shifts, health challenges, losses, and fatigue make it harder to “stay positive” — and that’s not a failure. It’s information.

The work becomes less about fixing the weather and more about remembering that you are not the storm.

Thoughts come and go. Moods pass. The body tightens and softens.
None of it is personal. None of it defines you.

What changes everything is learning to stop abandoning yourself when the weather turns.

Not through affirmations.
Not through comparison.
But through presence.

This is not self-obsession.
This is self-relationship.

And it’s a practice that deepens — not through effort — but through willingness.

How Pema Chödrön Quietly Shaped My Healing

There was a season of my life when Pema Chödrön’s words felt like oxygen.

I didn’t come to her teachings because life was going well. I came because things had fallen apart — internally first, then physically. I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and trying desperately to make sense of pain without turning against myself.

One line of hers stayed with me more than any other:

“You are the sky. Everything else — it’s just the weather.”

At the time, that teaching didn’t feel comforting.
It felt radical.

Because I was identifying with the storm.

The anxiety.
The fatigue.
The racing thoughts.
The sense that something was wrong with me.

Pema’s work didn’t ask me to fix any of it. She didn’t offer a way out. She offered a way to stay — without collapsing into self-judgment or needing the experience to be different.

That distinction changed everything.

Instead of asking, “How do I get rid of this?”
I began asking, “Can I stay present without abandoning myself?”

That shift became foundational.

Over time, as my health journey unfolded — through nervous system crashes, autoimmune symptoms, and the deep humility that midlife brings — I realized that the sky-and-weather metaphor wasn’t spiritual poetry. It was physiology.

The body, like the mind, moves through states.
Inflammation rises and falls.
Hormones surge and recede.
Energy contracts and expands.

None of it defines who we are.

What causes suffering isn’t the weather — it’s mistaking it for the sky.

Pema’s teachings helped me learn how to sit with discomfort without turning it into a personal failure. They taught me that compassion isn’t something you manufacture — it’s what naturally arises when you stop fighting reality.

Years later, I no longer reach for her books the way I once did. Not because the wisdom stopped being true — but because it’s woven into how I live now. Into how I listen to my body. Into how I meet symptoms, fear, and uncertainty.

Those teachings didn’t heal me on their own.
But they taught me how not to make things worse.

And sometimes, that’s the most powerful kind of medicine there is.