I’m undergoing a change of epic proportions…I’m happy.
After many years of not knowing who I was, and therefore looking outside of myself to get the answer to that question…..leading to choosing to be in community with others that were not a great match for me, I am finally finding myself very at home.
I am seeing now that I was getting closer to being with people that were an accurate reflection of my authentic self. Back in 2001, after 9-11, when I got a very clear message to stop hiding out as a healer, I attracted some very special people. Just a handful, but notably important and unusual nonetheless. Then we took off for the long journey into the hinterlands.
Now, in 2009, I am in the right place at the right time, and have let go of so much programmed thinking, thus uncovering my authentic self. And, this bright shiny flower wants to PLAY.
This has led me to think a lot about the ways in which human beings become indoctrinated into being someone they are not.
Reflecting on how I felt as a small child (which I remember as if it were yesterday-I hear that lots of people don’t remember their childhoods, and I find that sad), I knew who I was. I was independent, capable, resilient, curious, and observant. I remember feeling these things about myself. I believe that I was feeling my soul, my essence at a core level. It was only after I got reflections from people in power that those things were undesirable that I started to feel bad about myself, like who I was at the core was a bad person. So I started to doubt, and that consistent undermining of my concept of self cost me a pretty penny.
What I’m discovering is that the more I have been willing to be open to self examination…even when painful or unflattering…the more able to recognize the constructs that I internalized due to my desire to please and to my desire to survive in the nuthouse. And when I can recognize them, then I have the opportunity to choose whether they are still a fit for me, or whether they are holding me back.
Sometimes, I will choose to alter a construct to be a better fit for me, rather than throw it out completely. Such as the construct that being polite to all people is nice. Not all people deserve my politeness, or my niceness. I have discovered at the age of 44 that some people are assholes, and that’s just the way it is. So I adapted this one to “be polite until shown the need to be otherwise.” It has been hard, but when someone treats me with disrespect, I feel more ability to stand up for myself and recognize that they are the one with the problem, not me. It feels like growing up to come to this awareness, and to consciously incorporate it into my life.
Over the years of this kind of self-examination and application, I am getting clearer and more frequent glimpses of who I was as a child. I feel the natural joy and wonder that I felt then, more and more often. I feel safer in the community I am choosing to be around, because they are the kind of people that appreciate me for who I really am.
I have a strong intention, borne of longing, to live in authentic expression of my soul. Perhaps this came out of feeling lost in the world for such a long time, searching for my real self and for permission to be her. I am learning that the permission that I need to secure is my own…I am who I am, and coming into acceptance of who I am is freeing up so much energy and happiness in my days.
Seriously, I knew that having resistance expended energy…I have been preaching that one since I went professional energy engineer in 2001. And I have made little adjustments here and there in my own energy field, choosing to surrender to flow rather than to fight it.
But this one…this big letting go of resistance to being who I am….it is freeing up so much of my chi that I can scarcely believe it. I had no idea how much of my creative juices and my, well, just sheer JOY was wrapped up in me fighting myself. And when I am fighting myself, you can bet that I am feeling defensive against the world, and projecting onto every face of reality that it is against me. Which creates it’s own stew of conflict and unhappiness.
Do you ever feel like you are up against a wall inside of yourself? Like you can’t get past that last obstacle, or through a ceiling you can’t see? That’s what I experienced, and the wall was my own resistance to being who I am….out of fear that I would not be accepted by others. Turns out it was my own acceptance that was truly needed.
What’s the worst that can happen? I found the worst that I could imagine was the unnamed fear that drove me to sell myself out was that I was afraid I would be annihilated. Killed, physically, sure…like all those lifetimes of being burned, disemboweled, beheaded, drowned, murdered in front of my children, etc. But there was a deeper fear …the annihilation of being rejected and unloved by the source of my life…my parents….. and then ultimately, God/dess. That’s the fear worse than death. To be rejected by that which made you, what could be worse than that?
My sense is that fear is the motivator for us to do something so dire as to choose to stop being who we are in favor of who someone else wants us to be. I think it’s worth examining those fears, and facing them to see if we can deal with them. Sometimes, it is about confronting what we are most afraid of, and accepting that it is something we must inevitably face, such as death. Other times, I have found that the fear is bigger than the reality, and sometimes the fear is just plain untrue.
I wonder….if folks could remember what it felt like to be a child, before all the indoctrination set in, if they could get a sense of their authentic self. Do you remember being a child? Were you self reflective? Do you remember feeling your life, what it felt like to be in the world? Who were you? What were you like? Perhaps there are clues there about your own soul, and who you really are.
I fantasize about what kind of a world this would be if we all were in loving acceptance of ourselves. Can you imagine if we were all at peace with who we are? No inner torture, no self doubt, no cutting our own self off at the knees just before we succeed…wow, what would that feel like? Would we feel the need to make war on each other? To judge each other can call each other names? To create whole institutions and organizations and religions that say the others are wrong?
And may I humbly suggest that who you really are is sooooooo perfect? That it is who you came here to be? That the world needs you just as you really are? And that if you are pretending to be someone else, you are doing us all a disservice because what we really need and want is the REAL you?
