Let yourself see. Let yourself be.

On recognizing and breaking out of self-imposed limits

As I write this, I sit outside with the wind announcing itself through the trees’ rustling leaves while tiny, icy raindrops fall on my skin, reminding me of my mission: to evoke and invoke the world’s aliveness. 

Now I am swimming in the depths of watery tenderness thinking, “maybe I should just share that idea from a couple weeks ago. Then, at least I’d be showing up and offering something.” I recognize my fear of being seen speaking.

Then, I pause and feel a surge of tears coming and I remember: it’s okay - it’s the safest place to be - it’s necessary - to be human and messy. And that’s the moment’s message. Plus, if I’m navigating these waters right now leading up to the eclipse - probably some of you are, too. So this transmission will be more useful. 

In the depths of emotional processing it can be easy to forget the mission beneath everything. The foundations we’ve been building. The strength we’ve been cultivating. Our love. Our awareness. Our support system. 

It can be easy to forget all the tools at our disposal. 

It can be easy to dismiss them as useless when we feel desperate for someone to pick us up and do it all for us or make it go away - the challenge, that is. 

But that’s the thing. The whole point of the lives we’re gifted with: 

The challenge and growing through it. 

The challenge is what we wanted, when we came here, to Earth.

The challenge itself is what we’re really desperate for.

We came to experience, to learn, to share, to connect, and ultimately to become the embodiment of our experiences through these brilliant bodies. 

We did not come to sit and watch from the edges of our lives, while all the world goes on spinning.

Mary Oliver says this:

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 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.

•••••••••

How do we arrive at this recognition?
How do we embrace the challenge of living?
How do we air our suffering when it feels like we are drowning in it?

First: we must observe without judging. Recognize what is present and stop resisting. 

Judgment leads to fragmentation - right and wrong, good and bad, “I shouldn’t feel this.” “This shouldn’t be happening.” 

We must break the binaries that hold us captive to our suffering.

If we wish to move forward, the next step is this:

Feel the mother fucking feelings. Remove expectations. Cry. Laugh. Scream. Stomp. Be angry. Be tender. Be WITH it - the wave that is coursing. Get into the center and fire breathe it through your body. We are forces to be reckoned with it. Feeling our feelings reminds us of this. 

It reminds us, too, that though in the moment it may seem like life is going to end, it isn’t.

Each emotion is a passing wave if you let it be. 

Pause. Breathe. Recognize what is. Accept it. Let it in. And keep letting it in. Let it exhaust you, the process, until you have no reason to fight it. You’re alive. You moved through it. You’re SAFE.

Next comes the investigation - through observation, not judgment. 

Notice if your mind is running wild with narratives about what this all means. Then, open your mind to exploring the notion that your experience doesn’t mean anything about you, your worth, your ability, until you start telling a story about it.

Notice that, though perhaps the story hasn’t stopped running (yet), you don’t need to identify with it. You don’t need to become it over and over again. Open to the experience, and stay open. Hold the pose. You do not need to contract back into enslavement after a big opening. And even if you do, you don’t need to judge yourself for it. Once you notice, Forgive. Let go. Begin again. 

Continue experiencing.

Do you sometimes get deja vu of the same confounding experience? “If I know I am not actually a terrible, worthless wreck, why does this keep happening? Why do I keep finding myself down in the dirt, burying my experience?”

This happens because we don’t hold the pose. We let our awareness contract again, into the limiting narratives. We wrap ourselves back into habit.

We can only process with the tools we give ourselves access to. One of those tools is mindset.

Victim mindset is the tool many of us perceive our lives through. It causes cognitive dissonance and it looks like this: 

You believe burying the “unacceptable” experiences is the only way to navigate life. So, when you brush up against an experience you believe is unacceptable (which really means unSAFE), you learn to resist it. But it doesn’t go anywhere. It keeps coming back to greet you. The experience begs for your attention with more and more aggression the more you push it away. This is a limiting belief system at play.

Sam Harris says this: “You are not who you think you are, but you are bound to be whoever you think you are.”

You are not your stories or your emotions. To come to this recognition, you must be IN the messiness. You must experience the safety of your mess. You must learn to expand through the experience - to ask for MORE, not less. To be with the pain, just as with the pleasure, to tell yourself it’s safe, to soothe rather than punish. 

You need not allow a limited belief system to pull you back into it if you consciously choose to expand your awareness beyond it. This is a crucial part of the process of freeing your mind and body from self-imposed limits. Once you are aware of the limits you chose, you must choose to no longer impose them. You must fight the comfort of the insidious and familiar restrictions.   

Here, we are navigating the messiness of the underground network. Shadow work. The repressed. The discarded. The shamed. The forgotten. The everything you need to move through to be able to love yourself, actually. 

You don’t have to stay stuck on the surface, replaying the same stories and emotions over and over again. That’s just a product of habitual thinking. Of what we *believe* is safe. 

However; it is not safe to believe everything you think. 

Cognitive dissonance; you, believing your experience shouldn’t be happening, is exactly what keeps you on the edge of it, seemingly at its will, a victim stuck in an endless loop of painful resistance.

“Why is this happening to me again?” A victim might ask.

But you, my dear, recognize you asked for it. You, expansive creature, know this is your lesson to learn.

As you learn, remember this: 

Everything is here for you. 

The world is conspiring to shower you with blessings. 

Nothing is wrong with your experience. 

There is no need to blind yourself to it. 

Observation, not judgement.

Forgiveness, not resistance.

You can always begin again.

You can always expand.

Everything you resist comes back to see you again with the equal force of your avoidance. 

Your emotional experience is exactly what you need to feel through and let go of to become a more useful, grounded, connected expression of you. 

We must clear space if we wish to be able to receive something different. A different experience, one we play a role in. One we co-create.

Letting go is a visceral experience. You must allow yourself to be there. To take a deeper breath into your belly. To feel your heart expanding out of your chest. To be willing to connect, to be seen, to be embraced, to be honest, to be loved, actually. 

Once we recognize, accept and investigate what is happening in our mental and emotional bodies without judgment, once we identify the resistance and embrace what is beneath it, we give ourselves agency to experience what is. We no longer need to identify with the old narrative just to fill the space. 

Space is a gift. 

With a spacious, loving awareness, it becomes a bit easier to see the truth of our experience. Once our field of vision isn’t clouded by the emotional debris we were resisting letting go of (through feeling), seeing reality can happen.

See?

You have the power to clear the way by navigating through the seeming darkness of not knowing - through the trials of your own challenges. Remember the phrase “the only way out is through”?

From this recognition, it is clear: accepting the challenge of being human is the most important step in becoming better equipped to navigate the process that never ends. Being human is the process of becoming more useful, more able to support your own growth and the growth of your community. More able to see what you need - what actions need be enlisted as ritual, and what are just bad habits. This is the work to focus on.

Do you see that often, for growth to happen, all we need is to shift our focus from our self-imposed victimhood, to noticing everything that’s going right for us?

What are you grateful for? 

This path of inquiry might well lead you back to your strength. Might well offer you a perspective you’d forgotten existed within the watery depths of challenging emotions. 

It’s okay. It’s safe. To feel this way is human. You’re learning to navigate. The journey is never complete. So remember gratitude along the way, especially through your greatest challenges, when it may be most tempting to think the world is working against you. It’s not.

The world is conspiring in your favor. Your growth is important. The world is here to serve you. What are you asking of it? What are you calling in? What story are you telling? 

You are a creator whether you are conscious of it or not. So wake up! 

Who, and what are you connected with? And why? What are you building? What is your mission? What are you serving through your transmission?

Ask the questions, then go out and live them.