Monthly Archives: May 2021

Our Truest Nature Is Our Greatest Contribution

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In a woman’s circle well over a year ago, I was asking for guidance around how to be of service in a world gone mad with fear. I drew the card “Healing.” The instructions were to “Reconnect to My True Nature.” This was not the answer I expected, or even wanted. I was looking for something along the lines of an outer effort. Something that I could do. Something that could be seen, known, and quantified.

And yet, the guidance was profound.

I have come back to this one instruction over and over again because something deep inside me knew it was true. But it hasn’t always been easy. At times it has uplifted me, and at times it has smashed me into my own misconceptions; deeply humbling me and forcing me to rethink what it means to contribute to the world.

It can feel so much easier, nobler even, to send our energy and attention out to what needs fixing or saving in the world. Out to how we are supposed to be or show up according to someone else. How it is that we are to demonstrate our caring nature by behaving in prescribed ways. But if we are all to truly heal, it can only come in the form of reconnecting to our own selves. This is different than doing things for other’s health and well-being, and instead is a recognition that the single most powerful thing we will ever do for another is to take full, personal responsibility for how we show up in the world. For it is only in knowing and claiming our own Nature, that which keeps us healthy and that which does not, that we come to truly and genuinely contribute to the world.

Otherwise, we add to the chaos, the co-dependent ways of relating, and the polarizations and politicized debates we find ourselves in. Everything that will never be healed by focusing on what is outside of us.

Health and healing are fundamental to our truest Nature. As a matter of fact, it is all unbelievably simple. This is contrary to the messages we receive in the modern world that our well-being is complicated, requiring experts and things to buy. Over and over we receive the message that it is all beyond us and best left in the hands of another. But that is not how our truest Nature works. Despite the contortions and distortions of the modern day mind and what is being sold to us, our very own healing Nature is built into us. We have only to clear the illusions and confusions that get in the way of a clear connection. Not easy to do, but oh so very satisfying, and so desperately, desperately needed by All.

Would it not be the single greatest blessing in all the world if out of the past time period came a return to what is true around human health? A kind of deep inner knowing that can only come from becoming more completely accountable to the choices you make every day. For everything. From what goes into your body, to what goes into your mind.

Where could you begin? If in doubt, what could your body absolutely not survive without? Think back to times before there were the technologies, the experts, the junk foods, social media, insane schedules, things being sold to us, and anything else that takes us away from the Truth of who we are and what we really need. Start there.

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The Mind

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“How does imagining new possibilities affect realities in the present?”

I read this and weep. It saddens to me want something so much at times but still be ensnared by the ping pong match in my own mind. The back and forth between what I know is possible for all of us, and the old conditioned need to focus on, and fight against, what is not working. What I do not want. What lacks any possibility whatsoever; standing purely in the service of what came before.

It takes energy and determination to be the author of your own Life. To draw a line in the sand that says “I will no longer be party to what is broken.” Not in my own mind. And not in connection with others and the world. Sound straightforward? It is. But oh my goodness how hard it is to put into action. To untangle from all of the beliefs and the societal pressures that say “This is how it must be.” This is all you can expect. Nothing else is possible.

Even though I forget every day, there is one thing that I know to be true. It takes a decision. A big one. A hard and fast commitment to learning the ins and outs of your own mind. To challenge what you take for granted, and to be open to new perspectives. For starters, what is it that you are agreeing to that you would best not agree to? Either with yourself or with the world. This is so worth your time. For what you agree to in any domain of your life is the place from which all else flows. Your happiness. Your health. Your very own birthing of something you think you cannot be, but must. And it all comes down to a choice.

To decide your own mind is to choose to be with yourself and with Life through it all, while simultaneously recognizing that you do not have to believe everything you think. Or are told. That in any moment you can make another choice. You can step out of who you have been and into the possibility of who you are becoming. Into a present moment reality that says “Yes, this is where I most belong. This is where Truth lives.”

But to come to know this place, in effect, to be the author of your own mind, is to ask yourself over and over and over again, “Why am I doing/choosing/believing this?” And then, when you get your answer, the obvious, what-you-would-say-to-anyone response, try it again. This time, set aside all the socially condoned responses, the need to please, the fears around how this makes you look, while asking again, “Why am I really doing this?”

To open to new realities requires the possibility that you got it all wrong. Can you live with that? 

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Warfare

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I don’t buy food with chemicals in them. We do not spray any chemicals on our grass, fruit trees or garden. I do not put chemicals inside or on the outside of my body. But yesterday, I found myself within the stroke of a pen to agree to cover the outside of my house with chemical toxins. Why?

Wasps. Always the wasps with me.

I have such a live and let live attitude outside of them. Even with the ticks. But when it comes to wasps, I see red. I want to annihilate them. I hate them. And I look for every chance I get to seek out their presence as a kind of affront to me and my life. How they are ruining it for me. How scary and dangerous they are.

They have no idea of course that I feel this way. But if they did, I just wish they would know how uncomfortable I am and be different. Not so waspish. Not so “sting first and ask questions later.” Not so ugly with that weird thing hanging down. Not so swarmy and floaty around the front of my house. Or in the places where I want to be outside and not feel like I am in the middle of a war.

In the midst of all of this, I lose myself. Enough to have a pest control company come to my home. Truly, nothing could be further from the truth of who I am and what I believe. Caught up in my feelings, I just wanted them gone and I did not care what it took. I think the hardest thing of all is to stand in relation to another being (human, insect or animal) whose very behavior you do not understand. Or hate. Or are afraid of. And still say “yes” to their right to be here. To their right to live as they see fit. To move as they move. To choose as they choose.

I know, but what about how it impacts me, might be what a part of your mind is thinking. To that part I would say, open up your perspective to include more than just you and your particular beliefs. Root out the fears you hold about something or someone that is different than you. Especially when that difference brings up fears in you around how your life will be affected.

In the end, I did not sign the contract. Why? Because in the midst of talking this out further, suddenly the knowing that I was going to harm other forms of life, like the honey bees we are keeping, was enough to stop me cold in my tracks. Was enough to bring me to my senses. And therein lies a Truth. We cannot eradicate Life on any level without harming all Life. We cannot coerce living beings into being what they are not, or doing what we want them to do, just to make ourselves comfortable, without bringing great harm to All.

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Weighing In

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For more than a year, I have been taking a very deep, at times painful and at times empowering, journey into my own unconscious. Specifically, being with old, long-standing beliefs around who I feel I need to be for others. It has been eye-opening and humbling. And it has been sad. Deeply sad. It has been downright grief-filled in a way that bypasses any thoughts or stories I might have about what is going on, and instead, expresses itself throughout my entire body in a way that feels like every single cell in my being is relentlessly sobbing.

I have come to know this experience as a state of mourning. A state that I now know intimately, having grown accustomed to its presence such that when it shows up I no longer fight it. Instead, I let it wash through me when I can. I cry it out when I need to. And I give myself lots of TLC in between. Sometimes it stays for days. My last go around was for more than a week. It feels like someone I love has died, but that now I must go on. Some days are better than others. But always, either near or far, it is running in the background.

What has brought me to the place of such heart-break? Witnessing within myself, while watching it unfold in the world, a belief system that says, “Do everything you can to make sure you are never wrong in the mind of another.”

I will never be able to explain here all of the nuances, all of the devastation, all of the ways I have distorted who I am to make sure no one thinks I am doing anything wrong. Suffice to say, it goes deep, and it is pervasive. It is soul-crushing and it is life-wasting. It is maddening and it is deadening. And it is something we are doing now to each other en mass.

I suppose I should not be surprised. For years, we have been being primed for this. For years we have been creating a model of weighing in on each others “wrongness” and “rightness” across social media platforms. We have made it desirable, acceptable, and even required, that we weigh in on each others lives. That we rate one another. That we desperately put ourselves out there looking for others to tell us how we are doing. Begging for the answer to Am I right or am I wrong in your eyes? Do you approve or disapprove of me?

Please, please weigh in on how I am doing, and I will change myself accordingly.

Likely there has always, or at least for a very long time (probably when we acquired language), been opinions offered up by other people about us. Been fears inside each of us around being accused of wrong doing by another. Judgment, gossip and criticism used to mold and manipulate us to conform. Ways that we have been overtly and covertly coerced and shamed into doing things according to someone else’s agenda. Or else. But up until this time period in history, there was always a limitation to the scope, reach, power, pervasiveness and level of pressure that could be applied against us.

No more. There is virtually no end now in terms of how we can make each other wrong. How we can use the technologies to bend people to our will. Sadly, we have been going willingly. As a matter of fact, even though social media leaves us depressed, lonely, disconnected and suicidal, we can’t seem to get enough of looking outside of ourselves to determine who we are, and whether or not we are okay. Whether or not we get to be here. Whether or not we are an asset or a liability to the world.

Enter 2020. A year that not only sacred us all to death-but one that has both accelerated and birthed the narrative that says, “I have the right to weigh in on what you do. And if you do not subscribe to my version, you are less than, wrong, a danger.” Having grown accustomed, expectant even, of having our lives weighed in on by another through the platforms of social media, we are primed now to believe that we owe it to one another to be told what to do and how to feel.

This is a dark and troubling road to walk down. One that traps us in a never-ending hell where we believe that it is only by the approval of another that we are valuable, and “allowed” to safely be here. I will you from first hand experience, if you walk down this road unaware, you will not only waste your life by agreeing to all of the wrongs things, you will have created the path to the most wrong you will ever go on to create in our world.

Watch your mind. Listen closely to the explanations you are giving about yourself and your behavior. You may notice this in real conversations or in the imagined ones you have in your own mind when you are defending yourself. Listen to, and feel for, the narrative you have about your own wrongness. Watch the way you shift yourself in conversations when you sense, or imagine, another’s disapproval.

We are wired to herd together. To belong to one another. This sets us up to bond over what others expect of us. But that should never, ever, come at the expense of your healthy expression or your innate, felt sense of your own goodness and value. Nor should you ever acquiesce to a demand that comes from a sick herd. This is a tricky one and can only be ascertained by experiencing yourself beyond the demands of the group. This one place alone may be the hardest thing you will ever do. But in so doing, you will live and experience joy in who you are, instead of mourning what you have allowed yourself to become.

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