I am wondering this morning whether creating an intention to Be, to Be Me, deciding to fully express myself, to be creative, to follow my inspiration, is not just another way my mind seduces me into thinking that I am freeing myself up when all along I am being imprisoned again in another guise?
What if being ourselves is simply about what Life wants to express through us? Appearing as character, personality, individuality …
And also as emotions, problems, addictions and fears…
But without any conscious effort on our part?
What if we stopped talking about ego and Source, little mind or Universal Mind and just stepped into the flow of Life?
Because aren’t we all this anyway? Aren’t we already free but only our thinking makes us think we are not?
If we took away our thoughts about it we could just BE.
As we are.
Right now.
However that shows up.
Even if that is stepping into mind to question what I am saying doesn’t need questioning!
As I stop listening to my limiting thoughts and act only on inspiration, on what moves me in each moment, I am becoming aware of some very subtle but profound shifts in my way of being in the world…
I
think I may have talked before on this blog about my need to keep a visual record of my life – of personal journal entries, photographs, copies of art I have done, insights I have had, information from books that have resonated with me etc. Sometimes I become obsessed with it, as if holding on to it all will give me some security, some safety when I need it. A guarantee that I can answer either my own or someone else’s questions. All I would need to do, in this hypothetical situation, would be to look it up. And if it was written down, recorded in detail, I could remind myself of it when I had forgotten yet again how to live my life.
Until now I have been unable to let go of thinking that all I needed to do was amass enough information or read enough books enough times for the content to sink in. I wasn’t consciously aware of this need, I just thought it was the way life worked. Worked being the operative word. Work hard, work at it, work your way – and you will be alright.
But now I can see how utterly limiting it is. Because it’s second hand, is never fresh, and is always a direct result of someone else’s experience rather than my own. I’m not saying that it’s not helpful or interesting to read accounts of other peoples’ experiences, or to look up something that may help in certain situations, but as a way of being in the world it’s living vicariously rather than feeling and knowing directly from one’s own viewpoint and history.
And from the limitless well of information of Life itself, accessed by being present to all that is real and raw in each moment.
I can see that in any given situation I will always have what I need to ‘answer’ what is being asked of me. Whether that is words to someone in distress, solutions to a problem, or knowing what next step to take or what course to follow.
And that is so incredibly freeing! To not have to metaphorically haul a trolley full of outdated information and resources everywhere I go lest I need to retrieve the relevant sentence or concept or anecdote.
So as I act on intuition and impulse my behaviour appears to be chaotic and disordered. I feel totally out of control. I can no longer see the bigger picture, (which ironically never was the bigger picture but just my limited mind’s eye viewpoint!) and I don’t seem to be able to join the dots anymore. I am simply doing what I feel like doing and the rest seems to be taking care of itself.
I can see that Life doesn’t work in a linear pattern of ‘do x and y will appear’ or ‘follow Step One with Step Two’.
And it means that I can’t do anything wrong!
This is all quite difficult for me to explain, and may not make much sense.
But then nothing is making much sense for me at the moment.
Yet it’s a wonderful place to be!
About a year ago I found myself writing a letter to my father expressing my anger and hurt at how he had treated me as a child. I did it following a session with a homeopath who told me that the continual anger I was feeling needed to be directed to its source in order for it to be healed. It didn’t feel right to me but because of the vulnerable state I was in I was easily persuaded that it would be to my benefit.
In the letter I ranted about all the things that my father had done to me, and all the things that he hadn’t done to/for me. And then I said I wasn’t blaming him. That I didn’t expect any apologies or any explanations. That he didn’t have to answer to any of it…
Did I feel better?
Absolutely not!
I thought that by detailing all my criticisms I would feel heard. That having expressed how I felt I could release all the vitriole and venom that I had held in all these years.
But in actuality I felt worse.
My father left a message to say that he wouldn’t answer every point, but that things did need to be said. To this day he has not responded….
I had put it out there and got nothing back. I was left with it just hanging there, feeling even more unheard.
This morning I woke knowing that something had changed in me, that the blame I held for him had gone. In its place was a softness, an understanding that he really was only doing the best he could given his own upbringing and experiences. I know this is a cliché, and one which I have used in the past to negate my own feelings, but today I really know it to be so.
And with it I have a softness for myself too. One that sees that I was only doing the best I knew how when I wrote the letter, that it came from the best of intentions however misguided it may have seemed at the time.
And more importantly I now realise that I am the one who has to witness any sadness and fear and pain that I feel. I can be the space for all those parts of myself that need to be welcomed in and held like a young child. I don’ t have to do anything with them. By simply acknowledging them, sitting with them, I can give to myself what I was seeking from outside and which I would never truly find.
I have always had a problem with forgiveness. To my mind if you try to forgive someone it means that you have to go against what you’re actually feeling. It’s like a child being told to say sorry to a playmate they’ve hurt when they don’t actually feel sorry. They give the apology begrudgingly, and this is also how it is received.
But when you have actually forgiven someone, when there is no longer any residue in your mind or your heart, there is nothing to forgive….
So today I will write a very different note to my father…