I believe that much of our basic suffering in life lives in the unseen, unfelt parts of our psyche, the under-currents of fear and deficiency that we avoid seeing and feeling. We often wall off our feelings of deficiency and develop strategies to cover them over. And we begin to focus our awareness on how we think we look to others and making sure “we look good”. While there are many dangers in the world what we fear, what we fear most is often highly personal. Commonly we have a fear of failure, a fear of our own deficiency, a fear of making mistakes or of looking bad.
In other words we think we need to do more and try harder to be okay, to be accepted.
Unfortunately all of the covering over keeps us from what we want most in life—to connect authentically with others and to love and feel loved for who we are.
As we wake up and allow ourselves to see our true selves and accept our true selves we become more transparent. And we begin to experience real joy.
The Joy in Getting Real
If you look around you can find countless books, podcasts, and classes in self-improvement. I would like to suggest that you don’t need to endlessly seek to become better. Joy lives in self-honesty and self-acceptance.
In meditation I am learning to notice my thoughts and accept and allow them to be as they are. When I notice myself getting lost in thoughts during meditation whether they are happy, critical or fearful, I whisper to myself, “Forgiven,” and allow whatever is, to simply be there. I focus once again on my breath and continue my meditation. In addition, meditation teacher, Tara Brach, offers the phrase, “I consent,” for those thoughts and feelings that we consider wrong.
Remove the veils so I might see what is really happening here so that I can see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears.
— Elizabeth Lesser
One of the things that I began noticing when I started to meditate, was that my thoughts often swirled around a kind of rehearsal for or a re-hashing of life. The words, “I should have said,” or “what if?” filled my ruminations.
The Trance of Not Enoughness
I remember that as a child I performed on the front lawn when I saw a car driving down the gravel road that went past our farm. Even at a young age I craved attention; I wanted to be special. One time as a young adolescent I was pretending in my mind to be playing a part in a play. As I dramatically acted out the scene, alone in the kitchen, my father walked into the room. Immediately I stopped my role-play. He didn’t ask me what I was doing. I didn’t tell him. As I look back I realize that this was the kind of collusion that went on in our family. Disapproval and discomfort were often expressed through silence. It could have been a funny moment had we both met the moment openly of my acting a part in the kitchen. Instead it became a moment of shame for me. “What must Dad be thinking?” I wondered, filled with embarrassment.
We need both radical self honesty in investigating our thoughts of the heart and radical self acceptance. Without the self acceptance we cannot bear to be honest with ourselves.
By naming things out loud we give ourselves space to navigate difficult experiences in our lives. You can say, “This is what’s happening and it’s really okay.” Or when you’re in pain or suffering you can comfort yourself, “I’m sorry for all the suffering that’s going on and I love you.”
Space for Love
We need space for forgiving, tender loving-kindness and honestly holding ourselves with compassion and love. The biggest challenge to our own self-honesty is the belief in our own badness. Any judgment, any perfectionism takes us away from seeing clearly what is.
Allow
There is no controlling life.
Try corralling a lightning bolt,
containing a tornado. Dam a
stream and it will create a new
channel. Resist, and the tide
will sweep you off your feet.
Allow, and grace will carry
you to higher ground. The only
safety lies in letting it all in –
the wild and the weak; fear,
fantasies, failures and success.
When loss rips off the doors of
the heart, or sadness veils your
vision with despair, practice
becomes simply bearing the truth.
In the choice to let go of your
known way of being, the whole
world is revealed to your new eyes.— Danna Faulds
I suggest that you let go of your endless doing, blaming, and judging and work on simply saying, “Forgiven,” every time you notice a self-critical thought. Settle in to what is here now, feel each moment, notice how the world reveals itself to you, how alive you feel. In any moment of blame you don’t have access to the place of aliveness within yourself that is asking for attention.
True joy is in getting real, in accessing our internal place of aliveness interacting with the universe’s aliveness. If we cover our feelings of deficiency we also cover the love, creativity and beauty that is our essence.
May you walk in beauty.
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