When I was younger, not sure what to wrap myself around and grow, I listened to the cacophony of different voices inside and couldn't figure out how to reconcile them all. They all seemed so different from each other, these different parts of me. I couldn't hold this tension, this feeling that inside me were many different people. I couldn't see how to bring them all together. And so, I flattened parts of me into one.
Some of this was also because I conformed and gave in to the loud voices outside. But some of it was just to quickly arrive at a solution, to figure out what exactly I was supposed to be. The stress of not knowing, not having that clarity felt terrifying.
In the past few months, some changes have been afoot. I have started dancing again, something that defines my essence more than anything else. I have been getting in touch with my real feelings beyond the haze of being nice, and started gaining a felt sense of how I used to feel before getting other people's approval became such a driver.
The word "Authenticity" has been dancing in my consciousness, coming up from the depths of my own self and vibrating in the stories I am finding around me. Dipping through the lovely Julia Cameron's book The Vein of Gold, I chanced upon a little exercise that speaks to me right now.
It might speak to you as well, if you are feeling some cracks. You are noticing the difference between the official version of who you are and who you really are. Maybe you are feeling fragile too, and just a little crazy. You are changing your moves and that feels uncomfortable and unsafe.
I hope we both safely land on the shore on the other side. Maybe this exercise can be part of your raft. It goes like this. Number a piece of paper from one to twenty. Then fill out the sentence, "On the one hand, I'd love to ....."; on the other hand, I'd love to ....." twenty times.
This feels like freedom, a declaration of my different loves, and an invitation to stretch what all encompasses me. Too often, I have said, "I'm not the kind of person to..." "I'm not the kind of person" puts a label on me, puts me into a small box, makes my options limited.
I'm not the kind of person is also a way of making an excuse, of keeping myself stagnant. I am not the kind of person who questions other people. I'm not the kind of person who changes her definition of giving. I am not the kind of person who says No. I am not the kind of person who can confront and challenge when someone confronts and challenges me.
But maybe I am. Maybe I can be. On the one hand, I'd love to please everyone. On the other hand, I'd love to say No without feeling guilty. On the one hand, I'd love to give to others. On the other hand, I'd love to claim all my time for myself and give to myself for a change. On the one hand, I'd love to fit in and be harmonious. On the other, I'd love to stand out and reveal who I am.
On a lighter note, on the one hand, I'd love to experiment with the way I dress. On the other hand, I'd love to hone in on my own style. On the one hand, I'd love to wear high heels. On the other hand, I would love to dress down.
It's freeing to feel a possibility of different ways of being co-existing. I love heels. I love comfort. I love to please people. But too much pleasing has been killing me. I also love to please myself. This feels like lying beneath a very large expansive fabric, feeling that I can expand the ways in which I respond, that I don't need to stay within some arbitrary lines I drew for myself.
Here's what my beloved Julia says about the exercise and what it can do. "Do you feel the stretching of your consciousness as you embrace apparent opposites? Can you see that you can encompass more emotional range than you may have realized?" Can you see that? Can you? I have some sense of it. I hope to see it more, to see that I can be nice and good and strong and fierce and militant and peaceful.
All these different things can live inside me and be accessible to me, and I can be more expansive and less boxed in. I can be a little bigger than I have been till now.
Making decisions has been hard for me. I have gotten better at it, but I am still searching for ways to decide that feel right. I know that too much information can paralyze me, leaving me sorting through options. Is this better? Someone else is doing that. Should I do that as well? What is right for me?
One big piece of this struggling to decide is struggling to listen to the voice inside. It seems like there are too many clamoring voices. How do I know which voice is an intuitive nudge and which one is just wishful thinking? I need to find a way to get to that place of awareness where that answer becomes clear.
So, I have been reading about intuition and how to allow it to surface. One interesting exercise that I have come across is called Open Focus. It has been developed by Dr Lester Fehmi of the Princeton Medical Center. It goes something like this. We need to imagine the space between different points in the body. What we are trying to do is diffusing our attention and letting it cover a larger area, instead of trying to focus on a single point. This helps reduce anxiety, tension and inhibition . It helps us lose our preoccupation with a sense of time. We feel more expansive, more attuned to the wisdom that gets lost in the chatter.
The questions go like this: Can you imagine the space between your eyes? Can you imagine the space between your ears? Can you imagine the space inside your throat, between your shoulders, between your hips? Can you imagine that the area between your ankles and knees is filled with space? Can you imagine that your spine is filled with space? And so on and so forth.
We are not trying to come up with some answer such as "There are two inches between my eyes." What we are trying to do is imagine and experience that space. If we only have a vague feeling or sense of it in the beginning, that's okay. There is no right way to do this. We are learning to let our attention become expansive and move over a larger area.
When we can do this, we can become more flexible about shifting from narrowly focusing on something to a state in which we lose self-consciousness and where time slows down. This is the kind of state we need to access to tap hidden stores. This is the space from which insights and images will start bubbling up.
Of course, we can't make ourselves have intuitive insights. But we can create a space where they are more likely to happen. This exercise is one way of clearing the way.
Would you be willing to give it a try? It might be that the intention to learn how to tune into intuition might actually make it more likely to happen.
As I work with this, I will keep you updated on how much it worked for me, or not.
The littlest bird came and hovered near me the other day. I was sitting in the patio, reading. The sun shone overhead, and I felt entrained with the rhythm around me - the hum of birds, the little unnamed sounds that nature makes that seem to pull downwards, into the coolest, deepest well.
There was a feeling of relaxing into my body. Time unspooled. I felt part of its wave and not like a disconnected fragment. I could sense a solidity in my body that I don't often have.
I don't feel like this often. I think I have been feeling it because I am giving voice and expression to some of my anger. I have been reading about feelings and the foundation seems to be that we can't selectively numb them.
Push one away, and our capacity to feel other feelings is diminished. Pushing anger deeper into the recesses makes it harder to feel happiness. Not feeling sadness feels like almost deciding not to feel joy.
So, I have been diving into the muck of my uncomfortable feelings, especially my anger.
It feels dangerous at times. What if it turns against me? What if I don't have the skills to navigate through its murky waters?
These are valid questions. With them, fear rises and tells me to stop making this effort. But as someone who has lived through many feelings, I also know that just turning my head away won't make something go away.
It will lie there, getting knotted and twisted. Paying attention to my feelings, learning what to do with them - how to express them healthily, all this might be much less risk than letting anger and fear fester inside.
Inside, they just get contorted. They create a thick wall that keeps everything good outside. They make me a stranger to myself. Just like joy connects me to myself, so does my anger and sadness connect me to very real things.
Just the other day, I was talking to someone, and I realized why I used to feel fear and anxiety almost all the time. I thought anger was so dangerous that I never let myself feel it. I dropped it as soon as it came up. But doing that meant not listening to its message.
Some boundary had been crossed. Some of my space had been invaded. But because I didn't let myself feel anger, I didn't take any action to heal that breach.
Of course, fear would come up in such a situation. How can it not? I had left myself undefended. There was cause to be fearful.
Now that I can see that healthy anger has a useful purpose, I feel regret for that foolhardy girl who left herself unsafe, unequipped to deal with life and the world outside.
I am still learning how to navigate anger safely, and it makes me scared many times. I know anger is powerful, and you can use power in many ways. You might use it to self-destruct.
But I am learning healthy ways, and finding that I am regaining other feelings as well. Sometimes, I touch sadness. Other times though, I touch upon feelings of joy and being completely at ease.
There are birds outside. Things are alive and humming with energy. Time seems slowed down because I don't want to hurry any longer. Who knows how long this feeling will last, this ease, but even some moments are worth the try.
