Yes & No

connecting them to your underlying values

We are living in a world of quotes and quips. My instagram feed is full of them. Some I love and save, some I ponder and question, some I never want to see again. They can feel superfluous when the algorithm is onto you and the same message written in a different font keeps slapping you in the face. Insights from Yung Pueblo to Ram Dass to Mary Oliver… all beautiful luminaries but can still feel mind-numbing. At times, the quotes are signs from Spirit reminding me of a teaching I haven’t quite grasped yet and need to hear again. Other times, it’s a signal to get off the Instagram noisemaker, get quiet, and listen to my own inner knowing.

I have been immersed in liberation work for the past year. This work LOVES the language of protection, boundaries, the wild ferocity of self proclamation. Which I can understand in a culture of patriarchal oppression where the collective is correcting the course, righting the ship, overcompensating for the trauma - where the short-cut narrative is:

‘step into your power’

‘reclaim your essential self’

‘your peace is more important than their comfort’

‘find your authentic truth and speak it’

‘let go of people pleasing and find freedom ’

‘ no is a full sentence’

And so on and so forth. All important messages that have helped so many begin to understand their self-abandonment and patterns of guilt, dissociation, and living from the outside in. All work I’ve had to do myself, deeply and painfully looking at where I was in strategy to keep myself in control and “safe”. The inner resourcing of myself didn’t come first. It rarely ever does, that is called bypassing. We can’t avoid the discomfort of earth school and short cut ourselves into all encompassing “love and light.” Fortifying my inner landscape came after the acute awareness, the grief, the surrender, the somatic release of all I was carrying. Laying it all at the feet of the divine (insert your own belief of the divine) and opening my heart to a wider horizon. Admitting I have no control over anything except where I place my attention. I had to pull up all the fractured, dead roots of my existence to get to the fertile soil under them. I decided to place my attention there. In the reservoir of expansive opportunity and hope. I began the work of healing, becoming sound and integrated, meeting my patterns with compassion and choice without rejecting all the fragmented parts of myself. (still a work in progress)