I have been thinking a lot these past weeks about the notion of “doing what I want to”, as opposed to what I should do, or have somehow cognitively decided is the best or right thing to do. And I'm more appreciative of how difficult this actually is, when faced with the opportunity to put an otherwise lofty ideal into practise on a daily basis.
On the face of it, it seems like the perfect, enviable position. Those who are sacrificing so much of themselves as mothers or carers in some way, will likely think, if not say, on a regular basis: “When do I get to do what I want?” So I realise that in many ways I'm in a very privileged position to be asking such a question – notwithstanding the daily grief of not having said family.
The added challenge I can appreciate of meeting the relentless needs of children, is their innate and impressive capacity to name or demand getting what they want. I was watching a man (father?) walk with a little girl, maybe 2 ½ to 3 years old, on the beach today. She started wandering off in a different direction and he called out “this way Lucy!” to which she simply but emphatically replied, “No”, and kept walking just exactly where she wanted.
I was really struck by the immediacy of her knowing and her claiming of her sovereignty around it. I empathise, of course, with the bigger picture for the adults and their agenda, but something seemed very pure about this. She's not yet been severed or detached from the visceral essence of her own desire, nor the right to name and claim it.
And I found myself pondering all the ways I have been struggling to connect clearly to what I want these last weeks, even when invited or required to do so! All the ways I learnt very young, that doing what you want is either selfish or self-indulgent, or disobedient, and asking for what you want was simply against the rules, for reasons I can't entirely remember but certainly still feel.
For many years I rather consciously believed that what I wanted the most, was to make sure others were content or happy around me – that their happiness would make me happy. Which ironically, it actually did. But it was one of many, many ways that I was outsourcing my own life, constantly referencing someone, some thing or some god outside of myself for my choices, decisions or preferences. Either because I had been taught that they were the ones holding the wisdom or the power anyway, or because I was too frightened to inconvenience someone by imposing my needs or desires on them, or causing anyone upset or discomfort, or, God-forbid, risking being a burden, or ‘too much’.
And also, at the end of the day, I often didn't actually know what I wanted. How would I? There were so many hoops to jump through to do the right, non-confrontational thing according to the rules housed in my mind, that I never learned to reconnect the innate capacity I knew somewhere back there, to say “no, I don't want what you want for me. I want what I want.” To follow the pure instincts of my body.
And there are so many valid reasons for this. One of which is the fact that I grew up within a particular family culture and religious construct that has carefully crafted a compelling rationale as to why one must disavow one’s own needs, let alone desires, housing it in the worthiest service of ‘loving the other before oneself’. Though the ‘oneself’ part never seemed to arrive.
Another broader context, that puts my particular (if common) circumstances into perspective, is that we have been disconnected from our bodies for many generations, because we were all born into a humanity that has collectively evolved within a history of trauma, (wars, torture, famines, depressions, natural disasters etc), which utilises disconnection from the body as a primary survival tool.
Let me elaborate a little on how I use the word ‘trauma’. While this does relate to the ‘big T’ traumas mentioned above, I also, and more broadly, mean all the ways in which my inner world and my body were overwhelmed by experiences that required my survival mechanisms (fight, flight, freeze, faint, fawn) to shut down healthy functioning for a time, in order to survive. ‘Healthy’ likely includes being connected to my body’s visceral experience.
This could show up as lots of relatively ‘normative’ experiences of my self and my body not being accurately seen, acknowledged, respected, or listened to, as well as the reasonably common personal experiences of outright harm or violation of our physical, emotional or psychological experience, through to global, collective harm caused by man-made and natural disasters throughout all time. A collective story passed through from generation to generation – how? Through our bodies.
So… given that generations of pain lives in the body, and therefore the most generous and truly miraculous capacity to protect us from that pain, is to disconnect us from our awareness of our body, we end up in this conundrum. Our ‘safety’ (emotional, psychological, physical) has relied on our disconnection from the storehouse of pain, but our current lived experience – if we want to actually live our lives and not the lives that have been somehow constructed for us to live – relies on us being connected to the storehouse of our wisdom. Same storehouse.
We, therefore, are constantly experiencing a tension between two exceptionally valid needs; the need to keep ourselves from being overwhelmed by pain, and the need to feel in order to experience true intimacy with ourselves, with each other and with the natural world. At this point, the need to disconnect from our feeling states (physical and emotional) still generally wins out, as we see in the myriad of ways we take ourselves out of conscious connection with our felt experience – food, screentime, exercise, alcohol, drugs of all kinds, to name a few.
In the absence, then, of the visceral wisdom that holds the knowing of what is authentic, true and real for us, our mind heroically tries to compensate for the lack of this crucial information, using thinking to try to create an idea of what we feel, and therefore what we want. (Thinking has its place in the process of course, but its only supposed to participate.)
For all my struggle with the insatiable workings of my mind, I want to pause here for a moment, to acknowledge the care-full intention it has for me, and the very real need it responded to way back when; creating some kind of ‘knowing’ strategy so I could function in this life!
My mind has almost made an artform of convincing me that it’s up to the job – and I find myself following its wily ways and tripping down rabbit holes on a regular basis. But eventually I remember…. to breathe… and come back to the primary instrument of this process – to re-attune to my body.
In many ways this recent pilgrimage / quest of mine has been an apprenticeship of deepening this re-attunement. To step away from all of the safe and familiar constructs that had created a beat I was quite happily dancing to, but was no longer sure was actually, truly mine. To remove the mind’s primary safety net of having a ‘plan’ (and preferably one that had me doing ‘good’ things), and to force myself to actually connect in with my body, moment to moment, day to day, to strengthen this attunement to my own felt wisdom of desire, of wanting.
And not simply because I am allowed to, or to balance out the taking care of others and self ratio, or because I know it will help me in my relationships, or even because I am wanting to live into the liberating truth that I am worthy of having the life that I actually, deeply, powerfully want. But also, and most profoundly to me right now,
because this is how the Life Force, the Sacred Pulse, is actually trying to make Itself known to me.
I am coming to more deeply understand, that it is through the instrument of my own body that the Divine generates the soul-wise impulses for me to follow. That this is one of Divine Wisdom's key portals into my experience and into offering immanent guidance. My body is a bridge between the soul of the world, the sacred lifeforce, and my unique, true Self, my own personal soul. A channel through which I am in direct communication with the Universal Music.
And this miraculous body is an inherently tuned instrument. It has an innate capacity to sense, intuit and respond to input - instinctually closing toward a ‘no’ and opening toward a ‘yes’, for example. If I am able to connect to this sensed knowing, with each nuanced orientation, I create the path I walk on – a sacred path guided by my authentic, embodied truth.
While innate in nature, this capacity is not always easily accessible to us, given, as I’ve mentioned, that various experiences of trauma have required the disconnection from our embodied experience, in order to support our survival. Trauma also crosses wires and skews our radar for our ‘no’ and our ‘yes’ around the magnetic pull of fear. Another barrier includes experiences of ongoing and chronic pain that dominate our conscious, somatic experience and make relating to our body an inherently challenging one, to say the least. So it is a journey back here for all of us – the healing path.
But I have been deeply inspired to feel more deeply, to take my attention deep within my own tissues and muscles and barely tangible contractions or expansions. And with each conscious step in this direction, to reawaken my awareness and rewire my beliefs; that my wants are not a distraction, and far from ‘sinful deception’, but the very instrument through which my unique song comes into manifestation. And by definition, this creates a life that is personally fulfilling, and a vocation that flows through me with the grace and ease of an inner alignment. And not just an alignment for my own personal benefit, but one that is also aligned with all Beings.
Clearly, there's discernment required from the desires that are hijacked by the many influences of a world that likes to dictate and market its ideas to us about what we want and need, but my true and authentic desire is connected to the visceral, sacred wisdom of my body, and my body is connected to the bodies of all other Beings, which is the body of the Great Mother herself.
Therefore, as I move more and more deeply into my senses, my cellular radar, with the sensations of my embodied truth as my magic tuning fork, I am in resonance with Life Itself. And in this realm, if I am being self-serving, then I am also simultaneously being all-serving because I am tuned in, plugged in, to the dimension that is, at its essence, non-separate, non-dual.
From this place, my standing in the integrity of what is real and honest and true for me, is that which will serve the whole.
It is not necessarily, let’s be clear, what will make the whole the most comfortable.
I am needing to face more and more the way I prioritise preventing discomfort, especially in the other, over standing true in my real feeling or belief. I am endeavouring to choose, instead, to trust that my willingness to honour my Truth – my mask-free, rule-free, should-free truth – is building the very fabric of vulnerable, transparent, authentic relationship between all Beings; human and more-than-human. Which might just bring us all back to Life.
This kind of truth leaves a lot of space for “I don't know” and “I need help” and “I don't understand, can you tell me more”. But it also creates space for “This is who I am” and “This is my heart's desire”, and “Please could I have…” which allows me to be seen (arguably our greatest need) and therefore to be met.
Don’t get me wrong, I'm not demanding that I suddenly ‘get everything I want’. It’s not about the outcome, but more about the owning and honouring of the truth it speaks – my truth. What happens next may involve dissonance or conflict – which I can stay more compassionately grounded in if I’m centred in my own truth – or it may allow the sound of my true voice to be picked up by the elemental orchestra that is waiting and willing to support my full opus.
It is crucial for me to know that my sacred fullness will never harm or truly diminish the sacred light of another Being. We were designed to support each other in our flourishing, as any healthy ecosystem is. Which includes deaths, but not cruelty. So if I want to contribute to the health, the healing, of the world, the best I can offer is my most body-connected-authentic self. Which means we all have work to do, not only for our own lives, but the lineage of ancestral pain they weren’t able to tend to, that now lives on in us.
Alongside whatever support we need to tend to the trauma story we carry, sometimes we also need to just experiment, to create experiences that help us listen to the way our body says “no, not that… yes, more of that”, because often we can't know what we want if we don't truly know the options. For me, this lack of experimentation was (who am I kidding… IS!) rooted in the fear of ‘getting it wrong’ or failing, which kept (keeps!) me to rigid lines of the known to prevent this so-called disaster. So I am playing with the little things…
Today I was walking barefoot on a concrete footpath and then I stepped on to the lush green grass, and I felt the soles of my feet send up an “ahhh yes, so much better, thank you!” Sometimes we'll just keep walking on the good-enough-concrete path, or sadly, a far-from-good-enough stony or dangerous path, because we never managed to, or had permission to, or even thought to, steer ourselves towards greater comfort, ease, and pleasure.
O how the wellsprings of comfort, ease and pleasure have been under-sold in our limiting constructs of what is truly wise and what is truly holy!
I am also learning how critical it is to litter our healing path with these three balms – to learn how my body leans towards and relaxes into the embrace of them, and fill up on the good things.
This healing path – also called Life – really does hold it all, and I have been challenged, time and time again, to let it all in, let it all inform me, while not becoming me, and trust in its core intention to help me. To turn towards whatever I feel, and say ‘I’m here, I’m listening, I care… tell me more’. And to find someone to help me do that, when I can’t. This is not a solo path.
May we all reclaim the wild power of our miraculous bodies, especially our intuitive, instinctual, musical bodies and find our way back to our unconditioned “no-I-don't-want-to-walk-that-way”, “yes-I-want-to-walk-on-grass” selves. And find that as we do, the Divine Love of our own soul, in communion with the Great Soul, walks with us in intimate, caring, guiding presence, liberating us from well-worn paths of fear and showing us the ‘second simplicity’ and holy necessity of following our body’s wise desires.
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