NEVER LEAVE YOURSELF AGAIN
Marriage to yourself
Imagine feeling eternally connected, present and loved. In that state of being which we all seek and hope to experience for more than just a few fleeting moments. That resting place where we can let down all of the guard, relax and just be, forever abiding. You may wonder if such an everlasting state exists and if it is possible to experience it inside of this chaotic human playground. There is no doubt that the chaos and the tending to all of the things that need attention inside of this physical focus add some extra challenges to maintaining our natural state of feeling free and at peace. Yet somehow, someway we signed up for this challenge because here we are, so there must be a way through it while staying in full connection and being rested as ourselves.
Well just how do we do it then? We do it by never leaving ourselves again. You can think of this as a marriage of sorts with yourself, where there is a commitment and devotion to staying in love and connection with your own essence and being no matter what. We all know how the traditional vows go… to have and to hold, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, tell death do us part. This is definitely a union that you want to consider deeply before entering into with another being. We are all well aware that many marriages don’t last a lifetime, and even in those that do, the commitment to love and connection wavers quite a bit. We get tested, and with marriages we enter into with other humans sometimes the most loving thing we can do is leave the relationship. In the marriage with yourself however you can’t really leave. Wherever you go there you are. You can give yourself the experience of leaving, but you can’t actually leave. You can be uncommitted to loving yourself, which feels like leaving yourself, but you still can’t go anywhere. This is suffering at its finest.
If you aren’t present and in love, then you are not actively with yourself. If you aren’t holding and cherishing yourself, being with all of your sensations and bodily expressions, and all of your financial abundance or lack thereof, then you aren’t with yourself. Instead you are in some idea about what should be rather than being present inside of and loving your creation. If you have less money than you want, then you see deficiency of what isn’t rather than abundance of what is. You leave yourself in the worrying or feeling bad about the experience. If you have sensations or expressions in your body that you don’t want to be there, you leave yourself in insisting that they shouldn’t be there and in fretting about their presence. As a general indicator if you are anxious, worried, restless, withdrawn, avoidant, resistant, dissociated, not listening, in internal chaos, rigid or numb, you are not with yourself.
SOFTENING
Choosing the less chosen choice
It may seem natural to feel distressed about your life experiences in one way or another. Nearly everyone does even if they appear to be cool as a cucumber and like nothing perturbs them. We learn through perturbations, and while we don’t have to go into full distress mode when they arise, whatever ruffles our feathers even a little bit is an opportunity for us to see where we aren’t fully with ourselves. If you feel super zen in your state of being and completely untouchable by any of life’s experiences, I would say you have mastered what it is to be with yourself. However if I state the simple phrase “there is no wrongness” even if we think we are super zen, perturbations will begin to reveal themselves to us that might be hidden in our subconscious. Our judgments, fears, wants and subtle resistances are there if we stop, feel and listen. One of the most difficult things for us to do as humans is soften in the face of something that we don’t want to feel, experience or that we disagree with. To soften means to feel rather than resist, and to be with the experience rather than attempting to keep it at bay. Softening does not mean that we have to agree with something that we don’t agree with, but it does mean that we stop defending that we are right.
In general as humans we have gotten hard. We have callouses in places where we have attempted with all of our might to keep the intensity of our human experience at a distance. Most of these callouses were unconsciously created out of need for physical, emotional or social survival. We might notice them through what we call unpleasant sensations, disease in the body, relationship difficulties or general dissatisfaction with life. While it is true that there are a plethora of unpleasant sensations, feelings and experiences here to experience, what determines if we perpetuate and re-engage our callouses of armor is how we relate to our experiences and what we do with them.
What might be required for us to soften rather than engage with hardness? It is a whole LOT of letting go. I am not talking about the light and fluffy kind of letting go. I am talking about letting go of those things inside your psyche that you internally fight tooth and nail to hold onto. I know you think that you want to let those things go, but you don’t and that is why you haven’t yet. What would it mean to let go? Well, one, it would mean a WHOLE lot of forgiving. Forgiving the wrongs and injustices you’ve experienced and felt, like for real. To drop them. It would mean a change in perspective that life if for you, rather than something you have to fight to maintain and keep a certain way. It would mean no longer being a victim to anything or anyone in life. No situation, no circumstance, no person, past, present and future. While that is easy to write, it is challenging as fuck to disengage the pattern of victimization that somehow life does not love and support us particularly when we are seeing, feeling or experiencing unkindness, pain, violation or hate. Even in the most dismal of scenarios if we can find our way back into the recognition of ourselves, to the love and cherishing of ourselves, we can find our way back into our power.
Our power is soft. It does not need defending, protecting or guarding. It knows itself and is with itself. It does not need to be proven, validated or seen. It is full. It is not right or wrong. It just is. This doesn’t mean that we don’t sometimes need to be firm, we very much do, not because we are being attacked by life, but rather because we are clear on what best serves in any situation and scenario. When we paradoxically remain soft yet firm, both knowing and not knowing, we can more clearly take whatever required actions that we need to. Being in softness does not mean inaction. It means taking the most resonant and relevant actions for you to take and when you remain soft you are more clear on exactly what actions those are. Rather than coming from reaction and fear that life isn’t going to look, be or feel like you want it to, and letting that be what is motivating your actions, you come from softness knowing that you are in charge of how you experience life despite what it looks like. This allows you to come from your alignment rather than from fear of loss or injustice.
While people or situations can impact your body, your things, your social or professional reputation, and even your physical rights, they still can’t touch your power. They can’t make you harden, you do that on your own. Your power is who you are and it cannot be taken. Yes life impacts you, but what you do with that impact is yours. You can let it harden you, make you reactive and fight what is, or you can choose the less chosen choice, which is to soften, and let go of your charge with and around whatever is. In this choice you choose to be with yourself and receive the clarity from yourself as what to do next. This is what it is to be one with life, with nature, with ourselves. It does not mean life looks like we want it to, it only means that we get to experience it as we desire to be.
Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado
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