So I’ve come clean and have often prided myself upon being comfortable within the uncomfortable but lately I’ve been seeing that I’m not so patient just sitting with it for myself by myself about my self.
Pain, agitation, discomfort can be like a hot cinder on your lap that you immediately go to pat out and extinguish, perhaps its even a hot poker right on your arse. I’d venture to say most people jump when they get burned or feel like something is on fire, right?
Well, what about your emotional self or more correctly, the egoic self?
When we bring our attention and witness the ego, the emotions, the tendency to react/fix/attack/not react we become the magnifying glass and the sun on an ant instead of the ant. By witnessing, a little bit longer than we are used to, we move beyond the itch and scratch to something new. When we magnify the watching instead of the acting (even if its well intended non-reacting) and we go beyond our pattern, that’s when we get the bigger picture perspective and take things less personally which allows grace, presence and peace to take hold.
I had a profound conversation with a friend this evening where they reflected how thick and dense my stories are, like most of us. Who doesn’t love a colorful background, character development and detailed setting when it comes to telling a good story, especially our own? However if you come at life with a book full to the brim with no room to write or color in, there isn’t much room for creation, let alone participation. And so my friend shared that their first reaction to my story back in the day was to relate, pity or take action to help. Then it came to just listening and finally after setting that standard, we both felt ready to listen and I was able to hear that by being so in my story at times, so in the me of it, taking shit so personally and feeling everything I would dance between the all and nothing but never sitting long enough to see past that tango.
I didn’t stand still long enough to see the dance floor, I often only saw two steps forward and one step back.
And the thing about stopping to look at our feet while dancing is we often fall out of rhythm, it ain’t pretty and it’s more often than not, a smidge embarrassing.
Reality check- we’re in a human experience to learn and feel freer to be our true selves and that comes easier by witnessing that which isn’t. Witnessing others, othering and then ultimately realizing that there is no other, is quite a trip to the moon and back. We learn more by stopping instead of mindlessly to and fro-ing no?
To take my point here a little further- a star doesn’t know it is beauty or beautiful, it is the witness of that star that deems it so and therefore perspective gives us the freedom to define and expand our understanding of pretty much, well, everything.
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest–a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” – Albert Einstein
By experiencing our Self separately we free ourselves and remember peace by being in that greater awareness. The drug of humanity is connection and being “understood” so if we give it to ourselves, pulling our nose out long enough from our own autobiography we may just have enough to remember we can rewrite just about any trauma, woe or suffering. Thank you K.S. for the listening.
In awe of beauty and feeling like listening to this song again (thank you time and space of 1997)…
Starlight, star bright,
Ella
