Breaking The Mask

I’ve come to understand that nothing happens until you are ready for it. It’s been in the past couple of weeks that I have felt a shift in my energetic field. First I no longer cared what other people thought of me. This was a huge breakthrough and quite frankly one that I had been striving to get to for much of my adult life. As I have mentioned in here before the people pleasing practice was a well worn groove in the path that is my life. I can’t even remember a time when I wasn’t striving for someone else’s approval. This lead to a life of attempting hits but only coming up with misses. I never felt as though I could get things “just right” with someone and that often left me feeling constantly inadequate. The realization that I could not make everyone happy came like a meteor into my atmosphere just weeks ago through a relationship that is of great importance to me. I had been spending some time trying to get the person to see me, to see my way. But all of my attempts seemed to fall flat and I was beginning to wonder why I was continually beating my head on the wall. What was I hoping to accomplish? Was it that I wanted approval or was it something else? I wanted answers but none were coming. I had to take a step back, reassess and ask myself what did I ultimately want our of this relationship and would it even be possible?

When the people that you are trying to please are connected to your core identity it can be difficult to ask yourself those deeper probing questions that either leave you with no answers, or answers that you don’t want to hear. What I saw in this relationship (as is the case in all relationships) was a mirror. There was an opportunity to see myself reflected. Rather than look at who I wanted to be or who I was trying to be, I had to look at who I really am. This was a bit difficult. My shadow and inner child work, which I often view as one in the same, had become much more intense lately. I was facing into some truths about my traumas, about myself at the different ages when some of those major traumas occurred, and acknowledge that the stories that I had been telling myself all these years may have not been the most accurate. I’ve said before that memories are a funny thing. We like to think that they remain in tact and clear of the events that happened, remaining as truthful and error-free as possible but that’s just not so. Years ago I had come to the conclusion that what I needed was forgiveness. But not from myself to myself. Oh no! I wanted forgiveness from the other people who were in these traumatic moments. But even the spiritualist knew that such a demand was coming from a hurt place.

So I shifted my focus towards myself. I wrote all sorts of affirmations, spoke all the hippie positive words, read tons of books on the topic and even in certain cases implemented practices that could be used my any practitioner of wellness to one of their clients. But I felt like I was coming up short again. I didn’t feel that forgiveness truthfully in my heart. I believe that sometimes I am putting so much effort into getting through something that I rarely allow myself the space and time to just collapse. Lately I’ve had to hold space for people who have been going through their own shifts and transformations and I could do was sit with them or be with them as their pain swelled and crashed time and again. This is not an easy practice and I realized as I was being with others in their grief that I was trying so hard to avoid mine. I’ve talked before about grief and the practice of grieving which I believe none of us are good at and not equipped to help others in their grieving. Some years ago I started training to become a death doula, not just to help loved ones who are experiencing or have experienced the loss of a loved one, but also to get some “in the field” practice of being a grief counselor.

Much of what we all of grieving is ourselves and the loss of our identities. I’ve been struggling with that for my own self. Now not only do we all have to deal with the grieving of ourselves and who we thought we were, but we must also grieve the world around us. Life is so fragile. Our human experience is held up by thin sheets and threads of glass, easily broken at a moments notice. And maybe that’s what the Creator had in mind when it came to living this human life. Maybe we must continually break ourselves open to be reborn again and again. We see this pattern in nature, yet we push against it in our own lives. In order for growth, things must break, die and be cut off. Whether we actively do the cutting, breaking, dying or not is irrelevant because it’s going to happen one way or another. Trying to avoid the inevitable only causes the pain the be greater. This may sound harsh and I don’t intend for it be. But I’ve learned that acceptance gives space for all of life’s complexities. I don’t have to hold up a facade in order to save face. The face that I am trying to save in effect is the truest one of me and when I create some idealistic version of myself in order to trudge through life’s battlefield, I end up coming out battered and bruised. If I can just be, just exist, I am more aligned with life and the truth that everything is messy and I don’t have to be perfect. All I have to do is show up.