Today in my meditation I was surrendering my “doing” mentality to the Spirit. I realized that I haven’t allowed myself to truly just be, whatever that truly looks like in each moment. I haven’t been very creative lately; no writing, no drawing, no singing…I’ve been struggling with it. I’ve been wondering what’s wrong with me. I’ve felt stuck creatively. I felt the spirit say to me “just be, when you don’t allow yourself to just be, you are not accepting yourself…when you don’t accept yourself, you can’t be who you are and create from who you are.” I have spent, at the very least, the last 18 years “trying to be”. My motivation for things has been to try and garner approval for who I’m trying to be, whether that be an artist, a singer, a mother….I keep trying. I don’t want to try anymore. I don’t want to try and work out who I am…it’s locked into not accepting who I am. I want to just be. Just being is the basis for life. We don’t have to tell our heart to pump our blood around our body, it just does. Our bodies are perfectly capable of doing their inner workings without our interference…in fact, we can’t tell our bodies to release an egg once a month, it just does on its own accord. Our bodies are in their own state of being, in their natural state, doing what they do, regardless of whether or not we tell them to. So if our bodies are perfectly happy to just be and do their thing, shouldn’t we also just be and do our thing. Stop trying, stop trying to be the thing you are, you already are that thing. Be from your soul. When you be from your soul, you’ll be the thing you’re meant to be. When you try to be from your “self” which is a byproduct of the beliefs, circumstances, and grooming of the world around you, you will never be able to be out of your soul. It doesn’t mean you don’t do, but you do from a place of being.
To be present is to respond to what is right in front of you - it’s non reactive.
To react to what’s right in front of you, is to put that present moment into the past or the future. When you react to your present moment out of the past or future, you’re no longer present. You’re no longer being.
I’ve talked before numerous times about being a highly sensitive empath; it has coloured much of how I have seen the world, and it has altered my experience of the world as well. What I’ve spoken about above, about just being, has been very much influenced by my inability to separate myself from the people and the world around me due to my being an empath. There is a normal amount of taking up peer interest, especially as youth and young adults, but there is very much a difference between taking up, and taking on. I have historically taken on the thoughts, desires and energies of everyone around me, thus losing myself. I was mostly lost for a big chunk of my life. I had a few years in my late teens when my creativity didn’t seem to be impacted too much by my empathic nature, but perhaps I just surrounded myself with other creative types - so in that case, my desires were not inauthentic. But as a young adult I entwined myself with 2 men, my first serious boyfriend, followed by my ex-husband, and that entwining seemed to take my lostness to the next level. The message I learned from them was that I was not acceptable, so if I wasn’t acceptable, I had better find a way of becoming acceptable…so I tried. And I tried, and I tried, until I could no longer, then I tried some more. I took on their energy, which, when you’re with someone that has a narcissistic/sociopathic personality disorder means that you end up embodying their own shame, self-loathing, and their messages of “I am not enough”. So with their energy merged into mine, I ended up in a pit of sadness, of confusion, of feeling like all my efforts were for nothing, because nothing ever came out of them.
But that’s just the thing, nothing true can come out of something false.
And I was being something false. It’s taken me until now, 4 years out of the abusive marriage with my ex-husband, to realize that the narrative of trying to achieve was still active. I have still been looking for approval; do my drawings get enough likes on instagram? do my blog posts garner enough comments of resonance? does my voice evoke enough raw emotion out of others?…and the list goes on… Trying to be a good mother, trying to look like I’ve achieved something in my life so far, trying to attach value to myself through external acts, whatever they might be… It sounds exhausting, and it is.
So now what. An empath needs to be able to be in this world as themselves. It’s no use being an empath if all you do is mirror other people’s feelings and emotions. I have been learning from a very wise shaman counselor of mine how to put up an energetic shield regularly throughout each day. In doing so, I am learning how to be the observer of other people’s emotions and feelings, while still having my sense of self intact. In a sense, it’s the art of being energetically interdependent with the world around me; aware, observing, but not taking on. This has helped me greatly in learning what is actually going on in myself; what is mine to own. But then here comes the clincher - Our life is built on perceptions. So even now what I am learning to observe in myself, is really just a construct of what I’ve been surrounded by my whole life. As I mentioned in that first paragraph: this self of mine is a byproduct of what I’ve grown up in and subsequently lived in to. Armed with this knowledge, I now have the great task of surrendering it all to the cosmic now. I believe this is what Jesus is asking of us when he invites us to follow the Christic way: leave everything you know behind and follow the path of Love, follow the path of surrendering the “self” over to the Divine way of being in the world, but not of the world; it’s the narrow path where you pick your way through the bushes, not sure where it will lead, but trusting that Love knows better than any of us where the path should go.
We try to get certainty, but there is no such thing as certainty. We can’t possibly know what the future holds, so we must simply be. The act of simply being is the greatest gift we have to offer ourselves and as a result, all those we encounter in this world. In order to be truly interdependent in this world, we must first and foremost be. So I choose to be, right now, in this moment.
