Living the Transformation You Seek
I have spent a lifetime seeking something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I searched far and wide, into the conventional and unconventional. I searched and I sometimes got glimpses of what I was looking for.
And then, when push-came-to-shove, I had no idea how to live it. So I numbed my pain with the sex, drugs, and rock & roll. I got so lost in my own self-loathing that I didn’t how if I’d ever make it out, or if I wanted to. Death felt like a sweet relief. And at the same time, I knew it wasn’t my time to go, yet.
I am here for bigger things, and I always knew it.
Yet year after year, something would get in my way and all I’d be left with is the familiarity of the process of self-loathing that feeds perceived powerlessness (though back then I would have called it “depression” or “anxiety” or “bipolar” or “borderline personality disorder”).
You see, for a plethora of reasons which always boil down to control through compliance, I, like you, was never taught about the process of relating to myself. This is not because the people who raised me didn’t want what’s best for me, it’s because they didn’t know how to teach me because no one taught them, either. So there is no fault & blame here (a paradigm shift in and of itself).
And there is a fundamental truth we don’t always appreciate: You can’t give what you haven’t got.
Women are taught to be satisfied with crumbs.
The vast majority of women globally are taught to give what they haven’t got and be satisfied with the crumbs that are leftover. They are taught to live a life from a state of self-depletion, ensuring everyone else is taken care of but themselves. Women worldwide are culturally conditioned to be obedient and subservient to “the greater good”. So they spend their whole lives seeking to become who they think others want them to be. They chameleon their way through life, hoping no one would notice the depth of their pain (and their inauthenticity).
And that’s exactly how we find ourselves on the definitive path to self-loathing and self-destruction that is so intergenerationally and epigenetically familiar.
My father taught me some epic quotes, one of which says “when you lie, the first and only person you are really lying to is yourself”. I now know this to be true.
Given my line of work and the conversations I am immersed in day after day, I have come to discover that women work really hard to lie to themselves. They twist themselves into a pretzel in order to never have to face what their body has been screaming for them to notice. What do I mean by lie — isn’t that a bit harsh, Stela? Well, no. It’s true. Women lie to themselves and others when they pretend the illusion is real. They keep secrets from themselves and other in order to pretend the illusion is real. In other words: they would rather their life was different, so they are willing to do anything to never have to face what is. Manipulation comes to mind …
As a generalization, women are conditioned to keep secrets and tell lies in an effort to sustain the status quo of their lives. The alternative is too scary to consider facing into, especially if the only processes you know to engage are intellectual, familiar, and habituated. Yikes!
The status quo is killing them and their children, but somehow it feels easier because it is familiar. The fear of the potential consequences of what they believe would happen if they dared is greater than their courage to test it out, and see what happens.
The status quo of “normal” demands we live under the spell of illusion, capitulating the truth to the pain. The irony of all this? The pain is a byproduct of living an illusioned life.
But how does one live her truth?
How does she even discover that she is living in untruth?
Well, here’s the bottom line: if you live with pain of any kind in the body, you are living in illusion. The question is: are you willing to discover how else to live? For so many, living in untruth (aka pain) is easier than daring to explore the potentiality of the how else? I get it — to live an alternative mean to let go of the familiar, which is, of course, how everyone else lives. To live an alternative demands we find safety in the emerging truth and be willing to honour that over the consensus.
And that’s hard work, because it goes against everything we have normalized as “that’s just how it is” from our family and every system we encounter thereafter. In the process of being parented programmed, we learn to perfect how to be a “good girl” according to societal standards and expectations. If our focus and attention is on compliance with external expectations, where it isn’t is inside our own inner cues. No matter how well-meaning our parents were, if they do not know how to be internally referenced, all they’ve got to teach is you to how to be externally referenced. In this process of looking outside of our inner cues for the answers, we internalize the normalization of self-deception and living in denial of our truth (because there is very little out there that is designed to help you actually live your meaningful life).
The song Raz-ma-taz is playing in the background right now— “when you open your eyes and see something differently …” - Danny Go!
(Sidenote: if you have young kids, I highly recommend Danny Go! Such fun to dance together!)
So, then, what’s the antidote to living in illusion?
Well, living in Truth …
How to do that? First of all: stop. Push the pause button on everything. Slow down and give yourself permission to hear an alternative to the loud, invasive, habituated noise. Take heart – this is the hardest part, actually. Intuitively and instinctively, we all know: if we slow down enough, we will hear.
If you choose to stop, you will notice that there will be a lot of internal movement that will likely feel uncomfortable (you might call it “chaos”). Habitually, you will do anything to move away from feeling that. My invitation for you is to stay.
If you choose to stay in the pause, you will have new thought structures emerge from the depths of your being that will pattern-interrupt the familiar patterns and habituated repetition of thoughts (you have 65,000 thousand thoughts a day, how many of them are the same-old?).
As you pattern interrupt the old, the truth of who you are emerges. The question becomes: will you honour it…?
You see, what I’m talking about doing is hard. Why? Because it demands we live from the Truth of who we are, no matter what. And in order to discover that, you must be willing to educate yourself to an alternative process of living.
You must be willing to let go of your perceptions of ‘reality’, because they are someone else’s story, they may or may not be rooted in your emerging Truth. In other words: if your perceptions of reality serve you, go on and live your meaningful life as is! However, if you know your perceptions are hurting you, the time is now to begin the Decloaking process of living authentically.
Here’s the button line: deception and possibility cannot live in the same place, at the same time (just like protection and expansion cannot live in the same place, at the same time). You are either in protection mode, living in survival mode from your limbic brain, or you are in the rest & digest mode living from a space of expansion and intentional evolution.
The question you want to ask yourself is: do you wish to continue living in deception? Or possibility?
Personally, I suggest you choose never to choose limitation. Don’t be satisfied with ‘weany’. Instead, discover a new platform to stand on that compels you to live large and in charge!
Curious for more? Start here, with the Decloaking and Living Authentically audio files.
