Lessons on Being Yourself

lesson on being yourself

Once upon a time, a luminous energetic being (you) was born into the body of a human baby. As disorienting as the process was, it felt miraculous. In those first few moments of your life as a person you had no self-awareness. You were simply being.

As the initial days and weeks of your life on Earth passed, you experienced the limitations and demands of your human body. It needed sustenance every few hours. It needed rest in the form of sleep. And it absolutely loved to be touched, held, spoken and sang to by other humans much bigger than you.

After a few months, you became dimly aware that you had some sort of identity – a label you heard people referring to as a “name”, a “gender”, and an “age” or some combination thereof. Soon you began to associate these labels with yourself.

Years passed, and for most of them you joyously lived in the moment. There was so much to explore on Planet Earth! So many

Burning Down the House

burning down the house

 

There inevitably comes a time on any journey when you question everything you know.  Everything.

First, there’s the healthy questioning of what you were taught growing up.  By this I mean the belief systems you were conditioned with — the result of religions, cultures, schools, races, rules, or even simply your generation.  This is normal and natural since as we mature, our direct experience either does or does not align with these beliefs to support them and as the world changes, such beliefs either do or do not stand the test of time.

When direct experience doesn’t align or worse yet, is wildly contradictory to what we were taught, we realize such beliefs are someone else’s truth (or possibly even a complete lie) rather than our own.  Most of us learn to trust our direct experience instead and build on that.

A personal life philosophy can work well for a while.  Our seeking, searching, and questioning will eventually lead to answers, and direct experience will usually support our new found beliefs based on those answers.  Until one day it doesn’t.  That’s when you might arrive at a deeper, scarier, lonlier level of questioning.

I’m talking about that level of questioning.  Yeah, the level you get to when you think, “What if all this I now believe to be true actually isn’t?”

In other words, “What I’m wrong? What if I think I have it all figured out and I don’t? What if it’s all wrong? What if what I now hold dear that made sense five minutes ago is all hocus?”

The following brief parable emailed to me by a friend brought this up:

When You Hate the Human Experience

spiritual coaching

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Today, I hate the human experience.  Today I curse the day I decided to take form in this body, live this life.  Why? What possessed me to come and do this now? Again?

I want to disappear. Vaporize into pure spirit. Go back to the before.  I want to float out of my body and drift weightlessly, boundlessly free of the emotions that surge through it.

I desperately want to unite with the all-encompassing bliss I was lucky enough, once – just once – to feel after a weekend spiritual retreat.  The warming, flooding perfect joy that shuts out all else; that is pure love, or God, or whatever you choose to call it.  I want THAT again. Now.  But it eludes me.

Today after my husband finds fault with me yet again after I feel I’ve tried so hard to change I feel like giving up.  Today after my business isn’t where I want it to be after six years I feel like throwing in the towel.  Today after yelling