Dearheart,
Have You Forgotten?
This has been an interesting week. I haven’t felt like myself. Actually, to be completely honest, I’ve felt the ache of complete disconnect. Her presence, the presence of my own inner Divinity, has seemed nearly impossible to capture. Only now am I beginning to understand why.
I have forgotten.
Enlightening conversations with some of my favorite humans have a way of leading me toward my heart. I love this, and appreciate those who are in this life with me. I am now moving back to a place of knowing who I really am, and it’s got me thinking . . .
It’s so easy to forget who we are! In fact, we are often so inundated with conditions, or “domestication,” as Don Miguel Ruiz Jr. puts it, from the moment of our birth, that we forget that we ever even DID know who we were. #soultruth
Ah, conditioning! I call it the “get in that box” training. Conditioning comes from every corner; from our family, our religion, our culture, the society in which we live. I’ll give you an example of just how covert this conditioning can be. I am a content writer by trade. Recently, I was doing some research on infertility and the emotional toll on a couple struggling to conceive. In that research, I discovered that one of the ways a woman is conditioned from childhood is by her natural play with dolls. Is this really natural play, though, or is she playing with dolls because that is what she is given? This type of play is one of several ways in which young girls are indoctrinated into the (future) realm of motherhood.
Until recently, there was no loud voice speaking out against such conditioning. One might argue that girls playing with dolls had nothing to do with getting into the box of motherhood (or into a gender box, for that matter). Thankfully, the collective voice is getting louder today. But back to conditioning . . .
What this week brought into my awareness is: One, forgetting who is at the heart of this physical suit named Paula, doesn’t feel good. Not at all. Even when my idea of who I was related more to ego and accomplishment, something seemed to be missing. Two, conditioning is damned hard to overcome! What I’m learning, though, is that the journey can be fascinating and fun.
Getting to know oneself is an exploration of an inner world. This exploration, for me, involved asking interesting questions:
- How am I feeling right now? All day, every day. Checking in with my body alerts me to issues with boundaries, storytelling, and traps that distract me from myself.
- How do I feel about my name? When this question was posed to me, I recoiled. Of course, I like my name, it’s who I am! But is it? No. The fact is, I realized that I do feel like my name suits me. However, I also learned a fascinating detail about myself that relates to the next question.
- How do I feel about my appearance? This has nothing to do with that bit of cottage cheese on the thighs! It’s about feeling at home. The more I thought about this concept of “home,” the more I realized that there is something about my physical makeup that doesn’t feel right. My hair. I have always loved curly hair. More than that, I have always craved curly hair, felt more myself with curly hair. This goes back to childhood, which I love because I believe that THAT is when we are closest to our wild nature. When I was a young girl, I loved curly hair so, SO much that I slept in godawful, hard, uncomfortable perm curlers night after night. This is what it means to feel at home, or not, in physical form, and it is reflective of True Self.
- How can I be described? I did an exercise awhile back that took me out of my analytical – ahem! critical – mode and put me in touch with my heart. The task is to write down as many words as possible, the goal is 100 words, that feel right and true. No nouns; no verbs, only adjectives. Seeing my work makes my heart expand.
A Final Thought
I have come to believe that I may never fully and completely know who I am. The journey is a never-ending peeling away of petals. Sometimes I live in the shadows. But it’s all good, because the more I learn, the less I forget.
By the way, just in case you’re starting to wonder why our blogs begin the way they do, it is because Dearheart has a special meaning to us:
"an affectionate nickname for the person that has woken your heart and dispelled your misgivings about the world at large."
Be True, Be YOU!