Stepping into the uncomfortableness of our authentic selves

You know how it goes, I’d visited a spiritual site which had triggered something, I went for a massage which triggered it more, and later that day the uncomfortable realisation crept up on me, out of the shadows. My wise old friend had been badgering me for a while: why was I always so busy he wanted to know. I’d asked myself the question many times before, but it’s an easy question to brush aside with a flippant answer, “I’ve got a family, we’re all busy aren’t we, as a society?”
But I had questioned it myself many times since, increasingly so, with another birthday passed, which always calls for a life review and an awareness of how life is being lived and how that aligns with inherent truth.
Why was I always so busy?
So despite the uncomfortableness, I was grateful for the insight when it came. Financial consideration aside, there was the dawning realisation that I’m busy because I feel this need to be productive and achieve and, ah hum, be someone. It’s a sad old state of affairs, because despite the many years of stripping the layers away to be ‘no one’, such is the nature of the spiritual path if I can call it that, there is still a deep uncomfortableness that comes with the idea of literally being ‘no one’…(other than my beautiful self).

It’s an interesting position.

The more I have grown to love and accept myself, the more it has become less important to me what others think or feel or to seek their external validation. But! There is always a ‘but’. The layers of my cultural, societal and education conditioning run deep. And despite the work done, I can still feel a clinging on to my needing to be someone for fear of…drifting away into nothingness… and yet isn’t that where the most joy and beauty and bliss lies, in the deep mystery that can only arise when there is nothing else to distract us? And ultimately, we drift towards the nothingness of death itself, so perhaps that is the fear, the nothingness that comes from being no more.

I had thought about this too. How our lives are surrounded by stuff that seems to mean so much to us, yet when we die, what then? Junk to be processed and cleared by someone. We can’t take it with us after all, yet we spend our lives accumulating it anyway. It seems such a shame to think that so much of our accumulations end up in landfill, redundant. Our memory lives on in hearts and DNA, admittedly, and perhaps that’s the point, it’s never the titles, never the achievements, just how much we touch lives while we’re living.

The yoga has taken me to increasingly deeper places over the years, many know this because they’ve either journeyed with me into the thick of it, or found it too confronting that they have jumped ship and found refuge with all that was and remains familiar. We are all different in our wants and needs, it doesn’t make us more or less spiritual, we just have different motivations and journeys to be lived.

My teacher increasingly takes me into a state of nothingness and beingness, where there is no regard for achievement. Sometimes I find this desperately uncomfortable because old habits die hard, there are still strands that find me desperate to lunge a little deeper into splits, even if this does cause my ego to take over, because my ego is still so attached to outcome. Therein lies another little lesson. The one of attachment to outcome and expectation.

It’s very difficult to let this go and just be. Anyone who tries to live their lives aligned with their heart and soul knows this, because there is no guarantee, you literally just need to trust and leap. The mind hates it of course, clings on, goes around and around in circles trying to rationalise and work it out, trying to make the outcome known and certain.

I’ve written about this before, Krishnamurti wrote at length about this too and Vanda Scaravelli (they were good friends) was inspired by him, so it underlies much of the teachings now shared to me that have come from Vanda and her teaching of Diane Long (who taught my teacher Louise – to explain the connection).

As children we’re frequently asked what we want to be when we’re older, “what do you want to be?”. What do we want to be? Of course the answer might be, “I just want to be myself”, but usually it’s about labelling in some way, of defining ourselves by a title or profession, of working towards something. If we’re lucky we align this with heart but more often than not, we end up becoming what others want for us, be that society or parents, culture or teachers, to the extent that we sculpt ourselves to fit into something that has been chosen for us. Or maybe we fall into something and then get stuck, mortgages, children, holidays, dreams, they’ve all got to be paid for somehow, it’s difficult to make changes when we’re in the thick of it, we forget we have a choice, that we have free will to always choose again and live differently.

At Elijah’s school, there’s a wall filled with photos of each of the children in the school and a little snippet of what they want to be when they’re older. I like looking at what is written, the child’s idea of how their life might be lived one day. Many want to be vets because they love animals, or doctors because they want to help people, or dancers, or fireman. Some want to be unicorns and mermaids. Fortunately none that I have seen yet want to be billionaires or You tubers or rule the world. That’ll come (or hopefully not). Society today is all about money and power and the need to be someone who has achieved both, ‘to be someone’, to have made something of ourselves.

Even in the spiritual world there is this attachment to labels and being recognised for being someone. It’s a cosmic joke, a little like the one that has women feeling that they’re liberated and empowered, busting balls in the board room, being up there with the boys, working long hours to prove that they can do it as good (if not better) than the men, and all the time, their feminine energy is crying out through menstrual pain and menopausal symptoms that are seen as nothing more than their bodies letting them down. Power and money.

I have been as guilty as the next, I was groomed for the corporate world, and yes, my ovaries made me very aware that the suits I was squeezing into, the masculine energy I was channelling just to get through the day and stay on top of things, was not really going to work for me long term. I had to find that out for myself.

Even in yoga there was a learning too. In the earlier days, and for a long while after then (if I’m honest) I wanted to be someone here too. I was so conditioned to achievement that I wanted to be the best yoga teacher, I alone wanted to change the world. It wasn’t my ego ran wild, although of course it was to an extent, but more so that I knew no other way, I had been trained to be the best at everything, netball, academia, corporate ladder climbing, society encourages us to be the best, because being the best makes us feel better about ourselves somehow. It validates our worth in a world that measures it on the external, on possessions and badges.

When we love and accept ourselves regardless, the external becomes irrelevant, but it took a long time for me to embody this in my life.

Along the way, I also fell into the trap of thinking that I needed to externalise my spirituality, looking the (perceived) part. I forgot too that we’re all inherently spiritual – and instead of trying to be more spiritual, we just need to be less of everything else which prevents us from realising our truth as spiritual beings.

As soon as we start being true to ourselves, all of the externalisation begins to drop away, because it doesn’t matter, not really.

And yet, our conditioning is ingrained and it takes time to work our way away from old patterns. Achievement hasn’t always made me happy. It’s surprised me at times. I felt that writing a book, a long held dream, might make me feel more joyful than it actually did. The trouble being, I was so attached to outcome that I got lost in this. Many do. It’s what prevents us living our dreams in the first place – we get so attached to the idea of how it is meant to be, famous artist, best-selling author, award-winning entrepreneur, that we get overwhelmed and don’t know how to start. Even worse, we give it a go and get caught up in the idea of our wonderfulness.

Our life purpose, all of us, is to be. It’s really very simple. But we are always concerned about how others perceive us. This is my point. Even in the spiritual world where we are meant to be aware of this, we still fall into the trap of separation, of thinking we are better than others, more spiritual, more enlightened, more helpful, more aligned. I see it frequently at the moment. We have been going through a period of awakening these last few years, but even that has a process to it, and the spiritual ego runs rampant. It can’t be helped, simply because it is part of the process, and this is perhaps where all of this began, in noticing the manner in which my spiritual ego still plays out, in trying to be someone!

It’s so subtle that I could have easily overlooked it. The irony that I have been progressively trying to be no one. Leaving social media was all part of this. So too teaching yoga in a more aligned way, less about being popular or liked, such was my insecurity at various times in my life, that the number of students attending my classes was important to me. It validated my worth in the world, as I too was still looking externally. But as my practice has deepened, as the layers have been stripped away simply from the practice (this is the nature of yoga), and as I have aligned more fully with what’s actually happening on the inside and been increasingly comfortable and contented in my own skin, it has mattered less what people think of me. This has been liberating and at times scary, because I feel there is no choice but to share in a more authentic way, which is not always liked or approved by others, and which becomes less affected by the notion of achievement, a whole new approach, because I still look for some validation of it, yet because I am no longer playing the game (so to speak), the criteria has changed. There is no criteria now.

When we increasingly align with the heart and soul, it becomes more about feeling, and less about the mind. Thus it cannot be evaluated in the old paradigm, by external validation, approval, and objective assessment. We can feel as if we are free-falling initially, and can question whether we’re doing the ‘right’ thing. But we get to a point where we know we have no choice, regardless of how we are received. There’s a point when we can no longer sell out and compromise on the truth. Knowing when we are doing this does demand a certain level of discernment and honesty with self.

It’s been a gradual process for me and its ongoing too, we are like onions after all and our level of denial can be great – it’s not that it’s conscious even, that we are attempting to deceive ourselves, just that it’s so subtle, especially when we are ensnared by the spiritual ego, that we don’t notice it until we’re ready to see it, and then it’s uncomfortable.

I have a feeling the moon is bringing this up for many of us right now, as we question the direction our lives will take, whether we feed more of the money/power paradigm, or whether we birth into a new one with all the uncomfortableness of not really knowing what that looks like. But at the same time, having a sense that we have to move on because the current world view is outdated, superficial and – quite frankly – destroying humanity and the planet. What choice do we have really?

But it does mean we have to let go of how it is and of the way we have been trained and conditioned to live. We have to settle into the uncomfortableness of not being driven by power and money, by achieving and productivity.

I have a feeling that that which we most seek – of being who we truly are without the need for any external validation of worth – is found in the nothingness and the being no one. That it’s exactly the opposite of what we think.

But of course, that is the problem. We think and rationalise and get in our own way.

Instead, we have to live from a very different place and I have noticed that there is a lightness in doing so.

I have also noticed that this is the path that yoga takes us on. When I consider my most influential yoga teachers, none of them have an Instagram profile, they’re barely on social media, they are not trying to be anyone, they don’t seek followers, they don’t advertise, students find them when they’re ready to receive the teachings they share. I stumbled across each of these teachers at just the right time, there was divine timing to it, I didn’t seek them anymore than they sought me, our paths merely aligned.

There is a deep trust in living this way. Of stepping outside the logical and rational mind, of making things happen, and of aligning with soul, with higher self, with another way of connecting within this world.

It blows my mind even now, the synchronicities and coincidences that can occur to direct our lives. How we are deeply supported and all is asked of us is trust – albeit this is tricky!

This is what crept up on me out of the shadows… The extent to which we don’t always trust or have faith, even when we think we do.

There’s a certain free falling as we learn to let go. Because there is always fear when we move from one way of being to another because we cannot always be sure of what it is we are moving to, and often what is needed the most is space – nothingness, of being no one!

Anytime we look for external validation or direction, it’s an indication we need to stop and turn inwards instead. We have within us all the answers that we seek. We just need to turn down the noise, go within, be with it and wait until something shifts, and then this world that we were conditioned to live in begins to drop away, and a new world is born, a different way of seeing things, a whole new perspective which shifts our relationship with truth and with self – with life itself.

There is always the opportunity to unravel, to release the binds that keep us twisted deep on the inside, to find the thread and allow it to unravel itself, like an old jumper being unpicked, wound back to the ball of wool where it had begun, and spun again into something different. A new way of being, of being our magnificent Self without any of the need for external validation and adoration.

It reminds me of The Invitation:

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.

I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes.’

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.

I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

by Oriah Mountain Dreamer