A World of Possibilities

 Who Were You Before You Thought You Had To Be Someone Else?

“Often the pain of resisting makes us rust like iron, and in order to re-enter the flow of life, we need to be scraped back to our original surface.” Mark Nepo in “The Book of Awakening”

Scraped back to our original surface – our delightful, juicy, all-that-you-need-to-be surface.

It’s easy to forget that the original of you is what you want to get back to. It’s not about creating a new you.  It’s about removing the protective layers of rust scrapings that you’ve built up because of:

• what others have told you to be or
• what you thought you were supposed to be
• who you chose to be in order to feel safe

As my friend Ashley Inzer says  “You have been taking care of yourself the best way you knew how.”

Congratulations to you.  Taking care of yourself takes strength and a terrific sense of survival.  There was beauty, as you can see in the photograph, in covering your pain with rust.

What I know from working with clients, and from my own life, is: resisting and hiding who you are takes a gimundous amount of energy and closes you off to the possibility of being who you really want to be – yourself.

Being Taught How To Act (a list of “shoulds”)

• I was taught that it was bad to wear my heart on my sleeve so I learned to hide my feelings inside.

• In school I learned that being silly and giggling were not good things so I tried to be more serious and stop laughing.

• When I was passionate, many people stopped engaging in conversation with me, so I worked at being bland and uncontroversial.

• The protective armor of rust I built served me for many years. Until it didn’t. Then it became an albatross – a heavy weight -  that slowed me down and kept me from what I really wanted to do. It shut me off to a world of possibilities.

What I Finally Learned In Mid-Life

Now, and for years, I spend my time unlearning the limiting beliefs that I had, such as the annoyingly simplistic construct of good and bad. (Saying yes to people is “good”; saying no to people is “bad”). I now know there are very few objective truths.

I’ve been joyously scraping back to my original surface: a happy, rosy cheeked child/adult who finds humor in the darkest of moments, who finds joy in playing in the mud, who revels in schmaltzy and who loves easily.

Who is your wonderful original self? Who is the person you were before you thought you should be someone else? Let her shine.

photo credit: from i’mjustcreative.com