There are always bumps in the road. Just how dull would it be if the road were always smooth, without any twists or turns to test our attention and our skill…. to test our willingness and ability… to own both the destination and the journey?
I’m one of the lucky ones. In my life, I cross paths with more genius women than likely my fair share. Amazing women! Women who are choosing mindfully to shape their lives and in doing so, recognize that they are shaping their world. Women who are not afraid to own their fear and engage it directly. Women who are mindful that it is the magnificence of their imperfection that fuels their personal journey of discovery, growth and accelerated evolution.
Acceleration brings with it a degree of intensity that is not accessible any other way. Like driving down that road at 180 mph rather than 60 mph. You have to stay awake! The notion of ‘paying attention’ takes on a whole new meaning – when NOT paying attention could cost you your life. However, in the journey of personal evolution for its own sake, the life I’m referring to is not your physical body – that could go on for decades and linger in habit and drama for what will feel like eons. The life I”m talking about is the one that is about desire to engage; being willing to allow Self and other to be present and to be HUGE! The life I’m talking about is the one that (in my books) really counts: it’s not the life that allows you to be useful to society, it’s the one that allows you to be true to yourSelf.
A long, long time ago, I wrote a short piece called The Level of the Game. It was written at a time when someone I loved had become ill. At the time, I thought he had lost his desire to engage because he became ill. Now I know that he became ill because he lost his desire to engage! More than great courage, it takes much greater curiosity to continue to engage in those moments when we’re feeling the bumps along the way. It’s just so much easier to slow down or pull off the road.
It was written to honor, inside myself, the part of me that was him… and the desire to live large and play full tilt – even when I was unsure of both my willingness and ability to do that. It was written to remind me of who I am capable of becoming, in those moments when it is just so easy for me to forget. And it was written to give myself permission to know that if/when I choose to pull off the road, I can do so with my head held high, recognizing the genius of that choice and owning it, in its full measure. What matters most is that I continue to remember who I AM. In a holographic universe, it will be simply because I choose it and say so.
Bumps…. twists… turns…. internal and external weather…. they are all, without exception, invitations to my own greatness. It is when I forget, in those deep and dark places that forgetting guides me too, that I must remember I have created it all!
Breathing is good….
I am always so amazed and delighted when what I am experiencing shows up, right in front of me… in this case, your blog, Louise.
Last evening, I started to write about my experience of making the open-forum intensive, ‘Decloaking and Living Authentically’, my own – I am becoming my own program, in every moment that I engage. As I have yet to complete the blog, I have yet to publish it. Perhaps, that is a metaphor for life in flow. Is a blog, as emerging information, every really complete? And… who am I as its Publisher?
Re-reading the ‘The Level of the Game’ has also invited me to keep showing up for myself and to keep putting myself out there, so I can reclaim more of what’s in here.
I notice that I am allowing myself the luxury of being guided, more and more, by my intuition, my gut, in the face of my ferocious intellect to provocatively question, and even to deride, after the fact of it’s own choosing,
my choice to show up and to engage. I am becoming more and more awake to the pervasiveness of the cultural conditioning that says that I cannot express the very truth of my experience, because the presuppositions that I am waking up to must not be expressed as they could ‘kill’ others.
Who are we kidding here? Our culture demands transparency in all things, yet our programming defaults to bunker viewing, which is no view at all. Duplicity as a norm that is asleep (often as an escape, an exit)… and that duplicity carries the spores for ill-health and death, be it in our bodies and/or our collectives. However, when I am awake to my own duplicity, yet continue to choose it, the intensity of it’s roar will become the very coup that I did not want; I will have to stop and be still in my own genius, or die in every moment in the lie that I have contracted with.
So, yes, I am the program, I am one, with my game of ‘Decloaking and Living Authentically’. I am my own truth, I am unwilling to not live an exemplary and transparent life… for me… as an invitation to others to rediscover and reclaim ‘their’ own genius, resillience, and safety… inside.
It does take courage to stand alone, knowing that I am never alone, at all.
Courage: I am becoming one with that, too.
I am also becoming the invitation for more in my own ‘Decloaking and Living Authentically’.
Aloha,
Sheila.