sovereignty
The decision to value yourself
At a certain point you have to stop caring that you don’t fit in and decide that who you are is purposeful and holy and devote yourself to the task of being yourself fully and freely. Because doing anything else hurts in the way that seeing something beautiful be destroyed hurts. Your uniqueness is precious and will only exist once in all of the known Universe. Even if you were the only one who ever valued it, that would be enough to satisfy the reason you were born.
To find that fierceness, you have to get in a really quiet place with yourself and commit to your own unfolding. There is nobody who can give it to you because it’s an expression of your own sovereign will. It’s the decision to value yourself-as-you-are, and only you can make it.
Self-authorization is part of spiritual development
“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
Millions have walked the spiritual path before you. But they’ve all also been walking a unique path of their own. We each have a unique spiritual path that we have to discover by walking it. And part of the path is learning to trust inner guidance over any other form of guidance.
There are many tools of liberation, but the only one who can liberate you is yourself. You are unique. Your tangle of patterns and meanings is yours. It is and always will be on you to untangle it.
You can follow other people’s teachings, and many will help you and work for you. But ultimately you can only become free by working with your own soul and walking your own path. Because our individuality is part of our awakening. There is nothing about us that is not purposeful.
Rejecting the tyranny of productivity
The idea that we should be able to force ourselves to do things we don’t want to do is just an idea. It’s not something you have to believe.
I think it’s a tragedy that so many people (especially ADHDers) do not realize how much their motivation is utterly unstoppable once it’s aimed at something they actually WANT to do. Because they’ve spent so long trying to force themselves to do things they don’t want to do, and feeling bad about it.
I am just beginning to appreciate how much internal de-programming from social conditioning I’ve done in my life because the source of my bad feelings was actually social-cultural messages, and when I got to the root of them I was just like “nah, not believing that”.
Healing from my family stuff was emotional work, but undoing social conditioning requires something else–an internal “F*** you” to messages that are inherently judgmental to your basic nature.
I was not made to do what other people want me to do. It’s just not how I am wired. So of course my body-mind protests when I’m in that position. It completely shuts down. But when I’m doing what I love to do, what I want to do, and following my internal guidance, I have an immense amount of energy and drive.
This is why institutional education makes me wilt and yet I’ve spent my whole adult life taking classes and workshops and learning things. I love learning–I just need a high degree of autonomy and teachers who get that and support that. But if the only option for learning I ever came across was our education “system”, I would have concluded that I don’t like learning, because I can’t be happy under those conditions.
The same goes for work–I’ll work all day on things I am interested in and want to create, but working for other people was intolerable to me. I don’t think that would always necessarily be the case–people hold authority differently, and some leaders can handle people who need autonomy. But it’s not the norm. The norm is conformity. And I am just not here for that.
And I know that it comes across as selfish or entitled to some people. But it’s really just a fact that I’ve had to accept about myself. The more conformity is expected in a given environment, the less of “me” will show up in it. I can play along for awhile, but it starts to feel pointless. And I’ve had to spend quite a lot of time alone to really understand how much I need to follow the moment-by-moment impulses inside me in order to feel free and happy. This is literally how all animals live and so it’s a completely natural state to be in. And yet our social-cultural conditioning is based on “civilizing” us out of that awareness and teaching us to conform to systems and schedules.
This is not an intellectual protest–it’s my body itself that protests. I’ve never been a fan of idealism because it is usually too far removed from the territory it aims to liberate to be useful and it often becomes tyrannical. So I want to be clear that all I’ve done is removed what makes me unhappy and followed what makes me happy, and what I’ve come to is: I’m allergic to most social and cultural expectations (especially around time and work) and I’m at my best when I ignore them.
Choose the meaning that liberates you
The struggle to accept every part of your life and appreciate what it gave you rather than what it took from you is the price of wisdom, power, and liberation.
You create all meaning, so the meaning of anything isn’t important—it’s the freedom that the meaning gives you that matters. So choose meaning that is liberating, not disempowering.
Reconceptualize your weirdness
Reconceptualize your weirdness, divergence & deviancy as you being born to lead people toward new possibilities.
“To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.” – e.e. cummings
Coming out of the woo closet
I’ve always tried to keep my spiritual path to myself, to a large extent. I talk about it a little bit, but so much less than it actually lives in me and shapes my life. But the personal growth and healing and empowerment stuff I talk about–it was all done in the context of my commitment to my spiritual path, and doesn’t really make complete sense without it. I can’t authentically tell my story without talking about it.
- I can’t really explain my self-love journey without talking about understanding myself as a child of the Divine.
- I can’t really explain healing my trauma without talking about knowing who I truly am is bigger than any experience I can have in this life.
- I can’t really explain empowerment as an empath without talking about how energy responds to intention, and you have the complete right to own your energy field and not take on others emotions.
- I can’t really explain how I released my patterns of codependence and learned self-sovereignty without talking about my karma around self-sacrifice.
- I can’t really explain how I can survive very dark experiences and come out of them transformed and free of resentment without explaining my understanding of why I’m on Earth in the first place.
These things don’t make sense without the full picture. So I can’t teach anything without teaching everything. Which means my next step is to bring my weird, wild, woo-woo path explicitly into my writing.
It’s something I have resisted for a very long time, because my spirituality is so precious to me, and so close to my heart. It is the driving force of my life. But it’s getting to that point where I can’t not be myself in this way. I can’t keep pretending or masking my actual reality–something inside me won’t stand for it anymore. There comes a moment when the shadows of your past, the people who dismissed or belittled your authentic self and made you afraid to be yourself, just do not matter compared to the benefits of freedom and owning your own life story and your authentic expression.
I can’t fully own my power and let anyone else’s opinions or judgments or pain be more important than me living my own truth and speaking it as I am called to. Why would I give people who do not understand me and do not see me the power to shut down my own right to speak? I can no longer stomach giving that much of my power away. I can no longer live in the smallness I created to stay safe. It’s not enough anymore to merely be safe. I need to also be free.