How Embarrassing?
What is my most embarrassing secret? What is my least acceptable desire? What is it about myself of which I am most ashamed?
The answers to those questions do not come easily.
Even when brave enough to seek my darkest places I am easily misdirected by stories designed to leave deeper truths undisturbed. A phrase from David Whyte stopped me in my tracks last night. "It is not the thing you fear, it is the mother of the thing you fear". I recognised that I collude with my sub-conscious to leave the 'deep stuff' alone, focusing instead upon the behaviours or thoughts produced by the 'deep stuff'.
Like many other souls I have spent much time and energy confronting fears and shame, clearing, clearing, clearing. Unpicking stories from childhood. Forgiving abusers and apologising to the abused. Smudging, Ho'oponopono-ing, meditating, praying, psycho-analysing and even colon irrigating!
In spite of all this in my heart I know the mother of the fear remains. I also sense that it is common to us all. It lies beyond the reach of the mind and its tools.
Perhaps the mother of that fear is being human. The stories I attempt to clear to extinguish that shame and fear arise from that simple fact that I am human. The time has come to embrace my humanness, to celebrate my most embarrassing secrets, to love my least acceptable desire, to follow my bliss.
But how to find it?
The guide I seek is revealed in that beautiful line by Mary Oliver:
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
This resonates deeply with the recent insistent attention on embodying. Having spent so long exploring the higher dimensional realities it is time to come home, bringing those realisations into the everyday and most importantly into the body. It makes sense that my body is waiting to guide me back to my innocence. To guide me back to my humanity.
Perhaps my fear is simply of being a fully realised human, a fear that was absent in my original innocence. An innocence which trusted the lead of my body and knew no shame.
Love
Bill