And what happens when we stow away the emotions that accompany our experiences, never give ourselves time to process, try to force ourselves into feeling any given way at any given time, is we disregard what will give us the ultimate peace: just allowing, without judgment.
So it’s not about changing how you feel. It’s about listening. Not accepting what they appear to mean—that’s important—but really following your instincts down to what they are trying to signal. They are how you communicate with yourself.
Every feeling is worthwhile. You miss so much by trying to change every one of them away, or thinking there are some that are right or wrong or good or bad or that you should have or shouldn’t, all because you’re afraid that you’ll tell yourself something you don’t want to hear.
The feelings you most suppress are the most important ways you guide yourself. Your apprehension to listen is not your own desire. It’s fear of being something more or less or greater or worse or simply different than those around you have implied they will accept.
When you choose to value having other people’s acceptance over your own, you accept a fate of battling your instincts to assimilate to the needs of other people’s egos. In the meantime, a world and lifetime of listening, leaning, allowing, following, perceiving, feeling, and experiencing…
constantly eludes you.
Sadness will not kill you. Depression won’t, either. But fighting it will.
Ignoring it will. Trying to escape it rather than confront it will. Denying it will. Suffocating it will. Allowing it no place to go other than your deep subconscious to embed and control you will. Not that you’ll take your life or destroy everything “good” you do receive (though you might).
But it will kill you in that it will rob you of every bit of life you do have: You either let yourself feel everything or numb yourself into feeling nothing. You cannot select emotions. You are either in accord with their flow or in resistance to their nature. In the end, the choice is yours.
8
THE PARTS
of you that
AREN’T “I”
Let’s pretend for a moment that we pulled apart all of your organs and laid them on a table.
Feel your heartbeat; imagine it outside of you. You would not look at your heart and think: “That is me.” You think: “That is my heart.”
Now feel your breath. Feel it in tandem with your heartbeat, neither of which you are often conscious of, both of which are in constant motion.
You do not say, “I am my breath.” You say: “I am breathing.”
Think about your liver. And your kidneys. Think about your bones and your blood. Think about your legs and your fingers and your hair and your brain. You see them objectively. They’re just parts. They’re ultimately (mostly) removable and replaceable and they’re all entirely temporary. You don’t think of them and see “I.” You think of them and you see things. If you pulled them apart, they’d just be compilations of cells. You don’t see them and think: “That’s me!” You think: “Those are mine.”
Why is it any different when we compile and attach them?
There is a concentration of energy, of heavy presentness, in your chest and throat and maybe a little in your head. It is centered. You don’t feel yourself in your legs. You don’t have emotions in your arms. It’s at the core.
In that same space coexist the organs we don’t identify with and the energy we do. If we removed the latter, what would be left? What would be there? What exists when you don’t?
Have you ever sat in that? Have you ever sat with that? Have you ever felt each part of your body and realized the parts are not “I?” Have you ever felt the presentness that is somehow livened when attached? Have you ever identified the difference between what you call yours and what you call yourself?
Knowing who you are is grounding; it gives you a sense of trajectory. But when we assign words and meanings to what we know we like and value and want, we create attachments. We then strive to keep things within the
parameters of which we’ve already accepted. Out of that, we create failure.
We create suffering over self. We begin to believe that a static idea can represent a dynamic, evolving being. The ways we don’t live up to the ideas in our minds become our greatest grievances.
I think sometimes we get attached to the structures because we don’t like the contents. We’re more invested in how we’re perceived than who we are, in the idea of what the title means than the day-to-day work of the job, in the “do you promise to love me forever?” than the actual day-to-day loving.
This is to say: We’re more comforted by ideas of what things are as opposed to what they really are. We like to think of ourselves as bodies because that doesn’t leave us with the open-ended “what else.”
But what if the “what else” isn’t the end-thought, but the beginning? What if awareness of it frees us of so many things, quells so many thoughts, balms so many aches? What if healing yourself is not fixing an attitude, not changing an opinion, not altering an aesthetic, but shifting a presence, an awareness, an energy?
In this case, fixing the parts does not heal the whole.
The only thing that changes you and your life is the awareness of the parts that are not “I.” It is the whole, it is where you end up, it is where you began, it is the one thing, the only thing, that shifts, and raises, and facilitates the spark of awareness that made you question the elements of its vessel.
I’m not really asking you to consider the theories. I’m just asking whether or not you feel it.
9
20 SIGNS
you’re doing
BETTER
than you think
YOU ARE
01. You paid the bills this month and maybe even had extra to spend on nonessentials. It doesn’t matter how much you belabored the checks as they went out; the point is that they did, and you figured it out regardless.
02. You question yourself. You doubt your life. You feel miserable some days. This means you’re still open to growth. This means you can be objective and self-aware. The best people go home at the end of the day and think: “or…maybe there’s another way.”
03. You have a job. For however many hours, at whatever rate, you are earning money that helps you eat something, sleep on something, wear something every day. It’s not failure if it doesn’t look the way you thought it would—you’re valuing your independence and taking responsibility for yourself.
