There is a flavour of “leave me alone”, “I don’t need to give you an explanation”, “I can be me and you can be you”, “I know what I am doing”, “i am more important to me that your opinion of me”, “i need space”, “what about me”, “this is my time and I can choose what I do with it”, “I don’t need anyone to tell me how to live”…., in these recent times.
We already saw ourselves move into an era of “self empowerment” and to that end we employed the services of many a quite, teacher, motivational speaker and even books, to name but a few. We moved from a place of feeling victimised hurt pained devalued demoralised degraded and demoted to feeling good about us just as we are. That came with leaving relationships making new tribes putting our needs first and from that came an off shoot of then inspiring others to stop taking the crap of anyone else and live their life as their own and on their own terms. Also, we became less tolerant and more critical of each other.
We became guarded divided and more into our self preservation as opposed to self evolution or even self empowerment. The self became sidelined by the demands of the egoic mind and we found a whole tribe that gave us dopamine inducements keeping us in a place of “self incarceration” rather than self care let alone any level of real self connection or self acceptance and a far cry from self mastery!
What has happened in reality is we have mistaken the dopamine release for an actual paradigm shift in our consciousness. The shift from being in a place of say “I am hurt” or “I felt that my boundaries were not respected” or “I don’t want to be so open anymore as people just throw it back at me”, or “I feel I am not valued”, to being in a place of “I feel safe loved and free to be”, has to happen “THROUGH” and not over the wounds or pockets of injustices we feel we have endured.
For a while, when we find comradeship in another tribe feeling as you are, and giving you self affirmations and ideologies to inculcate in your daily lives, this looks like it’s fed the sense of self in you and you stay where you are, putting up a 9 foot fence all around you. You now engage with life on your terms. There is zero engagement here with the root of how you came to feel a victim of life. A victim of life can mean feeling misunderstood hard done by and whatever other garbs this comes with.
We don’t always realise we come from a place of being done to as opposed to making life happen for us. In this context it means, we don’t see any problem as being of us but of the others. We don’t see us as the ones that are triggered and therefore need a look within or in the mirror. Instead what we see is that so and so made us feel this way and therefore so and so are not good for us.
The real question and issue here is why did so and so bring such a feeling in you.
We are walking so guarded as though our idealised sense of self will crumble should we let our guard down. To the point that relationships are taken for granted. Friendships are no longer safe havens but places we must tread on eggshells for fear of our heads being bitten should we accidentally provoke a reaction in one another.
All of this added to it the pandemic times has meant that we are even more guarded and more on edge. We are desperately seeking love warmth kindness but we simply don’t feel we can let our guard down.
So, why are we all feeling like this?
We have lost our usual emotional regulation.
With the new movement into self empowerment without it being a through and thorough awakening of the self, we moved away from relationships, places and our “usual” or “norm” that would have provided some comfort. True we shifted focus into “higher” and more “worthy” causes and making finding ourselves a priority. However, we found comfort and not ourselves in a digital third party without the power of touch smell and proximity. We either had a podcast a tv box or a book or a paid therapist or a far off family member friend.
We deliberately created a wall of difference.
The wall of difference went up even higher with the pandemic. Only this time, it was less deliberate and more imposed without choice. Although, we could say, we attracted that which our global mind had become and therefore manifested it physically in social distancing and a larger online life than offline at home in our environments being present. Even with our screens off, what we read on screen still played havoc with our minds.
In the preceding times of “self empowerment” we seeded social distance in our thought because to engage with another became an obligation and something we did only if invited to. We lost our spontaneity in relationships. We lost our whole idea of healthy communication and relationships; how to live with self reverence and reference to others extended out of our own self reverence.
Instead, we started to revere the “petty self”, the “wounded self” as opposed to just the Self. We fell back in love with a false sense of self, a self that came to be as a cover up for the real self as a result of some event that upset the real self so much so that it fled. The real self too shy to come out too scared of the others lest it be hurt again developed a fake identity. The false self.
True it is that we have all been hurt and injured in ways unique to our blueprint. But we at our core are built to be social and sociable. We cannot be self empowered at the cost of social connection because our whole brain and how it’s wired literally thrives on social interactions. We need limbic regulation in order to feel safe secure and relaxed. A therapist cannot replace real human interaction and neither can a podcast.
Self awareness comes from a commitment to Self. To know the Self one only needs a totality of presence to the subtle nuances of how you manifest your sense of Self daily. Others will be just that, others. But how we respond to others is one crucial telling of where we are in the process of self awareness.
To take our power back simply means to reclaim lost parts of you and to know that you are a you that has your own story and not a you that is someone else’s version. But it also means, to bring back that original sense of self, which was, and still is love. With love comes spontaneity. Love knocks and we answer. Now we screen the calls of love because we don’t want love. We want an external acceptance of our new found empowerment of the false identity.
Self awareness and self love is all encompassing. There is no bypass.
Indeed, we live in very difficult times, yet, the perfect opportunity to really look at ourselves and our life choices. Are we moving closer to self or away from self?
Take a look, you might be kidding yourself. No stories.