Spring Cleaning the Inauthentic Life…part 2
Walked the razors edge several times between being guarded and feeling totally exposed with Lucky in Thailand.
For the second time in my life, I had a fire sale - watching the material existence that defined the last six years go out the door for pennies on the dollar. Earlier that year, I kept feeling like the queen of an empty castle, and it eventually shaped my reality, as those things tend to do. No more car, no more fancy bike, no more four-bedroom house, no more props from a career.
The voice of existential guilt I carried from going through the motions went something like this:
“What are you doing?!”
“Does the dance with attachment feel like it’s lessening?”
“Why do I still want to hermit between gigs?”
“Why does expanding my sphere of vulnerability feel like I’ll lose everything?”
You know, the stuff you contemplate on repetitive dog walks.
So, like an eight-house stellium does, I burned it all down and decided to take that clichéd trip around the world to find - and more aptly, lose myself. With absolutely no plan and a vague set of adjectives to describe a new future, we boarded a foreshadowing-esque, downgraded-without-warning plane to Thailand. Because why not take a bunch of unprocessed baggage to follow you around one of the most beautiful places on Earth?
Chronic low back pain from denying I was terrified also deserved a holiday. However, reposing for months on thin mattresses to know thyself didn’t really get in there till the kidney stone blew up. But that is for another day.
Once I could no longer lose myself in the distraction of constant work and allowed for empty days, everything I was holding turned thunderous. I had spent the last five years heavily working with guests in the medicine space, and there were a lot of voices vying for airtime. Many of them were unkind. Many were relentless.
Did I lie awake for hours, rushing? Absolutely.
Did I have to lie down and let the panic chemicals run their course? One hundred percent.
What was coming forward was the mind’s tendency to see insufficiencies in the present moment. I wanted everything figured out and sorted so I could feel safe again. As everything just got cloudier over time (as it was supposed to), I fell further and further into disagreement with life as it was. Yet I didn’t have words for any of this at the time. It just felt like pain. Like being abandoned by God, by material certainty, and by a universe that usually went my way. Top it off with the prevalent viewpoint that anyone in a healing or spiritual profession should be able to bust out their tools, and all will be sorted.
The irony is that the road to selfhood is often messy, lonely, and rife with confusion.
Is there a place for that in your heart? In mine?
My little porch in India where I would lament into my pipe and stare at the people who would walk by and stare at me.
Thus began the longer road to unlocking what I just alluded to.
Is there room in the heart to start welcoming home the pieces that tear the narrative or identity du jour to shreds? Was I finally ready to stop ‘cleaning’ and ‘transforming’ discomfort and move towards sitting fully in its depths to hear its wisdom? Was I ready to finally get real with the woman who could find 100 ways the present could do better?
Stay tuned for part 3.