I shall gather myself into myself again
I shall take my scattered selves and make them one.
Fusing them into a polished crystal ball
Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.
from The Crystal Gazer by Sara Teasdale
We are all living scattered lives. We are performing, reacting, and attempting to keep ourselves safe at all costs. We are living our lives on old programs that are constantly and relentlessly running in the background. We rarely stop to question or even challenge them, because we are too tired, too afraid, too overwhelmed, too invested in surviving the life we have already built. Any alternative way feels dangerous, especially when it is not aligned with our community or our culture.
So we perform. We morph. We shape-shift to survive and stay connected, all while we are quietly dying inside. We call this being good. We call it doing the right thing, being loyal, being successful, being peaceful, being prudent. Doing it any other way feels too overwhelming, too hard, too frightening, too bad. All of this performing works most of the time, until it doesn’t.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped trusting ourselves.
We stopped trusting that we might actually know how we want to live. That beneath all the noise and conditioning, there is still a quiet voice inside us that knows what feels true. Underneath all of our old programming is our quiet soul voice, and it wants us to trust what it is saying. A part of us already knows when we are betraying ourselves. It knows when we are silencing what we really feel, minimizing what we really want, or abandoning what we deeply need. Quiet truths whisper in our ear all day, but we push them aside. We don’t trust them. Or we just don’t believe them. We dismiss them because they feel too disruptive, too frightening, too costly.
What if we could begin to really trust ourselves again? What if we could make our voice the loudest in the room of our life? What if we stopped carrying the expectations, fears, and narratives of others as though they were our own?
We do not have to drastically change our lives overnight. We can begin simply by telling ourselves the truth. We can claim our knowing even before we know what action to take. We can say it in writing or speak it out loud to ourselves or to someone we trust. Claiming what is true for us goes a long way towards beginning to internally shift old stories before any action takes place.
Each time we claim what is true for us, we build a little more self-trust. And from that place, we can begin making small adjustments, one day at a time, toward a life that feels more whole.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
from The Journey by Mary Oliver
What truths in your life are asking to be claimed? What would your own voice say if you finally allowed yourself to hear it? What might change if you trusted it enough to let it guide you deeper into the world?
Soul Geography 