to dream again
At some point in our lives, we took an unconscious vow to play small, so we could never be hurt again.
We learned that to avoid the disapproving glare, the teasing, the mocking and the shaming, we needed to take a smaller piece of life.
We thought we must make ourselves silent or invisible to survive.
We learned to live with a limited palette for life; we shrunk our appetite, our excitement; we drowned our yearnings and dreams.
In our attempt to seek belonging, we became artificially adaptable, like a chameleon who changes the colour to fit in.
We learned to sniff out any potential rejection and react and adapt before anyone could do or say anything.
We live in hyper-vigilance, we screen the environment for any potential threats.
We try to gather what everyone in the room needs and try to meet them, and we try to make ourselves useful, efficient, productive, so we would not be rejected this time.
The irony is no matter what we do, all we get is a false sense of ‘fitting in’- where a part of us have been cut off to ‘fit in’ to a predetermined shape.
This false ‘fitting in’ never come close to the true life-giving belongingness that our soul yearns for.
We end up what John O Donohue calls ‘the trap of false belonging’.
Groups may offer membership, but at what cost?
— A career that helps us with our security but requires us to put creativity and our soul’s needs aside. A relationship that keeps us from loneliness but does not embrace the full spectrum of our emotions and expressions.
Often when you begin to step into authenticity, people in your family and community will dismiss, underestimate, or criticise you just as you are on the pivotal juncture.
The group feels threatened by your emergence, your charisma, your creativity that exposes their own stuckness, and they resent you for shaking up the equilibrium of the system. Your rising might be taken as a sleight of someone… if they buy into the zero-sum game perspective of abundance, then your rising means someone is falling.
But our intensities do not cease to exist just because our family, schools, churches and social conventions disregard them. They go into hiding, but will one day knock back on our conscience in the form of depression, sickness, or self- sabotage.
Most of us, because of the way our society is, have grasped onto an idea, a label about who we are based on the conventional wisdom.
As adults, we were told we must focus, choose one major, one career path, one vision of the future. But it is precisely this narrowing down that makes us feel heavier and heavier in life.
We are bored with the path that we are on, but we dare not imagine otherwise. So we try to justify it, and we hone ourselves deeper and deeper into a pigeon hole, often without even realising it.
When life closes down, we feel stuck. We dare not imagine a different life because of ‘all the things we may lose’.
We disown many possibilities and parts of us that are wild, unconventional, and fierce.
The truth is, you are a dynamic, ever-changing, multi-dimensional gifted being.
Although some stability and boundaries are needed, something in your soul resists confinement.
If you can free your mind to imagine and dream again
as though you were a child, starting from zero
what emerges may surprise you.
Shifting your focus from concepts to not-knowing clears a space for wisdom. This isn’t resignation or passivity; it’s a Self-remembering which lightens the mind’s analyzing and judging—a wakeful resting into truth. Nor is it a quick fix; it’s an uncensored, courageous embrace of what is.
- Nic Higham
THIS WEEK’S EXPERIMENT: REVIEW OLD PHOTOS
Recall a time, perhaps in your early teen year, where you have experienced a sense of lightness, freedom in your own heart.
It felt expansive, as you have complete openness to endless possibilities that life affords you.
If you can, find old photographs of you that were taken during that phase of your life.
Contemplate them, see if you can get a bodily, visceral reaction from them.
Put these pictures in your visual journal, then write some words or scribble next to them.
After you have done this, for the next week, when you wake up in the morning, write down any dreams, thoughts, or feelings, even if at first glance, they seem irrelevant.
Do this for a whole week, and see what emerges.