“ The burden of identification with any one belief, value, theory, experience or way of relating to ourselves and others is that we become tethered to our disappearing self. Life becomes stagnant. We need to continually leave our shoes at the door of ourselves and enter to greet whomever we are becoming anew with wonderment. “
~ Lotus Indigo Shakti Kruse
Robert Rabbin would often ask me my name and say “ pleased to meet you, tell me about yourself.” He would ask me this even after years of knowing each other. And I learnt through this exploration to let go of the assumptions and stories I told about myself and others that had become outdated and grown bitter on the tongue. I learnt to meet myself with new eyes and inquire into the curiosity of what was present in me.
Discovering that I am an ever evolving being in every way has been both disruptive and liberating.
I have also discovered how much we hold others in an obligation to identify in relation to ourselves so we can live in a guaranteed comfort instead of allowing others the freedom to evolve, sometimes away from us.
I experienced myself throughout many epochs of my life as stuck, stagnant and unseen. Unseen by others because I had learnt so naively to identify with a version of myself and stick to it. My loyalty relied on my obligation to an agreed one version of myself. At the heart of it, I had become lost to myself.
It is ironic that women crave so deeply to be seen in the world and yet hold ourselves invisible to our own terrifying and beautiful evolution.
I remember the day my mother rejected me for being other then she agreed with. She rejected my anger and my right to my choices, incapable of acknowledging my evolution. The punishment for change was her constant disapproval. My mother was an unseen woman and her strategies of manipulation to get seen were subtle and yet sinister. She taught me her tricks.
I have been a hologram. I have been unseen to myself. I have agreed to relationships that were founded on me staying the same, entrapping myself in an untenable shape and resented myself and the other in the doing of it. I have blamed and punished and demanded.
I have seen this in other women. And then finally when the realization of our concertinaed life dawns and if, just if, we let ourselves stop the control and demand of our own disappearing self, the upgrading feels like vertigo making our stomach churn.
Sometimes it leaves us frightened at the disorientation of not ‘knowing who I am’ and going on a journey of discovery is implied as being finite; with an end. The travel brochure tells you, you will arrive at your distant shore. In the books, she lives happily ever after The End.
What I know now is that I am continually disappearing to myself and having to reacquaint myself with the version of me that I am becoming as I find myself changing so rapidly these days as I know liberally let myself. It is a perpetual relationship of re-meeting myself in the integrity of my emerging and disappearing self. There is no end.
I also need to be vigil to untether myself from the expectations others place on me and I on them and instead meet them in wonderment of letting them reveal themselves to me anew.
“Pleased to meet you. Tell me about yourself.”
? Lotus
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