The False Summit of the Eternal There

Vol.1  Issue 1.

“I may not be there yet, but I’m closer than I was yesterday.”

Do you love that quote? Does it make you feel all content and hopeful inside? I read it the other day and it stuck in my craw.  I don’t love it.
As soon as I read it, it smacked me in my guts with a BIG NO.  I thought to myself, shit people still really believe this. damn it; I used to believe it too.

So I wanted to write to you today about what I have learnt along the way about what I call the false summit of the eternal ‘there’.

I was once a person who thought that there was something wrong with me and that I needed fixing.  So I took myself off to my first personal development course at the ripe old age of seventeen to be fixed, healed, saved or vindicated.  It didn’t seem to work so I repeated the same course because I must have been a really bad egg and maybe unfixable.  I sat that course some four times in a 12 month period only to find that the high of feeling fixed wore off over time.  Don’t get me wrong.  It was an amazing course with some amazing teachers and I went on to do many of the courses offered by that company and had some powerful learning.  It wasn’t the content so much as my fundamental premise that kept me hooked.

The underlying belief being one of, if I did enough inner work, I would be fixed and I would get ‘there’.  And when I arrived ‘there’ that it would be different from here and I would feel arrived (insert fixed, healed, better, more successful etc). I spent many years and a-lot-a-moola on my personal development work.  I used to affectionately call it my healing. If I had my time again, I would have done all that work still.  However the truth is, I look back now and see that I missed out on at huge chunk of the learning that was offered to me by some incredible teachers, because of this false belief that I was going to get ‘there’.

Much of the world will convince you or support you in believing that you are not whole just the way you are and that you need their product of service, their pill or their push up bra, their 6 step program or their complete box set to help you to feel complete.  It is one of the unspoken lies of a lot of what goes on in the world today in the pursuit of profit and it creates more and more pain which in turn creates more and more profits. Have this car and you will feel free, wear these hip high undies and you can feel sexy, wear these glasses and you can feel smarter the ads holler.  If depressed, take this drug, if feeling fat, take this wonder pill, if feeling ugly, get a nip and tuck. Maybe you need a tick sheet of how to get ‘there’, All the while implying that you are not enough as you are and you need an add on. No wonder we are all so exhausted.

Well I am here to tell you that, that type of thinking does not lead you to where you want to go.  It leads you a long way from where you want to be going, because where you want to be going is not ‘there’, out ‘there’, up ‘there’ or over ‘there’.  Where you want to go is home. Home is the knowing that you are complete and that there is nothing wrong with you and nothing that needs fixing. That you are whole and gorgeous and so full of love and light just because you exist. That everything that happened was meant to happen to have you arrive here.

The moment I stopped looking for the false summit of the eternal ‘there’ and realised that my work was something I desired to do to grow more intimate in knowing myself, then I was able to stop running away from myself and I started to get to know myself.  I began to like and respect what I came to know as the real me and I started hearing what I had to say to myself. I learnt that here is where I need to be if I am to feel what it is to be fully human.  Here is where the action is.  Here is where my feelings take on potency that is real and my thoughts can be laughed at, pulled apart and explored like a science kit.  Here is where I can feel a hole or my whole.  I can feel what I am feeling with out a push up bra or a sports car to feel it.

I felt it was important to share this distinction with you, so you too can stop reaching for the false summit of the eternal there and begin to embrace who you really are, right now, here, in this moment.  You may notice how much you criticise yourself in this moment or how much your heart aches for all the falsehood you have endured. You may discover that your spirit is a lot lighter, by nature, then you give yourself permission to be, because you feel somehow obligated to suffer along with other mountaineers scaling the summit of being fixed. At the end of the day, the moment you stop the climb and sit with yourself in all your glorious messiness and spectacular depth of heart and soul, is the moment you arrive home to the unique you in the world.