I'm not talking about you parter or your spouse, I am talking about the ability to know thyself outside of the cultural indoctrinations that keep you looking externally for the answers.
I'm talking about the reason why you people please, fawn and consistently self abandon when the world actually needs you bravely in your center.
I'm talking about the dangers of a culture that requires shared values, but doesn't know how to trust the individuals within that system to know what they actually value and why.
You see, what myself and many others have witness time and time over again, is a bloom of inspiration of people wanting to create new systems and structures of community and commerce, whom are not experienced or skilled in the foundational need of mature and authentic relating.
Yes, permaculture, natural building and sacred economics are helpful in building new futures, but at the end of the day, it's just people relating to other people, and that's often the time where the skills fall short.
Human social understanding and the depth of how we understand ourselves (outside of our conditioned programming) is absolutely vital to the health and sustainability of anything we wish to build or create for a better future. The challenge is that it's harder, it's significantly more confronting, and inherently more complex.
Yet, it doesn't have to be some unsolvable riddle.
The reality is that we were actually made to know ourselves, engage in mature and respectful relationships and let our brave authentic being then be in service to the greater whole. We were designed to move and take action from a place that's not seeking approval constantly, rather that is in full trust of our contribution to the whole based on the unique nature of who we are.
This is a shift from our lives being meaningless and self-serving, to our lives being the training ground for beauty and connection to flourish.
Our individuality (that which separates us from others) is actually a great gift to the greater web of life, but instead it has become a self-serving end-game that tries to fight and argue with anything that is different from itself.
When our individuality is a weapon not an offering, you know we've gone down the wrong path.
Any thriving ecosystem NEEDS diversity to survive.
We need to balance the scales of self-individuation and service to the whole. From where I'm standing, this has become a forgotten need and we are all living in the wake of it's implications.
I'm here to remind you today that restoring balance doesn't have to suck, but it does require some intelligible effort on your part to not keep perpetuating a pattern that strips us all of our sovereign and inherent power and purpose. The patterns of powerlessness, the patterns of superiority, the patterns of self-neglect... they all were programmed and can be un-programmed.
So what are these 'ways' I speak of that can help us all return home to a balanced humanity in a good way, and deepen our ability to relate to self and other with maturity and courage?
1st- You need to understand the reason behind your motives of staying small and doing as you're told without question. We are fear based beings, and until we understand and implore empowering and clever ways to work with our fears (all of them), then we can never make choices from trust, only fear.
I have a masterclass on this that is in service to aiding you in this process. Watch it for free HERE.
2nd- We all have to unwind our understanding of ourselves separate from our traumas, stories and skewed personal mythologies. This process is learning the art and skill of self-regulation, and how to stop the most popular trauma response of 'people-pleasing' from being the norm. It actually doesn't please anyone and ends up getting us into situations and agreements we cannot uphold, and thus the systems fails again.
3rd- It's embodied. The greatest loss of the colonial capitalistic agenda is our loss of connection to our body (energetic, physical, and the earth). We have been taught, as a way of being disempowered, that others outside of ourselves know more about us than we do, and it's best for us to obey and abide. But, the revolution is fully funded by our ability to return to our own innate gnosis and sensing as honest, true and worthy of our trust, or else we will continue to be lost sheep looking for a leader that will promise us something that no man could ever fulfill.
4th- Building upon the prior processes (which the order of is important) we should next learn how to take this robust and well-connected internal reality, and learn how to responsibly share that with the outside reality. This is when it's vital that we learn how to relate to others from a place of utter responsibility, compassion and understanding of the nature of relationship dynamics outside of our addiction to 'getting what we want' and 'feeling loved at all costs'. If we don't unwind our fears ,and learn to feel safe and at home in our bodies, we'll use our relationships to do that work for us, which creates incredibly unhealthy dynamics for both/ all parties. It sets everyone up for a harsh awakening when it all finally crumbles. Healthy relating requires honesty with oneself, consideration for the other, and an absence of unconscious/ non-consensual needs seeking to be met by the other.
This step, this exploration, is hands down the hardest and most interesting to unwind and understand because in one hand we are biologically wired to need eacother, and in the other hand we have unhealthy patterns that limit us from actual fulfilling connection.
5th and beyond- This is the phase where the individual has a healthy experience of self trust and understanding, is able to meet their needs met through empowering and consensual relationships, and is ready to allow their life to be surrendered to the greater goal and cause. We need to build futures with people we trust. Not only in the ways of keeping one's word (which is nice) but in the ways of being able to get it wrong and learn with humility, to be honest when their vision or allegiances change, or to make choices based on what's true for them, not what they should know as true. That is trust worthy, that is honorable.
As you can see, there is a journey that spirals from the inner world to the outer and back in again. You may be identifying with various stages, noticing where you're getting stuck, or tracking where you have 'work' to do. This is all a good sign.
This is also not a complete map, but then again nothing really is. This is a peek into a window that illuminates a need to focus on the roots of the revolution (and whatever that whole-heartedly looks like to you) being inherently relational, and due for some adjustments on the intrapersonal levels that will bloom into the interpersonal.
Because at the end of the day, I fully believe that this life is about much more than us all getting what we want and being approved of. Sorry y'all. This greater story we are so adamant about creating (some of us at least) is really built with the bravery to be an emergent edge walker, to be the kind of human that's ready to actually trust life instead of fight or manipulate it, and to deepen our roots of inter-relationality as a true, just and worthy cause.
I'd like to offer another version of a map/ process to help clarify this sentiment, and is a journey of the transition of authority.
There is a process of authority that is helpful to articulated this story-arch well spoken by modern mystic Carolyn Myss. It's the journey from tribal authority (being a baby and needing the tribe to inform, protect and educate you) to personal authority (actual individuation and and self-trust, not individualism), and COMPLETES with divine authority (the ability to turn over your hard-won personal will, not some fake guise of it, over to the hands of that which is greater than all of us).
Each step is crucial in the formation and flow of a mature and integrated human adult. Yet in the western culture here, we hardly have any of these in the right order.
I could blame the lack of community, the absence of any rights of passage ritual and ceremony, the severance from the natural world, or the inability to integrate our great initiations back into the context of our cultures and relations. But the greatest pit-fall I see is the loss of the desire to even return to something more beautiful and more meaningful, or attempt to create something new.
And at the end of the day, your beliefs are what is going to propel you down the path of a holistic and heart-full future, or at least help you to show up for it's possibility. And while the feeling of the 'task' can often feel daunting, the truth is, it gets to be this gentle shift in how we relate to ourselves and others that actually feels so good and natural once we let go of the protective patterns and outdated models of thinking.
Truth work is relational work, and relationality is the root system of our shared human existence on this gracious eden of a planet. There are many pathways to peace, and I hope at some point they are all walked with curiosity and humility.
The future is bright, and may we build it from with integrity so the efforts will be sustainable for many generations to come.
If you're curious to dive into to these pathways of becoming, or initiate yourself into a mature integrated adulthood, please do reach out. Truth Training (the last round ever) will close it's doors on January 24th. If you seek 1:1 coaching and mentorship, please fill out the application HERE.
Thanks for reading and feeling it all with me -
Jenny