Things I Need to Remember
What we talk about when we talk about self knowing
I keep forgetting these things. When I remember them my life is better. I hope this list will help you remember what is important for you to know.
My body is my home. It is the only home I will ever have. My body is not a thing. It is not a thing that needs to be weighed or measured or poked or prodded or shaped. It is my home.
My body has wisdom and knowing and experience in its muscles and bones. I can ignore this at my own peril.
My body is my playground. It is for my enjoyment. I get to enjoy my body no matter what shape it is in. I can enjoy this home and use it for whatever purpose I deem fit.
I have an unbridled sense of whimsy. I am not a serious person. In fact nothing is so serious that it cannot be looked at through a sense of ease, play, creativity, and joy. Whimsical solutions are better.
I am untamed. I lived untamed. In order to enter the next step of my life, I do not need to be re-tamed.
Important lesson I keep forgetting! Before every expansion there is a contraction. When I find myself getting smaller it is because I need to rest and recharge before a growth spurt.
Why do we need to wait until something bad happens (health wise or otherwise) to be like I pray for that person and I want them to have happiness and a great life. What if we just did that anyway before the bad thing? What if we all decided to have the life we want without having a cancer scare or something?
I believe in synchronicities and arriving to the right place at the right time. I believe life can be lived in synchronicities.
Radical Self Trust
What we talk about when we talk about decision making and choices
‘Mother knows best.’
‘Listen to your father.’
‘Respect your elders.’
These are the phrases we hear growing up.
And yes, to some extent, they are true. Our parents, our caregivers, have greater experience and know more than we do. They can show us the pitfalls they have plummeted into, how to avoid them. Where the rocks and steppingstones in the river of life are in order to safely traverse difficult terrain. I do not discount in any way the wisdom of our elders. Their songs. Their stories. How their words can guide us through life.
But also.
I believe each individual is born with an inherent wisdom. A personal inner wisdom. A wisdom that makes one person a great artist and another a great athlete. Skills and talents that a person is inherently coded with in their DNA. As a child develops, they show natural inclinations, they are drawn to certain toys more than others. They are drawn to certain stories, certain topics in school, more than others. This is their personal wisdom that shows where their talents lie.
But caregivers, parents, teachers, the world at large do not always encourage these talents. For one reason or another they do not notice, do not tend to, or ignore altogether the talents of the child in their care. There is the idea of creating a ‘well rounded’ child instead of tending to a child’s unique abilities. I have always found this strange. People generally are not well rounded. They are lopsided. It is rare to be equally gifted in sciences and languages and math. A personally generally leans to one area. It is unnatural to force their focus in a circle to be equal in all topics when they have a natural proclivity to one or two, not six or eight. By making someone well rounded they become mediocre in all topics rather than strong in their natural one.
There are also parents who want their children to fulfil a goal they never achieved or got to pursue. This superimposes a parent’s inner knowing overtop of their child’s. A child wanting to please their parent, to receive their love and praise, erases their inner knowing to try to accept their parent’s knowing for them.
Organized religion also instructs us to not trust our own inner knowing. Instead, adherents to a religion are taught to follow the leader of their congregation, the rules in a book, their parents, and for women they should follow their spouse. One religion that is quite popular in the United States instructs women to ‘die to yourself’ and supersede what is natural to them with their spouse’s instructions, their church’s teachings. A guru will do the same thing. He will instruct you in the ways of the spiritual tradition he follows and will tell you that he is a channel for wisdom. That you as a novice cannot possibly know. That a novice cannot possibly receive the wisdom of the deity or know what is best for them. The guru also supersedes their will overtop of their followers’.
Quite quickly, a person’s individual inner knowing is lost due to their socialization as a child and the instructions they receive as an adult.
As a result, every choice in life requires a group consensus. We’ve all been there. We ask friends, ‘What do you think?’. We scour the internet for advice. We listen to podcasts. Sometimes in desperation we ask perfect strangers. We are so used to asking everyone around us instead of looking inward and asking ourselves. It feels impossible to decide, especially the important decisions, without first asking everyone you know.
Should I stay with my boyfriend? Should I dump my girlfriend? Which job should I take? Where should I live?
All of this becomes impossible to decide.
We’ve been conditioned, especially women, not to trust ourselves. So the act of trusting our decision without consulting anyone else - that is a radical act.
One of the keys to these decisions is the illusion of a choice being something that needs to be chosen logically. Instead of looking inward and using the wisdom that we have from childhood and knowing. There is a difference between a decision and following one’s inner knowing.
This powerful knowing is similar to how our cells work. Cells don’t need to be told their function. They are created knowing their function. A cell inherently knows it is a blood cell or a liver cell or a brain cell. It does its function. It replicates itself. It repairs itself. Damaged cells are discarded to be replaced by new cells. Our cells are constantly working to repair and fix. Our cells want us to be healthier and better. Our cells know what is best for us. Our cells don’t make choices, they know.
Children know how to do this. If you ever have seen a child grabbing what it wants, it does so decisively. They don’t do it by committee. They don’t ask for a group consensus if this is right or not. If this is the next right step. They fling themselves forward with the hope and trust that their feet or their parent will catch them and grab exactly what they want. Children follow their inner knowing inherently. Children know their function just as their cells inside them know their functions. It is only later that children forget.
So what is Radical Self Trust? Radical Self Trust is returning to the inner wisdom and knowing that we are all born with. It is accepting that you know your truth, your wisdom, your path better than anyone else. It is the practice of looking inwards for an answer before looking anywhere else. It is the process of abandoning living by group consensus. This is not easy. We have been conditioned and socialized to accept others’ words, plans, ideas as true for us. So returning to our own truth requires a great deal of work. But, personally, I believe the work is worth it.
Instead of living a mediocre life of consensus to what everyone else thinks is right for you, you can live a fulfilling life of what is right for you.
Living Your Life
What we talk about when we talk about living life really.
“ …I have my phone pressed hot against my ear. Chelsea and I are trying to talk, but there is too much to say.
“I think I’m running out of time, honey,” I say finally. “I’m not trying to be dramatic, but here’s what I worry about: What if you are too?” She knows what I am saying. She is working harder than anyone I have ever known, but her selflessness has caused her to surrender too much of herself to ‘someday’. And now someday has come, at least for me.
Whenever I have fallen apart she has reassembled the pieces. I know she wants to reach through the phone and pull me back into our bubble, where one of us cries and the other diagnoses the problem with merciless affection.
“I have to go,” I say finally. “I’ve got to adjust my meds.” But we just sit there, clinging to goodbye, before I say at last: “Go live your life, Chels.”
All these words I am tripping over are benedictions. Live unburdened. Live free. Live without forevers that don’t always come. These are my best hopes for you, that you press forward at last. I don’t know how to die, but I know how to press this crushing grief into hope, hope for them. It doesn’t sound like goodbye. It sounds more like this: Fare thee well, my loves.”
I don’t want to miss out on my life. I don’t want to count on a someday that never comes. There is too much that holds us back from living. We get so distracted by to do lists, meaningless tasks that consume our lives. We get caught up in the pursuit of an end game, a goal, a place that feels like stability and safety and lose what could unfold in a day. Each day has the potential for joy. But we delay our enjoyment until someday. It is so common to think that weekdays are for work and weekends are for enjoyment. It is so common to think that if we put in the work now, that we will get to have fun later. But as Kate Bowler points out, that day might never come. Personally, I am not willing to take that risk.
Workaholism is the most widespread illness in my country. Wake up, drop the kids at school, spend the day working, pick up the kids, serve dinner, put the kids to bed, watch Netflix, collapse. Rinse and repeat. We call this a life. Where is the living? We are zombies that shuffle back and forth from home to work with little in between. Where is the life? Why have kids if you don’t get to know them, get to enjoy them? Why have a home if you’re never there? Why have a job that doesn’t fulfill you?
The United States has the least paid leave days and the second least paid vacation days in the world. That is astonishing to me. Out of totalitarian countries, out of dictatorships, out of countries with forced labor, child labor, the United States is dead last. We have an illness and addiction and a strange cultural mentality that work is all that exists. Why is no one allowed to take a break, to rest? Why is no one allowed to enjoy their life, their money earned? If we work so hard to earn, why not get to have time to enjoy what we have earned? It has gotten to the point that colleagues have to ‘donate’ their leave days to each other in order to have surgery, to attend to a sick child, to attend a once in a lifetime event. This has become normal. It baffles me. Why can’t the employer just grant more leave?
At any dinner party, any social gathering, I’ve even been to in the United States, I have always been asked ‘What do you do?’ as the first question upon meeting someone. I never understood this. Especially because I have always had jobs that I felt ill defined me. I never once identified with my job as who I am as a person. I never have liked leading with a title to say something about who I am. No title has ever really said much about who I am.
“Everybody’s working for the weekend… Everybody’s goin’ off the deep end”
We are lost in work, we are lost in goals, we are lost in trying to earn enough to survive. In that maze we have lost what matters most. Everything that makes us human – our capacity for joy, wonder, and love.
When my first nephew was born, it was the closest, most front row seat I got to have to watch a human arrive into the world. From seemingly nothing and nowhere there was a baby, a whole other human that never existed before. I got to hold him when he was two hours old. I watched his infancy as he discovered the world. First, he found out he had hands. Then he found those hands could grab things in this world. I watched his exploration as every new object entered into his newborn bubble. I was as spellbound by him as he was spellbound by each discovery he made. I looked around at the people in our family, the people around us. They were oh so busy. And I felt like screaming, ‘Do you see this? Do you see this miracle right here? This human who just showed up out of nothing is discovering what it means to be in a human body and interact with the world. You are missing it! You are missing it! How can you just go about life as normal?”
This is just my personal example of what I marvel at. What makes me stop and go wow. Not everyone is entranced by the development of a child. But there is something that entrances each of us. Something that makes us stop, our stomachs turn, and the world tilt on its axis. Suddenly, the world is different. It could be the development of a plant in a garden or the construction of a building, a beloved family pet perhaps. Each of us has the capacity for wonder. For awe. We don’t use that in our lives. We are missing it.
The checklist of what makes up a life goes something like this: after you are born, go to preschool, then kindergarten, go to school, to high school, to college, get a job, get married, have a baby, have two, buy a house, retire, and maybe then you might get to enjoy your life.
What I want for my life. What I want for all of us. What I want in my life is delight. I want to be surprised and delighted. I want joy. Laughter. Enjoyment. I want to act from a place of love. To let every decision I make be led from my heart and not my brain.
Leading with my heart has led me to places I never expected to be. But I can say truthfully that every logical decision I have ever made has made me unhappy and every heart led decision I have ever made has made me happy.
Living this way takes practice. It takes time to learn to hear your heart and learn what it is trying to tell you. It takes time to have faith in your heart. To shut out all the outside voices. To shut out the shoulds and have to’s. And to become intimately familiar with one’s one inner direction.
Choosing this way of living is terrifying. It comes with a healthy dose of fear. Because there is no logic under it. There is no security net. There is just faith. Faith that my heart will lead me in the right direction. So far it has.
Let me be clear. I am well aware that not everyone has the privilege and ability to get out of survival mode to live a heart led life. There are so many, too many, who have to work to survive. I wish for many things in this world, in this country. But what I cannot seem to fathom, in this country, one of the wealthiest in the world, we cannot afford somehow for everyone to have a living wage and time off to enjoy their wages? In a country with this much wealth, we cannot afford to take a break?
“I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.”