I don't know about you, but the waters many of us have been sailing in for the past four years have felt a bit deep and wide with a murkiness to them. It's taken an incredible amount of courage (and support from great people) for us to navigate these waters. Many of us have had to get cozy and comfortable with feeling vulnerable and uncertain... feelings I personally have spent a lifetime pushing away. Can you relate?
The thing is...if we can make a commitment to ourselves to be radically honest and transparent with ourselves, everything can change. Why? Because pushing our deeper truths under the surface and trying to ignore or avoid them every day is exhausting. Ignoring and avoiding truths takes a ton of energy and we could certainly use that energy in better ways in our lives.
So how about this instead: we find the inner courage to surrender to our deeper truths, open up inside, and get real with ourselves. This notion may sound or feel scary but it's also incredibly empowering and relieving. And in my experience, totally worth it in the long run.
Now let's go one step further. Let's start learning how to be more vulnerable, transparent, and authentic with the right people in our lives. Notice that I said "with the right people" and not with everybody. That's because it's unwise to do so with everybody, but it's fulfilling to do so with the right people in our lives. You know, safe people. Trustworthy people. Awake and present people. People who can go there with us.
Consider that to not do so means that we are hiding our most authentic self from others and keeping all our relationships at a safe (and somewhat lonely) distance in life. The rub with that is that it also keeps the capacity for authentic love at a distance from us. Something that's increasingly showing up among my friends and clients is this: we don't want to play that game anymore.
We crave authentic love in our lives. We want transparency, true connections, and authentic relationships, not ones that are based on hiding important parts of ourselves, or on subconscious coping patterns, defensive strategies, or masks. We all have them. No human grows up unscathed. It's impossible because every single one of us takes on psychic distortions, hurts, and untruths through our familial and societal histories and conditioning, but the great news is that none of us are beyond moving past this bullshit.
It's a blessing in this life to realize and repair the ways our childhood wounds hijacked our capacity to be vulnerable, transparent, and authentic with ourselves and in our relationships and lives. It's not that we've spent our entire lives being fake, but that we've spent them not able to clearly or fully see the ways we've been hiding important parts of ourselves from the people and world around us— something we do to stay "safe" without realizing it.
I believe that miracles happen when we find the courage to confront ourselves, embrace ourselves, and grow. And I mean our whole selves—our pains, our secrets, our desires, our hurts, our struggles, our regrets, our dreams, our truths. All I can say after doing so in my own life is...Amen.