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Overhead, as I write, a cloud is taking the shape of a fish. It’s the first time I feel cool air in months, after a storm broke the heat. I don’t do well in humidity, and the dew point was near 90 percent last time I checked.
In the evenings, I contemplate all manner of things. Like the fact that most organic molecules have mirror twins, and some scientists are warning that trying to create synthetic mirror twins could negatively impact the organic mirror twins. (Yes, this is real.) Or the idea that our media and technology are all manifestations of our collective consciousness and the role of artists in consciousness shifts.
Image above by
But mostly, I think about how we all want freedom, sovereignty, and connection, but have been entrained in our nervous systems to view most of these things as potential threats.
I subscribe to the idea that lack, limitation, and separation are illusions, but I also feel that if we didn’t have these illusions, we wouldn’t be able to have the experience of being human. Yes, I am you, and you are me, but I am also just me. I have a body that is mine to take care of. I have a history and a lineage. I have a bank of personal experiences that inform the way I show up (or don’t), how I relate (or don’t).
I am always shifting, navigating, and changing. And even if it’s an illusion, I am a distinct me. I am not aether, formless, or weightless. At least not in my experience.
And also, there is an eternal me. One that is perhaps hopping from timeline to timeline, stringing together the idea of a narrative, one moment at a time. From a certain perspective, I am bigger, vaster, and more timeless than my mind can understand. It is possible, from the perspective of the most divine and eternal me, that the human avatar I call Xenia is just a figment of my imagination.
How do we make sense of this? This being eternal, but also material. Of being everything, but also embodied?
For me, it helps to center EXPERIENCE as the most real, even if it’s limited, even if it’s an illusion. Because human life is designed for experience.
From the perspective of our embodied self, it helps to ask:
What do I have, like really have, besides my felt experience of life?
What do I know, like, actually know, besides what I have felt, touched, or sensed?
According to our most advanced science, it’s possible that our experience as discrete humans is merely a simulation, and reality isn’t real, at least not locally. (The Nobel Prize of 2022 seems to support this theory.) But, so what?
What feels real is real.
And the only way we open up to seeing, feeling, and perceiving in a new way is to build trust with our sensing system.
In other words, we have to validate ourselves as we are, to be open to changing ourselves.
*I have seen this in therapeutic models, and with so many clients. When we force change in a way that requires us to invalidate or suppress an aspect of our experience, it doesn’t stick.
When we take time to build trust between the part of us that isn’t ready to change, and the part of us that is, it may be slower work at first, but the change is alchemical, lasting, and irreversible.
INSECURITY DISGUISED AS SELF-ADVOCACY
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