Journey back to yourself

Maybe like me, you grew up learning how to “read the room”. I am not sure if anyone teaches us how to, or whether we learn when we are very young while learning to deal with life. But once we figure it out, this powerful tool is so handy that I do not think one can put it down without a lot of inner work. This tool is so useful to us, it helps us get what we need, mostly peace and stability from our surroundings. We begin to see the world this way, no longer just a tool, it becomes the lens through which we see every interaction we have, becoming part of who we are. The longer we go, the more damage it does and the harder it is to separate ourselves from it.

How many of us were taught to love ourselves and to discern and voice our needs? A lot of us were taught to be nice instead, and although there is nothing wrong with being nice, if it does not come from a place of connection with ourselves, it could be very harmful to us. The adults in our lives were unaware of this, they were most probably never given a space to do this themselves. Maybe it is not even something our parents taught us, but something we “understood” or better said…. “misunderstood”. That is how certain traits repeat in a family tree, it is not somehow magical and a mystery….we pass on what we know and the way the world has been shown to us. As we get older, the journey needs to be towards seeing that it was just someone’s point of view and not “reality”. Now our job as adults is to question that view and decide whether it serves us or not.

No other modality has helped me as much as family constellations in seeing the disorder in myself. We see it again and again in people who do not go on with their lives but stay stuck, maybe even repeating difficult destinies as a way to belong to their group. Another way to belong to a group can also be by “being nice”, “reading the room” and making sure everyone was fine, everyone except yourself, becoming so absorbed in other people’s needs that you neglect your own. I always said I would have time to rest when I was dead and at 43 my body said NO and forced me to stop. I wish I had come to this realization out of sheer illumination, I wish I could say I had done it differently with my kids. It was my body that forced me to listen to it, it was meditation that taught me to come back to my breath. Now I find myself at 50 trying to share this view with my children, trying to do damage control to what I modeled for them all their lives. Love for others, real love for others comes from our inner light. Our true nature is light and it is love and it is always been this way, we just have to see it in ourselves.