What is authenticity?

It’s being how we feel

Expressing for the world to see

The good the bad the real

It means no more pretending

That everything is good

No “I am fine” defending

When we’re misunderstood

It means that we get mad

When tyranny has won

It means that we get sad

When we feel a harm is done

It means we keep our head up high

Far from the shifting sand

Another’s pain we can’t deny

We have to take a stand

We have to speak out how we feel

No matter who’s offended

Collective pain is ours to heal

By all must be transcended

If truth becomes our consciousness

We’ll give ourselves a gift

Encumbered not by dissonance

Our paradigm will shift!

My daughter recently posted on Facebook, a meme that said something to the effect that, “My New Years resolution is to tell more people to fuck off!! “. In her introduction, she did include a great detailed list of potential people and potential situations that Fuck Off!! would be perfectly appropriate to say as a response if any of these scenarios ever came up in reality. Yet none of this added information kept me from being triggered by my own unconscious shame and anger that came up from reading the original meme.

Well, as some of you who know me can imagine, my first reaction to reading her post, for a moment, was “what will people think”?? After I let that energy flow through me it was, okay, “I don’t give a fuck what people think”! Between these two reactions is a part of me that needs to speak to embrace my daughter and myself for who we are trying to become. Our authentic selves.

In our collective society, for both men and women, especially southern ones, anger is a taboo emotion. We don’t like to see it, feel it, or express it, or have it mirrored back to us by others! We do mental gymnastics to rationalize that it’s not necessary to express anger, especially in public. We might look really bad, or we might piss somebody off, so we cover it up with many various defense mechanisms.

Most of us, especially my generation, want to appear to be cool, calm, and collected as much as we can.. We want to look happy, and put together, always putting our best foot forward. The problem with this is, if we repress and hide this anger, and in tandem the other side of this coin shame, behind a facade we are still going to act it out in many different ways, unconsciously.

We may become bitter, and use our passive aggressive anger to jab people with “funny” sarcasm, and blame them for being hurt, because they can’t take a joke. We may act it out in a Jekyll/Hyde scenario, like my father did, presenting a light and jovial face to one group of people and a very dark and ominous face to another group. We may stay silent for most or all of a lifetime and kill ourselves slowly or suddenly with disease or by “accident” or from a myriad of addictions. These diseases including addictions and “accidents” of any kind are in my experiential opinion, caused by internalized anger and shame that becomes, after a time of suppression , held unconscious in our mental, emotional, and physical bodies. If we don’t consciously become aware of our unconscious repressed feelings and express them to heal ourselves they are acted out as self destructive tendencies like the aforementioned, diseases, accidents and addictions.

That’s why I feel passionately, like my daughter does, about removing the taboo about expression of any and all emotions, especially anger. As a recovering “bless your heart” I want to be “nice” southern woman who’s struggled for years to try to be real, I am especially passionate about my recovery from unconsciously creating and living in a facade of proper manners and protocols that have been controlling us for centuries and kept us from living an authentic life in the flow.

So for many years now I have been focused on healing my spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical body by allowing all of my unconscious emotions to become conscious and expressing them in private to become more balanced so that the real, more authentic me could come out and be public. So that, in the moment, as much as possible, I can use anger appropriately as a boundary to protect my inner child. Yes, and in some situations, appropriately will mean to say in the moment “fuck off”!!! to an asshole who is being hurtful or abusive.

I allowed my daughter from the time she could speak to curse if she wanted or needed to, because even that long ago I wasn’t going to be a hypocrite and not allow my child this anger release that I was regularly allowing for myself. So she is the product of being a free expressor from her very beginning. This is part of the reason why to the majority of this world her expression of her authenticity might seem provocative, and extreme. If we as the older generation take on our part of anger expression in this world then maybe young people who are scapegoated by society for being way too angry, and God forbid, way too vocal, won’t have express so much for those of us who have disowned our anger and other emotions at our own, our children’s, and our collective’s expense.

We as individuals and as a society are now making some progress though, because we are being triggered by our personal and collective anger and shame to wake up these unconscious feelings so they can be consciously owned and expressed by us all!Look at the black lives matter movement, the #metoo movement, and the LGBT movement, we are all bringing our unconscious bipolar parts forward to be openly expressed and healed. So that one day we all will be personally and collectively unified and whole! SO BE IT!!!

When I dream of my home at night, I rarely dream of the place in the middle of a beautiful forest that I actually live in, in my waking life. I mostly dream of a small, cluttered, apartment that I sometimes share with one or more uninvited guests. I often dream of being lost in an unfamiliar dreamscape of dark and unnamed streets looking for my home. I think my dreams are trying to tell me something until now I was unable to hear. I have been interpreting dreams for many years but never questioned why I usually dream of such futile and lower realities. How did I create my third dimensional life of material wealth when I obviously feel so unworthy in my dreams? I want to dream of my true home.

Being the retired stay at home mom that I have chosen to be, whose husband plays the role of the maker of money with the important title, I must acknowledge and own what my dreams are telling me. I must own my part that obviously believes I am unworthy to have what I and my husband have manifested. In today’s society there is a collective reality which has gotten more and more prevalent since my upbringing in the 1950s and 60’s, unless you earn money and achieve something, collectively believed to be “important”, you as a person are not perceived as being of value. In our present reality we aren’t seen to have intrinsic value as a human being. Both men and women are expected to “be somebody” by doing something to earn fortune and or fame, or at least be married to it, to feel valued in society. It’s a paradigm we have all created as a world consciousness, thinking we are pushing ourselves forward for the betterment of society through the competition to achieve.  Yet, when the unconscious roots of the achievement paradigm are fear of failure, and loss, what you get are the branches of greed, narcissism, and obsession or the other side of the tree, false piety, self hatred, and apathy.

Because of this achievement/failure paradigm that we collectively agreed upon I think we all come into this world with this belief system as part of our collective unconscious. We all believe it on some level even if we are not overtly taught to believe it to be true. We are bombarded everyday with images of super achievers, that top one to two percent, who own the third dimensional world, because they have most of the money, are famous, or have done something we feel in awe of. We as a people not only accept this example of greed, and narcissism, but we celebrate, advocate it, and strive to be part of it. No wonder we all feel inadequate as human BEINGS! We as a collective have put these people on pedestals as our role models of what we should aspire to achieve, but the thing we don’t realize is that these “iconic” people we think are the most self actualized, are really only where they are because they were driven there by their massive amounts of unconscious fear of failure and unworthiness. If they were acting from a place of wholeness and intrinsic value they wouldn’t need to amass such fortunes, or find so much satisfaction in the spotlight, or need to spend large amounts of money on things they don’t have the time or the need to ever use.

Yes, we know and see that these idols and their worshipers all believe in and are acting out the achievement/failure paradigm, but what the rest of us don’t realize is that we believe it as well but we are “REACTING IT OUT” . We react against the achievement/failure paradigm but we are really just the flip side of the same coin, we see ourselves as either being above the need for accolades and the material rewards of achievement or are one of the people who have accepted the roles of the downtrodden or the ones who are the self inflicted failures of society.

When we are triggered by fear which is the common denominator of all feelings, we get an adrenaline rush, this causes three possible responses, fight, flight or freeze. People can respond to fear using mostly just one response but we certainly can mix it up depending on circumstances, but there are people with a certain set of hormones and personality traits that might be most likely to fight when triggered by fear. These are the achievers that use the fear adrenalin to try to create a safer world for themselves, with money and prestige etc. The people who have certain hormones and personality traits who in general might flee because of the fear are the ones who give up and drop out of the society because of failing to meet expectation. Then there are the frozen ones who are stuck in the middle they might move back and forth between the two extremes some but mostly use the defense mechanism of denial and rationalize that they don’t need to achieve because they are above wanting the fruits of achievement. If there are self actualized people out there you don’t hear about them because they are out in the world just creating their lives from a place of intrinsic worth and have worked through the above mentioned dramas.

So how do we change this paradigm we collectively created. The first step is to individually acknowledge and bring into conscious awareness the unconscious feelings of fear, shame and it’s counter feeling anger of feeling unworthy instead of unconsciously acting out the super achiever or “reacting out” the rebellious denier or underachiever roles. If we own and acknowledge, then next we will choose to transmute the lower astral levels of fear, shame and anger  by connecting to our higher selves, by intention or meditation, and opening up our emotional bodies to feel deeply, express in private, and release these energies into balance. When we do this we create a space for higher vibrational energies in our physical bodies. When our daily lives and dreams are clear of the feelings of unworthiness, and fear, we will be able to become an open conduit for higher energies and awareness to come through and merge with our physical world. When enough of us hold this higher vibrational awareness in our fields of perception then all of our awarenesses will shift to higher dimensions and a new paradigm of unconditional love, and intrinsic value will be experienced by all. We will become the NEW EARTH as was foretold by many spiritual traditions. In this higher dimensional reality we will know we are worthy. When our new paradigm is deeply and consciously rooted in our intrinsic worth we will bear branches of cooperation, compassion, and creativity. In our lucidity we will realize we are in our true home once again! We have recreated paradise and are living in the Garden eating freely the fruits of unconditional love from the Tree of Life in the most beautiful forest you can imagine.

Judgement of others is just a projection

Of judging ourselves, and unconscious rejection

Of feelings of shame that mirrors revealed

Reflecting desires unconsciously sealed

What makes us reject these feelings we hide

We want to look good and feel righteous inside

So we have to project our shame on another

To feel self assured it’s our sister and brother

Who chose the wrong path, from our path went astray

If only they’d listen to us as we pray

But journeys like this don’t follow a plan

We’ve gone now full circle back where we began

But this time we see who we judged was not wrong

They just took a route that appeared hard and long

But here at the finish they’re right here beside us

They were our reflection just wanting to guide us

To heal hidden shame not to judge and condemn

For they all are us and we all are them!

Humanity’s suffering is too hard to bear

We build walls around it to not see it there.

Unconsciousness shifts from one side to the other

Unconscious or not we feel for our brother

And feel him we must to open our heart

But then go within and take on our part

Of suffering’s pain that’s trying to guide us

To unconscious walls built with shame that divide us.

When we own OUR pain it becomes not the other

But oneness within, we are our OWN brother

As pain breaks down walls of our shame we will know

OUR pain was but Love that was crying to flow

I have been through the emotional ringer for the past couple of days because my daughter, who I love so deeply, is going through a very challenging time in her life. Tonight I feel like I did at age 16 when I gave up believing in God.  I feel alone, so numb I can’t even cry. The only feeling I’m sure of is the anger I feel because my daughter is going through pain and suffering and I can’t do anything about it. I’ve spent almost every waking moment in the last 28 years trying to heal from my abusive past, raising her in a more loving and balanced way, while constantly pursuing a connection with spirit for guidance. Tonight the only thing I am connected to is some old forgotten rage and abandonment that I felt as a teenager which caused me to quit believing in God.

Born into fundamentalist Christianity, I became an atheist at the young age of 16. One of the main reasons I abandoned religion and the fundamentalist god was the depiction of god I was taught never made sense to me. The basic story that was told as literal truth was that god is this perfect spirit who created a beautiful garden on Earth for his human creations, Adam and Eve. He created these beings basically to keep him company, and the only thing they had to do was to just leave one particular fruit off the menu.  Unfortunately though, Eve was tricked by a snake into eating the fruit from the forbidden tree of Knowledge.   She in turn enticed Adam to do the same and because they failed the test, they were kicked out of the garden and had to then live in a hellish place outside of the gate. Then if that weren’t bad enough if they didn’t come to their senses and repent of their original sin before they died, and worship this perfect god then they would have to go to an even worse hell when they died because they rejected and hurt the feelings of their ” loving heavenly father”.   Of course we all know there was no heavenly mother because if there had been, then this male driven ego drama would never have been written. This kind of god or creation scenario made no sense to me on any level.   I, as a 16 year old child, was a far better parental figure, and was far more loving, and compassionate than this so called god.  Because I felt in my heart that no matter what my future children might possibly do, and that would include rejecting or even hating me, I would not even create the possibility of a hell much less send my child there no matter what they did or didn’t do.

So the fundamentalist god was definitely not my idea of a being I could believe in. So until I was 27 I just had no belief in any kind of god because my only exposure to the god concept was my fundamentalist up bringing. I was so angry at my parents choice to force me into their religion I chose to be an “atheist” until my life was turned upside down when I was 27.  

This was when I was introduced to another possibility of God, one of my own understanding. I started going to Alanon meetings because I had 2 people in my family who had gone through treatment and were recovering addicts and I was a severe codependent who almost enabled one of them to death. So, I recognized and acknowledged my personal pathology, worked the program, and opened up to the possibility of a higher power for the sake of my husband, my 7 month old baby at the time and my daughter who had not been born yet. I spent the next 6 years trying to come to believe in a power greater than myself,  and eventually began working the program for myself as well.  

In 1991 at age 33 I finally had a spiritual awakening. Through many synchronicities I found my own personal higher power who I would call the “Universe”. God the Universe includes every atom that I and all other beings are made of as well as all inanimant atoms. I could believe that every atom in the universe is pure love solidified into different forms.  It made sense to me that this energy could act as yin or yang, good or bad, male or female, whatever would be necessary for spirit to experience everything physical. This knowing revealed to me the purpose of the dual nature of the 3rd dimensional Earth, opposites attract and hold together in this wonderful creation. This concept of the Universe as God, was my holy grail, there was no judgement, no worshipping needed, no hell except the one we create here on earth because we forget at times how to navigate well in duality.  This God force energy uses synchronistic signs and symbolic metaphors to guide us along our path back to oneness.  This is the God that resonated with my heart all those years ago but that eludes me tonight as I search for signs to show me the way forward.

I have followed my spiritual path forward and sometimes backwards for many years now.  I have chosen with others who are called, to resolve the duality in the third dimension by using kundalini energy to transmute emotional and mental energies into wholeness.  It has been rough at times because like tonight I have struggled with why, after all the emotional processing, and all the different ways I have tried to improve how I navigate this third dimension, I am still knocked in the head by circumstances that feel like I have gone back to square one.  In these dark nights of the soul I tell the Universe I am done trying to change myself and evolve, I am sick of feeling like a failure. In my rage I give up and tell spirit I’m done until you show yourself to me. I must have SIGNS that you exist tonight I can’t handle continuing to struggle without hope. I decide to write these words tonight to describe the grief I’ve been purging for two days, and remind myself of all the highs and lows of this long road that has brought me to this place.

As I’m writing the words you just finished reading, my daughter whose personal struggles triggered this catharsis, texted me a picture of a ladybug, that even in the dead of winter, inside a car, had found a warm resting place on her arm, asking the question ” Do you think this is a SIGN things are going to get better”? Well time will tell if her most recent personal struggles are over, but for me this was definitely a Sign I was asking for. A ladybug represents a wish fulfilled, a new beginning, so I will take this as a SIGN and recognize the SIGN I wasn’t aware of until this now moment.  My painful circumstances that drove me back to my atheism and dredged up rage and abandonment issues was a SIGN that there was still something I needed to heal that I thought was no longer affecting me. I must look at it, feel it, transmute it, until I am clear of the stuck energy and can see from a higher perspective that what looks like a hopeless situation is just a SIGN pointing me in the direction of an area in my soul calling for healing, and unconditional love, and acceptance.  Thank God for SIGNS!!