Art by Jiwoon Pak
In our fast-paced societies and busy lifestyles we have lost the art of inner stillness and deep listening to ourselves, to who we are or who we are becoming. We tell ourselves we don’t have time but the real obstacle is in our discomfort of being intimate with ourselves, our thoughts, our needs, our true essence.
We tend to fill our time alone with screens and phone calls, with to-do lists and future plans, and we have unknowingly mastered the art of distraction. We operate from a state of doing avoiding the surrender to a state of being. When was the last time you took yourself out on a date? When was the last time you sat yourself down for an honest talk about how life feels? When was the last time you created the space for conscious self-intimacy? Deep knowing comes from a place of connection. This is where we get to know ourselves a little bit better, where we calibrate our inner compass of right and wrong, of true and false, of light and shadow.
We have learned to value the outer world at the expense of our inner riches. We get engrossed in how we look from the outside with little compassion or connection from the inside. And in that state of internal alienation it is no wonder that the mind, body and soul send us messengers to reach our disengaged attention. These messengers often come in the form of symptoms, accidents, diagnoses and misalignments of all sorts. They move us in the presence of things we realize we don’t know about ourselves and have little control over.
In a society that hasn’t taught us how to trust and attend to the difficult parts of the human experience we have developed a collective muscle of instinctively trying to push discomfort away. We want the depression to go, anxiety to vanish, life to go back to how we think it ought to be. And in that ‘no’ movement we deny the most precious gifts of life. Because to follow life’s treacherous paths is to learn a lot about ourselves and how we exist internally and externally. To trust our symptoms as our guides and teachers into the inner unknown is to be edged nearer to who we truly are. And to be the self we truly are is an enormous act of liberation from the tyranny of the false self.
To love oneself is the start of a life-long romance.
– by Oscar Wilde
Our personal crises are always meaningful and serve a deeper purpose than what the surface of their symptoms let us see. They pave the way for transformation, taking us on a journey towards a new path in life. Tending to our connection to Self allows us to become that little bit more solid, that little bit more grounded, that little bit more rooted into the soil of our true self.
In our communities today, we need safe spaces that can support us in the challenge and practice of slowing down. That can teach us how to trust our wounds and vulnerabilities and tend to them with honoring compassion. Safe spaces that can initiate us in the art of self-love, self-care, and self-intimacy, opening us up to a deep appreciation of who we truly are and of the path we are treading.
