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The True Hunger

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We live in a culture that wants to super-size us. We’re supposed to constantly reach for more, whether that be more stuff, bigger goals, or a better self – even a better, more beautiful evolved spiritual self. There is a consistent and insistent voice telling us to keep reaching, that somewhere out there we will finally find that which will be the one thing that will make us extraordinary enough to satisfy the demand.

 

We do this until one day we feel the ridiculous exhaustion it causes within us. Ridiculous because nothing out there could ever satisfy the false hunger this attempts to fill. The false hunger will always want more and more and more to satisfy it but it can’t be satisfied because it is built upon a foundation of ‘not enough’. A foundation of scarcity.That is its core identity. And so it has no desire to really see through the endless journey of suffering to finally becoming enough. But we feel the exhaustion of trying. So we stop. But before long, like a trick birthday candle, this false hunger lights up again and we’re off on our way to the Land of More that lies somewhere out there beyond a horizon we cannot get to.

I know this cycle well. I’ve lived this cycle over and over and over. I had a very lovely woman for my counselor when I was at Stanford who finally asked me, upon the eve of graduation, “Julie, when will it be enough? When will you feel you have achieved enough?” Funny that she was working at Stanford. But not really. She had the prime seat to watch this play of continual striving for more play out. It wasn’t the desire to learn and grow she was commenting on. It was what she saw in me (and so many others): the endless search for something that would fill this false hunger.

I now know the feeling when the trick candle goes out. The feeling of ‘ oh, right, I’ve been in that cycle again. I am exhausted and I haven’t gotten anywhere, really. It’s harder to feel the trick candle light up again. It’s subtle. Terribly subtle.

Over the past months, a very simple truth has finally dawned on me. The true hunger has become clear. It’s not for anything really. It’s simpler. There’s a quiet voice inside of me that says, “I get to just be myself. I get to just be myself.” That’s it.

That’s it.

Some of that spiritual striving has actually helped me uncover myself enough to recognize the self I long ago thought could never be enough or could never be redeemed. She’s quite lovely in her simplicity. She’s beautifully ordinary in that there’s nothing special about her at all. And yet, at the same time, she’s got a really funky uniqueness that the false hunger thought was too weird, too strange. But when I hear those words inside, “I get to just be myself.”, I soften and the trick candle goes out and I can see and feel and hear what’s right here in front of me. And here, I can feel the profound beauty within that has always been here. The profound beauty that we are and that is visible when all of the clamors of the false hunger dies down.

It is from this place that I can truly RISE because it is what is – the truth of who and what I am. This place is within each of us. That’s the operative word – within. It will never be found out there. Never, ever. And it cannot be found by following the false hunger.

There is a true hunger. It is the hunger to remember, to uncover, oneself as one already is and then to simply live as this self. No one can tell you what is ‘the false’ and what is ‘the true’. Only you can feel it. But when you soften and stop and listen, you are close to knowing.

Who I really am is quite quirky and quite dignified, too. And really quite joyful and playful. We are like this on the inside. Quite beautifully quirky and that is good.

Who are you?

***

RISEBannerNEW03My potent and practical course, R I S E, is now open for registration. The early-bird price ends on Tuesday, April 18th.

We just finished up the first round and it gave me such joy to witness the subtle and loving ways this course works to remove the layers that hide our true selves from ourselves. The participants experienced many shifts in how they navigate the world and made concrete choices and progress towards real life goals. Yes, this course is both spiritual and practical, but then true spirituality is extremely practical in nature.

R I S E begins on April 25th for 9 weeks. If you’ve been following my work for some time, you know I offer a powerful and safe container within to do some beautiful life-changing transformational ‘work’. And I want to invite you to come join me. Check out the course. Let me know if you want to join and are finding challenges to doing so. If you feel called to be there, it is important for you to be there when we begin.

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Maybe there is really only ONE story in life – the story of learning to be real.

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Everything points to this, to the realization that to be happy we must live what we love, we must find our true selves, our north star.

Instead, we learn at an early age to leave ourselves, to forget what it is we love, to take on roles and identities that veil and hide our true selves. It’s something that comes up with EVERY coaching client, and every student in my creativity courses.

I’ve always had a way to speak to this ‘thing’ we humans do, but recently I came across a speaker and video that put it all into really simple words. A friend and colleague recently shared this video (below) by Dr. Gabor Maté. It is long, and it is worth every moment. While Dr. Maté is speaking to something much larger, and something very important for us all to be aware of, a part of his video is about attachment and authenticity.

Dr. Maté explains there are two things a child needs: attachment and authenticity; but when the child is young, these two things most often are at odds with each other, so the child goes for the one things she needs – to be attached to those who will make sure she survives.

 

“The story of your childhood is that you were born with the gut feelings intact and connected completely. But at some point something happened to you. At some point you got the message that in order to survive and to be acceptable you have to suppress your gut feelings.

Here’s how it works. Children have two needs. Infants, any human being We have two basic needs. the more immature we are the more important the first need becomes. and that’s for attachment. Attachment means the connection with another human being for the purpose of being taken care of. That’s an absolute need of a small child. Can’t live without it. Impossible. That’s one large need.

Another need however we have to function as full human beings is to be authentic. Authentic means that we know who we are, what we feel, are able to express it, and able to honor it in our behavior. So we have the need for attachment and the need for authenticity.

But what happens if in order to attach we have to suppress our authenticity, because our parents can’t handle who we are, because they can’t handle our anger as two year olds, because they can’t handle our expression of our needs, because they’re too stressed, they’re too needy? We suppress our gut feelings because the expression of them would bring us into conflict with our caregivers. 

Our problem as adults is that a lot of our behaviors are coming out of our need to attach…at the expense of our authenticity.”

 

What happens when we must have attachment to others who require us to be something other than what we are? We attempt to become something we are not. At least we think we do. We can’t ever be what we are not…we just pretend to be.

We are loved unconditionally AND conditionally, and it’s the conditions that are required for love that are the same conditions required for attachment.

 

This is it. The big enchilada. This is the journey from living by our ‘gut instincts’, to the conditioned – and hopefully back to the unconditioned. This is the human journey, the human story…the story of learning, again, to be real.

 

One of the most popular children’s books of all time, The Velveteen Rabbit, is a story of  becoming real.

“When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”  ― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

 

And who is the child in your story? YOU. Only you can love yourself enough, unconditionally, to be real. Only you can provide this attachment. It’s an inside job this unconditional loving.

For this is where we discover true love – a love that allows others to be real without our need for their approval of our realness, and our approval of theirs.

This attachment is a place of belonging to self, a place where you come to know and feel good living in your own skin, where you trust your gut and heart, and stay true to you.

I know it has been my story.

 

So the ultimate choice then is to choose the unconditioned: unconditioned love, unconditioned self, unconditioned life. Life won’t put conditions on you. Others will.  The opportunity is to not do it to yourself, but rather to love yourself without conditions, expectations, and judgment.

 

Life won’t present you with conditional attachment. You are already part of life. You belong. Right here. In your skin. Notice that…that life doesn’t present you with conditionality. 

 

Living in the unconditioned means being free to be you…and it means the acceptance that to love another is to release the need for them to be anything other than what they are, even if they act out in response to your being authentic by un-attaching from you!

Living authentically then is also letting go of needing Life to be anything other than what it is, and presenting anything other than what it presents.

As children, we make this trade-off to ensure our survival. As adults, in order to ensure the survival of the soul, we must return to being real and to discovering this place of maturity. 

 

And living Unabashedly Female is exactly this. What behavior do we suppress, what knowing do we suppress, what feelings do we suppress in order to stay attached to a system and culture that only accepts us if we DO NOT LIVE our power as women?

What do we hide about our female authenticity so that we will be acceptable…so we won’t be TOO MUCH…because a system can’t handle the power of the feminine?

To ensure the survival of the soul, we must live what we are.

 

Maybe there is really only ONE story in life…the story of learning to be real, to be unabashedly REAL in a female body.

 

You can watch the whole video with Dr. Maté. The part I mention is around 38 minutes in. If you can, listen to the whole thing because he speaks great wisdom about anger, emotions, and boundaries, too!

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Rumi, Women’s Leadership & Love

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 “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” — Rumi

This is the first of a series of posts on this topic of Rumi, Women’s Leadership & Love.

To be a leader, one must truly feel what others are feeling. To be a leader, one must be able to truly love those she leads. How do we learn this most necessary trait? By feeling, deeply, the depth of our own experience. By allowing our own hearts to break. Many spiritual teachers speak of the necessity of allowing one’s heart to break open. It’s not that the heart will break. It cannot break. It must, however, break open, meaning that all the bindings that have grown around one’s heart must give way so that the heart can thrive in its natural expansiveness. When one’s heart is free to be, it is as large, and as expansive, as the whole of the Universe.

Feeling the depths of shame and humiliation from our own experience of being marginalized, disrespected and humiliated generationally is key to women waking up to our fullness and wholeness. Both our lightness and our darkness must be brought back into consciousness if we are to be wholly female and embody the sacred feminine that we are.

Every midwife knows
that not until a mother’s womb
softens from the pain of labour
will a way unfold
and the infant find that opening to be born.
Oh friend!
There is treasure in your heart, it is heavy with child.
Listen.
All the awakened ones, like trusted midwives are saying,
welcome this pain.
It opens the dark passage of Grace.

~Rumi

Opening to the pain of our experience as women, individually and collectively, is our passage to Grace. It is paramount that we open ourselves to feel, deeply feel, that which has been projected onto us over the centuries of oppression. There are many layers to this feeling. How much of our anger, shame and disowned power can accumulate before the dam breaks? We can use this pain as the way into Grace, the way into the opened heart, the way into the depths of our humanity. This humanity has become ripe and fragrant with our own capacity to walk side by side men, no longer simply a complement or accessory, but rejoicing in our sovereignty and self respect.

When we are able to feel the depths of what has been internalized within our own beings through the generational oppression, our hearts will move into an awakened state of love for ourselves, for other women, for men, for all of life. And, when we come to embody this love fully, for ourselves, and for others, every cell of our being will be filled with Grace.

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The value of wisdom

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Wisdom within

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” ~Einstein

Over the last few weeks, I have been struck by the way in which our culture looks at knowledge versus wisdom. It seems to be that many in our culture value knowledge over wisdom. By wisdom, I mean the understanding that comes from life experiences and how we grow and change by what we experience. Wisdom comes as we respond to the world and our experiences in it. Reflection on these experiences, as well, can deepen our sense of who we are and the vehicle for change we wish to be.

As we shift out of the patriarchal culture and into something new (what seems to be a more masculine/feminine balanced worldview), the way in which we hold wisdom is shifting, too. Valuing our life experience, and the wisdom that comes from it, is another way in which living an important question can enhance discovery of what is true on a personal level.

Maria Shriver penned an article for Newsweek last Fall. I just came across it recently and found it to be insightful with regard to “What it means to be Female?”. In the article Maria states,

“I now have a new definition of power. It’s passing on what we have learned and creating meaningful change through these experiences. That’s the kind of power that truly matters.”

As a woman, how do you value your wisdom? What wisdom have you gained from the life you have lived? Do you share it with others? How does this wisdom empower you? What kind of meaningful change might you create through the experiences you have had and the wisdom you have gleaned?

Share your responses here. I look forward to reading them!

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