When we’re cut off from our inner knowing, or don’t trust it, we’re not able to access our own life-force with ease.
This can look like being successful but burnt out, or super busy but unfulfilled. It can feel like chronic brain-fog, confusion, and exhaustion.
It’s like hiking up a mountain with a backpack full of rocks. As we learn to trust that knowing within—the voice of life-force, of sexual, creative energy and how it speaks to us in particular—that pack of rocks becomes a jet-pack; we’re fueled by our own innate power, rather than striving against it.
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Joy—not glimpsed or tasted, but worn like a silky skin and savored—feels, to me, naked, exposed. Feels trembly. Feels unhidden. Feels all-in. Feels deeply vulnerable. When I anticipate and imagine cultivating and claiming fully my joy, as a spiritual posture, my heartbeat quickens and my chest heaves up then down, as it sometimes does when in an elevator and the body is still traveling between floors, suspended, despite the gentle thud of arrival.
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Over time, the curiosity that once propelled us effortlessly outward (into conversation with strangers, contact with insects and animals, imaginary worlds, woods and streams, tidal pools and marshes, empty lots, dumps, alleys, abandoned buildings, and forts erected from the refuse of neighborhood curbs) often becomes inverted and internalized: primary questions that once led us into exploration and wonder are often replaced by questions about our own belonging, our worthiness, and our competence. What will I discover here? becomes Who am I to want more? How can I figure this out? gives way to What’s wrong with me?
By mid-life we might feel pulled apart by these seemingly antagonist energies: the quest to learn and grow, on the one hand, and the fear of doing so, on the other.
Either way, I can tell you that, if recognized and harnessed, this tension (often felt in our bodies as acute discomfort) can be a very good thing: it's the symptom of untapped potential. Of your aliveness. It's your gateway to growth, to healing, to intimacy, to innovation, and purposeful service to others.
The problem isn't the tension itself between curiosity and self-criticism, but the way we perpetuate competition between them by inhabiting one at the cost of the other.
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