Riding the Rapids

ahhh . . . now I understand.

"You can see yourself doing your compulsive little dance, but now you don’t judge yourself and you don’t hate yourself for it. Quite simply, you are not so identified with that small self because you are resting in the Big Self, in the God Self, in the One who knows all, loves all, and holds all things in their seeming imperfection." R. Rohr


The work of dismantling my self-loathing is now going to get so much easier.

Now I understand that my self-loathing is attached to me identifying with my ego. So when I start judging myself for being "behind" or feeling like I'm going backwards instead of forward etc., I can remind myself and reassure myself that yes, my ego is probably struggling right now and no, that is not me.

Now the work of compassion is going to get so much easier.

Sometimes I feel like I am riding the rapids. Riding the "rapids" is when the understandings come rapidly. But the odds are, these are simply the seasons when we reap from the seasons of doing a lot of hard (and seemingly fruitless) work.

Good Idols

I was marveling at my entrenched resistance to self-help-anything in my younger years.  As I teased out the belief behind such adamancy, what surfaced was that my most valued virtue was Genuineness. To the young, that means anything that is perceived as being manipulated or contrived or pretended is dismissed summarily.

I had to be "me", whoever that was. So that would mean repeating Affirmations such as "I now affirm that I accept uncertainty and ambiguity" would have been a lie. I didn't believe that and so if I repeated it, I would have been lying.

What I didn't realize was the Genuineness I felt such loyalty to, was a reality I had already created and fed back to myself as ... reality. My grid had already distorted what was. What I didn't know was that if that distortion wasn't working for me, by all means, "redistort" it! By all means, be proactive and aggressive in changing your "you"!

But in my world, Genuine was king. You might even say that Genuine was an idol. All reality had to bow to my version of Genuine. And you know what happens to idols.

It is the good idols that are the last to fall.