When I think about Easter, Resurrection Sunday, I find myself thinking about and celebrating my own rebirths of sorts. I think about how many times I have shed parts of myself and become a different version. Most of the versions improved, a couple times maybe not so much. From the tennis girl, to the sorority girl, the makeup artist, the wife, to then divorcee, to the groomer, the traveler, the meditator, to the now spiritual cheerleader. Each time having to shed or unlearn a part of my own programming, a part of the self I had come to identify with so I could shift and blossom. The process occasionally painful but each time becoming more true to myself.
Sometimes the versions of ourselves get ugly. They get dark. They get greedy. They live in lack. They take and they don't give back. They numb, they fight. They do what they think they need to survive. This version of myself came in college and lasted until my divorce. It wasn't all bad, the light was still in there, but my light had dimmed. Programmed in my childhood to think that I wasn't enough. I wasn't worth love. My darkness searched for light in places where light did not exist. In drugs, in alcohol, in consumption, in spending, in clothes, in other people. Until the ferris wheel of high, highs, and low, lows started to make me sick. I had to turn on my own light. There was no where else to go, no light to find, except the one that was within myself. And then the deep surrender came. The surrender to something greater. To a faith in something bigger. I handed my power, my control, my lack over and right on the other side was the love I had been searching for. The love inside myself that had been there all along.
Unfortunately and fortunately, I think people have to hit a level of rock bottom or darkness in order to look for their own light. Only then will people really see a problem that comes bearing a solution. Only then will people realize it's time to go inward, toward their light.
On this Resurrection Sunday, I have been thinking about how we as a collective, as a society are in a period of darkness. Not all of us but a lot of us. However, in this enforced time out, we are all being asked to shed a part of ourselves, to shed cheap highs and happiness, to become truer to our higher selves, our more authentic selves. Some people don't understand why they're being asked to shed certain things. How could there be a lesson in the menial shedding? If you're an extrovert, you are being asked to give-up your social activities. If you're an exerciser, you have let go of your work out classes. If you're a 9-5er, you've traded your office for your couch. Some of us are being asked to step away from a lot more than that. We are being asked to drop our attachments to money, our careers, family members, our health. In the pain of loss, if you're strong enough to look at it, to look for the lesson, there is so much to learn. The universe, this planet is asking us to shed parts of ourselves because there is something in the shedding that makes us stronger, healthier, more supple. Consume less, create more. Take less, give more. Move less, rest more. For the extrovert, it may be asking you to learn to be okay alone. For the exerciser it may be asking you to rest or stop filling the void. It's a prettier costume exercising but in excess, is also a technique to run from ourselves. For the 9-5er it may be asking you to question your career and your purpose or show you it's time to create. When you identify so intensely as these labels, these ways of being, ask yourself why? This is all learned behavior, programmed behavior. There is a softness in the pause, there is a calm in the space between, there is a tranquility in the balance. The universe is asking you to find your pause, find your softness, find your balance.
It's time to shed the parts of ourselves that are not working as individuals but really the ones that are not working for our communities and our society as a whole. In doing so, we can stop unnecessary suffering. Let's take this slap on the wrist, wake up to the truth of ourselves, and resurrect into a world that works for not only ourselves, but for our families, our communities, the environment, animals, and existence as a whole.