View this post on Instagram
This world is confusing, chaotic, and can get extremely overwhelming at times.
Living in such a world with our own emotions can be terrifying. We become afraid of what we feel because we feel so much and at times struggle to contain our emotions.
Perhaps, this is where we go wrong.
This chaotic and convenience-driven world teaches us to be in control of our emotions all the time and keeps defining the appropriateness of our emotional responses and behaviors.
We get so caught up in this web of what’s appropriate and what’s not, what’s acceptable and what’s not. We get completely disconnected from the essence of our emotions and forget they are simply trying to convey something.
But who wants to listen?
Who wants to understand?
Before we realize, we start doing the same in our own reality.
We don’t listen to what parts of us are trying to say.
We listen and don’t want to understand.
We understand, yet we ignore—avoid.
We avoid our emotions, and keep stuffing them down.
Even when our emotions begin to spill out in every possible direction, we still struggle to see them, acknowledge them, own them.
How can we own something that doesn’t belong to us? And how can we heal if we don’t own our experience?
In the process of denying ourselves the full length and breadth of our life’s experiences and allowing them to help us evolve, we dishonor and disregard ourselves.
This is how we might be dishonoring ourselves:
1. We hold ourselves to unreasonably high standards. We think we need to have it together all the time and meet everyone’s expectations (because we think our happiness depends on the happiness of others). We constantly ignore, avoid, or dismiss what we think or feel about ourselves, others, or even the world, and force ourselves to adopt the worldview that others have. We trade our inner satisfaction and contentment for convenience.
2. We disregard our needs and wants. We let them go, cut them down, and constantly try to fit ourselves into a mold that is ill-fitting and keep shifting and squirming inside it. But rarely do we make the effort to create a new mold for ourselves because by then, our ideas of self-worth and deservability have already been attached to those to whom the mold belongs.
3. We convince ourselves that we’re not good enough—or worthy enough—to even ask for what we want, and we entertain this idea like our best friend.
4. We drown ourselves in work, responsibilities, or even substances to numb the pain, anguish, and discomfort that keep coming up. We tell ourselves that perhaps there is another way of doing things and this pain needs to be held so that we can free ourselves of all the others that don’t belong to us. But we don’t do that. How can we?
5. We become shadows of the people and relationships around us. Merely following them.
Our pain stems from our life experiences—unmet needs and wants, and those are what we keep running away from.
We cannot lead an authentic life without acknowledging the pain and the plethora of emotions that reside within us.
Without owning each and every life experience as ours and giving it the space and the acknowledgement it deserves—without judgement or questions—we’ll only be living in the shadows of life. Existing, not living. Surviving, not thriving.
Until then, our life is only a borrowed version.
Convenient, maybe—fulfilling, no.
~
Read 2 Comments and Reply
Read 2 comments and reply