#innerpreneur

Not wanting to feel it. Apathy towards the whole thing.

Why bother?

Isn’t it curious how we can love something. Someone. So much.

And feel so completely rejected and disappointed by them.

Two sides of a coin.

Love and pain.

How can I care so much, and yet desire to care so little?

Apathy. An easy option filled with complications.

Eventually, the truth will catch up with me.

Apathy. A dangerous act to perform.

It’s hard to keep up. It takes its toll.

Especially when masking the pain of rejection and disappointment.

How long can I pretend before I forget, and the mask falls from my face?

Can I trust myself? Am I that good of an actor?

What if I wore my rejection, my disappointment, without shame?

How might that change things? If you and I were to know the truth?

No reason to hide.

The love and pain, revealed.

Vulnerable. Exposed.

It is what it is. Equanimity. Towards my disappointment and my rejection.

I can learn to love them, as I do you. You’re intertwined, one. Ever present.

All of what I feel deserves to be felt.

Equally acceptable is my love and my pain.

photo credit: Karla Cantu

Other articles that might tickle your fancy:

Pay What It’s Worth: The Book

The World Is Flat – A Truly Inspiring Read for the Innerpreneur

All the People We Leave Behind

To see only yourself in every reflection, and only the parts you want to see, a life is lived in the shallow end. Where there is deepness and darkness, you do not probe, unwilling to go deeper. Uncomfortable with its truth, you reject and dismiss that which you care not to understand.

To be shallow is to only see—and believe in—the surface facade of others, and of yourself. This shiny surface is so alluring when the darker, less “perfect” aspects of yourself are unacceptable. You live on the surface, so that life’s deeper truths and anyone who expresses them, can easily be rejected.

To dip below the surface is supremely threatening. To acknowledge the depth possible is to accept the imperfect life we each bear. Dipping below your own facade, your own shiny surface, to acknowledge and accept your own imperfections is more than your shallow heart can currently bear.

Instead, it is easier to see that “other” people have issues, that there is something supremely “wrong” with them. It is easier to point fingers and to place blame. It is easier to not understand and to judge. Resolved of responsibility, comfortable in the shallow end, you do not see the deeper, darker truth of yourself hidden in plain sight. Everyone in your life is a mirror reflecting back the parts you love and dislike about yourself. That which provokes you and numbs you, that which drives you to turn away and to hide from your darkness, are the very reflections you can learn the most from.

photo credit: stttjin

Other articles that might tickle your fancy:

Pay What It’s Worth: The Book

The World Is Flat – A Truly Inspiring Read for the Innerpreneur

All the People We Leave Behind

Being hard on ourselves and others, we often assert that we either have confidence—or we don’t. Yet gaining confidence is a gradual process. It is only with practice that we learn to handle our affairs with proficiency and ease. Through practice, we learn to trust ourselves and our decisions, developing our self-assurance. Inherent within us, our self-assurance is not a momentary—nor set—thing. Rather it grows as our confidence expands, as we skillfully handle life’s challenges. Only through practice do we develop true faith in ourselves, assured as we bear witness to our ability to positively impact the quality of our life.

Looking back on when we felt self-doubt and lacking in confidence, and aligning ourselves to that person, we can see that true self-assurance is a process that takes time. We must learn to trust ourselves. We must learn to have confidence in our decisions. Being open to uncovering our past fears and doubts and seeing where we’ve lacked confidence, we allow ourselves to heal our old wounds and to notice how much we’ve grown since creating them. Invariably, our awareness creates greater strength and confidence within us about our future and our ability to skillfully handle it. Little by little, we find our confidence grows.

photo credit: Karen & Chris Highland

Other articles that might tickle your fancy:

Pay What It’s Worth: The Book

The World Is Flat – A Truly Inspiring Read for the Innerpreneur

All the People We Leave Behind

Regret is a painful thing. We see it through the lens of things undone, unsaid, unbeen. We feel it for those moments where our head overran our heart. We embrace it when we act from fear rather than love. All these moments we regret. It is never the moments from love, but the ones acted on—or not—out of fear; these are the moments we miss(understand).

Our mind wants to protect us, but from what? What is it our mind first causes us to fear—then ask us to protect against? Sadly, it is love. Always balancing our head and our heart, we are not perfect people. Trying to protect our self from the truth of our feelings, we make mistakes we later regret. Busy thinking about how we want to feel, we miss another moment to connect.

Other articles that might tickle your fancy:

Attached to Who We Are

Don’t Take My Advice

Emotional Self-Abandonment

It’s an endless quest to be good enough in another person’s eyes. Not facing our own thoughts and feelings, we measure our self using the eyes of another. Unable to acknowledge it’s really our own perception of self that we use as the measure—not theirs.

It takes practice to feel good and whole as we are. Sometimes, rather than doing this, we buy clothes and things, chase and stockpile money, and do what we can to be “better” than others. In comparison, we find our worth.

Rather than question and/or remove ourselves from the mindsets and situations that exert and encourage this dance of superiority/inferiority, we can find ourselves feeding into it and trying to puff ourselves up in order to match it—and even beat it. In our armour of clothes, hair, beautiful things, and pomp we are elevated and protected.

A culture of buying into the need to feel superior (and invariably, inferior) to others. A collective experience encouraging us and teaching us all to feel so very insecure.

Repeatedly pushed and pulled to feel inferior and superior, internally and externally, this wild see-saw of emotion is crazy-making. In our totality, we are no better nor worse, yet we each have qualities that make us “better” than another. It’s focusing on these qualities that gets us caught on the see-saw. Feeling superior ultimately leads to feeling inferior. And vice versa. The pendulum keeps swinging, the see-saw rises and falls.

How do we know what is impressive to another? Thinking what impresses us is what impresses everyone leaves us in fantasy, believing everyone is like us. And they are not. Acknowledging our fantastical expectations, we are pulled by them less by them—and we’re less likely to push them on others, keeping ourselves on the see-saw.

We are neither as perfect nor as terrible as we imagine ourselves (and others) to be. Accepting this frees us from the push and pull to be “the best.” Equanimity actively dissolve the illusion surrounding us.

For our own happiness, we need to own the places where we compete and compare, where we feel inferior and superior to others. It’s so very okay that we ride the see-saw. It’s so very okay we measure our self against others. Owning it, we make the see-saw an easier ride for all of us. The pendulum has less space to swing, the ride becomes less wild. For the moment, in our truth, we are each good enough.

photo credit: Mike Leary

Other articles that might tickle your fancy:

It’s Not You, It’s Me

Addicted to the Pain

Because My Gut Says So

So good at the act that you forget what’s true.

So good at pretending that the unreal becomes real.

What you feel is under your control.

You can simply act it away.

A mask of neutrality.

Leads you to believe you might actually feel it.

You can ignore your feelings.

You can act forever.

Yet at some point, the inevitable curtain comes down, and the performance ends.

You are left with you; and the feelings you’re pretending aren’t there.

If only for a moment.

The act is over.

What then?

Who are you when your truth has space to be?

The question, terrifying.

Its answer even more so.

It lies in love and the shape of it.

What does your love and care look like when there is no performance to mask it?

photo credit: Ania

Other articles that might tickle your fancy:

Emotional Self-Abandonment

If Our Stories Were Our Truth, We Might Call Them That

Emotional Littering

Emotional littering is when I attempt to alleviate my own overwhelming emotions by disposing of them elsewhere, when I inherently know they’re mine to be responsible to.

In those moments, I don’t want to own what I’m feeling and how I’m reacting to it. Instead, I’m trying to drop my responsibility into another’s backyard. To put it on them.

I’m not making space for my stuff, and I’m attempting to alleviate this by leaving it for someone else to take care of. I’m pretending to not be attached to what I’m feeling.

I am emotionally littering. And in doing so—in not being responsible to how I feel—I’m giving away my power to feel differently. What a waste.

photo credit: Steven Pisano

Other articles that might tickle your fancy:

Getting to Know Your Garbage

Building Blocks on My PWIW Path

The Motion of Emotion