Shadow Integration and Pains Taking Becoming
Tonight's episode was recorded this past Sunday at Cosmos.coop's Stellar Sundays monthly artist gathering. I offer a couple preaches and a song medley, and invite a wonderful flute player peer to join me in the middle. My offering begins at minute 18:25.
At the Edge of Integration
Friends,
I've been in deep inquiry these past couple weeks.
About how exactly could I be living for you more.
I'm speaking to something subtle here...
That began as a capacity to feel more nuanced sensations around how I offer myself and how I am received in my daily life and sacred work.
I GIVE, compulsively and with conviction.
But am I actually able to be received?
And to receive from you—interest, desire, love, gratitude, care?
Am I energetically open to you taking pleasure in me—and me taking pleasure in your existence?
Rather than an overpowering wall of automatic resistance or numbness... Stemming from a deeply submerged, tentacled shadow; long ago acquired. 👤
I have been marginalized, time and again. So I self-marginalize. You could call this kinky. I consider it a secret knowledge. I embody the careful memory of what We are like when We are dysregulated. I do not forget, for our sake. And I evolve, for us too.
But I really do spend a lot of cognitive energy processing what it is I must do. I'm blessedly committed to emergence, yes, and more or less tapped into directly to creation...
But also I seem to be depriving myself. Taking myself out of sacred streams of feedback that I could be in (and belong in): discourses; spoken word spaces; events and facilitation; romance-making and money-making schemes.
Let this be a pivot point
of which self attributes overcome and shine through.
I am at an edge of dysregulation and higher Self-regulation.
Rather, I am at the edge, the shape of my root wound in childhood, that continues to sculpt my circumstances and results.
In the video linked above, when the clip starts: I read myself as unsure if I like being seen by you. Avoidant. Disturbed, on some level, by the social setting. (This is subtle but I clearly identify it.)
Until it shifts into the spoken word part. When it feels to me watching it that my true voice comes through. And all self-consciousness dissolves like mist.
Be more like life.
It is what you are.
And Life is our great ally in this moment—
to try to break through into a higher order that integrates more.
Indeed, that voice you hear... that unity of me & my knowing... that is a self/voice I actually spend a lot of time with.
Though I have struggled immensely to show it and share it with others.
Afraid of the continuous rejection I encountered—and manufactured. An automatic self-preservation to doubt and be cynical. Noticing the tiredness and age in my body from all the heartbreaks, all the let-downs, all the holdings-back, accumulated in detail, across all the years.
So, as a deep seated habit, I stay hidden & silent. Yet I'm pent up with exquisite embodiment, wondrous rage and ecstasy, outrageous imagination.
My default reaction to getting caught off guard is to retreat, or to fling a barb right back.
I was trained this way in early childhood.
It is a sad shadow. A limitation of great familiarity and constancy.
In my efforts to conceal my genuine wonderfulness, to hide it from suffering abuse, I've created a dualism in myself:
- the story that you/I cannot connect with each other (I'm just too divergent)—and—
- the story that all beings secretly love the truth, the truth I also live for, and so maybe you all are, in reality, destined to love me.
I am caught in the middle. Today it felt more like a tornado than a cadeceus or DNA strand... the tension tending a tad more destructive than constructive, perhaps. 🌪️⚕️🧬
Yet, right now, a new more integrated self is being born through that crevass. ⚫
Not a mother by now (so devoted to Life I've been): my whole self is a womb. I ache sodden with the information passing through and from me—ready to spark new life in my surroundings. 👶
It is conceivable... That I could relax into an even more authentic version of myself. One I've seen in visions. One that spends more time regularly performing. One that spends more time reading, writing, and engaging in critical discourses. One beautiful goddessian creature even more well received. One that lives and acts as a minister—whether this is socially recognized and rewarded right away, or not. One that, generally, spends less time hiding—like a senile granny confined by small minds to dusty wee crannies, all over (overall)... 👵
I am trained to command stages, direct scenes, liberate dreams, after all. In fact. I saturate in creativity; with my free time, I invent more freedoms. Transmute (commute?) life sentences into sentient drip systems, curating an extensive pattern repertoire that can truly make epics manifest.
Only if anyone is listening.
And how could they not, in such an interconnected, interactive world.
...Unless you're trying to circumscribe your own wonderful sacred signal.
Friends. It is one of the most pointed (and painful) ironies of my life:
that the performer persona within me—is the one that actually gets closer to communicating the truth of who I am.
The same performer self who I've shunned for decades. For I've instead expended more than half of my life hiding myself, afraid others couldn't handle my truth—fixating on the truth I could make sense of, and locating myself staunchly there—eschewing any and all social performativeness, writing off any any all failures at social connection, deriding all connection as a sick type of pandering.
🎋 I pruned the tree of connection with you back too far—
I was so hurt, I wasn't seeing clearly.
I lack capacity for connection because my wound still invades and dominates my experience (under the right conditions). So even when I'm relaxed, I might actually be frozen. Preferring the safety of my own (and nature's) company... and therefore reinforcing my comfort compared to the energy that can be generated inside me when I interact with people. Also known as, the charge. ⚡
Sometimes in the game of life, where we're all striving to become our more true selves... You have to choose where to place your attention. For, the wound will be there. It is full of charge—it attracts my attention. Yet is that where my attention ought to be going? In this grand creation. Or should it be riding the stellar wavelengths of joy, legacy, invocation, community -making?
Should I, dare I, be empowered even to summon such waves and wavelengths—a pool playset for the whole scene to enjoy? Narrating clarity capable of synching minds and cascading conscious unity into the thirsty minds and hearts of the people? Show them:
I know you, and I love you, too.
We are all extensions of nature.
I don't actually fear you.
I don't actually loathe you.
That's an old pose. It no longer fits.
The truth is, I have so much to offer.
See it.
Receive it.
And give me back your love in kind.
***
You support me when you see me. And you can even help me edge 💦 —
Refer me to spaces / audiences / channels who would take excellent delight in what I offer.
This edge between spoken word and priestly preaching... between Buddhism and paganism and anarchism... Who yearns to encounter this woman's signals?
I need to speak more, be seen more, in front of people. No longer keeping my thoughts to myself, in these huge archives, all these years—scared of being witnessed (and accepted) by anybody else.
My trauma is a wild beast I ride. See me there. See me transcending it, too.
Push me to my edge of seeing me and sharing me (such as by sharing this video or newsletter with a friend), and praising / engaging with me.
I am learning even the hardest things for me to learn. I am learning to touch, and to be very touched, by you.
Help me trust the world again—that our signals are truly picked up and circulate real meaningful intelligence and collaboration among us. That people want the truth about my concealed wonderfulness, hidden from harm in a rigid posture since early childhood.
I need to update my self.
In ministry and spiritual community,
C.