| Having spent the last year in the cocoon of our home, moving through smaller spaces with fewer people around us, we are now beginning to press against the container and unfold bit by bit. As we emerge what will we bring out into the light of day? What will we grow? And what will we do with the yucky parts? Should we leave them behind in the shadows? Recently when I was with a friend, I realized just how much I had been missing all year. It was not what I would have guessed! When we met for a walk in late March 2021, she asked me if we could hug?! We were both fully vaccinated and had not hugged since March 2020. We agreed to HUG! 🤗 It was joyous. She cried. She’d been cautious all year. I was the first person she had hugged and while it was gorgeous…there was also something else I could feel in her body that worried me. I was shocked at what I could feel – the tension, the brittleness, weariness. The year had taken its toll. I knew things had been stressful in a roaming anxiety stress kind of way, but until I touched her, I really didn’t know the extent of the toll. We spoke freely each week about what was happening in our days to day lives, in our hearts and minds. Yet, it was not all there. I had not really understood. Movement and touch are the simplest and most straight forward way to the truth. We are much more likely to fool ourselves and others with words. Touch, movement and our bodies express something altogether different. They do not lie. Academics theorize that language was created to deceive. In other words (LOL), while language is all we have sometimes, it is far from accurate. Language is great for entertainment, storytelling and art – but it does not paint the whole picture. It can’t. Let’s look at a simple handshake. There’s a lot to feel AND sometimes what you feel has nothing to do with what the person was trying to convey or what it is we are trying to convey. Say you are going into a meeting and you are nervous. Have you ever been told to“FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT (🤮 )” “use a firm handshake” “look people in the eye” or “use a power stance so you can enter that meeting and win’ LOL AGAIN! Yeah it’s me laughing. You know why? That stuff does not REALLY work. It’s smoke and mirrors. A Potemkin village. Faking it only fools people who are not paying attention. People like you would probably not be fooled. Right? You are interested in paying attention. Smoke and mirrors work on lemmings who refuse to pay attention to what they sense and feel. So, if you would not be fooled by it, then why would you do it? PRETENDING to feel skilled and confident does not make you more confident or powerful. It makes you better at PRETENDING to be powerful and confident. And when we pretend, our insides don’t match their outsides. That causes problems in life every time. It often makes us miserable, lonely and confused. When the internal us and the external us don’t match IMHO this is where we can get into BAD trouble. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be better at pretending to be powerful or confident, I want to be confident and to have humility too. I had a colleague who was a martial artist. We shared lots of interests, had great conversation and he liked my work, but I felt uneasy around him – like I could not trust him. There was no ‘good’ reason why, but I just knew it. He moved with slow measured movement and a deep calm voice. One day, he was climbing onto a chair to use a long pole to get something from up high. He lost his balance, just for a moment, before recovering it. Thankfully, he was not hurt at all. As a matter of fact, he didn’t even acknowledge the loss of balance. In that moment I saw what it was he was always trying to cover up – I saw why I didn’t trust him. He was on a seeking path. I admired that. But while on that path, he was also posturing to be a wise something he was not (yet). He was not one of his teachers. He was trying to act and walk and talk like them, but he had not had the experience that would give him that skill. He had not built it from the inside out.He was a Potemkin village wall. It was just a wall, a façade with nothing inside. Why did he pretended to be more advanced than he was, I’ll never know. I know that with myself and with my students it is usually owed to a belief that we are not enough just as we are. And sometimes that is true. I faked it to get a cocktail waitressing job at age 18. I wrote down the drink orders for the bartender phonetically. When I wrote Old Granada, he was on to me. “What do they want?” I looked at him, knowing he knew I had no clue how to be a cocktail waitress. I gave him my best pleading face and went back to the man at his table to ask again – an Old Grandad on the rocks! I needed the job, and I was determined to learn quickly. I knew I had those skills; I just needed a chance, but I didn’t trust that I would be given one if I didn’t lie to get my foot in the door. After a few weeks of overall success at work, I owned up to my boss and the bartender. They already knew. My strong handshake had not fooled anyone;-) “Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don’t divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation.” – Moshe Feldenkrais We can learn to claim ourselves. We can own it all – our brilliance and our weaknesses. Every last bit of it. And we can learn to feel REALLY GOOD in the process. I have always been impressed by people who owned all of themselves. They did not give it away to someone else to decide if they were valuable or lovable. They claimed it – their anger, their fear, their ‘gross’, habits, their quirks. They owned it. That doesn’t mean they did not try to shift and grow – but they did not hide from themselves either. Find a trusted someone to begin to process, claim and know yourself with more and more clarity. Then your energy can go to creating more fun and joy and growth. When I hold space for all of me, I know I am enough, and I create a life with those who want to be with the real me too. Join me! It’s totally worth coming out for! Astra |
