We must be the Orchestrators of our own Becoming

“If you don’t define yourself for yourself, then you will be crushed into other’s fantasies of you and eaten alive.” Audre Lorde

It seems so simple and yet it is EVERYTHING. 

It begins in flashes of insight - a realization that there’s something missing. A brief awakening before you fall back into the peaceful darkness of sleep. A dream of a life you can’t remember. A taste of something you can't quite name. A mirage that entices as it burns away the idea of what life is and yet it just isn’t adding up. You’re waiting for something to click into place. It’s on the tip of your tongue, that nameless thing you’ve just forgotten for a moment. You’re in a waking dream, but you can’t remember which way is up. You feel like you’ve got some agency here, but you’ve forgotten how to use your own power.

You’re trapped in a cage of your own making and yet it’s the only place you know, the only place where you feel safe. You’ve got to pull the walls down around you in order to escape, but they’re the foundation of everything you know.

There must be more to this life than perfecting how you present yourself to this world. There’s something off about centering what everyone else wants and thinks and believes. This can’t be what life is about. Nobody really knows what they think and want anyways. We’re all given the script. If you’re constantly chasing the next way of being - spending time, energy and money to get there, you’re not the consumer, you’re being consumed. Perhaps that’s all we are, the yeast of the universe; our little lives and the energy we expend trying to get “there,” wherever that is, is simply used to expand the ever evolving expanse.

If that’s the case, why not spend your energy becoming exactly who you please? Why not expand instead of shrink?

To become who you truly are and wish to be, you must give up what you are not, and have never truly been. You must sacrifice that old skin to who you are becoming.

It turns out I am the dragon. I consume myself and create myself day after day. I am learning who I am and creating who I am. I speak myself into existence as I realize the power of my own voice, my own intention. I weave the spell of myself. I sow the seeds of my own existence.  I am constantly creating who I will be.

Am I tainted by everything around me, everything I was before I understood what it meant, or is it all part of the journey?

Each and every turn and mistake and rising and falling, it’s all part of the project of creating yourself. Life is not this linear plot as we’ve been led to believe. You’re not ahead or behind, you’re just where you are. You own this body, you own this mind, you own your energy and get to direct where it flows. You are your own kingdom. You are your own limit. You can shed whatever no longer suits you whenever you please. 

We are perennial creatures with many seasons of wilting and blooming and so many places in between. It’s all just cycles within cycles. A tapestry that has no beginning and no end. And when it happens that our bodies die and nourish the Earth again, our energy goes on into a new form.

We awake only to dream again. And through it all we discover some new facet of ourselves. 

It’s tempting to judge our journey, criticizing ourselves for not being past this or that, not being more evolved, not being our best selves - but with each trial you discover some new detail of yourself, some new facet of life.

No wonder the spiral was sacred, you go deeper with each turn, you come up for air to see the bigger picture and then delve back into the micro of it all again. What you avoid looking at, you’ll come face to face with inside the spiral, slowly but surely you’ll heal with each new turn.

Your thoughts and intentions become the map pulling you forward to destinations unknown. It’s not really about the destination anyways, but who you become along the way. A desire fragrant enough becomes the scent you follow through paths undiscovered. Is it your subconscious focusing on the “yellow car?” Is your mind so powerful it leads you to the destination you TOLD it you wanted to go whether you realized it or not?

No, you didn’t want to be broken down along the way, but this too is part of the process. A sandpapering before your new coat of paint can be applied. You said you wanted to heal this or that or become this or that, little did you know that sometimes a healing means a re-breaking so that you can heal correctly. Little did you know that a becoming means an un-becoming of everything that’s holding you back. Little did you know that this depression or bout of disassociation or whatever state of mind you’re in that scares the shit out of you is part of the process. The darkness is the planting. But you don’t learn that until you’re in the middle of the muck and you discover that what you’re composting and letting rot has its own beauty and it will serve as the manure for your rebirth. There’s nutrients even in the shit. 

You can create the life of your dreams from the fertile battlefield of your own destruction, or you can keep swimming in the muck of it all, torturing yourself for who you used to be or who you think you “should” be. Your journey is your own business.

The shit is ready to be alchemized into gold whenever you are. The seeds you’ve planted only need a little love and light and fire to take root.

As a child I came to believe that in order to be worthy, I had to be “good.” To be good, religion told me, I had to behave in a certain way. And when life happened to me and I did what children do, I began to believe that I was not, in fact, “good.” At the ripe age of 10 I fell into something of a depression. Thinking I was a terrible person and didn’t deserve to live or be happy. There were times I thought about ending it, I remember thinking I could understand why people might become alcoholics or addicts even if DARE said not to, because “fuck it” what was the point of trying anymore? I wasn’t good enough to enjoy life.

What a strange conclusion for a young child to come to. Where did those thoughts come from? Perhaps it was a combination of the hormones starting to course through me and the “salvation” I was told everyone needed. Afterall, the camp counselors told me that there was no getting all of the “sin” that was squirted toothpaste back into the tube. I’d always be tainted by the few “bad” things I’d done or had done to me in my short life unless I found salvation. While I believed Jesus was a cool guy, he never felt real to me, not in the way fire and brimstone felt. Perhaps because the churches I went to focused more on sin and damnation than Love and salvation.

I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t play, I became listless and disconnected. I remember talking with my brother about it because I didn’t feel I could talk to anyone else. He told me to give it to God. While it seems trite, I considered him an authority on such things, but which God I wondered. “Do you think God is just a combination of all the Greek and Roman Gods?” Doubtful (but maybe another manifestation?).

But either way our brief conversation had sparked an idea. While I’d been told by a friend on the playground that meditation was not Christian, the “prayer” I engaged in on nights I couldn't sleep, I realize in hindsight was just that. I would sit in silence with my eyes closed and my palms open, giving my guilt and depression to the God of my understanding. I vividly remember a white light coming to me and taking it away. Night after night eventually I began to feel better.

 And so my “good girl” conditioning took root. Maybe if I was “good” from here on out, I’d be ok. Maybe if I was “good” from here on out, I wouldn’t feel that way ever again. Maybe if I judged all the “bad” people it would make me even better … I became “good” and homophobic and anti-everything that wasn’t Southern-Baptist “Christian.” And yet, something was missing, something didn’t add up.

How could a God of Love hate so many of his children? How could a God of Love condemn people who didn’t grow up Christian simply because of their geography? What kind of loving God wouldn’t still love his children who were just fumbling through life, learning as they went by design? 

As I grew up, I tugged on the thread of that thought and slowly began unraveling my conditioning. All the things I thought were bad, were just people being what they were made to be - in fact it was the HATE and FEAR of what I didn’t understand or what I was told was bad that was wrong. The most vital part of life is Love.

And thus, in my mid-20s I came back to meditation. A dropping in, a letting go of the chaos around me, a setting of intention, zooming all the way into one moment, one mantra, one heartbeat, the stream of energy through my body, a rooting into the earth, a sprouting into the sky on an exhaled breath, following a breeze all the way to outer space and floating with eternity. With the setting of an intention to free myself I became the orchestrator of my own becoming.

In the years that have followed I've gone through periods of darkness, of healing, and of joyfully living. I have met God in new ways. I have let go of outdated beliefs and judgements about what is “good” and “bad.” I have prayed for the courage and fortitude to cultivate the life of my dreams … even if I have yet to know all of my dreams. I have declared a truce between myself and the supposed to be’s, sought some middle ground. I’ve dug up my roots and examined them, purged the rot and planted myself anew, growing new roots alongside the old. I’ve shed the layers of protection I no longer needed and allowed myself to cautiously bloom and wilt and bloom again, waiting to see what new creature I become.