Un-Becoming
"Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek & find the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." -Rumi
“Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”
-Paul Coelho
This quote has been nestled deep inside my heartspace for about five days now. I’m using it to anchor my nervous system as I experience a world that feels both erratic and surreal on most days. In taking inventory and peeling away what isn’t really me, I’m being asked to heighten my receptivity and pay close attention to the intricacies of my purpose and to the internal barriers that keep me from fulfilling it.
The big lesson for me here is that those intricacies aren’t found in what others think or say about me. I am ever-evolving, and who I am was never meant to be commented on, criticized, or critiqued by anyone outside me. Of course, this happens as we live amongst other people and energies, but at the end of the day, it’s only me who can own my ambitions or define my success.
Attuning to what isn’t really me prompts me to consider the habits, commitments, and behaviors that don't align with my desires.
I accomplish this through embodiment. For me, this level of internal alignment and self-ownership is a path uniquely my own. It centers my astrology and the subtle ways I hold wounding in my physical body. I’m always coming back to embodied practice, not because it’s a trending topic, but because it is my path toward letting my body lead.
Growing my somatic intelligence is one of those intricate parts of my purpose. The past five years have taught me and brought me face-to-face with unprocessed grief and ancestral burdens that I carry. So yes, having deep authority inside of myself is important. Understanding the critical importance of attuning to desire goes far beyond cultural perceptions/expectations about what I should want for myself and my people as a Black woman or how I am to perform as a “respectable” wife and a “good” mother.
For me, cultivating deep authority and divine desire inside myself is not about feeling the need to prove that no, I don’t hate men, or no, I haven’t been jaded about the sacredness of family because I grew up in a single-parent household. While these contexts certainly paint aspects of my daily strivings and conditionings, standing in my authority at its core is ultimately about me living the life I’m supposed to embrace this lifetime.
As I approach 50 years on this earth, I can no longer allow myself to care if or what others question/speculate about my motivations. To do this, I have to learn to be present inside myself. Even with the abundance of water and mutable energies swirling around inside, even as Pisces and Neptune swim in my psyche and make my empathy feel oceanic, learning to establish presence within my physical body provides the proper container to hold it all. I can no longer care whether who I am comes off as rigid, scattered, passive-aggressive, selfish, useless, or detached. It doesn’t serve me to collapse myself under criticism.
“There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”
-a bunch of people :o)
My only job here is to become who I am meant to be.
Another intricacy I’m walking with each day is the nuance of timing and action and its role in my life. I see the world through its patterns, and I feel and hold cycles at the cellular level. Natural rhythms are another one of my go-to anchoring tools. The complexities of when planned intentions meet the expected yet unforeseen blessing or encounter bring deep excitement. I thrive in liminal spaces! I also love the structure and repetition of nature’s cycles, as they keep me grounded and from spinning too far out into the ethers, so I can do basic shit like drive, eat, nod, and respond appropriately when people talk and ask questions. (lol!)
Walking in purpose is a sensitive subject. It’s a thing that can only be truly defined by the one living said purpose. The lucky ones devote themselves to it. The smart kids recognize they are always in ever-evolving phases of their own creative energy. It never stops. We always have the power to take any of the world’s chaos and bring it into a form that makes our toes curl, that brings us a tiny pocket of peace, so we can be who we were meant to be in the first place.
Places to Ponder:
What childhood dreams or interests did you abandon, and why? What parts of your younger self got left behind? Do they still call out to you?
Which relationships require you to be less than your full self? Where do you diminish, hide, or alter yourself to maintain connection or cultural expectations?