Do we have to be rid of our demons before we can live a full life?
The self-help, personal growth, new thought, awakening arena is primarily based on the questionable premise there is something wrong with us. We’re typically taught from before the age when we can reason and discern words and meanings until the day we expire that something is missing, awry, maligned, or just, plain, broken.
I wrestle with my own assortment of shadows and have learned, adopted, misappropriated or borrowed ideas and beliefs. Somehow, they took hold somewhere deep and managed to sustain themselves through infrequent feeding on the bile of my frustrations and confusions with life and the people in it.
Underneath it all, I have always been driven to improve the human condition, starting with my self. Music and the words that channel through are my creative mediums of choice, along with elements of imagery and an openness to the grand unraveling of things as perceived by our frustratingly inelastic minds. It has always been about feeling through it, and words have generally been nearly enough, but never, really enough. Still, maybe the next song and the next page and the next pen and the next post will sufficiently clear something up…
But I wonder, since we can never, ever, really ever get it done (in one lifetime or one hundred thousand), should we be so damn concerned with fixing everything?
Where we are now, as a modern culture, as a society, in the Wacky West and increasingly around the world, is fairly fucked up. It’s chaotic. It is both infuriating and liberating just how exotically and extremely we live across the sheer scope and spectrum of what it can mean to be human.
Every size and shape, color, disposition, constitution, motivation, intelligence quotient, and emotional tangent is experienced by someone. So amazing. So terrifying. So … perfect.
There is no masking or covering up heart wounds. Nor should there be. Betrayal cuts so deep it never quite goes away. But, self-betrayal? Self-denial? Self-loathing? Well they, if anything, can at least be alleviated through conscious awareness, by living authentically, and with routine spiritual upheaval.
We can be quite adept at transference, transmutation, and trophy-making. But life, I think, genuinely wants us to be the more that exists beyond the stories we continue to perpetuate.
Therefore, it’s not simply feel the fear and do it anyway. It’s feel the fear and know it’s OK to be afraid. But do it because you embraced the inspired notion to try something challenging, uncomfortable, and potentially beautiful beyond what that fear might limit you from knowing.
And all knowing, is readily available … When we’re ready.
Solvitur ambulando