The Paradox of Being Fully Seen
I went on a deliciously nourishing yoga retreat in Mexico recently, and as a closing exercise the facilitators had each of the participants cocoon themselves up one at a time in a swinging hammock while the other participants circled around and “popcorned out" words they felt positively reflected the essence of this person.
And the look on every single person’s face as they stumbled out of that cocoon afterwards, almost always with tears in their eyes, was so beautiful.
And also incredibly tender.
And actually a little bittersweet.
The bittersweetness of our so-core-to-being-human deepest desire to be seen fully and accepted in our whole, complex humanness side-by-side with the painful awareness of all the ways we've learned to protect ourselves from fully allowing ourselves to be seen and loved.
It’s such a paradox at the heart of being human, isn’t it?
How a part of us wants nothing more than to be wholly seen in our fullest expression, but another part of us wants to hide our truest self away for fear of being seen in that vulnerable fullness.
It always comes back to the Both/And of this whole-spectrum experience of being human. How we can oscillate so widely (and sometimes wildly) on the spectrum in ways that seem completely conflicting to the intellectual mind but which are, in reality, just how it is to be human and a creature of the natural world.
And counterintuitive (not to mention often maddening) as it may seem that we distance and guard ourselves from the love and acceptance we know we truly want, it actually does make sense — just as everything we habitually do as humans makes sense on some level.
It makes sense that our minds come up with ways to try to protect our hearts when they've been wounded in the past.
It makes sense that the thing we want most in this human existence is the same thing that feels hardest to allow ourselves to fully receive.
Our deepest desires reveal our tenderest parts.
So for most of us it takes some practice to expand our tolerance for being truly seen and accepted in our whole, messy, beautiful, complex humanness.
You can start by allowing some of your realest parts to be witnessed in small, safe-feeling ways, and grow as you go.
With Love,