Being Seen and Coming Clean – About Me Part II

A First Step – Being seen

A Second Step – Coming Clean

Except, I sort of started this journey…of coming into the light in reverse order!  Order is highly over rated anyway!

My real first steps on this journey were baby steps.  There have been many more steps since then…to getting here and coming clean. First I had to stop doing everything!  I have been a “doer” all my life! It was easier to keeping going then to stop…that was until life made me stop!  There is a lot that happened between there and here! During this time, I started learning how to stop, how to rest, to block out parts of the world, learn to listen to the inner voices and especially to the internal wisdom of my body, to heal, accept and yes…even to play!  This still continues to be my work!

I don’t mean to skip steps or gloss over details on this post.  I am learning to find my voice and learning how to be brave and authentic in sharing it. It comes from meeting and befriending fear at every corner.  We’ve travelled together for a long time fear and I …but only just started to become friends.  So bear with me…we have all the time we need to get to all the juicy details!

All “this” is part of my journey …a process …and all those years preaching process in the corporate world must have done some good right? Over there, it’s all about process, consistency and transparency.  Lofty ambitions…especially the last point! Transparency comes at a high price! No wonder many choose to remain in the darkness. I know I did!

But to get back to my post…this is about no longer hiding and being seen right? Honestly I am trying to stay on track!

One of the very few memories that I can recall from my childhood is hiding behind my amma’s (mother) sari!  I did not want to be seen! That was only one part of me …the part I showed to the world most.  Yet there was another part that longed to be seen!  All my life I have managed these two “siblings”. I have been their advocate, counsellor and mediator of tantrums…usually about who’s in charge! And most often it’s the one who wants to hide …the bossy one…that wins! Since they are both parts of me – do I win or do I lose? So you see my dilemma!

It was easier to keep the bossy one happy and in hiding for a short time, while I worked on getting the other one to come clean. You see, the bossy one’s been in charge for way too long! She has secrets…they give her power!

And now the time feels right! The desire to share comes from cultivating some special kinds of seeds… of kindness and acceptance. Only a gentle yet radical acceptance of all that makes up me, my stories and my history has brought me with trembling knees and all to this place.

I am ready to claim these stories as mine once and for all instead of putting them out there on their own.  They are like my children…parts of me…longing for acceptance and ownership.  So this is me! You can find a picture on my page home page and every other page. We are on a journey here together…the roads in between are still unknown, but the destination – that’s always just HERE!

On each post I’ll start filling in more of the gaps. I’m still discovering many of them myself and it’s overwhelming to do it all at once.

And why would l do this? Why would I set up a blog and start sharing aspects of my life and this very personal journey that I am on?

To be quite honest, I am still sorting through all my motivations. For one, I recognize there are no boundaries really. We can pretend that there are.  We can label some things as personal, others as professional, private, public and so on…yet it’s the same person that marches into work every day …a combined version of the personal and professional, the private and the public!  I discovered this little fact from my years working in the field of Human Resources!  Talking to people behind closed doors where they can safely take off some of their masks, you get to see and hear a lot. I got to see and hear a lot! There is no separation of roles in our internal worlds!  In here it’s all personal!  The “rest” are all just coloured post-it-notes on boxes in a very messy storage room!

My own desire to share comes partly from this deeply hidden (up until now) wish to be seen.  However, I also recognize the parts of me that want to share this journey live from on the road for more than reasons related to my ego!   Too often in the past when I was really lost in the woods, I longed for company. I longed to see behind the facades and the masks to connect with others who I knew and believed to be “out there” somewhere. But I had no access to them.  Eventually I started finding “my own”. I started meeting others who were also searching either because they had heard the call on their own or because life somehow found a way to get their attention. The more I speak to these fellow travellers, the more I realize the need for us to share or stories now!

We need to air our stories and our struggles and the holes that we fall into on this journey right now! Not 5 or 10 years down the road when everything is clean and organized and we have somehow found our way back to the highway of life and managed to tuck away all the loose ends into neat little baskets like the ones IKEA might sell so that the entire living room of our life looks like that of a model home, as if no one but immaculate ghosts live there!   No way!

I started this blog to share all of it! The good, the not so great and everything in between!  It’s important to honour all that is happening in the middle.  When we only see the heroines and the heroes in their designer gowns with their newly whitened teeth, holding up their newly published books, while they are on their book tour….we miss a lot!  Our eyes deceive us and only choose to see the “final products” that are being flashed in front of us for display!  We skip over all the not so glamorous details about how they got there.

While I  am no longer in that place where I started a few years ago, in bed, barely being able to get up to make my kids lunch and send them off to school without getting them obsessively worried about their mother, I still find myself in that “in-between” place!  I could not write from that place! I could barely brush my hair from there. In fact on many days I did not!

Here where I am right now, I still struggle with the old ghosts and I do go backwards and forwards from this place. And sometimes I do find myself slipping entirely off the path altogether.  It’s tough for me to “be seen” but I did take my own time getting to here! My most trusted friend on this journey…my practice of mindfulness…continues to be a faithful friend and flashlight.  Without this partnership, I would not be here right now.  I am finding that the places that scare me also usually hold one of the keys to my freedom…so I am claiming this key by refusing to stay in hiding any longer.

The next key….speaking the truth…my own truth,  independent of the approval or disapproval of others and especially the “others in my life,”…this is the marathon I am still in training for! More on this in future posts!

Thanks for visiting, for reading, and sending me your comments! It’s amazing to see the traffic go up on the site every day! Although I can only imagine what your faces and names look like…I know there must be a seed in you that must resonate to a seed in me! After all, I am convinced we all have roots leading back to the same tree!

Do post your own comments or send me your own stories too…I know there’s more of us travelling these roads!

An afterthought…this is a phrase from one of my other posts…i feel inclined to repeat it here:

A desire for sympathy is not the motivation or part of the subtext in the telling of the stories on these pages.  Forgiveness has already done most of her work here. What’s left, I am still actively working on! The sharing is part of the dealing and the healing of the past that haunts my present.