Fullness of life involves openness to whatever life hands you.
Hard.
Easy.
Whatever.
The only way to experience life with balance and completion is to be all in. Each aspect of you. Nothing left in the cupboard.
Nothing ignored, rejected, forbidden, forgotten or lost.
The fury, the lust, the child-like animation, the reliability, the volatility, the tendency to be late.
It’s all you.
You have to be all of it.
You don’t have to DO all of it. But you have to accept it. At least to start.
Then you can change it if necessary.
Because some of it’s not fun or easy.
But through exposure in the now to the energies inside you, you can learn to redirect and adjust how they show up in your life.
You can shed light on your blind spots.
…in the smithy of the now.
You can integrate those disparate energies that manifest in behavior you’d rather not exhibit.
Organize them into a manageable array without damaging them or shutting them down.
Because you need them. They’re part of your vitality.
This is a difficult, challenging aspect of being yourself.
It requires a connection between your inner and outer worlds. Your emotions and your circumstances.
And that connection can only be forged with the hammer and anvil of self love in the smithy of the now.
Emotional experience
Life must be felt to be lived.
A huge part of human experience is not accessible with the brain.
You need to feel it.
That’s what your emotions are for. They’re like senses for detecting and responding to life.
An organized emotional response to your circumstances allows your whole self to be involved in the experience. It gives you access to resources and strength you can’t get any other way.
But it can be uncomfortable to give your emotions room if you’re not used to it. And mediocre results are possible without them.
So, mediocrity can start to look good compared to the burn of vulnerability.
The wound
The word vulnerable literally means wound. It comes from the Latin word vulnerare which means to wound.
And who doesn’t love a good wound?
Heh.
Pretty much everybody. At least not at first. But only because we’re mostly unaware of the enhancing effect of the healing process.
And because wounds hurt. There’s that.
But when we are emotionally wounded, we almost always heal to a whole new level of strength and resilience. A level we could not have imagined occupying before.
That’s the magic of vulnerability.
All the little mini hurts of the day-to-day become a slow, steady training program.
And you gain a basis of perspective on the big hurts.
But to experience the magic, open the gates.
You have to let life in.
And in doing so you let yourself out.
Cues from your full self
The basic emotional response, the involuntary emotion that emerges in a situation is almost always dead on the right one.
It takes practice to learn to acknowledge and trust it. Or, for some of us, to even notice it.
It’s tough to give your emotions a voice in your responses to life. Because emotional experience lacks the manageable parameters of logic.
Emotional experience feels unsafe according to the sense of safety most of us are used to.
The truth is accessing and experiencing your emotions is actually the safest thing you can do. It makes you more safe in life, not less so. Because it brings more of what is into your field of view.
…your emotions go to work for you.
Brings it out of the shadows.
Makes it known.
When emotions come up in a certain situation, that’s information about that situation. Information from a region of your being you can’t access with thinking.
Information provided spontaneously from your full self.
Information that can better inform you aboout your circumstances, and enable you to respond more effectively.
The trouble is, inside your emotions, you’re always a little out of control. And there’s nothing you can do about that.
But you can become at home in being out of control.
If you can do that your emotions go to work for you.
True perspective
Your mind, your decision making, both benefit from the additional information provided by your emotions. Your emotions can “notice” details in a situation that your mind can’t see.
Details that can mean the difference between success or failure.
The more you clear access to your emotions the more you can polish them into an effective navigational mechanism that will enrich your life and make deep connections possible.
And bearable.
It will lead you where you belong, by helping you identify your inner calling, then joining it to the outward circumstances most conducive to living it out.
A mature mix of your full emotional range is key to fullness of life. Nothing shut down. Nothing overly emphasized.
It unifies you. So you can respond with all your capacities, all your energy, all your creativity, to whatever life hands you.
Hard.
Easy.
Whatever.
How self love factors in
Real emotional experience only happens in the now. Outside the now there is only distraction. And you can’t experience anything in distraction, except distraction.
But the now being all full of reality like that makes it a dangerous place sometimes. Only self love makes it possible to go there.
To delve it.
To navigate its waters with openness to what you discover.
Because you’ll have to forgive yourself.
That takes self love.
And you’ll have to not turn and run from your own magnificence.
That also takes self love.
Without self love presence is impossible.
It is a characteristic of presence is that you do not judge what you see. However messy, unattractive or disappointing it might be.
Judgement is an escape from presence. When you are strong in presence, you can see your own behavior without escape.
The escape of shame.
The escape of frustration.
The escape of self aggrandizement.
To face what you find in the present — in others, in yourself, in circumstances — without judgement, is presence.
Without self love presence is impossible.
Escape is inevitable.
Did you find this post useful?
It’s actually part of a series. Read part one here, part two here. And don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments!
About Peter Crowell
