Belong To Yourself

Come back to yourself. You don’t owe anybody anything. Neither does anybody owe you – there’s freedom in that. Belong to yourself first and foremost. Bring ease to social anxiety. Sounds paradoxical but it’s possible. Bring ease into communication and give space around the receiving of and responding to.

The anxiety of trying not to make anyone feel bad is something to feel into not follow up on. It’s okay to take your time and really sense into what feels most true for you instead of trying to mitigate their feelings or your imagination of their feelings. The pressure of that is too overwhelming for your system.

Notice the patterns, that’s what this is about, not about anything else. Don’t be a hero, don’t be spiritual, don’t be nice and don’t be too cool either. Don’t cover up your gut feelings by spiritually gaslighting yourself. Or your natural inclinations by shaming yourself. You’re here for a reason. You know what you’re about.

Don’t be a hero, don’t be spiritual, don’t be nice. Don’t cover up your gut feelings by spiritually gaslighting yourself.

Stay true to what feels most joyful to you, most supportive of you. You’re not here to support anybody else. That’s not your job. Inquire into what feels most safe, what feels most curious, what feels most supportive, most uplifting to you.

What doesn’t feel like an obligation. Enough obligations. Enough acting from obligation, “duty”. We’ve had enough of that. Bring things backs to you. This is about what’s most loving, kind, supportive, true, safe and real for you. You’re here for you.

Not everybody gets access to you. Not everybody gets access to your time. It’s not a given. You’re not available in that sense. You’re not open in that sense. Your openness and availability is to the moment, to yourself, to what’s here prior to what “social” expectations demand of you.

This is a deep dive into you. And a sinking into what is prior and kinder to any expectation or any demand – even ones you have of yourself. It’s not about the harshness or challenge or your capacity to overextend yourself and “bear it all”.

No.

When you’ve been conditioned to believe that you are betraying others or hurting them by being true to yourself then this is the result. Constantly overextending yourself to make others feel ‘comfortable’, feel at ‘ease’ with your choices, your decisions, your actions, your words.

As if they have some kind of ‘final’ say (and many have in the past) as to what sort of person you are if you betray their expectations or their judgments of you. And so you feel imprisoned because you fear the judgment of the other. Your ability to be open becomes compromised at the expense of yourself.

This is codependency. That’s not to say that anything goes and you should overlook slights that feel iffy, but to feel free in your relating with another is to be unleashed from the tightness of codependency. To be able to relate from a place that’s not tight, that’s not holding on with a million and one unspoken expectations.

Relationship dynamics are born out of these constructs, out of these expectations and out of these judgements. Roles are assigned this way; leader, follower, giver, taker. Someone who’s ‘allowed’ to be selfish and another who’s not. And a prison is formed and you become bound to a form of relationship born of obligation not freedom.

It’s a radical change when your allegiance shifts from the ‘other’ to yourself. Whether the ‘other’ is another person or a group or a social agreement or societal pressure or a person of authority- it’s all the same, it’s other.