The Necessity of "Faking It Until You Make It"

When we're caught in fear, sometimes "faking it until you make it" is the only way forward.

We won’t always be overflowing with feelings of radical love and unconditional self acceptance. These things do not happen overnight, much as we might want to will them into existence.
Rather than shaming ourselves for our experience and for not “being further” when we get caught up in fear and negativity, we could experiment with asking questions like
“How would someone who feels worthy talk to themselves?”
“If I really loved my body, what would I eat? How would I move through space?”

We cannot force ourselves to feel something that we don’t, but we CAN practice forming new patterns and new ways of existing in our mind and body. The more we do this, the more it will become second nature, until one day we might even find that it’s become our reality.

Elaboration

Swimming in the river has been a daily respite for me.

A few days ago I posted a photo on social media with the caption “Life is an evolution, not a race. You’re exactly where you need to be here and now”. Recently it felt right to repost it with an updated message. Not that I don’t firmly believe that life is not a race, and that we’re all exactly where we need to be, but there are a lot of vague inspirational one-liners and quotes in the online spiritual new age world that can feel unrelatable. The elaboration is that you can know that you’re where you need to be and that everything is unfolding the way it needs to while also experiencing loss and overwhelm. 
Life has felt relentless for me these past six weeks- between a breakup, the death of a family member, chronic pain management, needing to move across the country 6 weeks earlier than expected, finding housing, and a few others. 
Not fighting your life experience creates more peace, but being on the right path doesn’t mean that there are never any more difficult days. There is a limbo period when you’ve decided to bravely up and leave a life that is no longer for you but you’re not yet in your new one that can be really f**king lonely (Martha Beck refers to the experience as the empty elevator syndrome, for anyone who’s interested and wants further information). 
All of the feelings can (and probably will) surface- depression, fear, doubt, extreme resistance. It might be excruciating for a while, but it is so much easier and worthwhile in the long run to follow what feels right rather than to force yourself into a life that no longer fits.

When Rest Makes You Feel Unsafe

Feeling exhausted used to make me feel unsafe. Though it took me a while to realize this, I didn’t exactly have to look far to see where it came from. Most of us are born into hustle culture, where worth is based on work and rest means that we’re going to fall behind in the rat race. When I was briefly in animation school one teacher told us, like a kind uncle briefing us on the rules of the universe, that if we were unwilling to stay up until 2am to meet a deadline, there would be twenty other people in line behind us waiting to take the job. It was not uncommon to see kids wearing wrist braces because they would not stop working, and one person experienced heart failure and had to be rushed to the hospital during my six months there (they think it was due to lack of sleep). 
Is it really that surprising then that my body had internalized rest as weakness? The problem for me with that equation is that when you have Lyme disease and chronic fatigue you’re often bedridden, which is not exactly conducive to productivity. Hence the fight or flight reaction, which puts added strain on your already weakened nervous system, and ironically prevents you from being able to fully relax and renew. 
So what’s the remedy? Showing your system that it’s safe, one step at a time. Somatic experiencing has helped me (focusing on what’s right in front of you and orienting to your environment), as well as being real honest with myself about what really needs doing today. Not “this is what I need to do to feel validated”, but the bare bones. Do those things as best you can, and then rest. It became glaringly obvious where my self worth was tied to my output on the days that all I could manage was literally eating food, going on a 20 minute walk, and laundry. So exposing myself to people who were consciously embodying a different worldview became essential as well. 
When there’s less to do we might realize that we’ve also been filling up our lives not only out of social obligation, but in order to avoid the feelings buried underneath the speed. When the external noise is reduced, the inner world becomes louder, which can add to the feeling of unsafety if there’s a lot that’s unprocessed there. Rarely do we run from things that feel wonderful. There’s no rush, let it unfold naturally. Pushing yourself out of old patterns too fast can also have negative effects. We are not robots, and rest is not something that needs to be earned, it’s a need for human beings to function optimally.

To Love Is To Grieve

During covid I unexpectedly entered into a relationship that we both knew had a natural end date. I’ve been thinking a lot about something my tea teacher, Mariana Rittenhouse, said during one of our ceremonies: that to love is to grieve. The two are inextricable. 
Growing up we are more often than not fed two dimensional portrayals of romantic relationships that do not prepare us well for the complexity and messiness of real life. They do not do justice to the many layered forms of love, nor how grief can be a humbling reminder of our humanity. People walk into our lives when we need them to, and though we may grow to love them dearly, we recognize that sometimes it was not meant to be forever. 
The days are becoming lighter now, and as the darkness of a long and difficult winter melts into Spring, the visceral reminder of the inevitability of change all around brings equal measure of relief and loss. Moving forward means accepting (no matter how reluctantly) the reality that some people and experiences exist in a vacuum and cannot be extracted from one another. But we can also draw comfort from the fact that the empty space in our lives will be filled with new people, new experiences. It will look different, but we can honor those difficult goodbyes while knowing that there will always be more out there waiting for us.

Snow melting into the stream.

Feeling With No Expectation

What I've been focusing on lately is making space for feelings with no expectation or agenda. Even in certain spiritual communities and teachings there is the message that certain feelings are lesser, that you’re doing something wrong if we're not in an eternal vibration of "love and light". Maybe you just need to meditate more to clear that negative energy. Focus on your visualization. 
Ironically, excluding everything but positivity is extremely negative and will put you on the express lane to spiritual bypassment. 
On top of being influenced by those dismissive ideas, I went through a long orthorexic period where I obsessed over diet and wellness. While those can be enormously helpful, they don’t work for what I was trying to use them for, which was to ward off the painful feelings and emotions that are natural elements of life. 
I go through ups and downs, especially feeling housebound in quarantine. Some days I feel very on purpose, relaxed and lit up. Others I feel more weighted. Fear and loneliness come up. 
I spend time with feelings now not as a means to an end, secretly hoping that doing so will make the difficult ones go away, but letting them wash over me for as long as they need to. This can be really scary when it’s something like depression, because with acknowledgement comes the fear that it might never end. And while I have experienced extended and very deep periods of depression in life, they have never lasted forever. This creates safety to open up to more and more. We’ve had a full bodied experience of the nature of impermanence, rather than just understanding the concept mentally.

Overriding the Need to Do More

When I made the decision to cancel a client session yesterday because I was feeling under the weather, my first reaction was frustration towards my body. I slept 9 hours and the “only thing I’d done” was go to the dentist. You shouldn’t really be tired, said a familiar voice. You’re wrong for feeling this way. 
Upon closer inspection there is a whole list of reasons why I could be feeling tired. It was the first day of my period so my hormones are at their lowest. It was an emotionally intense weekend (even more so than usual). I didn’t sleep well for two nights as a result. We’re all still experiencing covid. Etc, etc. 
Doing less instead of more can bring up a lot of fear. It’s an act of rebellion against a society that has raised us to do the exact opposite. Feelings have more room to surface. You look at the people around you and the lizard mind shouts “What are you doing? You should be moving FASTER! You’ll fall behind all the other people and get nowhere in life!” 
We may feel initially frustrated and unworthy because we’re “doing so much less” than others. Yet I am reminded repeatedly to prioritize relaxation above all else, because when I am most in alignment with my body is without exception when life works best. Money flows without effort. Things that otherwise would have been a big deal become very doable.
Not everyone has the luxury of flowing with their body’s needs 24/7. There are work schedules, children, other life commitments. However, many of us fill up our valuable time automatically because we’re taught that it’s a marker of our self-worth. It’s a learned behavior, and there is so much that we can do (or rather, not do) once we begin to question the “should” and “need to” statements in our head, to let them unravel.