How do we identify what home means for us... and why does it matter that we should?
👋 Welcome to humanBeing. Where we gather to practice being more skillfully, creatively human together — not toward some impossible ideal of perfection — but toward greater authentic connection.
"I see you," he says, smiling knowingly, "You're just like me when I was your age..." He then proceeds to list out a number of traits about my personality — some of which feel resonant, many of which do not. A part of me feels keenly aware he's merely describing himself, not me.
But somehow, I seem to be an easy canvas for him to paint upon — the brushstrokes of his own dreams, ambitions, and regrets. Like wanting to create one of those digital avatars of oneself and then living — Siims-like — aspects of one's life over again... but through me.
He wants to take me under his wing, show me the ropes, help shape me into — well — I suppose into a version of himself, but how he could have been if he'd had him-as-he-is-now to show him the way.
👆 This is one of many nearly identical moments I've had throughout my life with different would-be mentors:
They often seem far more interested in nurturing the version of themselves they projected onto me, rather than showing interest in learning about me — helping me to learn about me: my nature, my resonances and dissonances — and then supporting me to take that self-knowledge and nurture it into my fullest manifestation in this world.
The trouble was — because I hadn't had that latter kind of mentorship — for the longest time I simply didn't know enough about who I truly was to differentiate it from who these self-referencing mentors saw me to be.
In my last piece on The Locus of Control, I wrote about how to reinforce a sense of internal motivation...
Today I'm going to write about how we can reinforce and build up a strong home inside of ourselves — a sense of self from which we can feel confident moving out in to the world, knowing at all times we have a safe & nourishing place deep inside of us to help us discern what feels right for us — what feels to us like our way — rather than feeling jerked around by outside forces who, for their own reasons, wish to impose upon us a strong sense of their perceptions of who we might be and what they believe we ought to do.
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❓ Why this? Why Now?
An Empty Vessel
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❣️ The Importance of Positioning Myself in My Work
In so many ways I have been one of the luckiest ones: as a child, my parents took really good care of me — loving me so dearly while teaching me to be a loving and caring person, in turn.
But something I was not able to learn growing up was how to establish a strong sense of myself — of how to discern, as I moved through the world, what was truly aligned for me, versus what might be right for others but simply wasn't my way.
And so I found myself turning to the outside world to try and find answers and guidance — media, mentors, prevailing Overcultural* ideologies, etc. — as a means of trying to cobble together for myself who and how I was supposed to be.
And it turns out the world had a lot to say on this subject — much of which was highly detrimental to my health, wholeness, and wellbeing.
This led to many moments of my life akin to that terrifying plot point in the Pinnochio storyline where the nefariously dandified Fox and listlessly hiccuping Cat lure Pinocchio into joining the puppet show and heading to Pleasure Island... offering him belonging, acclaim, and pleasure at the cost of his liberty, safety, and sense of self.
When we are without a sense of home inside of us, it is far easier for those with less than our best intentions at heart to offer up substitutes... The equivalent of that seemingly universal law of nature — an empty space tends to be filled...
If we're not filling ourselves up intentionally, we may find that what does fill us up... isn't always — well — us! The "us" that truly aligns with our highest good in this world: our sense of purpose and wellbeing, the specific and unique ways we are meant to contribute to the healing and greater wholeness of this pained world.
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🤔 What about you?
What Flexibility Means
And what it doesn't...
"Anyone who can be home anywhere really has no home at all." - Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz
During my acting training, I remember very distinctly being told during a masterclass by a very successful actor that their number one tip for success was...
"Be the actor who doesn't need anything... be easy going and adaptable. The more inflexible you are, the less hirable you'll be. Until you're a star, of course: then you get to do whatever you want."
I find this to be such a perfect encapsulation of the hierarchical and extractive systems so many of us are conditioned to maneuver our way through in order to achieve success:
Your job is to be exploited until — if you're some perfect combination of really strategic, lucky, skilled, and privileged — you'll get to be the one doing the exploiting.
Now... this isn't to denigrate the incredible power of flexibility.
But let's be clear about the differences here!
To be flexible requires a central point: somewhere from which to flex... without this, you're not so much flexible as insubstantial— manipulatable. Much like a puppet or an artist's dummy: able to be easily shaped and positioned to meet the needs of those with more power.
So this, then, becomes our question:
How can we cultivate flexibility, without sacrificing substantiality — rootedness.
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🧘🏾 Time for a quick Body Break!
False Self
"The opposite of home is not distance, but forgetfulness" - Elie Wiesel
There are many writings — both psychological and spiritual — on the idea of what's often referred to as a "false self."
As a concept it was brought into Western Psychology by D.W. Winnicott, but even he acknowledges that (like most powerful concepts about personhood that have trickled through to our awareness in these hyper-individualized, post-colonial times) it has ancient roots in many non-Western traditions, philosophies, and ways of being.
In a fascinating book on the wisdom tradition known as the Enneagram — which itself has a storied and complex origin story spanning multiple continents and many far more ancient traditions before it — Beatrice Chestnut offers that the personality can be understood as
"...a "false self," necessary up to a point to interact safely in the world, but also the means by which we lose touch with our "true self" —which gets buried in the background as our "false self" comes to the forefront to deal with life" - The Complete Enneagram
As with most of the elements of self we examine here as a part of humanBeing, what I find important about examining how this concept of the false self can work within us is that it helps to remind us of its initial function:
If we learn — usually early on — that it's important to subjugate our true selves — our inner wishes, needs, and desires — in order to gain eventual access to power and privilege, to garner belonging and care, then it's a pretty good adaptive mechanism for us to simply forget about those needs and desires altogether.
Okay... But so then, what's the problem? If our false self can garner us greater success and belonging in this current culture, and we figure out how to bury our true self so it doesn't bother us... Great! ...Right?
Well, coming back to a theme here in humanBeing land, the issue seems to be fractal*:
What is true on the individual level is often true on the global level — and visa versa.
(👆A concept I was first introduced to by the incredible writer, facilitator, teacher, and nonviolent activist Kazu Haga)
On the individual level...
The lack of connection to authentic self has incredibly damaging ramifications. In her incredible book on addiction as a current societal-wide epidemic, Anna Lembke says that
When our lived experience diverges from our projected image, we are prone to feel detached and unreal, as fake as the false images we’ve created. Psychiatrists call this feeling derealization and depersonalization. It’s a terrifying feeling, which commonly contributes to thoughts of suicide. After all, if we don’t feel real, ending our lives feels inconsequential. The antidote to the false self is the authentic self. Radical honesty is a way to get there. It tethers us to our existence and makes us feel real in the world. - Dopamine Nation
But this brings us back to the difference between flexibility and infinite adaptability or insubstantiality from earlier:
How can we be radically honest with others if we don't know what's really true for ourselves to begin with?
How can we be honest about how far we can stretch if we don't know where we're standing?
I think it's a really important distinction to make: While we don't wish to be rigid — immovable and unable to adapt — to seek flexibility requires us first to feel a sense of ground under our feet.
We have to know where our home is in order to determine how far from it we can truly, safely roam.
On the Global Level...
Moving up a fractal layer to the ways in which this lack of connection to self and each other has destructive impact on the world as a whole:
In the book Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein speaks to the ecology of interdependence. Part of being disconnected from ourselves is being disconnected from the felt sense of our connection to each other — rather than a mere intellectual understanding:
In ecology, this is the principle of interdependence: that all beings depend for their survival on the web of other beings that surrounds them, ultimately extending out to encompass the entire planet. The extinction of any species diminishes our own wholeness, our own health, our own selves; something of our very being is lost.
By separating us from our true, authentic self, the False Self separates us from this great interconnected web of belonging.
In Choosing Earth, Duane Elgin speaks poetically and passionately to the impact of this disconnection, as well as the power inherent in the act of reconnecting:
A soul that is awake is entangled with the living world — its beauty, allure, and wonder, its sorrows, rips, and tears. Given the state of the world and our soulful lives, we must pause and ask, “What is the condition of our souls?” From all observable accounts, the prevailing condition is desperate, empty, ravenous, impoverished, and grief-stricken.
For myself — outside of any spiritual belief system — reading Elgin, I begin to understand the idea of the false self as a depersonalized experience of performative shape shifting and hollow disconnection. As opposed to Elgin's awakened spirit: a direct, personal experience of Interconnection.
And from this perspective, it becomes not only incumbent upon me to reconnect to my true, authentic self — my own awakened soul — for the sake of my own wellbeing and healing, but for the sake of this world as a whole and every living being within it.
This, to me, is why this question of coming home is so fundamentally crucial.
In my experience, coming home to my authentic self is necessary to come home to my greater community. Which is to say: everyone and everything– our inherent and indivisible interdependence.
Without this, how can I ever hope to care for and step into active engagement with the healing needed to get through this time of escalating crisis we find ourselves living within?
So what can we do?
How can we go about deepening or even discovering what home really looks like for us? How do we find our sense of inner home from which we can move through the world, to which we can return when unsure about what is authentically true for us, versus what we take on in order to garner approval and opportunity from the Overculture as it currently exists?
❗️ Practice...
I'm going to be launching the humanBeing Community Circle — which will include an interactive, imaginal, embodied, creative Practice specifically designed to explore this theme — very soon! If you'd like me to let you know when that's available, make sure you've signed up with your email at the bottom of the page! I can't wait to see you there!
One Final Thought
I want to acknowledge that, as with all of these huge topics, there's so much more to say that I haven't touched on here: especially as it relates to the loss of culture and heritage as a part of the legacy of colonialism.
Returning to Choosing Earth for a moment, Duane Elgin highlights the connective, transformative role of traditional initiation and ritual, saying that:
The deep work of traditional initiations was meant to dislodge an old identity. The process was designed to produce enough intensity and heat to cook the soul and prepare initiates to take their place in the care and maintenance of the commons. It was never about the individual. It was not about self-improvement or making them into someone better. No. Initiation was an act of sacrifice on behalf of the greater community into which the initiate was brought and to which he or she now holds allegiance. They were being readied to step into their role of maintaining the vitality and well-being of the village, the clan, the watershed, the ancestors, and the continuum of generations to come.
For those of us of European heritage, or for anyone interested in examining the loss of connection to culture and ritual and heritage — huge social components that used to help cultivate within us our sense of home and greater connectedness — I want to share a specific organization called White Awake which offers online courses (with a commitment to accessibility no matter what your financial circumstances) designed to help us examine this and other ramifications of colonial cultural.
I will also be writing more about this in the future, but wanted to mention it here as a really crucial piece of the puzzle along the road toward reconnection.
🕐 Time For Your Wisdom! 🦉
The part I'm most excited about!!!
My goal in creating these pieces is to cultivate community around the ideologies and practices that have contributed to deep healing and greater wholeness in my life. To begin nurturing the seed of what I hope to grow – together with you and the rest of my community – into a lifelong place of creative engagement around what it means to be more skillfully human – not toward some impossible perfection, not toward some hyper-productive, hyper-individualist self-improvement addicted never-ending frenzy of impossible ideals to measure up to...
But quite simply toward greater authentic connection
With ourselves
With each other
And with the broader living community here on this awe-inspiring planet.
So...
Sign up below to engage with the Practice as soon as it's released!
And be a part of shaping this online community from the beginning, by contributing the wisdom of your lived experience so we can grow this digital meeting space to be a place of nurturance, insight, and healing!
Questions for Pondering
And sharing below, if you feel called!
❓ What are you noticing as you finish reading this piece?
❓ Did you write anything down or sit with the question I asked after sharing my story earlier? Has your understanding of over-flexibility — a lack of a sense of self — or returning home to your center, changed at all since reading this Piece?
❓ How does this concept of False Self resonate with you? What might not resonate with you!
❓ Is there anything these ideas help you better understand about your own life and experience? Did you have any "Aha" moments as you read thru?
❓ What doesn't get addressed in these ideas that feels important to you not to leave out of this discussion?
I can't express how excited I am to engage more with you!
So until then...
From here
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Thru here
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To there
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~ Sending so much care! ~
📝 N o t e s
🔼 Overculture. The mainstream, dominant norms from which we unconsciously derive many of our beliefs and standards of behavior. Coined by Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
🔼 Fractal. Existing in distinct yet recognizable forms on the individual, communal, and societal levels. A concept I was first introduced to by the incredible writer, facilitator, teacher, and nonviolent activist Kazu Haga.
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