Leaping past the indulgence of self-empowerment.
In a lively call with my 85 year old grandmother this week we were chatting about the need to rest when you need to rest, honouring that your body is always speaking to you, but how its also important to uphold your commitments.
Honouring the self, whilst upholding the integrity of the Whole.
Of course, it didn’t sound as new earthy as this.
The context was more about how she had a lunch appointment with her friends at a local Tavern and she didn’t really want to go, but she was going to go anyway. She had pre-paid for it after all.
She dropped the pearler:
“We ought to think a little less of ourselves, and I think we’d all be much happier”.
I told her I’d have to claim that one and write about it in my publication.
I’m not sure if she heard that part. But here we are.
This post isn’t going to go where you think it is.
My 85 year old grandmother, my children’s great grandmother, my mother’s mother. The woman who unshakeably sits down with a glass of best-value red at 4pm every day to watch The Bold and the Beautiful on the tele (if she knows she’ll be out, she’ll record it for later). Also the woman, who goes to the Buddhist centre on Saturdays to meditate (even though sitting cross legged is not an option and she finds the monk “funny looking”).
God bless her.
Seriously. I love my grandmother.
I used to think we lived in different realms.
That we were “just from different times” and we would never be on the same page.
The kind of self-importance we got in the maturing naivety of our 20’s (and before children). Like we think “we know”. We are. The paradoxical superiority and separation of our wokeness.
Now, it’s simply acceptance. Equanimity.
Which has ultimately lead to appreciation. Reverence.
The whole. Oneness.
My oldest living ancestor. The Matriarch. The woman who’s shoulders my mother stands on, and whom I stand on. And the woman who stood on the shoulders of all the matriarchs before her.
I was blessed that her own mother (my great grandmother) was actually my best friend when I was growing up. These relationships are the weaving of life within me.
And, these women carry immense wisdom. Just by being in the presence of our ancestors - our mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers - with the view of love, acceptance and reverence we can learn more about ourselves and the wholeness and oneness of the Universe than any kind of deep healing workshop.
I feel this is leading into another post… about the ultimate Divine Mother. The Truth of Family.
That true beauty isn’t always what’s peaceful.
It’s allowing truth to simply be and, in turn, seeing the beauty and peace held in it.
I believe our soul’s choose our family before we come. They are the most important part of our healing, our liberation and our global evolution. Could I go as far to say, they are the only important part of soul’s journey? As they hold the blueprint your soul came here with. That you inherited this lifetime.
Oh dear, I’m going down a rabbit hole here.
One I haven’t thought out coherently. That might trigger all sorts of things and that I haven’t an entire post of reasoning behind for someone else’s digestion. We know the wounds of family run the deepest. Where we meet the most resistance.
I’ll leave it at this. Keeping in your mind that truth is fluid, not rigid.
* * *
Now to circle back.
“We ought to think a little less of ourselves, and I think we’d all be much happier”.
What my grandmother said.
I’m in the midst of reading a book “The First Astronomers: How Indigenous Elders Read the Stars”, but Duane Hamacher and the Elders.
I’m still in the context part of the book: “Justifying” why Indigenous wisdom should be recognised as science (which to me, needs no justification), and how their entire culture and being is woven around this science and wisdom, into narratives and stories, passed down through orality.
There was a part of it that really struck a chord for me, and related to what my grandmother (my very own Elder) said.
That in Western culture we centre our “Self” and “Here” at the centre.
In the Australian Aboriginal culture, and indeed many other Indigenous cultures around the world, the “whole” is the centre, and we are but a feature of it.
One of my favourite indigenous proverbs, from Red Indian Chief Seattle:
“Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely but a strand in the web. What man does the web, he does to himself”.
Let me go further. I’m going to paraphrase from the book based on how I understood it:
One of the most obvious ways to convey this concept is through the concept of directionality. For example, I am sitting here right now with with the window open to my right, a wardrobe in front of me, and a shelf to my left. I am at the centre. The things I witness are around me.
In Indigenous culture, the window would be in the East, the wardrobe in the North, and the shelf in the West.
In Warlipi culture:
The North = Law
South = Ceremony
West = Language
East = Skin.
The intersection of these is “Country” (your belonging, your place, the land and culture of which you are part of in that moment in time). This the western understanding of “here”.
Instead of shouting “move over, move over”, they would shout “move East, move East”.
An ever-present knowing of exactly where you are in relationship to the Whole.
If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t be able to “move over / East”. You would be lost. Not just lost physically, but lost in your sense of self and place and belonging.
Mind-opening, right?
The Whole, in Indigenous centre, is not centred around you.
“We ought to think a little less of ourselves, and I think we’d all be much happier”.
My grandmother is a woman of her word. If she says she’ll be there, she’ll be there.
She’ll be there not because she’s a self-sacrificing martyr, who puts everyone else’s needs before her own, and then ends up feeling bitter because of it. Bets are you have someone in your family constellation like that. It’s a common wound of “the mother” archetype.
No, my grandmother will be there because she understands that to be complete in herself, she must be complete in the Whole.
I don’t think this is how she would describe it.
She would say it a little more simply. “I don’t really feel like going out today, but I have said that I would. I know that I’ll feel happier when I’m with my friends and once I get out, and I know that it’ll be good for them too.”
She is considerate and she has integrity and she is abundant with her energy.
Her powerful life-force at 85 is a testament of that.
She lives life like the the blessed ocean swim, that can feel too cold from the shore, but it always worth getting in for.
* * *
In my circles, my peers and I are all pretty good at “honouring ourselves”. Tuning into the subtleties of how we are feeling. How our energy feels - high or low, inward or outward. Honouring our emotional waves. The seasons, the moon cycles, feminine cycles. Learning to have and honour our energetic boundaries.
We are happy to cancel appointments and reschedule or just trust and let things flow for when it feels “aligned”, without “pushing through” things that don’t feel “right”.
But I also feel that sometimes this can slip slightly over to the self-indulgent side.
It’s a fine line.
We can we get swept up in ourselves, our own experience, that we can neglect to remember our role in the Whole.
I know we have a huge amount of unwinding, detoxing, uncurling and rest required from the grips of a life drilled into obligation, self-sacrifice, deep disconnection from the natural rhythms. I know that most of our modern lives (and the systems of employment, etc, that we entertain) are not sustainable to live in a way where we can truly balance the needs of the Self and the Whole.
I know it intimately.
We do not live like our Indigenous Elders did.
We have had to walk a different path to get here.
Reclaiming the Self has been an important part of our evolution.
Reclaiming the need to rest and honour where one is at, and say no to others, commitments and opportunities because we’ve tipped out of balance has been an important part of the journey to get here.
I know many of you reading this, might even look up to this state of being, salivating, because you’re still so far away and so stuck in a life that feels beyond your own choosing.
Most of us exist in a world where the falsely-constructed Self, the ego, has been at the centre.
Not just our own centre, but the centre of our entire social and economic systems.
But today I am reflecting on what it would look like if we started to realise that, beyond all of that, transcending all of that, we are not really as important as we think we are.
That if we accelerated (non-linearly) past the this “self-empowerment” phase, and leapt right into the phase of true Oneness.
Perhaps, this is when we’ll be able to embody the ultimate expression of living in service.
It’s not what we do, in service, but who we are, in service.
Where the Self and the Whole, are honoured as the same.
Where we think a little less of ourselves and we are all much happier.
Thanks Nan, for the inspiration for this one xx