To love oneself is to love Being rather than to love Doing. To love Being is to appreciate the interconnections, the co-creations, the energetic vibrations of the present moment. To love Doing is to live for the future, using the resources of the present moment. Self-love is not about loving my accomplishments, it's about loving my experience of being alive, to love Being me rather than to love Doing my life. As I excavate and repurpose my tendencies toward
productivity and
perfectionism I am working to alter specific behaviors, as well as to re-examine my values. I will continue to value being thoughtful about my time and giving my full attention to projects, which are particular aspects of productivity and perfectionism. I am simultaneously letting go of other aspects of productivity and perfectionism like creating my own stress and never being satisfied with anything. This is still change on the level of Doing, however. While these improvements seem to be helping me rewire my brain, I have placed too strong an emphasis on this level of change, which does not reach certain root issues. I have also been doing parallel work on the level of Being by paying greater attention to my breath, working on my mind-body communication, and developing a mindfulness practice. While all of these practices have helped, I am still strongly dominated by my Doing side, including focusing more attention on Doing my 90 day brain rewiring rather than living the process. Now that I am almost at the 2/3 mark of this rewiring process, it is time to shift my focus to concentrate more on the level of Being. Unfortunately, I barely even know what that means I'm so disconnected from it. What would it take for me to love Being without Doing? I think it is going to be a long and scenic journey to discover the answer.
Currently on this journey I am trying to crack the code on how to center Being while existing within late stage Capitalism as a person with 2 children who needs a fair amount of external resources to survive. I know it is possible, because I can feel the calling, but the road is very daunting.
ReplyDeleteAnd, beyond the external pressures of Capitalism, there is the internal pressure of "earning" my worth through Doing. This has definitely shifted significantly over these 10 years, but vestiges of it are very much alive in me. My fear of "non-productive" time and the constant feeling that I'm not Doing enough persists to this day. My bar has gone way down on what "enough" is, but it is still more than I can realistically accomplish consistently, especially given the stormy weather of my emotional world and the many pulls on my time that come with parenting littles.
And even these caveats feel like part of the same erroneous thinking. My internal orientation still requires legitimized excuses for not getting "enough" done, rather than a radical shift toward sustainability that is my birth right. These days I can sometimes center that sustainability piece - certainly more so than I could 10 years ago - but it can still be hard to hold on to at times.