The dynamic tension between self-acceptance and self-advancement or -improvement can be experienced alternately as a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because, without it, the evolution of consciousness would stall as we rested in the secure feeling of being content with the world as it is, including the separate sense self that arises within it. When we surrender to the spiral of actualization, this contentedness is periodically driven away by the striving to expand. This striving is often felt as a tension that pushes the self to move beyond current perceived limitations. Ideally, this tension is held lightly as we both accept our current being as stage-appropriate and allow the desire to grow to emerge unhindered. Sometimes - when the energy of Eros pushes to the pendulous extreme - we temporarily lose our footing and it seems like a curse. Because in those moments, we are not good enough, not whole enough, and feelings of disappointment and anguish tighten like a noose around our necks. Thankfully, the process of unfolding cycles between the extremes.

Today, the self-imposed noose is loose. The low-level anguish is less present.

I had a breakthrough in therapy yesterday that built on the growing awareness over the last couple of months that this striving - this not-enough - has been dominating my world. Not only have I been struggling to integrate all that I have learned in the last two and a half years, a profoundly shifting physicality - a healing of trauma and emergence of a more healthy gross form - has garnered most of my attention, and rightly so. Nonetheless, a desire to learn more, know more, write more and DO more has been my constant companion. And I fall short of the ideal that has infected my consciousness.  When I moved beyond the worldviews of my primary group of peers - most of those who I see face-to-face in my life right now - and into a new peer group that I engage with primarily online, it became all too easy to project greatness onto people when the only exposure has been via polished web-based publication. I moved from a world in which I felt intelligent and together into one in which inadequacy was fueled by the feeling that I MUST learn more so that I can contribute to the conversations that I simply witness at this point. Conversations that are pushing the boundaries of consciousness and draw me in with a fierceness and passion that make all previous passions pale in comparison.

I am remembering (or truly learning and experiencing?) that the cyclic emergence of a seemingly safe haven is necessary for the sustenance of the self and the incorporation of newer (higher) levels of understanding. Periods of resting in the gloriousness of who we are today strengthens our resolve and banks energy for the next level of the developmental spiral that ascends towards our ever-evolving highest potentials (dynamic emergence rather than destiny).

This morning - while engaged in the creatureliness of shitting - I read something that resonated so strongly that it brought me to this blog post. I wanted to share this experience because I know enough now to realize that if all of this is arising in my world, it is arising in the world of US. Someone else is experiencing similar phenomena right now. Or will be experiencing it soon. And you never know when you'll read something that catalyzes a shift.

So, from the July 2008 issue of Shambala Sun, I give you this passage, excerpted from the article Raja Hatha: Yoga's Path to Liberation by Chip Hartranft:

"If meditation is to move from doing to being, the other intention one must keep in mind is softening. Again and again, the yogi unclenches, relaxes his psychosomatic grip on the moment, and allows events to be just as they are. Success is proportionate to one's willingness to let each new impulse to control or improve simply appear, bloom, and fade. As a result, it becomes ever clearer that each bodily contraction was conditioned by a mental contraction, arising from desire, aversion, or simply holding a self-image in mind" (p 49; emphasis mine).

"The yogi realizes how much of mental life has been engaged in reconnoitering for stimulation and gratification, and how attaining them never produces anything like lasting happiness. This perceptual re-education, called vairagya, or "non-reacting," involves entrusting oneself to one new experience after another. As each fresh agitation or stab of resistance is recognized and permitted to settle, one unexpectedly notices that familiar triggers of disturbance no longer have any effect. A profound equanimity has quietly developed" (p 50).

I want to elaborate on this a bit, though. As this new way of being-in-the-world starts to emerge, awareness flits in and out of consciousness. A complicated set of circumstances are present in each moment; sometimes we notice that familiar triggers are not having the same effect, and sometimes we realize after the fact that we were completely consumed by patterned existence - triggers hook you and you are back to being-of-the-world (trying out concepts coined by Sartre).

But I want to end with a focus on softening: Let's do our best, as the dynamic between acceptance and emergence oscillates, to remind ourselves that we are exactly as we need to be in this moment. Stop, breathe, rest.