Dear Cheesemuffin,
Oh wow, do I love cheese. I love Brie cheese, which I can slather on a cracker or a piece of bread. Not just any cracker or piece of bread, though. I prefer those rectangular crackers, multigrain. Or a baguette. I just cannot, on any day, deny the power and beauty and perfectness of a French baguette.
I woke up this morning thinking about groundlessness, about grounding. About this moment I had with a friend years ago after so much transition in my life, when we sat across from each other at an Indian restaurant and I told her about how desperately I wanted grounding, and she shared with me that she thought my lesson was to find the ground within me.
I did not like that lesson. I did not want that journey. I wanted someone to hand me the ground. I wanted someone to hand me a nice pair of shoes, and a ladder so I could climb up and escape all the difficulty of my life. Maybe I’d sit on the roof deck and drink cocktails and eat crackers and cheese, and never have to engage another day with that terrible turning in my stomach that told me I was a worthless piece of shit. The knots of unknowingness about where my life was going, who I was going to become now that everything had been stripped from me.
So much in this life, I recognize, is about belief. And those beliefs get ingrained in us from a very young age. They are not only taught to us with words, and with impressions and senses, but also from the culture around us, from television and media. The air is soaked with them, soaked with messages which we absorb. It is extremely difficult to unpack the energetic transmissions that have taken up space in our bodies, minds, and souls and uncover our secret beliefs, and then—this most important part—form new ones. So your work now is to decide what is true, and look at your life in an alternate way, and recognize that the way you were taught, and how you are acting or behaving, might be rooted in some unconscious understanding that was not true understanding. It was an illusion, a fabrication.
All of this is to say that poisonous beliefs are hard to pull up at the root, because they are so nefarious we don’t often recognize they are even there. They are manipulative. They are ugly, and while we know them to be wrong in a conceptual, intellectual way, changing them in the root of us, where they are stored, is hard. It takes practice and bravery. Let me tell you, however, that this work is so worth it. So find some people who are willing to undergo it with you, or support you in the process. Let anyone who tries to force you to hang on to the old versions, the old concepts, the problematic operating system that keeps you in a state of suffering, to fall away from your life.
I meet people sometimes who believe themselves to be so broken that they turn away from anything good that comes their way. They witness good things for others, and they know how to love. But their pain and suffering and belief in brokenness is so rooted inside them, that they cannot acknowledge the potential in their own lives to live outside of that pain and suffering and brokenness. They have given themselves a life sentence, have placed themselves in prison. And unfortunately, they can’t muster up the anger-fire-flower-power to create real and lasting change in their lives. You know why, sweetcheeks? They don’t believe they deserve it.
I want to tell you that I love you, and that you always deserve happiness. It is your birthright! It is your destiny! You just have to step into those uncharted waters, those confusing, liminal spaces where it is dark. You have to walk through this new kind of cave, with your candle raised high, with the faith that what I say, and what others say about this, is true. If others found their way through these breakthroughs, and changed their lives for the better, you can, too. And you will, if you decide today to muster up the courage.
You are not, and will never be perfect, and you are never expected to be, by the people who really matter in life. And this truth means that you are perfect, too, by simply being you.
You are, and will always be, human. So get as goddamn human as you can, darling. Be the most human fucking thing that ever walked this earth.
That’s when you radiate. That’s when you’re beautiful.
Hugs. Hold fast to love, and truth, and knowing (and curiosity)—
MotherJana