I was exploring, with some women I know, about the different ways we had each chosen to cope with our "outsider" status when we were in our early days of high school:
One had dealt with being "outsider" by conceding and despairingly resigning herself to the feeling of being "less than."
The other had figured out ways to compete with and prove that she was as good as or better than any of the "in-girls."
My own resolution had been deciding that the "belongers" and "belonging" itself were dumb; that "belonging" was "less than" and that being different, being "outsider" was the superior way to be.
For most of my “grown-up” life, as I've tried to do what felt real and right-for-me, I've made choices that were “over the edge” of convention: Not birthing or raising children. Having an open marriage. Not going for post-doctoral training in psychotherapy before I started practicing. Dropping out of a “hi-rise, doorman, married, “professional “ life-in-the-fast-lane. Living in a van on the road by myself for two years, doing nothing more than working on my tan. Expanding and exploring my conception of my own sexuality. Choosing to live voluptuously in a primary relationship with myself. Choosing to reinvent how and what I do when I work as a therapist/coach with people. Choosing to live very simply, to “do” as little as possible as I live in recovery-from-overachieving. Choosing to celebrate rest and moving only as fast as the slowest part of me feels safe to go.
Until my mid-forties (I'm now 64), I neither noticed nor cared about how anyone else saw or judged my choices. Still, I can now see quite clearly how I was always secretly involved in looking down my nose at the more conventional-seeming choices made by others around me.
My strongest judgments were focused (albeit secretly) around people's valuing partnered relationship, busyness and outward directed lives as opposed to more solitary, unscheduled, inward, contemplative lives. And, to a lesser extent, I (still secretly) judged people for needing or choosing formal teachers and systems for the contemplative life rather than relying on their own inner guidance.
Gradually, I came to consider that both my judging of other peoples choices and my ideas of my own “superiority” were reflections of being less than wholly comfortable with the acceptability of my own choices to me. As I explored this idea, I began to see that my choices were only acceptable to me when I could see them as superior to, or “more healthy” than other possible choices. If they might be coming from my wounded or as yet unhealed places, it was problematic for me.
As I went deeper still with the exploration, I discovered that it was impossible to figure out to what extent my choices were made from the limitations of my damage and woundedness as opposed to being made from my wholeness. All I could uncover about them with any certainty was that they seemed to be the best choices I could make for myself in the moments that I made them. They addressed and were in harmony with my own needs, leanings and capacities-available-in-the-moment.
Actually, that's what made them right-for-me. As I could accept and consciously allow this to be so, I could come lovingly, compassionately and unconditionally to embrace all of “who” I might be at any moment in my unfolding. I could see my choices as “the most-right-for-me-in-this-moment.” I could give up both the trumped-up vision of my “superiority,” and the secret judging of others that made them ”ultimately” wrong in order to make myself “ultimately“ right.
As we come to let it be okay with us that we each can make only choices that are right for us in the moment, we can begin to let go of the idea that there are choices that are “absolutely” right for everyone-including ourselves. As we become more generous and spacious with ourselves, we can better allow that differences just are. We become better able to give up the belief that differences are directional: good/bad, more than/less than, important/insignificant, etc.
Let yourself notice whenever you are openly, or secretly, judging or feeling superior to anyone else around some difference in your ways. See if you can find more space for it to be okay just to be you where and how you are in the moment. And, consider not judging your judging!
Consider being really loving with yourself just exactly where and how you are.
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
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