Mary O’Malley – If you look closely at Life, you will see that everything flows. Water flows, light and sound waves flow, winter flows into spring as day flows into night. Your blood flows through over 100,000 miles of arteries, veins and capillaries while nerve impulses move throughout your body at seemingly close to the speed of light. You lived connected to this flow when you were very young, but slowly you began to tighten your body and hold your breath. Most people’s lives have become like a kinked garden hose – sometimes the water flows freely (like when you first fall in love), but most of the time there is at least one if not multiple kinks in your ‘garden hose of Life.’
It is usually in your reaction to the big challenges in your life (including a difficult boss, a failing marriage, pain, illness, loss and death) where you can see how you learned to ‘kink’ your energy. These kinks show up because you took on certain beliefs when you were young. This conditioning got frozen inside of you, and it has kept you ‘holding on’ most of the time.
Life longs to flow through you in an ease-filled way, but your conditioning keeps on taking over. In order to unhook from your conditioning, you need to see it in operation and be with it rather than falling into it or turning away (often through compulsions). It is in the challenges of your life that it is the easiest to see your particular brand of tightening (conditioning). The more you see your conditioned self in operation without judging it, the easier it becomes to relax your kinks and open into the creative adventure that is Life.
A friend of mine recently shared an experience that gave her the opportunity to unkink her hose in a big way. Soon after she began dating a man, he visited her with his two teenage children. As they were sitting around the table having a meal together, my friend noticed that her body was tightening and she suddenly felt very uncomfortable. She could see that a part of her was feeling self-judgment, but she didn’t have the space to explore it at that time. As she went to bed that night, she became curious about what she was experiencing. She remembered the same tight feeling in her body when she was young. Her father was very judgmental of her, and his remarks and criticisms oftentimes occurred while eating at the dinner table. He would say things like, “You don’t dress appropriately. You don’t hold your utensils the right way. Your grades are not as good as they should be.” Because we are so vulnerable to our parents’ opinions of us, she bought into the belief that she was not doing life right and she was not okay. And she was at the mercy of her storyteller when it said things like, “I am less than. I am stupid. I am not smart. I can’t do anything right. I am not enough.”
The way I see it, Life has her back in a familiar situation that is bringing up all of the ‘stuff’ that she had buried inside so long ago because it was too painful to bear when she was a child. This is a big kink in her hose and Life is giving her the opportunity to see and be with this deep pain rather than staying in that ‘not enough’ place. The day after the dinner, she called me and we explored in depth what was asking to be seen inside of her. She not only saw the part of her that felt less than, she also saw the part that felt she had to ‘win’ by being different than who she is. I pointed out that this is very typical of the conditioned, struggling self and I also reminded her that true winning is seeing and setting free the conditioned belief of ‘less than’ that she took on when she was young.
The second time my friend had dinner with the three of them, she felt the tightening in her body. But this time, it was different. Rather than getting caught in the conditioned thoughts that were fueling the tightness, she acknowledged the tightening and then said to the one who thinks she is not enough, “I see you. It is okay that you are here. I’m here with you now and you are perfect just the way you are.” She took a few deep breaths and made the conscious decision not to engage in the conversation with resentment or judgment, but rather with kindness and compassion. She told me, “Mary, I am beginning to enjoy spending time with these two children and their father around the dinner table. It is such a joyful thing to see and be with my deep wound of not being enough. This is setting me free to be myself!”
A big part of Awakening is learning how to relax when the big challenges come (and they always do) so your ‘garden hose of Life’ only gets kinked for a short period of time or perhaps not at all. As you learn to bring your awareness to what is going on inside of you and then see and be with what you are experiencing, what has been tightly held opens up, so you can enjoy the peace and ease that you deeply long for.
Mary O’Malley is a contributing writer for Shift Frequency
SF Source Awakening Jan 2016
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