Life is beautiful. It can also be traumatizing. And everything in between.

And, in my opinion, any modality which teaches us to turn away from some parts of our lived experience in favor of others can only increase a sense of separation within.

Disconnection within manifests as disconnection we perpetuate in our lives and our world. This is the subject of today’s message.

Reframing

Audio recording above

Everything is not happening to you.

Everything is not happening for you. 

There are some people who will want to help support you in shifting your mindset from one of what some refer to as a victim consciousness — “everything is happening to me” — into what seems like a consciousness of greater agency — “everything is happening for me”. 

How amazing if I perceive everything that happens in the world — no matter how it affects me, no matter how it affects people I care about — as though it's happening, on some level, for me and for my benefit?

The challenge is that interpreting happenings in the world that way can serve to bypass the reality of our experience: one in which what is happening in our midst can be experienced as painful, as hard, as unpleasant.

Just because we perceive pain or discomfort, unpleasantness, challenges… it does not mean we need to open ourselves up to receiving more of it.

Our perceptivity of a given situation does not mean that we have to be in receptivity to it.

By attempting to utilize a mindset to skip experiencing some aspect of that continuum of pain-to-pleasure, we are denying ourselves an entire range within the band of our presence, our experience, what we are here to be with.

And that then gets in the way of our capacity to bring forth what we're here to offer.

We cannot give to the world in a way that acknowledges the reality of what is needed if we bypass the full reality of our own experience.

This is why in the embodied leadership program that we refer to as Presence Foundations, we speak to the notion of whole-system awareness.

We are not selective about the range of experience that we're willing to acknowledge, because if we were to be selective we would not be able to meet the complexity of the moment. And this is the situation we find ourselves in collectively right now.

We can come together and move forth out into the world with a groundedness in the reality of what's needed. Not in a saviorism and not in a stance of separateness rebranded as some form of isolated unity.

For the entirety of the system to be held, presenced in our awareness… for us to let go of the pattern of denying an aspect of our fullness…

That's how we show up to the need of the moment grounded in reality.

It starts with us being real with ourselves

and being real with all of it

and being with all of it

and being all of it.

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