You are bigger than the picture you’re in

Energy is movement and can lead to growth, opens the path for growth, clears the way for growth.

Energy is also a force that can wipe out all the landmarks we look to for comfort and guidance.

It’s the same thing. Do you look at the razed-clear roadway and think, “Ah! Now it will be so much easier to move forward!” or do you cry and weep and groan and moan for the familiar things that have been swept away.

It’s okay to grieve what you have lost. There’s nothing wrong with emotion, with the feelings of anguish and anger, but you don’t have to have those feelings all the time. You don’t have to approach every change in your life with those feelings blocking you in and insisting on a certain interpretation of events.

What if everything is actually wonderful and you are looking at it upside down?
What if the taking away is a giving, a huge generosity, and you are standing a little too close to get a good perspective on it?
What if there’s absolutely nothing standing between you and a kind of ecstatic and unhinged happiness except your need to have a label that tells you who you are?
What if that label, the identity you want so badly, isn’t a help or a boost into anything real but is a cage blocking you into a certain way of life that’s never going to be enough for you? You infinite creature, you deserve more than labels and categories, don’t you.

You know it. I know it. We all know it, but we’re trained in self-deprecation and self-doubt from birth onward, all of us. This training occurs in various forms in the different cultures and families we find ourselves a part of, but the training is harsh and continual, unrelenting.

If you’ve maintained a shred of your divine knowledge, some spark that reminds you not to settle, don’t settle, no, don’t settle then that’s a treasure. It makes you feel left out and warped, it makes you feel unsustainable and awkward, it makes you feel as if you have no right to ask anything of anyone why can’t you fit in, why can’t you be happy like everyone else but that’s okay. Don’t listen to those voices.

The fact that you can’t fit in, not quite, no matter how hard you try, well, that’s a great thing. I’m happy for you about that. I feel so good for you about that. That’s a promise. That’s a guarantee. That’s a reminder. It’s the voice of So Much More whispering to you that keeps you unsatisfied.
You’ve tried being a good consumer and it didn’t work, did it?
Are you not entertained? No? What’s wrong with you?

Nothing.
Everything.

Depends on how you look at it. Depends on how you look at yourself.

Maybe you take a few steps further back from the edge of that group or that norm or that identity you’ve been running after for so long. Quit leaning into it. Quit striving to become it, to fit into it, to melt yourself seamlessly into that group that seems like it might feel like home, finally.

Step back, step back, step back, take a few deep breaths and take another look.

Maybe that’s not for you, eh? Maybe that is a trap. Maybe that is a very small space in an enormously large universe. You’ve saved yourself from one trap after another by being dissatisfied, by being unable to push in past the edges. You’ve never been able to let go fully, have you? Never able to that ecstasy of belonging that other people seem to have.

Because you (and they, too, but they’ll find out on their own, when it’s time) belong to something bigger.

If the small spaces will not hold you, don’t blame yourself. Don’t diminish yourself to fit into them.
If the stick-on labels of society won’t stick to you, don’t change yourself. Don’t cut off some part of your soul, don’t sand down your surface to be smooth and shiny enough to make the label adhere.

What is the lasting part of this picture?

The small systems, the system-built cultures and spaces, the culture-defined labels, or you, the soul
immortal
eternal
infinite?