When I try to describe myself I find I use a lot of common labels like very tall, experienced, married and mom. All of those are certainly true but they are just labels that describe my physical self. They are descriptors of what someone may use from talking to me for a few minutes. Are they though really all there is about me? Where does the true sense of myself come into the picture and what words are right for that description?
I have been working on building our son’s confidence. It seemed to me he was always saying things like he wasn’t able to do something, wasn’t good at it or was just not enough. Obviously as his mom I know none of those things are true. Yet it got me thinking how many of us adults, do the same thing to ourselves. We let failing at something or some major setback take away our ability to see who we really are and certainly what we are capable of doing. It isn’t only my son who is still a young child who suffers in these feelings.
A large part of these feelings I believe comes from us not feeling like we can be ourselves. We have set such high standards of needing to show we can do things perfectly in our lives that we have forgotten the very thing we work so hard at teaching our children. It is alright to make mistakes. It is also ok to start over, try again and be human. From our jobs to our very homes we have this principle that we want our children to know they can be themselves and just do their best but in reality we are relentless in our own pursuit of perfection.
In living naturally, we realize nature itself is a master at turning mistakes into masterpieces. One of my favorite lines of all times comes from the Eat, Pray, Love movie where they are standing in the ancient ruins. From the ruins comes transformation. Beauty. We grow from those experiences if we let them be part of our story instead of where we stay. That change in how we see things changes how we use the experience to not let it define us in a limiting canned set of descriptive words. Instead it gives us paragraphs and masterpieces that pour out of our hearts and into our lives.
The nature of being ourselves starts with freeing ourselves of limiting beliefs we have held onto for way too long. The words we use to say we cannot do something or it won’t work. We are not cursed or doomed. Ok we could be doomed but that is truly unlikely because of the whole odds scenario. The truth is we become our own gatekeeper holding ourselves inside the ruins like a prison versus realizing there is sunlight pouring into it helping things grow from the cracks. Nature is always transforming and that is the underlying teaching it gives us for our own journey.
Where we struggle in realizing this is when the ruins are there because of the situation that caused us pain, hurt and beat us down. Life is like that. Sometimes it is hard and challenging. It stresses us out and we feel like some days are just a constant battle with no one understanding what we are even fighting for. The truth is many of us live our entire lives that way and when we get to retirement we see so much of our life is gone. We missed the fun parts of seeing our kids give us a hard time eating their dinner or looking to us for helping writing papers for school. We saw them as chores and pains in our asses rather than the journey of transformation.
Setting up our life to feel like a journey of beautiful transformation is not easy. It may even take a lifetime to figure out but working towards that is what I believe represents the essence of living naturally. It is what gives us the words to fill paragraphs describing who we are rather than just the labels we can pull from commonality. It is what creates our masterpiece that is uniquely our own and fills our even most mundane normal days with vibration.
I believe the true movement to living more naturally is in realizing it isn’t sold but rather it is evolved into. There are tools that can help, like removing toxic people and things from our daily life but the work of that is within our very souls to awaken. It is realizing there is always something deeper in meaning we are pursuing than the surface rewards of recognition that we fit into another level of standard definition. Those things don’t fit us anymore when we feel the freedom from labels. It is no longer a matter of what we look like or do for a living but it is about how we are living that is seen as different by those who do not yet understand it themselves.
Call it bohemian, hippy or even crazy but I believe the nature of being ourselves is when we don’t settle and stop at the labels to describe us. There may not even be words to describe yourself and that is part of the transformation journey that is most beautiful.
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