I doubt this is coming as new news to any of you. Like, did you even need to read beyond the title to get the point? Probably not.

But here’s the thing – we are largely blind to how many walls we have operating inside us because we’re used to them… until a moment or person comes along where we realize we feel disconnected and we don’t know how to bridge the divide.

Yesterday afternoon I taught two classes back to back and THE theme that unexpectedly showed up in both classes was around authentic expression.

We’re all taught, one way or another, that quite possibly the worst thing we could ever be is needy. Cheri Huber talks about this a lot in her work and when you look inside you might find that you have some pretty entrenched and slippery fears about being “that needy horrible thing”. Eek!

So we hide. We bottle up. And then, we go some shade of numb.

In one of the classes yesterday, Ascend, most people were participating via Skype so it’s sort of like an interactive Brady Bunch meditation class, with everyone sitting in their respective homes, cozy with tea in hand and cats on laps. The class started and we had our usual check in and then… it just felt all wrong. What was going on? I asked them. One person felt numb. One person said she felt disconnected. Everyone agreed. The group started discussing what they could do to create a feeling of connection. Chanting? Mantras? Nope, that didn’t feel right. Then someone blurted out what was bothering her, something she was feeling really scared about. Tears came. Suddenly we all felt A LOT more connected.

Funny how that is when we put our cards on the table – we invite an energy that had been dammed up to start flowing and everyone, both the speaker and those listening, can feel it… and feel the engagement of experiencing what’s real.

Oh, the crackling aliveness of vulnerable authenticity! So scary, it seems, and yet so deliciously freeing and energizing.

There’s a lot more I could say but I want to leave you with this (because it’s really a matter of living it instead of talking about it)…

Take a risk, today, this week, SOON, and say to yourself or someone else the thing you haven’t been wanting to say. It’s always there. Even right now, when you pause for 2 seconds, you can feel it lurking inside you wanting to come out. So let it out. Just say it. Get the flow going inside you, through you, and out into life.

I’ll bet you’ll start feeling a lot better.

(Hey, that rhymes – we’re off to a good start!)

Here you are – beautiful, wild, passionate, intelligent, a throbbing mass of sensations barely able to contain how much vitality, desire, love, and inspiration is coursing through your being. You’re talented beyond words, with gifts you’ve been mastering for lifetimes. You are simultaneously so completely connected to the collective that within you is the entire universe, and so utterly unique that you are an irreplaceable instrument the greater intelligence is creating through with a purpose nobody but you can do. You are made of stardust, your voice is the voice of The Creator, you are love manifest.

Seeing you like this, I am in awe of the grandeur of life. Aren’t you!? I mean, take a moment to breath IN how completely mind glowingly cosmically exquisite this being human is, this being you is. It’s wild! Profound! The stuff dreams are made of! Only it’s real, everyday, and it’s called life and you get to live it. Right now. In this moment. Here it is – woo-hoo!!!!

So when I see you (or me) hunching your shoulders, looking critically at yourself in the mirror, holding onto a relationship with someone who treats you badly, telling yourself you can’t do it, looking away when you see someone hot instead of looking at them with your winning smile, and the other 10-bazillion actions that express the low self-worth we’ve each been conditioned to identify with, I want to run up to you and tear the victim mummy wrappings of conditioning OFF of you so you can start seeing who you really are – a divine expression of light in form.

The other day this was my status update on Facebook which got just about as many “likes” as anything I’ve ever posted, which is a LOT!

One of the biggest things I’m re-creating in myself is that it’s OK to take up the space I do, in all the ways that is, and to stop apologizing for being me… or my desires, feelings, dreams, and expression. We’re all dynamic, amazing, and unique – and that takes up some space, which, to me, is a GOOD thing.

One of my friends who is beautifully WAY over 6’0″ responded, “great freaking truths of goodness expressed here…here I am large of body and breath and sound and feeling and life, and there is this tension in me for taking up space…make it go away please!”

I think we all feel that. We want the tension of holding ourselves in and back to end, to GO AWAY. We want to feel free, to shine, to express the fullness of the love we are, and live fulfilling, connected lives of purpose.

But it’s not going to happen with us constantly criticizing ourselves into being small, and whipping ourselves into submission when we color outside the (painfully small) lines our egos tell us to stay within.

It’s going to happen when we say ENOUGH to the inner critic, tune into our respective muses for inspiration and guidance, honor our feelings and desires for expression, take what’s given to us and GO WITH IT!

I’ve been experimenting with this for awhile, and while it’s a forever becoming unfolding, I’m finding that as I keep peeling the layers of domesticated human off of me, the introvert I once thought I was is more and more a thing of the past, which is so fantastically freeing, not to mention FUN!

So let’s begin. Wild and free, baby – that’s where we’re going. You in!?

Your thoughts put you in prison or they can set you free. And I don’t know of anyone who gets to the heart of that matter more swiftly and simply than Byron Katie.

If you find this to be good, empowering medicine for you, also check out her 2 books “Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life” and “I Need Your Love – Is That True?: How to Stop Seeking Love, Approval, and Appreciation and Start Finding Them Instead“.

There was a time when you were five years old,
and you woke up full of awesome…

“Do you still have it?
The awesome.

Did someone take it from you?
Did you let them?
Did you hand it over, because someone told you weren’t beautiful enough, thin enough, smart enough, good enough?
Why the hell would you listen to them?
Did you consider they might be full of shit?”

Read it here from Pigtail Pals

It’s clear to me that what we each inherited regarding how relationships are and how we and others should be within them is stiflingly outdated.  Just one moment in those old roles and rules and we mostly find ourselves running away screaming!  The good news is that every one of us is hacking away at the traditions and structures that no longer fit and are carving our own paths towards what’s fulfilling for us now.  Yipee!

There are a million different ways this deconstruction/recreation is happening — gender roles, communication, sexual orientation, monogamy/open relationships, making clear agreements –  but the one I’m most fascinated with these days is expectations.   And my interest in this is largely fueled by an experiment I’ve been running this last year where the more I let go of the expectations and conditions I place on any given moment or person and accept, appreciate, and engage with what is, the more fulfillment I experience in my relationships!  (And I’m guessing those in relationship with me feel the same way.)

To me, expectations are the sneaky killer angel of experiencing joy in relationships.  They stealthfully creep in, like a wild anti-passion vine, and replace the flow of joy and positive exchange with heavy, sticky push-pull and disappointment.

You know the feeling I speak of.  You’ve felt it often enough in yourself when one of your (probably unconscious) expectations isn’t being met by someone in your life and you start having that all too familiar sinking and/or tightening up feeling that, if you feed into it, leads you to pull back, push, defend, blame, manipulate, or possibly go into an emotional spin-cycle.  And you’ve seen others play the same thing out with you and the other people in their lives.

It’s a trip, really, because we each have many relationships and, at the core of them, we have them to experience joy, mutual upliftment, and love. Right?

So in my desire to experience, live, and share more love, I’ve been playing around lately with the idea that just like problem and solution can’t co-exist, fulfillment and expectation may be mutually exclusive as well.  This isn’t the same as making requests. That’s a natural part of communicating and expressing self-worth. But to expect anyone (including ourselves) to be other than they are or to want what we want is a guaranteed recipe for disappointment because we’re immediately putting ourselves in a situation of struggling against and resisting what is. No matter how much we (or, probably more accurately, our ego) wants it to be different, the bottom line is that people are how they are and they want what they want.  That’s what is.  And what is, IS.  Period.  And, like Byron Katie often says – when you resist what is, you’re the one that will always lose because what is, is.

It’s a wild thing to really try this on because the second you put on your radical-love-and-acceptance goggles and say “I’m going to accept everyone as they are, myself included”, you’re immediately confronted with how much your ego tries to convince you that your lack of fulfillment in any given moment is because of how someone else is or isn’t being.  This, of course, is a BIG FAT LIE designed to keep you under the spell of identifying as a victim, but it’s so ingrained into each of us that it takes some perseverance and practice to wake up to this and break through.

So let us, for a moment, step into a wild world of imagination and possibility (à la The Reading Rainbow, if you were a child of the 80s) where you drop all the overt and subtle expectations you have of the people in your life.  You step into the knowing that everyone gets to have their own experience and that the fundamental joy, aliveness, love you seek already IS because it’s who you are.  As you really submerge yourself in this, imagine letting everyone OFF the hook. Imagine no longer looking to anyone to be anything in particular for you and instead enjoying everyone you know exactly how they are right now.  Imagine filling in the perceived gaps other people leave in your life with your own joy, love, and creativity.  Imagine not even expecting those who expect a lot of you to be different than that and not taking it personally because you see it for what it is – their pain and drama.  Imagine not expecting yourself to be different than you are.  Imagine releasing the conditions and expectations you place on your life in order to be happy and instead just being happy now.  Imagine!!!  Can’t you feel pounds of weight dropping off your shoulders as you imagine this? I do!!

The skeptic in you may say this is a utopian fantasy world, but I think this is possible with some practice because it’s acceptance and love in action.  And inherently, love is at the center of who we are.  The rub is that many of us grew up in households where there were a lot of things masquerading as love that were not love, and to varying extents, we’re all still caught up in these patterns and mis-perceptions of love.  Manipulation and expectation are part of that.  But there’s nothing loving about trying to blame, guilt-trip, or nag someone into being how we want them to be so that we can have more of what we think we want in relationship… and then punishing them when they don’t – or better said can’t – meet our expectations.  That’s a form of control that comes from insecurity and fear, not love.

A huge part of our opportunity right now is that we GET to be the harbingers who create a new, fulfilling pathway of relationship.  We GET to wake up to the way old, fearful mechanisms have been at work and carve a new path through being love and extending this to ourselves and others through radical acceptance.

So let’s begin as best we can, right from wherever we each are.  Let’s drop any lingering perfectionism that’s conjuring up grand gestures and move ourselves forward through the daily, moment-to-moment opportunities we have to be loving in our thoughts, words, and actions … and see where it takes us, how it empowers us, and how it heals and inspires us.

I’m ready. Are you?