It has recently come to my attention that I have been living two lives. In one life I am a fun, energetic, level-headed chick- who enjoys a good glass of wine with friends and perhaps even a mixed drink or two. I enjoy the occasional punk show, parties and a general lack of seriousness for life. I love to make people laugh and enjoy challenging people’s belief systems and social structures to encourage thinking outside the box of their own reality and in turn love being given the same challenge.
In another life I am a very serious spiritual seeker who is extremely sensitive, intuitive, idealistic to the core, and passionate about life and about helping people in recognizing their likeness with god. I do not drink, smoke or go to parties. I am a good girl with glasses, that likes to read… a lot. And I thoroughly enjoy deep intellectual conversation.
In the past, these two lives did not mesh well. They were different, distinct and separate from one another, in reality they were actually one in the same. Sometimes I would live in one life for month’s even years identifying with it as being who "I am".
Then something happened. I suddenly became aware of these two polarities and conscious that I was making one of them wrong and unacceptable because of a preconceived notion of what society and my community would think of me. I found myself hiding a part of myself out of shame and only showing what I considered to be the “finer” points of myself. After all, this other life that I had once actually lived was in fact deemed “bad” by me due to the consistent struggles of being a teenager growing up in LA… and a sensitive one at that. There was an imbalance in myself that was creating an imbalance in my relationships and consequently, in my world.
Until this point I had been attracting a certain type of person into my life. Particularly men who also were serious and sensitive (feminine archetype) like me, but lacked the energetic spark of the more peripheral oneness with life (masculine). My life was so much about depth and truth and seriousness that I often missed FUN! Movement! Energy! Life! And LIVING! Do not get me wrong… this life suited me perfectly for a long time. But as the wheel of life turns, it slowly stopped working for me and I felt like something was desperately missing.
Suddenly I had a new point of view. It was time to start livin’! I gave myself permission to blare punk rock and gangster rap as loud as I could out of my car windows while driving in the summer sun, unafraid of whom might hear it and think poorly of me. I went out to a bar and got drunk with a friend to the point where I was pole dancing with a tree. I started working out. I began to wake up every morning and dance my ass off in my living room to the Black Eyed Peas. I did things without thinking and I did things without feeling and suddenly I let go of the need to be a perfect spiritual being. I realized that not only do I love to have fun, it's also not bad. I realized that the culmination of my experiences as a child / teenager and what I identified myself with back then, made me into whom I am today. (Which I think is pretty awesome.) So I decided to try to figure out how to merge the two sides of myself into one coalescing whole.
Interestingly, this new point of view attracted a new type of man into my life. Exactly the opposite of my usual bloke… (serious and “deep thinking” math genius sort of guys). Instead this one is decidedly masculine and definitely knows how to have fun. This was relatively scary for me. Perhaps he would discover my more serious side and decide I was too much for him. Perhaps I would go off the deep end with so much fun that I would lose myself. Through him, I was able to have reflected back to me what was missing and out of balance in my life and suddenly I fell in love with the idea of having a masculine force complement my feminine nature- not only through him, but through myself as well. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before and I loved it. What I realized through my connection with him is that we each have within us the divine masculine (movement, extroverted, action) and feminine (intuitive, introverted, flow) archetype. Each part needs to be recognized within us. When we fragment this within ourselves due to judgment of either one, we stop flow, we stop living.
Life is meant to be lived and we are perfect exactly as we are. What we consider to be "bad" is relative and in direct proportion to our own personal experience within life and good is all around us if we are willing to look hard enough to find it. Also having faith that we are always exactly where we need to be to learn the lessons that will get us to become more whole and present with our individual, intrinsic nature as a blissful and dynamic representation of god. After all, that is our true nature.
We are all perfect exactly as we are.
When we truly see this and deeply know this… we can unabashedly start living life from a place of celebration and wholeness. Life becomes a journey and a mystery waiting to be lived without judgment. It is the judgment that stops life and flow because the judgment creates tension in what you deeply desire for yourself. When we are in the flow using our heart to guide rather than our mind life just happens for you… instead of to you.
