little more embrace
My feeling as of late is that we all need a little more embrace. While this might be as simple and straightforward as needing a little more physical embracing, I can also see the many layers of ourselves and our beings that are crying out to be embraced.
our fear
our sadness
our longing
our confusion
our uniqueness
our hopes
We spend so much of our time categorizing, labelling, rejecting, and denying. We don’t want to feel those difficult emotions so we reject, deny or suppress them. We don’t want to feel restricted or powerless, so we push away.
We are living in a world that encourages us to polarize, to find “our camp”, defend our side, and to reject the other. We are surrounded by this divisive energy. All of this rejection takes an ENORMOUS amount of energy, and is serving very little. And this mindset slips into how we think and treat ourselves, encouraging us to cut off parts of ourselves, to deny, or reject the parts that we are not so happy about.
So how do we shift to a posture of embrace?
Now, I don’t mean embrace to just be this flippant, passive response to life where we are inactive, and attempt to not be bothered by the difficulties. It’s not the toxic positivity that says we just have to think positively and our life situations will magically alter. Embracing is also not denying that we see things very differently. It’s holding tension, holding space that us and another might have completely different perspectives, and that is ok. It's allowing that we might have completely opposing thoughts/ feelings about ourselves, and that’s ok too.
Embrace to me is an action word, it is a choice, it is a power to engage the deep, dark and confusing with gentleness and care. Embrace looks like saying to those difficult feelings “I see you, I understand why you showed up, and I want to give you a little care and nurture to understand what might be underneath”.
I see this embracing self and other work as the same practice for embracing Mystery/ Love/ Spirit. It is honouring and acknowledging that we can’t know or understand everything, but we can work to embrace and nurture our experience, and our feeling. Any healthy spirituality will move to that space of holding tension/ unknown. Once we have moved to the position of “I know it all”, we have entered the rejection space.
My hope for us is that we can shift to offering embrace, offering unconditional, kind presence to our inner life, and that it may also spill into our relationships.
This month, take some time to notice what parts of you are needing embrace.
What does it look like to offer gentleness to parts of ourselves we normally hide or reject?
If this is unfamiliar territory for you, this month’s meditation will guide us in a practice of noticing emotional stuckness and how to nurture or embrace ourselves in it.
