True Nature

Is this steam any less important because it is ephemeral?

Knowing our true nature as individuals in a community can be difficult. Community belonging often leads people to deny parts of themselves for the sake of maintaining stable belonging.

This happens within family groups, marriages, friendships, workplace environments and any other place where homogeneity is valued (which to some extant is pretty much any organized group of people).

In my own self-compassion journey, I’ve been trying to understand why I get triggered at certain points. Here is my most recent discovery.

When community conformity is valued, then a community will have a practice of critiquing members of the community. How this happens will vary from one group to another, but the end goal being conformity seems to insist that these critiques occur.

While the members of the community will see these critiques as essential to the health of the group and often, as tools to help members maintain a ‘correct view of things’, they can be deeply damaging to an individual’s ability to be sturdy and confident within themselves.

I realized this is something I have struggled with in a particular way. One common habit that many people, in most communities seem to have, is the denial of certain kinds of traits that the group views as a ‘weakness’. Again, what is defined as weakness will vary from one group to the next. But the thread that runs through all the groups is the belief that it is best to not have these weaknesses in the first place.

We could talk about whether people actually do, or do not have them, but if they do, in that kind of critique laden environment, you can be sure that when they do have such flaws, they will deny or hide them, even from themselves.

Common refrains we’ve all heard, and said, are ‘I will never xyz’. It’s usually things like ‘I would never spank my kids!’ or ‘I would never compare myself to another person!’ or ‘I NEVER eat fat!’ or whatever the thing is that their group values. And if you happen to do those things, you can bet you’re not going to admit it to these people. Which ultimately leaves you feeling like a fraud in the group.

In my practice of mindful self-compassion, I am attempting to discover what those things are that I’ve denied are true of myself and acknowledge them and have loving compassion towards myself in even those areas. What good does it to do to pretend that I don’t compare myself to others when I actually do compare myself to others? What good does it do to not admit that I am both strong and confident and ALSO insecure and afraid of rejection?

I am what I am. I am the sum of often disparate parts. I am in conflict with myself. That’s my humanity. That’s real and true. My true nature. I want to both know this true nature and love myself in my authentic humanity. I want to love the bits of me that I am proud of and the bits of me that I have often wished weren’t so. I don’t just want to tolerate those bits, I want to truly love and welcome them.

We’ve preached tolerance for a good while, but people on the ‘tolerated’ side of that equation have discovered that tolerance isn’t really all that loving either. People are designed for love and flourish when lovingly accepted exactly as they are. It is in this climate that they find themselves able to grow strong and fulfill a sense of purpose in their lives. (I am not saying here that we will never want to improve ourselves!)

So my encouragement today is to get to know your truest self, warts and all, and love that person ferociously. You’ll find it enables you to spread that love to others as well.