Orienting from a place of wholeness
Beyond fear. Beyond desire.
In 4th grade, I got glasses. My vision wasn't that bad—maybe -.75, if that. Yet, many of the cool kids in my grade had glasses. Now looking back, I can see with clarity: I got glasses from a fractured place. From a place of wanting to fit in. Not because of what was true for me.
This happens more often than we realize.
I even heard a more drastic story of someone who thought it was cool to look into the sun, who nearly blinded herself. She now wears heavy prescriptions, and thank god she can see.
Hope, desire, wants—they cloud one's reality, obscuring our ability to fully be with what is. Similarly, orienting from and through fear clouds one's reality, preventing us from fully being present with what is.
This isn't saying not to hope, not to desire, not to want. Yet, it's about noticing when these frames take the driver's seat.
Are you acting from fear? Or from a place of wholeness?
Many are operating from fear without realizing it. The systems in which many and most engage are designed—whether consciously or not—to keep humans in a state of fight or flight. When humans are in fight or flight, they are easier to control. It's damn hard to control a fully regulated nervous system.
Orienting from a place of wholeness is like the ocean witnessing the waves. It's like the sky witnessing the storm. It’s a place of effervescent equanimity.
It's noticing the hope, being aware of the desire, acknowledging the wants, and allowing them to simply be, instead of allowing them to be the lens through which you act.
Imagine you go to a 3D movie. You put on the glasses to engage with the movie in one way; you take them off to engage with it in another way. The same is true for how you orient through the emotional drivers of your life.
The choice of which lenses to wear—or whether to wear any at all—is always yours.
With gratitude,
Rachel
Emergence with Rachel Weissman is weekly essays on human potential for regenerative progress — interlacing art & design, ecology, futurism, human potential, mystical wisdom, and technology.
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