A lot of my mantras come out of conversations with myself (in my heady head head) and with others- this is the beauty of therapeutic listening and the way I practice spiritual direction. We don't live in a vacuum we are constantly learning from others, nature, and the world around us. If we build the practice of noticing all there are is benefits.
I am a learner and as a learner, I have built this in myself, and more than once it has saved me. Some nugget of conversation that seems throwaway and the other person is unaware they dropped is the missing piece that unlocks something, lifts something, redeems something. Nothing is wasted!
I had one of those conversations tonight. It reminded me that I'm not alone. That so many other female-identifying people are working through the same shit! Questions of-
Am I Enough?
Do I Have Value?
Who's Making The Rules?!!! (most likely the patriarchy)
We get all twisted up inside measuring ourselves by these nebulous standards, by rules some anonymous person in history decided was the standard for XYZ, and we don't question the system (that, for the most part, wasn't built with us in mind) we question ourselves and what's wrong with us.
Let's flip the switch from the get-go and decide from now on that WHATEVER THE SYSTEM fill in the blank it was created for cis white heteronormative men (and it doesn't work so well for them either). With that in front of us, we can hazard a guess that we are not the sole problem the system is and if systems are the problem we can work to fix those systems.
It's a lot like the idea of going through life assuming the best out of people, not the worst, and the idea that this shifts more than us- it shifts the whole dynamic. Now does that mean we let shitty people/actions off the hook? No! Do we blame the systems and not take any ownership for our participation in them? No!
We start with an assumption that we aren't broken that we are valuable FULL STOP! And then we practice learning from each other, owning how we are in the world, what we say, and what we do. Not hiding behind fear and inertia but stepping out with a powerful willingness to learn from our mistakes and change the world one ownership at a time (ownership defined as owning something we did either knowingly or unknowingly that hurt someone else and working to change that in ourselves so we don't continue to do damage).
We need each other to live this way and the world needs us too.
Love,
Angie
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