i want it ALL
January 24, 2021
Cody, Wyoming
i chose it all
Acceptance is the most valuable gift I give myself and others.
That being said, I accept all I have given myself thus far. I allow my unconscious its sweet victory. I allow myself to see and accept all of what I've wanted for so long.
For instance, I allow my unconscious to revel in the victory of wanting my voice not to be heard.
I allow myself to see my small and degrading and fucked up desires and acknowledge them as my own.
...I am done wondering why things in my life are the way they are.
They are because my unconscious wanted them that way.
... Because on some level, I wanted them that way.
To quote Carl Jung, más o menos:
"If we do not become conscious of our unconscious desires, we will be ruled by them, and we will call it fate." It’s okay to have wanted to be safe and good, to have wanted to stay small and not rock any boats.
You win, unconscious!
I am not upset; I am overjoyed. Because now I understand.
How comfortable and beautiful it has been, this safe place where those I love devalue me and those I devalue give me the love and attention, the lavish affection I so desperately desire, just not from them.
How sweet, unconscious, it has been to be able to go on and on about my potential, and get off on my inability to reach it.
How sweet it has been to worry about money, and not having enough of it, to live in circumstances of lack in my own sphere so I can count on others to provide for me, sabotage myself (deliciously) back into a position of being controlled ... a position of being taken care of, a position of being dependent.
bet you didn't expect me to be down with THAT, did you?
See, this is where the divergence happens.
This is where I do something different.
You, old me, think I’m going to chastise myself for these "bad" things I wanted and gave myself; you think I'm going to say it’s time to STOP, that I'm going to call it ugly, that I'm going to pound that part of me to pieces.
Not at all!! Don’t you see??
Herein lies my power. My power is pronounced and presented in that which I already have made: My life.
Every part of it.
Look at what power I had to keep myself small and dependent and alone, quiet, without a mouth for Goddess' sake! Hoarding my writing away as my own treasure with the sick (and beautiful! And true! Of ME! Of my shadow, of my unconscious!!!) desire that people will only find my writing when I die, and then they will see how good it is, and they will understand how much they underestimated and undervalued me.
I give my unconscious the celebratory win even in death! For in such fantasies, that is exactly what I desire and give myself: underestimation and devaluation of my worth!!! This is what I give myself, and of course what I project back onto myself from others.
I am getting exactly what I wanted and what I want!!!
It needn't be shameful, like, "Well, I just got what I asked for..." *sighs and casts gaze down at the ground, closes eyes, covers them with a palm, sighs again* ….
No! it’s more like, FUCKING AWESOME!!! I GET WHATEVER I WANT!! *fist pump!!!*
All I need do is become honestly, fully conscious of what I want. (HINT: "Having is evidence of wanting" — Carolyn Elliott, author of Existential Kink)
It’s time to enjoy what I have right now.
Why? WHY???
Because I asked for it on some level.
flipsides
I might be loathe to admit it, but sometimes I get my pleasure out of pain.
Because pleasure and pain live on two sides of one coin.
As Carolyn quotes in Existential Kink, the book that inspired this post and tied all this together for me,
"Fear is only excitement [or pleasure] without the breath."(quote originally by Gay Hendricks in his book The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level).
So anything I'm afraid of, on some level I'm simultaneously excited by.
I just feel afraid because my ego, my conscious mind — which has been shaped and tamed and trained by culture and society — tells me whatever I'm afraid of is not an acceptable thing to get excited about … to desire, to want to witness and experience … and so I reject that excitement as "bad" and consciously experience it as pain and fear ... even while an unconscious part of me revels in secret pleasure.
good or bad ...
How can anything be "bad" if it is here? Anything?
This is an illusion, a false dichotomy we have co-created to reject certain parts of ourselves, and therefore certain parts of Life itself.
Why do all the greatest spiritual teachings tell us not to judge?
Because there is nothing to judge.
EVERYTHING that happens keeps everything in perfect balance, yin and yang, dark and light, "good" and "evil." We and All That Is must be equal parts all these things as they form the Whole.
We’ve tricked ourselves and each other into believing only what's deemed as the "good" parts can be expressed (look what we do to "weeds", and what we do in so many of our interactions with the Land, keeping what’s "good," obsessively denying existence to that which we judge as "bad" in these frameworks) … And so we kill and hide and repress and insist on the non-existence of the darkness, the "bad," the "evil," the unconscious, the void, the Moon, the Feminine, the left, the other side, because that is so "bad" it cannot even be acknowledged, let alone talked about, let alone expressed.
Well, when half of us is that "other side," what are we saying to ourselves? What are we doing to ourselves?
Sad and sick and dour are just as much parts of the Whole as joy and vitality and exuberance … yes, there might be one side that is a "higher" vibration. And, in this energetic world, all the vibrations get their being from each other. The high and the low and all the in-between: Together they all comprise and compose the infinite possibilities inherent in the One Energy.
I've got to love and accept them all to really experience any of them.
I'm not experiencing any of life until I love it all; that’s the rule.
I'm not really loving any part of myself until I love all of myself.To know my full self, I simply look upon myself lovingly, my whole self, including what I've buried in my unconscious as unloveable.
I turn the energy of seeing something as "good" --- the energy of acceptance --- onto ALL of that which exists in my unconscious, both what my conscious mind would call "good" and what my conscious mind would call "bad" ... I learn to see it all as "good" in that I learn to be willing to look at and accept all of it as part of me.
how do i know what i want? (i look outside myself & see)
In a beautiful mix of metaphysical and psychoanalytic outlook, Carolyn Elliott points out I don’t need 30 years of talk therapy to know my full self, nor 100 years of meditation.
I can tell exactly what’s going on in my unconscious, which creates my whole life, as well as in the collective unconscious, which creates the collective experience.
How?
Just look at my life (and at the Life of the collective).
Literally everything manifest in my life has been manifested by the unconscious (individual and collective). Yes, I DO create my own reality. I really, really do … and it’s my unconscious that makes it.
get withOUT the program
The collective unconscious plays a huge role in what's manifesting in my life and the Life of the World.
Which is why it’s vital to understand the programs the collective has fed me and trained me in, the collective programs I continue to harbor and get off on (whether consciously or unconsciously is up to me).
Whatever I'm not willing to look at rules me. If I'm not willing to look in the dark of my unconscious, my conscious mind can insist all day long that I'm not at all racist or sexist or genderist or ageist or whatever. Meanwhile, unconsciously, on some level, I'm living my life (among other dark fantasies) getting off on putting down People of Color, women, queer and non-binary folks, and young or old people etc. because the collective unconscious has influenced me to do so based on the social paradigms and power dynamics in which I've been raised and imbued (not to mention the generational and ancestral and genealogical bias and programs I've inherited).
I don’t consciously register this (unless I seek to). And these biases might feel like fear or anger. Yet they are also desire. There are some super fucked up desires in my unconscious because some super fucked up shit has happened and been and continues to be imagined in the collective unconscious.