Too Small For You

I subscribe to Tammy Vitale’s Wylde Womens’ Wisdom, and today’s quote was particularly apt:

Rather than being taught to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others’ versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else!……………………. ~ Julie Cameron

Here’s what I wrote back to her:

Tammy, this quote rings like a liberty bell. All those years of schooling, which now start for most at age 4 (and a junior kindergarten student can be only 3 when they begin), hammer it home, again and again, that we need the permission, commendation, accreditation, recognition, sanction, approbation of the “expert” outside of our own self.

All these “shuns” cause us to shun our own inner knowing. We certainly are trained to “listen to others’ versions of ourselves.” And that is true whether the version is accurate or not. In fact, the accurate versions may be even more insidious, in this regard, because they prove how “right” the experts are. At least when the experts are “wrong,” our own knowing has a chance to rise up in protest.

That is why meditating is so powerful. We get in touch with the wyse won inside of us (That is not a typo: we do have to win back ourselves from all that shoulding and shunning).

PS ~ I am by no means deriding the worth of good teachers. However, it is important that a teacher always remembers to assist the student in finding their own way to an answer, and assures them that learning is a collaboration. (Some “tion” words are positive, of course. Balance is the key word.)

PSS~

Sweet DarknessWhen your eyes are tired the world is tired also.When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you.Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own.The dark will be your womb tonight.The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.You must learn one thing: the world was made to be free in.Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learnanything or anyone that does not bring you aliveis too small for you.………….~ David Whyte(trailer that helps you get a “sense” of David)

INNER SANCTUM

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