Living Outside Yourself - The Voice
 

To support your growth and in particular your healing it is important to learn to live outside yourself. Most people live inside themselves.

Here is a simple example. Arista is walking on a trail in the woods. Sunlight is streaming through the trees. Birds are singing. The ground under her feet is cushioned with leaves. Arista is thinking and feeling, focused on the argument she had with her mother yesterday. Her feelings are fueled by past arguments and the judgments concerning how self-centered and controlling her mother is. Arista is living inside herself. If her mind was still and she was breathing in the woods, noticing the life of the forest, listening, sensing the qualities of the woods *– she would be living outside herself.

Most people spend a large portion of their day living inside themselves. They are surrounded by some combination of their thoughts, feelings, judgments, rules, stories about others, wants, past hurts, disappointments, expectations, memories, fantasies, hopes, lies, secrets, unsaid truths.

If you have a wound, an aching emotional space, points of high sensitivity then living outside yourself is essential to your healing. It is very perplexing that you (collective) primarily try to heal with drugs and taking people further inside themselves, or locking them up. Your mental hospitals and prisons are filled with people who have deep wounds. Many children, who roam the streets of any large city, are wounded and disconnected. They wlll likely fill your prisons in the future. How does this approach help them and the others you lock away to heal?

If you wish to be of service take those with wounds out into nature. Offer to teach them to use their hands to build and to care for. Let them feel the natural earth in their fingers. Let them grow fruits and vegetables or plant trees. Let then sail the oceans and lakes. Place those who are wounded in direct contact with animals. Animals live without judgment and are good teachers. Also for those that carry deep wounds – listen to them. Hold them with your listening, inviting them to tell their stories. This can best be done in a circle, where they are held by more than one. Now to those who mistrust absolutes or answers, this is an offering to consider, not “the” solution.

All of this applies to everyone. Living inside yourself is not healthy and will not heal your wounds, or soothe your emotional aches and pains.

Consider these practices:

1. Spend time in Nature practicing your experience of connection. Minimize thinking and maximize breathing, noticing, sensing and listening. The energetic definition of listening is to be in direct contact with all that is around you.

2. Practice your Listening. Create a deep intention to listen to people in your life.

3. Be of Service. Discover a way to be of service, to offer help without attachment to your community - volunteer.

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