Authenticity: Inhabiting Wildly Tender Revolution.
{Abrasives and Solvents artwork: Jamie Lopez}
When you live from your intuitive core, your belly, your heart, and let your soul lead and spirit guide you, your words and actions will be naturally subversive.
You will go to your edge. You will soften. Become wildly tender.
Question is, will you wholly inhabit your own revolution? In beauty? This inner revolution is a perpetual ceremony of the heart. It’s what you are for.
When you are real, cooked down to essence, rather than half-baked to get approval, to look good, the projections from others may fly, seek you out and try to stick to you. Don’t let them. Instead, let your authenticity support you in carrying on wholehearted, vulnerable conversation to resolve whatever arises. It is hard work. Uncomfortable. Deeply human. Can be harrowing. And often downright delicious. Intimate. Naked.
Courageous work marked by your solid presence. Here. Now.
I’d rather be whole than good, C.G. Jung said. And by whole, he meant real, messy, ensouled, deeply human, heart broken open with compassion — flowing first to ourselves, to resource and prepare to let it flow widely to others.
Being too comfortable, amenable, pliable to the point of contorting yourself, is a ticket to selling your soul right up the river. Don’t buy it. When you live from your own knowing-ness, from your gut and your wildly-rooted intelligence, you feel alive. Genuinely, madly, creatively alive.
Being real — true to your Self, your soul — is gritty. And grit causes friction, makes fire to clear the way for living a revolutionary act. This act is marked by action that the earth and the soul of the world are crying out for. And the cry is going to get louder, more pain-filled, and grievous, before enough souls answer wholeheartedly.
When you get real, it is actually not about you. Your individual program is only the ground from which you step. From which you step and choose whether you will make this life of yours a walk of grit and beauty, or one of accommodation to the forces that insist you do it their way, be well-behaved, produce, consume, make nice, and as the poet Mary Oliver says, “… breathing just a little, and calling it a life.”
Thing is, we’re not talking a self-improvement project; that’s only the gateway. We are being used. By Spirit. One way or the other: we go consciously or we are abducted — individually and collectively, now. So it’s a great time to dive in.
When we realize we have no choice but to offer ourselves up — like a sacrifice — to the mystery of Great Spirit’s guidance, this guidance insists on shaping us as a soul-centered contributor. And we’re in it! Soul’s got us. And Spirit carries us along.
We’re goners to those egoic, mechanistic, competitive ways — the ways that have undone the earth and so many souls who walk the earth, swim her waters, send roots down into her and watch from the skies.
To inhabit your own core, your vital, knowing center and a soul-centered way of being, you need to do the inner excavation. What we call, in Jungian psychology-speak, Shadow work, and in shamanic-speak, Underworld soul work, including ego-dismemberment work to heal old wounds and retrieve parts of your soul you had otherwise disowned or split off.
We need these pieces of our souls, as well as aspects of our bodies, and our connection with Spirit, and with the earth, along with the other-than-human ones and wild intelligent forms of life — to feel deliciously alive, ready to roll, to serve this crying earth, and love ’em up.
This is real adult work, asking everything of you. It will alter your world completely, but before that happens, you’ll be met with severing old ways, dismemberment, metaphoric death, dreams, visions — both lovely and horrifically heart-pounding, yummy, gut-wrenching, Beauty, raging tears, sweet snot, broken-open heart, blue-shimmering darkness, warm, comforting light. Rebirth. Love. Hope. A deep sense of connection with it all.
And a palpable knowing of what you are for.
So it’s a slow dive, a conscious descent into the depths of your soul, the dark ground of your being and your dreams: the Underworld of your psyche. This is vital work — no way around it — to discover what you’ve tucked away in the archetypal Shadow of your own psyche. If you’re lucky, you will unearth what you had, otherwise disowned to adapt to the egoic, mechanistic, competitive, earth-ravaging ways of modern Western culture.
And most often, these pieces of your otherwise whole psyche that you had disowned are what makes you utterly You. Beautifully. Creatively. Wildly alive. Authentically so. You. And you are needed here.
Your essential soul’s powers — what you were born with before you lost track of them, and they of you — are to be found there, in that excavation into your dark depths, awaiting you to carry them home, like mama leopard carries her kitties. With a fierce tenderness, knowing that all life — yours, your beloved’s, the earth’s, humans’ and other-than-humans’ — is at stake. The world needs you to be fully alive. Real.
The world needs you to find, bring home and embody your soul’s gifts and healing powers. It’s messy work. It’s what we are for.
When you are transparent, you will stand out as you are truly seen. When you are transparent, others can see through you into you, as your heart and true essence shines. You are clear, direct and kind. You are not an enigma; you don’t leave people scratching their heads wondering what you just said and did.
You do not hide. You are honest to the bone. You are courage enfleshed.
When you are congruent, you are wholistically aligned. What you think, say, feel in your heart, feel in your body, and the actions you take, line up to support and reflect each other. You know it in your body, often in your gut, when you put your attention there.
Congruent authenticity happens in the guts and bowels of your life. Being authentic is the grunt-work of the soul, of any deeply human, spiritual path. Being half here, half there, halfhearted, faking it to look good, strategizing to make things easier for your self — that’s the common way of the unconscious clotted middle, driven by our egoic, addicted culture. It’s a way that lacks wholeheartedness. Lacks real courage to let the heart break. Shatter.
Broken wholly and holy open to finally know compassion for self, others, earth. To live and love — on fire, fully alive, juiced, and ready to serve.
Being authentic and soul-centered costs you your ticket to ride from the collective mainstream to the illusion of safety and security. It opens the door to your bloody and glistening, broken-whole heart — reveals to you the honey of this wildly delicious, messy life. Leaves you, and those you touch, feeling radically free. Without choice now. Solid and light. Authenticity strips away all that is not real. All that is not made from love, to love.
All that is of enriched soul and inspired Spirit remains. There is no living a soul-centered life without being authentic, without mustering the courage to do the excavating in the dark: the Shadow work.
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” ~ C.G. Jung
What will you do?
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Melissa La Flamme is a visionary artisan of cultural evolution. As an author, poet, Jungian & shamanic psychotherapist and troublemaker, she kindles soul’s smoldering longing for everything real. She helps hack and track the smell of our longing to fully inhabit our life. She shows us how to enact our own prison break, from the inner and outer lockdowns we have unknowingly built. Melissa teaches the soul’s clandestine trade. The trade of the code-breaker of our one authentic life. The way of the Holy Hacker of our soul. The one writhing alive in our glistening, raving heart, vulnerable, ravished, undone and messy in a world where anything but is the safe way to belong. Visit her at her website, and on Facebook.
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