We have both within us.
A rebel and a dictator.
What are you today?
Within us, we have two different ways of being.
We have our True Self and our False Self.
From Richard Rohr:
Our False Self is our ego, who we think we are, but our thinking does not make it true. Our false self is a social and mental construct to get us started on our life journey. It is a set of agreements between us and our parents, our family, our school chums, our partner or spouse, our culture, and our religion. It is our “container.” It is largely defined in distinction from others, precisely as your separate and unique self. It is probably necessary to get started in life, but it becomes problematic when we stop there and spend the rest of our lives promoting and protecting it.
Our True Self is our soul, our deepest identity, our unique blueprint, at our own conception. Our unique little bit of heaven is installed within the product by the Manufacturer (God) at the beginning! We are given a span of years to discover it, choose it, and live our destiny to the full. If we do not, our True Self will never be offered again in our own unique form.
(Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond)
Living into our True Self enables us to feel free.
To be free.
Doing this happens not by saying “no” but by saying “yes.”
And not just to the things we like or are comfortable with but to everything.
Saying “yes” to everything, even the pain.
Read that again . . . . when we face pain, feel pain, experience pain – what if we said, “Yes!”
Not – “Oh my gosh, why is this happening to me?”
Or, I’m not quite that polite . . . . forgive my language, but when I’m in pain, facing painful things, I’m more along the lines of “WTF God?!?!?! Why this? Why now?”
“When we live in fear, it causes us to eliminate other people or things, write them off, exclude them, and somehow expel them, at least in our minds. This immediately gives us a sense of being in control and having a secure set of boundaries—even holy boundaries.
But people who are controlling are usually afraid of losing something.
If we go deeper into ourselves, we will see that there is both a rebel and a dictator in all of us, two different ends of the same spectrum. It is almost always fear that justifies our knee-jerk rebellion or our need to dominate—a fear that is hardly ever recognized as such because we are acting out and trying to control the situation.”
Author Gareth Higgins describes moving through the “no” of fear to the “yes” of love:
“Look beneath your fear and you will discover what it is you really care about. What you wish to protect: people, places, things, hopes, dreams.
Aggression, shame, and disconnection—even as attempts at making a better life for me or a better world for all of us—don’t work. But as we expand our circle of caring to include all people, all places, all of creation, we discover that our fears are shared and that all our cares come from the same place. Come to understand your fear, and you may find that we’re all just trying to figure out how to love.”
Our rebels let go of the fear and need to control. We grab life and run with it, knowing that in whatever it brings, “all will be well.”
Our dictators want to control ABSOLUTELY everything. In doing so we become miserable.
Are you living as a rebel with a cause today?
If not, what can you do to embrace that inner you?
What are you afraid of?
Grace and Peace,
Andrea
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