Maybe you prefer travel as much as I do. Well, maybe it’s not really about the travel but more about the wandering. That is what I like. Wandering. I thought it was because there is so much going on in my totally brilliant head that wandering allows the words, thoughts, theories, and projects to drain into my shoes and be absorbed by the ground. Then “ahhh”, I am just me again, rather than a walking balloon-head.
However, what has occurred to me through a TI Reading I did this week is that maybe wandering has less to do with my head and more to do with emotions. Being intensely sensitive to other’s feelings (in fact psychically or clairsentiently so) has the unexpected result of not wanting to stay still – to tune into my pain or others’. In fact, for me, staying still to tune into feelings results in overwhelm, in a Pavlov’s dog sort of way. Habitual resistance to the feeling of unbearable overwhelm reinforces the wandering. And sometimes wandering means interrupting myself – remembering what else I haven’t done just as I get into what I am doing.
As I reflected on this, it then occurred to me unexpectedly, that “expectations” are tied into this cat’s hair ball of associations. Another way to leave the task of tuning into my feelings is to look outward. When I look outward, my filter on the world shows me others’ expectations. What an expert I have become in sensing and exceeding others’ expectations! I can’t tell you what a good business person that has helped me become! When I’m focused on meeting or exceeding others’ expectations, then everyone is happy and I don’t feel overwhelmed – perfect!
Except sometimes I am overwhelmed by trying to discern and meet others’ expectations – so then I wander again. See? On one side of the polarity is wandering, and on the other side is meeting expectations – two ways to avoid the same fear: staying put, grounding, and feeling feelings that are way not happy.
Rather than swing from the sweat of checking the box of meeting expectations to the relief of escaping them, I could just sit quietly, ask those feelings that are not mine to leave my experience, and feel what is mine to feel. Since “God never gives us more than we can handle” and fear creates intensity that masks the simplicity of what are truly only my feelings, I am encouraged…a bit.
But as my mother advises on matters of the self, “Don’t go in there alone.” Grace is the most informed companion which brings with it the courage to look and to accept my own felt-sense of humiliation, fear, self pity, shame, and countless other feelings that can result in self-sabotage. With guidance and discernment of Spirit, I recognize the beliefs that create these feelings, and with self-compassion and mercy, I release the beliefs and the feelings.
Finally, the polarity of wandering and meeting expectations collapse into the paradox of releasing myself from wandering away from the self-condemnation of not meeting my own expectations…and that’s what wandering and expectations have in common.