Slowing experiences down to a crawl, sending them through new layers of inquiries into subconscious perceptions, subtle projections, and distortions. Acknowledging meanings of my creation and the feelings these cause, observing feelings about the caused feelings. Analyzing and clearly naming defensive behaviors and their underlying stories or fears. Giving the subconscious visible and tangible form to observe, know and play with consciously. Adding new layers of awareness to the original meanings and watching them transform, reframe, and create new feelings which no longer create internal conflict or blockages.

Aspects that were vague come into focus and are more susceptible to transformation through new data and the compassionate and loving gaze of consciousness.

I am gaining more clarity about what exactly triggers my survival patterns and have more choices in responding to them from a more congruent, integrated, and whole state.

Now I see why for the longest time the words of people too afraid to take a stand, have boundaries, express their principles, beliefs, and opinions carried little weight in my perception and feeling. Their praise often weak and inconsequential, their words feeling strangely empty and not worthy of attention. Lack of integrity and self love translates as a lack of truthfulness and trustworthiness to me.

How can someone who doesn’t love, stand up for themselves, live in true integrity or wholeness?
How can someone like this be trusted as a friend or more?
Will their capacity to abandon, betray, manipulate and lie to themselves not inevitably become the way they relate with me?

The child in me was surrounded by many incongruent people and could not have survived without several survival patterns. Yet survive she did- and has grown stronger and wiser from struggling with incongruences.

It feels great to have new tools to dismantle the mental and emotional residues of this aspect of past trauma. Intuitively guided and paced I am unpacking patterns ready for change. Teaching myself new practices to resource myself well for these inquiries and seedings of more congruence. Congruence, I have always sought and appreciated wherever I found it, even if expressing in ways I do not concur with.

Incongruence, even when expressing values and perceptions I share, has always set off my warrior into a protective or hostile stance. My senses are acutely attuned to picking up on incongruence, as my system sees it as the hallmark of the worst of relational harm and pain I experienced. Even if I do not comment on it, I pick up with ease when the spoken words are in conflict with the body language or the frequency of another has the distortion of contradictory or conflicting stances expressing concurrently. I might not interpret their meaning correctly but I do sense the lack of congruence, which takes away from my trust in the person and lets me take their words with a huge grain of salt. Thinking to myself I shall believe your words when I see them in consistent embodied action.

Now I also realize that incongruence was not addressed and healed in most NVC practitioners I have met. It might be helpful to get some there eventually or serve them in gaining a practice of empathic relating. Yet it misses its point to me when the underlying incongruences of the person stay invisible and unaddressed. And the formulaic approach- using another layer of artifice to rectify what at its core is an artifice just does not resonate or make much sense to my being. Don’t get me wrong, I support people’s choice in their tools of growth even if it does not resonate with me. As long as they abstain from attempts at coercing or manipulating me into lifeless artifices and what feels like stilted inauthenticity to me, I am good.

Now, I get to choose how I want to meet incongruence.
Do I even want to respond to it, and if so how?
Do I ignore it, while noting the incongruence, and move on with my life?
Do I engage in a process of making the incongruence visible to the other?
When is it appropriate to do this emotional labor, for and with another, and when is it better, for both of us, to bow out?

To do this emotional labor means to open myself up to deeper intimacy with the other.
Do I really want more intimacy with that person?
Will said intimacy cost me down the road?

Currently I do not see the need for depth of intimacy with everyone I like or love.

Which is surely owed in parts to aspects of my being who are avoidant and see intimacy as potentially dangerous, or as burdensome when intimacy is expected, coerced, manipulatively invoked. Yet there is another aspect to it for me. Time and social energy are limited in my human experience and I like to consciously choose where to invest these in alignment with my purpose and evolution. Social contracts among humans make intimacy into a sort of contract of fulfilling other people’s expectation or needs whenever they arise or hazard harming the connection by not being available for it.
For the past years I have only selectively been willing, and resourced enough, to be in deeper intimacy with people- selective on the people and the moments I am open to it. And it has done me a world of good to be deliberate and deny automatisms of habit or social constructs. I am not ready to give away this hard earned spaciousness and freedom without prompts from Spirit or seeing true value in doing so.

This is a period of stepping into a novel chapter of life for me, new skills want to be gained, integration and cohesion want to be upgraded to level up to what comes next. Not everybody can be a part or witness of this process, only select energies are supportive or aligned with this becoming.
Healing needs it protected spaces, growth needs conducive surroundings, expansion needs spaciousness. Some parts of the path need to be walked alone, some fellow travelers cannot accompany us on new paths as they have diverging paths to walk.

Maybe somewhere down the road I will be open for this depth of intimacy with incongruent people without a need for congruence on their part? I quite like that evolutionary idea…

Until I get there I shall side-step external incongruence and its draining effects on my wellbeing, while attending to transforming inner incongruence into greater integrity, wholeness and balance.

Image by Venuskind

The post Congruency appeared first on Venuskind.

I had witnessed with increasing awareness the emotional charge held in my body around men denigrating themselves or acting out of integrity due to feelings of inferiority and lack of worth. 

So when this pattern crossed my awareness in a meditative introspection today I asked to see its roots. Opening myself to feeling, sensing and knowing whatever might arise with gentle curiosity and acceptance. 

The first images, emotions and knowing that emerged were of my father as he was in my toddler years. I felt his weakness, discomfort at feeling inadequate, not measuring up and feeling less than my mother. I felt the urge to control it by posturing as secure and invoking biblical hierarchy to gain authority whenever he found himself questioned by my mother. I saw my mother and her strength as well as her intense and unforgiving expectations of integrity of herself and others and the lack of gentleness and understanding.

After observing and delving deeper into those memories and sensations I asked both for forgiveness for using their emotive, sensate and spoken experience to hurt myself and forgave them for bringing their unresolved issues to my innocent being.

When I felt into my body I sensed a lessening of sensations of contraction and heat but also sensed chords painfully tugging at my solar plexus and sacral chakra. Touching them I asked to be lead to their origin and suddenly patriarchal concepts and beliefs started surfacing in my mind. Letting me realize, once again, how deeply ingrained and alive this toxic programming is even after decades of self work.

I waited till I got a sense of having received all related beliefs with their corresponding emotions and images.. then I invoked memories of men whom I had uncomfortably experienced in such a state recently, sitting with the memories and feelings while asking myself why it hadn’t allowed for my natural empathy and compassion to flow towards them, asking to be led to the origin of this. And my emotional reactions of disgust, repulsion and rejection lead me to my shadow aspects of weakness and cowardice, my numbness and coldness to a blockage of my natural empathy by subconscious beliefs and rationalizations of their unworthiness and the underlying fear of touching into the shame and pain I felt and encapsulated from moments of weakness and cowardice of my own. 

It was easy to release the patriarchal beliefs but quite painful to embrace my lack of compassion, to own the pain and harm this has caused the men I had engaged with. It took a while to get to the point where I was able to forgive myself and integrate weakness and cowardice as parts of my self expression. Disarming my defense to owning, accepting and laughing about myself being in any of these states and letting go of the contractions, tensions and judgements by bringing self-compassion and love to it all and my affected chakras.

I am grateful to have a multitude of tools of inquiry, knowing and intuitive integration of unconscious and painful dualities within me. I bow in gratitude to the healer in me, my countless teachers and ancestral helpers along my path.

A profound sadness enfolds me as I reflect on the intricate web of contradictory beliefs, judgements and blockages the patriarchal cultures have seeded and grown in us. My heart hurts for the messages of unworthiness men have to live with internally and which are consciously and subconsciously being reflected back to them by all of us (not just male code and men). 

To witness how deeply we have been and are being manipulated and affected in our psycho-social being and relating by distorting programs meant to divide and oppress us in a multitude of ways and our co-creative part in it is hard. To have to own the responsibility in upholding, reaffirming and fueling patriarchy even though my conscious beliefs and principles are not aligned with it in the least saddens me and equally fuels my intention to keep doing my work.

And I wonder how I will meet feelings of inferiority in a man next time I encounter them.

What lies in my power to help heal this distorted perception in the other? 

Have I done sufficient work to no longer hold that distortion in me? 

Can I make it my conscious practice to bring the reality and frequency of worthiness and wholeness to the men I engage from a truthful perception and reflection of their being? 

How do I engage or gently disengage when someone is not willing, ready or capable to do the work and embrace their worthiness? 

How can being a silent witness be of service or is silence enabling?

When will we collectively end the torturous patterns embedded in our patriarchal programming?

This is just a small part of the processes of integration and unification of dualities those walking a similar path are being called to keep up and reverberating into the field. Cleansing ourselves and the collective with love and consciousness from the distortions of the controller matrix is an ongoing process. Every little moment of insight and healing is rippling out into the collective consciousness and changing the frequency of reality and calling in new timelines of healthier relating and being. 

May humanity keep rising above the evil interwoven into our psyches.

Photography by Marcus Branch

The post Male Feelings of Inferiority and Patriarchy appeared first on Venuskind.