Self-Betrayal
photo by Susan Saxe
Have you ever considered the possibility that the society and culture you live in are designed to and in fact, encourage you to betray yourself? That self-betrayal is considered the norm, it is what is considered acceptable and what most of us agree with and conform to? Self-betrayal is something you learned and adopted and borrowed from your parents, teachers and world around you, absorbed it like a sponge, identified with it at such a deep level, that to do anything different feels as foreign as learning a new language.
Sabotage folks. That’s what I’m talking about. While the self-help industry makes millions of dollars from your quest to find happiness, the society you live in does everything in its power to discourage you from finding it, living it, embodying it. For every step you move forward, the very nature of the world you live in is designed to pull you back.
Self-awareness, individuality, thinking for oneself, and real freedom are rare commodities in western society. It goes against the grain of the powers that be who expect our cooperation in maintaining the capitalist machine. What is particularly insidious about this is that we are led to believe that we are free to do as we please and so we doubt our soul’s cry for freedom, discount it as self-centered and complicated and impossible. We feel guilty for our discontent, our depression and unhappiness, and blame ourselves for wanting more than we have.
All the while, we hide our desperation and grieve about feeling out of place in the scheme of things; we wonder why our self-sacrifice for the good of the whole, rather than at the very least rewarding us with feeling connected to each other, instead, isolates us in our own private confusion. We know in our hearts that something is wrong, but we fear rejection and condemnation if we speak up about it. We fear that, we alone, carry this awareness around, that others somehow know some deep secret about how to make this self-sacrifice work, that, if we stuff our feelings and shame down far enough, we too, will eventually discover a way to fit in.
We recoil in horror when we see those who don’t fit in or we venture into envy or jealousy when we see those who have found a way to make not fitting in work, leaving us stuck in a kind of limbo or in between state. Both are extremes that feel foreign or inaccessible, but we wonder if living on the fringe might not be the only doorway out of this insanity.
There comes a critical point where this place of limbo no longer works. Once you decide you can’t take it anymore, something begins to shift, the bloom falls off the rose, and the life you were so entranced by, loses its shine.
The price of self-awareness is that you can no longer hold onto your illusions, nor do you feel that you have the courage to go forward. But forward you must go.
Luckily, life presents us with some powerful tools to guide us and to, in a sense keep us in line. One of those tools is our intuition. Another is our body wisdom or visceral wisdom. Ideally, over time, the two begin to work in sync, essentially giving us an infallible barometer to use to move through the world. When something goes against our intuition and we have a bad feeling about it, the body responds by reinforcing it with feelings of great discomfort and even illness. When something supports our intuition and we have a good feeling about it, the body responds by reinforcing it with feelings of ease and well being.
This can give us a clear way to be in the flow with life, to move through it without effort. Freedom’s not easy, but it is certainly preferable to feeling like a leaf in the wind and a victim of the world around us, especially a world that doesn’t support who we are, and is more than willing to continue to encourage us to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good.
The greater good is served far more by modeling self-awareness and freedom. For each time you do that, it gives others permission to do the same. The more of us who are free, the less resistance there is to being free, the less threatening it is, and then there is hope that soon we will all live in a world that is free. One at a time, we can change things. But it must start with us, having the courage to step to the beat of a different drummer and say no to the tyranny against the individual soul.
