When I was in my thirties, I was goaded into exploring what was going on inside myself by my partner at the time who said to me “for someone who is so curious about everything, why have you explored so little about your own motivations?” That was when I met a very important person in my life: David Mars PhD., a Licensed Clinical Therapist with an emphasis on somatic awareness.
One of the most amazing breakthroughs in my life was in an “Authentic Movement” session with perhaps a dozen or so of David’s clients. Suffice it to say that Authentic Movement has a LOT of very clear rules about how to maintain the safety and confidentiality of all participant’s experience. At the time, I chafed at this a little. I was still very attached to my rebellion against what I felt were unreasonable rules and very depressed by years of overdosing cannabis to both numb and stimulate myself because of the pain and tedium of my life.
You have to close your eyes as you move in Authentic Movement, and you are witnessed by half of the class that is not moving. I began to explore the wall of the room. Pushing up against it, shoving my self into it, banging it, resting on it, slumping into the angle between the wall and the floor and allowing myself to feel the full weight of my despair about the limitations of my life.
Something shifted in me and I began to feel the support of the wall and the floor. I felt the beginnings of the comfort that comes from accepting what I cannot change. I began to become clearer that walls and rules can help me to help me determine what I CAN change: I can change my attitude about myself and I can let go of perceptions, belongings, people and even some rules that do not enrich my life or someone else’s life. I can let go of my distractions.
The clutter clearing Queen Marie Kondo is incredibly popular for a very good reason. If some thing, feeling or person is not bringing you joy or serving a useful purpose in your life, then it is a burden and you will feel energized and liberated by letting go. The stuff, people and rules we cling to for safety, love and recognition are deeply limiting to the unique expression of who we really are.
Human lives are full of distractions: flashy, scary, stimulating dramas and traumas both real and staged, personal and collective. As long as we are distracted by the next shiny object, scary event or personal drama, we are deeply unaware of how much we are limiting ourselves with the mountains of physical, emotional and legal stuff we cling to.
Limitation and Distraction are the major control mechanisms of our society (collective mind) at this time. Of course threats and application of violence are still powerful deterrents to socially sanctioned behavior but distraction has largely replaced brute violence on a day to day basis collectively as a way of imposing limitations on what is socially acceptable behavior and compulsions for what we must do to be acceptable. The poster boy for the “social control science” of propaganda is the inventor of “Public Relations”: Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew).
Collectively, we are at the tail end of a cycle of authoritarian rule that is now applied through the mass media available in the palm of nearly every person on the planet. The last two years have proven just how powerful it is to deliver fearful “news” and “facts” of dubious veracity to individuals, using endless repetition until they become “truth”. Meanwhile, the world economy has been reorganized and centralized into the hands of a very few powerful individuals and corporations that are beginning the process of unifying worldwide governmental responses and policies through this mass distraction process. This is their version of the “new world order”.
At the same time the intelligence of the living beings known as the Solar System and the Universe are moving the Earth and all her inhabitants in to a cycle of learning to rely on inner knowingness. You can see it happening already. At the same time the effort to unify control of behavior worldwide is peaking, more and more people are letting go of the fears that have run their life, moving away from the people that insist that they be sick in the same way that they are in order to win their love, and learning to follow the “natural laws” that support the life of all beings.
The extremity of the limitation and distraction we are experiencing collectively is pushing some of us to choose more carefully exactly what stuff we want to live with, who we want to live with and what we determine internally to be the right way to live for ourselves that enhances the harmony of our lives. This is a brand now way of creating order out of chaos. Instead of imposing ideas and limitations on others in order to make ourselves feel safer, we choose to support each other in finding exactly how and with whom we want to live.
When we trust in the unique contribution of everyone in the groups we choose to join, the group becomes much more powerful and effective at thriving and contributing it’s unique offerings to others.