it is what it is till it ain’t -mac miller
Presence is not just a state of being. It is a state of mind. It’s your Soul. Essence. Authenticity.
It is a whole-body experience that requires mindful consideration of how all pieces & parts, conscious or not, operate in harmony.
It is dynamic, & because it is, it is a moving target that we must continually choose commitment with to accept it for what it is. Rarely static. Active. Constantly changing.
Presence teaches us what it means to be authentic even when anxious or stressed.
For a moment, think about how you already know Self to be when stressed. Notice how present you are. Ask yourself where you are in the moment or with the circumstances. How are you?
Are you in the moment with yourself AND the circumstance?
Are you living in the past, trying to change it, or belaboring what is current & how it came to be?
Are you trying to answer the unanswerable & engaging in magical thinking?
Are you attempting to predict the future?
Are you wholly present, or have you been taken captive by feelings?
Lately, I have found myself in conversations about depression, anxiety, reconciliation of deities, & the meaning of life.
Each conversation contains similar or crossover themes about purpose, acceptance, & authenticity.
In almost ALL instances, individuals share that at this moment of reality, they have never felt this emotionally charged before, coupled with an experience of overwhelming destabilization.
Stress, fear, anger, grief, denial, regret, getting elevated, etc., are a natural human response that requires validation of utility to lessen the emotional overwhelm we can experience when they visit.
How we relate to emotions like those which typically are labeled negative, characterizes our reactions to them & often our interactions with them. It gives them the ability to empower or overwhelm us. The difference in a positively balanced experience with emotion, then, is cultivated by the acceptance of our relationship with what we’re feeling. Its prioritization, however, can cause us to unconsciously reject or deny what is contrary. Therefore, rejecting stress, fear, anger, grief, denial, regret, getting elevated, etc., as useful, purposeful, or manageable is what makes its experience less favorable & less tolerable. Thus, how we view purpose, utility & capacity defines how we experience what we’re present to & how we manage our presence or become activated with it.
What you resist not only persists but will grow in size. - Carl Jung
Humanizing our emotions allows us to understand who we are, & how we react when overcome by energies that can destabilize us or disrupt our connection to our baseline. It also helps us to know what disrupts us & creates imbalance. It lets us know what will take us out of integrity & presence.
When we seek to understand our specific human responses we can commune with them. We bond with them. We make it less them vs us.
We see what is happening & how we feel about what it is, an indication that we are experiencing a moment, a circumstance, or an occurrence in a particular way. Acceptance. Responsibility.
Acceptance does not make how we feel go away.
It helps us notice that we can feel panic & still be OK.
It allows elevated experience to become less a self-identification that “I am my anxiety” & more a responsible knowing that the current emotion, which has the stage & is sending me signals, is anxiety.
When we learn how to understand we are having an emotional moment, we can experience the emotion without letting it take control of us & without letting it define us or encapsulate our reality.
In such instances, what is felt can become less overwhelming & in its intensity, more of an opportunity to internationalize convening with it to find clarity with balance.
The experience is capable of transmuting, of becoming identifiable as a response to a specific event or circumstance versus making it, us, who we are, the embodiment of solely it & wholly it.
The opportunity in an emotional moment is to accept it & validate it, but remember your baseline.
Let what you are experiencing be real.
Let it be current.
Let it be a part of you.
Let it be valid but not become all of who you are or what is in control of you.
When we invalidate our personal experience(s) we do not diffuse their happening. We deny personal truth. And, when we ignore who we are or what is true for us, we leave a doorway open to being unconsciously impacted by it.
Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will control our life & we will call it fate. - Carl Jung
By validating our experiences, we soften into humanity.
By validating our experiences, we become consciously present & aware.
By validating our experiences, even those we don’t necessarily want to be part of or want to welcome with open arms, we accept the authenticity of a moment.
In acceptance, we thaw rigidities of resistance or denial & create movement with emotional energies to balance within them.
Considering how to move into receptivity with emotional overwhelm, we stop fighting with our expereince to acknowledge…
now that this (what I’m experiencing) is valid, what’s next?
How am I currently engaged in or with this?
What -if anything- can be shifted in my engagement?
What cannot be changed?
Why is a perspective shift necessary, meaningful, &/or helpful?
When validating what elicits an elevated emotional response, we can understand the unconscious or unidentified truth behind what drives our reaction.
We get to substantiate why our reaction is what it is and/or the intent of our responses.
We get to notice where we are stuck or how we are possessed by it.
We get to recognize the risks of remaining emotionally compromised.
We get to understand what we need to create personal fluidity & presence.
We get to actualize how to support ourselves to return to centered access with wholeness.
We get to accept the circumstance is the circumstance.
Our reactions are our reaction.
Acknowledge that the truth is, sometimes, when elevated, we can frantically cycle in it (our truths).
Accepting our response to supercharged emotions allows it, our experience of it, to be what it is. Real. True. And, Honest.
The real, honest, truth, however, is that sometimes there is nothing to change the character of our organic human response when it happens. Some shit truly just is what it is. That is… until it ain’t.
For instance, my heavy truth is that I will always miss my Dad. I will always feel pained by his passing. I will always believe that how he died was unfair. That is how I am today & where I am with it today, & there is nothing anyone can do to change that.
Is it wholly how I will feel years from now? That is anyone’s guess.
In the same way, anyone can guess that how you react to something today may not be how you will respond to it through the wisdom of your maturity.
This isn’t a matter of being wishy-washy & justifying it. It’s a value of character & growth.
Character is the ability to transcend the ego’s quest to be right or righteous for the value found in a choice to align with accuracy.
Accepting character freed me from fighting or disregarding my 1st initial instincts or intuition…
on E V E R Y T H I N G.
It liberated me from trying endlessly to deny that how I feel is not acceptable or how I SHOULD feel…
about A N Y T H I N G.
It released me from continuing to invalidate my experiences or how I feel at any given time, & freed me from any unconscious attempts to avoid clarity or escape its reality…
with E V E R Y O N E & E V E R Y W H E R E.
Cycling in a lack of acceptance with what is, once we become aware of it, is a choice.
Sure. We can feel overcome by emotions. But, the truth is, we are NEVER just 1-emotion.
There is something you & I can do about emotional possession when it happens to work toward identifying it is active, & to stop its all-encompassing hold over us so we do not have to live or feel destined to remain controlled by such responses.
In addition to accepting the ability to cease cycling is to receive tenderness. Practice Patience. To work on both graciously with trial & error.
Acknowledging that we do not always know how to do ANYTHING immediately, we can work towards choosing to end emotional cycles by establishing an understanding of signs detailing who we are or how we behave when in them, realizing the value of noticing who we are & how we feel rests in accepting that we’d like to have a whole & healthily balanced experience with Self. self-awareness as self-care.
Said another way, acknowledging that we do not always know how to do ANYTHING immediately is self-awareness.
With self-awareness, we can work towards choosing to end emotional cycles by establishing an understanding of the signs that detail who we are or how we behave when in them.
Realizing the value of noticing who we are & how we feel when frozen in an emotion, cycling with it & only it, rests in accepting that we’d like to have a whole & healthily balanced experience with Self, which is self-care.
Self-awareness as self-care, then, is how we practice a whole presence. It’s how we live Soul. Our Essence. Authentically.
We can make efforts to stop cycling by managing our expectations. By knowing we will not be the same person all of the time. And by accepting that sometimes we will not automatically know how to manage feeling emotionally destabilized. Especially when what imbalances us catches us off-guard.
Accepting that sometimes we are in foreign territory, even with ourselves, we can explore meaningful self-care routines & remain hopeful about our efforts. We can start the re-stabilization process by practicing self-compassion & by not adding pressure or making ourselves feel bad about it. We can also get help & support for what destabilizes us, too.
It is worth noting that recently, SELF-CARE has become a Negative buzzword. Some encourage that its connotation is shameful. For this reason, the National School of Healthcare Science has coined a new definition of self-care.
Self-care: the practice of protecting one’s own well-being and happiness, especially during periods of stress.
Instead of pushing all of our energy into avoiding who we are or how we organically respond, the opportunity is to shift that focus & widen it. It is to remember we are whole beings. We are not ever just 1-emotion or even the loudest, most active one.
Nothing is ever all-bad or all-good. Object constancy tells us this.
After all, the saying goes…
The loudest person in the room is also the weakest. - Frank Lucas, American Gangster
In an emotional context, I would liken that the biggest emotion is also the most in need of love, attention, & reconciliation. It is not dominant. It is just presently the most active & reactive.
In accepting who we are, with the benefits of widening our focus with object constancy, what also exists is the benefit of acknowledging we do not all handle things the same or react the same, & sometimes, even how we know Self or how we’d typically respond, isn’t the same as we’d expect it to be, either.
Therefore, there will be things we cannot change or deny about what is genuine for each of us, like our authentic, emotional, & individuated responses to experiences. In this awareness, we are gifted the opportunity to change. We are also granted permission to come to terms with what’s so or presently accurate for us as of a point in time.
With permission to grow in Self, comes permission to also grow in awareness. In doing so, we can begin to notice our focus. Shifting concentration when necessary to include not only what is, but what we can control, ourselves, with what we would like to take agency to change, our life & how we experience it as well as how we live in it.
What do you accept as ‘it is what it is’ that you would like to experience differently?
Better yet, who are you choosing to be & how are you choosing to be it that is overshadowing the truth, fullness, & what’s interesting about who you are?
Be good to yourself for fucks sake. 💋
With Blessings,
