48. Humanness
I sometimes struggle to fully accept my own humanness.
Humanness is messy, imperfect, and painful. And it can be extra tricky when our humanness interacts with the humanness in others.
Practices like breathwork, meditation, and mindful noticing may offer moments of reprieve, where presence dissolves us in a blissful trance, and our mental chitter chatter floats on by. But there’s no off-switch to being human.
Even if such a switch existed, Vampire Diaries taught me the dangers of turning off your humanity. When we repress, reject, or bypass our humanness:
We suffer. Because suffering is resisting what is.
We deny the humanness in others. And we don’t have to look far for the devastating effects of dehumanization.
What lies at the heart of my dilemma is the challenge of reconciling ego and soul.
It’s difficult to hold the paradoxical nature of being both mind and spirit, both individual and collective, both limited and limitless. I understand longing to bypass the human in search of the divine.
Now that I’ve experienced glimpses of magical awakening, part of me has turned that state of spiritual presence and being-ness into a new definition of “success”. Slipping into unconsciousness, reacting egoically, and indulging the brain’s stories become deemed as “failure”. Pretty harsh if I do say so myself.
In many ways, this binary is no “better” than if I were defining success around accumulating accolades and material possessions. Though my current ideal is internal rather than external, it’s still a prison of my own making. And I seek liberation.