Your current circumstance is putting you in touch with your capacity. It’s doing so by limiting it.
This is frustrating, confusing, crazy-making, maddening. You feel like a teacup must, whose saucer is being placed on top of a steaming cuppa. You fight against the lid because you’re connected to the steam that must escape it. It’s a part of the experience of being you. You know it needs to curl, wisp, float, be taken in by someone’s appreciative nose, eyes closed, smile quiet. You know it should be seen for what it is - beautiful. Free.
The moments you feel the most constrained are also the ones that allow you to feel into the fullness of who you are. Sometimes life’s lessons come to us in the form of contrast. Constraint puts you in touch with the parts of yourself that exist beyond the limitation. You know them because you can feel them in the form of injustice.
Sometimes life’s lessons come to us in the form of contrast.
You will experience this as inner friction, stifling, struggling. The harder the struggle, the more important those aspects are to your character. They are the parts of you which must feel most alive, most engaged - the ones this circumstance is asking you to deaden. These are the parts of you that need to be free, seen, nurtured, and celebrated. You need this in order to be fully you, fully realized. Fully human.
Your energy, creativity, and joy. Your vision, intuition, and clarity. Your depth of presence, your connectedness, your capacity. These are your gifts. They’re also the parts of your being that must be cut off - which must go unrecognized - to fit within the limitations of the larger system you’re contained within.
The parts of you this place cannot hold are not diminished by its limited capacity. You are not bad or wrong for having more to you than it is currently set up to recognize. This is simply an issue of mismatched capacity.
The system knows that these qualities of being are exactly what would cause it to change. You know this too. It’s why you find it so maddening that they’re being rejected - if you could apply your joyful exuberance, you could right a wrong you see is so obvious. So clearly painful and harmful. But there is an intelligence to dysfunction - a stasis which eliminates exactly the qualities that would extinguish it. And everyone else within the system besides you is upholding it.
You cannot align with this intelligence. You must stay connected to the parts of you that don’t belong inside your current circumstance. Love them. Celebrate them. Nurture them. Whisper softly in their ears. Smile at them. Protect them. They are your salvation.
You must stay connected to the parts of you that don't belong inside your current circumstance.
From the perspective of your aliveness, the purpose of limiting circumstances is that they teach you not to internalize the limitation.
As long as you’re in limiting circumstances, there are three mistakes you can make:
- You must not identify with the lid. To do so is to disconnect from vital parts of you.
- You must not join with the lid. You do so by actively shaming those parts of you, attaching judgment and criticism that show up as negative self-talk, and an active severing from them because others have. This is the equivalent of cutting off your arms because everyone around you has theirs in a cast.
- You must not ignore the contrast, because it is putting you in intimate connection with what exists beyond it. To do so would be to petrify what was once - and will be again - alive. Do not ignore the parts of you that you feel fighting and screaming and shaking to be heard, to be expressed. Hear them - fully. Feel them - in their fullness. Give them freedom - within you. For as long as you find yourself in a situation in which they are not welcome outside of you.
You must trust that you will exit the limitation. Your exodus has already begun - the steam has escaped the lid. And more is building up underneath it. When enough pressure builds, or when you’ve grown enough safety inside yourself that you’re no longer interested in being confined to a teacup - the rest of you will join what the steam already knows.
When the time is right, you will exit the limitation.
It is your nature to be connected. And you cannot escape this inevitability. You will not. Instead, in the right moment and in the right time, you will be free. Joyfully, creatively, enthusiastically. You will be you. Fully you.
With a much more intimate knowing of all that you are - because of what constraint taught you.