As I look back and see that it’s been nearly five years since I last posted, a familiar shame creeps up. The self-doubt makes it way around my neck as it tries to bring my words back to the place to join countless more.
Today is quite an auspicious day in astrology. I might not get it right exactly, but something called “The Great Attractor” can either bring forth a new way of being or continue to magnetize what it is that has been filling your life, possibly holding you back.
I am aware that I have held myself back for a long time. I’ve limited my belief in myself and I have been trapped in an endless loop of incompletion, quick rewards and band-aid fixes. To give myself some grace, I have done a lot these last five years. My husband and I built and sold a business, we moved across the country back to our home state of Wisconsin, and we have been raising our now 18-month-old beautiful little person.
Today, it is said that we should focus on what we want to bring into our lives – not on the negatives or on the patterns we are stuck in. I just spent the last hour cleaning and organizing my house. That doesn’t feel like earth-shattering, soul-aligned work. But it’s where I was. And as I go through our belongings I realize how chaotic it all is – that I just pass it by so many times a day without a thought – but it’s stuck energy. In my mounds of cluttered things, my vitality gets lost. I’m distracted, I’m down, and I’m focused on pointless objects.
I have been trapped in a spiral of consumerism. This time of year gets worse. Even as I try to focus my energy on what matters during the holiday season, I find myself feeling the need to get more things for my daughter for the “perfect” Christmas.
Other than accepting that I need to manage my ADHD tendencies, I am trying to understand why I dropped this blog, something that felt so soul-aligned. Along with a need for more structure in my life, I think a large part of it is guilt – not only for neglecting my ideas but for not living consciously myself. While I try to dedicate time for inner work, I compartmentalize it, often going days or weeks without and letting my ego take the wheel again. I’ll get stuck in emails or even a Target run to feel “accomplished” – leaving me more empty in the end and, now, overwhelmed with useless stuff.
I felt like a hypocrite. While I put on the guise of a “conscious consumer”, I was still consuming and wasting far more than needed. I started eating chicken again when I was pregnant, and now I’m back to eating meat. I have to compartmentalize it and it’s hard to face, but I struggle because my daughter loves it and I feel that her body knows what it needs. I used to have to shut myself down and not think about where meat came from, but now I honor it, though I know the immense suffering of animals for the sake of food is heartless.
The world is broken, and a part of me feels at a loss to fix it. Does that mean that we should give up? Of course not. But I do think taking ownership of what we are doing and finding more sustainable solutions is a huge step. I’m beating myself up, but thinking back to the documentary “Buy Now” on Netflix, the answer is clear. Of course, corporations do hold the greatest responsibility to correct the grave harm they are causing for sheer profit’s sake. Most of us in the collective are not conscious of how the things that we consume are affecting the planet (in the point of this documentary, it’s worse than most of us realize). We’re trapped in the wrong reality – thinking that the key is to make more money to consume more goods and we’re left miserable in the process – disconnected to our souls and our planet.
I think ultimately the aim for this is not to sit on some soapbox preaching about what everyone “should do” to protect the planet, but to come at it from a human place. To realize that our planet is where it is because we are flawed. But despite what culture and materialism will make us feel, we are also not separate from the earth. As Alan Watts says, we are just infinite versions of the universe expressing itself.
So here I share my struggles, which will continue every day I am gifted breath on this planet. I will continue to write, not knowing where it will lead, even if it’s just for me.
Don’t let the guilt and negativity dim your light. Don’t underestimate your ability to manifest a better world. Your actions matter, in every moment. You can make the world a better place just by radiating love – for yourself, for your loved ones, and for all of us connected here on this miraculous life-giving planet.