Some souldiving

I am laughing out loud to myself as I am still wandering on the blogs I love as an excuse not to write these first lines on mine. I know the thing. I totally understand it, I am not blaming myself for doing so (I have been doing that wandering/blaming thing for some years now, at least ten, to put it frankly, and it only takes to more wandering and blaming). I've learnt at least two things: that what I've been doing has a generic name, procrastination and that it is not incurable.

There is another striking observation I made while « anthropologising » myself for one hour or so, lightheartedly.

Procrastinating does not make things (writing, jogging, loosing weight, journaling, living) more difficult (ok, in a sense it makes them impossible). These things are difficult in their own right in the sense that they'd bring about change. Change is difficult. Change is scary. And change-that-matters requires some amount of souldiving, quite a lot. Going down there and see, touch, explore what you feel, acknowledge your thoughts (and how your thoughts try to silent your feelings). Connect to your emotions, then come back & report. When suffering is acute, this seems unbearable.

Because we've picked up from somewhere the idea that when we are living in hell, change should be easy (fast and obvious, as a bonus), within your reach and the only option. I've been weighting the word here and I think « hell » is the right one. When you do not love yourself and you think yourself not worth of being loved, you are living in hell. Somehow there is always a way in which what makes you suffer may be resumed to not loving yourself, or not enough to treat yourself kindly.

So there is that thing that equals change to you, whatever it is. The baby step that you think you could take that you are postponing indefinitely. Against the natural move towards it, there is the natural move towards maintaining your head above the water, towards clinging to your life buoy. Which makes you delay the things you know you really want to do, the solution you'd figured out and the way to put it in place. I know it may sound counterintuitive, but in the long run life buoys (or food, or alcohol, or drugs, or denial) just don't work. Life buoys are not forever.

What I have understood is that change cannot happen while you are struggling to breath above the water. You just can't cling to your life buoy and expect to change.

Change requires some souldiving and the best you can you is to let go of whatever life buoys you've got for yourself. Go meet your soul there where it is. Celebrate it. Welcome it.

Only then surfacing together becomes an option.