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Being Human

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The only way forward and through this life is to embrace our humanity, not run from it. It’s no good hiding in “nothing is effecting me” and “I am beyond it all.” While true on an absolute level, it doesn’t account for the lived, embodied experience of being human. To be beyond it all is to accept it all. You can’t hide from it, you can’t run from it, you have to lean into it, breath into it and feel it all, right from your fingers to your toes.

What does it mean to embrace our humanity? It means to accept all and reject none. It means that even in the midst of messy, ugly, complicated life that you embrace all of it as part of you. Does a tree reject its gnarly root?

What are we afraid of? What is it in our humanness that we don’t want to look at, don’t want to accept?

There’s a darkness in all of us. A devil, a serial killer, a narcissist, a hateful, arrogant, egotistical bad boy or girl waiting to show itself and most people can’t, don’t or won’t see this. It’s those people who see this, accept this and learn to not be afraid of those aspects of themselves, they find themselves living in freedom.

I am not perfect by any stretch. I’m not just saying that either, I know it, I know my deep dark crevasses, I’ve gotten intimate with them. I’ve learned to honour and love them, embrace them. I’ve brought light to them. Not that happy-shiny-blissful looking concept of ‘light’, just ordinary awareness light. I’ve brought a lamp into the dark corners of my experience, I know they’re there, they’re not hidden.

The less you avoid, the more freedom you have. Can you release yourself from bondage, can you embrace even those hard to reach depths of your humanness and still somewhere in there, embrace them.

This is love.

It’s easy to love your friend, it’s a different story to love your enemy.

So what is your enemy within yourself? What is that part of yourself that you’ve gone to war with? Which part of yourself do you want to cut out and never see again?

We have to go looking for these parts and learn to at the very least accept them, know they exist.

Because if you can’t accept them in yourself, who can you accept them in? And if you can’t accept them in anyone or anything then are you going to spend your entire life in perpetual avoidance, at perpetual war with what is?

Embracing our own humanity is embracing all others as well. It’s having compassion for what it is to be human. It’s having compassion for the internal struggle of full acceptance that we all go through.

Embracing our humanity is to put down the internal war that you have with yourself, to wave the white flag and find some harmony in which all of your experience can finally be accepted.

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