The meditation for today in Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have is entitled, “The Lazy Susan Self”. Nepo describes the process of how we learn to show only certain parts of ourselves to others, in order to feel accepted or loved.
“It was my own misperception of how to negotiate the world that made an art form of changing faces, even though all the faces unto themselves were true.”
“The fine line between privacy and hiddenness is very thin indeed.”
The suggestion for meditation is to remember an aspect of ourselves that we have kept hidden within us and to breathe life into it for today.
“Each of us is an entire symphony, and though there are times when all of us will not be heard, dis-ease begins the moment all of us is not played.”
For those of us who are “highly sensitive”, I wouldn’t be surprised if many or most of the times when we have used to dull our feelings were when parts of us were not allowed to surface.
“The cost eventually– a subtle, but ever-present spiritual suffocation.”