On Safety, Familiarity, Self Perception, and Agency
Why the war against your flaws is one you're not meant to win.
It is said that when an enemy is understood he ceases to become an enemy.
To understand something is to become familiar with it. Familiarity is the master ingredient of safety. So the process of familiarizing (experiencing to generate knowing) is the process of cultivating safety and eliminating all enemies from your life.
Rather than thinking about enemies in terms of “someone who did you wrong”--though the same ideas will apply--let’s look at our own internal enemies. Things like self hatred, not good enoughness, insufficiency, body image conflicts (dysmorphia), and ways that we make ourselves an enemy.
When filtered into these contexts I hope you will begin to see the connection between “unfamiliarity with yourself” and “making yourself an enemy.”
When you hate yourself you haven’t given yourself a chance to know thyself. Instead, what you think you know about yourself is all externally validated. You have only made yourself real as a result of what someone outside of you has determined is true. Because of this you become afraid of finding your own voice and discerning what is actually true for you when you’re the only one in the room.
Your avoidance of self knowledge becomes a protection mechanism. You avoid looking at yourself in the mirror because you don’t like what you see. And because you don’t like what you see -- because of it not fitting the external dogma in some imaginary way -- you avoid looking at it for fear of acknowledging what you secretly believe. Even if what you believe was generated by external sources.
So you live your life avoiding admitting what you truly want and become “too considerate” of what everyone else wants. You avoid finding beauty in the creative expression of your own energy as it manifests AS your body. As a result of the unwillingness to familiarize yourself with yourself, you feel inherently unsafe in your own skin, unsafe as yourself and seek to be different. You assume being different would make you feel better and safe, worthy and enough. But since your selfhood always manifests as your energetic climate, you bring the unsafe insufficient self with you into these transformations and just repeat the loop.
You bring your enemy with you because your enemy is yourself.
And until your enemy is understood and assimilated, until you know it and are familiar with its thinkingness, you will feel unsafe near it. Your own self will be too unpredictable to feel safe.
Because you are so afraid of being yourself, you exist in a state of confusion. Where there appears to be no solution to your feeling of not enoughness or unsafety. So you resort to destiny, luck, or wishful thinking in the hopes that things will just work themselves out naturally. The problem is that those things work themselves out in your unspoken energy, not in terms of your desires. So when you are afraid of yourself, you exist as that fearful self, unsafe, and producing an energetic climate of unsafety that creates reasons for you to feel unsafe. Leaving it up to chance in the hopes that your own unsafety will resolve itself is like letting go of the steering wheel of a car and hoping it will choose to stay on the road. The chaos of confusion resolves itself unpredictably.
But you can stabilize the random motion of confusion by rewriting your values. Your new values can then give you a fresh frame of reference from which you can make new choices.
Right now your values are unknown or amorphous. They’ve been dictated by outside voices and so what you think is important, what you think makes you valid and real, is externally generated and therefore not true. They’re not true because they’re not internally true.
A value is not a lifelong framework, but instead a consideration of what is important to you now. You establish this value so that you have a stable piece of data around which all other choices and concerns can be understood.
Perhaps your whole life you have been hyper focused on how important “looking good” is in order to be attractive and chosen by a partner. So any eye bag, fold, zit, or soft spot is filtered through the lens of that external value. That value creates an energetic confusion in you because the baseline of your consciousness is one of acceptance, guaranteed survival, and optimism. So when you hold a belief that makes survival (being chosen) perceptively uncertain, or you create a lack of optimism in your worthiness, it stirs up confusion in your consciousness. The external value conflicts with the inner truth and is a vibrational distortion. So your internal acceptance is impossible, you become an enemy to yourself, and the vibrational distortion is a feeling of unsafety and threat. You then make choices around the unstable data represented by this self perceptive distortion. “I might not be good enough therefore...” and begin scheming and protecting yourself in all of your interactions.
Alternatively, you can stabilize data in an optimistic way. Of course when it comes to worthiness or body image there are many layers of confusion, but for simplicities sake let’s choose one element so you can see how this works. One element may be the internal choice to stop valuing appearances as highly... “appearance is not what is most attractive about a person” becomes your value. Using this stable data you now know how to respond to your questions about your appearance, your body image, and your insecurity about your body. Those factors no longer hold pressure because they are not the value you chose and because you said it isn’t as important to you right now, so you know how to make further choices.
Let’s illustrate this a different way that’s even clearer. You are choosing whether to stay at home living with your family or move to another city far away. You are stuck weighing pros and cons, trying to use logic to decide what is the best choice you can make. Or perhaps you’re choosing whether to send your kids through homeschool or public school. The illustration is the same. You start by creating confusion because all of the pros and cons act as moving particles. With all of that random motion you have a difficult time understanding what to choose.
So you must stabilize what you value more. In the case of staying vs moving, the deeper question is asking whether you value security and tranquility or you value potential personal growth. If you say you value personal growth more than security the answer to move becomes clear, because the security of staying home wouldn’t propel you to grow. When choosing between homeschooling vs public schooling you are weighing social development vs avoidance of indoctrination, and so you have to weigh whether you value their social development more or you value avoiding indoctrination more. If you value avoiding indoctrination then the answer to homeschool becomes much clearer, all because you chose what to value and that allowed you to orient your decisions.
When we make this choice to choose our internal values we also create a framework of becoming familiar with ourselves. We often choose values someone else gave us. And as a result we stop familiarizing ourselves with what matters to us personally. We get stuck saying “I want to grow, but my family will give me a hard time” and you trap yourself in confusions without immediate solutions. This confusion breeds resentment because your consciousness has an innate desire to know itself.
This same process should be used in your relationship with your body. When you judge yourself, judge your body, make your body wrong in some way, you are creating a reason to remain unfamiliar with your body. Your lack of familiarity with your body makes you feel unsafe in it. The problem is if you only knew what your body used to be, but don’t continue to know it as it changes and evolves with different fulfillment paths, you continue to exist in an old knowing, which lacks the understanding and familiarity you need. A high school athlete might feel it easy to stay in shape. But when they turn 30 and their body has changed, they often still holds themselves in the “should” of the 18 year old self, not the reality of the 30 year old. This unconscious comparison makes them avoid looking in the mirror or risk acknowledging something as a failure. The way you familiarize yourself with your body isn’t one of blissful ignorance where you never look at the mirror and pretend to be something you’re not energetically-- though this can have some benefits-- it’s about getting to know all of the pieces you think you don’t like. It’s about getting to know the “bad things” because they are your enemy that you do not understand well enough to assimilate. As you get to know those bad things, as you become familiar looking at them without avoidance or wanting it to be different, that familiarity creates safety. And as you feel safer in your body you will find that the old armors can finally be shed.
This is the case with all of your self judgements and shames. Because you feel shame you often don’t accept those parts of you. You avoid them and remain unfamiliar with their deeper desires and fulfillments. You don’t understand those aspects of you because you immediately label them as wrong and pretend “that’s not me.” You don’t listen to them, you don’t acknowledge them, and you don’t question them into clarity. You don’t ask yourself about them and if you don’t ask yourself about these things you can never know them, you just mistakenly assume you already know them and thereby avoid them.
As you gain this awareness you will find these threatening aspects of yourself, your failures, your not enoughnesses, will no longer be your enemy, but instead seen as a greater part of your selfhood, your development as a person, and your overall probable consciousness manifesting physically and psychologically.
The path through your deepest insecurities isn’t cultivating false bravado, toxic positivity, or avoidance, it’s through self knowledge gained through the process of experiencing one’s self.