Part 2
Make Room for Humanness
No one is perfect. We all have our frailties. A rewilded relationship has room for the whole person. It does not require efforts to tame ourselves or our partner. We have become a self-help addicted society constantly focusing on self-improvement thinking that will get us to the holy grail of happiness. But focusing on trying to improve what is not working and what isn’t good enough has us miss the beauty and goodness of what is present.
As with part 1, start with yourself here too.
Can you see that any efforts to tame and control yourself result in suffering?
Seeing this is important because if you think it is worthwhile to keep punishing yourself in this way, you will keep doing that and you will do the same thing in your close relationships. The misunderstanding is that you will feel happier when you are … fill in the blank. Or when they are … (fill in the blank.) What this misses is that love and happiness reside within. You don’t need to earn them. You don’t need to be any different than you are to experience them. At this moment your nature is love. That cannot be taken away from you. When you feel the love that is your essence, there is a beautiful feeling of joy, happiness, contentment that fills you. It does not come from outside of you. It comes from within. The only thing that separates you from that experience is identifying with thoughts that tell you you are not that. And those thoughts are lies. The lies that say: “You are not good enough. You are unworthy. You need to improve to be loved or to feel happy.” These are conditioned thoughts that are habitual. They feel real, but they aren’t true.
A rewilded you experiences the beautiful feelings of your true nature with your personality as it is. There are infinite ways we can see to improve ourselves on the psychological level. Trying to improve our psychology is like whack-a-mole. One thing tidies itself up, and another thing rears its problematic head. Underneath it all is fear. Self-improvement is about attempting to rid ourselves of the human experience of fear that takes on so many different guises including insecurity, anxiety, anger. These feelings result in behaviors like shut down, hostility, aggression, passivity. Trying to fix fear is not the solution because it is not the problem.
Trying to fix fear is an impossibility because it doesn’t need to be fixed. There is nothing wrong with us for having this very normal and healthy human experience. Fear is the experience you feel when you identify with fearful thoughts. Sometimes this is very helpful. Fear has you move away from a poisonous snake. Fear can give you a shot of adrenaline so you react quickly and swerve away from the car whose driver didn’t see you in their blind spot. It is practical and useful in these situations and more. It is not practical and useful, however, when you live in chronic identification with fearful thoughts so the jolt of fear doesn’t fully subside. This results in persistent stress that manifests in numerous ways on the mental health spectrum and in physical health ailments. This is not your natural rewilded state. It is the by-product of learned conditioning and it is detrimental to ourselves and our relationships.
If self-help and self-improvement aren’t the answer, what is?
Self-help doesn’t work because we can’t improve ourselves out of fear. We can only wake up from it.
Chronic fear that results in pervasive stress is the result of feeling separate from your true nature. It is an incredibly painful experience. This misunderstanding is what causes us to try and improve our psychology because we think it is by polishing the ego that we will feel better.
But the ego doesn’t exist, so polishing it won’t work.
The ego is a constellation of thoughts that appear and disappear. We create continuity so it feels real and solid, but our experience is constantly being created. We make up the through-line. Not understanding that there is no through-line and seeing we make it up, means that we miss out on the infinite potential in each moment to see something fresh and new.
I miss out on this all the time. I feel like a separate individual. I lose myself in my conceptual mind. I get gripped by insecure, anxious, angry, or reactive thoughts. With rewilding none of this is a problem. It is all part of the beauty of waking up in consciousness. There is no need to fix the way waking up is happening. Your way is your way. You can’t stop it. You can’t get in the way of it, but you can suffer more or less as you go through it. Self-improvement is salt in the wound. Healing happens naturally. The salt isn’t necessary.
The wild, untamed, free nature of who you are exactly as you are is beautiful. You are incredible, amazing, beautiful, lovable, magnificent. You are a miracle. There is no comparison to the unique blessing and gift you are.
You don’t need to improve yourself because your awakening is happening naturally just like your breath, you can take the pressure off of yourself and stop trying to be better. You can relax and know that your limitations are a healthy part of waking up. You are doing the best you can and that is the best you can do. No more is required of you. Any message in your head that tells you you are not good enough is a lie. Who you are cannot be damaged. Your innate worth and value cannot be taken away from you. You are loveable exactly as you are, no matter what you have done. This does not mean that you have only done good things. It means that your goodness is not taken from you by your moments of fear and blindness to your true nature. No matter how blind you were. No matter what harm you did. Your nature is still love. And you are still waking up to that. Can you see this for yourself? Start there, but don’t stop there. This applies to everyone!
If you don’t need to be improved, tamed, or controlled, neither does your partner. No matter what their human frailties are, their essence is love. They are waking up to their true nature. Can you see this? This does not mean you have to stay with your partner. There is absolutely no requirement for you to stay, but can you see their innocence? Can you see who they are? Can you see their beauty and magnificence exactly as they are with their human frailties?
Assuming you are in a relationship that you want to stay in and rewild, can you give your partner the room they need to grow and learn as they wake up to who they are?
Are you able to see their frailties don’t mean anything about you? They are a reflection of their level of consciousness just like yours are a reflection of your level of consciousness. Can you not take their frailties personally?
To rewild your relationship and make room for the humanness of yourself and your partner, it is essential to see that bad behavior is not personal. It is a reflection of a contraction in consciousness. Even if a comment is aimed at you personally and has personal content in it about you. It is not about you, and when you are the one in the attack mode, it is not about the other person. No matter how much it looks like they are responsible for your experience they aren’t. Your experience is a reflection of your level of consciousness, not them.
Knowing you are love and knowing when you don’t experience that, it is a reflection of your own state of mind, is key to rewilding your relationships. There is room for whole people in relationships when we know we are only experiencing our own level of consciousness. This does not mean you need to stay or put yourself in harm’s way. In fact, when you are clear that another person’s behavior is not personal, it is much easier to listen to your commonsense and take care of yourself.
Rewilding allows you to appreciate and enjoy the natural state of love that is the essence of who we all are and share that experience. It appreciates the full human experience as the path to waking up and creates an inner stability that allows us to love and accept ourselves and others as they are.
The final installment of the Rewilding Your Relationship Series will be available next week.
Rohini Ross is passionate about helping people wake up to their full potential. She is a transformative coach, leadership consultant, regular contributor to Thrive Global, and author of the short-read Marriage. You can get her free eBook Relationships here. Rohini has an international coaching and consulting practice based in Los Angeles helping individuals, couples, and professionals embrace all of who they are so they can experience greater levels of well-being, resiliency, and success. Rohini is the co-founder of The 29-Day Rewilding Experience and The Rewilding Community. You can also subscribe to Rohini’s weekly blog on her website, rohiniross.com. You can also follow Rohini on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and watch her Vlogs with her husband. To learn more about her work go to her website, rohiniross.com.