Bending Reality
I just finished listening to Victoria Song’s Bending Reality this morning (first time through). Her message is resonant and her reading so pleasant, I’ll be glad to begin again.
When I was working with John King a few years ago in the Tribal Leadership community, John had this beautiful mantra – “you are whole, complete, and lacking nothing…I love you, and you don’t get a vote about that.”
Coming from my more contracted (Victoria Song’s language) background, I could barely receive that. I found it such a curious phrase. My intellectual framework wrought of hardscrabble sharecropper Evangelicalism had been constructed to understand that the world was broken, humans broke it, and I am a broken human. The only hope was that God would sigh, forgive my brokenness, and give me a shot at repairing myself. That’s pretty messed up theology, but so very common in the world within which I grew up.
It has been a long road of struggle, desiring something different, disappointment, fleeing from myself, resisting, refusing to acknowledge and suppressing how I feel in an effort to conform to those “that’s a good boy” teachings used by so many to control, manipulate, and harness others.
Shame, guilt, self-loathing, deserving of all bad things, destined to work hard and told to be happy with the scrap. That was the world I knew, the world my parents knew, the world their parents knew, and as far as I know, the lineage goes back forever.
In that context, my soul couldn’t even peek out to accept John’s assertion that I am…we are…in truth inherently whole, complete, and lacking nothing, and Victoria’s suggestion that this inability was a bondage of contracted points of view driven by what I’d been taught and “learned” about the world by watching, listening, and interpreting/extracting meaning from my experiences.
Victoria Song lays out eleven “unlearnings” to practice that will help us move into a state of expansion rather than contraction. She claims that great things happen once we unlearn the attitudes and practices that keep us contracted.
As I think about the state of contraction, the image in my mind is of laying curled up in a fetal position, or cocooned in a chrysalis. Both are fine for the unborn, but for the adult the first state is pathetic and heartbreaking and the second feels more like the “cocoon” might be in a spider’s web.
Song’s list of truth’s that have helped her unlearn contracted ways of living and being include:
- The moment we seek to be a certain way, think a certain way, do a certain thing and are not comfortable just the way we are—in our own unique expression of life—we create contraction.
- As soon as you relate to anything in your life, as “must make something happen,” you are in contraction.
- Almost all your actions, thoughts, decisions, emotions, and behaviors come from the programming of your subconscious.
- All emotions are simply energy-in-motion, which is why you cannot selectively numb “negative” emotions, and feel only “positive” emotions.
- There are many things you can do, but the thing that’s going to get you access to your supernatural abilities is the thing that feels like play for you because that’s what gives you access to expansion.
- The way to remove contraction in your body is to go into the eye of the storm, and fully feel it.
- If you don’t feel your emotions, then the energy patterns get stuck and metastasize, creating dis-ease in the body, which becomes disease.
- If you only focus on expansion, you are bypassing what needs to be seen and capping your upper limits on expansion. If you’re just focused on removing contraction, you miss what’s possible when you entrain your nervous system to expansion. Combining the two is where the magic happens.
- It’s not until we admit to ourselves how much pain we are in that we can access sufficient energy to say, “Enough!” and create a new reality.
- You can’t manifest anything you want from contraction.
- Control is the vulnerable state. Trust is the invulnerable state.
As I’ve matured and listened to diverse voices tell of their journey through life and what they’ve learned along the way, I sense that I’ve come to the edge, to that liminal boundary that exists between predominantly contracted and predominantly expanded. Can I cross over? I want to. Just as I am without one plea. I believe,…Lord help my unbelief.