Subsuming of Self

One of the great contradictions these days is the rise of a focus on individualism simultaneous to the idea of One: that there is no ‘individual’.

How I sit with it these days is wondering where I have self-agency. Do I actually have it (no) and, if so, in what aspects of my lived-life do I (in repeatedly surrendering)? I’ve long known that I am not my own. I wasn’t made for me. Any ‘me’ doesn’t serve me though, lo, have I fucking tried—for years. For me the body, mind and all things spirit dictate the body and mind. It’s something of an ouroboros, with the mind moving along the circle as it moves as a vehicle of God.

Things like the last trip into the desert occurred without ‘me’ doing a thing about it beyond turning the steering wheel and managing the technology. I didn’t make decisions, beyond giving in to how the energies work together and following as closely as I could. What unfolded did so beyond the confines of soul and sinew. Fingers flew across the keyboard but they were not controlled by me. It was the first time where I tangibly noticed where I, as ‘just Ingrid’ was been subsumed. Though the process faded as I closed the distance between the desert and the San Juans,

The unfolding into the practical world of this particular triad of consciousnesses, this trinity that is more pyramid than triangle, is a marvel. How each moves into the fore, into focus (or in the lack thereof), without effort but with a sole purpose remains a mystery.

Not everyone will experience it this way but in the rushing influx of energies that people are struggling with there’s the deep desire to hang onto ‘me’ when everything is pushing into the ‘not me’.

Women, especially, can’t seem to find their footing. For many, across the globe, there is a drive to break free from the limitations that have been imposed by cultural norms founded by male dominance. In search for the independence that a collective has missed for centuries, it’s difficult to negotiate the flow of how to be, what to do, for ‘myself’ when what’s been calling is beyond that very small imagining.

It takes fortitude to move through the process—and a process it is. THere’s a dynamism that wants to move through, the perpetuation of creation, that calls forth through the mind and body that cannot be denied but regularly is.

Millions of people go through this process every day. Millions. And each “keeps fighting this because you think you’re special enough [to] not have to do the required work or can stand apart from everyone else in that way…Everyone in this process goes trough the steps, each in their unique way but each fight is the same.” This is from a conversation I had with God in the late winter of 2022, meant for me at the time but now seems apt for everyone quaking in fear, immobilized by it as they move through the world and their own physicality in a new way.

Surrender, the choice to do so repeatedly, damn-near hourly for some, is the only place where you have control. That and coming back to the next inhale and the next and the next…It’s not mental illness, it’s the attempt to control when everything within and around you is reminding you that you don’t have any that’s causing the ‘anxiety’.

You keep looking for the safety of familiarity in what used to work for you and it’s no longer there. You’ve grown past it and like the toddler you raised, you’re throwing the repeated tantrum to get your way. And it’s not ‘your way’ that’s evolving.

Mary Oliver has a line from somewhere I can’t remember about being “utterly obedient to a mystery”. That’s what the process you’re in, we’re all in, is all about. You’re merely confused about the ‘me’ that you think you’re identified with.

Annoyingly—and paradoxically—you’re not going to learn trust until behaving in a way that allows trust to actually show up. You’re not going to get to the feeling of safety until you learn to practice trust (and it is, indeed, a repeated practice). Trust leads to safety and to get there you have to be willing to experiment, to get your mind out of the trappings of how you think life should be and what ‘me’ means.

The repeated pushing of individualist seeking behaviors is being met by something bigger than you with a much broader perspective that is telling you ‘nope’. When you don’t listen to ‘nope’, it’ll get stronger until it morphs into, “I SAID NO”, just like you would with a child.

You can’t fight the process because we’re specifically wired as human beings to fight the thing. There’s a reason why we revere those who make it through and can lead the rest of us. Not everyone makes it, not everyone makes it through intact in the way they’re proud of and one of our roles with each other is to practice grace, internally and externally.

The wise Ms. Oliver also said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion” and gave a nifty recipe that is worth following in the midst of the ‘what-the-actual-fuck-is-happening-here’:

“Make an appointment with that part of yourself that is in relationship to the force of creation.” Making the appointment [and keeping it] creates trust, courtship and relationship. Call it meditation, gardening, hiking, fishing, knitting, cooking, painting, ski waxing, rollerskating, sitting still, vacuuming dog hair. Whatever. Make the appointment with the things that remind you that you are simultaneously individuated and notsomuch.

Start there so you can begin to feel yourself being carried.