Internal Bureaucracy

The scariest person I’ll ever meet is me. After having spent five long days in a row at a workshop designed to introduce each participant to themselves, it is a new experience to be present with myself instead of keeping busy to avoid.

The workshop days were looooong, twelve to fourteen hours in duration and I slept an average of three hours a night during this entire week. But as I kept at it, doing the work and letting go of my mask, I became unguarded. Surprise - I wasn’t nearly as tired as I had anticipated.

Guess what? Living in the moment frees up a lot more time! Dragging the past is exhausting, future-tripping leaks my life force faster than a flat tire leaks air, and hiding from myself requires redonkalous amounts of energy.

I had to strip naked. No, I did not show up to the workshop in the nude, but I did become transparent and allow everyone to see me as I am. In my hiding, I was so worried that people would see me as angry, which was an unacceptable image, that I worked overhard to apply the makeup and paste the smile.

The first feedback I received was that I seemed angry, which made me angry.

1) I feared people would reject me if they knew I was angry. 2) I feared people would reject me if I didn’t dress up in all my baubles and bling. 3) I feared people would reject me if I spoke out loud what I was actually thinking, and at times, about them.

I have no idea how it was done, but the workshop pushed me until I was standing there, in complete ownership of my anger. My head, my face, my body language and my energy all lined up in anger. I glared at thirty people, my waxy smile melting with the heat.

I sat down, my arms crossed in violent self-defense. I had left angry from the workshop the night before, stayed angry all night, woke up angry, and showed up angry. I wasn’t about to let go of it now.

It was so weird. Within moments of lining up and claiming my anger on purpose, it tip-toed quietly away and it took a bit for me to notice I was peaceful and calm. During the break, outside the room, people immediately came up to me and said utterly surprising things, words I never in a million years expected to hear.

“Oh my God, you are so beautiful in your anger.”

“I am so drawn to you.”

“Now I want to know who you are.”

“You are very attractive to me.”

Say what??? My red flushed cheeks were uncovered. My hair was uncombed, my clothes were plain, I was barefoot and I had glared. Instead of the participants glaring back, challenging my anger with their own or excluding me on account of my bad attitude, they welcomed me with open arms. Words were bandied about like passion, exuberance and aliveness. Were these people freakin’ nuts?

After my little showdown, the room was a new place. After my little showdown, my heart was a new place. I was open, playful, animated. My implacable wall was gone. I thought I was working hard to keep others out, but all this time I have been afraid to let me in.

A humorous definition of bureaucracy is “more than one person involved.” Since I’ve had all these conflicting thoughts and beliefs, I now call that chaos internal bureaucracy when more than one belief is involved.

One of them just got busted. I thought there was a separate tank of love for God, a separate compartment of love for others and a last-to-be-filled container of love for oneself. But I discovered, like holding a flashlight, when in the flow of love, it matters not whether you turn the beam upward, inward or outward, it’s all from the same source.

There is a song called This Is My Now by Jordin Sparks that has come to mean a great deal to me. Here is a lyric preview and the first phrase that hits home is
Living in a shell, hiding from myself…

This is my now, and I am breathing in the moment.
Because I look around
I can’t believe the love I see.
My fears behind me, gone are the shadows and doubts.
That was then, this is my now.

By the end of the seminar, I created a life-long contract. One of the next steps I committed to was telling it to others. I’d like to share my contract with you.

I am
Aligned
Right here
Right now.