I Am Multitudes, Not Monolith
In coming to embrace myself as a multitude (rather than a monolith), I've come to find myself resonating with many things that other aspects of me revile.
It is tough to teach consciousness alchemy through demonstration. Even my favorite guru, Teal Swan, a teacher of "AND Consciousness" and "the multitudes within" does not demonstrate these multitudes.
Why?
Because, after all, the followers still expect consistency within a personality. It is a strong social norm for people to remain the same person week after week. We even compliment people for being extremely "stable" or "like a rock."
What if we complimented someone for being someone different each day? It would be hard, because much of our sense of safety relies on people being consistent.
Marriage To A Multitude
Greg actually admits to me that he sometimes wakes up and wonders who he is married to today. I've been on a mission to embrace and express every forgotten piece of myself. It makes me a very changeable companion. This is one of the reasons why I argue that authentic monogamy already is polyamory. If you're honest and open with your selves, you've already got a complex relationship with yourself that you're navigating in addition to your relationship with this "one other person" – who has a complex relationship with themselves. (Read: Polyamory? What's wrong with monogamy?)
I used to value reliability above almost all else. Now I value presence and intuition more. I worry sometimes that this means I'm becoming some "new age flake" – as if the "new age" types don't have a bad enough reputation as it is. Worse, fears sometimes masquerade themselves as intuitive notions, and so sometimes I (and others like myself) think I'm choosing to step down from something because it is the best thing for me, but really I'm just too afraid to go forward.
But why so much fear? Because tapping into the multitudes within requires intense vulnerability. To see oneself clearly one has to let the old wounds be exposed to the open air. This brings up massive piles of shame, fear, anger, helplessness, resentment, and despair, some of it going all the way back to infancy. (Read: Developmental Trauma for more on that.)
Lately I've been tapping into aspects of myself that felt betrayed as an infant. I didn't feel well and I didn't yet understand I was in a reality where telepathy wasn't the norm. I couldn't understand why others were not doing for me what was needful. I was desperate, helpless, angry, and resentful. I needed to be taken care of, but nobody understood my wailing.
Tapping into this aspect of myself to find healing for it in my daily life now means falling into that same helplessness. It is incredible how real it feels. Sometimes I lose my ability to speak and my throat becomes so choked up that breathing hurts. I used to fear that symptoms like that were of some physical origin – germs or poor diet. Now I've finally unmasked enough of myself to dig into the undercover feelings that are becoming physical symptoms.
Shame
Shame causes my throat to hurt and makes it hard for me to speak. This shame is what leads specifically to helplessness and an inability to ask for help. It runs deep, causing my throat glands to swell, and often they stay swollen long after everything else has cleared up. This is because the shame has lived on in me – the original shame, and then the shame for getting sick. At least, that was the reality when I was a child and teen.
Anger
Anger causes my back to hurt, especially around my shoulder-blades. When trying to exert self-control over my anger, I feel my shoulder-blades clench tight, as if I'm trying to hold a pencil on my back. Anger also impacts my liver and the lymph channels around my eye-brows.
Fear
Fear stops my digestive system from working properly. I suspect the fear is actually causing the bacteria in my gut to become afraid, thereby causing it to attack the food rather than digesting it. Fear is what gave me stomach ulcers twelve years ago. (More about that here.)
Jealousy
Jealousy gives me nausea and dizziness.
Self-Denial, Lying & Inauthenticity
Denying myself (lying to myself or lying to others through omission of my authentic truth) gives me a fever. Extreme avoidance of myself gives me an extreme fever complete with shakes, muscle soreness, and chills. When the fever comes, only intense self-focus gives me the sweat-down; and the self-focus does this immediately. The sweat-down begins the moment I fully focus on myself. And the moment my conscious mind wanders away, the fever is back.
Stress
Forcing myself to be in "up time" where I am present with my external reality and with other people when I desperately want to just be with myself gives me migraines. (Yes, those headaches so bad where even a single L.E.D. light twenty feet away causes stabbing pain through my head.)
Multi-Dimensional Point . . . (Oxymoronic Pun Intended)
What's my point? Well, I believe I have many points – many planes – many aspects of self in three-dimensions and in four (or five, or six, or twelve). But really, what inspired this post is how difficult it is to be authentic when our culture doesn't recognize that every single one of us actually holds many contradictory beliefs. We're all walking contradictions.
Yet people will demand to know "how you really feel" and will tell you that you can't "have it both ways." But that's nonsense. Your real feelings absolutely will contradict each other. If you believe you feel only one way about a subject then you have relegated something to your unconscious where you can't consciously access it.
And you can, absolutely, have it both ways.
