No really, it is all in you.
Recently an invitation landed in my inbox for one of those really interesting looking online summits. You know the ones that feature about 80,000 different presenters, ranging from big, recognizable names to the up-and-comers, promising three days of answers to life’s riddles, and no worries if you can’t make it, the recording will be available for 48 hours, and this all-you-can-process wisdom buffet is yours for only $122.
Whoopsiedoodle, I didn’t mean for my cynicism to leak through so soon. And it’s not cynicism, not exactly. I have certainly benefited—been shaped, even—from the teachings of folks I see featured in these things. I know there’s value in these offerings.
But I do have a strong reaction when I get invited to them. The most recent time it was so strong I finally got curious about what was going on. I realized I feel kind of… insulted? And of course that doesn’t make logical sense, so I looked no further. I dismissed it as my ego having itself a little trip, deciding from atop its little high horse I am way smarter than these well known folks, and would derive no benefit from Thich Nhat Hanh and Martha Beck and Adrienne Marie Brown sitting in the same room (as it were).
Who wants to admit to thinking that about themselves, even to themselves?
An invitation to look elsewhere
But a few additional moments of focused reflection showed me that wasn’t an ego trip at all. What feels icky to me is that these summits—in the most well intentioned way—are largely inviting us to look outside of ourselves for what to do. So are self-help books, mostly. So are the methodologies, the models, the classes.
Again, though, none of it is BS. On the contrary, how beautiful and necessary most of it is. “I found this thing that helped me suffer less,” says the author, the speaker, the teacher. “Let me share it with you.” And we accept the gift, gratefully. We take up the tool—if it works for us. If it doesn’t, we don’t.
All of that is fantastic.
The part that isn’t so great is the habit many of us have to automatically seek out these resources to provide answers, rather than looking inside ourselves for what feels true and right.
It’s in all of us
There is a deep and abiding knowing in each of us about what is ours to do, but many of us been schooled (literally!) away from looking at it. Most of our education taught us that the teacher had the truth, not us. Our job was to mimic, to regurgitate. So it’s understandable that we apply the same approach to connecting with our higher selves. The very useful question of “How did you do it, wise person?” quickly becomes “How do you want me to do it?” or “What is the right way?” It assumes that there is a wrong way.
Nobody can tell us definitively what to do, but our conditioning has us believe that someone has to. So we keep going to different “this is the way” people, and getting different answers about what the way is. And without an internal reference (usually bodily; more on that in a sec) of what is true for us, we can become confused, doubtful, and unable to engage the material in a way that will help us.
So I guess that’s why these summits and things rub me the wrong way. They’re beautiful sources of wisdom packaged in a way that not only reinforces this habit of looking outside ourselves, they also leverage our ever shortening attention spans, packaging the material in a way where we can, say, listen in while doing something else, or listen later, maybe not listen at all but feel we’ve gotten something just by dropping our two hundred beans (money, after all, is a form of attention).
It’s just like all the books we buy and let languish on our shelves (I’ve got three collecting dust on my nightstand now, but that’s just because I’ve only begun collecting them again after a recent purge). We might get a few helpful tips, a quote or two to use, a resource or a direction to look further into, but none of it is necessarily going to change us.
No really, it is all in you. It really, really is.
This reflection also revealed to me that the only classes, trainings, teachers that have transformed me in any real and lasting way are the ones who have—consistently, insistently, and in spite of my resistance—pointed me back to myself.
I brought the same, yearning question to the Aikido dojo, to energy class, to the Camino, to the plant medicine: “show me what I don’t know. Give me the answer. Blow my mind.”
In response, folks at the dojo literally pushed on me to show me where my body’s center is, where the ground under me is. In energy class I learned about my own energetic field, how to discern what belongs there and what doesn’t, and how to protect it. The Camino asked, “what sort of miracle are you looking for that isn’t already here, babe?” The plants chorused, “keep doing what you’re doing. You have no idea how magnificent you are.”
Every one of these practices, I also realize, is somatic: heavily, if not exclusively, involving the body. The body is where our knowing lives, our divinity is expressed. (It is also where trauma stacks up, and the more we can clear that out, the easier it becomes to access what’s true. Many somatic practices that support that as well.)
How do you do it?
One more time so they can hear me in the bleachers: I’m not saying don’t listen to these teachers. In fact, the really good ones are constantly pointing us back to ourselves. If we’re attuned, we can discern the wisdom that lights us up, points the way home to ourselves. We can trust the feeling we get that there’s a gift there for us, take that gift on board, and live it.
What sorts of wisdom teachings are you drawn to? What is your barometer for knowing when something is for you, or not? What practices have worked for you, what has stuck, and how has it changed you?
