The No-Ness

In walking my path with heart, I keep running up against the same dynamic time after time. I have come to call this feeling the No-ness, because it had a strong element of the word No! to it. It was puzzling, and I was curious as to what this meant. Every time I came up against another part of my life to heal, there it was again, the No-ness. At first the impulse to not move against it was very strong, I'd feel paralysed.

I finally understood that this No-ness is a smorgasbord of perfectionistic, self-contradictory and rigid "shoulds" which were imposed on me by the dysfunctional environment I grew up in. This list is diametrically opposed to the healthy desires and drives that I, as an individual, have for myself. The result was paralysis whenever I wanted to heal something which I was hurting myself with.

I reasoned that, if I were to have peace of mind, I could not continue pulling myself this way and that. Either the lists of shoulds took precedence, or my healthy desires did. After working through some feelings of guilt and obligation, I chose my own desires. Since the original list was comprised of "shoulds," I had to be careful not to fall into the trap of believing the No-ness "should" not be there. A small yet subtle point.

Everyone who has suffered abuse, neglect and so on has their own variation of the No-ness. When wanting to do something worthwhile for oneself, up comes a feeling of being stuck, or paralysis. There may even be strong feelings of waiting for the axe to fall, for punishment to be doled out for even thinking this way. How to heal it? As Susan Jeffers points out in her book of the same title: "Feel the fear and do it anyway."

It is important to allow yourself to feel the feelings, to experience what previously you pushed away. Think of it as a wonderful opportunity to parent yourself back into freedom of choice and happiness. After all, whose life is it, anyway?
It is yours, bought and paid for already. Your gift from a loving and abundant universe.

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