There is a constriction in my throat this morning and a slight tightness in my chest as well as that feeling I get when something big is about to move. The word familiarity has been popping up in my awareness all week-end. And the meaning it brings up in me is one of doing what is familiar, being drawn to what is familiar stemming from family.

From the WEL-Systems® body of knowledge I know that the Androgynous Baby™ and Nested Living Systems™ are powerful processes. Processes that run and are buried deep within us, having us behave in ways we don’t know we don’t know because we believe it is part of the fabric of our being. What has been put into these processes in my humble opinion has been madness. It has been a process of passing on the crazy notion of we can not be bigger than what we are told. That we have to believe everything that we are taught, even when that aspect of ourSelves is screaming this is not my truth.

I have had the great pleasure to read some amazing blogs this past week as well as to be present to K decloaking in her full glory. Her story of abuse has been causing ripples in me. Abuse comes in many different forms, no one better than the next, the result is the same, death. When I am young, death of some aspect of mySelf that I did not know was dead. And it brings up the deniability that we use to not have to deal with the truth of our experience. We use words like ‘I don’t remember it that way’ or ‘ I never saw that’ as ways to push even further that in which our body is screaming out at us to look at as the truth of our experience. This is not about blame, this is about claiming what lives in our body.

Fear of abandonment is a big one for me. I know I don’t know when it got installed, what I do know is it runs in the background ever so silently and softly and rears it’s ugly head when I fight to keep things just as they are. I cannot grow and evolve when I keep things as they are, that is a recipe for death. And we become skilled in using these techniques, installed in us as we are growing to then manipulate our own relationships, not allowing ourselves to see the other person for who they are in all of their magnificence. How can I see your magnificence when I am not willing to claim my own. It is so easy to shut it down, it is so easy to fall asleep, and it is only the screams of my body that is able to wake me. Are you paying attention?

It is about paying attention. I will say it again, I create my world. I create all of my experiences, AND none of it is real, each experience is an opportunity for me to know more about mySelf.

So back to familiarity, back to the family. Where it all begins and ends. Family for me is beyond the blood ties, there is the family of choice, our family of friends. For some the strategy is to cocoon ourselves within our blood family, playing the game where the rules were created so long ago we don’t even think to question them anymore. Honour thy father and mother… interesting how often do father and mother honour their offspring? I mean really honour, allowing them to blossom into the magnificent beings they/ we are. Not too often. We get tied up in the rules about what is good behaviour and bad behaviour, what is acceptable or not, what is right and what is wrong. What a child can and cannot say or do, based on the rules that we learned from our own parents who learned it from their parents. Swimming against the tide is exhausting AND if we don’t we will continue to die. WAKE UP. Are you willing to see what you see, hear what you hear and know what you know? Are you willing, am I willing, to relax into what my body is trying to tell me and let go of the intellectual process of figuring it out, to not fall into the trap of towing the line. The sense of the shackles being tightened is all in my mind, created from years of training and observation. Much like an elephant being kept by a tiny piece of string. It does not doubt that it is more powerful and has the ability to free itself because it learned at an early age that thing around my foot is stronger than I am. It won’t even try.

The information we have been given is incomplete. I am more than what you see, and I am capable of being more than what you see. AND I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. I don’t have winch myself into the box that has been created or observe the rules as they are now because I am capable of making my own rules. Look around, those who we consider great are the ones who broke the rules, who decided to do it their way.

You don’t have to be what you are told, you can be anything you want. You can BE who you know yourself to be but don’t quite believe it. We do what we know because it is familiar and it’s familiar because we learn it in our family system. Are you willing for a moment to entertain the notion that they, the people who are our caretakers don’t know any more than you do. That to honour them we don’t have to live our lives just like theirs, that we can break the rules and in our breaking the rules we can create a world where everyone just gets to BE themselves. How often do you say or wish JUST LET ME BE. Do you know that you can choose that? Do you know you have the power within yourSELF to BE. Do you know that just because it is familiar does not mean it is right. Do you even notice the familiarity? There are times I know I don’t notice, it’s such a part of me the twinges I feel I dismiss as insignificant.

Pay attention to that feeling of familiarity – choosing to engage with it may  just be what saves your life.