Every act of authentic expression carries the possibility of being misunderstood.
The Unlatching
I remember the day the man introduced me to this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today. – ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ – Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
I remember how these words unlatched a huge chunk of my binding- the fear of being misunderstood- that was holding me back from raw expression.
I began to speak my truth in my teachings, to forgive myself for being messy and imperfect, for making mistakes, for at times being a walking contradiction – ultimately allowing myself to fully be human.
The Freeze
For the first half of my life I learned along the way to hold myself back from fully expressing. I slowly and surely dismantled, unstrung and shut down my various gifts of expression until I felt completely frozen- as though in a block of ice, unable to speak, move, breathe or be.
I held back in every way, until I was completely unable to even feel what I wanted, liked, or needed.
Over the years I have learned that this untangling is a grand ongoing work of art, intelligently designed to progressively reveal new miracles to us so we may grow and grow. It’s all cleverly perfectly timed to unfold in perfect bite size amounts so all flavors and nutrients may be fully absorbed.
The Wilderness
The work is ongoing. I practice daily to be true and free and forgive and stand tall in my human wilder-ness.
And the wild and free woman does not always speak the loudest.
I often feel the conditioned need to suppress and hold back from full expression of all my sides, needs and wilds. The programming runs deep. Some days it’s subtle – a hesitation before I speak, a softening of something that wanted to come out sharper. Other days it’s louder. A full retreat back into the smaller, safer, more acceptable version. The one that won’t confuse anyone, the one that fits.
And then I remember. I come back to the practice and return to the truth of what’s actually moving through me in this moment. Forgiving the retreat. Forgiving the contradiction. Forgiving the mess of being a human being who is still, always, in the middle of becoming.
The Gift of the Binding
But – it’s all in the highest order. Every bit of our binding has an incredible gift for us.
As the complex miracles we are, through the gradual unwinding of our old programming, we are grown into human beings that are more wise, deep, empathic, intelligent, connected and stronger than we ever could have been without the strengthening struggles of releasing our own bindings.
Each time we untangle a single thread that’s strung our wings, it builds the internal strength that carrying an elephant across a bamboo bridge would build physically in us.
Fingerprinting With Life
This quote still soothes so deep – igniting the mysterious wilderness in me, while reminding me of the gifts of being tangled and encouraging the innate beautiful expressions of the raw truth of the moment to move through.
A birthright to us all.
May we let ourselves and each other be gorgeously imperfect, free and courageous enough to experiment and express. Fingerprinting with our life force, even at the beautiful risk of being misunderstood.
Wondrous Expression is stillness as much as it is movement- it’s full force comes not from quantity or effort or wildness or flashing lights – but from the effortlessness that comes with deep surrender to the rawness that naturally floods out from the core truth of one’s being, when simply being.
With so much love,
Meghan