Come out of hiding

To everyone who is reading: thank you for being here. Today’s writing comes from what I have seen lately and that is that we hide aspects of who we are and we also hide aspects of our experiences from others.

What we fail to notice or what is not so obvious is that we hide them so well that, not only do we hide them from others, but we hide them from ourselves.

Because, let’s admit it, we are pretty good at hiding. As children we have practiced that a lot. Either in the form of a game or how many times as a child you did something that you knew your parents would consider wrong and you would hide in order to avoid a fight or being punished? And even if you were not hiding physically, you were hiding in yourself, you would hide your words just so that you would not make things worse.

And because we are so good at it, we fall into a vicious circle. Because we are so good at hiding we can very well hide from ourselves.

When there are aspects of ourselves than we do not see, then we are not aware of our true value and we show up in the world with the hidden belief that we are not worthy enough.

And because our actions come from what we believe, we end up settling in places, relationships, positions where we do not want to be. We end up feeling shame of speaking out, of expressing ourselves in groups of people, we fear judgment while desperately seeking for validation. “If only someone would tell me that I am doing something right then I would continue doing what I want to do”.

“If only someone would look at me and tell me how beautiful and worthy I am then I would feel better about myself.” Or, on the contrary, we feel awkward and uncomfortable when we do receive compliments. I know I packed a lot of implications here and I would like us to move a little bit further from all these thoughts as I want you to notice them. Simply notice your thoughts in this moment and when you feel like you become more aware of what you are thinking, try to answer the question:

If your thoughts would have a speed, how fast would they go?

No need to use the answer to judge yourself or to label yourself in any way, this is not about noticing how calm you are nor how fast your thoughts flow. This is about noticing who is noticing them. It’s like sitting on a beach looking up and noticing the wind that moves the clouds. Regardless of what you notice, you are still. Even if you see gray clouds or bright ones, you are just being, I dare to say for the sake of contrast, transparent.

While you are here, noticing what you notice, connecting with yourself more and more, there is a sense of peace that comes out of hiding. Or not. Again, judgment is not invited to our talk today.

Whatever feeling comes out is what it’s appropriate for this moment.

Your experience is not your enemy. Your experience is not telling you how good or bad you are, where you should be or what you should do.

Your experience comes from the thinking you have going on in this moment and that is perfectly fine. Because, as you know, thoughts come and thoughts go.

There is this misunderstanding that your value is reflected by your thoughts, by how intelligent or less intelligent your thoughts are.

That can’t be true if they come and go. You don’t come and go. Your value does not come and go. Let thoughts do that and you stay with what remains.

And when you are there, feel free to explore answers to all the questions you might have. Feel free to explore solutions to whatever problem is still left. This is not just another strategy for hiding from what needs our attention.

Now that I told you what this is not, I will not tell you what this is because that is uniquely for you to discover. And if I would drop my final invitation for this week, this would be it: come out of hiding and feel free to discover.

More than that, allow everything to be uncovered. And, with the risk of repeating and summarising everything I talked about in this article in one sentence, all I’m saying is: let your inner glamour shine!