breaking free of "why"
“What am I doing wrong?”
“Why am I feeling like this?
“Why do I feel so horrible?”
“Everyone around me seems to be coping with issues just fine. Why does it seem like I’m not doing as well as they are?”
“Why am I so behind?”
“What am I doing wrong? I try so hard to feel good by doing what I’m told is the right thing - meditation, rest, clean eating, moving my body in uplifting ways - but end up feeling like shit instead.”
Do these questions sound familiar?
To me, they do. It’s so easy to obsess over asking myself “why” when I’m feeling upset, drained, bored, confused, frustrated, or any other mess of negative emotions. The soul-level transitions of 2020, and now the ongoing work of building new paradigms, brings with it opportunities to become more intimately familiar with these feelings than ever before.
These feelings have a tendency to become reflexive, instinctual. I get caught in a web of questioning the negative feelings that sit in the pit of my stomach, just as quickly as the feelings appear.
There is an intense burning inside of me that believes that if I can just understand WHY I am feeling the way that I do, then I can solve the issue and release my suffering. I can get “back on track” and understand the problem, thereby avoiding it again in the future.
I used to believe that this worked. But then it all started to unravel, and even when I’d follow the process of asking myself why, and come up with answers that I thought were sufficient, I’d still fail to relieve my suffering and end back up in the same place I was when I started. Sometimes this process was instantaneous; other times, I’d convince myself I was fine, at least for a little while. Eventually, though, the negative feelings would creep back in, and things would go back to how they were.
After repeating this cycle over and over, stumbling along the way, here is what I am ready to understand:
The ego seeks understanding. The soul seeks, and is, love.
What do I mean by this?
The ego is ready to go to war for things it cannot understand in basic, simple terms. It seeks answers to questions that cannot be answered plainly, validation for feelings that do not need to be coddled, and resistance to things that are new and unknown.
The ego exerts itself through an insatiable need to know on an intellectual level. This has nothing to do with the felt sense of the body. The ego thinks, “if I can just know the answer to this problem I am having, then I can control it, and by controlling it, I can feel safe. All I need is to feel safe, and then I can be free.”
The ego is responsible for upholding what soul-level astrologers Mark Borax and Marcella Eversole call “the Trance of Normalcy”. The ego within all of us has a hard time understanding that it is not truly in control, because most of us are taught that the ego is the critical, and most central, point of contact between ourselves and the world we live in. We are taught that it’s the ego that makes the decisions, seeks the recognition, gets the accolades, and creates our success.
How does this show up in practical ways? For me, it can look like:
Comparing myself to people I know (and people I don’t)
Doing things that don’t feel aligned just because someone told me I “should”, or because there has been an expectation of certain behavior from family, friends, and/or society
Repeatedly working until I am physically and emotionally overwhelmed and exhausted
Placing an emphasis on my external achievements and believing that my worth is defined by them
Overly rigid and binary thinking (this is right, that is wrong, and there is no in-between)
Abusing my personal boundaries by saying yes to things I don’t want to say yes to
Abusing my personal boundaries by ignoring how I really feel just to “get along”
Fear of being vulnerable, even around people I trust
The soul inherently counters this notion of absolute control. Esther and Abraham Hicks are an amazing source of guidance on the subject. The soul understands that having the “right answer” is not what will solve the perceived problem. In fact, the soul knows that there is no specific “right answer”, only an infinite number of paths to various destinations, some of which will lead us to places of joy, and others which will lead us to places that do not serve our most aching wishes. The soul wants us to know that we cannot make a “wrong” decision; there is no such thing. The soul is always working to realign us with our most true, most divine wishes, dreams, and desires. The soul understands that the only way to emancipate ourselves from the feelings keeping us down is to accept. That’s it. Accept them, feel them, experience them for what they are, without judgement or shaming. Once we accept, we can divert our energy to spaces aligned with what generates the most happiness and joy for us internally.
And so today, I sit and I write and I share this with you.
I am learning to break free of pestering myself with questions of “why”. Why I fall into believing I’m not good enough, why time seems to be moving both more slowly and quickly these days, why I have trouble letting go of certain patterns in my life, why things in my past have happened that didn’t make sense to me then, and still stand to confuse me now. These are all pieces of my ego that yearn to be noticed. Instead of growing more and more frustrated that I can’t always answer these questions, or the answers I come up with seem insufficient, I turn to letting go.
I turn to accepting the emotions for what they are - fear, anxiety, frustration, loneliness, sadness. They are all valid and I am no less worthy for feeling them.
The next time I am tempted to ask myself “why” I feel a certain way, I will take a deep breath in through my nose, exhale fluidly through my mouth, and just be with what comes up. I am learning that in the moment after, there is truth, and there is love.
I am grateful.