Showing Up for Ourselves

With mindful self-awareness and choice – By Stacey Huget

We sometimes forget that life doesn’t just happen to us. We are also happening to it. We choose how we show up in any given moment – and exercising that choice mindfully is one of the keys to our own well-being, to living our lives with ease.

No matter what is going on around us, no matter how we are feeling inside, we can always choose how we respond. And it isn’t something we do for others – but for ourselves.

So much of our happiness in life depends on how we choose to show up. Our moods and emotions are often a direct result of our own behavior, our own energy.  Rise to a challenge with grace and courage and we feel great about ourselves. Totally lose our cool in the heat of the moment and, well, not so much.

Now, we’re not talking about faking it, about donning false masks to suit each occasion. Definitely not. Showing up for ourselves isn’t about compromising our authenticity, but of bringing mindfulness to it. It’s about making choices.

When we say, “I lost control”, what we really mean is that we forfeited it. And when we tell ourselves, “I just couldn’t resist”, what we really mean is that we chose not to. It has nothing to do with being authentic and everything to do with choice – and whether that choice was mindless or mindful.

The truth is, we are able to bring our best, authentic selves to any situation. It’s all in us – everything we ever need.

Victor Frankl famously said in Man’s Search for Meaning: Everything may be taken from us except the last of the human freedoms – our ability to choose our own attitude in any situation.

However we need to be in a given situation, however we want to show up, we can.  When we don’t it’s because, consciously or un-consciously, we’re choosing not to.

Sure, we explain it away with all kinds of reasons: It’s too much work. It’s someone else’s turn to make the effort. It’s too much pressure to be always be at our best.

And that’s all fine – if it makes us happy. The problem is, it usually doesn’t. More often than not, we feel more stressed, more disconnected, more down on ourselves. And it’s hard to be truly well or happy if we don’t feel good about who we are.

Self-love is a key part of wellness. We sometimes think of it as an experience we have when we’re in a good mood or when things are going our way – like a faucet that turns on or off based on the circumstances. The truth is we step into our self-love every time we call upon the best that’s within us.  We are honoring and expressing our highest self – not as a burden we “should” carry, but as a radiance we step into that enlightens even the darkest of circumstances.

There are few situations without choice points. In fact, life is full of them:

• Our partner snaps at us, and we can either snap back or bring up our patience and good nature.
• We wake up with a sense of dread, and we can either pull the covers up to wallow or conjure up our encouraging voice and get out of bed.
• Disappointing news arrives, and we can either get irritated with the world or cradle ourselves with compassion.
• We say something hurtful, and we can either get defensive or muscle up an apology.

Yes. Whatever we need – it’s within us. Marianne Williamson, in A Course in Miracles, reminds us of this: Only what you have not given can be lacking in any situation.

Our choices don’t only influence how we feel. They change the energy of a situation as well, inviting happier outcomes. Mastering them is all about mindful self-awareness, about asking the questions our deepest self wants to answer: What is going on for us in this moment?  What are we afraid of? What is it we truly want? What is within our control, and what do we need to accept? What is the best part of ourselves we can bring to this moment?

This ability to be “on” our process as well as spontaneously “in” our lives is uniquely human – and incredibly life-changing.

We have a vast reserve within us, of strength and resilience and light.  The more we tap into it, the more it rises naturally to the surface. And the more it changes our experience of the world.

Yes. The world is as encouraging as it is punishing, as full of love as it is of hate, as inviting as it is daunting.  Our experience of it is an eye-of-the-beholder thing. Like Anais Nin said, We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

And how we are is up to us.