Thoughts on Being Compliant and Complacent

Recently, when I thought about being expected to be complacent, I started laughing which turned quickly to tears as a wave of emotion and response moved through me. I grew up believing that I was annoying and that was something which I had to curb and correct.  I had to be compliant and complacent.  Don’t ask the questions moving in me.  Don’t question the status quo. Don’t make waves.  Accept the space relegated to me and mind my place.  And I’m angry as I write this – angry that this was done to me, angry that I didn’t feel safe to be an SD if I wanted to be, angry that I bought that BS even as I knew in a very deep place that I really couldn’t do that.  And, as I write this, I know that my anger is nothing more than a distraction – fall back into history and story and rail against my past and I stop moving forward for my own evolution.

I don’t feel complacent. I don’t think I ever did.  I was never content.  I just didn’t get that it was and is okay to be non-compliant.  I know that I lived in fear of being judged as that even as I could not rein in my being a nudge.  Oh I’d try to pull back and fit in and I always felt as if I was playing a role or wearing a disguise.  I could only do it for so long and then the I AM that I AM would come blazing to the fore – often in anger and rage which I now know wasn’t anger or rage and was pent up intensity finally being released.  What an image – I see mySelf like red hot lava flowing over my world!

My friend, Louise LeBrun wrote: “I am not matter or energy; I am not form or intention, I am all of it. Where I stand along the continuum will determine how I choose to live.” A much more elegant way of saying what I’m feeling in this moment. With each day, in each moment, with each breath, I’m enjoying my larger than life self!  I like what I’m creating in all aspects of my life: learning and writing and engaging with others and myself.  My choosing is no longer grounded in habit and old stuff.  Rather, its foundation is conscious awareness grounded in now.

There was a time in my life when I felt that I was living on the outside and always looking in and waiting for an invitation to join in. And I know, in this moment, that I don’t feel like that anymore.  And in that, I don’t feel separation from others and only feel opportunities to engage and create in ways which fill up my soul.

I am struck by how I feel so much more open within mySelf. And I feel that I’ve chosen to be part of conversations for what I will learn about mySelf and that my responses are not intellectual.  [A side bar – responding intellectually was always a way for me to distance myself from any discomfort or dis-ease I was feeling.]  It has struck me that, with each day, what I read and hear and each conversation opens space for waves to move and that they do so with ease and anticipation and no longer any trepidation.

And for that, I am really chuffed. And I don’t feel the need to be compliant and complacent.  That has absolutely no energetic pull on me anymore.