New Year's Challenge Day 20: How to Take Up Space

WISH Radio: Straight Talk for Women’s Health

[New Year, New You] Day 20: How to Take Up More Space

Life is either expanding and improving, or declining. There are no flat lines in life until we’re dead. As soon as things are flat and unchanged, they are beginning to decline and fall apart. Since the time you came into the world, you’ve been accumulating wisdom and experience. As your body grew, you gained strength and physical ability. It’s perfectly acceptable to assume that with new wisdom and experience life should improve--things should get better and you should become more competent.

A well-known and almost overused quote by Marianne Williamson comes to mind, though I’d like to take it a bit further than most do and offer an explanation for why this quote may be true:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.”

-Marianne Williamson

When you were young, chances were good you acted without hesitation. You weren’t afraid to speak your mind, run without wondering how you looked and declare even your wildest dreams to be certainties about your future.

Then, under some of the unkind pressures of life, you, a droplet capable of great influence, started to question your ability to influence and create a positive effect on life. You may have learned through others around you (those who did not have your best intentions at heart and who likely were under an unbearable burden of their own confusion) that you were too loud, too ugly, too messy, too stupid, or any number of other disqualifying features. Maybe as you aged and acquired more confusions, you started to make mistakes and act in error. You caused problems for yourself and other people.

The more you started to doubt yourself, regret your decisions or create problems by acting in error, the more you held yourself back from causing harm. It’s as if our failures and frustrations cause us to question who we are--we act less, think and worry more, and do our best to hold ourselves back from the flow of life to avoid causing more problems. This behaviour is the FUNDAMENTAL REASON people withdraw from life--we doubt ourselves and fear causing more harm and so withdraw and limit our influence rather than extend it.

Out of confusion, we create problems. Then, having created problems that don’t align with who we know we are capable of being, lacking the tools to understand why and with no support to help us clear up the confusions and resolve the problems, we begin to withhold ourselves from life. We create illness, failures and other “reasons” to take ourselves down. It is for this reason that we do not shove someone who is struggling further down the chute with punishment or blame. It will only push people further away from life and create a decline for ourselves in the process.

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