One of the most significant shifts we will ever make in life, and it’s also one of the most challenging.
Our culture teaches us that the ONLY thing that matters is how things look on the surface.
It teaches us to value ourselves and others, to value what we are doing, to value what we achieve and to value everyone around us based on how it LOOKS in the context of culture.
But the reality is, living for how things looks is the perfect formula for living a life that feels…terrible.
That leaves us feeling like we don’t have purpose, like we don’t actually have joy and like we don’t really know WHY we are doing what we are.
It leads us to a state of not being able to connect to our humanity or the humanity of others.
It’s actually much more detrimental than most of us really understand it to be.
So let’s explore today why living for how things feel is so important and how making this shift can radically change our lives, our values and what we pursue and what we prioritize in our lives.
More importantly, let’s look at how living for how things feel can help us connect to our humanity and be the kind of people who can create the future we actually want on this planet.
This is a BIG deal, so let’s dive in!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We Learned That Approval = Love Very Early In Life
The truth is, we live in a world and in a culture that fully trains us to live for how things look vs. living for how they are.
It teaches us to prioritize image over literally everything else - and it teaches us to disconnect from our feelings, our bodies, our lived experience and our true spirituality/humanity in favor of that which looks ‘right’ or ‘good’ to others.
As we have talked about a lot around here, this living for how things look vs. living for how they are is something that is very attractive to us on a subconscious level.
This is at least partially because in our early childhoods, we had little to actual autonomy in our lives.
Rather, we were fully dependent upon our caregivers to understand us, provide for us, care for us, meet our needs, explain to us how the world worked and so on. We were not capable of meeting our own needs, of supporting ourselves, of taking ourselves out of a state of pain and moving ourselves into a state of pleasure. We were not capable of living for how things were/how they felt because we were dependent upon our caregivers for all that we needed and wanted.
We were in a situation where from our perspective, our caregivers were all knowing, all powerful beings that COULD have met our our needs, kept us safe and given us what we wanted at any given time - and when they didn’t, from our perspective this usually meant that we were going to assume that there was something wrong with US.
We perceived that if we were in main, this must have meant that we were doing something wrong, that we were bad, wrong or shameful, that we then had to reject, deny and suppress parts of ourselves or that we needed to figure out what kind of behavior was going to get us approval from our caregivers so that they would then care for and connect with us, and so that they would meet our needs and keep us safe.
We were in a temporary codependent relationship with our caregivers, that really drilled into our nervous systems that getting our needs met came from being loved, understood and approved of by those around us.
This is the first way we learned to relate to other humans - that being loved, being valued, being seen, being understood and being held as important and ‘good’ by those around us meant provision and that being rejected, denied, abused, misunderstood or otherwise neglected by others meant that WE were doing something wrong/were somehow deserving of that treatment.
This is because as children, we really couldn’t conceptualize the reality that our caregivers were humans separate from us.
We couldn’t really conceptualize that our caregivers weren’t fully all knowing and all capable.
We may have learned later on in childhood that our caregivers were incapable on some or many levels - but again this doesn’t mean that we would then have learned to love and value ourselves no matter what - what this would actually have done was likely created a situation where we were thrust into an independence or a caretaker role where we tried to care for our caregivers FAR too early in life, leading to a sense of never feeling safe/secure/ok in relationships moving forward, and leading to a feeling that the way to be loved, to be seen and to be provided for in the ways we NEEDED to be, came through understanding, caring for and taking care of others and their needs.
We would have learned that it was either our job to continue to try to ‘figure out’ what our caregivers wanted/needed from us so that they would finally approve of and pay attention to us, what they wanted or needed from us so that they would stop abusing or hurting us, or what they wanted or needed from us in terms of care and support so that they would finally have the time and resources left over to see us and what we needed. Or we would have learned that depending on others is simply unsafe, and that the only way to live in the world and be ok is to be fully self-sufficient and independent.
We would have learned that approval from others was the key to being taken care of and getting our needs met - and the more our needs went UNMET, the more we were abused, the more we were neglected, the more we were shamed, blamed or otherwise left to feel like who and what we were wasn’t what was wanted via not being taken care of - the more we would have learned that the way to be safe was to mold ourselves in whatever ways we could to the expectations of the outside world.
This meant that from the very beginning of our lives, to the degree that we were cared for, the degree that we were made safe, the degree that we were allowed to be ourselves and express ourselves and still get our needs met and the degree to which our caregivers were capable of caring for and providing for us would have become the degree to which we grew into our own autonomy and understanding of how the world actually worked vs. settling deeper into the idea that outside approval was dependent upon us being/living/acting in certain specific ways in order to get our needs met.
You see, the more we lacked a secure connection in our relationship with our caregivers, the more we were made insecure and unsafe, the more we were shamed/blamed/guilted for our behavior and way of being, the more we were neglected, the more our needs went unmet - the more we would have learned that it was our behavior that was the problem, and that it was up to us to figure out how to change ourselves so that we would be loved, seen and valued and therefore taken care of.
This is, for most of us, the root of why we feel like we need to live up to the expectations of others, why we feel like we must be loved and liked in order to be safe, why we so deeply shame, blame and guilt ourselves whenever we experience pain and why we constantly feel like who and what we are isn’t good enough.
A Culture Of How It Looks
Many of us were never able to make the healthy, developmental transition from this state of feeling like love and approval from the outside world = safety and provision, to the understanding that as adults we are now capable of understanding ourselves, understanding systems and how they work, understanding the world around us and taking the power we have to create what we need/want to create for ourselves in real reality.
Most of us took what we learned in terms of being codependent with our caregivers, and took it out into our relationships with our peers and other authority figures - and many of us feel that sense of the 'generalized other' - that sense that 'everyone' thinks/feels certain ways about us, what's right, what's wrong and who and what we should/shouldn't be - and we feel like the approval of those around us and 'everyone' is important, and like we aren't going to be ok if we don't get that approval.
We would likely have developed ways of adapting ourselves and our true nature to match what we felt was required for us to be liked by our friends, our teachers, our church-groups and society at large, eventually into what we felt our partners/S.O's wanted, what our co-workers and bosses wanted and so on and so forth. Until eventually we feel like we are living lives where we aren't able to be our true selves, or where we feel like we don't even KNOW what our 'true self' is, all we know is that we are constantly struggling to 'fit in' and 'be good enough' - most of the time never really knowing what 'good enough' would be, if we had to slow down and actually define it. We just know we aren't it. And we have the receipts of rejection to prove it.
We got stuck in this state of feeling like we either need to be perpetually reading the people/society around us for what’s ‘in’, what’s ‘acceptable’, what’s seen as ‘good’ and ‘right’ and morphing ourselves to fit that image, or like we need to be fiercely independent so that we avoid being reliant upon anyone or anything else in order to get our needs met.
We got stuck in a state of feeling like the only way to have pleasure, safety and provision is to be understood, loved and approved of by those around us - so that they will then figure out what we want and need and will provide it for us - or feeling like the most dangerous thing we could possibly do is show any kind of vulnerability/weakness/incapacity to others because that would mean being let down and made unsafe automatically.
Then culture comes in and tells us that this is EXACTLY how things work, exactly what the expectation is and that this is how we must live in order to be ok.
Culture comes in and tells us that all of our pain is our fault - that if we are experiencing any kind of struggle in our lives that this means that we aren’t ‘taking enough responsibility’ for ourselves, that we are lacking some sort of self help/personal growth/spirituality modality that will ‘fix’ us, that we need to change in some way to be more valued by society and culture.
Culture comes in to tell us that it is our lack of being able to fit in, to look how we are supposed to look, to achieve what we are supposed to achieve, our lack of ability to have it all in terms of the perfect career, relationship, financial status, wardrobe, body, self care routine, spirituality and so on that is the reason we never feel satisfied, safe or like we are ‘doing good enough.’
Culture comes in to tell us that we are morally failing, that we are not who we ‘should’ be, and that the solution to our problems lies in becoming more productive, more consumptive and more in alignment with whatever is in ‘style’ at the time.
This messaging means that we are continually drawn out of our bodies, out of our power, out of our adult autonomy and perspective and back into that childhood perspective that if we are in pain, if we are suffering, if life isn’t going how we want it to that this means that WE are failing on some level.
It activates us into feeling deeply unsafe - because we are constantly feeling like we must be being rejected on some level.
Because to our nervous systems pain = being rejected = I am not going to get my needs met = I have to fix myself to be better.
With this, most of us have developed ways of being that we would call coping mechanisms, self sabotaging behaviors, deep levels of self hate and rejecting, shame, blame and guilt stories that loop around in our minds telling us that if we could just ‘be better’ in certain areas of our lives everything would change and we would feel how we want to feel - and we walk around thinking that these SURFACE things are the ‘problem’ that we need to fix.
We aren’t seeing that these ways of being are all behaviors rooted in our childhood desire to get our needs met through fitting in, shutting parts of ourselves down we believed were the reason we were being rejected, that are rooted in trying to make us ‘better’ for the people around us so that they will love us, understand us and then meet our needs for us.
Most of us don’t see this - all we really see is the pain being caused by the surface behavior, all we hear are the shame, blame and guilt stories - and it feels REALLY real to us to believe that the solution is to fix ourselves.
We are not seeing that the real answer is learning to understand ourselves in a way that we have never been empowered to do before.
We are not seeing that getting past the shame, blame and guilt means actually seeing the pain we are in, it means learning to understand what it is we didn’t get or that we got that was harming us in our past, learning to see where our patterns actually came from, and what we need to be SUPPORTED in finding new patterns that work.
We aren’t seeing that our pain is not our fault, that we all live in a society that isn’t supportive of our humanity, and that THIS is actually what leads to a lot of our pain.
We are taught to continue in our loops of self rejection, instead of ever getting to know who we are, what we need and how to meet those needs in real reality - and THIS is what keeps us trapped in that state of ‘always striving never arriving’ feeling.
We never get to the roots of our pain, we never learn to have self compassion, and we never learn what we need in terms of support and provision - so we stay stuck in that childhood codependency with the world around us.
This is why nothing ever actually sticks or works. This is why we get stuck in healing, and stuck in lives that don’t actually feel good in general - because we stay stuck in the patter of living for how things look vs. living for how things are.
Wellness/Spirituality Touts The Same Message
This is especially true in the self help/spirituality/wellness space.
If we really take a step back and look at how most things are marketed to us, they really aren’t sold as things we should do because they feel good - we are sold things based on the idea that they ‘look’ good.
They are following trends, they are all about the quick, flashy, ‘change your whole life in 30 days’ solutions that keep us trapped in that never ending quest to fix ourselves while never actually getting to KNOW ourselves, what we want, what we need or finding tools that work over the long term.
The health, wellness and spirituality worlds are operating just like the rest of our system - make sure you feel like what’s ‘wrong’ with you is your fault, is rooted in a behavior, a bad part of yourself, something that you can look at on the surface and say ‘if I could just get rid of/fix this ONE thing my whole life would be better’, make sure you feel like you are being ‘empowered’ through a message that you can do the program or take the supplement or use the protocol being offered to do this very work, make you feel ‘special’ because you are now in the group of people who really ‘get it’, and then they offer you something that will usually have no hope of working because again, they don’t actually address root issues.
They don’t take you into an understanding of WHY you are how you are, how you developed your patterns as a way of supporting yourself the best way you could, they don’t offer tools that help you get to KNOW yourself - but rather just sell things to buy and consume that put a bandaid on your pain for a while, that give you that ‘buzzy’ feeling as you white-knuckle your way into resisting what you really want to do and you end up in a state where you are resisting and rejecting YOURSELF on an even DEEPER level than before - leading to more coping, numbing, self sabotage and pain, making you feel like you failed and drawing you into consuming MORE things thinking that is the thing that will fix you.
It’s a big mess, because it’s never about how it actually feels, how it’s actually working or what you actually need.
It’s all about the surface, how it looks and what’s popular in the moment.
So How Do We Shift?
The biggest key to start with here is to recognize that healing happens in steps.
That there is no ‘one thing’ that is EVER going to be THE ANSWER to our problems, and there’s no one path that will be the ‘right thing’ for all people, or even for you all the time.
Rather healing is going to come as a result of getting to know who you are in this moment, getting to know what happened to you, getting to know how what you are doing now is serving to help you, and working with your nervous system and perceptions in a slow, gentle, progressive way.
This leads you to being able to slowly shift your ways of being through supporting yourself, vs. fighting with yourself.
You are going to start to realize that with all the options out there, the tools that are actually going to ‘work’ for you, are always going to be the ones that meet you where you’re at in this moment, that actually feel GOOD to you while you practice them, that help you feel more grounded, safe and like you are innocent and worthy of love, and that connect you back with your feelings vs. taking you OUT of your body and your feelings.
They are going to be based on teachers and guides who never ‘tell you what to do’, but rather support you in figuring out for yourself what actually feels good, what’s sustainable for you, what’s helpful for you right now and what is rooted in the deepest levels of compassion.
THIS is what is actually going to work long term.
When you are being supported in getting to know yourself, in seeing that everything you are and everything you are doing is rooted in innocence, in finding compassion for yourself and then moving from that place of self support through tools and modalities that offer you more and more capacity to ground, to see things differently and to FEEL differently - THIS is when you know you’re on the right path.
So long as we are staying locked in the mental gymnastics of trying to ‘do the right thing’ in our world that has a million and a half offers for us at any given time, and that thrives off of us constantly feeling like failures and like ‘fixing ourselves’ through self rejection is the answer, the longer we are going to stay stuck.
The more we are turning this ship around, the more we are offering ourselves true compassion and curiosity, the more we are learning to FEEL how the different tools that are offered to us actually FEEL in our experience - knowing that anything that feels heavy, contracting or like it’s shutting us down, or anything that gives us that out-of-body light, buzzy feeling is actually taking us AWAY from ourselves and healing, and anything that gives us a sense of peace, grounding and safety is drawing us TOWARDS healing - THIS is how we know we are ‘on track.’
Living for how things feel is the key to figuring out what’s actually right for us and what isn’t.
It is truly the ‘secret key’ foundation upon which ALL other true healing is going to be built upon.
I know it’s really challenging in our world to make this shift - but I promise you, it is the thing that will help you determine not only what’s best for YOU, but also what’s going to be best for all of those around you.
Living for how things feel will help you understand what you can withdraw from, what you no longer need to participate in, what you no longer need to consume and where you can stop producing, where you don’t actually need the approval of those around you and where you can start to build the new world we all want to live in - because the more you are supporting yourself in this TRUE way, the more you are going to figure out how you can support others as well.
With all of that I want to invite you to look at your practices, and test all of them against what has been written above.
How do you FEEL when you do your practices?
How do you feel when you consume and produce?
How do you feel when you think your thoughts?
If it’s not helping you feel safer, more grounded and more empowered and supported - there’s room to question.
What would it look like for you to start practicing living for how it feels vs. living for how it looks?
Are you willing to give it a try?
That’s all that’s required.
<3
If you’re looking for more content like this, as well as a more guided approach to the self love path, come join the Mystery School for community and more resources and tools like this! For all things self-love, self awareness, grounded spirituality and true community, check out:
The Aliyah Mystery School Right Here!
