In February 2017, I spontaneously decided to wake up at 6am every morning for 30 days and publish a blog post. These posts were just daily updates of projects I was working on.
I imagined I would either hate it or it would change my life forever. The latter was true.
Nearly 10 years on and I’ve decided to give it another go.
Here’s why.
The Feminine Needs a Container
This is something that I am making for myself for now. That is all it is.
It is a diary entry. Everything I make is a diary entry.
The beauty of a diary entry is that you can’t tell me my diary entry is not good enough or that it’s not what I experienced. I am writing the diary for myself. No one else can judge it. It is my experience of myself and my life. Everything we make can be that.
~ Rick Rubin
Back in December last year, I started working on a project called The Map of Transformation. I had been doing a lot of shadow work because I needed to establish direction in my business.
I realised that, in childhood, I had repressed a lot of masculine energy to feel safe. This resulted in over-identifying with my Anima (the feminine aspect within men), causing a lack of an internal masculine container that could hold space for my anxiety.
The resulting fragmentation of my psyche led to an absence of internal structure, order, decisiveness, direction, and ultimately a sense of autonomy. Needless to say, the first 30 or so years of my life was chaotic.
The Masculine Needs Structure, Direction, and Purpose
This realisation of repressed structure and direction explains my desire to create structured content externally, hence The Map of Transformation project.
It’s my souls attempt to integrate my repressed masculine back into consciousness and achieve individuation – and it’s working.
Saying that, I’ve recently hit some creative blocks with the map due to some gaps in knowledge. I needed a different approach to 1) bridge those gaps and 2) to help me internalise how information is structured effectively.
This led to my idea of publishing book summaries, something I’ve wanted to do for years, but hesitated.
The External World Influences the Internal World
The book I chose to start summarising first is one that’s had a big influence on me and the way I understand the human condition. It’s called How to Be An Adult by David Richo.
As soon as I started writing about it, I could feel the excitement of my Anima. It’s like she’s praising and thanking my inner masculine parts for developing the structure she needs to get into her creative flow.
It’s bridging the connection between my unconscious parts and conscious ego. The masculine feels respected and valued and the feminine feels safe and free.
Because the only influences I had growing up were either aggressive or chaotic, it led to a life of constantly seeking reassurance from external sources that I was safe.
But I could never find an external source of containment that felt solid, calm, consistent, or validating.
That was until I found books and other forms of content that followed a structured format. It led me to that decision to post a daily update on my blog back in 2017, when I first started reading books.
Even though this led to launching my own blogs and 3 years of freelance writing, I had no idea of the impact it was making on my inner world.
Since losing all freelance work and direction in my business, that internal structure started to crumble.
I felt lost.
Rituals and Integrating the Masculine
Around the same time I first read How to Be An Adult, I was also reading The Six Pillars of Self Esteem by Nathanial Branden, another book that completely reshaped the relationship with myself.
This developed a crystal clear understanding of self-esteem and how it shapes our lives and relationships.
A key element to develop self-esteem is knowing our values and doing actions that represent those values.
Another key element is ritual.
Ritual also requires action, a healthy trait of the masculine.
And what happens when we take consistent action on our values, not to prove, but to ritualise and habituate our creative expression?
It awakens the parts we’ve denied in ourselves, integrates them into consciousness, and allows the true Self to take the lead, instead of a fearful ego.
We gain self-esteem and awaken the wholeness that was always there.
Practice
Everything is a practice. If we don’t change our behaviour, we don’t integrate a new way of being. We stay stuck in a self that we were conditioned to be.
But its not about force or trying to change ourselves. That’s still the old self trying to take control.
When we surrender to a plan (or a map) and allow guidance from the wholeness within, what we are meant to practice presents itself to us.
These updates are my new practice that provide me with a container, direction, and structure to reveal my authentic self.
Stay tuned. I’ll be publishing my first book summary soon. Until then, you can follow my journey with these daily updates.
Thanks for reading.