Validity and Connection
I feel thrilled and honoured to have been invited to be a contributer to the Women Gathering site. The fun of it all started, today, when I attempted to login to the site with the username and password that I had been given.
My username was being displayed as ‘invalid’ when I logged into Women Gathering. I had entered my username, both as case specific and as non-case specific; No matter what I did, I was unable to connect (and I was, seriously, staying present to that thought rumbling through my body as I looked at the words that I had written to my host in a subsequent email – ‘I am unable to connect’. Can you help me with the connection? What a metaphor!
WordPress… when I arrived at the Women Gathering login page, I remembered that I had never been able to fully understand the WordPress site connections, where to start, and how to navigate them; I figured I would stay where I was at (Blogger = for me, then, yet another identifier… maybe, then, I would be valid). I guessed that I was going to learn about these connections with respect to staying connected to myself through my own press of words. Wow, there was a ton(e) of metaphors running though all of this!
‘Invalid username’! Me… invalid (as in not valid) or invalid (as in crippled, disabled, twisted, bent out of shape)… NOT SO. Them’s fighting words… but whom was I fighting? My throat was raw, its tissue was undulating and there was huge, uncomfortable movement deep inside my left chest – that started at my sternum and moved into the area of my heart and out through my left breast. My palate was moving and spreading as if from the vomer (seam on the roof of my mouth running parallel to the seam of the corpus callusum) out to the edges of my oral cavity. My head was aching and moving.
How long had I been carrying around unconscious, now conscious, notions of invalidity? How had that fertilized the expression of whom I was? As such, old, historical thoughts of ‘I have screwed up again’ would have been strategic genius to sustain the vibration of ‘username invalid’.
Imagine! All of this epiphany because I simply said ‘Yes’ to an invitation to contribute to Women Gathering. That really is what blogging is all about… the awakening of truth in a collective, whether it be the cells of one body or the individuals of one collective or of many… in this case, women gathering in small groups, talking. Does it get any better than this?
I know that there is more to come. I also know that I am now done with all notions of invalidity as applied to whom and what I am - and am not.
So… another notion to consider relative to the validity of my username: I AM not my name; I AM much more than that. As such, my name is a strawman identifier for the essence of me, yet it is not me. The strawman identifier – not me – is the one that is unable to connect, because it is a fiction, not real. I, alone, AM real… and I AM not my name!
Wow, Just think of it! This realization was so much fun that I started to laugh. I knew that I was metabolizing this new reality as information because the sensations in my body were changing… and, metaphorically, I was easily making all the necessary connections to WordPress in the Women Gathering site. Metaphors galore! It was and is all pretty funny to me! And… it is amazing, too.
In the beginning, I had written that I was unable to connect. How hilarious, yet profound, is that as metaphorical to my expression of my life?! If I think that I am the strawman identifier, I will always be disconnected. Yet, when I know that I am not, then my connection to self is certain and sound. What a riot! This is so much fun!
The writing of this blog has lit me up! I grok whom I am and whom I am not. I grok what I am and what I am not. I also grok that my validity is birthed, moment to moment, in my Signal from Self. Everything else is the strawman – the one that I believed I was and, now, know that I AM not – the one that I identified with as real and, now, know is not.
