“May I have more sugar for my coffee, please,” shouts a man sitting on a barstool at a local coffee shop. The chatty waitress behind the counter is involved with another customer, more attentive to her own needs than to her restless customers.
Irritated by the distraction from her idle banter, the waitress scans the line of empty sugar containers on the counter and shouts back, “Stir what you have.”
Our waitress, as metaphor, shows up in all those places we least expect her: in our dreams, in our prayer, in our efforts to fill a void with something or someone outside ourselves. She shouts back that emphatic No and leaves us scrambling to refocus on and rediscover what we do have.
The point? We have everything we need to have a satisfying life.
We are wired, as human beings, to know what is best for us and to be able to pull exactly that from within ourselves. No new romance, no new house, no plastic surgery, no piece of furniture or new job is going to satisfy the longing for safety and satisfaction that haunts us at our core.
If I continue to look for more and more outside myself to fill my longing, I diminish, discount and ultimately starve that creative, nurturing, eternal source within. If I project on to others what is creative, romantic, intelligent in myself, I lose touch with my own ability to meet crucial personal needs of safety, sanity and soul.
Following the lead of soul in ourselves will lead us to what it is we really want, to be alive in the moment, in all our moments. To embrace our life circumstances and to experience aliveness in them fills us with the vitality, the adventure and the sacredness we long for. We come to know what satisfies us, what is enough for us, what makes our heart sing. We can give it to ourselves.
One of my clients reminds herself this way: “Get back inside and quit giving away your power!”
We project outside that which we most need to connect with inside ourselves. We project our creative gifts on to another person and then see them as god or goddess. Only later, after we have seen through the projection, we realize that what we admired most about them was something longing to be recognized and developed in ourselves. Already ours.
We look for safety in another person’s love, in financial success, in more and more of whatever we think will make us safe. You are safe, the old witch/waitress taunts back at us, because it’s all there, already within you. Claim it as yours –your creativity, your intelligence and imagination – and you’ll never again fear that someone or something can rob you of that feeling of safe.
It takes a long time to realize our real gifts. Not many of us got the kind of mirroring we needed from our parents. Not that our parents didn’t love us, but they probably didn’t get it from their own parents. We come to recognize our own gifts through other’s response to us.
Throughout my life, I fell in love over and over with the same man, never realizing that what I loved in these different men was some unknown I loved in myself. I was drawn to the books I loved because they reflected back to me my own untapped wisdom. I didn’t recognize this for a long time. Over and over, I fell in love, was drawn to, my own soul.
This is not to say that our relationships with others, our love experiences, our knowledge gained, the wisdom given us by others, is not important. It is. We are not meant, as human beings, to be alone. It’s only when we keep looking for someone or something outside of us to fill what we can only fill for ourselves that we run on empty and keep coming back to the same starting place.
Recognizing the witch/waitress/eternal essence that speaks in our night dreams, that calls from our prayer-place, that shoots us down when we invest in something or someone at our own expense, comes as we come to love ourselves, our bodies, our personal story. Startling at first, she points to those places we give away to someone else that which is really us, then shows us, laughing, how to reclaim our pearls.
We live an abundant lifestyle. We live in an abundant environment with magnificent animals and exquisite specimens of nature. We keep thinking there is more to have. It’s the more of it that we misread. The more, indeed, is within. What we have is more than enough.