Conquering Yourself

It's been too long, Ask Edahn, and I'm sorry for not writing sooner. I've had a lot on my mind and a lot on my plate.

Tonight's post will need to be quick, but hopefully it's a sign of more to come. (There's like 20 That'sWhatSheSaids in there, but I can't parse em all out right now.)

One of the crossroads, or maybe paradoxes, I've found myself in these past, oh, 2 years, it's the paradox of change. The more you force change, the more you become the same person--fighting, battling, judging, and being self-conscious. And it's the moments where you surrender that you feel free to try new things with a sense of self-forgiveness and bravery. It's in the moments where you stop trying to get things that you see 1) you have every tool you need and 2) there are still some things you need to do. When you push forward, you find resistance, but when you let yourself be as you are, you seem to drift almost effortlessly in the right direction.

This puts people (read: me) at an impasse. You know there's an alternative, but you know that the only way you'll taste it is through giving up your pursuit of it. Sort of.

It seems to me that so much of psychology and the self-help movement is aimed at forcing, change, conquering. As long as I...you...we try to conquer ourselves, we'll just fall into the same old patterns of enemy/friend, winner/loser, good/bad that steal our sense or real peace and meaning. Rather than conquer the parts of ourselves that we don't like, I think it makes much more sense to try and conquer the part of yourself that always believes there is something that needs to be conquered to win. Conquer your false notions of success. Conquer your feeling that something is wrong with yourself. In other words, sit still and see what's already here, however ugly or boring or painful, and just wait. That's the only kind of conquering that really makes any sense to me.