As teacher of the month for Longwave Yoga for December, I was asked a few questions about the theme of the month, finding your true north. One of which was about how we get to our true selves. I talked about peeling back the layers, that we have so many roles that we play throughout each day that those roles can sometime cloud our true self. If we’re not paying attention, we can lose ourselves in the expectations of the roles we play.
I first thought of peeling back the layers of an onion, each concentric section encircling the center, but as I was thinking about this blog post, I landed on the image of unwrapping. Yes, one obvious reason would be the December holidays, but also the sweetness of unwrapping, discovery and the opportunity to take our time. As I was daydreaming on our flight to visit family for Thanksgiving, the image of the scholarly owl rose up, asking the question of how many licks it takes to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop. I loved those Tootsie Pops – the odd sweet and tart combination of cherry and fudge tootsie roll, the crinkle of the waxy paper as I untwisted the wrapper, always keeping it whole and later folding into some variation of a miniature fan. It was tempting to take a few licks and then bite to get to the center, but I found the flavor to be totally different and then the sharp pieces of candy was intermingled with the soft chewy center. It was much better to take my time enjoying the emergence of the tootsie flavor peeking out through the candy, blending, meshing.
When we’re feeling disconnected, it can be tempting to cast off all of our layers of self, to get to that center, but if we’re not careful, we can lose aspects of those layers, those roles that speak to our true nature. If we take our time to peel them back, we can allow those qualities to integrate, blend, mesh.
Unwrapping is a discovery, a process, and if we are patient, we have an opportunity to uncover a more whole version of our Self, one that includes all of our roles, without any one particular role defining us.
"Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside, awakes."
~ Carl Gustav Jung ~
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