The Veil We Live Behind
As part of the Hidden Architectures theme I am beginning to point out, I am starting to notice after diving deeper into the Kind Rebirths space, I start to think back and notice how many of us move through life without fully realizing something – the Veil. If you’ve been following some of my posts, you see that I have discussed the Lila – or God’s Divine Play and the Maya – the illusion of the way we believe life exists (if you haven’t read them…it’s never too late) some. This is sort of an outreach of those concepts in the way that I see it. This veil is not a literal veil. It’s more of a psychological one and one of emotion. It is a subtle separation between the actual and factual events that happen within us versus the version of life that we have learned to perform because we have over time made ourselves believe. And trust me, this veil shows more often than we may even realize. Let me give you a few examples.
The Veil of Busy-ness. This veil exists in a way that we convince ourselves to constantly stay occupied because once we slow down just a bit, we start to notice that we may have to confront some personal issues and our own demons. As such we start to fill every moment of our lives surrounded by noise, by work from our jobs, our responsibilities, errands, and just random busy movements. This is something different than functional or necessary productivity. It’s another time of movement that becomes more of a hiding place than something purposeful. Haven’t you ever felt that sometimes staying busy helps us avoid things that we would rather not address?
The Veil of Social Performance. This is the pressure to always appear to stay composed and emotionally unaffected. Or, how about when we try to look more “evolved” than we actually are? Maybe it’s an act of trying to always look as if we are emotionally unaffected and that we are composed. And by this last one, I don’t mean remaining brave in the face of adversity. I am referring to remaining bottled up when we are going through a difficult moment not willing to release or express our true feelings. I am guilty of this because sometimes I just don’t know how to handle a situation, that’s a fact. So we learn how to perform confidently while privately we are overwhelmed, disconnected, and just plain emotionally drained.
The Veil of Forced Certainty. As a whole, I think we as humans often struggle with uncertainty. We don’t like the unknown. We don’t like the loss of control. So we cling with a tight grip to opinions, to those busy movements, to routines, and sometimes unrealistic expectations because they make us feel safe. And when we are not super careful, certainty becomes a defense mechanism which activates that “fight or flight” response as a tactic to ward off change. Rather than facing the uncomfortable nature of not knowing, we force and create conclusions.
The Veil of Distraction. Think about how many ways we pull ourselves away (or equally we allow ourselves to drift away) from the present moment because the present moment asks us to do something difficult or face something difficult. As much as we talk about mindful awareness to find clarity here in KR, in truth, awareness ushers in discomfort. But it’s many times necessary. Finding clarity was never meant to be easy to obtain. After all, don’t we distract ourselves so much that we often lose sight of true perspective? It goes hand-in-hand: we see difficulty, we don’t like it, and we try to distract our minds from it. Awareness, when properly focused through positive mindful thinking practices, help us meet our attachments, our fears, our avoidance, and our emotional habits.
The Veil of Emotional Avoidance. Grief, loneliness, disappointment, anger, resentment, vulnerability are just a few of the most common feelings (and fears) that impact us. And the irony in this is that when we avoid them, they don’t disappear. There is no surprise there. They are patient and will wait all the while reshaping how we react, how we manage our personal and interpersonal relationships, and the decisions we make.
In the Kind Rebirths space, we can’t make you perfect. And mindfulness, as easy as I may make it sound, isn’t easy AND it is not about making you perfect either. It is about becoming aware enough to notice that these types of veils exist and that we wear them. Mindful awareness slows us down when we start to put them on. It gives us the moments we need to find and recognize them. And that, this moment of clarity, is a Kind Rebirth.
Stay Mindful…
Rebirth.
