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Terrifying acceptance

By Lian Brook-Tyler

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” – C.G. Jung

It is terrifying because it is the most shocking, confronting and disruptive thing… it triggers other people like nothing else when you’ll no longer gag and contort yourself to receive scraps of their approval.

And it is also the most healing, loving and liberating thing not just for ourselves, but for everyone in our lives.

Here’s some things I’ve accepted about myself that have taken me closer to accepting myself completely…

Being autistic, especially the aspect of being autistic that means I say and do things that others experience as strange, exacting or aloof

Beauty being one of my highest values – shallow, material, egotistical nonsense to many, a heartfelt spiritual practice for me

Being dyscalculic and several times a day making a mess of anything involving numbers, times and dates. Only yesterday I replied to a friend and said “#3… this is me” #3 in his list being an older brother mentor figure

It feeling natural to me to express my deepest desires and being open to receive them being met. This one might sound easy to accept and yet, I’m often told it’s something that triggers other women in particular like crazy. My sister often says it makes her laugh how I’ll say “I would love [insert what for others would be a distant dream]” and then it’ll appear in my life immediately

Being partially deaf – this one was SO hard for me to accept and so I hid it for years, which meant I spent meetings in my corporate days lip reading, guessing and redirecting

Being so open to magic and spirit that I’ve had shocking experiences and feared going mad, therefore spent most of my life denying it and silently judging others for their naïveté or duplicity

And here’s something that I’m still learning to accept about myself…

Being devoted to fully embodying the Feminine and all the politically incorrect, shadow-provoking, challenging things that it entails. Even though I feel I’ve accepted it; the fact I don’t share much of this aspect of me outside of WTW crucibles shows it’s something I still have some way to go to accept completely

If you’re feeling inspired to accept yourself too, know that it doesn’t need to happen all at once… honour that wise and wonderful nervous system of yours… what’s one thing you’ve been hiding, repressing or shaming yourself for that you’ll choose now to learn to accept?

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HOLIER THAN THOU

By Lian Brook-Tyler

I read a couple of studies recently about the dark side of being seen to be “doing the right thing”.

They showed that displays of excellence can turn off or provoke the very people they might otherwise inspire.

One study showed that “Principled deviants who take the high road threaten others’ moral self-worth”. Research subjects were asked to complete a racist task by an experimenter, and the people who refused to obey were disparaged by the other participants who had themselves gone through with it… the rebel’s stance felt like an indictment of their own behaviour.

I’ve heard many times that how I am seems too extreme, perfect or unobtainable.

Who is *that* devoted, no matter what it requires?

This kind of feedback isn’t new though, decades before I had this conscious devotion, right from childhood I was always on the edge of whatever group I was in, doing whatever seemed like the right thing to me at the time, regardless of what others thought about it.

Whether that was making it clear that I wasn’t going along with the whole office laughing at a racist joke, being the only vegetarian I knew as a child and then the only vegan – 26 years ago when it was seen as a weird extreme, the vegan who is friends with hunters – I appreciate their deep, reverent connection to the natural world, the only one of my circle of 20-something club-inhabiting friends who didn’t drink or take drugs, the only woman in a men’s boxing club, the only person talking about spirituality in the corporate world, the person going on about unique souls in a spiritual community where it was all about oneness, the rare person embarking on shamanism without ever having taken plant medicine before… I could go on.

Whilst I know I have a specific role as an edgewalker and taboo breaker, I know many of our students have similar experiences whilst devoting to their soul path… from feeling like they’re alone as the only person they know who is on that path to actually being accused of being in a cult.

The thing is, unlike the study which showed participants attacking the person who was seen to be doing the right thing, I’ve rarely been openly attacked for any of the choices I’ve made, instead people tend to feel silently judged by me and my choices.

Ironically, I’m not particularly wired for judgement, by nature and nurture… autistically, shamanically, Devil’s advocating, transcendentally Libranesque… it’s actually a challenge for me not to seek to understand and appreciate all perspectives.

So I’m simultaneously extremely clear about what’s right for me or the person in front of me (if I have their permission for that), whilst being extremely open to and unopinionated about almost anything else.

I am devoted to you being and doing whatever is aligned for your unique soul, which by its very nature will be night and day different to what’s aligned for mine.

And that’s the only kind of “doing the right thing” I care about.
♥️

Photo: me happy to be reunited with my other tree, as I begin another four days in the woods

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8 years old today! 🥂✨💃🏻

By Lian Brook-Tyler

I’m *barely* back from the woods so please don’t expect any sense from me but I’ve just discovered it was 8 years TODAY that the podcast was born and it feels right to celebrate…

🎤 Almost 400 soul-stirring episodes

🎤 100s of magnificent guests

🎤 3 evolutions (the Born Happy Show then, now The Primal Happiness Show and soon to be The Waking The Wild Show)

What a ride… to think I didn’t want to be a podcaster and only did so because Jonathan, then just a friend, suggested it and then provided his tireless help and guidance to create it.

All my love, gratitude and blessings to Jonathan, our devoted team (Sara, Leanne, Bex, Sweet and Daryl), my family (“Please keep quiet, I’m recording now.”) and our incredibly smart, conscious, magical listeners (I often say to guests “Don’t dumb it down”).

What began as a show is becoming a beautiful community of wild souls.

I love you all. ♥️

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“Do they think I’m lying?”

By Lian Brook-Tyler

This is another shadow voice that’s made itself known very clearly lately.

Interestingly, or rather – magically, this is growing louder just after my last initiation into Father Sky, who brings the truth serum from Above.

The rich irony of this shadow voice is that I’m painfully, horribly, triggeringly honest (as my family, my team and our students will tell you).

Side note: one of our Sovereigns was just laughing about how much she’s been triggered by me this week and quoted something I’d said about her. I told her I was writing this post about my triggering honesty and she said “You have permission to use it as long as you don’t tell everyone who the brunette angry hopeless weakling is.” There’s context to me calling her that, it’s not *quite* as awful as it sounds but still, it’s a good example of what I mean.

A dear friend calls it my “autistic purity”.

And she’s right.

As many autistic people will be nodding their heads in agreement with – it *costs* me excruciatingly to even tell the whitest of lies or half (really ⅘) truth.

If I feel I’ve accidentally omitted a detail or hyped something too sound even a tiny bit better or worse than it is, it gnaws away at my soul to the point where I will want to go back and correct myself – which then sounds ridiculous because to most people it’s an inconsequential detail.

Or if I’ve said something and it feels like it could be too amazing to believe, I’ll want to share evidence that the thing really happened.

This shadow is one I haven’t been able to fully trace the source of and it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes we know the wound, sometimes we don’t – we have the opportunity to work with it either way.

The invitation it provides is to visit it fully, discover all its hidden rooms, and feel deep appreciation for its good intention to keep us safe.

So I’m soaking now in the experience that you might be reading this and think I’m lying, and worse, lying about my honesty. I’m drinking it in, I’m noticing when fear causes me to gag, and I’m following it up with a chaser of love.

The truth is, I’m becoming ready to move beyond it.
🌹🧬♥️

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In devotion to Union 🧬

By Lian Brook-Tyler

(Written a year ago and even more true today)

I planted these two different honeysuckles over the swing seat many years ago with the dream that one day they would unite in the middle… now they finally do, it absolutely delights me.

I live for the “both”, the “and”, symbiosis, paradox, Light and Dark, the Ascent and the Descent, and most of all: the Masculine and the Feminine.

From Fear, this can show up as indecisive fickleness and then at the other end of the shadow pole, rigid binary thinking #autisticlibran … which I’ve spent a lifetime being made wrong for, by others and myself… and yet, from Love, it’s an expression of my truest, purest, most heartfelt soul desire.

And that is what it’s all for… the rewilding, shadow work, magic, embodiment, polarity, and spirituality is all for ONE thing (ironically)… my devotion to Divine Union.

Today the honeysuckles, tomorrow the world!

I would love to leave this here with closing credits and beautiful music announcing a nice happy ending.

But really of course, it’s not the honeysuckles and it’s not the world… it’s me, right here, right now, in every moment, moving through all the ways Fear shows up and tries to compel me to close.

And maybe it’s you too.

Moving through Fear over and over until one day, we finally unite in the middle.
🦁✨🌹

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