Cultivating Lost Parts of Yourself

While sleeping last night, I found myself excavating a new basement area of a home that felt familiar to me. The concrete was smooth and the walls were studded with no sheet rock. There were windows and doors leading outside, but the space was clearly mine to design and build. Mine to flesh out. In the same way we flesh out ideas as we explore them deeper giving them life. Taking them from a rough draft or a sketch to a final finished, polished product that we are ready to present to the world.

This home is my psyche. My conscious connection to the world within and the world without. This is the place where I develop and cultivate the characteristics that I want to manifest in the world. I (we) get to build out our interior space of self guidance, judgement, and encouragement, getting lost in cognitive biases telling us we aren’t good enough or harping on that stupid phrase we spoke grinding the conversation to a halt and getting found in grace, inspiration, gratitude, and blessings. The stuff that fills your love tank up. As this interior space is fleshed out we begin to illicit responses of life in our external world, guiding us down a pathway of our choosing, based on the patterns of thought and behaviors (actions) we exemplify. In this way, it appears to me, that we are capable of finding the lost parts of ourselves that we bottled up or were robbed of by the actions of others. We are fully capable of blooming the psyche into something new over and over again, washing away the old, to create the soft, supple soil for the new. Psyche also means butterfly by the way.

All these personality tests are a helpful jumping off point but I don’t think they are the final word on who we are. You cannot place an absolute on something that is forever in flux, growing, multiplying, splitting, and reuniting ad infinitum. The constraints of the absolute will continually break down under the pressure of the flow of life in the same way enough water will destroy the strongest dams. Instead of defining yourself with labels of personality and stating this is all you are and will ever be, try using that label as a spring board and begin to explore and manifest the weaker parts of you personality. An introvert is fully capable of going to a party and enjoying themselves and an extrovert is fully capable of sitting quietly, alone, reading a book. Bringing out these qualities might be the best thing for your ego, as it will create some roundness to your personality, smoothing out the rigidity of absolute labels. A circle contains all other shapes within it. Be like the circle. Be the Alpha and the Omega.

Thank you,

The Relative Merchant