What Message Are You Sending? (and is it Intentional?)
Did you ever play *Whisper Down the Alley as a child? (also known as Telephone or Whisper Down the Lane). I used to play it with my Kindergarteners as an example of how distorted a message could become when it passes through multiple people and how important direct, honest communication is for the well being of all.
It never failed to amaze me at how convoluted the initial message would inevitably be returned….something like, if the original phrase was: “you are beautiful, whole and enough.” It would end up as: “your booty is full of holes and fluff.” And while a full, fluffy,holey booty might sound quite comical, the real life version of the game most likely will be anything but comical, it will be more like a massive mess of delusion, confusion, drama, and heartache.
We all hear what hear, see what we see, and feel what we feel, based upon our own individual experience of the world, most of which has been left unexamined. Well, at least for me it has. Much of what I see and most of my choices are based upon my likes and dislikes. And my likes and dislikes are chalk full of conditions, agendas, false assumptions, and a distorted process of perceiving. Anais Nin says it best, “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we ARE.”
So does this make me a “bad” person? Hell NO! It makes me a human being. And as a human being, I am inherently good, that is my being, that is UNCHANGING. It is simply a matter of choosing to make it my responsibility as a human being to BELIEVE in the GOOD of my being and take the action necessary to examine what human tendencies, habits, and behaviors might be covering up the bright shiny “being” within my “human.”
I used to believe that the core of me was “rotten.” This kind of thinking put me at the VERY end of a VERY dark and lonely alleyway, making me the one who received the most warped, deceptive message of ALL, the one who was sitting the furthest away from the truth.
Yoga has helped me learn that the message doesn’t come from someone sitting at the head of the alleyway. Yoga asks that I acknowledge each one of those people lined up in the alley as simply one of my own habits, tendencies, or ways of being that separate me from my own “beingness” or truth.
So ask yourself today, where are you sitting in the lineup in the alleyway? What thoughts and habits are coming in between you and your bright, shiny “being?”
Yoga asks that you begin to examine and eliminate people/thoughts from the game so that the ORIGINAL message comes out BLARING, loud and clear, from you, through you, and to you…..the original message…. YOU are beautiful, whole, and enough.
*Whisper Down the Alley is a game where a number of children sit in a circle or a row and one person whispers a message in the next person’s ear and so on and so on, until the last person to receive the message says the message out loud and then it is compared to the original message. It is silly because the message always ends up distorted.
