Embracing the Stranger in Me:

Embracing the stranger in me required the acceptance of gifts I found hard to believe I had, gifts of essential soul qualities and inner essence. We all come into this world with these gifts. We are intimately connected to them before we become estranged from the very essence of who we are. We know our soul qualities when we are very young, before we learn concepts of right and wrong, good and evil. We know our soul qualities before we build constructs around ourselves that we fool ourselves into believing are truth and essential to survival. We shape life to fit in and shape ourselves in trying to make other people happy, particularly parents, others we look up to, and authoritative figures we depend upon for survival when we are young. Later it is good friends and family, significant others, and those we work with and for. Peer pressure and those we believe have power over us. Conditional love and conditional acceptance with criteria to meet, often unspoken but communicated nonetheless. As we move from infancy to toddlerhood, we learn it is not always safe to expose our inner being. When it shows up in innocent ways, it somehow seems to be a threat to others through the openness, authenticity and honesty of it. It is a looking glass for what we are afraid to face in our lives—how separated we feel from essence, how much like a stranger we’ve become to ourselves. It contains such sweet anguish; even as little beings, we feel the projection on us. Our soul essence begins to feel fragile instead of strong. Without and beyond words, protective instincts kick in. We are not even aware that we are beginning to create these protective patterns. We begin to hide our inner being in little bits at first, but this grows to “at all costs.” We know how precious it is, but we lose sight of it, connection with it and forget it is there. This continues to the point that our inner essence becomes a stranger—the stranger within. Not the dark, foreboding stranger we imagine it to be, but rather a light-filled, joyful, loving stranger trying to make itself known and heard. But when this stranger, our essence, calls out or whispers, it is like an echo with a source that one cannot discern. We imagine it outside ourselves and look around to catch a glimpse. And so begins the journey of the stranger. We don’t even notice. We don’t have awareness of the process we are in. We build defenses, construct walls, and create personas to protect our inner essence. Bit by bit, we begin to imagine the constructs we have created are our inner essence. Disengaged from our inner essence, we imagine that the shadowy construct we have created is who we really are. We summon shadow to protect our inner core and imagine a stranger resides there—someone we don’t know, aren’t connected with, and should fear. We know we should fear it, because every time we make a decision that is not in alignment with our core essence, with our values, we attribute it to this stranger we have crafted. “This isn’t like me,” we say, looking to excuse the poor choices, bad behavior, or emotional responses we have become uncomfortable with—usually anger, sadness, grief, and frustration. In our confusion, we seek this stranger out less often. Then we forget what it is we have hidden from ourselves or how to unbury it, often for a long, long time. For some of us, maybe even forever. The inner being of beauty and light—the very essence of who we are that we see in the purity and innocence of children—goes undercover, shifts into a stranger. We spend much of our life trying to thwart this stranger, running from the fear instead of facing it. In so doing we generate more shadow, obscuring our soul essence more completely and expanding the construct of the stranger within, even more certain that what lurks within is to be feared, not embraced. We make choices about our life, our path, our relationships, and our work. When we perceive those choices to be bad, we begin to imagine we must be bad—otherwise, why would we make bad choices that hurt us or hurt other people? And if this badness—this evil, even—resides at the core, why would we ever want to know it? And why would anybody ever want to know us or, more than that, love us? We must be unlovable. If we believe this story—that we are unlovable—we will look around and find all kinds of proof to support our belief in the story we make up. We make ourselves unlovable to ourselves. We look outside ourselves to find that love and are disappointed time and time again. No one can love us enough. We cannot get from others what we have not given ourselves. We cannot receive all the goodness, love, beauty, and joy that is awaiting us. We shut it out. We believe ourselves unworthy. And we shut down more. It hurts to love. We build excuses to barricade our hearts. We externalize the source of our pain. The answer doesn’t lie out there or with someone else. It lies inside, beyond the shadows we fear. It is only by embracing the stranger in the shadow that we release its hold, the power we imagine it has over us. It is by heading into the shadow with curiosity and compassion rather than fear and judgment that we can begin to see the stranger for what it actually is—a part of us we mistakenly fear, a part of us that needs to be embraced with love and openheartedness. By shifting the shape of the story of the stranger, we gain the power and the strength to shift the shape of our lives. The openings to embracing the stranger appear all the time if we are paying attention. Every now and then, the stranger—our inner essence—finds an opening and bubbles to the surface. We glimpse it, but it is so unlike what we are expecting that we don’t recognize it. We are expecting a monster, but we glimpse something else. Maybe we have been inspired or encouraged by it and now want to find it, but it seems elusive. We find it hard to believe that what we have glimpsed lives in us, because we are convinced the shadow shields an unsavory stranger we do not want to know. If that constructed stranger is within, then purity, light, love, joy, and redemption must be somewhere else—anywhere else, not inside. We look elsewhere for it, everywhere other than where it actually lives. We look outside of ourselves to see what we are afraid to look within to find. We look to others to validate us and our experiences and tell us what a good job we’ve done, what a good person we are. We compare ourselves to others. On occasion, we take false joy in our journey because we can measure our progress and success externally. But deep inside, the stranger, our core essence, is rumbling, calling to us—sometimes gently, sometimes with a strength and persistence that rattles our cage. It is trying to guide us, but we cannot hear it and cannot feel it except for the deep tremble we interpret as fear, the image of this constructed stranger that is larger than life itself. Journey to Openheartedness Things happen in life—conspire, even—to force us on a journey to discover who or what the stranger really is. It becomes time to step fully into the journey, to intentionally shift the shape of who we are and how we show up in our own lives. It is only by going to the edges of our fear and a bit beyond that we become ready to face it without even understanding what that means or what we have begun.