I’m a good kisser. Let’s just start with that.
Yet I recently made out with this guy who told me that I wasn’t kissing “correctly”. Or maybe he didn’t say it quite like that, but by stopping me in the middle of a kiss and instructing me as to where and how I should proceed, it sure felt like I wasn’t doing it correctly.
Oh no he didn’t!? Well, actually, yeah he did.
Once I got through the shame and embarrassment of thinking I was doing something wrong (which took me all the way back to my first kissing experience as a 16-year old and not knowing what I was doing at all!) – I ascertained in the moment that this remark by my future husband (not!) had more to do with his controlling tendencies than it did my missing his bottom lip.
But it also showed me where I (and all of us) can get stuck.
When life (through people, experiences, rejections, challenges) delivers us a response not to our liking – we often retaliate by meeting such resistance with our own pushback – namely control.
It can show up in lots of ways. Shutting down. Disconnecting. Disengaging. Closing oneself off. Getting angry. Or just becoming a total ass to someone.
It’s normal. It happens. But combatting control with control never works. It shuts out all possibility for solution and from generating the kind of openings in awareness that we’re looking for in life.
That is; awareness of how to remain open, when what you want to do is really control!
If we could but realize how powerful we truly are when we let go of control, we might just never try to control things again.
We can’t be both controlling and powerful at the same time. They’re antithetical to each other. It’s counter-intuitive because we try to control everything in life. And we often do a great job in the short run. We get our way, we stay in our comfort zone, we micro-manage, we exercise agendas. Hey, control can be fun!
But in the long run we become set in our ways, unbendable, not open to new adventures and experiences, and ultimately . . . stuck.
When we realize that real empowerment comes from letting go, from allowing something to unfold rather than forcing our agenda, that letting life show us what it wants to reveal rather than our demanding it – life takes on a whole new meaning.
We become freer. Have more fun. Stop stressing the small stuff. Let go of our Drama Queen tendencies! Live more in the unknown. Experience surprise and awe and wonder.
Remember those qualities? They used to be abundant when we were kids. As we grow older, our ability to see the world that way becomes diminished because control not only shrinks our capacity to see not only other worlds that exist, but also from seeing our world correctly.
It’s still full of surprise and awe and wonder. You just have to give up control to experience it.