Dressing for the Weather You're Stepping Into

Coming home isn't arriving somewhere naked and bare. It's arriving at the understanding that you have a choice.

This week's circle has us exploring what it means to come home to ourselves.

What does it look like to remove the layers of drag and reveal our true selves? Not lying naked and bare — but arriving at an understanding that we have choice. Our freedom lies in the sovereignty to choose the outfits we wear. Or more accurately: how we show up, and the vibration we carry.

But first, I want to talk a bit about the weather. And trauma.

No Bad Weather

The Nordics have a saying: there is no bad weather, only bad clothing.

We cannot control the weather of life. We can only dress appropriately.

This aligns with my analogy for trauma. Trauma is the outfit we wear as we respond to life's weather.

If it suddenly drops to 0°F, the trauma response might be to put on a heavy down coat, a fur hat, gloves, wool socks, and thick boots. Congratulations! You survived. And you look great, too.

That outfit actually feels comfortable and safe in the moment, so you decide to wear it a little while longer. Time passes. It's now summer, and 100°F. And that same outfit that kept you safe and warm in winter can literally be the death of you.

So we change outfits as a response to the weather.

trauma and Trauma

This is happening all day, every day, with every environment we walk into.

Our culture usually only thinks of trauma with a capital T — not the trauma response we have every day as we adjust to the mental, emotional, and social climate of our hours. Trauma with a capital T becomes a sort of armour we wear and don't take off. And most of us add more layers of drag — the outfit, the persona you wear — on top of that armour. Sometimes so many layers that we forget what our unarmoured self looks like.

We've forgotten that we have tender, supple skin that wants to see the light of day and be touched by another human.

Some of It Was Never Ours

The drag we wear, the trauma we're carrying, may not even be our own.

We wear the collective trauma of capitalism, patriarchy, authoritarianism, elitism, zionism — the foundations of western and eastern cultures around the world. The hurried pace. The prove-your-self-worth. Earn your access to education, to health, to housing.

Layers we never chose, handed to us fully assembled.

The Closet

One of the varied processes of healing is to begin to see the outfits we are wearing, and whether they're still appropriate for the weather of today.

I don't believe that it's even about discarding the old outfits. We all have that favorite t-shirt we like to wear.

The process is about choosing. Consciously choosing, with awareness — what outfit do I want to wear? And knowing that we have a closet full of choices already proven to protect us when we need them.

None of this was meant to be carried. You are not meant to wear all of your outfits, or all of your hats, at once. We have a space within us large enough to hold any outfit we want, there to support our choices whenever we want it. It's kind of like Narnia's wardrobe, or Hermione's bottomless bag.

There Is No Getting It Wrong

The invitation is to return home. To return to yourself, where the closet of endless possibilities exists — knowing you're supported by your inner being, your soul, the unfolding of life.

A friend once told me that my soul was here for all of this. My belief is that the soul's mission is to experience the unfolding of life. And I believe the higher we go in consciousness, the more connected our souls become, until merged with god, or source, or one field of consciousness, energy, creation. There are many words and many paths, all pointing to something similar.

So if my soul is here to experience life, it is treating life like a roller coaster, loving every twist and turn, every up and down, every unique experience it gets to have through me.

Therefore there is no getting it wrong. There is only experience.

And when there is no getting it wrong, we can open up to play. We can begin to play with the outfits in our closet and see if and when they serve us. We can Marie Kondo the shit out of our inner ways of being — the sarcastic response to the world, the armour that keeps our heart from experiencing pain (and connection). The outfits we tried on that aren't serving us, whether they came from trauma or Trauma.

Let the Water Help

In circle, someone shared a beautiful water ritual that helped them dissolve and shed some of the old outfits they'd been wearing.

Not all of us can get to an ocean. But we can invoke the same process in the shower, in a local stream, in a lake. Bring your awareness to your body, ask what you're letting go of, and let the water move it. Off the skin. Down the drain.

Tranquil and Alert

How do you know when you've dropped the drag, the masks?

For me, it's when I can just sit and be. Truly just be.

I sit in my yard almost daily, usually with my feet touching the earth — although some days it's moist, and admittedly, under the right conditions, I can be prissy. I listen to the birds, my wind chimes, the leaves fluttering in the wind. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do.

No one to be. Simple presence.

Like a cat. Like my current town's motto: tranquil and alert.

Eckhart Tolle has been known to say, "I lived with many Zen masters. All of them, cats." If you've ever had the pleasure of living with a cat, you know they sleep a lot. I mean A LOT. But they're not actually sleeping all of that time. They spend a good deal of it in a liminal, meditative state.

Present without reaching. Present without clinging. Present without avoiding — in my case, allowing the sound of the cars in my "peaceful" yard, along with the birds, chimes and wind.

That is being naked, without all the drag and all the masks. It is a coming home to self in a way that many people never truly experience.

And that state, that space, is where we practice healing. The longer we sit. The more frequently we sit. The more we get to review the outfits we've been wearing and decide whether we want to keep wearing them — just for now.

Every breath is an opportunity to sit in a closet full of fabulous drag and choose to be naked, just for a moment.

Be Kind on the Way Out of the Outfit

The process of peeling back the layers of drag we wear can be painful.

If you've ever worn an outfit for multiple days — I have, while camping — you know that it begins to stick to your body. Now imagine an outfit you've worn on your energetic body, your mental and emotional body, for decades.

That shit's gonna hurt unless you're kind and compassionate with yourself.

You put on that outfit to protect yourself, and you didn't have the resources — the time, the money, the support — for a quick change before you had to amend it or don a completely new outfit on top.

You are here now, sitting in this proverbial closet, choosing which to wear. Not back then, when you first got dressed.

The Practice

You can't change what is, for it has already happened. You can't dress for the now, for it is already now and you are already dressed. Maybe.

But you can dress for the weather you're stepping into.

So this week, catch yourself in an outfit. Notice that you're wearing it. And ask one question:

Is this still serving the life I'm cultivating?

That's it. You don't have to take anything off today. Notice and allow.

And know that the closet is right there. You might put on a playful sundress and walk straight into an unexpected shower — and that's fine. You already know there's a raincoat hanging in there.

Come Practice With Us

If this is something you'd rather practice than just read about — on Thursday, August 20th I'm offering the first live virtual session of Humanity Recalibrated 101: Your Inner World Is Your Most Powerful Contribution.

It's 2.5 hours, live on Zoom, and it's experiential rather than instructional. Five core principles. Real practices that land in your body, not just your mind. And three simple daily practices you can begin that same night.

Details and registration at HumanityRecalibrated.org

And if you're looking for somewhere to keep practicing after that, we gather Mondays at 7pm ET on Zoom. Come sit with us and take a layer off in good company.

With love,

Sherwood

This post is part of Echoes from the Circle — reflections, teachings, and practices drawn from the Humanity Recalibrated community. If something here resonated, there's more waiting for you at HumanityRecalibrated.org

I'd love to hear from you:

What's one outfit you've been wearing out of season? You don't have to take it off to name it. Drop it in the comments — sometimes naming it out loud is the whole loosening.