I believe books show up when we need them.
Not able to sleep one night several weeks back, I decided to take a bath. Brené Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness was sitting on the side of the bath.
After filling the tub to almost spilling over and resting down into a decadence of bubbles, I began to read … and didn’t stop until I was halfway through.
I’m familiar with Brené’s work but had never read any of her books, being mostly a fiction reader not a non-fiction one.
But this was gripping, a true page-turner.
It was her reference to Maya Angelou and one of Maya’s quotes that stopped me in my page-turning tracks.
It was the quote “You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all.”
Brené then went on to explain that what Maya Angelou means is when we know we belong nowhere but everywhere, we realise that true belonging is belonging to oneself.
Brené says that true belonging isn’t external. We can’t find it in people, places, society, culture, communities, etc. We can’t find it in the outside world. We can only find it within ourselves.
When I read this it was like a lightning strike in my soul.
Time seemed to slow down, and in flashes, playing out in my mind’s eye, I watched my past and saw those times where I’d tried to fit in or belong, and how it had, inevitably, led to crushing, gut-wrenching, soul-shattering pain and despair.
In the timeline of where I, Belinda, had tried to find true belonging in the external world; in the times in my life where I’d thought, “Oh, I want to fit in here!” Or, “Yes, finally, here is where I belong!” it had always ended with me in crippling pain because I was either turning myself inside out and back to front to try to fit in, or, the people and places where I felt I had belonged, were taken away from me and I was left in deep despair and awful grief.
All of my life I had tried to fit in or belong—to something external, thinking this was what true belonging meant.
But as Maya Angelou and Brené Brown teach us, when you belong to yourself, when you truly belong, you belong nowhere and everywhere because you belong to you. To your energy field and chakras. To your inner self. To your spirit.
You are then free to stop needing to find belonging from a country, a community, a family, a race, a culture, a way of thinking, a group, an identify of any sort, or anything else external in order to be happy.
You can let go, and simply be free to belong to you.
On this earth plane, the spiritual journey requires us to always be changing, moving, growing, and evolving; to be in an eternal state of flux. That means, at some point, anything you try to belong to or feel you belong to, you will out grow.
But—there’s a part of you will never need to try to belong to, and you will never out grow!
It’s your spirit.
It’s eternally stable; not changing or in a state of flux. You can rely on it to always be there for you, 100% of the time, 24/7. This is your place of true belonging.
This is your inner self. Your nowhere and everywhere.
with love,
Belinda
