Insecurity Stripped Bare

It was as I settled down to listen to an Ice Cream 4 the Soul recording (Discovering Inner Security) that I had an epiphany. It crept in silently, like a splinter of morning sunshine filtering through the curtains’ chink, chasing away the last of the night’s shadows. No fanfare. No trumpets. Just a beautiful feeling of relief and gratitude for uncovering this buried treasure.

You see, I heard the words “inner security” as “in security” and I saw something afresh. A simple truth glimpsed in a moment of presence. Pure gold.

Like most women, I have spent a disproportionate amount of time preoccupied with the proportions of me, feeling as if I didn’t measure up to some impossible to attain magazine / movie ideal.

I first noticed that I looked different when I was the only chocolate coloured girl in a sea of milky faces at primary school. My frizzy hair fascinated my friends. They loved to play with it, unleashing my plaited mane to scoop and twist up handfuls of hair, leaving me with a knotted bush that would make my eyes water when combed through later.

By the age of eight, I was cursed with declining vision which led to the purchase of a pair of pug-ugly pink plastic NHS specs. How I squirmed, how my cheeks burned when I had to put them on for blackboard work.

Puberty wasn’t kind to me; I blossomed into less rose, more dandelion. A (too) tall, big footed, straight up and down clump of a woman with big hair. A work colleague christened me Olive Oyl and my nana cracked jokes about my two-fried-eggs chest. To top it off, my thighs were of the dimpled-no-gap-chafing variety. These were probably the most shameful and embarrassing failings of this body of mine.

This insecure thinking often made my brown eyes green, much to the bewilderment of those stung by my caustic tongue. I envied those who seemed to wear their skin with grace and ease. Mine was a more awkward existence which caused me to shrivel away from situations that would leave me exposed. Not for me an impromptu, exhilarating, moonlit skinny dip.

I didn’t play full out. I half lived.

It never occurred to me that I had a choice about whether or not to believe the thoughts that said I was less than, simply because of how I looked. I thought they were fact – a true reflection of my physical reality. I didn’t realise that my insecurity was made of Thought and, as such, was borne of neutrality and was transient in nature.

But, as I sat in the chair that day, I was fortunate enough to catch a glimmer of what Sydney Banks saw of insecurity. I realised that it was all made up. How can we be insecure when the truth is we are bathed in security, always? It is only ever our thinking in the moment which leaves us living in a world of lack and leaves us wanting.

What remains, once our thought full minds get an opportunity to quiet down, is a recognition of our true nature. We are perfection personified. We are pure love. We are miraculous.

And each and every one of us is a unique expression of the creative intelligence behind life. There is no body like us, so how can we not measure up? Why would we compare ourselves? We are all the same formless energy taking on a human form.

The photo above (a rare beach shot taken almost fifteen years ago) is the one that popped into mind as I let this lovely feeling wash over me. I looked at it – without cringing at the flaws of me – and, with new eyes, I noticed the smile. I saw someone who, just for that moment, was comfortable in their own skin. And I knew that I would never see insecurity the same way again.

“As surely as rust slowly destroys the strongest steel, hate and negative thoughts erode the soul of humanity. Negative thoughts are like scratches on a window: they stop you from seeing life with clarity. When negative thoughts cease, the scratches disappear and the window becomes crystal clear. Then the beauty and positive aspects of life can be seen”

Sydney Banks, The Missing Link (page 54)

What stops you from seeing through Thought?