Okay, who doesn’t like to be seen? Raise your hand. I’m talking about the kind of seen where you get to be yourself, you’re not endlessly (or even occasionally) editing yourself. Where you can freely use the language of spirit and healing, where you feel completely comfortable talking about that time you bought a cute throw pillow at the flea market and I’m serious, it was haunted. Where you say to the little dog, “wow look at those beautiful choppers!” and the dog laughs, tilts its head and opens its mouth wider so you can get a better look. It was a miniature schnauzer. I love them because they usually look so disapproving, then turn out to be hilarious.
I’ll never forget the day I saw a big, red spider on the wall of my office. This was years ago. I tried and tried to get that spider into a paper cup to take it outside and it raced around madly, just out of reach. Eventually I slapped my hand against the wall and said irritably, “if you want to go outside where it’s safe, you’re going to have to get on my hand.” It got on my hand. There was a lot of screeching from my office mates and after that people would remark that I was a spider whisperer and other nonsense – c’mon people, a “whisperer” refers to a training method and I’ve never trained a single spider. After that, care was taken not to call attention to other ways of doing things that might be considered odd. But there were lots of dogs at that job, maybe half a dozen per day, so there were many, many opportunities to talk to animals as if they were people because, why wouldn’t you? The funny part was, the business was very New Age-y, for lack of a better descriptor. There probably wasn’t a person there who couldn’t handle anything I might fling into a conversation, but still I edited myself.
Why? Astrologically I have Mars in Libra and that’s a people-pleaser. It’s my inner warrior, needing everyone around me to be comfortable, in the house of my personal identity. I want to groan just writing this. It’s one foot on the gas and two on the brakes, and makes about that much sense. It’s been years, and I’ve moved a lot of energy. I still recognize that tendency to protect my truth but now I can work with it.
My daughter eats up the Clairvoyant information and shares it with her friends at college, so when someone is complaining about how hard something is she’ll confidently toss out, “Well, you chose this life. You wanted to go through this because you knew how much you’d grow.” It’s said that children are the next higher octave of a parent’s energy and there she is, scattering little pearls of energy wisdom around like seeds. She tells me, “I have to! We’re here to teach each other, Mom.” I reflect on how much care goes into speaking my truth, in comparison. Yes, it is important to know who can have certain kinds of information. But sometimes it’s good to jolt a person out of their comfort zone, like when Cher slaps Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck.
Why do so many of us balk at sharing our truth, at being seen? It could be: 1) we’ll get in trouble, 2) we’ll be ridiculed, 3) we can’t trust ourselves. 4) fill in the blank. In other lifetimes some of us got in trouble, sometimes big trouble, for being unlike the mythical “everybody else”. We look at the concept of a “valance” in one of our graduate classes. I love the valance class because it explains so much about humanity. A valance is our facade, our presentation to the world as if we were in costume and/or wearing a mask. Our valance is the role that we typically play when we’re not home alone with the cat. We all do it. We do it when someone asks, “how are you?” and dutifully we say, “Great! How are you?” even when there’s a story there, something more truthful, more human.
The valance often gets involved when we go into competition with others, projecting how we want to be perceived while comparing it to our perception of others. Sometimes, the valance extends to how we live, the people we spend time with, the topics we are willing to discuss and our interests and pursuits, among other things. Our valance becomes our “acceptable” self, the one least likely to be judged (or so we think). It can become a way for us to feel accepted, or at least not left behind in the human parade we’re all marching in. The strength and persistence of the valance can be a reflection of how unstable it feels to be authentically us.
We might create and make use of a valance for very different reasons; for privacy, or safety, or because we feel shame about who we really are. We might create a valance as a means to “fake it til we make it”, putting it out in front of our self-doubt or sense of limitation. Some people are born performers; we could do it for amusement! There’s no good or bad, by the way; the valance is a legitimate resource! The original intent was that it would help us, and it does, for a time. Eventually, we might get tired of keeping it going. Maybe we need to go in a different direction, maybe it becomes a liability. In our graduate class, students learn to identify the valance energy and what brought it in. We help them to manage or release it, allowing the true Self to step more into the forefront of their lives. It’s a graduate class for a reason; students need to move a lot of energetic “clutter” first so they can have more clarity around the concept.
In closing, it’s common to resist being seen! It can help us feel safe, it can make the world make more sense. It can be amusing, or help us project a future self we aspire to. Some of us are born with the inclination to stay behind the mask but later, we feel the need for a breakthrough. But the bottom line is this: the reluctance to be seen keeps us and the world from experiencing the full beauty of who we are. It’s something that can be addressed with energy tools, and you know I’m going to tell you where you can go to learn those tools!
Please visit our website for more information, or call us at 303-440-7171 if we can help you with a question or concern. We look forward to seeing you in one of our many classes and/or our free or low-cost readings, workshops, meditations and clinics.
Blessings,
Katie
Rt. Rev. Katie Heldman is the Co-Director of Psychic Horizons Center, and wrote this article for the July 17th, 2023 eNews.
