Change Catalyst with Shanna Mann: Strategy & Support for Sane Self-Employment

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Float Like a Butterfly

Ty and I are working on my new website. It’s peacock coloured. It’s beautiful and bright and airy and unbelievably cheerful looking.

Then I looked at my recent posts, full of challenge and battle and smiting.


I am too cute for words. I have a doll-like body, an infectious smile, and a baby face. I am so winning and playful and unscripted I cannot help but be adorable.

But The Vile Scribbler, who knows me eerily well for someone I met through a random link-back, says :

“You have such a strong will and sense of conscious, calculating control over so many aspects of your life. You’re always planning how to turn situations to your advantage, how to land on your feet, how to come out of a difficult situation unscathed. It’s like your ego never rests, never allows anything else to gain an advantage over you. Your sense of control extends to your belief in how much your own thoughts control your health, your basic reality itself. Though you may talk about a higher power, say, you live as if your consciousness is the center of your world, never relinquishing power or leaving anything to chance.”

I read a novel once, which sadly I have forgotten everything about, except this: There was a warrior from the east who followed the Way, and the path to the Way was balance in all things. Because he was a fearsome warrior, he dressed effimanately in order to balance himself in the world.  Because he was so deadly, he was exceeding gentle in all other things. At all times, he tried to balance the yin and the yang, the dark and the light, the warm and the cold.

I don’t practice this ritual with the same emphasis and solemnity, but I think there’s so much to be gained from it. Who among us is wholly one way or the other? Often we’ll skew to one side, identifying with one aspect of ourselves and building our identity around it. All good, all true, and yet… not really telling the whole story. Not really in balance. Not really ringing true.

In what way do you embody unified opposites?

[ssbp]

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