Caricature-Building

Turns out RAISING CLARITY’s caricature is relentless positivity.   Who knew? Our soul-colleague John shook his head when I ended our last meeting asking he remember how lucky he was to be even having his level of problems:

That’s my caricature of you: I could say, “I have cancer,” and you’d say, “John, that is such an opportunity!”

And I laughed so loudly!  I was so relieved to be known. Relieved to be seen, as we all want to be.  And relieved that after what I have come through, this is the message I put across.  I had built caricature.  John had shown me my caricature–and I loved it, as Ntozake Shange wrote in her 1975 play (made into a 2010 film), “for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf”:

I found God in myself/and I loved her/I loved her fiercely.

What John said was true: everything is an opportunity.  Hallelujah!  Every circumstance, every meeting, every encounter.  The Course in Miracles and Marianne Williamson, one of its foremost interpreters, actually call every encounter “holy,” whether it’s the start of a life-long relationship or an “excuse me” in the street. 

I had never had this reflected to me so sharp and strong.  What John teased me about believing is exactly what I believe.  And he’s right that that’s what I would say if someone told me they had cancer.  OK, it’s what I would think, along with how sorry I was they had cancer.  Of course!  Cancer’s no fun.  Neither are a lot of the circumstances we face.  Building clarity into our character gives us strength-with-flexibility, a curious marriage between solidity’s earthiness and water’s fluidity that more than gets us through, allows us to suck the juice right out of every experience and be nourished and deepened by it.

Remember the advice to act “as if”?  If you want to be the life of the party, act as if you are?  If you want to become more confident, act that way until it becomes real?  “Fake it til you make it” may sound shallow but it’s deep when you try it.  That’s “caricature-builidng.”

Manifesting new reality comes from finding the seed of that reality within the present you’re experiencing, and watering that seed, those tiny, invisible root-hairs whose existence is a natural fact you must at first take on faith, keep watered and in the soil. Love that seed!  And build your own best caricature.

OK, what do you think? Too soft? Too loud?  Just right?  What’s your experience building your caricature?