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Building YOU: What’s your base? (part 1 of Blueprint for Building YOU Within)

Fundação de uma casa / House foundation
Image by Márcio Cabral de Moura via Flickr

What’s your base?

You know, that place–in thought–from which you live out, day to day, hour by hour?

Too broad a question?

What do you base your decisions about your day to day from?

What grounds you, sustains you, feeds you when you’re going about your moments?

Why do I ask?

Well, I’ve played this game both ways. Without a base leaves me tooing and frowing and roaming and wandering around. a lot. Even when I’ve not been mobile.

With a base, I’m grounded and my actions are less sporadic, random, and actually follow through with a choice.

I’m not a linear invidual by any means. Far more. touchy feely go with flow and spontaneity are my best friends.

But, without a base, life can feel mere existing. It can feel like you just move from season to season reacting to the have to’s and putting off yet again the want to’s.

So what is your base?

And if you’re still going ‘huh?” or you’ve already done that honest looking within and realizing you don’t have one, I wanna say this: it’s okay. It’s beyond okay to not feel like you have a base or know what is grounding you.

But this is perhaps why things feel outa wack, random, or kinda hit or miss about your life.

The blown outa proportion emotional reactive way to describe this feeling is you feel like you’re going nowhere slowly and or you feel like you watching the movie of your life the only problem being you’re in the audience, not in the film, because the person starring as you doing what you do in life so can’t really be you, can it?

Where’s the dreamer and doer and make things happen change the world girl you once were? Where’s the fearless woman who charges full steam ahead armed with a deep vision and motive and purpose? Where did she go?

Yep.  I get it. So much.

Here’s the thing a lot of soul searching will do.

It will make you own your base.

Even when you don’t think you know what that means or what that is or where to find it.

Why?

Because your base is that quiet gentle voice within that comes out when all the huggabaloo of reactionary emotionalism stops squawking, or when you consciously choose to direct your attention away from the squawking and listen within to the deeper pulls and inclinations and impellings.

We each have a base.

We’re just never nudged to cultivate a relationship with it.

In fact I’d argue that we’re often insisted to develop a relationship with all the things outside ourselves that are supposed to give the base and sense of ‘doing life right.’

And many of us go through the motions of doing what we think we’re supposed to be doing to ‘do life right’ only to wake up 20 years after college going ‘hmmmm….something huge is missing.’

  • With or without spouse or partner
  • With or without children
  • With or without fabo career
  • With or without your own real estate
  • With or without a 401k you’re proud of
  • With or without the meaningful philanthropic work you maybe have or want to invest thousands of hours into…
  • With or without making the folks proud, the neighbors ooh and ahh the grandparents do a giddy dance, the siblings high five (yet internally feel a bit jealous)

My point: without a base, the feeling of fulfillment is likely to be defined by amassing a ton of external victories and then, once that’s achieved and attained, if that fulfillment is not there, we friek and do like eat, pray, love is positing: sell all and travel the globe expecting to ‘find that thing.’

I wanna offer something: having a base doesn’t guarantee you amass anything except a 24/7:

  • awareness of groundedness –where it is and how to feel it..
  • awareness of just knowing what you’re about and striving to exude a better you

and these two things: knowing what grounds you and knowing the kind of person you are striving to be…they become this bedrock of a base that can literally arm you or support you with everything you need to accomplish anything you want to do.

Why am I writing this: I’ve spent so many years feeling without a base, and then trying a few things I thought would give me one, and then always tossing that effort out for another when it didn’t work.

Now I’m pretty sure had I known a bit more of how to establish a sense of my base earlier on, well, it could have helped.

(But the stubborn me wouldn’t trade any of my vagabonding). 🙂

Here’s the thing no one teaches us in highschool or college: the most important investment any of us can ever make for ourselves is to invest our whole heart of hearts into finding, solidifying, and grounding ourselves in a base we can rely on 24/7.

And the only one I’ve found is in thought…in going within and listening to that inner voice—which for my sense of truth is how the divine communicates with each one of us.

Growing and cultivating awareness of this inner nudge invites and really kinda demands a consecrated focus, a total willingness to pour effort into it.

But as you do, you begin to have this 24/7 resource to turn to under any circumstance.

And that base is a foundation from which you will never be severed from or separated from.

Give some thought to cultivating a base.

And as always, here to help you do just that if you’re so desiring.

It will never be first about what’s out there.

It will always first be about what’s within.

Here’s to you defending your base, your right to own it, nurture it, live out from it. 😉

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{ 3 comments… add one }
  • NS September 9, 2010, 11:52 am

    thanks tresha. you are right about not trusting the inner voice. In fact at times, i am not even sure if the inner voice is really the inner voice you talk about or if it is just something else that is selfish and focused too much on myself and conflicts with the “doing life right” and feels wrong. I am not even sure i know how to listen to and recognize the inner voice and distinguish it from other distractions and thoughts. The one time i did think it was the inner voice and i followed it through, things fell apart so that has led me to question my ability to listen to the inner and my motives. Would be great if i could figure out how to channel and listen to the inner voice, be sure that it was the inner voice and then go out and act on what it was telling me without doubt. Need help there if you have ideas, thanks again

  • Tresha Thorsen September 9, 2010, 6:50 am

    always always always listen to that inner…that's the base. tension/conflict seems to pull b/c we often believe what we know/assume more than what we're impelled to do…there's no other way to give ourselves a steady base than to go within, listen, hear that inner voice, trust it and act on it….conflict is not a bad thing. it's actually the most natural of all but we're not causing it…it's just there to the degree we're not used to trusting our inner voice…it lessens….

  • NS September 8, 2010, 10:48 pm

    hi tresha, excellent article again as usual. And i love the concept of having a base and basing decisions on that. It is such a disciplined way to thought that it can never go wrong if religiously adopted

    You say “In fact I’d argue that we’re often insisted to develop a relationship with all the things outside ourselves that are supposed to give the base and sense of ‘doing life right.’”.

    I think that has been my base when i have had to make decisions or justify them. However what if your inner voice suggests a base that conflicts with this external base? How does one wrestle that tension to the ground? Need help there

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