How to Show Up In Your Life

Wake up. Clean up. Grow up. Show up.

- Ken Wilber

I was a teenager when I began to have intuitions of how I wanted to show up in my own life. When I expressed these desires I was usually met with bewildered smiles or straight-faced disbelief. I wrote about one of these times in a previous newsletter:

When I was around middle school age, I was with my family in my grandfather’s apartment sometime around New Year’s. He had gathered everyone (uncles, aunts, kids who were old enough like me) to share what they wanted out of life. (I don’t recall him ever doing this before or after; it might’ve had something to do with his own soul searching in the face of an imminent divorce from my grandmother).

He might have asked what we all wanted out of the next year. But I obviously thought he said “life,” so I responded: “I want to find the meaning of life.”

I remember everyone laughing somewhat affectionately at this. The feeling I got was: that’s cute and ridiculous. But more ridiculous than cute.

Later, when I had just turned 19, I had come home for the holidays and I was talking with one of my cousins about what I wanted to do: I wanted to throw raves because I wanted to help people dance. She looked at me like I said I wanted to become a firetruck. I quickly changed the subject.

Most of us learn even earlier than I did that our own inner knowing of how we want to show up in our lives is not acceptable to our family, friends, and society.

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To “show up” means to express, do, achieve, affect, or build something in the world. There’s a natural tension in everyone between showing up in their own life with authenticity, intuitive knowing, and clarity and playing it safe by conforming, over-analyzing, or withdrawing.

We play it safe because we have inner protector parts that took on their jobs as protectors when we were emotionally hurt in the past. These protectors carry a banner that says “Never Again.” They’re going to criticize and judge you, over analyze and force you to play small so that they can help you fit in. And if you can fit in, you won’t feel that emotional pain and loneliness again (or at least that’s what the protector parts think).

The problem with this approach is that there’s a steep cost. Maybe you’ll fit in and maybe you won’t but one thing’s for sure: you won’t show up in your own life. You’ll instead by playing a bit role in the projections of others’ judgments and insecurities.

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All of this is NOT to say that I should’ve devoted my life to a spiritual quest at age 13 or throwing raves full-time when I was 19. I needed other modes of development that would help me be able to really show up. Without these other ways of developing, efforts at showing up can go sideways and lead to frustrating dead ends.

The philosopher and writer, Ken Wilber, describes these other ways of developing as waking up, cleaning up, and growing up. Insofar as each is cultivated, we’re able to start showing up. Waking up refers to the process of realizing that life is not what you or your parents or your friends or society thinks it is. Waking up is not about getting answers; it’s about realizing the answers you’ve been given are insufficient. Cleaning up refers to the process of discovering and healing childhood and inter-generational emotional wounds. Cleaning up is not about being healed; it’s about the process of healing. And growing up is the process of psychological growth as outlined by many developmental psychologists. This is a process of growing into ever more complex, nuanced, intimate, and sympathetic ways of knowing the world and ourselves.

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Showing up in our own lives then grows out of a multi-dimensional process of personal development. I believe there is nothing more important than listening to that inner call to show up fully in our life. But if we listen carefully enough, we’ll hear other calls to wake up, clean up, and grow up.

None of these processes needs to be complex, difficult, or painful. They just require us to listen and keep taking that next step. I’d love to hear what next steps in waking up, cleaning up, growing up, and showing up you’re being called into.