Awareness changes everything. And once we begin such a journey, there is sometimes the misconception that this enlightenment will cleanse our lives of any and all turbulence. This is the old way of reasoning - believing that if we're good, only good things will happen to us, or that being bad, equates to bad things happening to us. Shoot, simply believing,
Things are happening to me,rather than,
I can change my circumstances,is a victim mindset. There is zero personal-power in this rationale.
Self-awareness is an infinite journey. There is no end, no achieving it, or 'getting there.' It is a deep exploration into ourselves. This awareness naturally shifts our life experiences. My guess is that we purposely came here, forgot who we were so we could find ourselves again, and from that process of remembering, we expand. This might mean walking through experiences we don't enjoy and yes, sometimes it means walking through the pits of fricken hell! Remember we don't grow very much living behind a white picket fence. We grow in the trenches. The more intense the challenge, the greater the growth.
I won't kid you, moving through our shit isn't what I'd put on the fun list! But if we don't deal with it, it will keep rising to the surface until we do. This isn't a one-time,
okay I'm done,type of process either. We have layers of entertaining stuff to explore; blankets of beliefs we've collected along our journey, to sift through and decide if they're rubbish or not.
So how do we begin rummaging through all this? By reconnecting to ourselves; by allowing ourselves to feel again; by no longer throwing up armors to divert our pain, but rather sinking into it and expressing whatever it is that comes up. The goal is to integrate our stuff so we're no longer directing our pain outward toward others. Anger, sarcasm, blame, etc are simply pain's bodyguards. They are defense mechanisms we use as protection, to hide the fact we're hurting.
When we attempt to side-step our pain, it will continue to 'act out' in our every day lives. By feeling it, we move through it, not around it.
This 'moving through' is rarely done in one fell swoop, but gradually over time. Our lives can be flowing quite smoothly one second, then suddenly out of nowhere, something happens that pisses us off, or knocks us to our knees, or triggers us in some way. This is simply more of our pain rising to the surface to be examined and dealt with. When this happens, are we going to fall back into that place we know so well, where we leap into defense-mode, ready to attack? Or are we going to really look at what's going on within us, so we can finally move beyond it?
There is of course, no right or wrong answer. We have free-will afterall. But again, it's no picnic moving through our stuff, namely because it calls for the very thing that we are often most afraid of - vulnerability. This process of facing our wounds, requires us to fire our bodyguards, lay down our defensive shields, and no longer numb ourselves with our favorite 'feel better' dependencies. It insists that we feel everything.
I remember during my earlier 'shit processing' days, I often became frustrated with myself, for not being able to reach some imagined place of free-flowing peace, that it seemed others were achieving. Eventually, I discovered that it's not a place, but simply a way of being. The more pain we process, the more calm and peaceful we become, because we're no longer lugging that baggage around. This peaceful state of being then becomes our normal modus operandi.
Whenever we are experiencing something extremely challenging, we're standing at a crossroad. We decide the destination. If we're willing to take the journey into ourselves, we will walk out the other side of our pain, with a renewed sense of empowerment and peace.