One of the reasons that many of my articles get very long (as this one obviously is;-), is because there are so many levels involved in this experience of being human - and I catch myself wanting to explain those levels and how they relate to each other. I try to communicate about multiple perspectives from the metaphysical and Cosmic down to and including how the process looks and feels on a personal level. It can get pretty complicated.
"The individual human being is a fully contained system involving multiple interrelationships within multiple levels. This is easy to see, and understand, when looking at the physical level. The interrelationship of the organs to each other, to the blood, to the skin, to the nervous system, etc. - is a dance of grand, and compelling, complexity.
Just as grand, and compelling, is the complexity of the dance of interrelationship between the mental, emotional, and spiritual components/levels that dynamically interact to form the make up of the individual being - the persona, personality, consciousness, of the self. The more awareness is acquired about the different levels of the self, and the interrelationships between those levels, the easier it becomes to diagnose the dysfunctional interaction dynamics." - Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Author's Foreword
It is vitally important to become conscious of the larger perspective - that is what consciousness raising / enLightenment is all about. But the larger perspective / aligning with Metaphysical Law - though vital to change our intellectual programming and make a paradigm shift to a more Loving perspective of life - does not help us make fundamental, significant changes to how we live our lives day to day, or how we relate to people on an intimate level, until we can integrate the larger Truth into our emotional relationship with life, love, and the experience of being human. Or as I explained it more bluntly in this quote from my book. "In the next section, Part Five, when I discuss the Cosmic Perspective and the Cosmic Perfection of this life experience, I will be discussing the paradox, and confusion to human beings, that has been the result of these multiple levels of reality - but I have devoted Part Two and Part Four to discussing the Spiritual growth process and our perspective on that process because the Cosmic Perfection does not mean crap unless we can start integrating it into our day to day life experience."
In order to help you understand what it looks and feels like to experience the feelings and the process, I am going to include a couple of examples at this point. I referred earlier to sometimes ranting and raving when I see people giving out messages that it is not okay to feel the feelings. I thought I would share here one of the times I was really bursting with frustration about the emotional dishonesty I was seeing - in the aftermath of the terrorist attach of 9/11.
"If I see one more person on television starting to get emotional and then choke it down and apologize, I AM GOING TO SCREAM!
Please feel your feelings. Let those sobs out. We are supposed to feel. It is healthy to grieve. Breathe right into those feelings. Sobs are little balls of emotional energy being released. If you breathe into the feelings it breaks up the grief and the little energy balls of emotions can rise up and be released from your being. That is good. Keep taking deep breaths. Get into a rhythm. Inhale, sob sob sob cry cry cry as you exhale, inhale, sob sob sob cry cry cry - that is good. That is healthy. Do not shame yourself for feeling. Do not apologize for your feelings. It means your human. It means you care. Sobs, tears, snot from the nose are all ways of releasing energy and cleansing chemicals out of our body. Grief is not a pretty sight - but it is a beautifully healing and a Loving thing to do for yourself. That emotional energy does not go away just because we stop breathing and choke it back down. It does not disappear. The more you can release, the faster you can move through it. Watch the History Channel some time when they interview vets from World War II or something like that. People who have never really grieved will get emotional and choke it back down 40 - 50 years later, because they never released it. It didn't go away, they have been repressing it and denying it all those years. Release it now. It is healthy. It is the Loving thing to do for yourself. Amen. . . .
. . . . . Feel your feelings and release them. Give yourself permission to let it all out. Wail and scream and sob. Try not to let the messages of an emotionally dysfunctional society, or the discomfort of emotionally repressed people around you, keep you from owning the grief to the fullest. They want you to pull it together and get yourself under control so they will be comfortable. Let it out! Release it! Do not shame yourself for it, or apologize - it is marvelously healing to grieve. Owning our grief is part of being True to our self. In an emotionally honest society Dan Rather would have been crying and sobbing on his own program - serving as a role model for others - instead of keeping up appearances and stuffing his grief until some of it leaked out on the David Letterman Show." - Attack on America: A Spiritual Healing Perspective & Call for Higher Consciousness Chapter 1
I have made reference to how important it is to start learning how to set internal boundaries within, and between, the mental and emotional levels of our being.
Within the mental we want to start countering the negative, black and white, fear and shame based messages coming from the critical parent voice with positive affirmations and reality checks - so that we can choose to relate to whatever is happening in our lives from the perspective of our adult recovering spiritual consciousness / recovery control center, instead reacting and projecting our past experiences and old perspectives onto what is happening in the now.
Having a boundary between mental and emotional allows us to focus on Higher Truth intellectually while also owning and having compassion for our emotional wounds.
We can then have a boundary with those emotional wounds by not allowing them to define what we are experiencing in the now, but at the same time owning and releasing any repressed emotional energy from the past that has been triggered by what happens in the now.
Here is an example of how that looks from one of the earliest Newsletters that I wrote for my original web site in 1998.
"Working on the positive affirmations page was also a perfect part of my process as usual. While I was doing it I got a perfect example of how wonderful and powerful positive affirmations are - and how dramatically they have changed the quality of my life.
My car broke down.
It was a wonderful opportunity to be reminded of how much work I have done over the years in integrating my Spiritual belief system into my emotional responses to life - when some seeming tragedy occurs like my car breaking down, my very first reaction is gratitude that it happened when and where it did instead of when and where it could have. I used to react to life events (like car break downs) and other people's behavior out of my childhood programming that told me that if something "bad" happened it was because I was bad. I had gotten the message in childhood (in a variety of ways) that there was something wrong with me, that I was unworthy and unlovable, and that God was going to punish me for it. So life events felt like punishment.
Due to all the work that I have done in changing my subconscious programming (including at several different times making recordings of positive affirmations and messages of Love in my own voice to myself that I would play as I was going to sleep at night) my first reaction to life events now, and for the last 4 or 5 years, has been acceptance followed by gratitude because whatever it was could have happened at a worse time and place than it did.
It is amazing to me to see my capacity to let go of things that used to drive me crazy with worry and feel like punishment. The key for me has definitely been integrating the belief that everything is unfolding perfectly into my emotional process - it makes life so much easier.
Of course, that does not mean to ignore the feelings. Unfortunately, a lot of people use tools like affirmations, meditation, gratitude lists, etc. as another way of denying the feelings. These tools are meant to be used to balance the feelings not negate them. After my initial reaction of gratitude, then I let my adult take charge in terms of doing the footwork - finding a mechanic, calling a friend, calling a tow truck. As the car was being towed and I was following with my friend then I relaxed into the feelings and let myself cry with the pain of how hard life can feel sometimes. And when I say cry I mean cry - with heaving sobs. I can access those feelings and release them because of the energy/breath techniques that I have learned on the way (I describe these on the Grief Process page).
Just using the affirmations to keep from feeling my feelings would be out of balance, just staying in the adult to keep from feeling my feelings would be out of balance, just feeling the feelings and letting myself feel like a victim is also out of balance - we need to be able to use all of the tools and own all of the parts of ourselves.
What we are working toward is to find balance. That means using tools like the positive affirmations to integrate a supportive Spiritual belief system into our inner process, as well as using them to balance the feelings that come up. It does not matter what happens in my life I start immediately to tell my self and my inner children that it is all perfect somehow, that everything is going to work out in the long run - that way I can keep from buying into the shame and doom messages that are coming from the disease so that I can maintain some emotional balance." - Joy to You & Me Update Newsletters 8-23-98 and 10-25-98
Learning to have internal boundaries is the key to being able to be consciously present in the moment. We need to stop putting so much time, energy, and effort into trying to figure out how to control the things we cannot control - like the future - at the same time we are taking actions that will help us head in the directions we want to go. Just living in the now is out of balance and dysfunctional because then we are not being conscious co-creators in our lives. We need to take control of the things we have some control over (which includes our attitudes towards the situations and people in our lives) and let go of trying to control the things we cannot control - like the future - at the same time we are taking actions that will help us to head in the direction of what we want to create for ourselves in the future.
Here is a quote from one of the Question & Answer pages (the Q & A pages were the idea I had that my critical parent voice was beating me up for, at the same time my inner child was thinking we were going to be rewarded, in the excerpt I used in the Law of Attraction article) I had on my original web site.
"We are powerless over outcomes in the future. The future is not really our business - it is our Higher Powers. We worry about the future because of our innate human fear of the unknown - it is natural and normal for humans to fear the unknown - but ultimately the future is not something we can control. Now that does not mean that we are not co-creators of our lives - that doesn't mean that we just sit around doing nothing. There is an old story about a guy who wanted a garden and went out on his land and spent every day praying to God for a garden. This went on for days and then weeks and then months - finally one day the man got fed up and yelled at God "Where is my garden?" A gentle voice came down from heaven saying, "My son, you must plant the seeds."
We need to do any footwork necessary, gather any information that is helpful, make any connections that can help us, etc. and then let go of the outcome. Some days are seed planting days and some days aren't - if we put all of our energy into trying to create the future we want then we miss out on today - but if we just think of today and never think of the future then we are not being co-creators of our life.
We need to have a balance between being a responsible adult and being free to be spontaneous in the moment. By having internal boundaries and starting to change our patterns so we are not always reacting to the past - we can start having the choice of being present in the now. It is very important to be available for life today. I heard someone in a Twelve Step meeting not long ago say "What if today is the happiest day of my life and I miss it because I am busy getting better?" Balance is what we are seeking - balance between being in the now and taking care of business so we can eat tomorrow. . . . .
And most important, remember to lighten up and enjoy life when you can - take time to smell the roses and hear the birds and watch the sunset - we need to own the anger and the pain and the fear but they are not what defines us - who we really are is Light and Love and Joy and Beauty - and that is the Truth. We are the music of The Great Spirit - we've just been way out of tune." - Excerpt from Joy to You & Me Question & Answer Page 5 9-98 quoted on The Recovery Process for inner child healing - emotional balance
To shame people for feeling fear is really awful. Fear of the unknown is innate to human beings. It is part of the human survival programming. If we had not learned to check the cave for saber toothed tigers before moving the family in, we would not still be here. We need to own and accept our fear of the unknown. It is our codependent fear that is dysfunctional. That codependent fear is - as I say in some of my writing - a magnified mutant monster type of fear.
"Fear of the unknown is a natural, normal part of being human. It has a purpose - and deserves to be honored as something which serves us. But, like our relationship with all the aspects of our being, our relationship with that fear is dysfunctional.
The damaged ego responds to it's programming by generating fear of the things we learned to fear as a child: making mistakes; doing it wrong; being emotional; speaking our Truth; taking risks; being alone; not being alone; whatever. We then empower the fear by focusing on it, magnifying it, and generally giving it the power to define us and our life - or by denying it, which also gives it power because in denying our fear we are denying our self and reality. Going to either extreme results in the inability to see the situation clearly.
Because our ego was programmed to react to life from fear, negativity, scarcity, and lack (again due to emotional trauma we experienced, and the messages and role modeling of the adults around us) the disease focuses on and magnifies fear - and then it scrambles around trying to find something to cover up and repress the very fear it is generating. The disease blows the fear way out of proportion and then leads us to addictive and/or compulsive behavior as a way of stuffing the fear.
This is the essence of the dysfunction. We live our life reacting to fear, and the shame, that the disease empowers and then "helps" us avoid by causing us to focus on something outside of ourselves as the cause and/or the cure for the core place within us where we feel empty - where we feel unlovable and unworthy.
We are afraid of our own emotions - of all the repressed feelings and unresolved grief that we are carrying. We learned to be afraid of our own anger and pain and fear. We feel afraid of our fear of our own emotions. It is this fear once (or twice) removed that is paralyzing. That is, the fear of our own fear is our greatest block to healing. We are afraid of our own pain and anger - and then we are afraid of our fear of our own pain and anger.
In order to start finding some balance in recovery, it is important to learn how to take power away from the fear. In order to do that, it is very important to clear up our relationship with fear. And to look at all the different levels involved in our reaction.
The first step is to stop judging ourselves for our fear (or anger, or pain, or loneliness, etc.) - or denying to ourselves that we even have fear." The Recovery Process for inner child healing - through the fear
Fear and shame were the music of the dance that we were dancing as long as we were reacting to life out of ego-self - our ego programming (which included feeling ashamed for feeling fear and shame.) The more we can align with living life out of Spiritual Self instead of ego self - the more we can change the music of our dance.
"Thus, one piece of the puzzle fell into place. Emotions are energy. Energy has a vibrational frequency. Anger has a higher vibrational frequency than pain or fear - thus the human defense mechanism which allows us to turn pain or fear into anger because it is has more energy mass and therefore feels empowering instead of vulnerable and weak. Much of world history becomes clearer just by understanding how humans - as part of trying to survive - have reacted to fear and pain by getting angry and acting out that anger.
. . . . . The dance of life for humans has been grounded in shame and fear, empowered by belief in separation, lack, and scarcity. These are lower vibrational emotions and beliefs based on the three dimensional illusion that humans experience as reality. As long as the dance of humans harmonizes to music - vibrational emanations - that are rooted in shame, fear, and separation the only way to do the dance is destructively.
As I did my deep grief work and started to clear up my internal process so that I could more clearly differentiate between Truth that was a vibrational communication from my Soul and the emotional truth that was coming from my wounded soul, I was able to start trusting myself to be able to discern Truth. . . .
. . . . I was able to have a more trusting and Loving relationship with myself through getting more in touch with my Spiritual Self, my Higher Self, and through that Higher Self with God as I was coming to understand God. I was able to start having a personal, intimate relationship with my own concept of a Higher Power / God / Goddess / Great Spirit. I learned to trust the vibrational communications, the feeling of something resonating within. I was studying Quantum Physics, Molecular Biology, religion, theology, philosophy, mythology, esoteric metaphysics, science fiction - whatever was brought into my path to study. In those studies I was sorting out the wheat from the chaff - I was picking out the nuggets of Truth from the twisted, distorted beliefs they were embedded within.
I started writing a book based on what I was learning. This book was the first book of a Trilogy that was an adult fable about the history of the Universe. In that book I wrote about different vibrational levels of reality. I was writing a mystical, magical fairy tale based on a belief system that made it possible to view life as fair and Loving from a Cosmic Perspective. The Higher Power in this belief system is so powerful that everything is unfolding perfectly, with no accidents, coincidences, or mistakes. And this Higher Power is unconditionally Loving because we are part of this Higher Power - not separate from it. We have never been separate from the God Force. Every human is just a little piece of the energy of ALL THAT IS which exists in perfect ONENESS because it vibrates at the frequency of Absolute Harmony that is LOVE.
We are extensions of, manifestations of, this Higher Power temporarily in human form experiencing life in a lower vibrational illusion of three dimensional reality. We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience - not sinful, shameful humans who have to earn the Love of the Source. We are here to experience being human - to go through the school of Spiritual Evolution. . . .
. . . . It is on the Spiritual Plane that the highest vibrational frequency range naturally available to human experience is generated (by the Souls). This frequency range is the transcendent Emotional energy of Love. This Love frequency range also contains frequencies which are experienced as Truth, Joy, Beauty, and Light as well as sometimes being called; the God within, the Goddess within, the Christ within, The Holy Spirit, etc." - The True Nature of Love - part 3, Love as a Vibrational Frequency
Another reason my articles get so long is because I want to qualify statements so that they don't come across as if I were saying what is right and what is wrong. In doing a final proofreading of this article I saw again how in trying to communicate about how important it is to not buy into the black and white thinking it sometimes comes off as sounding black and white. When I say 'We cannot just start being in the Now and let go of the past' - that is a True statement in the context I was using it in - but not Truth in and of itself. We can be in the Now and let go of the past - in the moment. We can't let go of the past and have it gone - never to haunt us again - but we can let go of it in the moment. [I did end up deciding to add this aside: (except in the moment - the more we heal the more ability we have to let go of the past and be present in the moment for more moments of the day.) You wouldn't believe how many times I could add some qualification like that because it is hard using polarized language to explain all this complicated stuff.] "We were taught to look at and do "human" backwards. We need to make a 180-degree swing in our perspectives.
Anyone who has done a lot of healing or spiritual work and has gotten to a very peaceful, serene, happy, Joyous place in their journey while living alone - and then gets in a romantic relationship knows this one. 'It is interacting with other human beings that gets messy.' ;-)
Anyway, I just decided to conclude this with a quote from my book where I address the trying to communicate about a multilevel reality in polarized language conundrum. I think I have made my point about emotional energy and need to stop now.;-)
That includes our perspective on this healing process. Many of us have pursued healing and Recovery just like we did the rest of our lives - as if it were a destination to be reached where we would find "happily ever after." We have gone to healers and psychics and therapists in order to learn the "right" way to do life.
Recovery is not a dance of right and wrong, of black and white - it is a dance of integration and balance. The questions in Recovery are: Is it working for you? Is the way you live your life working to meet your needs? Is the way you are living your life bringing you some happiness?
When I state that the grief process works, I am not saying that it is the "right" thing to do, or that you are bad or wrong if you are not actively pursuing your emotional healing.
Maybe it has not been time for you to do your grief work yet. Maybe you have not had a safe place to do it. Maybe it is not part of your path in this lifetime.
No one can tell you what your path is!
What I am telling you is that the grief process works to dramatically change the quality of the life experience. What I am saying is that it is possible to find some Peace and Joy in life. Unfortunately, in sharing this information I am forced to use language that is polarized - that is black and white.
When I say that you cannot Truly Love others unless you Love yourself - that does not mean that you have to completely Love yourself first before you can start to Love others. The way the process works is that every time we learn to Love and accept ourselves a little tiny bit more, we also gain the capacity to Love and accept others a little tiny bit more.
When I say that you cannot start to access intuitive Truth until you clear out your inner channel - I am not saying that you have to complete your healing process before you can start getting messages. You can start getting messages as soon as you are willing to start listening. The more you heal the clearer the messages become.
When I talk about ways that we use to go unconscious - like workaholism, or exercise, or food, or whatever - I am not saying that you should be ashamed if you are doing some of these things.
We cannot go from unconscious to conscious overnight! This healing is a long gradual process. We all still need to go unconscious sometimes. Recovery is a dance that celebrates progress, not one that achieves perfection."
Progress not perfection. As I said in quote from my article on Soul Mates and Twin Souls that I shared at the beginning of the law of Attraction article:
"I very seriously pursued learning about past lives and different planes of existence and all of the esoteric, metaphysical knowledge I could access. And that pursuit was important in helping me to enlarge my intellectual paradigm - but a few years later I realized that the whole purpose of the pursuit had been to bring about a shift in my relationship with myself, my concept of God/Goddess, and with life. The details that I had accessed about past lives and other dimensions of existence were not really important in terms of how I live my life today - but the shift in my paradigm, and therefore my relationships, was vital. At that point in time, I threw away all the notes I had taken about different past lives and such.
The whole purpose of my quest was to discover a belief system that could allow me to start believing that I am in fact Lovable and worthy. Figuring out how it all works isn't what is important - what is important is discovering the faith to believe that there is a Loving Force in control. That is what helped me start Loving myself more - to start relaxing and enjoying life a little bit more instead of always giving fear and shame all of the power." - The True Nature of Love - Twin Souls, Souls Mates, and Kindred Spirits
The "and such" part included notes on the etheric plane and such. We can't possibly understand all of this, it is just important to be open to larger perspectives that are aligned with Love. If someone is giving out messages that feel shaming, feel black and white, that don't feel Loving - then don't buy into it. Pick out the baby from the dirty bath water. Take what works for you and leave the rest.
I posted this page last night ending it with the quote from my book - and then woke up this morning knowing that it wasn't quite finished. I used a lot of quotes from writings that I wrote years ago for these two articles, because I don't write much about the metaphysical and cosmic perspectives these days. Not because I don't believe them any more - but because they aren't really important in my day to day life now. As I have mentioned repeatedly, it is important to enlarge our perspective in order to have a more Loving relationship with ourselves and life - so it was important that I spent a lot of time and energy investigating levels that most people don't ever really have to think much about in their recovery. I hope these articles will help you to stop buying into any messages you hear that don't ultimately support Love as the highest Truth, as the ultimate Truth. I wrote these two articles because I see a lot of spiritual teachers out there who are teaching that Love is who you really are and that we are all connected in ONENESS - but sadly, are still giving out messages that aren't Loving.
I am going to end this article with first a quote from my Attack on America book - which includes a quote from my Trilogy about my Cosmic beliefs. And then I am going to include some lines from the very end of my book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls. The purpose of these articles is to help you learn to be a little more Loving to your self. We are all butterflies whose minds keep telling us we are caterpillars; Swans who still feel like ugly ducklings. It is our codependency that causes us to keep allowing the old tapes and old wounds to define us. Codependency Recovery is about owning who we really are by tuning into the Truth that resonates with our Spirit - even when, especially when, life is not feeling very Loving.
Life is in some ways not feeling very Loving to me right now, so I wrote these articles to remind me of who I am and why I am here in human body at this place in time. I hope that sharing my experience, strength, and hope helps remind you of who you really are and why you are here - so that you can lighten up and enJoy today more than you would have if you hadn't read this article.
I end all of my workshops and grief groups with two prayers. One of them is a group Serenity Prayer. The other is to have everyone do the Hokey Pokey. That is a reminder to lighten up and not take this life business so personally and seriously. We are unconditionally Loved. We always have been, and always will be. Each and every one of us is perfectly where we are supposed to be on our Spiritual Path - and we are being guided Home. Love & Joy to You & Me. ~ Robert 11/9/08
"The bottom line is finding a way to live life that works to help us be more Loving to ourselves. That works to help us open up to happiness and Joy and freedom from living in reaction to the past. I am sharing my relative Truth with you as an alternate perspective for you to consider. It has helped me to Lighten up and enjoy life. (We are moving from dark to Light and from heavy / serious to light and not so attached to the illusion - learning to relate to life more as a sitcom and less as a tragedy.) A quote from that personal journal I write for my Joy2MeU Journal states it quite nicely I think."I was explaining to someone in a phone counseling session the other day, about how important I believe a Loving Spiritual belief system is in recovery. She said, but that is just a crutch, you are just playing a mind trick on yourself.I really like that: why let it mess up my life today. ;-)
I said, so what. It works. Who can know what the Ultimate Truth really is? Not me. I choose a belief system that helps make my life easier and more enjoyable today. That works for me. That is the bottom line - it is functional.
I also happen to believe it is the Truth. What I have discovered as I kept surrendering and enlarging my paradigm - is that each new level I arrived at made perfect logical sense. I have to surrender to the intuitive, emotional side in order to reach a higher perspective, that I can then see makes perfect sense in a rational logical way.
That is how I have arrived at a more balanced way of living life, at a way that makes life a lot more enjoyable. If god really is judgmental and punishing, I will find out soon enough - that doesn't mean I have to let it mess up my life today. ;-)" - Joy2MeU Journal: My Unfolding Process - Transition, June -July 2001 - posted 7-01
. . . . In the meantime, I am going to end this with a capsule summary of my Cosmic belief system. This is the understanding of Truth that works for me."