A gentle reminder to myself and others that we can be both. We can be both deeply understanding that life is happening as it’s meant to, with our highest intentions always in mind, AND we can also feel completely devastated, anxious, and lost about the way life is currently looking.
A week ago, I found myself deep in the pits of grief. Here I am, a medium, able to connect with those who have crossed over, able to hear messages and see images that show me that we never truly die, and yet, there I was alternating from the floor to the bed, crying in deep heartbreak and despair over the physical loss of Mickey. For days, I found myself lost in the trenches of grief, with little light shining through.
I am someone with concrete proof that our loved ones are always with us HOWEVER, I also experience moments of unbearable pain and rage that people die.
I can be both.
You can be both.
We can all be BOTH.
We can both understand that life and energy is a cycle without beginning or end AND we can also feel like there are hard finite closures in life that we cannot survive.
We can have peace knowing that we are protected and loved by the Universe AND we can also have moments of panic and anxiety about the future.
We can know that we are all God’s children and all deserving of love AND we can have absolute hate and anger at someone for what they have done.
We can understand that no one has power over us and know that we ultimately are in control of what we do and how we feel AND we can also feel like the biggest victims over the treatment and actions of others.
We can love and appreciate our family for all they do AND we can feel bitter, angry, and resentful at all they have not done.
BOTH can exist.
Over the past few years, as my education and spiritual practice expanded, I noticed myself struggling to accept the fact I was still having waves of anxiety, grief, depression, and anger, despite all the learning I was doing around inner peace and consciousness. Intellectually, I was understanding all the material in the courses on form and formlessness, yet, I was still having moments of huge suffering.
No matter how much I learned about detachment, I still saw that there were things, people, places, ideas, and dreams I was heavily attached to. One hour, I would be absorbing all the benefits for nonattachment and nonduality, and the next I would be fuming with anger over someone canceling plans.
For a while, I was frustrated with myself for not evolving faster. Why couldn’t I just let go of my old desires and limiting beliefs and be free and limitless in the nonattachment? Why couldn’t I just let it go that someone didn’t text me back or follow through with plans? Why could I not just sit in lotus position on my freakin yoga mat and let that shit go?! I mean celebrities are even doing it now!
Logically, I knew that my beliefs that their behavior was wrong, was my own perception of the situation and possibly my own projection. They may not have attached the same meaning to changing plans as I did. Nor was it even their responsibility in the first place, to do what would make me happy. Whether or not I wanted to admit it, I knew I was holding them all to invisible standards that were not theirs to honor, but ones that I had created for them. Cue me falling out of lotus and face planting on the mat.
Deep down, I knew my anger was all a message that I was feeling lack not with them, but within myself, which revealed to me, that I really felt lonely, disappointed, and unloved on the inside.
HOWEVER, even though I knew the wisdom perspective on why I shouldn’t be upset- the Universe loves me, God loves me, I’m never fully alone, blah blah blah, I still was in fact very upset and not in the slightest bit interested in hearing how much the Universe loved me.
Eventually, I came to accept and learn, that even though we may intellectually understand great teachings and wisdom, these knowing’s do not just integrate immediately. Rather, they take time, observation, deconstruction, practice, and lots of patience.
We must constantly walk ourselves back from places of fear and go back to our heart. Some days, that walk back takes me all day or even week. Some days, it takes only an hour and in great moments it takes just a few seconds.
Regardless of how long the walk takes, I have learned that berating myself and being upset that I am in an old place of fear, judgment, or anxiety is not healthy or fair to myself. I can’t force myself to just be more conscious or awakened. Instead, I have to keep feeding myself the wisdom teachings, knowing eventually with time they will keep integrating and become easier and easier.
This is not an overnight process, but one that takes continuous attention. There is nothing wrong with feeling these ‘heavy’ or painful feelings. After all, we are humans and those feelings are very much a part of our experience. The severity and duration of the changes with our evolution and understanding, but we don’t need to force ourselves to feel less of them. And we certainly don’t need to be mad at ourselves when we do feel them. We will feel those feelings naturally less and less as we evolve. We don’t need to force the evolution to take place.
We are humans.
We are growing.
We are learning.
We are evolving.
We cannot be mad at ourselves for the level of consciousness we are at because that is simply where we are right now. It’s not possible to instantly jump to somewhere we are not. Wherever we are on our journey, we are always acting from our highest level of consciousness. Some days that may not feel very conscious but that’s okay. It’s all allowed. The difference is, we can become much more aware of when we are being unconscious.
You can practice and understand the wisdom teachings of the Buddha or Jesus, or whoever inspires you, but you can also feel the full spectrum of emotions without being any less than them or anyone else.
There is no level of consciousness or enlightenment that makes us any more worthy, powerful, important, or loveable than anyone else. We are all at the level of consciousness that we are meant to be at and none of it is higher or lower than anyone else.
There are many things to be in this life, but before we become “enlightened”, let’s just practice being compassionate. Especially towards ourselves.
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Book a free discovery call with me if you are being controlled by your fears and you need to relearn how to find peace and direction amongst the internal and external chaos.
