Just Doesn’t Work

For years now, I’ve paid a fortune to learn techniques and tools to get all or part of my “rascally ego” to stop “blocking me” from having the life I know I could be living. I’ve applied these tools, taken multiple levels of advanced seminars, read more books, worked more diligently. Guess what. My ego didn’t go anywhere, and I still have days where I judge my life as less than stellar. So, what could I possibly have done wrong, when I applied these tools and information? I have come to the conclusion that I have done nothing wrong. I just used other people’s opinions about the wrongness of being human to move my experience into me accepting and loving all of me. Here are some insights I had along the way.

On Being Human

What’s so wrong with your humanity anyway? Over the 25 plus years I’ve done transformational work with people,I’ve found that so many clients hate their bodies. They don’t want to be in them. They feel victimized by their egos; betrayed by the limitations of being in a body. They don’t want to be in the human experience. They only feel free when meditating, doing out  of body experiences, soul travel, astral work, etheric journeying. They literally spend tens of thousands of dollars to learn how to stay out of body. Then, they wonder why their in-body experience doesn’t work for them.

I find this line of thinking quite mystifying at times. Before we come to Earth, we stand in line with millions of other souls, praying that we get an opportunity to come to Earth to have the rich experience of being human. We’ve done nothing but think about coming here; talked to our teachers, guides, and spiritual families; planned for every eventuality; looked at the options. We pick the perfect life for what we want to experience from our parents, where we want to be born, what gender we want to be, what preferences we want to have, and what part our ego will play in revealing the richness of life on Earth. Then, we project that plan into reality and come through the veil of actualization, pretending to be unaware of our greater being, so that we can get the most juice from the Earth experience.

Ego Is a Part of Being Human

I’ve hung out with A Course in Miracles groups for decades now, and I like their take on the ego. The ego was created by you. It started out as a collection of thoughts that you used to observe your experience and make sure that your body is safe. It’s had so much power over you because you kept feeding it. Every time you had an experience that you judged as “bad, wrong or uncomfortable,” you gave the ego more instructions. “Watch for this now.” “Don’t let this happen again.” So, the ego expanded to accommodate your instructions. Now, you wonder why it monitors so many aspects of your life and you hear its warnings running in your mind a thousand times a day. Your ego follows the patterns you told it to. Since ego is your creation and it is following your instructions, how can it “bad and wrong?” So, why would you want to destroy, kill, eradicate, or get beyond ego? Wouldn’t it be more effective to include, without resistance, instead of getting beyond the ego?

Does Resistance Create Permanent Change?

Have you  ever noticed that when you  put  weed killer on weeds they just find some place else to  grow? If you pick maple seedlings out of your flower beds, more seedlings appear? I’ve noticed this pattern with clients, too. Someone would come into my healing practice with pain in a very specific part of their body. They would ask for the pain to be eradicated but often didn’t want to deal with the underlying reasons why they chose the experience. So, they’d hop up on the table and have a Reiki and sound treatment. The would get relief from the pain. Then, a few weeks later, they would have pain in another area of their body and make another appointment. In fact, I’ve had this experience, too, where all I wanted was the pain to be fixed. Then, I woke up and decided to allow the pain to teach me what I needed to experience so that we both could move on.

We Deal with Pain Ineffectively

I’ve done a lot of thinking about why we get stuck in a pain loop, and at times, I’ve just prayed for relief. At first I took the pain medication the doctors prescribed, ate foods that dulled my senses, slept through days of my life. Then, more permanent relief came in the form of brothers and sisters along the path who had moved beyond judging the human experience, of calling pain bad and wrong. They first taught me about allowing, since I couldn’t accept suffering. I talk about this part of my experience here: http://www.transcendentjourney.com/when-you-cant-accept/

The key teaching my Elders model is that they accept their experience as it is. Using their example, if we allow the energy to flow, by breathing it through, and feel our emotions in the experience, then nothing gets stuck. We automatically will flow into our  next experience.

How Do We Accept and Allow?

Ultimately, an experience is what it is. We might have experienced love-based emotions along the way. We might have experienced fear-based emotions as we are on the journey. But, what is really true is that the circumstances happened. You can judge the past all you want to. You can stay stuck in these experiences — what you feel is good or bad — rerunning them over and over in your mind, trying to figure out what went right or wrong. Or, you can move on and live life from a “not good for me, not bad for me” viewpoint. After all, you created your life plan with the Divine. So, it’s unfolding exactly as you designed.

When accepting and allowing seem like they are the last thing you want to do, ask this question (which I use myself), where is God/Divine/Infinite Source in this _________________? When I take a breath and ask this question, I feel the energy start to flow again.

Embrace Life

In order to come off auto pilot, you have to be willing to experience life.  Some days will be perfect, and you will feel that you have actualized your mastery and illuminated your tiny corner of the planet. On other days, your cat is going to vomit all over your keyboard and cry in pain. You’ll feel compassion for the cat, frustration about having to take time to clean up your desk, anger at your ego talking a mile a minute, and anxiety about how you are going to pay for a new keyboard. If you keep breathing, allow that you are feeling what you are feeling, that your ego is saying what it is saying, life will continue to  flow. When you embrace life in all its unique expressions, then you will experience all that it is to be human and the peace beyond understanding will be yours.