Words With Myself

Hurt people hurt people, an old adage but an unwavering one.  Trauma has symptoms when left untreated and if we are constantly acting out of trauma we are likely to end up spreading that trauma onto those around us.

When I feel a strong emotion, my default go-to is to analyze the who, what, why's of the situation and try to understand what is causing it. I have gotten so used to doing shadow work, it has almost become my instinct to delve into what I am feeling before I have even had a chance to truly feel it. Shadow work has become some form of defense mechanism as I know that understanding and processing trauma is the road to heal it, I am trying to shortcut the negative emotions before they even arise. I think in some way, I am cheating myself from actually processing the trauma. Rushing to get through it and not allowing myself to feel how I feel or process what I am feeling and instead rushing to try and logic my way out of it.

We all have an idea of Good and Bad, what that means to us, and it is probably completely different for every single one of us. Good and bad are subjective, not only to each individual but also subjective to the moment for those individuals too. When we try to control our life into submission and create a life of good without bad, we end up causing ourselves far more suffering in the attempt to control than we would have with just allowing things to play out how they were meant to. When we allow ourselves to enter a flow state of non-attachment, we can truly experience life in the realest sense.

Second part to the Fear is the limit episode a few weeks ago, expanding on what fear is and how our approach to dealing with it drastically impacts our life. How is fear controlling you and what are you doing about it?

When we are growing up, we fall into the trap of building an identity. We create a mask or a series of masks and learn to keep ourselves sheltered. Over time, we keep checking our reflection and all we see is the mask so we forgot we ever put one on in the first place, believing the character we created is truly ourselves. Who are you really? What do you really want? When you answer these questions through the glasses of the mask/character, we get answers like "I want to be rich" or "I am a loser", answers that attach to the identity we created. We learned that people value rich people, so that is why we want to be rich or we learned that we are a loser because nobody wanted to be friends with us, we traded who we were for somebody that was more palatable for other people. It is time to stop playing the character and start living as authentically as we can bare.

As Henry Ford once said, "Whether you think you can or think your can't, you are right." He knew that the beliefs you hold will dictate your reality. Despite the fact that I disagree with modern mainstream spirituality suggesting that manifestation is this cure-all magic problem solver that will make all your wishes come true, I do know just how powerful manifestation can be. Many of us curse our power to manifest, mostly because we often find ourselves manifesting terrible things for ourselves due to our negative beliefs, it is time to change that. 

Fear is the barrier to action, it can prevent us from doing and being all the things we want. Yet, fear can also be our biggest source of motivation and strength, it is all about what we do with our fear and how we process it. Instead of letting it control us, we can let it motivate us to be better prepared, more alert and more focused. The more we get used to dealing with the situations and things that frighten us, the less control that fear will be able to exert.

Learning to trust yourself is a tricky business, how can I trust myself when I get things wrong so often? How can I trust myself when I don't have all the answers? Well, my trust lies with my ability to listen, learn and grow, my trust lies with my intuition and with the fact that things happen as they are meant to happen even if I don't see it at the time. So really, I trust myself to be the vessel rather than to be the water, I don't know where I am headed or what my destiny will look like, but I will ride the waves and do it with a firm belief that I am exactly where I am meant to be.

Paradise, a tropical island with a fresh coconut? Not always. Paradise is found within, even when everything is going your way and you are living someone else's dream life, it can feel like hell to you. Sometimes, it takes us being exactly where we want to be to realise that it wont change how we feel within.

As someone who has been caught in the trap of taking life too seriously for a large portion of it, I am beginning to go through the uncomfortable process of re-learning how to play. I realize that a lot of the fear and anxiety I hold caused by this way of living is also preventing me from enjoying life at the moments where I really should be able to sit back and enjoy the profits of the hard work. Instead, I am caught up in thinking that the work is all there is and I see how wrong it all is, but learning to play can be easier said than done.