The Pitfall of Self-Reflection

Yesterday was a very strange day in which I found myself for the most part completely wiped out and actually slept for a large part of it during the day. I awoke yesterday evening having an intense and deeply mystical experience whereby I was actually watching my brain circuitry being re-wired into a higher template. I saw that this higher template was literally super-imposed over the lower one, and all it would take to use it was a shift up to place my focus there instead, just like moving from the small self to a larger self super-imposed over a wider part of existence. This brain template appeared to be the fully functioning template for my largest self super-imposed over all that is.

This morning I woke up from a full night of dreams highlighting key insights I had missed in the form of childhood belief systems I was still holding on to. Having decoded the messages I set about the process of scanning through the family home in which I spent much of my early life room by room. I was looking for something but wasn’t sure what so I just combed every area until I hit on a giant mirrored wardrobe in my grandmother’s bedroom. I remembered that I used to sit on the floor in front of the wardrobe with the middle two of its four doors opened towards each other. I would sit in between them and pull them back and forth towards each other, creating a kaleidoscope of endless mirror images of my reflection. This one addiction to self-reflection is at the core of all my problems throughout the entire span of my existence.

The Healing Power of Relationship

I can honestly say that I would not be in the position I am in today were it not for the help of the beautiful and gentle-hearted men who have come into my world, and I want to thank every single one of them.

Not all of these have been romantic partners, but all have touched me deeply and left a lasting impact on the landscape of my life. For any of you who read this, you know who you are, and I honour you.

It is true that relationship can be that which inflicts wounds or that which heals them, and I have been indescribably lucky with some of the relationships that have crossed my path. I have always said that when we love ourselves enough, somebody who equally matches and mirrors that love will appear before us. When we achieve enough of an inner balance that we no longer need to see the reflection of our dysfunction but instead the expression of our potential manifested, the universe must deliver our heart’s desires. That has happened for me now at least in certain areas, proof that this understanding is indeed true, and I couldn’t be more joyful.

Loving ourselves completely means refusing to settle for less than what we know we can potentially experience and achieve. It means never settling for less than exactly the dreams that we dream of, and never accepting that we are limited despite whatever distorted vision our
world may seem to show us. It means being brave enough to say no, and to say yes, according to our highest inspiration in any moment. Saying yes to life is the prerequisite to drawing towards us the kind of relationships that we really want to have, and saying yes to our whole selves is the key to attracting others who can embrace our whole selves too.

Throughout my years of searching, few have understood the desire to find somebody with whom I could go so deep as to be able to find myself in their eyes and to have that feeling reciprocated. But yet, I feel that this is a desire in the heart’s of almost everyone, it may simply be the case that we have not gone deeply enough into our own hearts to find it there. We may not have looked deeply enough into our own eyes to be comfortable with this kind of intensity, and we must do that first before we are ready to meet others with whom we can share these privileges of mutual unfoldment. How can we expect to handle what we really want in terms of our romantic partners, until we can handle the depth and intensity of ourselves? Only having done this first, have my dreams become apparent. We cannot find the match of ourselves until we know what we ourselves are, and that is a metaphysical concept that applies in the most basic of ways in our daily lives down to the tiniest detail. By coming home to ourselves, we find the natural extension of our home within our world.

There are many things that evolved relationship can do for us, and one of them is to show us wounds within ourselves that we would otherwise never realise are there. It takes somebody to look that deeply into us to unearth all of the little quirks and kinks in the corners that we may have missed by ourselves, and I genuinely feel that we cannot go this process alone. Regarding healing, often people get annoyed when I “go on about” the issues of childhood abuse and sexual trauma, but I’m not going to let up on it until there is not a single person left on the planet who feels unheard with regards to something that been a reality for so long. The problem is not over, and the healing is far from over either when we are only beginning to understand the
potential that this kind of relationship brings.

Just as racism is still a problem, the fact that the tide is turning is not a call for those who have been affected by it and are still hurting just to pretend it didn’t happen. There is work yet to be
done. I don’t want to make this a post about that, but I do want to highlight that it is through loving relationships based in oneness that we can heal all of these things and more. From the starting point of knowing our oneness, we can draw all of life in every single area into the living expression of that reality with us.

Relationship is such an important tool for us to navigate the peaceful reality that we are entering into, but we need to know how to navigate our relationships masterfully. It is not enough to wound others due to our lack of awareness and then to withdraw our attention because we can’t handle the mess we have created or can’t seem to get along. Relationships are our holy temples of initiation and we need to treat them accordingly in order to be able to access the divinity that is inherent in our partners through life’s myriad of experiences be they lovers, mothers, sisters, brothers, colleagues, clients or friends.

The understanding of this is fundamental to the peaceful navigation of our future, and this will form a primary focus for me for at least the foreseeable period going forward.

Through relationship in oneness we have the potential to explore the reality completely transcending dualistic experience, where there are not two but one, standing side by side. The power of love blesses us, but often love is not what we think it to be. Often what we think of as love is just attachment, or dysfunction that tells us we cannot be whole without another and seeking parts of our own being in the illusion of external mirrors. I will speak a great deal more about this later, but for now let us say that in order to find the ones our hearts so thoroughly yearn to be with, we must first find within us the keys that are needed to pivot the curve of our own destiny in the direction of our highest vision. Only then will life deliver.

Take a look around, how many sacred relationships do we already have before us?

Moving Towards Inspiration

Yesterday morning I revisited the feeling of what it’s like to be made to feel by another that your life is of no worth and you might as well just give it up. Like there’s no value to your continuing existence, and nothing beyond the tiny box in which you find yourself in that moment, unable to see the potential beyond the edges. I was surprised to find it there when I got out of bed, and it was very strange to perceive such a foreign sensation from this dramatically different perspective. I realised that the memory lingered like a ghost of my past self , though I had not even known it was there.

Over the years I have come to understand that the feeling came from not knowing that it was another’s reflection merely projected onto the screen of my soul, and nothing in fact to do with me. Not knowing, I took it on as my own and genuinely believed that this is how my loved one felt about me. This time I was struck with sadness not for myself, but to see the full extent of the grief in the other who had fully allowed me to believe that it was so. This time, I watched the feeling fade into a distant echo as I recognised with every cell in my body the inestimable value of my being.

Surprisingly and quite automatically, I found myself speaking out loud to the inner child who was now smiling and laughing, reminding her what a beautiful little thing she is. As I went about the rest of my day, it occurred to me quite how much we have taken on in the form of personal misperceptions having not realised that we lived in a hall of mirrors, and that nobody else realised this either. It is really down to each of us now to set all of these old records straight, and throw out the ones that are scratched and broken and are clearly never going to play again.

Throughout the healing process I have learned that how we perceive everything another says to us is a choice, and where we have played the victim before because we simply didn’t understand any better, we never have to even look again. We tend to hold back on telling others when their behaviour and conduct is unacceptable to us because we fear that they might take it personally. But this too is a choice. Somebody can either take our words of truth as the impetus to pick themselves up and change, or as an impetus to spiral further into the petty drama of pretending that they are somehow unloved and then inflicting this on everyone else. What most people don’t recognise is that we cannot truly love another until we love ourselves, and so if we don’t speak up for our own wellbeing then we are not truly loving our loved ones anyway, all the while fooling ourselves that we are doing the best we can. To allow others to get away with unacceptable behaviour keeps them imprisoned in a box of their own making, and we may well just be the ones who have come along to set them free. The kindest thing for us to do is to speak our highest truth in every moment, whatever the personal cost. This is always the greatest love that we can give.

I have found myself quite recently having absolutely zero patience for those who wish to pretend that life is up against them rather than changing from within, because I know that to do so is possible, and I cannot fathom the selfishness of anyone who wishes to drag those around them down out of sheer laziness and unwillingness to get real about the possibilities that are available to everyone if they choose to become their own energy source. There must always be a balance between inner work and making changes in our external environment, and if either is neglected then life as a whole is going to suffer. There is only so much we can do within to change others, and there is only so much we can do externally without changing within. There comes a point when we have the choice to leave the game of mirrors completely, and if we do this then to attempt to work only with the picture in the mirror no longer has any effect at all. The mirrors are valuable in that they show us the things that we are not, but as soon as we know what we are and have integrated all of the aspects that we need to live at our fullest then looking into a mirror which shows only a distorted view is of no further service. This is the point at which we must look seriously at whether we want to play this game anymore. If we don’t and the others in our environment do, then we are going to have to leave them behind.

On the way to here, we can oscillate between only seeing the flaws in ourselves, and only seeing the flaws in others. The first question to ask always is are we allowing ourselves to get away with unacceptable behaviour? If we choose to live within the game of mirrors, then we must be very careful in detecting what is real and what is merely an illusion that we have constructed for ourselves to suit our own egoic needs. On the other hand, if we have truly done the work on ourselves, then where are others who have invested less in self-change still treating us badly? What makes something unacceptable? Anything that wounds the sacred is unacceptable. Whether this is done by another or by ourselves to ourselves is our own call.

If we’re not happy with our situation, we can always change it. There is always something different, something new, something more in alignment with our purpose for being (which is to explore the potential of love). Our job is to bridge our inner knowing of this with our outer experience of it, and the process of doing so is not likely to come all that easily at first, because the very first port of call is to look at and then move away from all those those places where it is evident the potential is not being lived.

One of the biggest problems inherent among light workers is the concept of martyrdom, and feeling that our only job is simply to see the perfection in what is there. Yes, it is true that there is perfection in everything, and that mastery of our circumstances lies initially in peaceful contentment with what is. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t hope for anything more, and that we don’t dream of a better, more joyful, more inclusive, embracing life. It doesn’t mean that we don’t take any further action than to be internally grateful. It doesn’t mean we have to “put up”, it only means that we first must be glad for the gift of living before we can open the doors for any further blessings to step in. Furthermore, we don’t have to martyr ourselves. To do so is extremely dysfunctional when the highest service we can render is to live in joy. If our circumstances restrict us from living in joy, then the best thing we can possibly do is change them, by first accepting unconditionally where we’re at and then taking the necessary steps to affect real and lasting change externally too. It is such a fine line to tread that it can only be experienced directly, no amount of theory will help unless we pluck up the courage to begin making the changes in practical life just as we have done everywhere else.

On the matter of unacceptable behaviour, behaving unacceptably towards ourselves includes the process of not speaking up when something another does consistently is not ok. Let’s assume that we understand this much and we have already done that. If not, we need to do it, whatever the fallout will be. If it means we need to up our guard and buffer whatever hostility may come at us, then let us remember that we are here as warriors and our task when in battle against illusion is to do just that. Failing to do so means permanent entrapment, speaking up means minor discomfort for the period that it’s going to take to get ourselves straight again. If we have well and truly determined that we are being true to ourselves and others are not and have no intention of doing so, the time has come to begin walking away. There is no point in pretending that this is not going to be painful. But what is more painful, the temporary pain it’s going to take to flip the game on its head, or the pain of living a lie?

One of the very cool things you learn by getting tattooed is that all pain is temporary. It doesn’t make it any less real when it’s there, but if you can somehow manage to muster the courage just long enough to push through it then you’re gonna end up with something very beautiful that you can enjoy forever. I imagine those who’ve given birth recognise the very same sensation. The key is to keep on breathing, knowing that this is the case. What kind of picture will you be left with afterwards, compared to the picture that is there now if no changes are ever made? If you are the artist and this is your chance to create a masterpiece, how much effort are you willing to give?

The hardest part of walking away from unacceptable situations is that the heart cannot understand why it must be so. The heart knows only peace, beauty, joy and love, and so looking into the face of what might be destruction is incomprehensible. The only thing I can say that helps to come to terms with the reality is as follows: that too is a picture of its own, and is perfect in exactly how it is. If life is a gallery of Infinite potential, the choice comes down to which is the picture that we really want to look at forever, the one that makes our hearts sing? Where is that picture being painted? I know what my choice is, and so I will keep looking away from everywhere where my song is not playing until only the echo of what has been remains. I want the expression of my life to reflect my beauty in every regard, and I will settle for nothing less.