by Liz B | Sep 6, 2020 | Love, Self-Improvement, Spirituality, Twin Flames
The battle we fight is always within ourselves first, even if others are acting as a catalyst.
I’m so far from perfect, I have my flaws just like anyone else, but my relationships with people over time have served to tamper down my ego by showing me things about myself or triggering things in me I never would have seen otherwise.
I have so far had a few very major events in my life that really made me struggle. One being my anxiety disorder where I had to really get a grip on my mind to not suffer anymore (this took years of practice). Second being one of my “meditation experiences” where it felt like my ego and “soul” for lack of a better term were on a battlefield — the deeper part of me was trying to fly high while the ego was cowering in fear over what was happening. Perhaps close to ego death which can feel like you’re actually throwing yourself over the cliff mentally.
My latest battle came through in connecting with someone in a way I had never experienced despite having other very deep connections before, and it taking me to a level of vulnerability and love in a way that I had never seen.
Love on this level can trigger so much fear, and if you already have past wounds, forget about it. In this case, their past wounds caused pain and for us to have to stop contact altogether.
This made my ego go absolutely crazy. I could not accept that things would go this way for a connection so beautiful, deep, and meaningful that we both felt. As a result I felt as though I lost control of myself entirely.
I couldn’t stop messaging them, and I found myself overcompensating and showing more love and affection in times when they weren’t showing love, effectively throwing things out of balance. I would beat myself up daily over doing it but yet, I couldn’t stop.
As someone who felt like I usually had so much control over myself in this way in relationships and prided myself on being good at letting go — this was EXTREMELY unsettling.
I also found myself trying to teach them things I learned that I felt might help them see things clearly — something that seemed helpful at the time. But I learned this was really just another sign of my ego trying to control the situation.
It has taken me months of pain and reflection to realize what was going on with me internally. That it wasn’t really about them directly, it was how the situation’s dynamics were causing me to react, and I did not have a handle on it.
This showed me there was something for me to learn, and the lessons wouldn’t stop there.
Over a year later, and I still experience bouts of some of the most intense emotional pain over it that I have ever had.
In dealing with the pain, I previously thought I could just push it away like I do with my anxiety: distract myself and with time it’ll lose its power.
I made lots of new friends. I traveled. I did anything to put my attention elsewhere, but to my surprise, that pain was still consistently weighing very heavily on me beneath it all.
When I thought things were going okay for a while — like even a month or two — BAM it would hit me and take me over completely…making me wonder “what the hell is this?”.
It’s been this and the connection itself that showed me this wasn’t just any ordinary love journey I was used to, and it’s so hard to describe this unless you’ve experienced something similar.
And I realized that this pain was serving a purpose that I needed to address. In order to stop the pain, I couldn’t just ignore it anymore.
This is where more lessons begin. The pain nags at you until you learn to figure your shit out. It REALLY won’t let you NOT begin to dig deeper and understand yourself.
I had to start asking myself questions like…what daily thoughts am I holding that are reinforcing the pain? What ideas if any am I holding onto about this situation that is inherently causing it? Is it my attachment to wanting something to happen with one of the most beautiful connections of my life yet now not even being able to talk to them? That was certainly part of it.
And ever since this has been my journey of learning to strike what has felt like a very tricky balance between loving and letting go. How do I continue to love this person and honor the connection without being attached to the outcome — without my ego trying to control it in some way?
How do I learn to keep this level of love while not having the pain? It almost seemed like the two come hand in hand.
My goal has been in this journey to learn to love unconditionally and without fear, and I honestly can’t say I’m there yet, but at least I’m getting closer.
And looking in retrospect, this journey from the time I met them has been something intensely connected with self evolution.
It was never really about what they did to me or how they handled things. Things happened the way they happened for a reason.
I have simply had to learn to move forward and deal with my own stuff amidst some of the strongest things I’ve ever felt, and it was way harder than I would have ever anticipated it to be.
This is me getting used to being vulnerable more often rather than in a state of pride. Being able to not be afraid to sit with the pain, to love without blame, and without the shame weighing on me of how I handled things.
And in some ways, I recognize I’m a different person than I was a year ago because of it. Kind of the way any sort of pain will wear you down over time. I’m more resilient, more humble, less attached, and stronger within myself, and at the end of the day that’s the most important thing.
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the
daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem
less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons that
pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the
winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within
you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy
in silence and tranquility.”
—Kahlil Gibran, “On Pain”
by Liz B | May 15, 2019 | Consciousness, Fear, Identity, Intuition, Mental Health, Mindfulness and Meditation, Reflections, Spirituality
In this world we will continually experience battles between the ego and the “soul” or higher self parts of us, whether we realize it or not.
Personally, my first most obvious battle in this way happened when I was 21, when I reached a very crucial point in my meditation sessions (I had been meditating constantly at this age). I had been spending two hours per day, five days per week, at a Zen Buddhist center in New Mexico where I had been living. I had been doing this for months.
Later on that year, I went on a camping trip where I camped out at a music festival for a week with my mom. I was dedicated to my meditation at this point, so I really didn’t do much except meditate there. It became kind of like a meditation retreat, meditating for most of the entire days I was there.
The more I meditated, the more I began to progress into this higher awareness state. This is when everything began to change.
For one thing, my senses were greatly heightened. I remember being able to hear a cat’s footsteps as it was walking around outside, and I could hear them so insanely acutely. The cat wasn’t even that close to me.
I began to sleep in a completely different way. I didn’t like this at all, because I could never tell if I was actually sleeping or not. Some part of me always felt really awake even while asleep, and this was maddening. It was nothing like a lucid dream, in fact I’m not sure I was dreaming at all during this time. If anything I would probably say I was constantly awake, and this worried me as I truly didn’t know if I was ever getting any real sleep whatsoever.
The pressure in my forehead (which I guess would be called the “third eye” area) would become so overwhelming at times that it would practically force my eyes shut, and I would often then fall into those sleep states.
I also became hyper-aware of the concepts we understand ourselves and the world through, and how limiting those can be. They literally serve as a box that keep us from experiencing the true expansiveness of ourselves and the world.
When I talked to people, I felt myself responding with my whole self, rather than just my mind. This is difficult to explain. But usually when we are talking with someone, our mind is conjuring up in the background how we want to respond, or how we want to word it, or just feeling out the response conceptually in general. With the constant meditation I was doing, my mind was not in the way nearly as much as usual, and it was like the responses to people came from the depth of my being without my mind in the way at all. It’s almost as though I had no awareness of myself as I responded to people. I just responded. I was one with the response.
I also began to be able to see all of my mental states happening simultaneously, as though I were watching a movie where these “worlds” were being created. There was a world that my speech created, a world that my thoughts created, and a world that my actions created. Then, there was the pure awareness state outside of all of these, that I was merging with more and more.
I felt intuitively that I needed to have the world of my speech, thoughts, and actions completely in tune. It felt extraordinarily important for these to be completely in harmony, or else I would not be able to maintain higher awareness.
However, as I kept myself in this awareness state through meditation, I also began to become increasingly dissociated. Thoughts felt slower, and I began to feel very disconnected from my body. And the more that I became disconnected from my prior concept of myself, the more I felt like I was walking on air, and not the ground. I was becoming ungrounded. This went on for days. I told myself this was my new mode of being, a new experience of love and expansiveness. The problem was I realized over time that I was becoming out of balance.
I started to feel anxious, and like I was playing with fire. The anxiety spiraled with the pressure of knowing that the fear-filled thoughts I was having was keeping everything out of harmony, and I wouldn’t be able to keep higher awareness this way. But I couldn’t control it. I was beginning to experience a world where I didn’t know the rules or what anything was anymore. I also didn’t know how to consistently operate in a world where my conceptual understanding of things was falling away.
My ego felt the need to cling, to hold on to my prior understanding of myself and the world.
I got to a point where I got a very clear intuitive message that told me in order to continue, I would have to abandon everything I “knew to be real.” I literally had to abandon my understanding of my self, and any conceptual frameworks I had developed of things. Because ultimately, these concepts were limiting me.
The fear that I was feeling took over. It won. It had felt too much to me like I was traveling into no-man’s land, where I was out of control, and the fear of the unknown progressed into full blown panic attacks. For a year or two. I thought I was going insane at this point, because I felt like I had gone too far into this strange land to even come back the same person (I wish I had known at the time that this was just the fear talking).
A counselor I saw later on that was knowledgeable in spiritual things, told me that because I was so young and my ego had not developed yet, if I had “jumped off the deep end” into the unknown, it may have resulted in massive confusion and psychosis. She said very matter-of-factly, “ironically, you have to have a very stable ego in order to be ready to explore the realms of the soul.”
To this day, I still don’t know if that’s true. It is very clear to me now that the intense fear I was feeling came from the loosening of my entire framework of reality. Honestly most people would be scared shitless if, for example, they were to be thrown into the massiveness of space suddenly, feeling as though they were at the mercy of whatever. I did not know how to trust that process. How to trust that if what I understood as my self died, that I wouldn’t really die. Just my sense of self would.
In the moment, our ego can’t differentiate. We don’t realize how tightly we hold on to our sense of selves, because it is what we use here on Earth to operate as a self. It’s all we really know, unless of course we have a taste of our higher selves, and of higher consciousness states.
It was a very scary battle between who I thought I was and everything that encompasses, and my real, higher self. But, this battle was happening at a very rapid pace. At one moment I was embracing my new experience of life, a higher sense of love and oneness, and a temporary new way of operating. Then the next moment I was cowering in fear, extraordinarily scared I was losing control, and losing myself.
My ego won. I stopped. But that’s okay. Because I felt I did indeed delve too quickly and deeply into this new world, and I needed to take a step back. I think the whole process of loosening ourselves from our clinging to our concept of ourselves and the external world is something that needs to happen slowly, over many, many years of time.
It has also taken me years since that experience to even understand that my inherent desire to reach new heights of awareness was due to having a natural awareness to some degree of the higher self, and longing to return to the richer experiences of life that are available through these higher awareness states.
It’s a part of my self that is consistently wanting to bring my “lower” or ego-self up to the higher self’s level.
Having any awareness and experience of this higher self makes it more difficult to live in the contrast of the “lower” self. Therefore, it creates a sense of longing to return to the higher self’s reality. The reality that is far, far more expansive than the limited reality we typically experience here.
Another very important thing that hit me just recently is how real these higher experiences of love, of existence, of understanding, actually are.
The most unimaginable joy, pure love, and living with a higher level of awareness is very. fucking. real. These are not just dreams, a desire for an escape (though it can serve as that), or a plight of the imagination. It is totally achievable. But here on Earth, it’s very difficult. We have to be in such a place of mental freedom and openness before we can ever experience these things without our clinging to our conceptual understanding of things, as well as other mental obstacles bringing us down.
I also realized intuitively after this particular meditation experience that the different part of my selves were out of harmony. I was trying to experience a reality that I didn’t have the tools to integrate. Kind of like when you go on an acid or shrooms trip (which I haven’t done before), you gain great insights, but then you come back down and ultimately it fades into a memory, with very little or no integration into your daily life.
I had slightly more integration with this consistent meditation I was doing, but I also realized quickly afterwards that it was going to be a long road of developing my own tools and everyday awareness before I could hold and process the intensity of the reality I was experiencing during those temporary states.
Nowadays, as I go through this life, I get to experience that higher sense of joy and love much more consistently than I did before. The more I learn and grow, and the more aware I become, the more my mind expands and naturally allows for this reality to be experienced more regularly.
But all of this is where the battle of the ego lies. You might be lucky enough to be faced with the most unimaginable, otherworldly beauty you have ever seen on this Earth, whether it comes in the form of a higher consciousness state or a pure love, and you may experience it for a moment. But then if you have not worked on overcoming your mental obstacles, this beauty will simultaneously arouse all of your fears and any blockages you have that keep you from realizing higher awareness.
It can be scary. And if you don’t surrender, your ego will win, and you will shrink back down into your normal understanding of things, and you may even pretend what you saw wasn’t real. Or maybe you were just going crazy. You might even feel intense fear, anxiety, and anger, depending on the situation. It will all be your ego kicking and screaming, trying to hold on to what it thinks is real.
Believe me, I’ve been there.
But it’s all okay. It’s all part of the learning process. It takes many years, a lifetime, for us to surrender who we think we are and not allow the ego to have such a hold on ourselves. Some of us may never experience higher awareness states at all, until death. That’s okay too — we are all on our own personal journeys, and we experience the things we need to to help our own growth, at our own pace.
“In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond; And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king? Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”
—Kahlil Gibran
by Liz B | Oct 1, 2017 | Fear, Mental Health, Mindfulness and Meditation
Living our lives and learning throughout them on this Earth is an incredible experience. Each of us have our own unique journeys in which we approach all differently based on our perceptions and understanding of what goes on around us.
Being Sensitive and Choosing How to Respond to All the Input
I have always been a sensitive person. Sensitive to noise, sensitive to light, attentive to the world around me and things could always easily affect me. Growing up, this wasn’t really a pleasant thing. I didn’t see the good in it, I was purely just affected by it. But as I’ve gotten older, I can see that it has been a blessing. It allows me to really observe and deeply process the information that’s constantly going on around me. However, when I was younger, I didn’t really have the tools required to be able to choose how I wanted to respond to all of this input. It simply just hit me, and if it was negative input from someone or something, it would affect me negatively and that was that.
This at times created self-esteem issues or fears that would cause me to doubt myself. And this can easily spread to other things — second-guessing your own abilities in almost anything. Then if it goes on for too long without resolution, these habits of self-doubt, fear, and low self-esteem can become more thoroughly etched in our brains; more permanent. I realized this is what stifles people’s growth and causes so many people to build up walls around them, or to see the world more negatively and act out of fear. They don’t learn to believe in their own potential.
The world CAN be very negative, painful, and difficult…but ultimately it is us holding onto this negative, fearful outlook that will hurt us more than anything else.
Luckily for me, I grew out of most of these negative thought patterns (having an anxiety disorder didn’t help). It took quite a while.
Dealing with People’s Judgments
If people said something in particular about me based on their perceptions, or judged me in some way, the first thing that hit my mind would NEVER be that it was their problem. I automatically assumed that if they were saying it, it must be for a reason. And maybe it was. But I never really looked at (or saw) the root cause of why they were saying what they were saying. This put me through more emotional pain, so to speak, because it caused me to really analyze myself and see if what they were saying had truth to it. I literally faced it and absorbed it, and thought about it deeply.
I don’t think this is a bad thing either; as I think it’s important to keep our minds open. Someone who never looks at themselves or their own potential faults will not grow in awareness. They won’t become closer to really understanding themselves.
However, it is also very important to understand that most often, the way people see you is completely limited by how they perceive the world in general.
Most of us have limited/stifled our potential in one way or another — and it’s usually never wholly our own fault. It so easily gets stifled over our lives by potentially how we are raised, the expectations and pressures that might be placed us, getting overly fixated on money and letting that drive our actions. Or just by negative experiences and fears, or their own judgments of what they think is right or wrong.
Lately what has been sticking out in my mind is that over the course of my life to date, so many times I could feel that someone had a certain perception of me and I never really looked at it objectively. I always gave it perhaps more credit than it deserved. However, this was always something subtle and unmentioned — for example, if someone had said to me “you’re really stupid,” in that case I certainly wouldn’t have believed them. These were not obvious judgments or statements made, and they weren’t always negative. It was simply just the reflection of their own worldview projected on to me that became apparent through the natural dynamic of our relationship.
It was clear that they didn’t understand me for who I really was.
And I think more often than not, this is often the case for most relationships we might have, to varying degrees. And if we don’t know ourselves deeply, we’ll never be able to detect when someone’s perception of us is off. Especially because this is often just a subtle thing. We get lost in our own misperceptions, which are made worse by others’ misperceptions, and can get lost in a maze and may stray farther away from who we really are.
People’s Perception of You Has More to do with Them Than With You
Every once in a while I come upon that quote on the internet that says, “people see you as THEY are.” I never fully understood this until recently, to be honest. But it is so completely true: People so often project their own fears or negativity or even the nature of their own self on to you. People who make assumptions about you or judge you are often doing so because that is what lies in their own hearts, NOT because it has anything to do with you.
And the answer to this is not to judge them back. You can limit contact, but don’t hold negativity in your own heart, because in the end, negative thoughts will only do you harm. It is best to just pray or hope that someday they are able to rise above their own stifling thoughts and habits.
We must work on becoming more mindful of how we respond to the outside world. Even though it’s often not easy, we can choose our battles; we can choose how we respond. People assume that because they are interacting with other humans most of the time, that that’s who the battles are fought with — like it is us against them. This is never the case. The more we act out of fear, violence, vengefulness, and so on, the more we close our own hearts and are affected in the long run.
“War within ourselves is always a prelude to war outside ourselves. All war starts within our own hearts. When our egos are inflated or our desires insatiable, we go to war with the other for the sad joy of maintaining our one-dimensional worlds.”
― Joan D. Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today
“NOTE TO SELF – BOOMERANG EFFECT
My words, thoughts and deeds have a boomerang effect.
So be-careful what you send out!”
― Allan Rufus, The Master’s Sacred Knowledge
“Very often in everyday life one sees that by losing one’s temper with someone who has already lost his, one does not gain anything but only sets out upon the path of stupidity. He who has enough self-control to stand firm at the moment when the other person is in a temper, wins in the end. It is not he who has spoken a hundred words aloud who has won; it is he who has perhaps spoken only one word.”
― Hazrat Inayat Khan, Mastery through Accomplishment
by Liz B | Sep 24, 2016 | Attachment, Mental Health, Spirituality
One of the most difficult lessons we can learn is how to manage our desires and understand where they come from. If we understand their source and reason for being, we can more easily look at them objectively and not give power to them to control us.
Many people get confused by for example Buddhist teachings that sometimes make it sound as though we should eliminate all desires or eliminate the ego.
Our desires and especially our ego are both inherent parts of our human lives.
The ego allows us to establish an identity in this world, as without some sense of self, we wouldn’t be able to function well here. What would we be without a sense of self? The ego serves as a tool to allow us to pursue a life path and be a part of the community. It is even a tool with which we can understand ourselves more deeply.
The key is in understanding it as a tool and recognizing its limitations, seeing that the ego in itself does not necessarily define us, and understanding how we can put it to good use.
Our desires are like windows into our own minds. They show us where we might feel like we are lacking in our lives, and if we look at them closely, we can learn more about what we value and try to understand why we are valuing it or what type of emotional programming is creating a craving for one thing or another.
Too much focus on our desires however leads to a mind without clarity and a heart that is not at peace, as all we can focus on in that case is trying to gratify them. Once the are gratified, the rush is over, and we may then return to state or feeling of lack as we are basing our feelings of happiness on whether some condition is met.
When we learn to really feel the difference between being at peace and our minds spent thinking about our desires, we may more quickly see that this focus on desire feels empty in comparison and won’t fulfill us in the long run. Because instead of letting things be and work out as they are intended, we are too attached to controlling the experience or using it to match our programmed addictions to feelings of pleasure and perceived happiness.
Now and then I still fall into focusing on desire. I still fall into emotional programming and habits. But the difference now is that I know where that pattern will take me mentally and how it will manifest in my life, and I know it won’t be to nearly as satisfying of a place in the long run if I just learn to let go and let things be as they will — without continually chasing cravings.
As with all things in life, it’s about a balance and keeping perspective. Using lessons we have learned from past experiences is helpful, as long as we can still keep an open mind to the present experience.
This all falls under the umbrella of mental discipline, which I believe is the greatest tool we can continually develop over the course of our lives. One of the most dedicated people I’ve seen in terms of developing mental discipline is Bruce Lee.
The following excerpt is writing that was found in his pocketbook that he continually carried around (found on https://www.brainpickings.org):
WILL POWER: —
Recognizing that the power of will is the supreme court over all other departments of my mind, I will exercise it daily, when I need the urge to action for any purpose; and I will form HABIT designed to bring the power of my will into action at least once daily.
EMOTION: —
Realizing that my emotions are both POSITIVE and negative I will form daily HABITS which will encourage the development of the POSITIVE EMOTIONS, and aid me in converting the negative emotions into some form of useful action.
REASON: —
Recognizing that both my positive & negative emotions may be dangerous if they are not controlled and guided to desirable ends, I will submit all my desires, aims and purposes to my faculties of reason, and I will be guided by it in giving expression to these.
IMAGINATION: —
Recognizing the need for sound PLANS and IDEAS for the attainment of my desires, I will develop my imagination by calling upon it daily for help in the formation of my plans.
MEMORY: —
Recognizing the value of an alert memory, I will encourage mine to become alert by taking care to impress it clearly with all thoughts I wish to recall, and by associating those thoughts with related subjects which I may call to mind frequently.
SUBCONSCIOUS MIND: —
Recognizing the influence of my subconscious mind over my power of will, I shall take care to submit to it a clear and definite picture of my CLEAR PURPOSE in life and all minor purposes leading to my major purpose, and I shall keep this picture CONSTANTLY BEFORE my subconscious mind by REPEATING IT DAILY.
CONSCIENCE: —
Recognizing that my emotions often err in their over-enthusiasm, and my faculty of reason often is without the warmth of feeling that is necessary to enable me to combine justice with mercy in my judgments, I will encourage my conscience to guide me as to what is right & what is wrong, but I will never set aside the verdicts it renders, no matter what may be the cost of carrying them out.
The most beneficial perspective shift that I have had lately is in seeing all negative thoughts and circumstances as a way to train my mind for the better. I have always known it intellectually, but for some reason I never truly applied that perspective until recently. I think it took a certain amount of mental suffering throughout my life and overcoming of that suffering (by primarily relying only on myself to relieve it) for me to really see how much it had rounded me out as a person, and how it had made my spirit only more resilient.
We have so much power within is, we just have to believe.
Past this, I would strive to have more of Bruce Lee’s mental discipline — a daily intention and method to convert negative emotions into a form of useful action. In repeatedly doing this, over time negativity will hold significantly less weight and we may even learn to welcome it as difficult as it may be to deal with.
by Liz B | Apr 8, 2016 | Consciousness, Lifestyle, Self-Improvement
When I was younger and a good thing happened in my life, I was always full of wishes for it to last forever. I’d say to myself “please PLEASE let me have this person in my life forever!!!” or what have you — I’d plead and beg to myself that things wouldn’t change and that it was something I could keep, in its exact state, as it was in that moment. I’m sure most of those of you reading this can relate.
It’s like that first love you had that was unlike anything you had ever experienced and allowed you to experience a whole new range of emotions and maybe made you feel a little more grown up, like you could say you finally knew what this “love” thing was all about.
It might’ve helped you form your identity by having this new experience with another human being and made you feel more important, because you were getting extra validation of your actions and your existence with this close relationship, and through each other you begin to meet new people who see you not just as an individual but a unit.
But as I have gotten older, the passage of time has told me the necessity of change. However, it has also shown me how resistant some of us still are to it. Even as we age, most of us have a plethora of external circumstances that continue to validate our actions. We learn to look to external sources — be it people, structures and systems such as school, accomplishments, careers, and what have you — as tools to measure our existence by.
It’s hard to ignore, because it happens by habit and by growing up in a society with structured systems that each of us plays a part in. Everything becomes a matter of relativity to something else; we’re making less money than someone else, we’re a different color than someone else, we didn’t accomplish a certain number of degrees compared to someone else, and thus the list goes on forever…and in even more subtler ways we might not immediately recognize.
We might be in and out of relationships that put us in different life situations where we have varying social statuses or introduce us to situations that are new and we discover new dimensions to add to what we understand as our identity.
Sometimes we notice how other people (or groups of people) react to us as a person and use that to understand ourselves or our placement in this world. Our identity really ends up becoming the sum of comparisons against something else, or a sum of the reflection of others’ opinions. And sometimes, we forget to learn how to look beyond all of it to reveal the source.
It might sound in words more simple than it is, but it is really complex, because from the time we were born, we have been introduced to life on earth and society as it is in this current state. We learn to understand ourselves only in the context of the current state of our world. If we don’t naturally explore other ideas frequently in our minds, learning to uncover our core can be a major undertaking.
These days, I use meditation and frequent contemplation to discover what deeply rooted perceptions I might have that were built from the time I was a kid or during days where I didn’t know better. I try to observe my day-to-day emotions and actions and see where they might be stemming from, or what is provoking them.
In my opinion, there is nothing more valuable than the evolution of the self. Relationships of all kinds, achievements and the like are important, but if they are becoming a hindrance to your potential, this is likely an issue or will become one. Healthy relationships and circumstances should be helping you to propel you forward, or should at least be supportive as you reach new heights in your understanding of your self.
And without change, we would suffer. We’d never grow, be pushed out of our comfort zone, and come to understand the world in new ways. We’d never reach new heights of happiness or release the chains of our mind that might be holding us back.
If change comes knocking at your door, open it with welcome arms and remind yourself that it might be the opportunity of a lifetime, even if it’s disguised behind a veil.
“I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a person’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.”
— Martin Buber
