by Liz B | Feb 26, 2022 | Reflections, Self-Improvement, Spirituality, Writing
Some of us are called to walk very unique and lonely paths in life that test us in every way possible. Sometimes these paths are rarely understood or talked about, and so often you must walk them alone.
These experiences can take you places you never imagined to be real. Something that makes you intuitively realize… this is not ordinary. This is not a typical part of this world we live in here. This is a touch of something higher.
But yet… they resonate with you. There’s something familiar about them. Like you’re just remembering something you long had forgotten.
And they will then often bring up the most intense triggers, attachments, fear, pain, you name it…it is a battlefield of the ego and the soul, and I’ve been on this field (consciously) for over half my life.
They shake the ground you walk on so radically that you cannot be the same person afterwards.
While it happens you are so fully captivated by it, only to be thrown back to the wolves afterwards. But now you have a new spark inside you, a seed has been planted…this marks the beginning of a new journey… to at least understand what the hell you just saw.
This journey can beat you repeatedly down to the ground while you’re flailing about like a fish until finally you realize you have no control over it and all you can do is surrender.
We sometimes face the deepest depths of hell and end up dying to ourselves, only so we can truly be reborn to a new reality and deeper understanding of our real selves.
This is the ultimate destruction of who you thought you were, required to make room for the new.
by Liz B | Jan 3, 2022 | Reflections, Self-Improvement, Spirituality, Thoughts and Reflection
Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a mother, wife, or hell even a partner. I realized I’d be happy, after all, just continuing to explore all my hobbies and live and die by my ideas and personal discoveries.
My first love in life told me I had an artist’s mind, we were maybe only about 15 or 16 when he said that. But I never forgot it. And he’s right. My imagination is actually extraordinarily entertaining and I never run out of ideas or things to do.
One thing I know for sure though is I’m pretty good at following my heart and I’ve been blessed to have a lot of unique experiences that people can easily look at me as crazy for, really shocked to find out that I did it all drug free lol but anyhow what I wanted to really say here is that if you have a different path in life than most, it really CAN be scary to follow it. It can be easier to just sweep that shit under the rug and ignore some of your deepest feelings. I’ve done it, and it surprised me that I did it. I’ve never been that type. I don’t suppress my emotions. I vent things, I address them, I’ve never run away from my emotions. Until…the fear or uncertainty associated with them was simply too much. I thought I could just ignore it til it resolved itself….until it didn’t. Sometimes it becomes easier to live a “practical” “normal” life. Everyone else around you seems to be doing it. And you have all those reinforcers around you all the time. People and their gatherings, their cozy families, their secure jobs. All seeking the same thing. But what if you have a different calling?
In all my past spiritual experiences, things people often never heard of were happening to me. I followed them because all I felt then was fascination. But once fear became involved or obstacles I didn’t have clarity on? Well that’s easy, I’ll just cover that up for now with my day-to-day goals and activities. But something kept nagging at me. Year after year after year. Nagging at me not to ignore it. Til I was like god, fine – what do you want? And realized something had to change. I had to try to conquer my fears and what other people were telling me was best.
I had common fears of ending up alone or wanting kids but then it being too late. Another fear was that I’d end up suffering alone in old age, lonely, in pain, with no resources to help me. I honestly have no idea where that fear came from (or any of these really), except maybe that that’s more or less what happened with my dad, and I saw his suffering, and naturally, it affected me greatly.
Of course, you want to live in a practical and smart way, but the cost of doing things out of fear or because “you’re supposed to” comes at the cost of living your truth and potentially paving a very unique path that will light the way for others. For me, this would be an extra big mistake because the intuition I have that calls me is so strong. I don’t know exactly what it means, but the callings always feel significant. And despite my fears, I can’t ignore them. You have to drop all expectations and be open and ready for anything. So — here’s to living your truth and facing your fears. Happy 2022!
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 | Oct 28, 2019 | Poetry, Self-Improvement, Spirituality
I. Darkness
I said I was a broken soul; nothing could repair me.
Nothing ever seemed to have much meaning anyway.
This world is nothing but a parade of images, and humanity’s keeping score —
Yeah well, I failed to fit into those frames long ago.
I’ve got a broken mind; I’m stuck in a rut and I’m probably blind.
I’ve worn this mask so long I don’t know want to know what lies behind.
I can’t even seem to let go; I’m holding on tight
But hey my time’s up — I don’t have strength to fight that fight.
Life’s broken my heart and no one lives up to their word
Sellouts, liars and fakes are at my every turn
People don’t really give a shit about you; they just pretend
So I’ll be fine by myself, I don’t need to let anyone in.
II. Light
The other night something came to me, randomly in my sleep.
Maybe a dream, yet it was much more real than anything I had ever seen.
I saw my mind right in front of me; I saw all of my pain —
It was like a gigantic, visual, cause and effect chain.
I looked at my mind in 3d space as I was existing outside of it.
Immediately I exclaimed, “how is this possible?” — and then I heard a voice say:
”Don’t you see? None of this darkness nor this mind has ever been who you are.
You are a being of duality and your soul is still pure…”
It continued: “Earth is but a play; And your mind’s ideas and concepts set the stage.
You created your own prison because your pain perpetuated more pain.
It’s no mystery darkness overcame you because of your mind running this game.
You were never separate from the light, you were simply living in a cave.”
III. Integration
I then woke up from this “dream” in a daze and had a strong urge to cry.
I felt I had finally found what I was looking for my entire life.
I knew the voice talking to me was simply part of my self
But in this Earth school, like most, I had been partially blind.
Even so, my mind and its patterns did not immediately change
But how I subconsciously defined my “self” infinitely expanded and rearranged.
Clarity began to seep through my once shaky foundation;
I then knew what to do to let go of these self-imposed lines.
I realized we sometimes may need help from the outside
To shatter the boundaries of what we thought we knew.
Carrying through the midst of an often dark world
We might then eventually find the truth: the battle has always and will always be within.
by Liz B | Oct 26, 2019 | Consciousness, Identity, Intuition, Love, Out of Body Experiences, Self-Improvement, Spirituality
I’ve always been, since I was a child, someone who is very tapped into my soul.
”Soul” is one of those slippery terms that varies too much based on the person, so I’ll define it as I understand it. I can’t claim to know what the soul is made of, its exact properties, nor exactly how it operates.
But I have always had a strong awareness (and sense) of a part of me that I would call simply an awareness in itself. It does have its own attributes — it is ME, in the deepest sense. But it is something that remains constant while the rest of my human character does not.
As humans, we define ourselves by humanly things: genetics, various factors in the environment, values, likes, dislikes, and so on. The soul is outside of this. It is a constant presence — an essence — and many describe the soul as having more of an “observer” role throughout our Earthly journeys.
Being aware of my soul to the degree I am today often makes me feel like I am simultaneously in two worlds.
All of this generally sounds like a positive thing, and it is. But now that I have been through multiple types of consciousness-breakthroughs as well as various types of spiritual experiences that came to me rather spontaneously, I’ve become increasingly able to differentiate between the “soul” part of me and the “human character” part of me.
The Challenges of Increasing Awareness
As I become more aware of my soul as I am experiencing being human, I’ve realized that there are inherent difficulties that can come with this.
Part of the difficulty for me has been the fact that learning to follow your soul has been very much like walking blindfolded in a pitch dark place, having to learn to use another set of senses to guide your way.
You have to develop this set of senses, and keep developing them, if you want to fulfill your soul’s desires and understand yourself to the very core. This requires discernment: you have to know when to shut out outer influences and trust your inner voice.
There is a time to acquire knowledge from outside yourself, and a time to shut it out and pay more attention inwardly.
I’ve noticed that the majority of people I meet don’t really know how to trust themselves, let alone listen to themselves, and it’s not really their fault. We are part of a time when we look to external authorities, common knowledge or perhaps the “latest” knowledge in order to decide what anything means. We are taught this from a young age — we get our knowledge from going to school and having someone tell us what things mean.
It’s not a surprise to most at this point in time that as a whole on Earth, we are spiritually lacking, because we are mostly cut off from our selves.
The idea that there is wisdom to be gained from our own selves — from a part of our selves — sounds ridiculous to many. So they don’t even attempt to believe in themselves or begin to listen. They see themselves as just another human going to school to “get smarter.”
From the time I was 17 years old, I began to have significant things happen to me psychologically (including my first “consciousness-expanding” experience at 18). If I, for example, had had a parent who was not very open-minded and I had told them what happened to me, I could’ve been committed to an asylum.
Instead, I learned to follow what my intuition was telling me. Because it was sending messages to me loud and clear, and honestly, those messages were hard to ignore even if I had wanted to.
Potential Isolation
The other difficult thing that happens when you begin to align more with the “soul” part of you, is that you begin to have things happen to you that make it more difficult to relate to others at times.
You may begin to feel, see, and desire different things that sets you apart from the rest. You may become more detached and potentially not enjoy the things you used to enjoy in the same way anymore.
Values or other perceptions you felt once were a part of who you thought you were may begin to fall away as your human character expands beyond what you thought it could ever be.
Seeing the Duality More Clearly: My “Higher Self” Is a Parent to Me
I like to say this journey of awareness really accelerated starting at age 17, and I am now 35. It has taken me this long to be aware of this “soul” part of me to the degree I am now, after developing my mental tools.
In one key experience I had which was some type of random out of body experience, I sensed my “higher self” presence there directly. It felt as though it was the parent and I was the child, yet both were me! It’s hard to make logical sense of with the way we understand things, as it did feel like a separate presence from me in some way, but it was pretty clear that it wasn’t somebody else.
After that for about two weeks, I felt this incredibly secure, beautiful, unimaginable sense of love. It felt like something was taking care of me, showing it loved me and wrapping me in the most unbelievable security blanket. It wasn’t a presence I sensed at that time, but rather just the love itself.
I still don’t fully know where that sense of love came from, but I believe it may have been a result of experiencing that higher consciousness state in the way I did.
The Expansion of Your Understanding of Your Identity
As you continue to wake up to your soul’s presence and understand that you are not just merely the human character you’ve been playing for so long, there is usually a bit of an initial shock or time period of integrating this knowledge. Because quite honestly, it changes your life completely. But it only comes to you when you are ready.
When this integration happens, over time you slowly start to uncover things that feel like you simply had long forgotten them. But at the same time, you can’t put these memories on any kind of timeline. They feel like they are coming more from another dimension (for lack of a potentially better term) than they are another “time.”
For one thing, I began to constantly get what feels like pieces of memories coming from this “soul” part of me. I was able to feel that it not coming from the same part of me that my typical human memories come from. But these memories are so vague that I can’t hold on to them for more than a second. However they often offer me some recognition of something. They often feel like a very sudden remembrance and confirmation of something I experienced but once again, on a timeline I cannot pinpoint.
No matter where you’re at in your life in terms of understanding who you are and how things work, I think the most important thing to take away from all this is simply to believe in yourself and trust in yourself. Learn to go within.
Sometimes this starts by simply questioning who you think you are and why. Where do some of your opinions and perceptions come from? What types of emotional attachments might you have that drive your desire to interpret something one way or another?
Try to look at yourself objectively and with an open mind, and watch how your thoughts tend to process things. Are you mostly negative or positive? Where is the negativity coming from, and does it have any basis?
The journey within typically starts with questions and really learning to acknowledge why you are feeling what you are feeling, without judging yourself.
It’s all easier said than done, but it is one of the most worthwhile journeys there is — and it becomes an endless river of learning as well as many rewards along the way. Over time, you’ll begin to have more confidence, depth, and clarity than you could’ve imagined having.
by Liz B | Nov 30, 2018 | Consciousness, Identity, Mindfulness and Meditation, Out of Body Experiences, Self-Improvement, Spirituality
A long time ago, my talented best friend and spoken word artist Cory Russo wrote a poem about the power of pain and how it can change us entirely. For me, one of the most meaningful lines from this poem was, “I can make an atheist drop to his knees and pray — I AM PAIN.” (Click here to listen to her entire poem!).
This line is meaningful on many levels. For me, it has only become more relevant and meaningful over time, as I relate it to my journey of life’s experiences kicking my ass and deepening my character in the meantime.
It is my journey of a dominating skeptical attitude into openness, as I became more aware that this skepticism was primarily due to my own lack of awareness and knowledge, which in turn led me to believe that I was knowledgeable enough to assert my opinion on things I didn’t know enough about.
Like most people at one time of our lives or another, I was more aware of popular opinion regarding certain topics that seemed “illogical” and this is the stance I would take, without actually having proper experience regarding that topic.
Skepticism obviously isn’t necessarily bad — as everything should be examined properly and skepticism often exists for a reason.
However at the same time, it has the great potential to keep us closed, and doesn’t always allow us to actually examine from a neutral and open mind state. We don’t have to believe, but we don’t necessarily have to be skeptical, either.
Being open is ultimately about getting to a point in life where you have enough humility to understand that our levels of knowledge are always relative and life truly is a much more multi-dimensional place than we can fathom or experience easily here on Earth.
After 34 years on this Earth, I’m at a point now where I look back and see how much openness has given me vs. how much skepticism did. There is no comparison.
For example, if I had allowed skepticism to dominate what was happening to me during any consciousness-expanding experiences I had at a very young age (without knowing what the F was going on with me), I wouldn’t have learned from it the way I did.
During that sensitive time, I had to completely shut out the noise from the external world and really pay attention to what my own self was telling me about this experience. If I had listened to some others, I might have believed instead that I needed to be reeled in with some medication.
Now, to elaborate on pain and suffering.
Many of us that are trying to understand the mystery of our existence often wonder why, if there’s some sort of higher power, that pain and suffering are allowed to exist to the extent that they do. What is their purpose? Why would a higher power make us suffer seemingly needlessly at times, if there is one?
It is something I had pondered on some occasions myself, but as I grow in awareness I feel I’m starting to understand it a bit more.
There is not necessarily one easy answer, as there are multiple reasons why pain and suffering occurs. Sometimes we cause our own, from our own lack of awareness. In those cases it is just simply cause and effect.
For whatever reason, from a young age I had multiple consciousness-expanding experiences that shattered my reality as I knew it.
My entire life felt like an illusion as I had discovered new inner worlds on another consciousness plane, not produced by thought and conception, but as a literal direct experience.
While I learned certain things in the moment of those experiences, it has taken me years to process each one of them and really understand them more over time.
These experiences did not come from a firmly held belief in anything. They were simply something that happened as a result of listening to myself and following these “feelings” I was getting from my intuition.
I was always very eager to share them with people, but with these not being common or well-understood phenomena, I was usually met with responses like, “are you SURE you weren’t on any drugs?”. Thankfully, this did not make me question the validity of my experiences. They had shaken my world in a way that was unlike anything I could have imagined, and I felt like I needed to share what I saw with the entire world. I felt I had a very important message.
But, people learn things at their own rate and in their own due time. It was not my place to control that, as much as my ego desired people to understand. All I could do is tell my story and leave it at that.
After the first experience, I still did have many unanswered questions about life and existence (and still do). There are many things I simply can’t know yet and am not going to pretend to. Each subsequent experience would show me a little more context, but generally what they gave me was more insight into the nature of our true selves, or our essence.
They led me to understand that there is more to our selves than what we experience here on Earth.
Yet as significant as these experiences were, the insights gained from them felt very obvious and clear. This knowledge is something that is with us all the time! It is just blocked by so many elements of our humanly experience. All of it was completely familiar. It was just finding something so essential that I had just long forgotten.
The best way I can explain it is that it was literally like waking up from a dream (the dream in this case being your current understanding and experience of your entire existence) into a completely new “world” where you suddenly meet your “real” self and you directly experience that you had merely been playing this human role your entire life, thinking that the role itself was you.
What an illusion! And what incredibly immense JOY it was to encounter my “real” entire self again! To see that there really IS more than this human drama we are playing out; that all of our sorrows, our worries, our pain, would someday be put in perspective. It feels like such an insane relief.
I had never known joy like what I felt in that experience. I literally cried for days out of happiness in meeting this part of myself. There is no way I could respond except by just an endless release of emotion. In attempting to explain it to my mom, I’m sure she thought I was nuts. I had no words.
There is no comparison between way that I see and understand life after these experiences versus my perspective prior — i.e., the “me” at that time that thought, “I have no reason to believe there is any form of existence after death or let alone any higher power. Why would I?”
And honestly, at that time, I was right — I didn’t have a reason to believe it. I had no personal experiences or insight into any other mode of existence, and I was never the type to blindly believe things like this. I was never religious, never believed in God (especially not in the traditional sense), and I had been a self-professed atheist or agnostic. I was once actually almost prideful to proclaim that I thought we entirely cease to exist after death.
That being said, words never fully do an experience like this justice. Unless you’ve had a similar experience, it’s easy to underestimate how much this can shift your entire psychological landscape.
It’s not just, “oh I didn’t know this and now I do,” the way typical knowledge acquisition works. No. It felt like I got a whole new operating system — and it mentally opened up door after door to new realizations. My beliefs didn’t change; I was just simply awake.
Occasionally I would casually ponder as to why this knowledge regarding our selves is as uncommon as it is. Why is it for the majority of us that our consciousness levels are lowered to the point that we have no recollection of these things unless we have some sort of consciousness-expanding experience?
I have learned over time that there is a VERY good reason why we aren’t able to easily remember our existence outside the Earth realm. Continuing to play the “human role” after meeting the “essence” or “soul” of ourselves and seeing that it’s so much more massive than this and not confined to this body, can feel very odd at times to say the least. It can make it incredibly more difficult to focus on just having a normal human experience if we are not ready to properly integrate the knowledge with our existence here.
Regardless, I understood that we are here on Earth to have an experience, no matter what that experience entails. Within the experience will be many trials and lessons.
So, any pain and suffering we may go through — it may be seem needless or unjust, but it’s not us or even close to our entire story.
However, suffering WILL ALWAYS deepen our characters and give us perspectives we may not have been able to have had otherwise. It rounds out our character and strengthens our spirit.
Ram Dass speaks on this all the time. He is a former Harvard Psychology professor who turned Hindu spiritual teacher and later in his life suffered a massive stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body.
I’ll take this passage from one of his most recent articles:
“There is a line from a letter that I wrote to the parents of a young girl who was raped and murdered that I would like to share with you. It said, ‘Something in you dies when you bear the unbearable. In other words, you go beyond just the horror and pain of it because it takes you beyond it. You can’t bear it and it is only in the dark night of the soul that you’re prepared to see as God sees and to love as God loves.’
It’s the horrible beauty of the Universe and to realize that there is a wisdom inherent in it, and that wisdom includes suffering and that all suffering is not an error. Until you are resting in a place that understands that, it’s quite presumptuous to think you know best. I have watched in the work I do with people that are dying, where they suffer and suffer and suffer and if I could, as a human emotional heart, I would do everything I could to take away their suffering. It breaks my heart that they’re suffering and I watch as the suffering burns its way until they finally give up because the suffering is so great. I’ve watched as they give up, something emerges in their being that is so beautiful and so radiant and so spiritually innocent, that it’s like they meet a part of their being that has been hidden all their lives. It’s like an egg being cracked open.”
He also talks at length about what suffering through his stroke has given him, and that he wishes that all people could experience the grace that the suffering gave him, but without the unfortunate experience of the stroke itself.
It is from people like Ram Dass and my own consciousness-expanding experiences I was able to have that I feel compelled to share this message:
The experiences we have here on Earth are all for a purpose and there is hidden beauty in them that we will eventually be able to see. The greatest part is that it is not our entire story, so we must have hope that one day we will be able to see the greater context for why we are going through what we are going through.
My wish is that you may retain a glimmer of hope and that every minute, every second that you fight a battle you are strengthening your own spirit (even if it feels like the opposite) and the end result will be something beautiful.
If you’re currently suffering from anything at all, hang in there and know that you are not alone, and there is a bigger picture that you will see one day that will bring you a peace and understanding like you could never imagine.
”The wound is the place where the light enters you.” —Rumi
