Month: January 2016

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”  -C.G. Jung

It is holy when you finally actually, actually choose to face your deepest pain with full commitment.

Pain cannot kill you. Pain may be profoundly challenging to experience at times, but your awareness cannot be harmed by it. Your body can and will die, but suffering will not obliterate your spirit. In fact, there is tremendous power to be gained by facing all of what you feel. Choose to accept all of your experience, including pain when it comes! Do not justify it away or tell yourself a story to temporarily ease its presence. Even when pain feels insurmountable and completely overwhelming, go in to the storm. Even if you fear deeply that it will destroy you, plunge into the tsunami. Rather than being destroyed, you will come out far stronger on the other side.

When you make the journey into pain, do not judge the pain or its perceived causes. Rather, simply experience it and be present with the feeling itself. It is important that we feel our pain without any judgment at all. Often the stories we are telling ourselves about the pain only contribute to it as they simply layer new negative self-perceptions on top of an original fear. The original fear root is available to be processed and truly healed, if we are willing to actually feel our way through the branches (individual surface pains) one-at-a-time as they surface. The divine will always be there to guide and help us when we are truly willing to face our own darkness. To feel it is to heal it.

If all is not well, it is because you have interpreted that all is not well. Your evidence for all not being well may seem obvious to you. After all, it appears clear that suffering abounds and the world is in rough shape. You may even feel disdain for those who don’t see that things are “obviously” not well. How can anyone say “All is Well”?

In fact, consciousness has the power to place interpretation and meaning on anything. We come into the physical to experience the constraints of physical life, including the constraint of ignorance which causes us to have to interpret our experience. In response to our sense data we “buy in” to interpretations, perceptions, and beliefs, and then have the resultant experience that our interpretations, perceptions, and beliefs yield to us. That process of actually living through our interpretations, perceptions, and beliefs is what adds to Creation and is so meaningful to our soul.

At the fundamental level beyond all the interpretations, perceptions, and beliefs, the consciousness that exists is unharmable and capable of nearly infinite creation. Its ability to have the experience of limitation is simply a part of its creative power. The brave soul that jumps in to experience the darkness helps “All That Is” grow in its experience by providing profoundly valuable contrast and perspective. You are participating in that incredibly meaningful activity right now!

Beneath all the wants and “not wants,” sickness and health, sight and sound, birth and death: ineffable Beingness exists deeply. From that state, it is totally and wholly apparent that All is Well, and always will be.

If you cannot sense that right now from your current state of awareness, don’t worry- that’s a part of the game! Allow yourself at least intellectually to consider that the pains and fears and destruction of your life and the lives of others exist within something greater. If you fearlessly listen quietly within, beneath all your own interpretations, perceptions, and beliefs, you may just hear a voice gently reminding you that indeed, beneath (and through!) all the drama, all is indeed very, very well!

You are so unconditionally loved by God that you are permitted to almost completely forget that you are unconditionally loved by God. In coming to Earth, somehow the truth of God’s unconditional love that exists specifically for YOU has moved out of your waking awareness. Perhaps you have no recognition of it at all. Perhaps the concept of God’s unconditional love has become simply an intellectual concept for you, as an aspect of faith. Or perhaps you have had tiny partial glimpses of it, through personal moments of surrender and dedication to the divine. In any case, the truth of the unconditional love that exists for each of us remains largely obscured while we are physical: painfully, persistently obscured.

Yet, being brought to the brink of total ignorance about how much love exists for you is an extremely important and necessary part of your purpose here. You could not have your adventures in physicality, with all of the opportunities for mis-perception and personal growth, if you actively recalled all of what you are! The very purpose of physical life- growth of the spirit toward love- could not be accomplished with such recall.

Take some time then to simply sit in silence with yourself and the divine, and see if you can quietly feel even a glimmer of the real love that does exist for YOU (specifically you!), so that you may be encouraged. For you are what you are- which is a loved immortal spirit- even if you don’t remember it. Even if you’re so deep in your current personality that you cannot feel God’s love- comprehend at least intellectually as much as you can that today, right now, you are indeed an incredibly adored, cherished, powerful, and irreplaceable portion of All That Is.

From the other side, the spirit actually excites at the prospect of having to deal with such constraints as we experience here in the physical. When we’re here, though, often the incredible challenges of our lives seem insurmountable and crushing.

And yet, the spirit does transcend them!

Thus we can approach our deepest challenges with an understanding that we can in fact rise above (and through!) that which seems to thwart us, no matter what it is. We can embrace our difficult experiences, and use them as the counter-pressure they were meant to be. Metaphorically, we are on the weight bench- so we might as well lift the weights!

Doing so is a process not just of intellectual willingness, but of a deep commitment to have the intent to actually embrace our current experience, whatever it may be. We must be willing to feel. We must be willing to be honest with ourselves. We must be willing to be fully present. We must be willing to face our fears. We must be willing to remove the blame from others and the outside world, and instead accept responsibility for our own state of being. We must choose to experience what we are experiencing. In doing so, we may find that physical life is not just a challenge- but instead it is an amazing and precious opportunity for peace, love, and joy!