The Real Journey
The journey you actually undertake when you try and return to authentic good health, mental or physical, is ultimately a journey back to your own Source. The real journey is of rediscovering and consciously reconnecting to the very power and energy which created you in the first place, one that presently exists within as a dim spark of its full potential. The real journey begins when you recognise that there is no clear distinction between your spiritual quest and your quest to be successful and happy in life, and that as you recognise and remove more and more of the false notions and layers which you have collected over time, what you are actually doing is revealing something vast and wonderful within, a source of power and awareness which you inherited at birth but then seemingly forgot as your awareness externalised over time. Healing is not about transforming yourself into a new or different person, or traveling away from yourself in search of a new home. It is simply removing the layers that obscure you and finally returning to and reclaiming your own true skin. From this perspective, there is no difference between authentic personality development and spiritual unfoldment, they feed into each other and strengthen your progress hand in hand. The Mechanics of Healing Lets take a step back. As a newborn, you had an innate connection with the same power that created you. In this connected state, you were content to explore the people and world around you with a fresh lense, without bias or baggage. You were also comfortable expressing exactly how you felt about what you were experiencing, good or bad. (Take some time to reflect and go back in time to find an age where you were able to do this easily and naturally. Are you able to recall the feelings from that early childhood stage or are they too obscured?). By the time you reach adulthood, however, things have somehow changed, and you have instead become accustomed to filtering both your experiences and your self expression based on your environment. You are careful to analyse and judge what light you will be perceived in before acting. There is an undue focus on managing perceptions and managing risk, on making rigorous plans and having back-ups in case of failure. In essence, you have shifted from being in your heart to living life almost exclusively through your head, focused on defining, categorising and analysing your life and your self in an attempt to create a sense of certainty and safety in an inherently uncertain world. These changes are driven by unresolved feelings and experiences that you have allowed to shape your beliefs and thoughts. Instead of seeing things as they are, you filter everything through these distorted thought patterns, living life through a historic lens instead of first hand. This general trajectory is the same for everyone, what differs is the individual path you take along this journey. (Again if this resonates, take some time to think of events that caused you to change or modify your behaviour. If you can recall, what were you feeling at the time of the event? Do you feel the changes that occurred within you as a result are for the better or for the worse? Are you happy and at peace with where you stand today in relation to these past events? Not easy questions to answer honestly, but crucial in moving forward). The mechanics of reversing this change and returning to your heart, to your own unique natural equilibrium, begin with re-tracing your path through life and accurately, honestly and objectively identifying the experiences that impacted you, identifying the associated beliefs and thought patterns they left behind and actively engaging them to weed them out of your psyche. Surprisingly, a large amount of weight can begin to lift simply by becoming aware of what you carry. Based on the range and strength of belief patterns and held in emotions discovered, various techniques ranging from affirmations, energetic healing, journaling and reflecting can help release the related distortions. For more deeply ingrained wounds, a more powerful approach might be required, involving bringing the wound to life and reliving it to face and conquer the shadows associated with it. The task at hand is always the same, recognising unwanted thought patterns, weeding them out of your system and replacing them with their authentic counterparts at all levels of your being, emotional, intellectual, physical and energetic. In theory this sounds straightforward, but the mind is a wonderful creature and challenges appear once you commence your own journey. The initial hurdle is correctly identifying what you are carrying and how it is affecting you. Is your anger driven by sadness or is it bottled up insecurity? Are you really an introvert or is it a mask to hide your shyness and lack of self belief? Does your drive to achieve stem from genuine passion or from a need to prove yourself to someone? Once you have correctly identified the distortions being carried and connected the dots to what caused them, the next hurdle is tougher - facing similar situations and personalities to the ones that caused your initial wounds without relapsing into old patterns. Holding your ground in the face of pain and fear. These tests are to be expected and embraced, with the understanding that the real challenge is not what is happening in front of your today , but what it speaks to in terms of how you have allowed the past to limit and define you within. The Source of Healing Another critical piece of the puzzle is to understand the source of all healing and transformation. A practitioner only points certain things out and at most initiates a process of change, the rest is carried forward by you, supported by your own inner awareness. Change cannot be forced, you must bring forth and embrace change from within, allow it to manifest and not hold it back or resist it by staying in your own inner prison of fear and inertia. Ultimately, however, even your own self effort can only ever yield limited results. If you observe carefully, it is not your own self effort that brings about change, but simply your dropping of resistance to a higher power or energy within, allowing it to correct what is wrong and reset a more natural balance. Your task, ultimately, is to drop resistance driven by your pain and shadows and allow this higher power within to facilitate the change required, to allow it to heal where required. True healing is always carried forward by the same power that created you, a source of never ending health, joy and radiance within that restores you to equilibrium and fills the emptiness within with the permanence you had been searching for all along. This is where healing takes its true ultimate course – where a journey that started off as dealing with ideas of the intellect and emotions of the mind converges into a process of alchemy, so that the very source that created you can over time express itself more fully once again and in the process restore you to a state long forgotten but yet always remembered. At this stage ideas, concepts, terminology and techniques begin to become less meaningful, and words begin to fail to describe adequately what can only be conveyed by your own first hand experience. On this journey which you initiate, or rather one which life perhaps forces you to initiate, true success can only come when you begin to recognise the source of the voice that prompts you from within, the constant inner reminder of the need to return home to your own true self. The final destination of healing is not just health but an empowered and inspired state where you have freedom of expression and mastery of experience. The steps towards it begin with seeing how and where you are wounded within your personality today, and having the courage and initiative to begin to unravel these wounds. To face and embrace the unresolved past with love and to stop living life in an attempt to outrun it. |