Recognizing our golden opportunities to evolve and using self-love to alchemize pain back into beauty, is probably the only thing we have to learn how to do in our lives to maintain balance and live in harmony together on this planet.
Managing our internal struggles either becomes projection of that pain onto others or a self-reflection which can then be transmuted towards our personal evolution. Most of us know by now that projecting is a common thing. We do it out of self-neglect but we also do it as a way to protect ourselves from feeling so much. When we are in self protection mode we tend to spiritually bi-pass ourselves into thinking that the cause of our pain is coming from the outside world. This self-protection mechanism is so strong that any little moments of self-awareness easily get dismissed and rapidly get thrown back into our subconscious minds until we feel strong enough, stable enough and vital enough to deal with them.
Unfortunately that moment can sometimes rarely come. That golden opportunity where we ‘see’ ourselves and have enough courage to accept ourselves, embrace ourselves and alchemize our pain into something beautiful. Self neglect is such a huge issue in society. Most live in societal paradigms still controlled by backwards age-old thinking which shame us into neglecting our fundamental rights as human beings to feel and express those feelings. So many of our parents were brought up in a world where they had to sacrifice the majority of their inner-truths for the greater good of their family and states. Self-love is a real movement that is happening on a global scale and is calling into action all sorts of radical behaviour which stem from our simple human right to freely ‘be & feel’ as and who we are in this world.
The key with self-awareness is to first know that anything numbing you, excess consumption of alcohol, drugs, sex, materialism or t.v eg. are going to place you the furthest away from yourself as you can get. These addictions operate like opiates to the mind-body-soul connection. The less we feel physically the less we will think with clarity. The less we think with clarity the less in touch we are with our heart’s wisdom, another way to describe our soul’s calling. Self-awareness can only come once we’ve stripped ourselves down to our bare-bone human nature. Our natural state of being on this planet is very much an emotional experience. Our emotions guide us towards our highest evolution when they are properly seen and self-consumed. They show us how we feel about any given situation which reflect back to us our internal-situation.
Once we’ve set up the conditions for ourselves to feel again, removed the numbing factors in our lives, we can truly begin our journey inwards towards self-illumination. We may at this point hit walls of self-neglect, another form of self-negation. We all find ourselves here at one point or another, we’ve worked so much to live sane healthy lives yet still find ourselves in patterns of self-sabotage or poor work habits or relationship drama. It’s at this point that we need to recognize we’ve hit our comfort zone in allowing ourselves to grow and move forward onto the next step in our personal evolution.
It’s very painful to face deep emotional wounds that were caused in our child-hood or growing up. These are the ones that created the negative patterns, moments when we chose we were not worthy of self-love or standing up for ourselves. Moments when we put the opinions others shared about us before our own knowing about ourselves. The same times when we chose not to forgive ourselves for putting ourselves ‘out there’, beyond what we felt we should have. Moments when we were deeply hurt by a loved one and did not have the internal spiritual and external mental strength to alchemize our pain back into beauty and love.
So how can we recognize those golden opportunities to grow and turn them into beauty? They are blips in awareness when we see our shadow through the situations and scenarios we feel hurt by. When we feel hurt by others, one of the most self-loving things we can do is to take a moment to interpret how and why we created these situations in our lives. If we are looking at the small picture of she-did, he-did we will not see our hand in it. It’s when we look for the bigger picture, the how and why it happened in relation to one of our life’s theme stories, we can then begin to generate self-awareness on a deeper level. If a situation strikes us once we might be the teacher or the tool for others to learn a specific lesson through but when we are hit multiple times by similar situations we are dealing with a personal theme story of life-lesson quality in self-evolution and overcoming.
If you take the time to reflect during those difficult moments and can tie them into an on-going theme in your life you have found your golden opportunity to transcend personal trauma, drama, pain and conditioning. When this greater awareness comes in like a flash-gestalt-epiphany-gift, you take time firstly to thank yourself for giving yourself the time and self-love it took to become self-aware to a greater degree. Then you thank the people and situations that allowed you to come to this greater understanding, shifting you from being the victim and taking things personally to taking responsibility for your own well-being and breathing life into bliss.
As adults we realize that no one can do this for us, no one can love us like we can love ourselves because no one can do that inner work of self-reflection for us. We might have way showers along the way, catalysts, spiritual gurus, psychologists, amazing wise friends but ultimately only we can ‘acknowledge and see’ our situation clearly and assume responsibility for it.
This act of self-appreciation and infinite gratitude towards the people who have played the roles for us to ’see’ ourselves with, become the pivotal moment we generate strength and courage to transmuting the pain that was unearthed back into love and beauty. When we begin to feel gratitude and appreciation we literally open up a whole new dimension of understanding that is not present when we are in victimhood. We final see the possibilities of over-coming our challenges. Almost like making that last point at the end of a video-game level, if you can make the point of gratitude, you will shift your awareness enough to enter a whole new level of thinking with more options and yes often greater challenges. Once we make it to the next level we are gifted new insights that act like super-powers because we all know that our greatest challenges in life are our biggest gifts.
Gratitude and appreciation show us the gifts inherent in the lessons or weaknesses or lack of self-awareness we held onto. Once we see the gifts that are bestowed in forgiving, taking responsibility—loving ourselves enough to not let others have power over how we experience our lives—we feel an enthusiasm that generates a feeling of happiness and ecstatic visions about our future. We realize at that our pride or lower ego no longer has a place or a say in our movement forward. We feel the blissness of optimism as we begin to taste our evolution towards our greatest good and highest potential and nothing will allow us to back down. There is a very real sense of inner freedom that comes through painfully admitting to ourselves where we have been stuck on our personal journey of evolution. It is a bitter-sweet medicine that generates so much inner expansion and creative movement forward.
This new space becomes the ideal conditions for planting our seeds of greater self-awareness which can then flourish into more joy and beauty. Through our darkest moments of finally seeing with clear eyes what we we have neglected to deal with, sparks a fire which alchemizes previous darkness and pain into a golden ray of self-illumination.
Be real with yourselves, allow yourself to feel gratitude for the most painful situations in your life, find forgiveness for yourself and others and I promise you—you will begin to see the people, places and senarios that truly reflect your soul’s longings enter your life for good.
One love,
J