Loving the Light and embracing the dark
My life and my sense of self has always been an interplay between the dark and the Light. The experiences I’ve had of the Underworld on Earth have always (eventually, when I crawl my way out of them), strengthened my connection to the Light. It hurts my heart a little when I see people levying claims of “toxic positivity” at the concept of “love and Light” because it is so clear in my mind and heart and body that the Light is where we came from and where we will return, and that “love and Light” is just a literal description of God. I’ve always been drawn to depictions of Angels as messengers of the Light and to me the message is always to remember who we truly are. That is why we come here–to forget and to practice remembering. I can’t not love the Light because I feel how much it loves me. It is hard to be on Earth and it will never stop being hard because that’s largely the point of Earth: to learn how to express our truth and shine our Light even in the dark, and to choose to love even when ego is afraid.
(Of course we may all have different reasons for being here), but this has always resonated the most strongly for me as the point of pain–to strengthen us, as fire strengthens steel–and the strongest steel is forged from the hottest fire. That is why I don’t begrudge the slings and arrows, even though it is exhausting and I am often weary of being here. Because I know it is for a reason, and I know it won’t last forever.
All humans bypass
There is nothing wrong per se with spiritual bypassing. It just means your lessons will take longer because you are avoiding accepting that you do have to grapple with them and there really is no way around that. But humans do this all the time in a million different ways. It’s kind of the human condition.
Avoiding pain is equivalent to avoiding your own growth. But we all do it. It’s OK. You have forever, so you’re fine. The soul doesn’t have deadlines because time only exists for the purposes of being on Earth. It’s not actually real. It’s part of the video game. So as long as you have more karma to clear, you’ll have more time to do it in, because that’s what time is for.
You don’t have to meditate to be spiritual
If you can’t meditate, it’s OK–mindfulness is the point (that is what unlocks neuroplasticity and allows brain rewiring), and you can do that other ways. I have never been able to mentally sit still enough to meditate. What I do is apply mindfulness all day long. I am constantly noticing what it’s like to be me and how I’m responding to things, and considering whether that response is a conditioned response or an authentic one, and if there is any emotion present to process (process = sit with and talk to the part that holds the emotion, with compassion, until it releases). And I’ve been wildly successful with this–so no, you don’t have to meditate. And yeah I’m sure it would be good for me to meditate the way vegetables would be good for me to eat, but neither are very accessible to me right now (see: ADHD). You can start where you are and be who you are and still use mindfulness to change who you are. Your path of liberation doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s path–it just has to actually work for you.
Learn more about mindfulness on my other blog.
Embracing the dreamworld
I have never only occupied the world that the physical sciences can describe to me. I also occupy a dreamworld that has wild magic as its basis. I am a living bridge between them, as so many others are today on this planet. We each have our own way of translating that magic into something useful to the people living here. And there are thousands of different symbolic systems and ways of making meaning out of the dreamworld. And the question of, “How can they all be true, how can any of them be true?” is irrelevant, because the dreamworld does not operate according to the laws of physics. It has its own logic and its own laws and its own truth. And that truth is often mysterious and paradoxical.
I cannot be nourished by the physical world alone. I deeply need to explore and find meaning in the dreamworld, and translate that meaning into something that is accessible and practical. It’s just part of my nature. Being deeply practical and curious is also part of my nature, so I also love science. They coexist for me, and I understand they don’t coexist for everyone. But I am only here to live my own life, and it’s OK if it doesn’t make sense to everyone.
My survival does not depend on being everyone’s cup of tea. This isn’t the 1500s, and I’m not going to be burned at the stake. It’s safe to be who I am and honor my own truth. And there is no way I can truly be happy and fulfilled in my life if I don’t.
And as I do this work of deep self-acceptance and reclaiming and honoring all the parts of me, I relax. I’m less defensive. I’m less resentful at having to be here on this planet, stuck in this meatsuit. The parts of me that were pushed aside or hidden can finally breathe, and live, and just be who they are. And that feeling of wholeness is worth whatever social consequences may result from just living honestly as myself. I’d rather the discomfort live in the tension of being different than other people sometimes, than for it to live inside me as alienation from myself.
What is spiritual healing?
Spiritual healing occurs when you remember that who you really are is bigger than the thing that you thought had power over you. That is the moment you master the lesson.
All healing is remembering that the fear was never real.
Choose the meaning that liberates you
The struggle to accept every part of your life and appreciate what it gave you rather than what it took from you is the price of wisdom, power, and liberation.
You create all meaning, so the meaning of anything isn’t important—it’s the freedom that the meaning gives you that matters. So choose meaning that is liberating, not disempowering.
God does not belong to anyone
The spiritual meaning of “open your heart to Jesus” is that our connection to God is through the heart, not the mind, and that connecting to God has to be a free will choice we make to be open and willing for that connection to occur. I’m not a Christian, but I can recognize spiritual teachings exist in all traditions.
And I can separate those teachings from the bullying I received at the hands of Christian kids growing up, and the authoritarian politics of some Christians in my country that is frankly terrifying. These are all different things.
God doesn’t belong to anyone’s tradition–the Light shines for us all, and whatever words and methods help you find it are perfectly fine. I sincerely hope humanity can eventually stop fighting about what are only symbolic interpretations anyway. Our mind cannot comprehend the truth of God, which is why we have to connect with our heart and why “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao”. So use whatever works for you, and let other people use what works for them.
Reconceptualize your weirdness
Reconceptualize your weirdness, divergence & deviancy as you being born to lead people toward new possibilities.
“To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.” – e.e. cummings
Choosing painful incarnations
I often hear people feel the idea that we choose our incarnations, and therefore choose our traumas, to be victim blaming. I understand why it would feel that way from a human perspective. But the choice isn’t made from within the human experience. This idea presupposes that who we really are is so much more vast and expansive than we can ever hope to imagine while we are in these human vessels, so the choice to experience helplessness and victimization makes sense. It makes sense to a soul the way that lifting very heavy weights to tear our muscles so they regrow stronger makes sense to us as humans–the soul has absolute knowledge that it will survive the experience and learn things from it that it can’t learn any other way.
If you can’t understand why a vast immortal being might choose to have a very challenging but temporary dark emotional experience, then you don’t understand the idea itself, and it’s not meant for you right now. This is a problem with esoteric spiritual ideas being readily available all over the internet, and people encountering them far before they are ready to understand them, at a point when they can actually be harmful or painful to hear.
Coming out of the woo closet
I’ve always tried to keep my spiritual path to myself, to a large extent. I talk about it a little bit, but so much less than it actually lives in me and shapes my life. But the personal growth and healing and empowerment stuff I talk about–it was all done in the context of my commitment to my spiritual path, and doesn’t really make complete sense without it. I can’t authentically tell my story without talking about it.
- I can’t really explain my self-love journey without talking about understanding myself as a child of the Divine.
- I can’t really explain healing my trauma without talking about knowing who I truly am is bigger than any experience I can have in this life.
- I can’t really explain empowerment as an empath without talking about how energy responds to intention, and you have the complete right to own your energy field and not take on others emotions.
- I can’t really explain how I released my patterns of codependence and learned self-sovereignty without talking about my karma around self-sacrifice.
- I can’t really explain how I can survive very dark experiences and come out of them transformed and free of resentment without explaining my understanding of why I’m on Earth in the first place.
These things don’t make sense without the full picture. So I can’t teach anything without teaching everything. Which means my next step is to bring my weird, wild, woo-woo path explicitly into my writing.
It’s something I have resisted for a very long time, because my spirituality is so precious to me, and so close to my heart. It is the driving force of my life. But it’s getting to that point where I can’t not be myself in this way. I can’t keep pretending or masking my actual reality–something inside me won’t stand for it anymore. There comes a moment when the shadows of your past, the people who dismissed or belittled your authentic self and made you afraid to be yourself, just do not matter compared to the benefits of freedom and owning your own life story and your authentic expression.
I can’t fully own my power and let anyone else’s opinions or judgments or pain be more important than me living my own truth and speaking it as I am called to. Why would I give people who do not understand me and do not see me the power to shut down my own right to speak? I can no longer stomach giving that much of my power away. I can no longer live in the smallness I created to stay safe. It’s not enough anymore to merely be safe. I need to also be free.