People often speak of healing as a journey. But it isn’t really. It is what living is really all about. I posit that life is what we are given to work out our karma. We are born to work out the issues from the past and we will keep getting the same pain and discomfort until and unless we learn the lessons we are given.
Being awake is hard. Paying attention to what is happening with you and your life requires heart and soul. It is so much easier to set your sights onto others things as the focus of life. Getting the guy or girl, making a fortune, spending a fortune, where you live, what you drive, the value and chicness of your clothes. We all get consumed by these things from time to time. Some of us appear to be lost forever on the quest for whatever is next.
What if whatever is next is to turn towards our spouse and tell them we are afraid? What if what is next is to say to someone we are dating that we would like an emotional connection, but we are really unsure how to even do that anymore? What if what is next is that we admit that we have no idea what we are doing or that we feel like we are failing all the time? What if what should really be next is an admission that life, this one right now, is here to help us heal? It isn’t just certain situations, it is life itself.
I am not sure about you but I can see that the entirety of my life has been about healing. In fact, I have created some pretty shitty situations for myself which have really just required me to have to do more work. Of course, I didn’t do this intentionally, I was busy in the pursuit of something else, something that would make me feel better or more whole. I thought I was getting somewhere...turns out that I was just creating more stuff to heal from.
Healing does not appear to be preparation for anything else. It isn’t a journey towards wellness. It is its own thing. It has inherent value that just is because it is what we are supposed to be doing with this amazing gift of life.
I realize more and more that my purpose here is to wake up and to endeavor to help others do the same. My job gives me lots of opportunities to help people in this regard. To see the negative choices and patterns in their relationships and to make some changes. Guess what? No one really wants to! Oh, they say they do but when you try to get them to drop their storylines about how much of an ass their ex is, I get resistance. I get push back. I get anger. People become the stories they tell and so that creates a dynamic that if they give up the story, they also, therefore, have to give up their solid identity of who they think they are. It isn’t a real self construct, just one fabricated, usually upon the personality defects of their errant partner. But I have seen people work very, very hard to maintain their own self image, even when there exists large evidence to the contrary.
I am frustrated at work. I want to help. I try to help. But it feels like no one wants what I am offering these days. No one really wants to change the patterns of their dysfunction. They want to blame the other person and keep on doing whatever dysfunctional shit they have always done but now they want to do it with a new partner. Or sometimes they just desperately wish to keep doing it with the same partner even though their current partner is abusive, mean and awful. And they know it.
I get that change is hard. But all of these people are being offered literally a million different ways to heal themselves but they miss them all because they are so focused on others or obtaining something that is just not meant for them. I can relate and I am not speaking from any moral high ground. Hello, I spent four years mourning the loss of a relationship that was dead six months in. I am not all that well either.
I guess the place that I depart from some of the people I am tasked with helping is that I know that all of the things that happen to me, the difficult people, the hard circumstances, the pain is about giving me opportunities to find a new narrative, for me to see myself in a new way and to wake up to the reality that everything that happens to us, is happening for us. That is the essence of all spirituality for me. Nothing in this life is wasted or an accident. That all the things, ALL THE MOTHERFUCKING THINGS are happening to us so that we can evolve spiritually. Yep, every single one of them.
And waking up and helping other wake up is the entire purpose of life. But this process is so acutely painful that we find lots of distractions along the way. Lots of stories get told all in an effort to show that it isn’t really us. People, places and things to pull us off of the task of awakening to a new awareness and consciousness.
For me, I see life as one continuous opportunity to heal, to work out my karma and learn the lessons. I may have been doing this for fifteen lifetimes. I may be doing a horrible job this time around. Regardless I am here to do the work to heal and help others do the same.
Today I am frustrated by other people’s lack of willingness to heal. I am frustrated by their marriage to fear. I am frustrated by their endless stories that only help to keep them stuck and miserable. I am frustrated today by my own lack of effectiveness. Even though I know that I cannot make someone else wake up, I can throw a fit, cause a fight, hurl profanity or generally behave like an ass all in an effort to get someone to see what they are doing to themselves and their children. And you know what, somedays it matters not what I do...they just keep spinning tales that keep them forever in a loop of misery. Committed to repeating the mistake over and over again.
Yesterday was one of those days. And it ground me down. Until I realized that all of that marriage to egoic stories about others could just be another message to me that I am on the right path. I do not want to tell these tales to myself anymore. I want all the things that happen to me in this life to be vehicles to make me heal, do the work and grow and change. And yesterday was a fucking crash course. And today I am grateful. I can see that it all happened: the frustration, the apathy, the fear, the anger...it was all here to help me see that my path has value and that each thing happens as it is. A great unfolding of moments in my life to teach me that which is readily apparent but so often missed...these events of your life are here not to bring you great fortune or even happiness, they are here to show you where you are stuck. All in an effort to help you sort through the karma of the past, and evolve into whatever higher self the universe needs you to be.
