Choosing Joy

Part 10: And the Cause Would Be...?

What an amazing ride this is turning out to be! I started out trying to be happy, discovered I was depressed and catalyzed a major journey of discovery into my own psyche.

Friends, I can tell you that I am now firmly "not depressed" anymore. I have much work still to do but I can report that I actually WANT to do that work. I want to be here doing this. Which is very different from doing what I have to do to try to feel better.  Very, very different.

The real reason I am beginning to find wellness in my psyche is that I am now making huge strides in discovering and healing my deepest issues inside myself.  It will not do it any justice to try to write this all up here in a blog post. There is far too much to tell and most of it won't make sense without a lot of back-story. I can see, however, that these experiences will feature prominently in the upcoming chapters of the books I am working on at the moment.  

But for now, I certainly can share a learning about all this with you. So here goes:

We are, each of us, pure undifferentiated consciousness... sparks of self-creating Life.  We create ourselves and our perspectives and all our experiences with our BELIEFS. Belief is what defines you. It is what makes you as you are. it is what differentiates you from me, from the planet or the galaxy. You are the part of Life that is holding the intricate, complex, multi-layered set of beliefs that you do. You are who and what you are because you believe this to be so. 

So far so good.

But you don't just believe this-and-that about yourself. You also have beliefs about what life is like, what you are like, what kind of person you are, what kind of a person you should be, how you should respond to all kinds of interactions and relationships... and so on and so on. It all gets HUGELY complex.

Then, at some point, you notice that one or two of the huge number of beliefs that you hold have come into conflict with each other. Let's try an example: you believe you should always be loving and kind but someone is taking advantage of you and you also believe you must stand up against injustice. The conflict between the beliefs must be resolved or else you will get into turmoil within yourself. You will get angry and upset within yourself. And if you don't do something with that the anger will build up. And then it will either explode in a rage or, if you bottle it up inside, it will make you very ill indeed.  It's a silly, simple example but I think I make my point: our beliefs can make us ill if we don't work with them.

You'll notice conflicting beliefs because you  will be fearful, angry or unhappy. And if you ignore that you will get ill.  Or you might have difficult relationships with others. Conflicting beliefs will be felt!

Some beliefs are in and of themselves inherently unhelpful. More than one of my Soul Re-Integration clients were, in their past-lives, burned on the stake as a witch. Imagine that for a moment. Imagine the people who you have been helping and serving with your wisdom, love and knowledge sell you out to the authorities out of fear and then turn out to watch you burn at the stake. How would one NOT come to a belief like "I cannot trust anyone else ever again" or "I should not offer others my gift"?

And since you create your reality with your beliefs and a deeply limiting belief like either of those will cause you untold pain in the lifetimes that follow.

So we go about our journey through the lifetimes with all kinds of pain and trouble. This continues until we begin to heal those beliefs.

And this is exactly what I am doing for myself right now. I am finding and healing the limiting beliefs that keep me small, fearful and sad. That cause me to wrestle with myself every time my Soul calls on me to be MORE. And one-by-one, as I go healing these beliefs, I feel like I am climbing out of the tiniest little box into which I have cramped myself. I feel like my limbs are unfolding and the blood is rushing into them for the first time. I feel like I am stretching and flexing parts of myself that I never even considered might exist.

You see, just as I am beginning to open my self-perception up to a greater version of me... so Life is rushing in to reflect that back at me. It's too early to share with you exactly what is going on but I can tell you I am just about to take what I do to a WHOLE NEW LEVEL. 

It's a little bit scary. But its very exciting.  I am essentially doing Soul Re-Integration upon myself and my outer-world is powerfully reflecting my changing inner-world back at me!

And as I go, I discover that there is another type of belief that can cause a certain amount of pain and suffering in this lifetime. This third type of belief, however, needs no healing or changing. It is the "healer-as-purpose" belief. I know many of you, my readers, will share this one with me. it goes like this: at the level of Soul, many of us have decided to take on the belief that we are about healing. I, for example, am about bringing joyful relief where there once was stuckness.  So far so good. Sounds like a nice enough decision, right? Well the problem is, if you want to be a healer there must be pain and suffering for you to heal in the first place! By definition, you are deciding to go where the pain is!  And it gets worse... if you are truly going to be a healer then you will have to feel some of that pain yourself. Without feeling it you will find yourself standing outside of it not understanding it. You'll be saying meaningless things like "oh, pull yourself together" and "don't worry, you'll get over it". You certainly won't be able to say, "oh, wow, yes, I understand! I know something of what that is like." You also won't be able top offer: "let me tell you from my own story a little about how I dealt with something similar. Maybe it will be of use to you?"

None of those more helpful positions are possible if you haven't felt at least some version of the pain that others are going through. You will not be able to be the healer you believe yourself to be. At best you will be a clinical technician: someone that enacts procedures to silence the symptoms. Which is fine, I suppose, but if the BEING isn't healed then the pain will just manifest again elsewhere. If you are not a healer then the best you can hope to offer is a temporary alleviation of the pain. 

So, you see, it is all about belief. My beliefs are why I am where I am. My experiences are brought to me with my beliefs. And, in the end, I actually find I can be joyfully grateful for the experiences I have had. All of them, including the painful ones. Perhaps even ESPECIALLY the painful ones.  And miraculously, as I find myself accepting these experiences, so I find them fading into the background... becoming a memory. When I was resisting them declaring that they shouldn't exist and shouldn't be as they are... then I was keeping them front-and-centre. I turned pain into suffering and suffering into self-torture.

So that is the summary version that I want to share with you now of what I have learned. You will most certainly be hearing more about this in the chapters of my new books as I write them!