Here you are.
Can you feel yourself pushing out of the layers of lethargy, reaching up, reaching out, coming up to the surface of your Being again?
Can you feel the energy? Behind you, around you, within you, a force, an energy, a readiness that is stronger and brighter and clearer than any motivation you’ve felt before. It’s the difference between looking for a snack because you’re bored and eating a meal because you’re hungry, famished.
Much of what you’ve done in your life has been an effort of boredom, of procrastination. Of fear and ego. Not all things.
Some choices you made from your core, from the fullness of your Being. Your true Self is always calling forth the unpredictable reality of its deepest desires, relishing every change and challenge and gift, all the richness they bring, every experience of growth.
Fear and ego get in there and try to take over. Try to make things easier, more comfortable. Try to smooth out the organic unpredictability of expansion, the messy birth-growth-death cycles of life. Try to collect, control, capture; label and categorize; understand and predict; jar and shelve it all, neat rows, we will come back and examine these specimens at our leisure.
Pointless, all the impossible efforts, but not really pointless. And not at all damaging, for the only thing that can be damaged is the ego and its boogeymen, all of it unreal. The point of all that banging around is to let the ego break itself on the impossibilities it will always attempt. Let it shatter, let it break apart, and there: the real Self can emerge, more fully and freely than ever before.
It never ends.
Or maybe it does, eventually, but it’s far more than one breaking that’s needed. Over and over, this pattern: pushing through the layers of fear and self-deception, with a certainty that cannot be stopped, the desires of the real Self emerge. The ego tries to wrap them up in certain acceptable ways, but the Universe understands. God knows. And without fail, what you ask for comes to you.
The ego will shrink then, will defend, will fight, will seek to control, will fail, will shatter itself upon the rock of the true Self’s reality, and look! What release and joy in that breaking.
Finally the Self can breathe.
Finally, movement and freedom, and there are fewer layers of ego to push through for the next beautiful cycle.
At some point, after some amount of these cycles (big, small, all sorts of sizes and values and experiences, it’s infinite, a daily, hourly, yearly, seasonal, lifelong experience which we often fail to notice), it gets easier. We’re not always conscious of what’s happening but our Soul knows, doesn’t it, and we have this beautiful truth to comfort us: Nothing Is Wasted, ever, in the cycle of self-regeneration.
You can resist.
You can add more ego layers on, bury the real Self, pretend not to see. But every experience hits you, every crack of the ego extends to a fault line and you can’t stop the inevitable shaking that will happen. Let it go, little by little, or let it go all at once. It will go. You can cling to the broken pieces of ego as long as you like. There is no limit, no rush, no urgency. You are moving forward. Eventually – when you want to – you will realize your hands are full of trash and you will set it down without another thought and walk on.
Each step forward leads to another step forward.
You could worry about the next step. You have worried. You have wasted enormous amounts of time on worry. But the shift out of worry, out of the continual anxiety that fear produces, is not a shift of habit. It’s a shift of understanding, of perspective.
Worry is logical, in its way, when you feel yourself alone. When you feel cut off from the Source of all. When you feel disconnected, helpless, small, confused, powerless, hopelessly overwhelmed, a victim whose best option is penitence and passivity. Of course you will worry, when you see reality as a system (or a series of systems) that exists to serve itself and cares nothing for the individual, for unity, for you. Of course you will worry, when you see yourself as undeveloped, as broken, as less-than, as missing some important pieces, as not quite fitting in, as not worth caring about, as a sinner, a worm, an outcast, an accident, lowly, limited, dust to dust. Of course you would worry, because worry is nothing more than fear playing brain games. The perspective of self as worthless gives you reason after reason to fear.
But you can change your view.
You have changed your view, haven’t you? You’ve turned your head and not only do you see a different horizon, you see a different reflection. A true reflection. Still in a mirror, dimly. But you know now. You lose sight, but you know. That other identity was a mask, not a reflection. Now you see your Self and there is still the habit of worry (even now it chatters at the back of your brain) but the reason for it, what gave it validity: that’s gone. It’s going. Now every step forward brings the true reflection clearer and clearer, and you are looking. You are looking, and you are seeing, and what you see – your own reflection in every person, in every encounter, in every experience – reminds you over and over of who you really are.
Now you turn your mind to new things.
Worry takes up less space. You have more breathing room. More energy. More creativity. Let the feelings come and go, ebb and flow. Here you are, and you have walked each step necessary to be here, right here. All the movement and energy of your life has a centerpoint right now, right here, in you. Be in the midst of it. Know that you are safe. Know that you are loved. Feel the acceptance you can afford to give your Self now. It was too much, before. It seemed too dear a price. But now? It is easier and easier to say Yes. To open your hands. To see the value of your own soul. To mess up beautifully, fantastically, and accept the mess, accept the failure, accept the pain, accept the learning, accept the growth. All these gifts you give your Self! You are learning to accept them. You are learning to receive.
The resistance seems silly. What were you so afraid of? You can’t quite remember. It doesn’t matter.
Here you are, and here is exactly where you need to be.
Photo by John Baker on Unsplash