by Ross Bishop
You came here to work on an aspect of your spiritual development. But we usually try and sidestep that issue because it asks us to be more vulnerable than we feel comfortable with. What we are being asked to learn is to love others and ourselves. And although we do care about others, fully expressing that love makes us feel more vulnerable than we think we a ready for. And that, of course, is why we came here in the first place. Besides, the concept seems abstract and out of reach, and in truth, in its unvarnished form, it is.
Plus, loving ourselves means confronting what we have come to believe about ourselves, and in general, we are reluctant to do that, too. In the short-term it is actually easier to get by feeling defective.
So to resolve this dilemma, The Creator has put us here so we can interact with others and have “issues” - which are manifestations of the thing we are being asked to work on. And these manifestations are what we call life. Allow me to explain:
Everything that happens here, and I mean EVERYTHING, in some way or other, is a reflection of the issues you brought in. Absolutely everything that happens in your life revolves around that central concept.
One way to look at the situation is that you are in school, and the curriculum in this particular class is, “Learning to Unconditionally Love Ourselves and Others.” And, as I said, at this stage in our development, this is not something we do terribly well.
So, what is the best way to approach the situation? If you think about it, our most powerful learning comes from our failures. Fall flat on your butt and once you get past the pain and embarrassment, you will learn more than through any other way. And since we have free will, we must experience this for ourselves. That’s why the Creator has set life up this way.
No one likes to fail, but we get so caught up in dealing with the fallout - the shame and blame from our “failures” that we rarely “look up” to take advantage of the learning opportunity that is being offered. Guess what happens then? The lesson comes around again, and it will continue to do so, until you get it.
So OK, you screwed up. You were reluctant to love unconditionally and instead you operated from your ego, and you both got hurt. What you need to do now is work on what the lesson was for you from this experience. (And a bit less self-recrimination would be helpful.) Then you need to sincerely apologize to the other person. Too many of us, in my judgement, step off the path of learning to lick our wounds, instead of taking life’s lessons to heart and then, lesson in hand, move on.
So what do you do if you are stuck in a cycle of screwing up and self-recrimination? Start by recognizing that you are being driven by the beliefs about yourself that were created when you were a youngster. These beliefs are held by your inner child. And they form the foundation of how you see yourself.
The thing is, this was all intended. Your beliefs were created by your parents own feelings of inadequacy. Your parents were selected for you before you came here because they would exacerbate the issues you had to work on. And this is a two way street. They aggravated the places where you felt vulnerable and in turn, you challenged their feelings of inadequacy, giving them the opportunity to work on their stuff if they chose to.
Your beliefs would not have stuck unless they connected with the vulnerability you brought in. Consider: how would you react if I said that you had no ears? You know the truth, so you would just allow my words to pass by. But, what if I were to say that you were not worthy? Or, that you were not good enough? Gets a little sticky, doesn’t it? That is my point. And also, look at how vulnerable you make yourself to someone else’s opinion of you!
Your beliefs cause you to not see yourself or situations clearly and they also cause you to hold back when you are given the opportunity to be more compassionate.
Take a minute and connect with your inner child. Ask he or she to come and be with you. Your inner one may be angry because you have not been there all these years, and he or she may still be harboring resentment toward your parents for what happened in childhood. Hear your inner one out and offer your love and support.
You can’t change the past, but you can make things better today. Besides, your inner one knows that you are the only one who can bring him or her out of this dilemma. So once you get past your inner child’s frustration, you can begin to bring him or her the truth.
And what is the truth? That there never was never anything wrong with you - other than the beliefs you created. Even in a situation as extreme as sexual abuse, you did nothing wrong!
And the thing is, NONE OF YOUR BELIEFS ARE TRUE! Consider, have you ever met an unworthy child? That’s the setup in this situation. You are dealing with something that cannot possibly be true! So given enough time, there is only one way that this dilemma can turn out! Any delay simply creates more pain for you.
Your inner child may take some convincing, but you have truth on your side. And if you are having trouble, when you connect to your inner one, ask The Creator for guidance. You won’t hear many words, but take what you hear to heart.
It is also important to remember, as I said earlier, that all of this is happening because you are in school. Your lessons are significant, and you don’t want to just go around hurting other people, but at the same time, when you leave this mortal coil, class will be over and all you will take with you is what you have learned from your experiences. That is not to diminish the importance of your lessons, but to shift them to another perspective.
Remember when you learned to ride a bicycle? At first, you learned from falling over, skinned knees and all. Maybe you had “training wheels” or a loving parent who ran alongside and kept you upright (and saved you from skinned knees), but the principle is still the same. And as you practiced, the riding got easier and you learned more from the subtleties of remaining upright. And then pretty soon you were streaming along, in harmony with the wind and in balance with the forces of nature.
And so it is with life. As you advance in your learning and begin to “get it,” the learning process changes and you begin to learn more from your successes than your failures. And then you learn to fly.
copyright@2023 Blue Lotus Press
