Our story is what we often mistakenly refer to as our life. The chapters of which are filled with our past experiences, our disappointments, our pain, our hurts, and our beliefs. The characters within that story are those who we have loved and have loved us, and those who have hurt us and we have hurt in return. These are all bound together and referred to time and again as a reference manual on how to live our life. We cling to it tightly never realizing the limitations of what it is we are doing.
It is our story and the pages of our history that define us and give us a sense of who we are. Whenever we face a new situation in life we unknowingly confront it in much the same way. We refer to the reference manual called “My Story” in order to know how to respond. We never dare to look beyond what was, in order to see what could be.
Finally we reach a point on our journey where we feel “stuck”. We have the desire to move beyond our limitations but feel helpless to do so.
For me that point was reached a few weeks ago and it filled me with despair. I knew how vital it was to let go of my story, or as Eckhart Tolle refers to it ‘find the life beneath my life situation”, and in all honesty I believed that I had. I had stopped using it as an excuse for my life being the way it was a long time ago. Or so I thought.
I started to become acutely aware of the fact that there was something driving me from within that I could not identify, nor access. My spiritual yearnings although great, were being hampered by an invisible force that I could not control. My mind was running its own program.
So, last week I withdrew from the world and journeyed within in an effort to heal my life and remove the obstacles that stood in the way of truth. And much to my surprise the first obstacle I encountered was “My Story”. It was still there!! My denial of it had not made it disappear. It merely lurked in the shadows, still running my life autonomously. And now, all I could do was face it, but in a way I had never faced it before. Telling my story as I had in the past had meant I was merely projecting it outwardly and the sympathy and pity I received merely reinforced the fact that I was in fact a victim to it. To truly face my story meant I had to “feel” it, feel every part of it that I still carried within me and controlled my life. It was quite unsettling, but with “Love’s” gentle voice guiding me every step of the way, I found the strength and the resolve to move through my pain.
Most of us never get the chance to do this. We bury the past in an effort to move on with life, and hope and pray that it will stay buried. In suppressing it, what we are in fact doing is denying our emotions, our actual feelings, and in the long run creating further problems in our lives. For some of us this behavior is a result of fear, for others it is a result of our conditioning. We are taught that to show or express our emotions is wrong. We just do not realize the harm we do to ourselves in this denial. Suppressed emotions take a lot of energy to keep in place and as a result we experience the effects of our actions in a physical way through illness, depression, anxiety, headaches, fatigue and of course, illnesses such as cancer. Denying our emotions leads to dis-ease.
I realized during the course of the week that if I truly wanted to heal my life, then I must face myself completely and give an outlet to everything that needed to be released. Only by confronting that which I had denied for so long was I able to fully understand the behaviours that I had put in place in order to “survive” my pain. In order to discover the truth of who I am, I needed to first understand who I am not. And so with each mask of falsehood that was peeled away I journeyed closer to the core of my being, my essence.
But to get there I needed to journey through the anger, the resentment, the fear and the sadness. It was a difficult journey, and the effects of it were not merely felt in my psyche but also very profoundly within my physical body where I experienced pain and sickness. All this I was carrying within me, all this toxicity which had left no room for the happiness, the peace and the joy that I so desired to enter in and take its place.
As I faced these emotions and allowed them to rise to the surface I feared that they would consume me and I would never be able to let them go. But I needn’t have worried, for ever so gently Love took me by the hand and walked me to our next stop on the journey, “forgiveness” and there it was that my healing truly began. As I forgave every person that I felt had hurt me in some way both living and dead, and in turn asked those I had hurt to forgive me, the heaviness in my heart started to lift. But the most profound and transformative act of forgiveness I had to face was to forgive myself. I hesitated for quite some time until I realized that until I released myself from the bondage of guilt, I would not be truly free. My tears were like a release valve relieving all the pressure I had carried within me for so many years. I felt so incredibly light. So free.
And suddenly, my story was gone. I could recall it if I wanted to, but it was no longer “me”. And seeing that it was no longer me, holding onto it was no longer necessary. The most beautiful discovery of this healing journey was finding the jewel that lay hidden beneath all the pain. That jewel of course was “Love”. That Love within me allowed me to see that everyone is at their own stage of their journey, and with that gift came acceptance. I no longer need “them” to change, I am now able to love them for who they are. Nothing outside of me needs to change. It is “all” within me. I have discovered my essence, my true voice, my light, my Love. And now I step forward and begin to live my “truth”.
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