As we may already know, the true source of our struggles and suffering for so many of us is the cultural conditioning and emotional adaptations stemming from a primary emotional wound: the break in the bonding – or the lack of bonding – with those whom we relied on to care for us. Most of us have no conscious memory of that wound and no experience in our lives of a similar nature. It is the job of the identity, the ego, to keep that memory and experience unconscious.
The natural movement of spirit and form is towards healing. And that which is wounded continually seeks to be healed. This puts pressure on the ego and the identity to keep distracting, keep managing, controlling and manipulating the world, to be in charge so that that which was too painful, too distressing, never surfaces. The strategy of the ego and the identity is not fool proof. We are triggered by events and circumstances. We are reminded of an awful feeling of aloneness or separation, hopelessness or despair. When we experience them the ego and identity panic. We are left feeing there is something terribly wrong, terribly bad. We are very likely to feel there is something wrong or bad about us. In reality, by our very nature we are seeking wholeness again.
When we experience physical wounds they require attention – we must keep them clean and insure they are not re-injured. We pay attention and we care for them. But when we re-experience emotional wounds, we are more likely to judge and criticize. What we may not realize is that these re-surfacings, these emotional breakdowns, are doorways back to truth. They are openings, cracks in the identity. The identity is brutal in its judgment about these times. But in fact they are part of the healing process. They give us an opportunity to come to know ourselves at a deeper, more experiential level.
The suffering we experience when we are triggered like this is not due to the emotional content. It is due to the judgments and criticisms of our conditioning – our idea that this is something that is wrong with us, something that is bad about us. If we could see the effort we went to to divorce ourselves from the reality of our emotional pain, if we could clearly understand the cost of this separation, if we experienced the depth of the betrayal, loss, and fear that was the source of our dissociation from our true selves – the love and beauty and creative power that is our true nature – we would be much more compassionate with ourselves and others.
There is no need for regret, for judgment. There is always an order and harmony to the unfolding of life and it is unlikely that we see the complete picture. Our task is to allow, to get out of the way of the healing and growth process which is always at work, always guided by divine intelligence. Our task is to recognize that what we think we are is not real, who we think we are is not real. Our task is to support the end of the dissociation, to welcome the healing, to remove our trust and faith from control and place it in the infinite one, the perfect source of our being. Our task is to recognize the illusion of a separate personality and to affirm the unity of the one consciousness, to accept that there is only one power, one consciousness, one intelligence, unified and expressing in form in such a way that it can recognize itself through awareness, conscious awareness.
“I Am” is the fundamental quality of our existence. It is the basis of our life. It is the source of our being. In this moment we can choose to recognize and allow the truth of our being to be the only truth about us. This is the moment we can release all the clutter of the identity, thoughts, ideas, concepts, all the shoulds and shouldn’ts, all the do’s and don’ts, and experience this moment exactly as it truly is.
We are not seeking to control our experience – we are freeing ourselves from all obligation to be or do anything except what is true in this moment. We are not seeking something separate or outside of us – we are allowing to be revealed what is always true. We are removing the blinds of illusion and opening to the light of truth.