There Must Be Angels.
These pains you feel are messengers, listen to them. ~Rumi
Namaste.🙏
It’s easy to lose balance these days - with so much to polarize our hearts and our homes, our attention is up for grabs — causes us to fall from grace. Indeed, when we place too much attention on “what” we want (or what others “want us to want”), it makes it hard to trust “what” we see or hear or taste ahead - it’s hard to Love.
Love is “what” we are, from “what” we come and confides in us that this is to “what” we return.
This is, after all, the journey of every soul - to provide the guidance of Trusted Sources, Angels, and Visions - that would return us to Love. But “love” is not the same as “trust. Trust is earned through courage, action, and compassion that returns us to Love.
To earn trust, we must first locate within ourselves “what” we value - identify “why” it has value and determine if that value is still valid - then update and be loyal to those values through our words and actions. When we fail, we accept, forgive, regroup, and move on. This response takes time, as trust asks us to consider the opportunities that may challenge the beliefs that indoctrinate the habits that confirm these experiences.
This willingness to push, relax or surrender the boundaries of our previous behavior by shifting our perspective, offers ascension from the bondage and suffering of the lies that we’ve been telling ourselves forever, like how, “All ___ are like _____,” that, “I am not enough,” or, “I will be happy when.”
Isolated from compassion, empathy, and forgiveness, these thoughts conspire to tell a story of victimhood that identifies a villain and calls upon a hero. It feels familiar, feels true like some mythic, Marvel Hero, but only further isolates us from the power to respond to these thoughts with Love, humility, and care: “Not always so,” “You exist and therefore are purpose,” and, “You are not a victim, rather a creator.”
To be clear, when we chase our thoughts, we are attached to the destination of fulfilling a desire, and we are not free to create anything.
This includes being True to the words that are erupting on this screen, being unattached to “what” they will return to my ego, and being deeply devoted to “how” they are received. It’s painful! I (this limited person/ego named Annette) suffer when I place my happiness on readership or response, and I am liberated when I trust the place from which the words come.
The beauty is that, embedded within this sweet, sublime, and painful discourse, suffering becomes a friend, a guidepost that alerts us when someone or some choice is shifting us away from that confidence.
We recognize suffering when we are attuned to the soma - to the body’s cues of discomfort (tolerance), challenge (investigation), or hunger (desire) through motion (motive) and touch (friction), but also acute presence (intention) and attention. At this point, we are primed to recognize those cues in the mind and the heart - the Heart/Mind is aligned for connection and courage.
This process frees us from the bondage of the 5 senses, and integrates us into a multi-sensory/dimensional life, and connects us with Trusted Sources that arrive in the form of our greatest faith.
Life provides us with the experiences to realize these relationships, and offers us the higher power of seeing with more clarity and less attachment as we rise and open up space to include more possibilities.
It reminds me of the work of Medical Intuitive, Carolyn Myss. She uses the analogy of a high-rise apartment to describe spiritual ascension, what an educator would call developmental schema. When you are on the ground floor, you’re smack dab in the middle of the drama of life. You can only see as far as your hand. This can awaken many feelings: feelings of being trapped that cause us to constrict or defend; or feelings of curiosity and longing to travel beyond what we can see - the way babies first turn, sit up, crawl, scoot, and then walk.
We cannot skip the order that allows us to rise confidently into the world.
As you rise, you find open space and a greater perspective on the variables below - on how they are connected and on the paths you might travel that would avoid the destiny of density - think of the view from the Eiffel Tower. Every floor requires a skill, a tool, or a perspective that challenges the last. And, make no mistakes, there are dues to pay for one to live in the Penthouse.
Life is how we learn to trust not our experiences, but the process that honors Universal Truth - when we account for the choices that kept us stuck on the lower floors, we rise.
That means that conversations like the one we are having right now, offer us an opportunity to understand, heal and grow. Like Viktor Frankl and his quote, “Between stimulus and response … lies our freedom and growth.”
We must trust and respond to the vision of what is True Now under these conditions and within these circumstances, and expand into our Universal potential, rather than recycle old stories whose narrative we can or cannot control. We must also look at those old stories with a new lens - through admiration, love, and compassion rather than wield them as shields of decency and tradition or wave them as swords of justice and democracy.
We must be wise without identity.
When we realize that much of what is happening is the result of the habits of beliefs we’ve put in motion, what do we do? How do we bring compassion to the thoughts and memories that betrayed us with half-truths? Do we deny Truth, and surround ourselves with others that confirm what we want to be true?
Or do we continue to lie to ourselves about the power we have to make our lives beautiful, meaningful, and essential?
That would mean that anything that follows will be rooted in a lie. And, if we can’t trust ourselves, “what” can we trust in this idea of freedom?
Trust no idea! … not even the idea of Love.