Hello Dearest One.
Today let's explore why you should never, ever be ashamed of anything that you have been through.
Anything that you are going through.
Anything that you will go through in the future.
Today let’s explore why you never need to be embarrassed or upset with yourself that it took you longer to 'get over' something than you thought it ‘should’. Or other people thought it should. Why you never need to judge yourself or categorize yourself based on your experiences.
The reason?
Who you are and what you have journeyed through are two different things, which do not 'mean' things about the other - in a defining, definitive, quantifying kind of way.
Your path is the path your soul has chosen to facilitate a tactile experience of who and what you are.
What we all are.
It is an individual experience of a Unity ultimate truth.
A trillion different vantage points for God to gaze at God.
It is the virtual reality, real time, physical version of Divinity looking at Divinity, looking at Divinity.
All of it.
It is only the human mind that categorizes things as holy and unholy.
The truth is, it’s all holy.
There is no journey that could define God as less then God, and there is no journey that is not God itself.
You are Divine, having an experience of the Divine, and the experience itself is Divine.
Because unity consciousness requires complete unity. There can be nothing outside. Either it is all God, or it isn’t. So if you want to believe it all is, then all of it has to be – including every single journey that has ever been.
Including your journey.
Why Releasing Identifying With Journey Matters
The reason I think this topic is so important, is because it is very easy to get caught up in the PAIN of defining yourself by your journey. It is easy to decide limiting things about who and what you are, based on what you have gone through.
This pain is simply totally unnecessary.
The Trap Of Your Journey Becoming YOU
First off, pretty much everyone has identified with his or her journey on some level. Most of us to the point that we are not even consciously aware that we have identified with our journey as being a part of who we are, nor would we ever think to question doing so.
"I am a recovering alcoholic."
"I am a school teacher."
"I am a Masters Student."
"I am a wife, mother, brother, child, friend, lover."
These are all pretty common associations and identifications.
The thing is, you take it further than this.
Not only do you identify with the external characteristics that make up your life and identities, you also deeply identify with your EXPERIENCES as though they are now a permanent part of the tapestry that makes ‘you’ you.
If this journey is a pleasant one – like the journey of obtaining a degree in something you are super passionate about or falling in love – the pain of association with that journey is not so deeply felt. (It is ALWAYS painful on some level to identify with this reality that is passing. Even if the associations you have are pleasant, what is created is a sense of fear or pain over losing that association, so identification in and of itself is always going to lead to pain on some level) If the journey was a rough one, and you believe that this then means something negative about YOU, then obviously this association is going to be much more immediately painful.
Rather than allowing yourself to go through what you have gone through, and carry the learning as your take away, what you most likely have done is said “I am” the journey you have been on.
Anorexia Is Not An Identity
To illustrate this point, I will give you an example from my own life.
I used to identify with being an anorexia survivor.
I deeply and fully allowed the journey of anorexia to be a big part of my identity.
It first it felt like it was a black mark on my record that I had been through something so dark.
Then it was a lighter mark on my record, since I could in turn help others find a way through.
Still, no matter how I looked at it, identifying with BEING a person who had traversed my way through anorexia was stifling. Having that boundary on my being made me feel like there were now areas of life I could no go. Things I could not do. Experiences I could not have. Things I could not say.
The identification with the anorexia journey put me in a box.
Being in a box, for a soul, sucks.
To get out of that box, I had to stop identifying with that journey as being a part of my soul. I had to start identifying that journey as being a passageway, which clarified and expanded my soul. No longer carrying the journey itself forward with me as an identifying characteristic.
I no longer consider myself someone who has recovered from anorexia. I do not consider myself a survivor or any kind of poster child for life on the other side of an eating disorder.
I am a soul, who journeyed through the experience of anorexia, I learned a lot through that experience, but ultimately that experience has no bearing on who I AM as a BEING.
Let me clarify - the experience of anorexia changed me.
Recovering from anorexia changed me.
I was absolutely refined by the experience.
But on this side, I no longer attach myself to the anorexia as an identifying marker.
Instead, I identify with all that I have become through the experience.
All that, ultimately, I RETURNED too.
Healing from anorexia meant deeply looking at my painful core beliefs about the world that were leading me to be self destructive - and were therefore out of alignment with the truth of who I and the Universe are. The journey through sickness and into health highlighted where I was living out of alignment with my Divinity, and then was my road back into alignment.
That's it.
‘I’ was never truly anorexic. ‘I’ never really healed. It was all a deep, textured journey of forgetting who I am and forgetting how this universe works, and then re-remembering. A virtual reality experience that was real, but at the same time, was incredibly unreal.
Anorexia was the specific path my soul chose to walk for that time period to deeply learn those lessons at that time.
That's it.
It is no longer a part of me. My soul is now on a totally different path. And in a while, it will be on a different path still.
Your Path Is Not You. Period.
What this means is, your journey is not defining who you are. It is simply the method your soul is using to give you a first hand experience of delusion and of reality.
To give you a first hand experience of forgetting who and what you are, of believing things that hurt, of piling a whole bunch of things on top of yourself that have nothing to do with you, and then giving you the experience of re-remembering who you are, seeing the truth of reality, and letting go of all the stuff that never really existed in the first place.
Your journey cannot make you a good or a bad person, because ultimately you are simply Divinity. Divinity experiencing itself. You can't be good or bad. You can only BE.
A soul.
Not in a box.
To use your journey as a measuring stick for your value, your worth, your virtue, would be like going on a hike, noticing that the path is inclining, and stating "because I have to climb this hill, I am a bad person. If the path had been going downhill, I would be a good person."
Hopefully just reading that made you exhale strongly from your nostrils in recognition of the silliness of it.
To say you are a bad person because the road did something random on a hike sound so ridiculous.
But this is EXACTLY what most of us are doing when we look at our own lives.
The point is this: Your path is going to change and refine you. But not in a way that you are 'actually' being changed. It is going to pull you to ever deeper levels of understanding and self knowledge - which is ultimately knowledge of the Divine.
You might resist these revelations. You may stay believing you are a piece of shit for the rest of your life. You may never 'transcend' normal, mundane consciousness that says that you are a whole bunch of junk other than complete Divinity - and that is ok.
That journey leaves absolutely no black marks on your BEING.
You will exit this body, and remember. And that will be the end of it.
Or you may fully awaken in this lifetime, and have the whole enlightenment trip. You may arrive at the knowing, the EXPERIENCE of being all things, of witnessing the perfect unfolding, of having no cognitive dissonance when it comes to the idea that all things are already done, and that everything is expanding and happening and changing and growing right here right now and forever.
And for that, your soul will be your soul.
You may have a drug addiction trip. You may have a journey where you become president. Maybe you will be totally crushed by life and then redeem yourself. Maybe you will live a perfectly normal, average, comfortable life.
Whatever your journey, you are the soul having the experience. You are not the journey itself.
This is just a trip. An important trip. One that changes and shapes you. One that provides valuable, tactile experience of who and what you are, who and what the universe is, and what this is all about.
But it's not 'you.'
You cannot be made less Divine, no matter the path your soul takes you down.
That is a simple as it gets.
You are Divinity, having an experience. You may find it far less painful to identify with the awareness, the reality, the consciousness that you found on your path, rather than identifying with your path in and of itself.
Anything that is less painful, is closer to the truth.
You are the soul having the experience.
<3
