Hello and welcome back!
In case you missed them, you can read:
Of this series before you move on to today's post.
Today, we’re going to look at what the TRUE path looks like.
If we’re not trying to be normal, and we’re not being extreme - what ARE we doing?
What actually gives us the results we want?
What actually leads to transformation?
THIS is what we are exploring today.
Let’s take a look at what it really takes to heal, so we can recognize the path when we see it.
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The Reality Of The Healing Path Is Very Grounded In Our Humanity
Life doesn’t stop being life on this spiritual/healing path.
There is no ‘arrival’ at a place where you stop being human. Where you stop having to eat or sleep or emote or talk to people.
Where you stop learning about yourself.
Where you stop needing to grow and interact with the friction of life.
Where you stop having resistance to certain things and negative emotions.
Where you stop having growth challenges, growing pains or desires for something more.
In fact, you may realize that true spirituality/healing requires that you simply learn how to interact with the stuff of life in a DIFFERENT WAY.
Now again, I want to make it clear that there WILL be issues we DO heal. There will be traumas and patterns and ways of being, there will be physical symptoms, relationship turmoils and work problems as well as the ways that we generally feel that DO change, permanently, for the better.
Growth, healing, ‘transcendence’ to a degree IS possible and WILL happen in your life.
I don’t want to make it sound like healing isn’t possible, and as though we can’t get to a place where we genuinely don’t deal with the things we used to deal with anymore - because we DO and we CAN.
You WILL.
Transformation is possible - just know that it’s not TRANSCENDENCE.
It’s not going to be anything magical, overnight or ‘miraculous.’
It’s not going to be struggle, struggle, struggle, nothing, nothing, nothing BOOM healing! It’s not going to be something you don’t see coming. It’s not going to randomly show up after trying hard enough or doing a practice long enough.
Rather you will know you’re on the path, because things get incrementally better OVER TIME. You will take STEPS. You will be guided down or will find yourself walking a PATH. There won’t be any one THING that does it - but rather a plethora of tools you will add to your toolbox that will, over the course of time, create small changes that eventually lead to big changes that eventually lead to a new way of life.
Also, what will ‘work’ will again work over time, but you should be seeing results AS YOU GO.
If you’re doing practices, protocols or any healing/spiritual technique that isn’t showing SOME benefit to you NOW - if it’s all promises of the future or if it’s all pain and suffering now with no actual reward - please be wary of this.
Nothing that is truly healing should be all pain right now. Again, there may be times and places where what we need to help us grow and change IS hard, is painful, does bring us in contact with our pain in a way that is intense at times. There will be ‘dark nights of the soul’ and all sorts of times where we have doubt, fear and don’t know if what we’re doing is enough or if it’s going to work - but these should be brief periods of time - not the whole experience.
If you are not seeing progress, if you are being isolated from anyone who isn’t on the path, if it’s all promises that you will see results if you do more/go to the next level/work harder, if there is some expectation of doing things PERFECTLY before you see results and if it’s all struggle and no rewards now - that ain’t it.
If it’s all ‘try harder to fit in, keep struggling, keep submitting yourself to the norms of culture and keep blaming YOURSELF if it’s not working’ - that ain’t it either.
If it’s all forcing, pushing and only being able to ‘stay on track’ for short periods of time before your mind takes you ‘back into old habits’, if it’s all discipline with no reward, if it’s all complex rules that only feel good because you ‘do them right’ not because they give ACTUAL benefit in and of themselves - that ain’t it either.
Please be aware of this.
This is what the path really looks like.
The Path Is Steps, Tools And Incremental Progress
Tools.
Steps.
Progress.
Incremental change over time that feels good NOW even if it’s also challenging.
No expectation of perfect performance.
As you walk this true healing path, you WILL change how you see what’s happening in your life, how you interact with what’s happening in your life, how you perceive what’s happening and what you’re making everything mean. This will lead to long term transformation over time.
You will go from seeing negative emotions as this horrible experience that are taking you away from your dream life, to seeing negative emotions as part of this journey of life, letting you know where it’s time to grow. You will come to a place where you know how to process and work with your emotions, so that you no longer fear sadness, doubt, fear, shame or anger - you see these things for what they are. You can embrace them and they no longer rob you of the underlying joy or feeling of rightness on your path.
You can experience turmoil in your relationships knowing you will ALWAYS have conflict to some degree so long as you are interacting with someone who has a different perspective of the world that you (ie. every person ever) and instead of this being threatening, you will see it as an opportunity to be continually seeing yourself more, and seeing more of the WORLD that you were not able to see through your limited perception. You will learn where a relationship is truly toxic and how to get out, where you need to set boundaries, where you need to learn new tools of communication and will work through the NUANCES of human relationships. Continually. For as long as you’re alive. Those fights will turn into opportunities for growth and expansion, or for seeing where it’s time to get out, to ask for help or to set a boundary. The friction will always lead to more awareness. There again will be joy in the mundanity of relationships.You will find more stability, fulfillment and joy in your relationships as you GROW and LEARN over time.
You will discover a place of peace with food and your body - not a place OUTSIDE of food or body issues. You will still get colds sometimes. Aches and pains. Serious disease maybe. You will still have to eat. But again your relationship to all of this will be radically different. You will no longer feel that your joy is only possible when ALL of your body is working PERFECTLY and will instead be able to enjoy your healing journey with all its ups and downs, bumps and bruises, symptoms and the like. There will no longer be a race to be ‘cleansed’ or ‘to eat clean and perfect’ because there will be a respect for the journey and realistic expectations of what you can expect as you simply do what you CAN each day. You will learn how to inhabit your body, to process the feelings that come with it’s limitations, how to ask for support and how to create a LIFESTYLE that allows you to feel the best you CAN, grieving what you can’t have, and again, it will release you from rushing. You will see that healing doesn’t come from doing what’s extreme, but from slow, steady, supportive action over time. Slow. Steady. Over time.
You will shift the way you see work. The way you see your value. The way you understand the system and what you need to do for yourself within it. You will understand what your ENOUGH is, and you will do what you can to find that. You again will ask for support. You may find a new career that’s your passion or you may settle into doing what’s enough to keep you alive and that supports you in having what you need. You may find that you need more support than that, that you need to acknowledge systems and how they aren’t working for you and in this you will stop blaming yourself and again, find different paths of support. You will start to see our culture and especially our work and hustle culture for the lie it is, and in this you will shift over time in your relationship with it.
It will be all about seeing systems.
Seeing your past.
Processing your history.
Learning to find new ways that work better.
Being curious and compassionate with yourself as you transform over time.
You won’t transcend, you will know exactly how you got from point A to point B. There will be no magical moment but rather a steady path towards a new you that knows how to interact with life in a totally new way.
THAT’S the transformation.
You will find that in reality, you don’t stop being human and you don’t stop interacting with the realities of life.
You’re going to come to see that the realities of life are THE POINT.
We’re not here to lay under it or rise above it.
We’re here to find the truth WITHIN IT.
To be in it, to live truth (so be different from the crowd) as we interact with the stuff of life (so to be non-transcended but fully rooted in our humanness.)
There’s SO MUCH Potential Within Our HUMANITY
We will discover that there is so much potential for the human being to have a human experience that INCLUDES magical/transformative/mystical events - to feel purpose even in sadness, anger, confusion and rage, to be able to work with and be in our physical forms and have pleasure and freedom in a way that is reasonable for us and what we were given, to be able to be alone and enjoy it, to be able to be in partnerships that are balanced and fulfilling, to be able to access wisdom from the universe and so on - experiences that ‘seem’ and really FEEL transcendental - but are truly just a ‘normal’ part of a human experience when we’ve done the work to open ourselves up.
These experiences don’t have to be understood as supernatural gifts - they’re the outcome of a vessel that has a little more energy flowing through it.
You will find that joy does not require fitting in, that you can be a bit, or a lot, off center, you can challenge those around you and be radically different without having to make a stand out of it. Without having to be preachy. Without having to defend yourself at all. You will see that this whole game was pointing you to find true self love - which required that you get rejected. You can find a place of peace and balance in being your unique self that actually feels GOOD for you, even though it doesn’t get you praise and approval from others.
You will have your down days, your struggles, your challenges, your being weird, your lack of ‘pleasures of the world’ and all of it will be right and exactly perfect - and you will be able to SEE it and FEEL it that way. You will be able to find your balance between participating in things that really do nourish and support you as you are, here in this moment, and you will also discover new ways to honor your humanity - not following any kind of ‘rules’ of what a ‘spiritual’ or ‘successful’ person ‘should’ be, but rather you will be on YOUR journey of discovery around what’s right for you at any given time (which will shift as you grow).
You will be able to find the joy in all the things you thought were fundamentally opposed to your joy. You will find that your humanness and the stuff of life was never blocking you from joy, nor was it the source of your joy. It was/is just the playground that you need to interact with to find the truth. You will continue to interact with it for the remainder of your time here in the body - since that is the whole point/HOW your soul is evolving. None of this is against you or to be transcended. This is the curriculum that is designed to give you the health/awareness you want. You can’t have it without this, and you also can’t have it if you don’t learn to see it all in a new, expanded way.
You will find you don’t stay normal, but you don’t transcend your humanness either.
You become a natural human. Interacting with life just like everyone else, just in a different way than anyone else.
You wind up in the middle.
Life goes on as normal.
It includes some magic.
You are totally different.
Life continues to happen. You are weird and give stuff up. You are also ‘normal’ in certain ways too. You are transformed and also the same. You see things in a totally different way and have a whole bunch of new tools to help you navigate what once felt impossible. You see yourself from a totally new vantage point. You find that the path wasn’t about transcending or fitting in but rather it was about finding YOUR path and YOUR way and it was about aligning WITH reality and your humanity - then working with these things to gain new awareness, skills and perspective that allow you to live in a transformed way. None of it was in the way. All of it was for your expansion.
The way you get there?
Embracing everything that is right now.
Not necessarily ‘accepting it’ as what you want forever, not embracing it as your set point for life - but realizing that by being IN what IS to the best of your ability, you will then have the best chance of DEALING with what is and THAT is how we make progress.
It’s not about over-analyzing or trying to spiritualize everything - but finding the meaning where the meaning exists, the patterns where the patterns exist and the steps where the steps exist.
All the pain and suffering. All the struggles and dramas. All the having to let things go and be weird. You open yourself to all of it - again to the best of your ability at any given time, acknowledging your humanity, feelings, resistance, sadness, anger or whatever else is coming up, as well as our need to check out and numb sometimes when life gets to be too much - and to the best of our ability we look to see the STEPS and benefits in all of it - all your habits you think are your problems, all the stuff of life you think is holding you back, all the changes you know you want to make but are scared to because it will make you weird - and you really LOOK for the truth in all of it. Because it ALL contains truth.
You start to find COMPASSION and CURIOSITY for yourself. You start from a new vantage point that you’re not broken.
Then you start to work from a place of looking to SUPPORT yourself - not change, fix or transcend yourself.
You start to look at the world through a lens of questioning, curiosity and expansion. What’s true? What’s not true? What’s actually beneficial? What’s in your control? What are part of power structures you may need to push back against? What perceptions do you need to challenge? What conditioning needs to be questioned? Where do you need community? Where do you need more independence?
Where is your power and how can you use it to SUPPORT yourself? Where can you come closer to what actually feels GOOD for you, and allow that to lead you and guide you towards a new kind of life? Where can you stop blaming yourself and your humanity, and again, look to SUPPORT yourself and your humanity?
Then, all of it evolves. Naturally. At i’s own pace. No forcing, rushing, resisting or fast-forwarding required.
You start to change the shitty things you really CAN change.
You question everywhere you have blame, shame and guilt.
You look for what’s GOOD about you.
You connect to your body, your emotions and your feelings and you start to understand their guidance and wisdom.
You challenge what’s normal.
You find your transformation within it.
Participate in those things that matter.
You realize you don’t need to stay how you are, nor do you need to become something altogether different than what you are. You just need to evolve, one step at a time. Through embracing what is. One step at a time. It all unfolds naturally if you just allow it to.
It’s all healing and it’s all spiritual if you let it be.
Some things you thought HAD to change for you to be healed/spiritual stay the same - you just see them different. Some things you thought had to stay the same for you to be safe and familiar change - and you find yourself more joyful than ever.
You do your practices because you like to. You let stuff go because you know there's more. You embrace the struggle as part of God that is helping you. You love it all even when you hate it.
The hard circumstances, feelings, emotions and thoughts of life stop being *quite* so hard, because they no longer mean you’re doing it wrong. Being weird and giving things up no longer feels so scary because it no longer means you are alone and unlovable.
You find your joy on the path. In every step. No matter what it brings you. You love the friction and the bliss all the same. Because they are the same.
Not so fancy. Not so flashy. Not so fun. But real, rooted and possible.
Then, you will realize that the TRUE point of all this spiritually/healing stuff is not to fit in or transcend.
It’s not to simply improve your own experience.
It is so that you can become one who truly has your head in the clouds but your feet on the ground.
You will realize this was all about becoming truly benevolent - one who is able to be in the stuff of life, to interact with the interface and to be with your fellow humans in a way that serves to improve the experience for ALL of us. You will see that you are here to help - maybe not in the way you thought you would, and maybe true help will change its meaning for you - but you will recognize the journey isn’t really just so you can feel bliss. It's so you can feel bliss, and in that, help to make this world less scary, less chaotic and less painful for everyone.
You do it to become the version of you that can bring order to the chaos. Peace to the fear. Love to the doubt. Salve to the weary. So that you can be human with all the other humans in a way that serves to uplift all of us.
We do this for all of us.
Not just for our own selves.
We do this to find the truth, so we can make this world more peaceful for all.
It’s not only about us.
It’s about the whole.
We just need to learn to play our part.
THAT is what healing/awakening is.
Learning to see your part in the whole, so you can serve your part. You will see that to be benevolent you don’t need to be fully accepted or transcended.
And in that you’ll be able to simply embrace the journey you’re on. No rush. No force. No hanging on to the past
In THAT - you will find the joy.
<3
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Are you ready for a true spiritual path that connects you to yourself and reality so you can feel good about your life?
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