As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been busy working on new creative projects to expand my work. The idea of launching a podcast made me realize I needed an intro for it. So I began working on the content and the music, and that sparked the desire to go back to making music again, which of course entailed learning new things about the technology that didn’t exist when I was a music student.
A few months later, I had several content and music projects going on for the podcast as well as the concept of a workshop or group setting where I’d integrate my spiritual teachings with movement and music.
I was super excited… until I wasn’t.
Music production takes up a lot of room in a computer, so I had been working from an external drive to work efficiently while saving memory. It was both my framework and my backup disk, so I didn’t keep my files anywhere else. Well, all my excitement was blown into smithereens when I accidentally reformatted the drive and erased all my work!!! I can’t even explain how it happened, but as you can imagine, at first I felt like the most stupid person in the universe.
However, rather than identifying with negative emotions, I saw this as an opportunity to explore any self-defeating patterns of perception. Even though I must restart from scratch, now I have a stronger resolve to make things happen (I’ll try to keep you posted) instead of letting my inner bully deflate me (see Why Fulfillment & Spiritual Growth Trigger Your Resistance).
The truth is, our individual experience of reality is filled with obstacles, challenges, and disappointments because it is a product of the ego-mind blocking our divine nature. By creating individualized experiences through the delusion of separation from the eternal Self we are, it also produces a sense of deficiency that taints how we perceive ourselves and how we view life itself.
Life Is Perfect As It Is
At the same time, since all is Divine Consciousness and nothing is real but Consciousness, all the drama we experience is meant to redirect our attention inward, which is how we dissolve the ego at the root of our pain. If I perceive myself like a separate “person” doing something stupid (like erasing months of work!), I block the love within and suffer. But if I remember that it’s all Consciousness unfolding, then I don’t judge or suffer because I am not the doer, even if things appear to happen through my body and mind.
I can be humble and detached enough to see that nothing really belongs to me, for I am just the vehicle though which things take shape. I also know that every experience is there to make me conscious of myself, that is, to know my ego or who I think I am or should be. The key is recognizing and removing the need to control life and the self-centered righteousness that judges what is good or bad, or what should or shouldn’t be.
When you embrace life as it is you liberate yourself from the egoic feeling of deficiency that keeps your sense of otherness in charge of your behavior. It does this with the ridiculous yet deeply ingrained idea that “you should be someone other than who you are, doing something other than what you’re doing or want to do” (see Does Your Sense of Otherness Keep You Small?).
This may show as an absurd perfectionism that sabotages your endeavors or as self-doubts stalling your progress, sometimes to the point of paralysis. For your egoic sense of otherness—the inner bully through which you perceive yourself—nothing is good enough. But as the Pure Awareness you essentially are, everything is exactly what it’s meant to be, including the pain you experience to help you dissolve a distorted perception.
Life is perfect as it is. You are here to experience yourself in a variety of situations that shape the roadmap of your human experience as a whole, swinging from pleasure to pain until you remove all the false ideas that block the awareness that you are Pure Awareness—the eternal Self witnessing its own unfolding.
The real struggle is not with life’s circumstances but with your own ego-mind hijacking the truth of what you have always been. Since the ego is also a projection of the Self to experience itself in individual forms, it is a relentless trickster hiding in plain sight to fulfill its functions. Without understanding how it works, it’s easy to get caught in its illusions and painful fluctuations. So contact me today to learn the Swan Method to experience inner peace and accomplish your goals as you gain greater emotional and spiritual freedom!
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