I used to feel invisible. For a long time, my interactions with people left me with the sense that they couldn’t actually see me or understand what I was saying. Especially those I cared about. It was hurtful, confusing, and all around frustrating that the people I loved appeared to speak a different language and refused to see me for who I really was! But now I know this was a reflection of how I was hiding.
I was hiding behind my identifications, my judgments, my codependency, my unfulfilled desires, my illusions, and my fears. It was easier to hide in an imaginary reality filled with wishes and expectations—the way people should be and how they should perceive me—than to accept what was in front of me and how it made me feel about myself. Like most people, I found various ways to skirt around my painful aspects, either blaming others and rationalizing why, or squelching my voice to avoid opposition, hoping that others would magically change their ways to meet my needs.
Clearly, this wasn’t a conscious choice, but a repetition of familiar patterns passed down and reinforced over many years (and lifetimes) that robbed me of my full presence and truth, and also caused more pain. As a child, I was expected to fulfill certain family roles and unspoken needs, and to hide aspects of myself that either didn’t fit those expectations or were deemed unacceptable. Not only did I learn to hide, I also internalized this dynamic I’d later project into my close relationships.
Of course I couldn’t feel heard or seen, I didn’t have a true voice or presence! I had ideas, desires, words, arguments, expectations, and even demands, but I didn’t listen to myself long enough to know who I was, what I really wanted, or what would make me truly happy. I had learned early on that, even if a well-known dynamic was painful, reversing it could mean losing someone else’s love or approval. In this sense, it was safer to hide behind the people I loved, giving them a lot more room in my own life-movie than I gave myself. Does this sound familiar?
Without self-awareness, you’re walking in the dark, on auto-pilot, unwillingly playing a game of trial-and-error with yourself that simply reinforces painful patterns of thought and perception. But because you are a spark of Consciousness, you also hold the potential to shed light upon what’s hidden in your psyche, to clarify the meaning and purpose of your life-movie—and transform things from within. This requires taking spiritual responsibility for everything in it and stop taking emotional responsibility for everyone else, which is what you learned to do growing up. But your own effort transforms life into a spiritual journey.
Spirituality Is Self-Knowledge
The path of spiritual awakening and growth is a process of self-knowledge. As you set out to discover the higher reality of Divine Consciousness, you must recognize and remove your delusions, your distorted identifications, and the unconscious beliefs you’ve held on to that maintain those delusions and false identifications. Behind them is where the real you is hiding. Reading self-help books or learning a (New Age) spiritual language or philosophy cannot replace the path you’re meant to travel to discover who you really are and step up to your purpose here. There are no short-cuts, it’s a step-by-step, ongoing process.
In other words, your life is the platform from which you learn about yourself, and spiritual growth comes from your own experiences, as long as you’re willing to look closely and honestly at them. Rather than believing that what goes on in your life is separate from you, when you question how and why you’ve placed yourself in difficult or painful situations, you start taking spiritual responsibility to heal what you came to heal.
This is how you reclaim the power to shift your life-movie and start awakening to the higher reality you yearn for. You may not be able to see the reasons behind the events in your life, which are karmic, complex, and multilayered, but you can be honest about your attitudes and choices as those events were unfolding. You can also reflect as to what new attitudes and choices you may consciously choose now if similar situations would appear (and trust me, they will, until you’ve completely shifted).
Understanding that you are not separate from your life, that it’s a projection and reflection of yourself, changes everything. Instead of fighting it, you can learn from it. Rather than giving away your power with resentment and frustration because you believe others can’t see, respect or appreciate you, you can stop hiding behind their perception and give yourself permission to express all of who you are, no matter what people expect or judge in you. In other words, to be fully present and visible, you have to:
- Embrace the good, the bad, and the ugly in yourself, and relinquish the need to be perfect.
- Stop seeking validation and stop trying to heal your wounds through others.
- Develop the mental discipline to watch your negative tendencies without following your impulses.
- Recognize your expectations and break free from familiar or fixed roles and attitudes.
- Accept all difficulties as the path back to yourself, and find the meaning behind them.
- Clarify and express how you feel to yourself first, and choose wisely what to share with others.
- Meditate every day to dissolve the ego-mind that isolates you, and surrender to the Divine within.
You can’t be fully present when you dismiss or deny aspects of yourself; and if you’re not fully present, then your life-movie will reflect that back to you as lack of emotional and spiritual freedom. So contact me today to stop taking things personally and instead learn to discern what your interactions with others and the events in your life-movie are pointing at that only YOU can and are meant to transform. It’s time to take full spiritual responsibility to reclaim your inner power and create a new, higher experience of life!
© 2018 Yol Swan. All rights reserved.
