Don’t let the past overtake the present and prevent you from enjoying a new and different future. Take care to reconcile anything that concerns you and overshadows your days with regret, fear, pain or despair. To hold onto a painful past for whatever reason, and there are many, is far more debilitating than recapitulating it so that you can finally enjoy a good life. A good life is one of calmness and joy, one filled with newness and anticipation, one that only you can give yourself. Let go of the old and open to the new.
Unearthing old feelings brings up more than just those old feelings. Everything attached to them is unearthed as well. Healing takes time and investigating what has been unearthed thoroughly and completely brings one closer to healing old wounds, old thoughts, whether true or not, and old feelings that may or may not show themselves repeatedly throughout life to be more cantankerous than supposed. To heal from the old is to heal deeply, and to heal deeply is the good work of the soul, for it is the soul’s journey that is just as important as the one physical life you are currently in. Healing is a multidimensional process best engaged in one step at a time, one day at a time, one issue at a time.
In the play of light and dark, in the shadows of the self, find the inner you that calls out for acknowledgement and healing. You are all complicated beings with many sides, many issues and many agendas. Get to know all these sides, issues and agendas so that as they arise and ask for time and attention you are able to give them what they need. Acknowledge them, question them, listen to them, get to fully know them, accept and integrate them. In this manner, reconcile with them so that they do not rule you but still have their place, so that they do not blindside you over and over again but become so known that you see them coming from miles away. In knowing yourself fully and reconciling fully, life will begin to take on a calm, more focused agenda, with truth in the fore and illusion put to rest.
The greatest challenge of all, in this life of physical form and beyond, is accepting the truth. For one thing, truth is relative.
In childhood we believe we are responsible for everything. Mature adulthood allows us to accept the separate existence of others, including their contributions toward our difficulties.
Wisdom, the next level of truth, takes us full circle. Reflecting objectively upon life, from the pinnacle of spiritual acuity, we see ourselves in everyone. From this perspective our oneness is restored.
Our evolutionary journey requires that we traverse successfully these developmental stages of truth.
The Buddhists suggest that we reincarnate into bardos, into dreams of our own construction, until we are at peace with the full truth of the lives we have lived, which then enables us to be open to life beyond them. This is the true achievement of detachment—the freedom to move into new life, fully resolved from dilemmas of previous lives lived.
Frequently, loyalty to unresolved issues results in counter-suggestions to the subconscious mind around changes we intend to make in our lives. For example, if one fundamentally maintains the belief that they are unworthy, a suggestion for prosperity may be cancelled by this blocking belief of unworthiness.
In this case, the subconscious may generate incidents to reinforce one’s loyalty to the felt undeservedness. Detaching from this belief will require recapitulation of formative experiences that reinforced this belief. This may expose distortions that were formerly needed to protect a significant other, or a part of the self.
This recapitulation may also lift the veil of narcissism shrouding the belief that dates to the primary narcissism period of childhood. From this view, one is able to assign responsibility for events where they should be truthfully assigned, unseating younger interpretations of reality. From this perspective one is able to accept the fuller truth of self and other.
Ultimately, one might reach a perspective that once again assigns one full responsibility for the life one is in. This might include realizing one’s decision to enter life in the time period, and family constellation, one was born into, as one’s contribution toward one’s greater soul’s journey of infinite growth and awareness.
This does not absolve a perpetrator from responsibility for their behavior. However, it might explain the choice of a victim-experience as part of one’s spiritual growth.
Accepting the truth also requires that we face the ulterior motives within the self. From a holographic perspective we are comprised of the same everything as everyone else. If we attempt to solve the polarities that live within the self via projection onto others, we lose the thread of our fuller inner truth.
Fuller acceptance of our shadow self, with all of its desires, manipulations, cruelty and greed, allows us to be in full truth with ourselves. Acceptance requires that we live our wholeness as responsibly as possible.
Every day we are offered countless opportunities to be in truth with ourselves. We just need think about the world and our relationship with others; what truths are we being asked to face each day, in each moment, as we live out our lives.
From a place of higher truth, we are quite likely to manifest the kinds of experiences that will bring us fulfillment, as we eliminate negative counter-suggestions from an unknown shadow self. And then we can fully own our whole, integrated and wise self.
At some level of our multidimensional being we decided to enter the life we are in to fully explore and master a specific issue. Carl Jung would ask people to discover the myth they were living, alluding to this deeper dimension of being that ushered us into the drama of our life.
Typically, we are so absorbed by the drama we are living that it can take the lion’s share of a lifetime to arrive at a detached enough perspective to begin to unravel the mysteries of our lives and to discover our true mission in coming here.
Often, we are so caught by the compensatory defenses that protect us from the vulnerability of our core issue that we mistake the troublesome defense for the root issue itself.
The psychic channel for Seth, Jane Roberts, was a prolific author who demanded of herself that she spend several hours every day at her writing table. Her eating habits were highly restrictive, definitely qualifying for an eating disorder diagnosis. The longterm impact of these compulsive habits eventuated in near total paralysis.
Those who knew and loved her prayed that she might free herself from these fatal defenses, that she might enjoy the physical freedom of a fulfilled life.
When Jane’s mother died in a nursing home in 1972, of advanced rheumatoid arthritis, Jane was 43 and hadn’t seen her mother in 15 years, largely due to the unresolved trauma she had suffered at her mother’s hands as a child and young adult, and which haunted her throughout her life. At this point, Jane was already well into having symptoms of the same debilitating disease.
Jane was riveted by her mother’s death and writes in her journal of her fear that her mother would continue to actively haunt her, not only emotionally but also somehow embody Jane with her paralysis while she finally went free.
Ironically, Jane, fully in possession of herself, clung to the rigid defenses that led to her own debilitating paralysis and her eventual death, at the age of 55, from the same disease. In effect, she was haunted by her mother for her entire life.
Clearly, for Jane, it appears that her core challenge was mastering her feelings for her mother, which she failed to complete during her lifetime, and which accompanied her on her journey into life beyond human form. And yet, as a pioneer in transpersonal psychology, her contributions are fundamental, as attested to by fellow pioneers, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson and Louise Hay.
From a multidimensional perspective, the primal trauma of her childhood dissociated her from human connection, while at the same time it launched her so deeply into subtle reality that she energetically was able to make contact with a highly evolved teaching being who mapped the deeper dimensions of the psyche and shared the tools for human evolution, which are still so crucial at this stage of our collective development.
In the role of a wounded healer, Jane channelled the material to enable spiritual seekers to discover and interact with their soul while they navigate the meaning of their lives. Though she could not fully use the insights to help herself heal, I suspect that Jane chose this extreme imbalance to be energetically available to deliver this invaluable gift.
Carlos Castaneda, another wounded healer, delivered to the modern world the shamanic tool of recapitulation to fully master the kinds of trauma at Jane’s core. With recapitulation, we fully reclaim our energetic selves to explore transpersonal reality with balance and confidence.
Trauma appears to be a precondition to human life, as clearly delineated by Stan Grof’s documentation of universal birth trauma. Nonetheless, the root of trauma can be fully neutralized and the thrust for spiritual exploration be one of innocence and wonder, instead of being one of compensatory defense.
Many a masterpiece is the product of an extreme compensatory defense. But continued spiritual evolution requires that we ultimately master the deepest root of why we are here. And from there, our possibilities are unlimited, in this life and beyond.
