Expect the best today and you will experience the best. Hoist yourself out of your usual inner deflating drone and inflate yourself with a new sound that has you humming and happy. Replace some negative truth with a positive truth today. Every day that you resolve something inside you, is a great day. Keep up the good work on yourself, and yourself will thank you in more ways than you can imagine. One day soon you will be remarking upon how lucky you are!
We speak often of the power within as the building block of change. But what good is it that we speak of such things if you do not feel any power within? To find that power you have to spend some time alone with what is going on inside you, in your thoughts and feelings about yourself, in your past and your feelings about your past. It’s not a bad idea to take up a psychological study of your inner world, in trying to find out what has you in its grip, in discovering why you do what you do. Going back into the life you have thus far lived and finding what grips you with fear, dread, worry, pain and finding ways to resolve those negative energies within yourself is actually the most important job in a lifetime. To be free of what controls you on the inside is to be free of the life challenges you set up for yourself as you embarked on your earthbound journey so long ago. It is the real goal of a lifetime to be free within. And only you can decide to turn inward and find what needs freeing.
Triggers are spontaneous eruptions of emotional terror that can seize the heart, take the breath away, or throw one into a rage. Logically, we seek to avoid such encounters. In fact, loved ones and friends often know to avoid certain topics with us rather than trigger such explosions.
What are actual triggers? Simply put, triggers are current experiences that resemble prior experiences in life that were never fully put to rest. Triggers can also be schemas, in the form of powerfully negative beliefs about the self, which overshadow our comfort with current life and self.
Triggers thus represent unfinished business, current reminders of past experiences and the emotional outbursts generated by those reminders.
Triggers are inevitable encounters that will, ultimately, be fully mastered. Life reviews in Near Death Experiences frequently send a soul back into life in their body, with the charge to fully resolve a trigger in their current life.
Buddhists believe that triggers are the seeds of reincarnation that must be completed in an otherworldly bardo adventure upon leaving this world and before beginning the next life, or that they are an actual reincarnation in a human life, which must be dealt with before life can progress.
Carlos Castaneda’s loving advice to us all is to take all the time we need, but, to hurry up! The evolving journey is magnificent; let’s free our energy to fully go forward into it!
Triggers are composed of life experiences we have already had but have been unable to mentally and emotionally digest and, ultimately, fully metabolize. Full metabolism is nothing short of love for everything we have ever experienced or believed. Fortunately, we have the innate capacity to achieve this radical acceptance of all of our lives.
At some level, most triggers exist in states of isolation from the greater personality and typically generate sadness. This sadness is separate from the actual sadness of a traumatic experience or core schema. This sadness results from the imposed isolation of the trigger as being too much or too powerful for the rest of the personality to bear.
When the ego is ready to go and be with a trigger, suddenly that trigger is no longer alone. The weight it has borne in isolation is in some degree lifted, as the ego—in whatever state of fear and trembling— proves, simply by its presence, that it can be with the contents and intensity of the trigger.
This act alone introduces a primary love, love for the unwanted and undesirable. Some sadness can be released at this rudimentary level of acceptance. With this act alone the past begins to be completed.
Regardless of the nature of a trauma or schema the truth is that it has been stuck in a suspended animation of no time. All experiences naturally find their home in our personal storybook of life. However, given the suspended state of triggers, they have never been allowed to be calmly put to rest in that loving storybook.
Once the ego, on its hero’s journey, is perseveringly present to a trigger, other resources within the greater soul are able to offer their resources. The subconscious generally provides dreams and synchronicities that offer a needed memory trail that support the full recapitulation of triggers.
The High Self might also point one to helpers, or clinical modalities, to support this natural processing of life experiences.
Processing such triggers or experiences changes the past because the past was never previously fully known or fully completed. Ego’s engagement with the trigger brings its own broader view and inclusion of elements not available to an earlier state of self.
Acceptance of everything leads one to fully loving every aspect of one’s lives lived, which renders all former triggers to become colorful and neutral pages in one’s personal storybook.
And that storybook could easily be shared with all—no legacy of shame or limitation attached.
Life moves quickly and before you know it you have missed out on something that you once thought was important. But now, if you step back and look at all that you have experienced in life, and at all that you have discovered about yourself, you may realize that perhaps those dreams were not to be a part of this lifetime. Perhaps there was something else you set out to do that did not come to consciousness. Perhaps old dreams are no longer viable, just as old habits are no longer necessary. Perhaps the life you have led all these years was the exact life you needed. Ponder today the broader aspects of the life you have led and where it has landed you. Without regret, ponder the good and the bad, the exciting and the miraculous, and be in awe no matter what dream you once had. For you are a being who has truly done what you needed to do. And that is something to really be in awe about!
When life is overladen with heavy emotions, it’s similar to a ship overladen with cargo. Sooner or later the ship is going to tip over in rough seas and capsize. It is then, during a capsized state, that rescue can happen. Until then, the heavy-laden ship will lumber along, ignoring all the warnings and, in foolhardy optimism, race ahead. When the energy of life is steeped in heavy emotions, it is best to wait them out. Sooner or later, they will reach a tipping point. It is then that they will begin to spill out, and it is in that release that the good work of reconciliation will begin.
