Here’s the hardest part of teaching ascension when you are still in the process of ascending: sometimes you have to practice what you preach. It’s such a monumental pain in my ass to actually have to take all the concepts I know to be true and then put them into practice while the shit hits the proverbial fan.
Yesterday my girlfriend and I got in a fight. We haven’t had many of those. Sure, we annoy each other at times, and sometimes even get angry, but generally those conflicts are resolved by a conversation and the inevitable conclusion that we are amazing at holding a mirror to each other. It’s darling. Really, it is. But this one was different. This time we actually yelled at each other. On the street. In North Beach. Like a couple of fucking drunk millennials.
The argument was an age old quibble (might have made that word up) of the sexes. Money. I have been under the egoic impression that I am extremely generous with my money towards her, and am therefore acting like a “man.” This in turn has built up a very strong case for my smaller self to erect a fortress of need around my rather endrearing prerequisite to be appreciated. Basically, I acted like an asshole. Simple as that. The fact is, in this archaic battle of small mind — the male energy generally feels like they are under appreciated for all they do, the female energy generally feels like they aren’t being taken care of. The fears of generations of opposing masculine/feminine energies come to the surface and reside in the combustion engine of a volatile identified self. That’s what the fight was about in a very over-written, complicated nutshell.
So, no big deal. It’s happened to all of us. Have a fight. Make up, or don’t. Move on. But this one was different because of the timing and the nature of the woman that I found myself mixed up in a tussle with.
Let’s start with the timing. I am in the midst of an ascension from my identified self to a universal consciousness of Oneness. That’s just a super pretentious way of saying I’m on a spirutal journey. In order for me to recognize my real self (No Self) there are a few things that need to be cleared first. If we use the analogy that enlightenemt is the sun, and that the ego are clouds that merely cover the sun, (Sun never went anywhere, it’s just not recognized as it is currently under cloud cover) then I can confidently say I have some clouds hanging around yet to be cleared. The thing about these particular clouds is that they are the heavy ones. The heaviest ones actually. The ones’s that lingered and stubbornly stuck around after the Sun burned all the others away. Basically, my cross to bear. Thing is about this journey, the closer one gets to the periphery of freedom, the louder our sticky, life long limited beliefs get. Think of it as the desperate death cry of something that knows its days are numbered. The proverbial ‘guy hanging on the edge of a cliff by his fingernails as we step on his hands’ scenario. Basically, an Indiana Jones movie within our soul.
Anyhoo, for me in paricular, and many other masculine energies in general, that sticky limited belief is around money, abundance, career and the general aura of needing to be a protector in order to satiate our need to feel indespensible and therefore feed our ego’s hunger to identify with itself. It’s an old energy, one that doesn’t necessarily fit in a modern society, but one that remains within many males still. It’s ancestral, It’s karmic. It’s energetic. It’s a heavy burden to carry and it’s not our fault that we carry it.
The femine energy of needing to be taken care of is equally, if not more, archaic. But it is, again, an energy passed down through millenia from a time when strong women were helpless to help themselves by the constrictions of a male dominated society hell bent on maintaining its grip on power.
We have been living in a misbalance of the feminine/masculine energies for centuries, and as we scoot up the on-ramp towards a New World, we are starting to find those energies re-calibrating into balance. And this re-balance is happneing within us. All of us.
These older paradigms are in the process of dying, but in order for them to be wiped out completely, the individuals facing them need to do just that: face them. Watch them. Objectively and dispassionately, from our internal state of I Am awareness, simply observe as the ticker of limited beliefs crawl and crackle its way past our awareness.
These energies, thoughts, and the ego in general are not your enemy. They are more suited to the class of a severely spoiled child. These energies feed off our attention and resistance to them. When we suppress them, we give them importance, and when we give them importance we allow them to take residence in what we think is our reality. So, like a child who repeatedly asks for a Cherry Coke, and repeatedly gets it because the parent doesn’t want to deal with the child’s screaming, so thrives our limited beliefs. And so it has thrived (thriven?) for our entire lifetimes, and in many cases, the lifetimes of those before us and before them and so on and so forth.
And so, in the aftermath of the debacle that was Alex v His Girlfriend in North Beach Part I: Now It’s Personal, I am faced with something I don’t want to do. I am faced with facing my bullshit. I am faced with watching as the limited beliefs and angers come up. And here’s where the spoiled child really gets crafty. It’s so much more fun to find reason why she was wrong. It’s so much easier to defend my stance. It’s so much more joyous to just stand my ground rigidly as I mind-rolodex the numerous beautiful things I have purchased for her. It’s easier. It’s more entertaining, and it’s exactly what my ego needs to stay in power.
You want to be brave? You want to be challenged? You want to overcome your limited beliefs and transcend the everyday slog of life to be birthed into a natural state of bliss, love and gratitude? Then give up ground. Surrender. Release the need to be correct. Give up the stance, and instead start to Watch. With a capital ‘W.’ (capitalizing it does nothing, I just thought it would be cool. So I’m doing it. Sue me) Watch as wave after wave of reasons to be pissed come streaming past your conscious seeing. Feel as all those constricted emotions start to ascend from your belly into your heart where they have held residence for the last 37 years. Just Watch. Without emotion. Dispassioantely. Objectively. Just Watch. And continue to do so.
Meaningful relationships are not catalysts for co-dependancy, rather mirrors to see what you need to clear in order to be free. When we allow them too, meaningful relationships provide an opportunity to be triggered into feeling an emotion or seeing a thought we have been resisting. That suppressed feeling or thought, whatever it is, is not there to hurt you. It’s not there to side track you. It’s not even there out of its own volition. It’s there because we have — through years of suppressing and bailing — allowed it to live there, unimpeded. It has clouded us from recognizing the Truth because we have unwittingly decided that this feeling should not be here. As a result we have batted it away thinking that by avoiding the pain we are saving ourselves, when in fact the exact opposite is true. Suffereing is resistance to What Is. Freedom is the objective, dispassionate Watching of What Is.
So, today, I Watched my spoiled child beg for attention. I Watched him catalog all I have done. I Watched him ruminate on how great a boyfriend I have been. How generous and amazing I am. How lucky she is to have me. How wrong she is. I Watched it. All of it. Dispassioanely and objectviely. I let it say its thing until eventually it completley exhausted itself. Then I got really really bored because nothing was happening. And I watched that. Until I felt like I couldn’t watch anything anymore and just wanted to go to my MLB app to check the Giants score. And I watched that. And I watched that. And I watched that…and then something cool happened…
I opened up. I started to find myself contentedly chilling in a space separate from the mind. I became the Watcher to my thoughts as opposed to a participant inside them. Additionally, I lost something. An indentification with me. The “I” was no longer there. It became space instead of form. The thoughts that began to surface were no longer seen by Alex, but rather by an energy that I can only describe as existance. The I Am. And from the rose of this watching came a fragrance of, among other things, forgiveness. Forgiveness to myself. I finally stopped beating myself up because there was nothing to beat up. Gratitude. Gratitude to the Girlfriend for guiding me to this place. Peace. I no longer needed to fight against anything. I could be effortless in that moment because I knew inutitely there was nothing to do but Be. Total Peace. So freakin good people. So freakin good.
We have one choice to maker in our lives. Just one. Are our lives happening TO us, or FOR us?
When we choose the latter we start to watch life working for us. When we choose the latter we start to dwell in the unfolding. When we choose FOR us, the need to DO stops, and the peace of BE unfolds. We stop furiously paddling upstream and start trusting in current. We stop playing the victim of circumstance and instead understand that the Intelligence of Nature has a greater plan then we could ever fathom and that this plan is unfolding automatically. We start to spot the miracles of synchronicities that are laid at our feet as we dwell in the vibration of the heart. Action happens spontaneously out of the creative geyser of intuition. Most importantly, we start to open up and reveal, through the clouds of discontent and fear, our true selves. The self that’s been burid behind all that crap slowly starts to reveal itself. It’s not the person we idenitfy ourselves with, rather it’s the energy and spaciousness of the Observer who observes that person. This is what Jesus called Heaven. What Buddha called Nirvana. What Krishna called Enlightenment.
All of a sudden, in the blink of an eye, by the simple virtue of us choosing FOR over TO, to opt for Watch over resist, the courage it takes to face our lives becomes effortless. We become the audience to those limited beliefs, and the tragedy of their death, becomes the comedy of our re-birth.
Damn. I should fight with my girlfriend more often.