What Happens in the Shadows (Judgment/Karma XX)
Anyone who has been through a spiritual awakening knows there are moments that feel far less like a magical ride through the cosmos and much more like a slow, maddening descent into hell. The experience can leave us feeling completely hollowed out, broken, shaky, and absolutely batshit crazy. What is it about pain that carries such transformative powers? And whose sick and twisted design plan included that we as human creatures must suffer in order to become refined as spiritual beings? God must be a sadist. If you even believe in a god. I didn’t. Not really, anyway. And in some ways I still don’t, at least not in a fundamental, conventional way. I certainly don’t believe in a god that requires his “followers” to worship him and follow some sort of strict dogma, or even a loose set of guidelines for that matter. If I followed a god he’d have to be REAL laid back and loose with the rules. Like The Dude from “The Big Lebowski.”
But I digress. A spiritual awakening does not require a belief in any one god, belief structure, or any god at all, dare I say. A spiritual awakening is far more about the recognition and validation of the self than it is about identifying any one particular creator or spiritual authority. Many of us awakened people refer to the idea of “God” as “The Universe.” and that’s because we recognize the universal life force that flows through everything. From the microcosmic cellular level where all of life begins, to the macrocosmic expanse of the infinite galaxies - we are all one. Because we all vibrate with that same life force energy. I know it sounds woo-woo, but is the study of energy not the basis of physics? And has it not been proven that matter can neither be created nor destroyed? The concept of time gets a little tricky, because it doesn’t fit comfortably within the confines of our brains. Time is man-made, and has become the foundation of how we run our lives. Time is measurable, but energy eventually becomes a phenomena unquantifiable by the tools and understanding of man. AND THAT’S OK! In fact, it’s totally fascinating and awesome. Because what this means, when we “awaken,” is that we are seeing consciousness for what it truly is: awesome, rebellious, rule-breaking, limitless POTENTIAL. What if time doesn’t really exist, and therefore the answer to the question where did life begin really is NEVER. It never began and it never ends. It has just always been and it always will be. What?!
What I’m trying to say, is that we will never have all of the answers. There will be gurus and healers, prophets and teachers probably always, channeling messages and waxing philosophical about their discoveries, revelations and “downloads” (insert eye roll here.) As long as we remain curious as a species and continue to study our galaxy, other universes, and the phenomena of energy, then we will most likely continue to learn and understand more about how we got here as a race of beings and what we are trying to accomplish. At least that’s my hope. And that brings me to the point of this article.
I do not have the answer as to why it takes pain and suffering to become an enlightened human being. But I will tell you HOW I believe pain and suffering make this happen. Deep traumatic pain and suffering break our spirit. It’s like running a marathon and getting hit with a giant rock from twelve stories high. Scratch that. It’s more like getting pummeled by a series of rocks over and over and over again. Like running through machine gun fire. And then finally, that one bullet takes you down. And you are at the bottom. You cannot go any lower. I call this “rock bottom’s basement,” and there are truly only two other places you can go. You can choose to remove yourself from the equation of life altogether, or you can choose to rise above. But you know you cannot keep doing things the way you have been doing them. You realize that salvation means saving yourself FROM yourself. You realize that there has to be so much more than what you used to believe (or not believe) because it’s all too much, too heavy, too awful, too depressing, too terrifying. So you begin searching. You begin running your hands over the sands at the bottom of the deep, dark murky waters of your suffering, trying to find the glimmer of light, the pearl that will hold within its small, shiny orb the answers you need for survival. You dive deeper and deeper down, over and over again for more answers, more answers, more answers. And you go up, way up into the cosmos and begin praying and begging - who? Your deceased loved ones? Your guides? God? The Universe? Spiritual mentors? For me, it was essentially all of these. There is so much I have seen and witnessed, but for the sake of brevity, I will only say that our perception colors our reality. Despite what you do and do not believe in doesn’t matter to me. My truth is mine and mine alone. Spirituality and the experiences that go along with it are unique to each individual and can be quite different from one another.
What’s important is this: all of that pain and all of that suffering become like the elements in the tumbler that are slowly polishing your soul. You begin to deepen your well of empathy, compassion and unconditional love. You begin to fully understand what it means to let go of attachment, why impermanence doesn’t need to be scary, why change is just a natural part of the living experience and how letting go of control and cultivating a faith in a higher power is not a sign of weakness. You begin to understand how limiting your belief systems and perspective used to be, and how that was keeping you trapped in a mental prison of victimhood. This is the essence of what I mean when I tell my clients that PAIN is the most effective tool you have in your tool box when it comes to cultivating power. Pain breaks you open and tests your limits. Pain wants you to give up. And every time you say NO, and you choose instead to rise above it, you overcome and you LEVEL UP. Like fear, pain is a liar. It tells you cannot do this any longer, that you are weak, that you are temporary, that you are imperfect. And guess what? At times you are all of these things. But what a spiritual awakening tells us is that we are also strong, immortal and perfect, just as we are. Flawed, ugly, scarred, scared, fearful…yet also beautiful, loving, joyful, hopeful, honest & unapologetic about the duality of our human-spiritual nature. This is the essence of embracing the shadow and the light within us all. An enlightened soul loves her pain and is grateful for her suffering, because she wouldn’t be where she is today without it. And she now knows her spirit is completely UNBREAKABLE. It doesn’t get more powerful than that.
