To See It's Depth and Breadth and to Not Freak Out
I was a little doubtful about doing a phone meeting, asking myself if "I was going to get the bang for my buck". I quickly found that this was not a bones and flesh exercise anyway. This inner world was obviously farther reaching, more agile in a sense, and had more than legs and feet. I could feel his first hello - he was with me. This is what I told him:
JON: I am starting to see more of others for who they are, and it seems directly related to understanding more about where and who I am.
DOVE: As you are feeling more centered; you are seeing where others are relative to their center. You are gaining the foundation for compassion.
JON: I tend to be emotional and somewhat reactive, and sometimes I have anxiety that gets in my way. There’s seemingly no supportive environment for staying in this new centered place.
DOVE: I would like to suggest another way of seeing it. The other side of the coin is that as you get clearer in your sensitivities or ‘mechanisms’ for compassion, it becomes clearer that people in general, are hurt and hurting. As one starts to wake up, one gets slapped with how much psychic human wreckage there is out there. One can see the breadth and depth of human suffering. It takes some effort not to freak out. It is a challenge!
JON: It’s always felt like a chaos of hit or miss and hope for the best scenario. It feels out of control and scary is the real truth.
DOVE: It requires tools to stay centered. To not get slapped, it is important to create a protective shield and still be with it all and not be reactive. Remember, the game “hurt the healer,” and the principles of being pre-emptive and pro-active.
JON: That takes a lot of energy. It’s like trying to vigilantly focus on something through a mist, and it all feels vague.
DOVE: Okay, here are a couple of ideas. At the beginning of the day you can imagine or anticipate everyone you are going to encounter, and pre-gift them with light. Then there is a reservoir that is right there for them. Assume that you are operating with wisdom. You know humans are hurt and therefore wise people pre-gift. When something not anticipated happens, then that’s just a lesson that you know you can learn. Secondly, it is wise to learn your own basic ways to comport yourself as one who is awake in their center. There is certain maintenance to it, like swimming. When learning, it's awkward and you are trying to develop the muscles and ways. Once you learn the “psychic body knowing” you can swim through the day.
JON: Wow, that shows me how I much I do in fact react.
DOVE: Reaction is a function of survival, associated with the ancient flight/fight response. The mundane regular world is keyed to the primitive aspect, engaging flight and fight - it’s the wreckage! So, simply observe it.
JON: That's the part that was the hardest when I was little. I am feeling the impact like never before. This is hellish. Talking about which, this week has been like when I quit smoking cigarettes years ago. I was committed to quitting but would catch myself reflexively reaching for a cigarette. I didn’t want it, but fell into it. It’s similar now, the "falling off center" experience. I catch myself falling back and it all seems a struggle that I can’t win.
DOVE: Jon, you are interpreting what’s going on with you as backsliding, but it is not necessarily backsliding because your observation of it is much clearer. So in those instances, you can appreciate your clearer observation as your own psyche simply defines the next area of focus by showing the next step.
JON: Going one step at a time is all I can do.
DOVE: Therefore, it is appropriate to let yourself off the hook. Take some of that compassion you have been experiencing and it direct towards yourself, and see that it is some of your human wreckage.
JON: I am not used to being compassionate to myself. I guess it is a new behavior I’m working with. I'm approaching things from new angles.
DOVE: Any new intra-psychic habit sits in our consciousness in a new kind of way. The psyche says "What’s this?" Therefore you are encountering a validation. That is what happens. You ask "How do I accommodate and install the newness?"
JON: Tell me more.
DOVE: In the next waking steps you will see another side of yourself. There is an aspect of yourself that is an answer to the suffering, a part that is equipped and very able to be responsive to whatever you encounter. This is the aspect of you that you haven’t had a lot of experience with or awakened to yet. You have the ability to respond to the trauma you perceive. Otherwise you wouldn’t see it. There is a truth about that you which you have yet to appreciate. That is the wondrous discovery when you learn you are "enough for this situation." The only lie is that you are not enough. So, you get to obliterate that lie with a new kind of feeling. It is a feeling “like being born into your own life.”
JON: That reminds me of Pinocchio or the Velveteen Rabbit beginning to animate.
DOVE: And its all happening on time…it’s a destiny thing. The fear you are having is that you could mess it up. The real truth is that you are waking up; it couldn’t not happen.
JON: I had the desire to call you on Wednesday because I felt I needed your voice to get balanced. I was feeling like a failure and a little schizophrenic. I needed a lifeline.
DOVE: That somehow the lifeline was outside you was a dusty old fear. The over-arching reality is that you are designing the whole thing, and I am simply mirroring it. Your soul called it in when you initiated involvement with me. Your higher aspect structured a scenario that your lower aspect could deal with. I just stepped in as a facilitator as a tool of your soul. You are doing it for yourself now. Your soul always calls in the right tools. In the first part of your life, your soul called in sleep because that is what your soul needed then. Sleep was important, so you could learn to wake up. At one level, there is no difference between the booze you used and me. We were both the medicine you needed: alcohol was your medicine for being asleep; I am the medicine you are using to awaken.
JON: So, I am the initiator. If I am here the appreciation can then go deeper. Then I can see, and feel and participate in the conscious divinity of the whole thing around me.
DOVE: Even the trees in the park speak and have messages. There is a cumulative knowledge that happens. It gets easier and better as you are dealing effectively with what is. The rightness, appropriateness and exquisite perfection of presence becomes more real. The need to apologize and justify takes energy and distracts from clarity, and you can become a midwife for others' souls dealing with what’s there. The joke is that it’s all right here. You just need eyes, and you are just opening them like dawn is coming in. It’s God playing peek-a-boo. Or very simply, you are living in your life, inhabiting your life. You are encountering your higher self and it is alerting you to the steps of waking up: like the security guard experience outside the bank last week giving you the right questions to wake up. There is a larger communication happening, giving you information all the time. As we look at it we can decipher it, and it spells out the next thing to know. So, with you now Jon, you are having distress around who you are, thinking you are backsliding, which leads you to evidence that you are not enough. We are discovering that you are enough, and then the stress starts to evaporate.
JON: That is what I’ve been working on for 22 years.
DOVE: Your taking notes is important for others, Jon.
JON: Writing started with my near-death experience. I used it as breadcrumbs so I wouldn’t get lost in what I experienced as a totally foreign new world. I was completely disoriented. Then I was essentailly reclusive for two and half years, writing every day in journals.
DOVE: Getting re-oriented is a pattern that turns up over and over in your life: The attempted suicide at 3 years old; your continued dangerous playing at the edge of life that almost rendered you dead on a few occasions; and then your near-death experience at 36 years old.
JON: Playing at the edge of death was an attempt to feel I was here, capable and alive.
DOVE: It was an aspect of you trying to awaken - these were seeds of your awakening. It was like being asleep but uncomfortable with being asleep. And like primal attempts to shock yourself awake, it was all an impulse for spiritual awakening.
JON: It’s true that at the edge of death I came alive.
DOVE: Now, seeing the overall picture and how eveything comes together is a further aspect that everything fits, leading to a fuller realization that the seeds were there all along.
JON: Through it all I felt optimism that somehow I always had an ace up my sleeve - something at the bottom of my being, and that made me believe I was invincible. I lived that way. It was the near-death experience that introduced me directly to the ace, the something more.
DOVE: This is a further experience or understanding of how seamless and exquisite it all is.
