It is true that you can know where you’re at in your journey — if you’re learning your lessons and growing beyond the limits of the old, and likely small story — by looking objectively at the people and situations that are occupying your life.
For most of us, we establish a nervous system, as well as the limits and boundaries therein, in infancy, childhood and adolescence. This is how the body becomes the mind; ideas get hard-coded and locked in, making it increasingly difficult to change. Many of us never really grow out of this developmental stage, either. Then, when life knocks us around, we tend to blame everyone and everything outside of us — the world and anything else we perceive and understand at this level of energy — for holding us back, holding us down, or otherwise keeping us trapped.
Since life doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and because our asking and desiring operates on numerous dimensional levels, we are in a constant state of attraction to people, circumstances, locations and events, that will afford us opportunities to change — because if we’re in pain, or living in fear, we are deeply desiring to change.
In the past few years, I have been able to experience a lot of forward and backward steps on my path. I have known the moment I have leapt out of the old story, as almost instantaneously, different people call or contact me, and new, lighter feelings persist.
I have also slipped and tripped and fallen backward unintentionally into the old nervous system. It’s difficult to find the patience to listen to the old and stuck stories of family, friends and acquaintances — but mostly, it’s painful to again see myself doing the same.
As much as I want to shake them by the shoulders to help them to snap out of it, I have to take a breath, and snap myself out of the judgment that created that perspective; they are simply mirroring my own energies and beliefs. These are bitter pills to swallow.
Every single soul in my humble little circle of reality is a teacher, a mirror, and a purveyor of the materials I can use to build a structure upward and outward into a new story.
We can tell when we’re activated and embodying a new nervous system, by our reactions to those who are living within the old story; we transcend the reductive, judgmental perspective, into deep empathy, gratitude, patience, compassion and love.
Peace, love and courage require a deep vulnerability that can only arise as we step into and maintain the energy of openness and non-resistance. There are certain callouses that can be useful for defining our lives, but most hardened energies are based on trauma and trapped energy that needs to be softened, understood and released — preferably before the surgeons suggest that you need to cut it out.
Flow requires us to be fearless, so to know again the voice of our soul.
Listen to their words, but don’t necessarily believe them. Observe their actions, but don’t immediately trust them. All of this “out there” is cosmic information that’s useful to you in your own discovery. Know it, and engage more deeply.
Solvitur ambulando