The Spiritual Path

I feel like I am at a transition point in this sabbatical. I am not sure exactly what is transitioning, but it is feeling like I am ready to move to a different level. I have been using this blog to open up my own personal logic for others, and have gotten feedback that it is "too much" for me to share. Honestly, it hasn't always been easy to write some of these posts. I have felt very vulnerable at times. And yet, I still wrote in the hopes of inspiring you to have the courage to look within.

What I have been trying to say through this blog and nine months is that we are human and in our human experience we embrace all of who we are. I have spent much of my life covering up and was fearful to look within, and I can see in hindsight that it took enormous energy to do this. No wonder I was tired all the time!

Others have been trying to help me see what it means to embrace myself fully for several years, and now I see it. We all ultimately have to discover things for ourselves in our own unique experience. And yet, we do have people all around us who can reach out and support us in our discovery, as we reach for others to assist them in their discovery. This is one of the ways that I offer assistance to you, by describing my own path.

I am reading "The Undefended Self: Living the Pathwork" by Susan Thesenga as part of my reading for the Barbara Brennan program. I would like to share some excerpts (pages 30-34).

The spiritual path requires that we explore the personal dualities which become manifest in childhood and are carried over into adulthood. We need to unravel and reverse the process by which we have become alienated from ourselves and our environment. We make the journey from the limited identify of our idealized self-image back to the expansiveness of our real self.

Each time we meet and embrace a hidden part of ourselves -- something that was rejecting in childhood as unacceptable or bad -- we create more inner unity. We become more alive by awakening from our numbness and self-rejection...

From our normal ego experience we see life in terms of opposites, one of which we deem desireable and the other undesireable. We consistently try to enhance the one and move away from the other... This place of the unity of opposites can only be discovered when we no longer defend against experiencing the rejected "half" of the experience, when we can allow into consciousness and even embrace the bad/dark/painful places within us...

Every time we relax into the feared or denied part of ourselves we go through a kind of "death" -- of our idealized self image, or who we thought we were -- which leads us to a new, deeper level of inner life... We come to unity through accepting our dualities.

Thus, following a spiritual path is not just seeking experiences of union. It is also about getting to know all those negative fragments of self that have been split off from unitive consciousness. This requires our commitment to self-purification, to becoming aware of our flaws and limitations... The job of transformation is to keep choosing to incarnate more and more of ourselves, to expand what it means to be human, to release our flaws at their origin... All human beings, however evolved, have human flaws. The undeveloped aspects are brought into incarnation for purification and our spiritual task is to focus specifically on these faults in order to transform and integrate them. Our dreams often reveal where our paths must focus next... The dream calls on the dreamer to build his nest high in his inner sanctuary...

There is nothing so dark within the human psyche that it cannot be transformed if brought to the light of awareness. Negativity that is met within the self can be embraced, forgiven, and released... Every fault acknowledged, every defense dismantled, and every pain felt and released, gives us powerful new reserves of thought and feeling for creating our lives in positive new directions.

Amen!

I love you all so very much, and support you in your journey as well.

With much love and gratitude, Mj XOXO