Day 137 - A Year of Spiritual Awakening - Once You Have Gone Through...

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Lesson 137: Once You Have Gone Through These Two Particular Doors...

“Once you have gone through these two particular doors: pain and compassion, you will never go back there again. It is a one-way process, from darkness to light.”

— Sara Wiseman

I have to disagree with today’s lesson, especially in reference to the passage of pain. I do think people will go back to that part of the heart, though they may be better able to manage it. For instance, if my mother died tomorrow, I’d feel pain. To suggest that you will never go back there, as in never experience it again, is incorrect in my opinion. I know I will hurt, I know I will grieve, I know I will then move forward from it… in my own time. I understand the concept of going from darkness to light, but to suggest that all darkness is eradicated, to me, is ridiculous. I think we all need to embrace our dark side in order to learn how to move forward. To me, we will be forever going through cycles of dark and light, though to suggest that we should always remain in the light does not suggest growth to me. In fact, to me it suggests ignorance to the fact that darkness is always within us and is integral to our own make up.

I actually do not like when lessons teach the light, the light, the light. We need to acknowledge the dark side. We all have it. Sometimes it takes over for sure, but it’s in those situations that we need to feed it light, in order to maintain balance. Sure, you can just live in the light and be ignorant to the darkness, but that suggests to me that you won’t be well equipped to deal with difficult situations when they arise. It’s from the darkness we learn things about ourselves and then be able to face those challenging situations we didn’t think we could handle.

I actually like the thought of having compassion and not being any other way. I think from this lesson, that’s the part I agree with. I think if we all had more compassion, we could work better with one another. I think the world would operate in a much more peaceful state.

It’s evident here that this lesson has challenged me and I’m not about to conform to just the light side of things. I feel light and dark is a cycle – some cycles being more profound than others. I don’t think pain is something to ever get rid of. I think it’s important to feel it in order to grow. Like my example from the first paragraph, I know pain will come again one day whether I like it or not, though the way I handle it will be much better than before. This is just my opinion, and you can agree or disagree, as I know there would be a divide on a matter like this.

Day 136 - A Year to Clear - Zip It, Zap It

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Lesson 136: Zip It, Zap It

Eradicating obstructive thoughts takes a lot of awareness. It does take routine over and over to recognise when a thought does not serve you and it’s hard to come out of some negative cycles. With the lesson from the last post of “Strike that”, Stephanie Bennett Vogt lists some examples of what types of thoughts may roam in our brain and essentially what we need to strike out of our thought processes:

• [Aghhh] The traffic is terrible, we're going to be late to the airport, we're going to miss our plane, our vacation is shot. Strike that.
• [Ugh] This task is taking forever. I don't think I'll ever finish clearing my piles. It's time to check my emails. Strike that.
• [Groan] I have no time, there's no food in the fridge, the house feels cold, I'm fried, this day has gone from bad to worse. Strike that.

What we do need to acknowledge is how we feel during those types of thoughts – do we feel tightness in our chest? Do you feel you heat up? Do you feel muscles tighten? Do we tense up? Does our breathing change? Etc.

Today is all about zapping out any negative thoughts right in this second. Mine for today is all the feelings I have towards my work situation. I am trying to change my thought processes – even went to a councillor to get the advice to think better. What was explained to me is that my expectations can be set too high and when they are not met, I become frustrated and anxious because I’m waiting on things to happen that are outside of my control. I’m working on it for sure though I find it difficult when all you want is some direction in your work life. If the management don't have answers when you need them to give directives, it makes you question their ability to lead. I recognise that I get tense when I think about this. This seems to happen in random places of my body. I can heat up as well because I’m usually frustrated and angry over it. I am trying to change this way of being around as it is wasted energy.

All I can say is that I am mindful of it and putting things into place to be calmer. I was told by my councillor to lower my expectations of the company in order to not become anxious or frustrated. The company needs time to figure it out so if I be more understanding from that point of view, then it will allow me to return to my normal self. This is what I’m working towards and I admit I have not conquered it yet. I do recognise what I need to change in order to overcome this situation. I am sure I will be fine.

Day 136 - A Year of Spiritual Awakening - You Have Moved Quickly

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Lesson 136: You Have Moved Quickly...

Today is about acknowledging the work that has been done to move into the passage of compassion. It has been a good life shift and has moved along swiftly. It’s all about raising the vibration to a higher level and recognising that low vibrations can be turned around or eradicated altogether.

We can be the leaders of compassion. We can set an example that helps others. If we are all interconnected, then we need to spread this notion. We all have the power to do this. We all have the power to heal each other.

I’m not saying that compassion comes easily. It takes take some mindfulness to really change your thinking towards someone. There are days when I really struggle with this and days where it’s easy. Like the passage of pain, you may not fully completely overcome that passage, just like you may not have fully conquered compassion. I think making a start to recognise there are things that need to happen within your inner world, is a good step towards an overall good direction for yourself.

Day 135 - A Year of Spiritual Awakening - Take a Moment Today...

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Lesson 135: Take a Moment Today...

Today we are to hold compassion for someone or something that has bothered us. It is all about lifting the vibration. When we live with compassion, even in those moments that test us or triggers some emotional reaction or feeling, we don’t feel as bad when we apply compassion to those situations. We can make the vibrational shift whenever we want.

Today I thought of a situation that happened a couple of years ago where I was sexually harassed… some would say assaulted but that’s open for interpretation. The instance was a co-worker got too drunk, decided it was okay to inappropriately touch my best friend and then decided to slip his fingers a bit too far near my vagina, which was a violation of my body and personal boundaries. It was a debacle at the time, but when I complained to HR, my case was pretty much won because of people confirming the story. There were comments made such as “you don’t want to ruin peoples lives” “he was drunk, it’s okay” and I was made to feel bad because of what he did. I stood my ground however and was not going to back down on this fight. This person has a wife and kids and somehow that was my problem? It’s odd how humans work – man violates my body so therefore I must feel sorry for him…

Anyway, this came up in conversation today with a friend. Can’t remember the context but it was the first thing that came to mind when having to apply compassion for someone today. This is a huge ask of me because I still have mixed feelings of the situation. I hold compassion for myself but also this man. I hope he one day gains the understanding that his actions has consequences. I also hope he doesn’t do this to someone else and his family do not suffer for it. He comes from another country and culture where women are subjugated, so I really hope he one day sees women as equals. As I type this, it’s a nice thought if all of these thoughts flow through his mind. If I envision it, maybe it will happen.

Day 135 - A Year to Clear - Strike That

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Lesson 135: Strike That

So, what’s one thing that dominates our life? Our own minds. It floods with both negative and positive thoughts. When I tried to google how many thoughts does an average person have in a day, it answered with up to 70,000. To me, that seems excessive because you can be debilitated with one thought that repeats over and over in your mind, and I just don’t actually think that many thoughts pass through my brain. I know I have had one negative thought engrained in my mind cycling through my mind because I just wouldn’t let it go away. It was all consuming. I thought max you might get a few hundred at most. Maybe I just don’t think so a lot?

Anyway, the point of today’s lesson is to teach us how to keep the noise that clouds our mind out. That we can use a simple term (which Stephanie Bennett Vogt says happens in a courtroom quite often) “Strike that”. obviously, this requires a lot of awareness by yourself. You need to recognise the noise as something that doesn’t serve you in order to block it out. This would take so much practise, only because we can succumb to other peoples thoughts and have it influence us. It’s about training ourselves to be like “No, this doesn’t resonate with me and therefore I shouldn’t think about it further”. Sounds easy but when I actually think about this concept, it would actually be training your brain to filter things out automatically. At first, you’d be assessing everything said to you before it became a routine, and then blocking out certain things that don’t benefit you or your mind.

Do you think this can be a simple task?