Ignorance and fear are our greatest enemies. When you decide that you don’t want to live in ignorance anymore and you want to face who you really are, it means that you’re „awake” and your journey has just begun.
It is the moment when you start to approach yourself and your life in a totally different way. Being awake it’s not that easy, actually it is really difficult. Observing yourself, your emotions, your reactions and actions makes you be more responsible. You also understand that a lot of pain that you feel, in general, is caused by yourself (your mind, to be more specific). You want to take control of your own life, it is a great feeling and it’s good if we also learn how to control things that we can change and let go of things that we can’t change. For example, we can’t control other people’s feelings or actions, or their way of thinking, but we can control and change ours.
But anyway, the main thing in our journey is to heal our soul and live a life with less ignorance and violence, to understand our traumas, heal ourselves, cultivate more acceptance, forgiveness and love.
So here’s the trap that I’ve got into. By being responsible I started to come out under the victim role and use all my willpower and intellect to change. During my transformation I found out more truths about my issues or problems which ended with exhaustion and self punishment. It led me to enter a cycle with no way out. How could that happen? Let me explain.
Let’s take a negative experience. When we have to deal with a negative situation we experience pain, grief, suffering, and other emotions. So I ask myself: ”Why?”. And I start to analyze the situation. The first thing that I feel is anger. Then I go into judgement, like ”Oh, this anger is not good, I have to change”, so I force myself to change using my willpower to do so. And this forcing makes me feel really sad (and here I mean sadness along with self attack) and because of that I get angry and afterwards I judge the anger again. And this keeps going round and round, and of course, the end result is exhaustion.
So what is the lesson? I need to let myself connect with the actual grief rather than judging myself for having it. I need to allow myself to feel what’s really triggering my anger, which I also end up judging after.
I had to analyze each part of my cycle. If I can connect with my anger (and I am not saying that I will become violent) and I don’t use my anger to avoid fear, I just allow myself to feel, then I can really find out what all my anger is about. Sometimes, we judge anger too hard, and we don’t allow anger to be felt. And each part of this cycle shows me the feelings that I avoid to actually allow myself to feel.
Being that harsh on myself, made it impossible to experience self-love. My yoga practice helped me to raise my vibration and I attracted positive things in my life, but because of my self-judgement it was only for a short time, because my mind was pulling me back saying “you don’t deserve that, you are not good enough for that, you still have to grow to get that”.
Letting myself to feel, by living and fighting the pain is a good thing because this means that I am facing them rather than ignoring them. But this led me to another “trap”. Living this process every day created a habit in the brain, and I was “programmed” to do things that were creating the same negative state of mind. It was “forcing” me to stay blocked in the role of a victim rather than helping me to get out of it. This drove me to an emotional exhaustion.
I had to go deeper and make a change at a subconscious level. I had to understand that living my pain every day was a need of my mind and not of my soul. I was so sick and tired to live that over and over again. After all these realizations, the change was only a matter of decision and willpower. I choose love over pain.
On one hand I had the guilty feeling for what has happened, for which I wanted to punish myself and, in the meantime, I also felt like a victim. It is extremely hard to “stand up” when these feelings appear at the same time. I had to learn that I can do this whole transformation (feeling, observing and, the most important, accepting my feelings) while I cultivate self-love. So be careful if you are feeding your soul or just an idea that your false ego is creating.
Here’s my mantra: “I accept myself with love and understanding, I know that every little step is a huge change and I have enough courage to let my mind believe that I really deserve to be happy. Love cures my fears.”
Namaste!
Renata Coznici