Waking Up from Unconsciousness

Why is it that so many things happen in our lives that we have no control over? I cannot count how many times I have asked myself this question over and over. I still don't have an answer to this after contemplating it over and over. But overall, what I have learned in my lifetime, through my mother's words and in the words of many spiritual books I have been reading is that there is no guarantees in anything, to me this is a scary and a sad reality. However, this has served as a vital life lesson that I will always keep in my treasury box of wisdom in my heart. I will sow this lesson onto my future children and even future husband. The fact that there is no true way to know if something will last or not can be hard to accept for many people, especially for those that are similar to myself and have an empathic nature and a constant need for certainty. This is true even in marriage, I mean the divorce rate is around 50 percent. People are not as invested in putting in the effort, respect and patience into their marriages anymore. They just want to give up when things get a little bit hard. There is also no guarantee that your kids will turn out perfectly healthy and void of mental illness or even of a degenerative disease. Unfortunately, we do not get to chose which ones are to be affected and which are not to be affected. I feel like before I enveloped on my spiritual evolution, this use to scare me a lot more because it had me wondering constantly "Is there 20 more obstacles down the road ahead waiting for me?" or if things were going good in my life, I always questioned it, thinking to myself, "This is too good to be true, I just have a feeling that it can't stay like this forever." I always felt that when things were going okay, the way I wanted them to that it was a sign that soon something bad was going to come and disrupt the harmony and bring discord. Like a volcano that could erupt at any given moment. This wasn't far from the truth, because it is true that when you are starting to feel like things are finally settling down or are going the way you want them to that something out of the blue will come and sabotage what was built and created. Every moment is fleeting, and with this lesson I have learned to be grateful when times are good because usually it doesn't last forever. There is something that will come up eventually and test your faith and the waters of your relationships with other people, to see if both people are able to overcome and get past the bump in the road. It can feel very overwhelming at times, like the world is caving in on you, and that all there is to look forward to is the bad things in life since they come up for us all the time. In many ways, I have felt this way, like no matter how hard I try or if I meet a rare kindred spirit that it never lasts cause something happens that either causes a shift or both people go on their own paths or we just grow apart by nature.

At times, I still feel this way, but it is not nearly as extreme and intense as it was in my early adolescent years. I have tried to embrace the good with the bad, find hope where there is grief, the light that accompanies the darkness, the inner wisdom that follows the confusion I have about myself and my own identity. There might be many peaks and troughs in the mountains of our lives. Maybe there are far more troughs than their are peaks, and you know what, that is okay. I don't think that is something that we should fight. I use to fight it all the time thinking that I was always in the drivers seat. But with stuff that happens outside of us, we are seldom in the drivers seat. Because we cannot control or predict how someone else will respond or react to us or how they will be feeling. This is where our control ends, we might think they feel this way because of something that we may have done or said to them. This is what I was conditioned to believe as a child, that how someone else felt--their opinions, perceptions, or feelings toward me--were something to pay attention to as they were a reflection of something I did wrong, that somehow other people's feelings are more important and trump mine, which is why I'd suppress them. It wasn't until I observed some of my beliefs and conditioning from ages 1-7 that I began to question them. It was in those moments, a little bit before I turned 20, that I began to wake up. When I discovered this belief, I said to myself "Wait a minute, is this me or a thought someone else gave to me?" Most of the time, our beliefs are given to us by our parents and other family members. I don't blame mine for this belief because I know that it wasn't their fault and that they did the best they could. But it was this very belief that was running the show and affecting my relationships with others, that I would often find myself wondering "What am I doing wrong?"

But, this isn't true either, that belief couldn't be more false, that person may be feeling the way they do because of what they did not do or say to us in the past. They may wish that they took a different kind of action with us and they may feel that being around us stirs up those mistakes that they made with us that are unable to be altered. Perhaps, it brings up those insecurities that were always deep inside them all along, that got stimulated from this conflict. This is why I always tell myself, that what someone else does, really isn't always about you, it is usually more about them and what they are going through than you. It might feel like it is because of you because of the fact that things are so stagnant, and that you are the only one they are saying no to. But, it most likely isn't. I say that if this person is down-to-earth and really cares about you that sooner or later they might come around when they feel the desire to do so. And if not, life will be okay either way, it was okay even before this person and it will be when they cease to have a spot in your life. It might feel harsh to say that but it is the truth. For things that are meant to happen, you shouldn't have to hold on, struggle, strive, or fight to make them occur, they should just happen naturally in their own time. It is when you let go of struggling mentally and physically for something that you give it a better chance of happening. Usually, it is when we let go and forget that what we least expect to happen comes true.

More problems are created when we try to protect ourselves from feeling our inner problems and insecurities. These things need to be released so that they don't create a blockage in our energy. We need to let them go so that we can purify our hearts and raise our vibrations. If we don't we will always be stuck in that low spew of energy, and it will block off the energy from flowing to your heart and you will give it the power over you. So my friends, you have the choice, when you get caught up in "monkey mind" or your mind starts creating a melodrama of chaos, you can just sit back in self-awareness and watch it go on by without judging it or talking to it or you can engage with it every time and fall into each thoughts story and rabbit holes. It may seem hard, but the choice is that simple. It took me a very long time to put this into practice, months of training my brain to let go of thoughts instead of holding them captive and developing new ways of thinking and even using neuroscience and psychology to my benefit to transform into a more conscious being. You have the power to heal your life, the day you truly awaken is the day you wake up and see that the stories created by your mind and thoughts are just objects trying to pull your consciousness into them with nothing important or meaningful to say. Just sit back and watch without getting caught up in it, if you don't then you will have allowed it to take you places you never wanted to visit and fog up your vision. Is it ever really smart to look for insight when you are stuck wearing the lenses of self-pity and doubt? All you have to do is sit back and watch and eventually the energy will pass right through you, so is it really worth it to dive into it each time it rises up? This is a question that I leave you all to ponder on. Only you can answer that for yourselves.

Namaste,

Julia