Some days are wonderful. In those days, life is good and we don’t have a care in the world. We never really wonder when those days are going to end. We just enjoy them in the moment.
Some days are quite the opposite. Some days it feels like everything is going wrong or circumstances arise that trigger our “less pleasant” emotions such as worry, fear, anxiety, depression and so on. It is often in these times we not only wonder when the intense emotions will end, but in those moments, it also can feel as if it’s “always going to be this way.”
I recently had series of those “darker days.” And even though my mind had all the logical answers and even though I knew what I “ought to do”, it seemed every attempt that I made to force these uncomfortable feelings away had no effect.
I ought to:
- Turn this around to what gifts and lessons this situation brings
- Just stop worrying and be happy
- Trust in the Divine order of things and know these situations have a greater purpose, a lesson
- Take these circumstances as a clear message from God as to the direction I need to be taking (sometimes closed doors point the way to the right path)
- Just think positive thoughts and continuously repeat them to myself
- Pray and ask for help
- Meditate
- Do something outside to get my mind off things
I analyzed to death the patterns I was finding myself in. I had pinpointed every little piece of the patterns I was falling into where I may have learned them along the way in my life. Yet even this awareness did not make a shift. I meditated, I prayed, I asked God and Guru to help me to apply all the things I knew I ought to do to alleviate these feelings. NOTHING. And then it came, as a “last resort” I picked up a pen and my journal and just began to complain. Complain about everything that was wrong, complain that I knew what I should do but just couldn’t seem to get it, complain that “nothing was working” I asked for help dissolving worry, fear, anxiety and depression yet none my “pleas to God” seemed to be answered.
And then, out of the middle of seemingly nowhere, the answer came:
“All of these things you are asking for, I cannot take them away without them easily returning as you are asking me to simply alleviate your symptoms. No matter how many times the symptoms subside, they will always come back if you do not address the root cause.”
Right then and there, I asked, I prayed – “Please help me heal the root cause of all of these ‘issues’.” In that moment, a wave of peace washed over me. My “symptoms” almost instantly vanished and I knew I had tapped into something extremely important.
You see there was and is nothing wrong with the circumstances that had presented themselves (the so called cause of my worries). There was nothing wrong with the reaction I was having. What the ultimate “solution” pointed me to was this deeper understanding of how we resist life’s lessons and how easily we can get caught up in our own pain.
Yet the root cause of all of it seems to be something bigger than “my mom did/didn’t do ‘X’”; “I had a difficult life”; Name any thing that you think is the source of your misery and I guarantee that it is not even close to the root cause. In my experience, once I get past identification with the so called difficult circumstances of the past (things outside of myself) I realize that the root cause is this notion that we are somehow separate from Source that something “out there” is doing these things to us.
Perhaps in truth, it doesn’t even matter what the root cause is. Following this, we begin to realize that it is definitely not any of the symptoms that we experience on a day to day basis. Whether you know the root cause or not, addressing healing, addressing issues at their source, alleviating the strain where the it starts is a sure way to help the symptoms subside as well.
It is like the story of the woman whose “check engine” light kept turning on in her car. She had been to the mechanic multiple times for this very same issue. Each time it would appear they had found the issue, her car would be returned and a few weeks later, the light would come on again. Getting quite tired of the woman’s complaints and quite tired of working on this car, on her last an final visit to the shop, the mechanic simply took the light bulb to the check engine light out and returned the car to this woman. She was happy – the light no longer came on, but was the problem really fixed?
Time and time again, we do this in our lives – solely relying on cessation of the symptoms, treating of the symptoms as starting points and the focus of our healing, missing completely the underlying disconnection with Source with our Divine perfected Self, with our true nature.
This new found awareness, of asking for healing at the root of the issue, has brought incredible amounts of peace and equanimity into my days. It is from this mindset that I now give and receive Reiki healing sessions. It is from this mindset that I approach all so called challenges throughout my day. It is from this perspective that I offer all of myself to the highest and greatest good each and every day. It is from this space that I approach my meditation practice each morning – knowing and trusting that my practice is bringing me closer and closer to my true roots – my divine Self, one who is in yoga, union, yoked with the Christ consciousness within – something that is accessible to all of us if we choose it.
