It's been a fascinating ride for a long time now, and an especially focused ride with a lot of surprises and twists and turns in the last several weeks as I've been preparing for this morning's Global Healer Group with David Elliott on "Psychic Boundaries", with my home as one of the locations for it.
I set a very strong intention after reading David's focus for the group: To have clear, strong, boundaries based in abiding self-love and to take a big leap deeper with my capacities to work with intuition that's based clearly from the heart, from love that is Universal, rather than emotionally based.
Little did I know how clearly Life was listening, and the speed with which it would bring me circumstances so far outside of my experience, and seemingly out of the clear blue sky (even though I keep being reminded that there just aren't any accidents).
I'm more than pleased with how I'm noticing more and more support from within to keep reaching through the discomfort in a handful of situations and choosing to feel love from within. Even when the felt sense of love has felt like a tiny grain of sand, I know that once I slow down and focus, it's not long before the feeling expands.
Cultivating the ability to recognize and feel love seems less an issue at the moment, thankfully. Remaining fully anchored there is still a work-in-progress.
As I look backwards (yes, Mom, you're so right about hindsight always being twenty-twenty) at the moments when I've felt stuck, heavy, depressed, angry, afraid, or sad, they all have a similar feel to them. I sense them like textures, and this particular texture is the same, irrespective of which negative emotion it's attempting to stimulate in me. It's heavy, dark, intends to appear immovable, knows how to create confusion and drama, and withdraws in the presence of real love.
My relationship with this heavy teacher (yes, I choose to see it as a teacher rather than adversary), feels like it goes back as far as my consciousness has had some form of existence.
Generally, it seems to come into my space in costume. Meaning, it often has a very different initial appearance than the less than positive ways I've described it above.
One of its many enticing costumes over the years has been to present me with the opportunity to get something I think I want very quickly, and with little to no effort. The absence of the need for effort or patience can make whatever it's promising (historically: money, love, intimacy, respect, and being appreciated, recognized, and included), appear to have a certain sparkle or glamour that appeals to my ego.
It HAS to appeal deeply to my ego to get my attention. And it has had to be sneaky of late to get my interest in what would seem like unfamiliar ways. It can't actually look like a short-cut, as I'm on the lookout for those and cultivating my discernment with these trojan horses. It will try to look like something I've wanted, like say a really ready-to-go relationship. And in a case like that, it'll have the potential partner be incredibly appealing to my ego so that when this person so emphatically tells me how amazing, how beautiful, how hot, how smart, how talented I am, that I'll take the bait.
Why is it bait? I didn't grow up thinking I was beautiful, hot, or amazing. And there are still holdouts through my memories of growing up with these insecurities. So these "tantalizing" opportunities will do their best to offer to erase my past pain by filling me up with another person's need, want, and desire for me.
I'm not interested anymore. The glamour is wearing off. I'm beginning to see the pumpkin masquerading as a Maserati sooner and sooner each time.
And because everything in this vast world of duality is generally a mirror, I'm becoming more and more cognizant of the places where I have let the little boy in me think he was being loved through a person's infatuation with the tremendous energy the accompanies the work I do personally and professionally. I'm learning to discern the difference between infatuation and readiness. I'm studying it more closely than ever.
Getting deeply involved very quickly with someone who is merely infatuated with me based purely on the externals of appearance or life-circumstances, or glamoured by the energy associated with the work is a short-cut. It's a temporary gratification to my ego, that has a tremendous cost to my personal energy when the obvious need to de-escalate the romance arises and drama of one sort or another ensues.
The closer relationships in my life require me to be very conscious, and I'm setting a stronger filter for that consciousness to be reciprocal and based in self-love.
As a very clear example, and a strong communication from me to the Universe, I said to a friend this afternoon, "I no longer wish or need or am willing to date anyone who needs healing from me." I am no longer willing to let my work be an enticing pull to be in relationship with me as a friend or a lover. While I recognize that we all will continue to grow in relationship with each other, it is not my job, my interest, nor am I willing to be holding the role of the healer in my close relationships.
This is something I have used in the past as a short-cut to connect with the
appearance of Love. As my experience of self-love continues to expand beyond my wildest dreams, I'm far less seduceable in these ways. On the heels of these last several weeks studying boundaries with a more refined magnifying glass, I'm definitely not interested in being seduced by anything that doesn't know Love.
Someone recently asked me, "Why aren't you trying to 'sell' me on working with you?"
I said, "Well, for starters, for this work to go anywhere, you need to be sold on working with yourself. My job is to be a witness, not a salesman. When the time is right for someone to engage with this kind of work, they know it, they feel it, and their Spirit nudges them along to the best places to do the work."
I don't want anyone dependent on me for a sense of self. At some point they'll resent it, and get aggressive about it.
AND, selling anyone on working with me is an attempt to take a short-cut in expanding my work short-term.
It's far cleaner for me to love myself, focus my awareness on deepening and expanding this self-love, and in the words of one of my great teachers over the years, "Let what comes come, and let what goes go."
By the way, that last quote is not at all about being passive. It's not about being a victim of life's circumstances and just sucking it up.
The quote depends on a foundation of self-worth and self-knowledge which recognizes that everything truly lasting and worth having comes from the openings around abiding self-love. Self-love leads to awakenings, joy, peace, and happiness that aren't based on better circumstances. They're qualities of my True Nature. No one can give them to me. No one and nothing can take them away. It's my job to let these qualities live me fully, and from there to enjoy letting what comes come, and what goes go.
It's fine to take time open-heartedly exploring a situation before signing any binding contracts, physically or energetically. It may not feel like an exciting short-cut, but it may just preserve a tremendous amount of life-force down the road. I'm worth it. So are You!
