Epiphanies

Imprints and the fear of being proven what we fear we are

I wrote about my recent urgent care trip and how I got asked the super amazing question, “What is energy” by a fellow in the waiting room. And the question what is energy could be opened to ask the question, “what energy am I bringing to this?”

I had some big epiphanies this week…today.

The fear…of not being worthy, of failure, of not being good enough and being thought a terrible person…was an energy I carried into my parenting of fear actually created the imprint of the same fear of making mistakes, the same feeling of not being good enough in my kids that I so desperately wanted to spare them. They felt my fear and at times felt uncomfortable to tell me things.

If we fear something, we often create it.

How okay can I get with whatever happens, so that I am freest to create from love instead of fear?

This is a global question. But it is answered personally. We are all pixels on the great screen of life. It is our energy and how it dances on this screen that adds our influence to the collective pot. Let’s make good soup!

What fears are playing out the larger stage of life don’t have some kind of correlate with something playing out locally, individually and in families?

What beliefs do we hold the generate fear that is interfering with the ease to flow toward the highest and best outcomes for all life, including ourselve and loved ones, whatever they may be, beyond our understanding?

“I’m clearly worthless because when I’m innocent, look how they treat me.” And the standard, “No matter what I do, it’s never good enough.” The fear of failure. The feeling of not being good enough. The fear of what if I really am bad. I thought I had a grasp on these patterns…I mean hey, it’s been years since someone rear ended me at a red light. A decade ago that happened three times in relatively close proximity. It’s a brilliant idea that sucks when you’re going through it: That the universe that shows you what you believe by playing that movie on the screen of your life, in the very most personal of ways. It doesn’t have to be your fault. It’s just what you believe. We have to forgive our beliefs, even our unconscious ones, for the consequences they create in our lives and in the lives coinciding with ours most intimately. We have to forgive ourselves for things we aren’t even conscious of. “Father forgive them for they know not what they do could just as easily be, “Father forgive me, for I do not know what I do.”

It could also be, “Mother, forgive me for I do not know who I am.”

If I truly knew myself, I would embrace equally the imperfection of what it currently means to be human, alongside the perfect of divinity expression through this imperfect human life I am living. My I AM presence is living enlivening a multifaceted person, a human connected to long lineages of pain on a planet liberating itself from countless ancestral wounds by replaying them until we can get it right that war is never the answer, oppression is never the answer, and it is in letting go of the epigenetic shame, fear and torment we carry that we can birth heaven on earth through forgiveness of the past and an awakening of our oneness that doesn’t require conformity or submission, yet operates on a platform of unity based on true interconnectedness, true oneness that celebrates each individual expression, every group’s unique contribution, the whole richer for its diverse colors and frequencies and harmonies melded into symphonies of grace.

I forgive myself.

I woke up this morning and couldn’t. I did some inner work, including the inner work of noticing my feelings and blocks and affirming that I am worthy of love, worthy of being treated with healing love even when I’m stuck and I can’t forgive myself, even though forgiving myself would be the most helpful thing to all the others my fear as ever impacted. I did “pages.” I used to some EFT, which has a lot of evidence basis for a number of things for those of you who are geeks out there. I snuggled my eternal puppy, who used to be my youngest daughter’s. Ashlynn and I have adopted each other. She likes to sleep under the blankets in the cooler months.

As do many of us, I have trauma around harsh criticism. As a young person I developed an eating disorder to avoid it. My skating coach told another young woman to lose 15 pounds. I thought she looked healthy but I was so terrified of being told to lose weight that I preemptively went ahead and lost weight. An older girl saved my life by saying, “Alicia you used to have the perfect body. Now you just look lanky.” She saved my life, yes. But only because the bar of perfect had been moved back to where I was, instead of where I was going. I worked so hard to correct everything I thought was wrong with how my parents raised me and with my own patterns and I thought I did such a great job, only to realize that although I made huge progress, I still had imprints of the same perfectionism.

When I lived in Jersey, I did hospital chaplaincy training program at Cooper Hospital in Camden. My supervisor told me, “You can be perfect or you can be whole. You can’t be both.” I heard him but I didn’t hear him. In my gut, I felt like somehow there had to be a way to both.

A shaman once told me that perfection is not possible in the human experience. I found it really annoying. If enlightenment is being at absolute peace with what is, I had a ways to go to approach anything like acceptance, much less peace. Imagine a grunt, and an inner note that perhaps the shaman might have missed that this is the time of ascension…can’t we quantum leap into perfection…can’t we just collectively decide to be perfect and express perfection? PLEASE?

I honestly, genuinely believe life can be really beautiful and meaningful without anguish. I have felt for a long time that these are not the needed colors for the tapestry I want to create. And yet I look at the world. Maybe our oneness has to be remembered through our shared pain. Maybe there could have been another easier timeline that we didn’t take, but this is one we have to work with, so if you’re reading this, you’re here, you’re part of this journey of blossoming from the compost of what we’ve survived.

On the emotional layer where my fear lives, I wasn’t even conscious there was another way to be….to actually feel okay, that it could feel safe to be, even if that included making mistakes. I’ve taught these things. I’ve sent the right verbal messages and usually done the right behaviors to accompany them. But I never felt them…more importantly I never even realized there was another way to feel than the way I did, because it was so baseline, so imprinted. And so we can’t heal what we aren’t aware of, and then when we see it, aha, it becomes our power. And our power to forgive ourselves, including for believing we needed forgivness…forgiving ourselves for not always being able to forgive ourselves or others…until we feel enough self-compassion that forgiveness happens to us of its own accord.