I was writing for my website the other day, and this very act spiralled me into a topic that keeps on unpacking. In working on my website I again had to think about what it really is that I have to offer to someone else. And why. And I asked myself, what can I be more honest about? What has been the theme in my life, and how does this theme play a role in my current life? And how does that challenge me and support my path?
It came to me that the most honest answer to these questions was about my encounters with darkness and heaviness. These are frequencies that have pulled hard at me in different phases of my life. Causing me to loose hope, causing me to settle, causing me to choose safety, over and over again. Causing me to not follow my dreams, to not pull through with something I really felt and really wanted in the beginning, causing me to not say the thing that would turn things around, causing me to stall and freeze and amount to nothing. Causing me to be a heavyhearted, depressed, anxious and fearfull being for periods of time.
Sharing it from a personal perspective, is apparently a risky thing, still. When I feel into it, it touches on safety, and control. Wanting to be able to manage peoples opinions about me. Wanting people to think highly of me. I notice some resistance towards putting myself in a corner where not everyone will follow.
It’s where I’ve been most in my truth, that I’ve experienced the biggest setbacks. These where the moments in life that I was most disillusioned and disappointed, because I was met with the most misunderstanding, the most resistance, and the least reciprocity.
This article is not necessarily about me, but more about why this happens. Why we’re not just simply celebrated by everything and everyone for our uniqueness and greatness, and vice versa. And importantly, why we’re not always able to simply celebrate others for their uniqueness and greatness. This article is about the dynamics of light and dark, outside of us and within us.
A world that is anti light
Imagine a hyper sensitive, intelligent, pure being, fully open and with a giant consciousness, entering a world that doesn’t appreciate that, a world that is against or in fact anti that. A world, or system, that is anti all that is light and wise and powerful, and meets it with oppression. A being like this gets used to this at a young age, and effortlessly starts to adapt to the frequency of others, rather than remaining in their own. For safety, for survival. These beings are the ones that sooner or later become most overcome with hardship, disillusion, disappointment, fear, depression and heaviness, when in their true nature they are the exact opposite. What a waste.
What I’m describing in this article is the road back to how you can be that person again fully. And how I practice to be who I am again fully, day by day. Not just when alone, but in relationship to life and to the outer world. This last part is important because we can only make the difference we want to make in the world as ourselves.
What if…
And now just to draw an image, imagine if you were fully freed of all the shadow parts and unconscious layers, that now still run the show from time to time. So take away bad moods, take away anger, depression, jealousy, low self-worth, negative thoughts, fear of being seen, stuckness, stagnance, tiredness, fear, overall heaviness, … What are you left with? This might be hard to imagine, but let me enlighten you. You’re left with being fully yourself, loving, joyful, connected, celebratory, fully comfortable in your body, inspired, moved, alive, ecstatic, expressive, orgasmic, open, safe, receptive.. You’ve probably felt this way. And you probably know somewhere that the good stuff is our nature, it’s who we are in essence.
So let’s stay with our essence for a bit longer. Because if you think about it this way, you can maybe understand that there is something in the way, or covering our essence, when;
You don’t fully enjoy life
You don’t fully enjoy your bike ride, your walk, your day
You can’t be fully present with what it is that you’re doing
You wake up feeling meh, not looking forward to the day
You look outside to a beautiful sunny day, and you can’t take it in
……
……
Maybe you feel a low-tone underneath it all, a tone that makes life feel different from the beautiful list above?
Whatever it is, it’s not bad. It’s not wrong. On the contrary, it’s part of the deal. Whatever you meet in life is what you said yes to before coming into this life, as an opportunity to expand. All to remember who you are, truly, and let the light of the highest version of you shine through you, right now, in this lifetime, in this body, on Earth.
The inner oppressor
An important question, if these oppressing energies are not part of our essence, where did they come from? Where did they start? Not so simple to answer, and maybe not entirely for me to answer (there’s so much out there to enlighten yourself, if you haven’t already), but I have to slightly draw it out to make my point, so I’ll give it my best shot.
We live in an unnatural system, that has bled into the collective field and into the individual, and vice versa, for a very long time. Call it the matrix, dark, evil, call it the shadow. It works against the light, as it’s meant to do as its true opponent. It’s in place to do the opposite of what light does, it wants to diminish all that is pure and good and light, and it diminishes growth and expansion, which in its turn is a danger to the shadow. Due to this system that represents the shadow, mechanisms and beliefs came upon us and rooted in our systems - passed through in our souls evolution from lifetime to lifetime, as well as from generation to generation, and passed through from person to person on a daily basis, causing us to not only have the limiting frequencies around us, but also in us. We made it ours, which means we oppress and limit each other and ourselves, making it scary and difficult to stick our heads out, and keeping us underneath a certain ceiling of consciousness. And it’s because of our agreement with that ceiling (we agree with it it each time we choose fear) that it exists. A long story of ‘as without so within and as within so without’, and back again. The key is in us.
Did you know the word e v i l is the word l i v e the other way around? Remember that it’s Living that we’re invited to pursue, in every decision we make. No need to point to anywhere, but yourself. We can only control what’s within us, our own choices and our own inner oppressior.
We need to want it, badly
We could see it as a game, because there are plenty of ways to win, every day. But it’s easy to feel powerless when we are caught in fear or anxiety, or when we are struck by overall low, and we don’t see a hint of hope out there. Yet, this is where we have to start, in the pain, in the thick of it. That’s where the information is, waiting to be understood. In taking responsibility for our own wellbeing, we empower ourselves and take the course of our lives into our own hands. No one else can do that for us. The hurdle is in daring to move through our own density, our own oppressor; disbelief, doubt, grief, hopelessness, powerlessness and imposter. We need to dare to look it in the eye. We need to dare to move beyond it, and dare to be powerful on the other side. We need to want it, badly. That’s when we have a real opportunity.
How do I deal with it?
I’d like to tell you a bit more about how I deal with all of this on my path. I’ve personally learnt that it’s when I’m my most authentic self, I’m most vulnerable to defeat. And this is a threshold that I, and a lot of us, need to move through in order to be able to stand tall when it matters, when we want to bring ourselves forward in life.
In the past few years I was shown bit by bit, that the connection to myself and to Source/ God/ Creation is most important, and comes first. It’s from this place that I connect to life from an authentic place. And it’s from this authentic place that things start to become lively. This is the practice for me. And it’s not always easy.
So I monitor myself. I check during the day; where am I, am I here? What’s keeping me from being here? Am I connected to Source? Can it flow? Can I feel that I’m alive? Is there anything in the way? Is there anything I feel that is not mine? Where do I feel it in my body? If I’m in my head, how can I get back into my body? Etc.
I can feel fully alive, flowing from head to toe, connected to source, and I can feel it when that’s not the case, even when it’s just slightly off. And next to it sometimes being totally frustrating, it’s interesting information that’s asking for my attention.
A sensitive being can feel many different things at the same time. Like happiness and a tone of fear somewhere in the body. Or a flowing feeling of spaciousness and at the same time a tense heartbeat. These are the things that I look and feel into to find out what my body is telling me. And I don’t always find the answer, sometimes life or time needs to go by for it to fall into place. Maybe you recognise feelings like these?
When your light shines bright, it’s met with something to tone it down, by design.
Why do we need to feel all these things, and where do they come from? What purpose does hyper sensitivity have? The thing is, the tense heartbeat comes from somewhere, and so does the tone of fear. It’s only when it starts to intrigue us, and bother us so much that we want to understand what it is, and why it’s there, that it can finally be seen and let go.
To understand where it comes from we need to realise that we constantly communicate to each other on an energetic and often unconscious level. Passing through projections of fear, conviction, worry, guilt or shame to one another. Why? A simple answer is, to stay ‘safely’ swaddled in the bliss of ignorance and unconsciousness, together. To keep someone else down when you are not ready to rise, and vice versa. When you stick your head out of this ‘collective agreement’, it’s met with something to tone it down, by design.
The game
To not have this affect you is spiritual university, at the very least. It’s just not simple to learn to not let it pull you down when someone is projecting their negative emotions onto you, even though that’s exactly what we’re here to learn. If we don’t, we can’t bring our unique self forward when it matters in life. We collapse the moment there is a hint of resistance. I been there, and it takes time to heal and get back into the saddle.
I’m starting to understand the game, though. What a creative process often looks like for me is, one day I’m full of certainty, connected, inspired, and the other I’ve lost the thread, and I stall. What follows in this state is critical, I can either succumb to even lower frequencies, which will always represent themselves in a weak moment, or I can catch it in the moment and see if I can linger in the in between a bit longer, and look for an opening. I experienced a test like this right before writing this article. Right before I knew what action to take I felt restless, with seemingly no inspiration. I got stuck and stalled for a day. It was in a slight action (a few words written down) that said: I’m staying true to what I want, and it shifted. Moments like these happen over and over, asking you to choose again and again.
The in-between is uncomfortable, because the ‘opening’ is often sort of blocked by a threshold. The threshold consists of both the fear and the possibility, the doubt and the longing. It asks to break with the thing that keeps you safe but small. It asks you to step up, to step into - again - a higher, truer version of you, which is vulnerable and risky every single time. Because with each step you take towards your true self, it feels like you take a step away from who you where, and thus away from the people who liked you for who you were. And what you’re stepping towards, and saying yes to, is not yet there. You stand alone at first, and chances are you’re not comfortable with that.
I see now that there is a constant test of strength, asking ‘are you willing enough to walk through the fire of becoming fully yourself and have the untrue layers around you, that were keeping you safe, burn off?’
Expanding consciousness takes consciousness
Maybe you’ve noticed it’s not this hard for everyone. You’ve probably seen people out there moving through life as if there are no thresholds at all. They don’t experience real lows. Some don’t seem to, but do, others simply don’t. They don’t feel as deeply. Which is confusing for the highly sensitive ones that feel like they are too much and too difficult, and are being perceived and judged as such. But the more sensitive you are, the deeper you feel, the more you are challenged. The brighter your light, the more you are met with limiting energies. You can count on it.
How does consciousness expand and sensitivity increase?
Expanding consciousness paradoxically takes a certain level of consciousness. The more conscious, the more movement, the more lessons are wheeled in, the more we experience, the more expansion. Without consciousness we stop moving, we stay where we are. In the pain that at some point becomes too much to bear, becomes visible what our souls choose to experience. Carl Jung said: “there is no coming to consciousness without pain”. Some kind of friction will eventually move what is not moving. It will touch us all at some point. And when that is, is the perfect timing.
Paradoxically, without a low there no rising to be done. It’s through the dynamics of light and dark that friction builds and we are finally compelled and motivated to expand our consciousness. In remembering who we are, we transcend the ceiling. We start rising.
It’s the little girl in the picture that I think about when writing this. And all the little boys and girls, our parents and grandparents when they where boys and girls, before they were taken over by an inner oppressor. Remember who you were.
With all my love & joy,
Justine