Life becomes a greater struggle than it has to be when you are
insensitive to your feelings. If you are not sensitive to your hurt,
you will not be able to use that feeling as a guide to focus you in
the direction you should be growing. When you are not growing in the
right direction, your life fills with more negative stress,
complicating any healing that needs to be done. If you are in a job
you don't want, if you are in a marriage you are not supposed to be
in, if you are doing things you are not supposed to be doing, life
will be a greater struggle because you are not in your life. It is
like trying to swim up a river that has a current too strong for you.
The river has a strong current of stress that only can be dealt with
positively if you know-like the salmon-that your home is upstream.
You should not be swimming up a stream that your feelings do not
direct you up. Regular life-stress becomes compounded with stress
from things you shouldn't have accepted. You don't get the relief you
should because you are not doing things which make you feel good. If
you don't follow what you are supposed to be doing, nature will get
angry at you and punish you by making things more difficult than
things should be. This does not mean that you cannot grow from
swimming up a 'wrong' river; you may be growing simply to become more
sensitive to your feelings. Don't complain; start becoming what you
are supposed to become. Get back into your river.
A powerful force that gets us off track is having never dealt with
the pain we experienced as a child. This pain can become so old and
deep that we forget it is even there. When it gets superimposed on
the present, as it does despite the best attempts of our defenses to
contain it, it makes us more needy and sensitive to present pain.
This confuses us, and we may think we are going crazy because we
don't know where so much pain and anger comes from. We don't know how
to deal with the feelings because we have not placed them where they
belong. The feelings cannot leave us until we attach them to where
they belong. We may be afraid to look at the old, deep hurt. It may
seem as an endless, dark space where we may never find light. After
all, it must contain something scary for us to have been running from
it our whole lives. In fact, it is the single most scariest thing for
us to face in our lifetime, but we must in order to be healthy. And
we must face it over and over again.
What helps you walk through this scary, dark space is knowing that
you are in the process of embracing and becoming yourself. This is
the little candle you can hold onto in the dark. You can stop looking
for yourself outside: in other relationships, places, and in excesses
of money or material objects. You are already complete in this
moment. Other external things may come as they come, but you no
longer need them. You are on the journey to yourself.
Stop running from yourself. It no longer makes sense. You are not
bad; you are not powerless; you are not worthless; you only feel so
when you do not face yourself, preventing yourself from being. Think
about that. You should feel bad, powerless, and worthless when you
are not being yourself. That is where you should be. That is part of
your healing process. Otherwise, it would be too easy and painless
for everyone not to be himself. Humanity would stop existing. Why
won't you take the next step into the darkness? It is through the
darkness that you will find true light. Do you want someone else to
take that step for you? That will never happen. The step is yours to
take, so you must take it.
