"I have a tendency to sabotage relationships; I have a tendency to sabotage everything. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being afraid. Useless, good-for-nothing thoughts."
~ Michael Buble
It is a great pleasure to be writing again for The Kundalini Consortium blog. I would like to thank JJ Semple for giving me the opportunity once more to share my story with the readers of this blog. Various things happened between the time I last wrote for this blog and today. I got divorced and that led to a mental breakdown. I am currently overcoming those obstacles and am happy to report that the worst is behind me.
Relationships, unfortunately, become a vestige from the past sometimes, and one awakens to find that the relationship they are in is not right for them. This happened to me. Having had an awakening allowed me to see this. To be able to remove oneself from that situation, however, is not easy. We still go through the same cycles of trauma and recovery, to be able to cope with the event, and it is not always under our control. I was fortunate enough to have the Kundalini energy guide me through rough waters and came out at the other side stronger. It involved “going with the flow,” and allowing the self to discard the old trappings, comfort zones and attachments that act as an impediment to future growth. Progress requires a reset, some personal assessment, and a genuine attempt to change by discarding psychic layers that no longer served my best interests.
My divorce offered me a great opportunity to find myself in a different period of my life, like when I was single. The last time I was single was in 1997 at the age of 23. I found myself in that same situation again in the early part of 2018, but now with a lot of baggage, learned habits that needed unlearning, and a chance to live once again a simpler, pared down existence to find out how much transformation the energy had brought about into my life over the last 12 years since my awakening began in 2006. It was a wild roller coaster, but I was helped immensely by the kundalini energy and its promptings, which led to some beneficial changes as I type this on a sunny day in the fall of 2021.
As I have mentioned before in previous blog posts, the awakening kundalini energy entails a lot of upheaval, chaos, and can bring about serious mental trauma. No matter how well prepared you are through previous practices, nothing really prepares you for the mayhem that follows. It is like my mind and past events turned against me as I coped with a constant barrage of sensations, thoughts, emotions that were being churned up by a snake moving constantly up my spine. It was like Iwas learning to drive a car, and at the same time, I had to learn basic vehicle maintenance, while parts started to break down or ceased to function correctly. I lost track of how things work.
Of course, the advantage a very powerful supernatural process like this has is it comes with cheat sheets baked into the process. We call this ‘Gnosis’. It is like a higher energy is guiding your exact steps moving forward, warning you and giving you the right advice at the right time. If you are patient and persistent, which you have to be, since you have no other choice, you will learn to drive the ‘car’ at the same time you learn its inner workings. If you choose to oppose that voice, you will suffer, and the process will take longer. So, eventually, you give in and let the energy guide you.
“If you go into a relationship with selfishness, expecting that your partner is going to make you happy, it will not happen. And it's not that person's fault; it's your own. When we go into a relationship of any kind, it is because we want to share, we want to enjoy, we want to have fun, don't want to be bored. If we look for a partner, it is because we want to play, we want to be happy and enjoy what we are. We don't choose a partner just to give that person we claim to love all our garbage, to put all our jealousy, all our anger, all our selfishness onto that person.” - Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
I had a major revelation. For the very first time in my adult life, I understood what having a grown-up relationship meant and how to nurture the self and the other in that relationship without damaging either. By being patient, mature, understanding and by standing up for what made me happy, I learned to co-exist and thrive in a relationship. As much as I would like to blame my past upbringing or the person I was, some of these things, I genuinely felt thankful for certain experiences. You realize that each event, person, and episode is brought into your life to teach you lessons. If you are willing to learn from them, without being judgemental, you will treat each event as an observer, expressing gratitude for having had the opportunity to do so.
Ego, that ever-willing great imposter, is ready to deceive and take you further into unconscious behavior. It's like a great tyrant. If you don’t have the requisite mindset to recognize its doings, you may never learn to take a step back and witness your own thoughts. Changing bad habits comes from learning mindfulness and is very difficult in the beginning. Having the same programming and the same responses to moments of crisis ingrained into you by force of habit, leads to cascades of unconscious behavior. Mindfulness allows you to see the cascade as a choice and your initial response, unconscious, prompted by the actions of others, to be the trigger that sets events in motion, repeatedly, over years, in similar patterns. You are the total of your thoughts that you act upon, creating the indelible patterns of your character that are only obvious when you take a step back and become a witness.
Not reacting, staying silent, holding back and witnessing as an observer, are all powerful catalysts for change. To avail yourself of these techniques regularly, you must stick with the process and allow it to do its work in even the most trying situations. Initially, this is very hard. Invoking these techniques during gaps and lulls, when you still engage in negative behavior and you still have patterns to dissolve, is the best thing you can do for your future wellbeing. Once these methods become routine practice, and the results start to manifest in your life, you begin to wonder why you would behave any other way.
Getting to that stage takes a lot of time and persistence despite failed attempts. It pays to hang in there, with determination and the belief that you have the power— through non-action, witnessing and observation —to change your patterns and stop the long, incessant years of self-sabotage.
This is a powerful thing to know about yourself. ‘The shadow’ that we have accumulated over the years, is nothing but the ego and its mischief being refined into a personality. Certain character traits, driven by the most negative aspects of the ego, resentment, jealousy, anger, the feeling that you deserve better and that life has been unfair, all usually hide the mistaken assumption that one has been harmed by something on the outside. This culminates in the need to assign blame to those people or events and to ensure that you, i.e.,the ego, assumes no blame and comes out looking good. The ego tries to hold on to a fake, non-existent self-image, but facing facts will lead to the collapse of even the most well-constructed mirage. It may hurt. Itmay seem like too much to bear.
Once you learn, however, that not facing pain causes it to accumulate and always get in the way of genuine progress. That is when you start to realize your full potential. It’s called ‘the shadow’ because at every moment when your true self desires to do something incredible, the part of you that has been stung by rejection or failure will create a brainstorm to avoid struggling with those same emotions again.
If you give into those emotions, you’re on the same old path of the past, never attempting anything painful for fear of loss of your self-image. In the process, you never really gain anything worthwhile, thereby losing the immense pleasure and deep sense of satisfaction for having accomplished your goal of release from karmic bondage.
By being brought down a notch or two from your own fake self-image, all you risk is feeling bad. By not realizing you learn a lot more through exercising circuits in your brain that you’ve never used before, you sacrifice a genuine breakthrough as well as the chance at coming out the other end fortified. By facing down the ego, the shadow gets weaker and you get stronger with each passing day. More of who you really are and what you can accomplish becomes obvious.
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