Darren brought up some
questions at my talk on Wednesday night and I thought them deserving of further
expansion and elaboration.
Question: “Do we have to
identify every incident of guilt and shame in our lives and forgive it to be
free of it? Or do you have to do it collectively? I do it all the time but I
don’t feel that I have really forgiven myself. Why?”
Answer: “No, you don’t have
to itemise each and every incidence, only if it is causing you to remain
fixated in self recriminations and self loathing. If it is robbing you of the
pleasure of living in presence and truly experiencing the freshness of every
never to be repeated moment, if you are stuck in the false belief that you are
somehow attached to your resultant emotions and feelings that were initiated by
a past event, then you need to go back and address the issues and bring them to
the light of consciousness. You need to sit with the guilt, name it and
understand where it is coming from. You will see when you bring it to the light
and expose it for what it is, that your judging yourself as guilty and shameful
is self-imposed. There are no wrong or right choices. We get to choose, like or
dislike our choices and make different choices the next time around. It’s as
simple as that. The ego will con us into believing that our stories, our guilt
and shame somehow serve us, which we know when we confront it, is the biggest
lie.
We need to die to the past
and leave what happened behind us. We need to live in the present. We don’t
want to take this baggage with us on our journey going forward, do we? We want
to be free.”
Question: “So we just
determined how crafty the ego is. It’s going to keep us in bondage. Dying to
it? The ego’s not going to let itself die?”
Answer: “What is ego? Isn’t
ego just a branch of our minds, an assumed sense of self which is based on how
we measure up to others? We measure ourselves by the clothes we wear, our
possessions, how well we perform, whether we are liked, praised, respected by
others and even ourselves. We need to go within ourselves and be the presence
that we are as the backdrop to our lives. We need to get to the root of our
essence which is spirit and that is pure, without blemish. Our spirit is not
concerned about what car we drive or job we do. We need to derobe ourselves of
all our earthly clutter and realise that we are perfect just as we are.
We need to manage our egos with our minds. Our egos are like unruly, ill
disciplined children. All we need do is constantly expose the ego’s
misperceptions. Our ego doesn’t rule us. We don’t need to heed the constant
barrage of misinformation it projects. We are way above that. We have the power
over our minds and whether we choose to buy into the ego’s lies or not. You’ve
personified the ego into a kind of ‘devil’, who is going to fight us to the
death. I perceive ego as the negative side of our minds. We get to die it off
by our choices, by facing our truth and ignoring its constant barrage of
fear-based perceptions and constantly challenging ourselves to focus on the
here and now. You can’t have the negative and positive portals of the brain
open at the same time, so by focusing on the positive we shut out the negative.
By focusing on the present, we shut out the voice of the ego.
I firmly believe that we need
to be focusing on training and disciplining our minds and stop entertaining the
advertorials from the ego department. We should start to skip over them like we
do with the TV remote and focus just on the main movie which is our journey.”
Question: “Is it o.k. to feel
angry at times, to feel rejection, to feel these human elements?”
Answer: “Absolutely! We are spiritual beings having a human, physical experience so that we can entertain, feel, express all range of emotions and as a result thereof, make choices to work these emotions into a place of better comfort for ourselves. No kid ever experienced what hot was until they felt the burn on their skin. You can study every manual on raising a child, but you only learn life’s lessons when you actually have a kid of your own and have to face the puke, the shitty nappies, the battles of will, the pain of watching them learn it for themselves. How can you not feel pain and sufferance when someone you love is injured? It is all part of the process. When we feel anger that someone close to us has been hurt, it is our opportunity to address whether we choose to allow our emotions to rule us or whether we take responsibility for other choices. Our negative emotions and feelings are as much a part of the sum total of who we are as our positive emotions. Our shadow side is what balances us and gives us substance.”
Answer: “I absolutely
disagree. Our evolution into the now was a process. It is built on our very
experiences. That is the foundation of what we have become. The fact that we
have become aware of our choices to live in the present and die to our pasts is
testimony to the fact that we have visited with anger, rejection, etc. and
decided that these emotions no longer serve us. We go through the motions of
feeling and expressing anger and then we make the conscious choice to discard
it as it doesn’t serve us to carry it in our hand luggage. When we
forgive our pasts, we don’t forget them. We choose not to dwell on them and
continue to revisit a time that no longer exists except in our imaginations. By
living in the ‘Now’, we are making a conscious and educated choice to
experience fully the live show. Why would we choose to watch our whole lives
via PVR? That is exactly what I was referring to in last week’s blog about
living proactively or defensively. Living in the now is about empowerment
through awakened choice. You cannot be empowered if you only have half the
emotions available to you. Living in the ‘Now’ is an awakened state of
conscious living, being empowered by the freedom of choice and making that
choice out of garnered wisdom without fear or judgement or guilt.”
Well, all that said, I wish
you a prosperous week of self discovery and growth, refining and fine tuning
your choices as you evolve on your path to enlightenment.
Love you lots
Nicolette
www.nicolettelodge.blogspot.com
