In a recent article I say that until you start and get some headway it taking the sting out of past hurts, you won’t be able to raise your vibration, you won’t be able to climb the tree of life.
That applies to everyone, including myself.
Once you set the task, the hurtful incidents start lining up: the mind works best when you give it an instruction and then let it do its work. 1
So, outpops an incident, for me.
A few years ago I contacted an old boy friend of mine. He is now married and has a university student daughter… so this relationship was when I was about 30… nearly 40 years ago.
Anyway, we go on skype. His family, wife, daughter hovered in the background. We talked, me in my broken Hungarian, he in a very formal way. There was no connection, and then he complained about my poor conduct of the language.
I suddenly had to go, and that was that. I never contacted him again.
But the hurt stayed with me, obviously.
I am calling him names in my head, but then I remember that the purpose of this memory popping up is to remove the hurt, remove the sting.
So I ask a different question: What was the purpose, what was MY purpose in contacting him? What did I want out of this conversation?
I realized that I wanted to be validated. That I wasn’t a loser… that he still loved me as a person. That I was OK.
He didn’t give it to me… He didn’t have to. Probably didn’t even see it.
It was my hunger for validation that caused the incident to turn out anything other than two people talking after 30 years of not talking. No big deal.
The hurt was done. I also saw that I don’t need outside validation any more… that I have grown beyond that. That I can have compassion for the 10-years ago me… lonely, regretful, maybe even shameful, hopeful… Poor baby. I am glad she got over it.
OK, so this is what happened.
If I know you well enough, this story didn’t land as “Oh, I can do that”. It didn’t give you hope.
Why? For two reasons: 1. you can’t really see what I did
2. Your hurt is more real, because “they did it to you, and you are the victim, really. There is nothing you can do about it.”
OK, let me shed light to what I did:
1. I retold the story as simply as I could
2. I then looked what I expected. Every hurt is from the gap between what you expect and what happens.
3. I owned that having that expectation, MY expectation, is the cause of the hurt, and thus take the sting out.
You live in an expectation on how things, how people, how the world is supposed to be, and then reality knocks.
The moment you can see that your expectation is YOUR expectation, you can set yourself and others free.
Allow the “should reality” fall by the wayside, and interact with what is… directly.
By the way: another way to be locked in into “should reality” is to consider that you know how it is, how it should be… and you set yourself up to a ton of grief, especially to frustration.
Life is not in any way… really. But if you think it is, you are locked into an imaginary unreality, where you cannot do much.
Your first step if this is your predicament is to get at least glimpses of the cage you live in… where you can see what you think there is and you can see how it really is.
It is an art to do this, and I have taught this a lot, and very few ever followed my instructions.
This indicates to me is whenever you are sure of how it is, it doesn’t even occur to you to question it. But when you are sure, that is the best time to poke. Poke the box…
For some of you it is enough to say: it ain’t necessarily so. For some of you that is not enough. Because it is so comfortable to know that you know how it is, you are unwilling to poke the box… even if you believe me that the real reality is outside of your box.
One of the main reasons humanity will not evolve, most likely, is this comfort… You and seven billion others choose comfort over evolution.
But the few of you that at least temporarily choose to grow… getting glimpses of the real reality is one of your main goals.
- That is not what you normally do, is it? Normally you are forcing the mind to do the work in real time… and to boot, you are forcing it to look for something it doesn’t have. Your results: loss of the present moment, loss of the ability to learn, loss of peace and happiness… Congratulations. The world gave you want you earned.
