The OS behind the actions: How intentions can corrupt a growth path

I'd been finding a good balance here in Pensacola, between being productive at work, getting to the coffee shop and doing some writing, going to the gym, meditation and spiritual practice, gym, walks and other things.  It's made my days very full and fulfilling, I've moved into a place of connecting with my community instead of just escaping into fishing and withdrawal.

I'm moving from a place of loneliness and isolation into a place of integration and genuinely listening to and following my heart.  I've upgraded my wardrobe, my lifting, my writing and my overall life.

All of which brought me to yesterday morning.  I woke up early and decided to "just go" and fish Johnson Beach.  First problem, the road was closed, because I was too early.  Second, it was dark and setting up is a pain at that time.  Third, it was cold in the morning, in the fifties, and I never like fishing in that kind of weather.

And finally, I was tired.  My system was deeply fatigued.  Yes, the new experiences I've added have made my life here more rich, but I hadn't left myself any space to, well, space things out and allow my experiences to integrate.  It was not manic, but in that vein.

And eventually "following my heart" becomes "following the schedule." Natural increases in strength become "max out because that's what I do."  And eventually the body and system have enough.

The body has a way of telling me it's tired or strained.  One is the cortisol spike at 3am.  This isn't a "go with it" event, this is a "you're off track" event.  My system is stuck, either in inaction or unconscious action/reaction.

So here I was, on this beach, in the cold, finding myself not really appreciating the beauty around me, but very much in my head and trying to ignore my body, which was telling me it was tired, cold and sore.  But hey, the glasses and hat are a nice new look.

I managed to catch a couple decent fish, it wasn't a bust, but I just wasn't feeling the experience.  I brought Orion stones and the meditations felt forced.  Everything felt out of place. 

As I was bringing in my lines to go home, one of my poles started bending - a strong but gentle bend.  I thought I had seaweed, but it was sort of moving, very gently.  I kept nudging it in and noticed a sea turtle had become caught in my line.

I kept nudging this gentle creature to the shoreline, worried my line would break or the creature would get scared and struggle and I'd have a stalemate on my hands. Instead, as the turtle got to the shorebreak, she turned herself and extracted herself from the line, leaving my rig and line (and her) intact, and off she went.  

It was a beautiful experience.  Yes, I felt anxiety and concern for the turtle.  I also felt uncertainty.  But I followed my higher instinct and the turtle's movement until we were able to disentangle.  

This was a sign - both that I'd allowed my higher self to get snared by an abusive pattern (which led to my fatigue and presence on the beach in the first place), and how to disentangle.

The turtle is aligned with my higher self - slow, gentle, it rides the currents, it doesn't fight them.  It doesn't overreact with fear, it trusts the process and conserves its energy to act when appropriate.  It carries an innate wisdom that lives in the moment without being owned by it.

And it was that slow, gentle, wise self that got me out of that situation, that saw me off the beach, that came home and went back to sleep until I had my baseline energy back.  This is the pace of my higher self, it is slow, it rides the current.  It is gentle and wise and not governed by fear or reactive patterns.  It is the living embodiment of heart's desire.

And yet this can get snared.  Habit, emotional drain, fatigue, anxiety, these can cause the higher self to get hijacked until a good heart-centered stack becomes another to-do list for the ego and the same things that elevated me now drain me.

The heart has many desires, many new experiences it wants to enjoy.  And yet, a wise higher self knows to follow the current.  There is a time for action, a time for courage, a time for "doing," but stay in the current, move with it, glide, nudge.  The old turtle didn't get there by darting to and fro, or going as fast as it could.  

And that's the wisdom coming through from my higher self: slow down, find the flow and ride it, nudge, don't force.  And know your loyalty is to your higher self, not the individual items on your wish/to-do list. 

 

Higher Self vs. Lower Self

I’ll talk about my story, because many people on this spiritual path deal with similar challenges.

There are two versions of myself, battling it out for my energy.  There is my true self that follows my heart and there is my anxious, doubtful self that has been raised to suppress my true self.

My true self knows how to find silence, how to connect to higher planes of energy, how to create some amazing things.  It does things that are not intuitive, that are often difficult to explain to other people.  Sometimes it takes me through pain and suffering and periods that can elicit doubt.  But it’s always right, it always leads me to where I need to be and doing what is best for me and everyone.

My true self was very quiet when I was younger and only began speaking up when I was at the point where I’d had enough, where I knew there was something better for myself but I wasn’t going to find it going through the linear path.  The more I went down this path, the more clear this voice became and the more in charge of my life he became.

The anxious version of myself was a product of my environment – family, school, social, work and other external sources, and the internal feedback mechanism that reinforced these patterns.  While it’s a painful and unhelpful version of myself, it’s familiar so it “feels right.”

For a period of time I believed the anxious version of myself got me some early success in life, but now I don’t see it that way.  It facilitated my achieving some externally-based benchmarks – good grades, good university, passing some professional certification tests.  But was that really success?  No, not really.  Grades mean nothing.  Being in an elite college is overrated.  A certification for a career I never liked that has created mostly unhappiness and rewarded me with very little is actually counterproductive.

So the anxious version of myself fooled me into thinking I was gaining something from being like this when in fact it really did nothing good for me.  This is a realization that just came to me.  Kind of powerful.  That’s going to sink in.

But when things get uncertain or difficult, the anxious part of me would make my life miserable – all kinds of worry, lack of sleep, insecurity.  But recently things have been happening that are providing visible, tangible proof that yes, things are getting better.  Much better.  My heart, my higher self, is right, and the anxious part of me hasn’t done much good in my life.

It’s been a pretty long stretch where the voices saying I was wrong, or I was a bad person, or I was on the wrong path, were getting louder and louder.  Then boom – confirmation that everything my higher self had been saying was right.  The people saying I was a bad person, or foolish, are wrong.  The parts of me listening to them are wrong too.  My heart was 100% right.

Yes, I am exactly on the right path.  People who tried to ruin my life are falling by the wayside – either realizing their error, finding better things to do, or getting their asses kicked by karma.  That part of me that listened to them is also disappearing. 

Happiness doesn’t come from going down the predictable path of success.  I never found success on that path.  But switching paths, as I began to do about seven years ago, and really in earnest about four years ago, can take a long time to yield success.  And in the process there was a lot of pain and challenges. 

I knew in my heart this was the right path and things would turn around and get much better.  And in some ways it has been getting much better and opened up massive spiritual powers, even in the beginning.  And in others it’s been a slog.  But by listening to my heart things have become consistently better.  But there was always a cloud over all of it, some big, nagging problems that allowed the doubt to continue.

Then this weekend those stuck things unstuck.  The cloud lifted and the truth came to my vision so even my ego self couldn’t deny the truth of it  My heart was right.  Against everyone and everything, my heart was right.  And my anxious self is completely wrong.  Everything is going exactly as my higher self said it would. Even the crazy stuff.

My motto is “follow you heart, let everything else go.”

And it’s 100% right.

Through all this time I felt stressed, was anything really bad happening?  No.  the worries were over nothing.  The things that actually happened were aligned with my heart.

From My Higher Self, The Fox

I was off the grid for the better part of three days and it was both beautiful and challenging.  Somehow I expected the time in nature and away from the Internet to be more relaxing and “spiritual.”  It certainly had its moments, but also a fair amount of inner turmoil and frustrations manifested.

This troubled me, so I took some time to consult with my higher self.  My archetype seems to have taken the shape of a humanoid fox, a two-legged fox-man who is considerably shorter than me but far, far taller than a fox.  And he speaks English.

One of the things that came up was that I was bothered by others who were very closed-off in their energy, and making all kinds of dumb decisions, talking about how third-eye awakened and spiritual they are. 

So I sat with this.  My higher self pointed out this was pointing me to the places where I doubted myself, where I was telling myself my third eye isn’t open, where I am telling myself my spiritual and energetic progress is bullshit.  And it was really solid advice, changed everything. 

Every time I want to engage, that’s where my inner negative-talker is residing, the blocks waiting to be released.  This is where real progress can be made!

Similarly, today I kept noticing people being critical or Etienne, calling him a fraud.  What is that?  Well, it’s a reflection of my own doubt about my own path.  Of course.

My higher self said my most powerful projection object is my ex-wife.  Every fear of her is my own fear; every doubt and trigger is something in me holding me back.  A lot of the time she attacks me for things that don’t trigger me at all, because they’re off the mark.  But there’s still stuff there.  Avoiding it doesn’t make it go away.  Asking within is the only way.

So what are those things?  I have inner doubts about my ability as a father.  I feel rather impotent and angry about how things have gone with my older son and I’m afraid I’m a hopelessly inept person.  Deep down my fears about my job, about my exes, all boil down to this fear that, deep down, I’m incompetent, I’m no good, I’m not worthy.

That I’m a fool, that I’m stupid, that I’m just no good as a person.  And certainly there have been times the world has reflected this.  And there have been times, frankly, I’ve given out that loser energy and got what I deserved.

Sometimes it’s difficult to face these truths.  But collapsing into “I am a loser” or denying “no, no, I’m all over that, I’m good now” are both failures to confront.  There are core fears, core limiting beliefs.  Now I can face these. The real reason I fear conflict, attacks and rejection is because I’m afraid I’ll see that I am a hopeless loser and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Well, of course that’s bullshit. It may be work, but, yes, I can look at those things and make changes.  I don’t have to accept what I don’t like, but I have to accept reality is what it is.

Which changes everything about conflict and confrontation.  It doesn’t have to be triggering, it can be enlightening, an opportunity to find and heal those blocks and negative programming. 

The other thing that comes up is I feel like I don’t have the energy, that I’m lazy.  Hah!  I’m realizing this is just another illusion – the rest of the world isn’t working harder than me.  Maybe it’s something that seems like hard work – okay, give myself breaks, reward myself and pace myself. Not hard.  A lot of times it’s just about applying solutions instead of finding excuses.

So the time away was positive – very enlightening and worked through some thick barriers.  But not the restful walk in the park I thought it would be. 

But that’s the point.  The vibration of the crystals isn’t designed to zone me out, it’s there to raise me up to help me better resolve issues and serve my greater purpose.  That’s what it’s about – moving forward.  And I have a real path out of my worry now, which is through my problems, not distracting myself.  This is progress.