I have just read a wonderful story, written by a sister also trying to follow the Way. It is a lovely analogy of all of our stories and the hope we have to do things differently. Please check out the link below:
https://divinetruthhub.com/a-story-about-hurt-in-wolfdom/
It has been a long time since I have written my blog. I have thought many times to write and then changed my mind, which relates to the comings and goings in my own soul: the feelings of overwhelm – which I still don’t like and then dipping ( bit of an understatement) into resistance – preventing the flow and making words difficult. But I do have a desire to share so that it may help others just as other people words and experiences have helped me, so here I am.
I was completely blocking God and God’s truth out for a while, struggling with other issues in my life and stubbornly being self-reliant and following old patterns and addictions ( emotional and physical). But during the last couple of months my desire for change and to learn more has come back and I have been spending more time listening to videos and reading about God. What I have found really useful is journaling as soon as I wake. I scribble away about sleep state, dreams, things that that I felt the day before – just about anything, without restraint and I am learning things about myself all the time.
I love what I read about God and the universe we live in, most of the time, but sometimes the contrast between where I could be and where I am hurts and that is what I am going to write about.
To understand more of what I am about to talk about, it will really help you to listen to “How the Human Soul Functions” and “Emotions and Feelings” on the Divine Truth FAQ Youtube channel and on the Divine Truth channel, “Understanding your Emotional Self” from 2014. ( Also found on divinetruth.com)
I am going to list many of them and then explain further below: (please also see the glossary page for some short explanations of some of the vocabulary I use)
This is a really important point that Jesus (AJ ) mentions again and again. We cannot KNOW something until we feel it emotionally. Our soul, which governs everything in our life, is emotional – it learns and experiences emotionally or for many of us now – it’s not learning much because it’s do full of error-based emotions. I can vouch for this from my personal experience. I am an intelligent person. I pick up a number of things quite easily. My IQ is pretty good. Even Divine Truth I can spout off the theories and things I have heard Jesus and Mary say pretty well. However, despite all the things I “know” intellectually my life remains quite small and restricted. How come an intelligent person like me can’t sort that out? With all the information I am holding in my brain I should be in a high-flying career possibly, in a good relationship maybe and out there in the world, doing more, even having a few adventures. But also, I have listened to the Divine Truth teaching for 6 years and yet only a few small changes have occurred and in fact I am still dodging the big stuff all the time.
From that, it is logical and obvious that I don’t really know it. I have just retained information. If I really knew that Divine Truth and God’s Love would change my life in wonderful ways wouldn’t I be doing it every minute of the day? I am on my third reading of the Robert James Lee books, where there is such incredible information on the how everything in this universe is based in Love and how much God is doing to call us home to know our true selves and to know Him, to be happy. I do cry when I read some parts of it. It does touch me in some way, but if I really believed everything Aphraar tells us in that book, I would be living and breathing those truths every minute of every day. I am not. Therefore, something is stopping me from truly knowing and understanding it and it’s not my intellect. Also, I am very determined about something when I want to be. So I have a strong will, but it is questionable in how I am using it right now.
So if it’s not my intellect and not a weak will, as such, it has to be emotions. Over the years I have tried many ways to heal – Christianity, atheism, psychology, therapy, hypnotism, NLP and various other new age methods, yoga, meditation, chakra clearing and the list goes on. They helped somewhat for a short while, but inside lay this deep despair at times, a feeling of lack about myself, a hopelessness about love, confusion about life and much self doubt and poor decision making.
So it is and has to be emotions in me. I haven’t known the truth emotionally indicated by my life and how I feel. For instance, at work I have had a facade of confidence, capability, but many times I would go home and cry, criticise myself, feel crappy, eat a lot to comfort/suppress and also get mad at people for not helping or making me feel better ( addiction).
The world is currently in a state of avoiding and being terrified by emotion. The world is currently in a terrible state: wars, lies and deceit, secrecy, fear, poverty, children are being murdered by the millions. Our desensitisation is not working! Our hidden dark emotions of anger and fear rule our lives. It is so obvious really. We have created many things from our intelligence – space rockets, computers, medicines, but we can’t feed everyone, or provide shelter for all, or take care of the plants and animals that actually help us sustain life. Something is wrong and it is not our intellect.
So despite all my “efforts” at healing, I am now in the place of having to face the truth of the layers of what I feel is protection and safe, but actually, is just a pile of addictions and anger to avoid how I really feel; how much fear and shame and sadness is still in my soul. I keep trying to skip the anger as I was taught it is not something that is not “ladylike” to express; I have to be a “good girl;” if I express I am damned to hell forever; I will be punished, denigrated, shamed and blamed; I am selfish and horrible; afraid of what expressing my anger will mean/where it will lead. All these false belief systems that I live in and ignoring God’s truth that I am allowed to express my anger ( lovingly) and it is good for me to do that as it’s the top layer; it’s loving to myself and the world to let emotions flow.
Firstly, I am letting the people who taught me all that still rule my life and I am shutting out the one parent, who loves me unconditionally. My God is fear, a prison of my own making. But WE CAN ONLY CHANGE THE THINGS WE STOP DENYING and I guess I am moving out of the denial phase. I have been doing that very slowly for the last couple of years, but now I am facing up to the fact that i do have a big pile of unloving emotions in me and sitting on top of everything is my anger/addictions and a huge facade.
I need to and am beginning to want to swing the pendulum of my strong will across from suppression, denial, resistance, substitution and fear over to one of truth, love and humility. Even as I say that I can feel how difficult love is for me and I feel overwhelmed with the task ahead, but fifty years of destroying my life in many ways so what is another fifty sorting it out – though the more desire I develop for Love, Truth and humility the faster I will progress. But in perspective I will have a much longer time of good things that the fifty years of hell I may have been in.
I am curious and that helps me: What is it like to be an emotional being? Can I really feel that God exists and that She loves me? What would heaven be like? What is love like? What is it like to be truthful and fear less? Who am I really without all this “mud” stuck to me? So many questions and curiosities stirred by discovering these teachings and witnessing first hand two people walking that walk.
So what will help me/us?
These three things will include help me have a strong will to release my anger, my addiction and break down my facade. From then underlying emotions will be able to flow out more easily. My hurt child will be able to grieve, my fear will be able to be felt.
Please note – in saying this I am saying what I have learnt from Jesus and Mary who DO know this because, unlike myself yet, they have done it – they are doing the experiment and they and their lives have and are changing. But intellectually, it makes some sense to me – having tried pretty much everything else!
In the new age world, the dark night of the soul refers to feeling painful emotions, suffering in some way. I now feel that it may be difficult to feel certain emotions, but that is not where the dark night of the soul is. The dark night of the soul is the denial, suppression and resistance we are in; the life of physical and emotions addictions we live in day in, day out, where we cling to our “comfort” and “security” , but are in fact living in dark prisons of our own making, thinking and feeling small; living lives far away from what God intended. We are living in a dark, grey world from our souls’ perspective and the only way to bring in the light is stop the denial.
I have so much more I would like to say, but it is a long blog and well done if you have gotten to the end. I will write a follow up. The Divine Truth teaching shakes us to the core, but goodness we need it. Looking truthfully at ourselves, at our world right now will change everything. It’s not pretty, but it’s not permanent, but we need to take the first step.
WE CAN NOT CHANGE THE THINGS WE ARE DENYING AS THEY DON’T EXIST UNTIL WE SEE THEM.
@Maxine Bell
We live in a world where we say “there are plenty more fish in the sea;” where we console ourselves over lost love by imagining another person is out there and that our perfect mate is our choice. We just have to find the “right” one and often these days we have a list of requirements: tall, slim, happy, positive, makes me laugh, kindness, takes care of me, nice eyes, long legs, large breasts, intelligent, sexy, a good cook and so the list goes on.
In the process of looking for a good match, we make mistakes and kiss many “frogs” before we find out prince or princess. This is the same whether straight or gay. We keep looking for that other half to fulfil our lives, that person who will make us happy and whom we can share our lives with and yet we don’t want to admit there is maybe just one other half. The truth is we are told there is not just one special person, that there are many who we could match with and we just look for that best match. A few people believe in finding “The One”, but are often mocked about this. Our ideas about love and relationships is very confused and contradictory.
In the western world, at least, our ears are constantly filled with songs of broken hearts and lost love. The other side of the coin is the number of programmes about dating, finding dates, and even weddings. We are certainly looking, but in fact many of us are pretty confused about the whole thing. I recently watched a few episodes of a programme in the in the UK called first dates. I felt it was a bit of escapism, but I also think inside I am also trying to work out this love/relationship stuff, just like the rest of you. Before the dates they are the participants what they are looking for and in so many people I notice the first things people list are physical, even down the type of teeth, the next most common thing is “fun,” “make me laugh” and “be positive and happy.” ( to me this indicates how afraid we are of each other’s sadness) .For women the other frequent request is be a gentleman and be big/strong; keep me safe and take care of me. There is very little mentioned about personality, qualities, ethics, morals, or much of any real depth. It may possibly be there, but they don’t say it.
Between the lines there is a lot of disappointment, confusion and hurt about love and relationships as well as a huge amount of fears about not being loved and accepted and safe. I too have these emotions, but what I have realised lately is that I have never felt truly seen or loved for myself. I always had this feeling that any mistake I made I would be punished and rejected. My belief is that to be loved I had to be perfect.
Then it hit me that the other side of this was that I had never allowed myself to be truly seen and that I didn’t even love or know myself so how could expect anyone else to love the real me. I don’t even know the real me, myself yet. I learnt early on in my childhood, like many of us, that to receive “love” I had to become the person that was acceptable to my parents and other adults around me. I had to be “good girl” or “helper” or “servant” or any other role that fitted their beliefs about me. I don’t remember my mother ever asking what dreams I had or what I would like to be. I just remember if I showed an emotion she didn’t like or expressed something she didn’t understand or want to hear or was too busy to listen too I was shut down, screamed at or ignored. So to not get punished or yelled at or ignored or rejected by my parents I became what they wanted and the feeling I have now is that “I” fragmented across the universe somewhere; went into hiding and quickly formed a facade that helped me survive, but in the long-term was and is deeply painful and got the point until recently where I really believe my facade is me.
This is the truth for most of us in one form or another and so we grow into adulthood with roles. For men is could be provider; strong; capable; husband; lover ( who knows what he’s doing) or “DIY-er, for example. For women there are many roles: carer; mother; nurturer; helper; virgin; sexy; sister; friend; multi-tasker and these days we are often expected to be able to and expected to be all of them plus have a career. It is pretty exhausting. But which one or any of them is us, the real us?
We can’t find love, I haven’t found love because I haven’t found me, and I haven’t found love because I haven’t even understood love. When I watched that dating programme I saw clearly, what Jesus has been teaching, that most relationships are based on co-dependency and we think that is love. We think that someone who fulfils all our needs or more truthfully, the “holes” in us is someone who loves us and we love someone if we fulfil all their needs: it is an emotionally addictive bartering system.The trouble with having a list of wants is that we are often never satisfied and is based on someone or both people sacrificing themselves or parts of themselves.
I can look back on all my relationships and see in each one I became who they wanted me to be. I fitted into their life, rather than discover what I wanted and when their were times I started to seek something for myself the relationship would start to break down: the bartering system started to shatter. In this process, I compromised myself in so many ways: self-love, sexually, ethically and morally. Over time, my disappointments and hurts and pain got deeper and my demands to them got greater. I tried to have control over everything and I got angry and more in addiction. My fear and sadness got greater and the things I did and the things I wanted partners to do to stop me feeling my sadness and fear got darker.
Co-dependency is a sticky, thick, ugly thing. It is all about facade and it may feel “comfortable” or “safe” because it helps us avoid painful emotions, but is does not lead us to love. How can we be intimate when we are not being our true selves? We are being a lie and living a lie. I feel very sad about the lie I have lived for so long and because it has been lived for so long there is a lot of lies/facade to break down and a lot of unlovingness to myself and others to face.
So how to do we change it? How do I change it? For me, apart from a lot of self-reflection and increasing my longing to understand and know the truth I have also been trying to learn about love; the real truth about love – God’s truth about love. It isn’t easy and I find myself confused at times, fighting between old belief systems, the world’s belief systems, versus what Jesus and Mary are teaching. The facts are there though – look at the world – if we knew love, it would not be as it is. If we knew about love, we would not be so obsessed with our version of romantic love that seems to go wrong constantly. We are not being honest that we just don’t know. The fact is I think we just have to start again – look at the whole thing again.
Something else has hit me in recent years and listening to Divine Truth is the idea that I have a soulmate – THE other half of my soul: the perfect partner for me, created for me by God. Yep, despite free will, it seems that we don’t have a choice in who our soulmate is! That is pretty confronting if you compare it with the world’s view. We can of course reject our soulmate and try to defy what God created for us, but for me it is a fact I can’t ignore. I am not sure if I have accepted it 100%, but I do know that I can’t just look at any man anymore. As those of you who have followed my blog you will know I have suspicion who my soul mate is, but because of all my emotional injuries I really don’t know for sure and to be honest, not even sure how I could have attracted him into my life even temporarily. I have some deep emotions to heal around gender and sexuality and other things.
But, logically, it makes sense that to know the other half of me, I need to start knowing who I am. If I want to be intimate with my other half, I have to find that intimacy with myself: fearlessly and I have to start challenging my beliefs about love because they sure haven’t worked so far. The “love” I have known has been conditional and in God’s eyes that isn’t love. Jesus teaches, love is a gift: unconditionally and in my heart I don’t know that yet.
I have been reading a book called “Loveability: how to love and to be loved” by Robert Holden and he talks about our deep fear that we are unloveable and it has led to our obsession with falling in love. This obsession is about being loved rather than being loving, indicating that fear of unloveablity. He says we need to stop falling and start thinking what real love is. This is what Jesus has been saying for 2000 years – what is real love and indicating that real love is demonstrated constantly by God in so many ways in our lives.
In the book, unconditional love is summarised and is very similar to what Jesus teaches so I like what was written:
I think hearing that Love is a gift has been one of the most important things I have heard. It really made me think about my demands, my fears and truly how loving or not I have been over the years. From this point, I can ask myself: do I really love this person freely, without condition? Am I willing to gift my love without expectation or demand? Then if I feel any demand or expectation I know in that moment I am not loving them.
Also, do I really want to know them? Do I really want them to know me? Am I prepared to be vulnerable and open and humble to the errors and fears in me? This is intimacy – being prepared to be completely vulnerable and it scares the crap out of me and yet I am also curious. I have tried the other way and it has brought me much unhappiness, and suffering.
We need to be prepared to see the mountain of evidence that we know little about love and that’s okay. Just be honest about where we are at and build a desire to know the truth. When I was a child I had this feeling, among all the chaos around me, that if they just loved more things would be better: that love would be the answer. When we are kids we do know much more than the adults around us often. I grew up sadly, feeling my heart had been very badly battered and bruised – but it wasn’t and isn’t love that does that. It is not-love that does that. So to find love, to know love, we need to look at the not-love in the world: the not-love in ourselves, our false beliefs, our neediness, our fear, our grief.
We can’t change things we are lying about – because a lie isn’t a reality: it is a lie. Only the truth can create change, because it is truth and logically truth is real. For me, my personal truth is too impacted by emotional baggage at the moments so I look for a greater truth – a higher truth and only God has that. That is what makes God, God – she knows more than us – about love and about what is true. Jesus says to learn about love we have to learn about Love from someone who obviously knows more about love than us. Weirdly, we often try to learn from others around us who know as little or less than we do: we all scramble around in the dark together. So stop scrambling and look for someone who carries the torch. Only they can show us the way: the ones who carry the light: there are a few on earth, but a more guaranteed source in God. Praying for the faith to really know that in my heart – what a day that will be!
@2017 Maxine x
I had a realisation in early November that I had spent a lot of my life in survival mode. In fact it has become a recognisable bed I was lying in, but not a very safe one. The last 3-4 years have been particularly bad and my external life had reflected that financially, in my home situation, physically via the cancer and emotionally just feeling numb and being okay about having so little.
Living in survival mode means you are always living in fear: fear of death, fear of destruction, fear that the few things you have in life will crumble away and you will fall into the abyss. That is how I have felt for as long as I can remember. This terrible fear led to becoming a control freak – trying to manage aspects of my life – money, relationships, day to day living, and my son – so as to feel “safe.” Living in the fear, but pretending to yourself you are not; “its okay you’ve got it all under control Maxine.”
But the fact is in all those aspects of my life, I may have controlled them or felt I did, but they weren’t natural or loving and none were being done very well. Control does not allow for love to flow and controlling addictively to avoid fear is unloving. Avoiding fear, living in fear is unloving, restrictive and self-denying as well as unloving to others as to avoid feeling vulnerable you try to control those around you, sometimes heavily disguised as “taking care” of them, but still controlling them.
Being in survival mode is really bad for your health too. When we are in flight or fright mode we produce adrenalin by the pint and all this adrenalin constantly pumping around our system isn’t good. In the end it creates a toxic environment and it is exhausting. Now that I have started to pay attention to my fear, I have become aware that daily I do so many things to avoid feeling unsafe physically, emotionally and spiritually.
I have become an expert in batting back, ducking, avoiding, distracting myself from feeling fear. In the process I have created a facade that is dull and hard and uncreative. I have lost more and more of myself.
However, compassionately, there are some deep causal events and emotions that started this whole survival mode. John Bradshaw, in his book Homecoming, says “a witness to violence is a victim to violence.” I had a father who was violent, a step father who was even more so both, physically and mentally to my mother. I sat on the stairs or behind my bedroom door many times listening to the shouting and violence going on near me. I even have a memory of standing in my cot and feeling this big dark red cloud coming into the room. It was rage – I think it was my father’s rage, at my mother, I don’t have the details, but I feel panicky and scared…and there is still much I haven’t remembered yet.
Then there is the other violence, of being shouted at, clipped round the ear, blamed and shamed in one way or another as my parents, unable to cope with their own emotions, sent them my way. The terror that comes when you think your mother has killed herself – again and again and again: all these things and so many more. I wish my experience was unusual, but it isn’t or am I minimizing it? As a small child, all these things shake you to the core and it has left me with the constant feeling that my world will end at any moment, that there is no solid foundation to exist from and at times no real love to be found.
When I hit the wall in November, my body aching from doing a job that was too demanding and pushing myself to the limits with it, and only months after major surgery and cancer and then coming home to live in a place I really don’t like, reduced down to living pretty much in one room with no space to get the things I love out – my art materials and writing materials and no money to buy new clothes when I need to or enjoy things I love, counting every penny and struggling to pay off some debts.
So I started to feel some emotions about it – yes mostly effect emotions – sadness, and some frustration, but mostly sadness, at the situation I was in, and created by my unhealed emotions, my choice to keep suppressing them. A painful realisation, but to be frank to feel something was a good thing and it created some small shifts in me, about what God wants for me and it not this – this small life.
In relation to this, for the last 2-3 of years I have also become aware that I have attracted a large group of spirits who do not want what is best for me, but only want to control my life, zap my energy and keep me small and at times completely destroy me. They have been with me for a good while I feel. By not feeling my emotions I allow that attraction to continue. It has been tough dealing with this. I feel them sitting on my shoulders, at times suffocating and crowded. It has kept me awake at night the last few months and I have felt I have no privacy whatsoever. Every time I try to take a step forward I feel they come for me. It has felt like a real battle for my soul. So I am in the process of feeling more truth about this, bit by bit.
I am letting myself feel that facade, I am returning to long-ignored passions that connect with my real self and I am doing a few things to come outside of my “comfort” zone/prison. They are a few small steps, but I am feeling a shift in some areas. I still have much to learn and feel and discover, but letting that control addiction go is tricky, but I really am beginning to dislike it. It doesn’t feel like me, just like a strange creature that has taken over. Plan A: to turn from rock to river!
I wanted to share this, to help those of you who may be doing the same as I have been. It is so important to be honest with ourselves, to look at our lives and see what it is showing us about our unhealed emotions, our self worth and our denial. We do have the power to change all this and we have much greater power to change all this if we include God in the process. Step one, for me, is working through blocks to receiving God’s love. (which would so help me soften to emotions).
The blocks I think I have identified about God are (constantly up for review!):
These realisations have created some changes. A week after my meltdown a new job came up and I got it and I am working in a more loving environment – though still having to watch my own self care in it, and with that my finances have improved and I am looking for somewhere new to live, and I am writing more and have joined something called solo autobiographical theatre which is triggering memories and emotions and pulling me out of a comfort zone and challenging me to do it despite fears that come up.
The Divine truth teachings are never far from my mind and heart. The God blocks are still there, but by listening to the videos by Jesus and Mary, I learn about God’s truth and re-educate myself about Love and Truth and error and as always nature is one of my greatest teachers about God and her Love. Also, books like the Robert James Lee trilogy (see the extras page) give such hope and wonder and curiosity to keep searching and investigating the truth about God, and Love and life. I am blessed to have this knowledge and experience at my fingertips and I do not want to walk away from it until I start to really walk it and keep walking it, with no turning back and no fear.
This year is about my moving out of survival mode, of really finding out what being me is about, what loving myself is really about: to move from the pretend love that feeding my addictions gives me and finding out what God’s love really feels like. To create a blunt analogy I feel I have been clinging to a pile of hard crap that I have convinced myself was a soft cushion: comfortable, but sticky and not allowing me to move much. Clinging because I felt there was this deep bottomless pit below, a drop into the unknown, to a point of meaninglessness and death, very related to childhood fears and flight/fright mode. Now it is time to let go of clinging to this crap, falling into the abyss…whatever it may. My feeling is instead of nothingness or danger , I will find God’s hands there ready to catch me and lift me up to greater heights, even with wings to fly – just has he planned. I can see even see that knowing smile…… Yes my child, here YOU are… here you truly are…
Oh goodness, now won’t that be wonderful…
Maxine
“You use your strength to separate yourself from everyone, but it’s thrilling when your defences are down.”
This is a line said by Harry (Jack Nicholson) to Erica (Diane Keaton) in the film “Something’s gotta give.” I am not writing a film review, but I watched it because having never heard of it before it came into my view twice in 12 hours – firstly, it was mentioned at dinner with friends and then the next day I wondered into a charity shop so see if I could find a film to watch and there it was standing out among the DVD’s on display. I felt I was being guided to watch it and so I bought it.
It came under the guise of a romantic comedy, about two people, who in their own way had shut down the idea of the possibility of a deep love and connection, both for different reasons. They were thrown into the path of each other and despite a tricky start they fell quickly and deeply in love. However, fear came up and one of them pulls back. I won’t say too much in case you want to watch it. It is funny and touching and I waited to see what it had to offer me.
On one hand it is obvious, I am terrified of giving myself to love and I struggle to receive love. I am very suspicious of someone saying they love me, because love has meant departure, manipulation, feeling used, disappointment, confusion and pain. In truth none of that IS love. I know this intellectually and I have a small feeling deep down there is something much more special that is truly love, but my emotional wounds, my parent’s/ environment version of love, like many of us, was wrong, is wrong and now I am attempting to understand what love is, but I am scared. Scared by previous experiences and my emotional knowledge of love. Yet to keep saying this is also an excuse and an addiction and re-educating myself about love is within my own power and choice.
Then on the other hand is this issue of strength. When this line was said it struck me – it was me. I use my “strength” to separate myself from everyone. I have noticed that I call my mother the bounce back queen. Despite all her own lack of self love, the damage she has done to herself and to others, how she has treated her body, she still survives, she still keeps going. She has a chronic illness- temporal arthritis which requires horrible medication, including lots of steroids. Because of this her bones are fragile and the smallest fall she breaks a bone. This year she fell and smashed 6 ribs, had a metal plate put in to fix them. She was home within 3 days. Last week, she discovered she had 2 fractures in her neck, that had gone undetected for a week and she still got on a plane to Spain for a week. Many will read this and think, wow she is strong. But is it being strong or is it being self-reliant and avoiding her vulnerability?
Last week at work, someone asked me some questions about myself, which I answered honestly and their comment was, “you are one strong lady.” It was said in a way, that I should be proud of myself, proud of my strength. It has been said to me before a number of times. But right now I don’t want to be strong. What does it really mean? I am addicted to it. I am addicted to “being strong:” to surviving through many things, to getting back up, to pushing on, to keep going. I am addicted it, but I am sick of it because it is as Harry says my strength has become the space I use to stay separate, to avoid relationships, to avoid love, and to avoid feeling. It also involves appalling self care at times because I ignore so much of my pain.
I can feel the damage it is doing to me, emotionally, spiritually and physically. I have pain in some part of my body daily and I don’t take analgesia. I haven’t for long time and I used to consider myself to have a high pain threshold. I do, but this is not a good thing, this is shut down of feelings. And there are many of you out there who do the same thing.
There is no judgement is this because we live in society, that celebrates this kind of strength, this way of coping. I am English and we have had a long tradition of stoicism, that “stiff upper lip” nonsense: “chin up!” In other words, pretend it doesn’t hurt, don’t be emotional, just grin and bear it. The words that aren’t said here are “don’t be emotional because that will trigger all my emotions which will make me and everyone else around me upset and we don’t want to be upset because we don’t want to feel our emotions either. Avoidance, facade and all of us meeting each other’s emotional addictions.
What I feel now, is that this is incredibly sad. It is incredibly sad that we are so locked up, that I am, because when I lock up my negative emotions I also lock up my positive ones. So I can not experience my joy and happiness as I should. It is the way our soul works – suppress one emotion and we suppress another and it builds up to the state of numbness and de-tunement many of us live in.
I am not happy being like this and I am sick of being “strong.” It means I am overly self-reliant and I don’t let others in and I don’t let them help me. Then I feel alone and then I feel upset and angry that no on will care for me: a vicious cycle. Compassionately, I have reasons why I became “strong:” it was a survival technique and in fact I was taught to be this way, to support my mother and to care for my brothers and I certainly wasn’t encouraged, like many, to feel or acknowledge my own needs. I may be “strong” to the world as it currently is, but the truth is I am weak in knowing myself, and allowing myself the real strength and courage to feel all of my emotions.
There is small part of me that wants to be vulnerable and the times I have allowed that have been the most amazing times and I have felt almost beautiful. After the crying, we often feel more peaceful, especially when it is a causal emotion. I long for that peace and yet I must have a greater desire not to feel at the moment, to hold on and if I really want to progress more quickly something’s gotta give.
Being vulnerable is something I don’t emotionally understand properly. I feel inside it is weakness, as many do. Most of freak out when too much emotion hits the room. We can cope with a bit, but if it goes on too long, either with ourselves or others we judge it, we get fidgity, distract ourselves, talk ourselves out of it, eat ourselves out of it, drink ourselves out it; anything to lessen the “drama” of a roomful of emotions.
But emotions are E – motions. They are meant to move in and out, like a river. Often, instead , they sit in us like a rock and despite on some level we feel the weight of stuck emotions we have become experts in pretending they are not there. It is similar to being very overweight, we keep buying bigger clothes, bigger chairs and bed, put elastic in our belts so we don’t have feel too uncomfortable and aware of that extra flesh.
Being vulnerable would be to put on those trousers we can’t fit into, feel how uncomfortable they are now, walk out in them, feel exposed and allow all the feelings of that to come. So for me this acts as a key to accessing my vulnerability – getting out my comfort zone.
In November I did a four day workshop called Solo Autobiographical theatre. I had 4 days of being outside my comfort and it was transforming in the sense that I faced fears, didn’t live in them, felt emotions, felt exposed and at the end felt empowered discovering bits of myself I hadn’t before. So now I am signed up for 2 terms of this and I keep looking for ways to get out of my comfort zone. Actually, I think I will call it my addiction zone, because I would say most, if not all, of my so-called comfort zone is full of emotional and physical addictions. It is pretend safe zone, but truly an avoidance zone and the truth is, the reality is this addiction zone may give me some sense of gratification, but it has not brought me real happiness, love or joy. So, on an experimental basis I would say that experiment has failed and it is time for new experiment. No real love in our life is no real life at all: it is living life in the greyscale, instead of vibrant colour.
I have so much to learn about vulnerability and blocks to work through to allow it more in myself. Then I feel, I will also learn more about being strong in the true sense, strong enough, courageous enough to feel, to feel my emotions, to feel my Self and awaken all my senses, and start waking up to truly living again. It is in there, because God made us that way. She didn’t create robots after all, she created living, breathing, dancing, singing, creating, thinking and most of all, uniquely of all, emotional beings: all that makes us human.
The ability, the desire to feel all of our emotions all of the time is humility. Humility allows vulnerability to be present and allows us to move those negative emotions out of us and let in the new, more joyful ones in. Our current definition of strong for me is rigidity and denial: a painful holding on: the inhale. Vulnerability is softening, allowing, surrender: the doorway to more truth, joy and freedom: the exhale. Sighing…
“You’ve got to learn how to fall, before you can learn how to fly.” (from the film).
@Maxine Bell 2017
This is a topic I have been thinking and feeling about for a few weeks and I had a big fear about writing it and being “wrong” and there is still some fear there, but in the process of feeling about the topic of Robby, so to speak, I have come to some new awareness. Robby and I are currently apart. We have not lived together for over a year now. During that year we been apart, and then drifted back together, tried to make a go of it, but it has not worked. It has been very confusing, sad, scary and at times frustrating. By October, Robby had had enough of the to-ing and fro-ing – and over the next few weeks it became apparent that we were not resolving anything and going round in circles, nothing was clear except that and so we are now just friends. However, for me, in my own pondering and feeling about all this, no matter what seems to happen, and unlike other relationships I have been in, there is something about Robby that I cannot shake off. When we are apart, I never feel quite separate from him …there is a pull in my heart in his direction that in many ways makes no sense when I look at what our relationship has been so far. So what is this strange and curious journey we have been on and in some ways are still on?
In the ‘About Me’ section of my blog I talk a little about my relationship with Robby and the feeling that we may be soulmates, but also that we don’t know that because we both have a large amount of emotional injuries that impacted our relationship and in fact any relationship we may try to have still. We have been on a roller coaster over the last 4 years a bit of good, but a fair bit of bad and ugly too. Robby has given me permission to talk openly about our relationship and he has a strong belief in the power of my writing to help others and discover my true self along the way.
The issue of soulmates, sexuality and gender wounds is a massive one for all of us and it impacts our world greatly. Jesus and Mary teach about soulmates, but they have also experienced their journey together and so talk very much from personal experience. I will give a brief explanation of soulmates, as taught by Jesus and Mary, before talking more about Robby and I. I highly recommend listening to the Soulmate Relationship talks from 2010 on the Divine Truth website (or go to the Divine Truth YouTube channel and search under soul mate) for a fuller understanding of what I write. I also found the talks on Sex and Sexuality very helpful. There are also shorter talks on Partnerships on the Divine Truth FAQ channel.
Jesus teaches that God created billions of souls (her children), who before they incarnate on earth are not conscious of themselves as individuals and it is the incarnation process that allows us to discover our individuation. Each soul has a unique personality and quality that is a gift to our life. When the time is right to incarnate a soul is drawn to a parent in a law of attraction for the parents so that they can progress in love: the child reflecting back unhealed emotions, (that is the current situation in our state of error). Before it incarnates a soul splits in half and one half incarnates first to one set of parents. The second half incarnates sometime after, anytime from a short time up to about 20 years after.
God, our parent, has both male and female qualities. Each whole soul can have a mixture of male and female qualities to a varying degree. Most souls are fairly even so that one half will be born into a male body and one half into a female body (heterosexual). Some complete souls will be predominantly male and will split into two males bodies (homosexual) and some will be predominantly female and will split into two female bodies (lesbian).
Our soul represents the true us, containing such things as our personality, emotions, memories, intentions, passions and desires. Incarnation is the time we individualise and learn about love. When we incarnate we gain two bodies: a physical body and a spirit body that exist at the same time and are encompassed by our half of the soul. Currently, when we “die” our physical body dies, but we continue to live in our spirit body and we continue to live our lives as we have, making choices, experiencing and living. Spirit world contains many spheres, from the lowest to the celestials. We move up the spheres by progressing in love: some through the natural love path, reaching the sixth sphere – the highest sphere attainable through that path. Others choose the Divine Love Path and can pass into the celestial spheres, of which, there are currently 36, but development there is infinite so there may be more in the future.
During our life on earth we can all meet and be with our soulmate. However, because our current soul condition on the earth is nearly all equivalent to the first sphere because we have so many emotional injuries we may never meet our soulmate whilst on earth, or we do and don’t recognise them and/or reject them or sometimes we could be married to them and not know they are our soulmate and in fact still have a very co-dependent addictive relationship: so we are in a relationship with them, but it is a damaging one, on a soul level and is not really a soulmate relationship. As I understand it, being in a soulmate relationship requires the main qualities needed on the Divine Love Path (also called The Way of God’s Love): truth, love and humility from God’s perspective as well as desire to progress in love from each half of the soul. In the end, if one half of a soul progresses to a high state of love the other half will automatically be drawn to them.
Currently, on earth, we are not taught about soulmates or it is told incorrectly as it was to me through the Twin Flame teachings, so we grow up not even aware we have one soulmate, one perfectly made mate, just for us: one of God’s gifts to us. Our soulmate will have similar personality traits and in their progression the same main desires and passions. If the soulmate halves choose the Divine Love Path and get beyond the 7th sphere they can continue to progress to the 36th sphere and join again in Soul Union. This is what Mary and Jesus have done and is the only state that allowed them to choose to reincarnate. I don’t think words can convey the state of bliss that must be and it is not something I feel qualified to comment on. The Robert James Lee books and the Padgett messages give some idea of what it is like in the celestial spheres as well as the power of the soulmate relationship. (See the ‘Extra’ section on my website).
So where am I? I can only give the perspective from my current viewpoint, but I do feel that all the information given by Jesus and Mary is correct. It just makes sense to me. It is clear and loving. God created us to innately seek two things: God and our soulmate so we all have this ember burning in us somewhere and many of us have memories of feeling this longing, for the One. These days it is often decorated in Hollywood and Mills & Boon ideas of romance: we meet, we know, we seek, we find and once we really decide then that’s it – happiness with little or no problems: remember that final screen kiss which silently promises all? But we all know from experience it is not that simple and in fact there are more songs and more movies about the loss of relationship than about successful true love. I have come to the truth that with my experience of “love” from my environment as a child, I do not know much, if anything, about real love: love that is unconditionally without demands or expectations, that just exists and lives regardless. We believe we have it for our children, but as a parent, I do not always unconditionally love my son. When I am tired, angry, afraid I do not love him regardless. I do not have that level of development. I want to, but I do not and I know I have little, if any memory, so far of being unconditionally loved as a child, so what do I know of it?
I decided it is better to start from the truth I know so little and try to discover the truth, because the reason I currently struggle to love or to receive love is because the “love “ I have experienced has been very conditional. This is true for many of us, including Robby. He does not remember being loved at all. His father was strict and emotionally distant and his mother was so wrapped up in her own woes and anger at men she could not love as a mother should. They provided a secure physical home and food and clothes, but no affection, only rules and regulations and harshness.
My mother’s emotional injuries mean that she was such a wounded child she could not give us love, but in fact demanded through projections that we love her, make her feel better and provide her with things that no child should have to. As the eldest, I particularly felt this: my mother’s neediness and instability. I felt like her emotional husband and carer/parent. My father left when I was about 4 or 5 and I had two stepfathers all of whom I felt rejected by in various ways. There was domestic violence, alcoholism and day to day drama. Where were lessons in love in any of this?
During my adult life I had relationships of course. The first serious one was just like my father: irresponsible, chauvinistic and at times frightening. After that I has boyfriend the complete opposite: passive, but still wanting looking after and I did it because I had looked after my mother and I knew nothing else. I had a few brief affairs that were painful and finally a more caring relationship, but we were more friends than lovers. Following this was a “big connection” that was just a highly addictive and damaging relationship. (Not coincidental during my interest in New Age ideas that encourage and feed this “I just felt this amazing connection” stuff). By the time Robby had come into my life I really did not want a relationship. In fact I told God I would wait as many years as it needed until I found my soulmate, as that was the only one I wanted. I had the desire, but it was a desire, coming from pain and disappointment and fear of more pain and disappointment, though I don’t think I knew that at the time.
I was working as a healer and doing readings in Glastonbury when Robby and I met. I had just come across Divine Truth, but was still uncertain and still trying to understand why the “big connection” had come crashing round my ears and was still working as healer/ card reader. Robby came thundering into my little room asking for a reading and I remember this feeling of feeling slightly knocked sideways by his presence. I composed myself enough to do a reading and found him to be unusually honest about himself. For him, he had a relationship at the time that was coming to an end, and he had had a feeling, and told her so, that his soulmate was nearby, without having a clue what he was saying. But over the next few weeks, he used to pop in to say hi and we became friends.
During that summer we bumped into each other sometimes and one day he came on a trip with a Dutch friend down to Tintagel. Robby is Flemish so they could chat in Dutch. We had a great day with her and my son and I was touched by Robby’s playfulness. I ran into the sea and Robby joined me and I remember this point when he came towards me, didn’t touch me, but I felt something. Only I was aware of it, but it frightened me and I pushed it aside. There had been other times before that when he would text me, intuitively knowing when something was up and when I saw him, he began to disturb my equilibrium, which I kept trying to ignore and I still like his company.
Then one day I had been to see a friend at the Ashram and afterwards I had a strong urge to go to the orchard behind Glastonbury Tor. All the way there, I kept hearing Robby’s name, “Robby, Robby, Robby,” again and again. Unbeknownst to me he was sitting in that orchard telling God he was ready for his soulmate. A few minutes later I suddenly appeared. He didn’t tell me at that time about his prayer, but we sat together. I did not feel relaxed, (my equilibrium blown again) and he touched my shoulders at one point and it made me really nervous. Nothing was said between us, but I could not shake the feeling that something was going on.
As friends, we had made a deal of honesty right from the start, so after a couple of days of feeling this, I decided I needed to be honest and confront what I felt was happening. I knocked on the door of the caravan where he was staying and asked him if he felt something was happening. He honestly said he didn’t know. However, something did change and we arranged to meet for a coffee the next day before I drove off to a friend’s wedding for a few days. By that time, Robby was often sensing me and he knew before I arrived back a few days later that I was about to appear and I did. This sort of thing continues until today.
For two weeks we had a wonderful time and then he lost his accommodation. Without a doubt I suggested he move in. Not normally what I do, but it felt right. We were big into “signs “ then and numerology and we took the he “sign” of a rainbow and the number 2222 appearing, as well as a love song on the radio as signs this was the right thing. Robby moved in and I think we had another couple weeks of a honeymoon period and then the shit started to hit the fan, so to speak.
Robby’s anger and the issues from his previous relationship with an alcoholic, my sexual issues from my previous relationship – both related to deeper causal emotions. Lots of things got triggered. We made attempts to understand, feel it, but we weren’t very good at the feeling part – still aren’t. We were both heavily suppressed as children and so allowing too much emotion terrifies us. Over time we settled into a pattern, which actually became a heavily co-dependent relationship. So regardless of being soulmates, or not, we not really loving each other. Co-dependence is a bartering system and is never loving and in fact degrades our soul. If we are soulmates, that of course, impacts our whole soul.
One of our big co-dependent emotions was Robby wanted to be rescued and I was addicted to rescuing. Robby’s desire to be rescued created neediness in him, and was part of low self worth and not feeling loved. It meant he often projected a lot of fear. My rescuing was something I have been doing since a child to my own detriment, but I would say in later years has also become part of my horrible control addiction. For me, control feels like security, but it is an unloving and ugly addiction, creating a lot of angry projections.
As you can imagine, this is not the making of an open and passionate relationship. We also, like most, have many gender wounds: layers of anger and hurt. There was and still is so much “Stuff” in the way it is a miracle we are still even friends. But we are and when we decided to try and break that co-dependence things improved individually. Robby learnt to stand on his own two feet more and I felt less drained and demanded of. We have been at least trying to feel what is really loving in some areas.
The other thing we do trigger some deep emotions in each other. For instance, I trigger a lot of Robby’s injuries about his mother. He struggles to see me emotional and I have let him shut me down many times (something I am also used to letting happen and choose to). His mother was constantly sad and crying. He triggers lots of things in me: anger at men, hurt over being used for what I can give rather than whom I am and many things. These triggers are a gift if we have humility – the willingness to feel all of our emotions, but I have not been good at that, though I am getting better in some areas.
But all I know is right now, I look at Robby and I have such compassion for his injuries. I see and feel his struggles – sometimes more than I feel my own. I see both of us blundering along and have compassion and understanding that right now to be intimate is almost impossible until we heal more, but mostly until we have a real desire to be humble in relationships, a real desire for complete truth and a real desire to learn about love, to love and be loved. John Bradshaw, in his book, Homecoming, talks about when we have unmet needs as a child, when we are not validated and accepted and loved for who we truly are, we lose our authentic self, we create a facade and become what our parents and others want us to be. We do it to survive as a child and by the time we are adults we forget and continue with our facade, which grows ever stronger as we continue to live in our hurt. So how can we be intimate, be our true selves with someone when we don’t have a clue who that is. He says it is impossible to be intimate if we have no sense of self. That makes sense in my life and my relationships. Neither Robby nor I have much sense of self.
For me, the other big emotion is abandonment. When Robby recently said he felt open to a relationship with someone else so that he could experience something more loving, I felt numb. I am disassociated, but when I let some feeling come, inside I felt “Well I expect it, they all leave; I will never be the one to be the one that wows them – I am just not enough. I don’t blame them, I am just not lovable. No one will love me forever and I am not surprised.” My wounded child is so hurt she believes it, I believe – emotionally. That is the grief that I am afraid off – it seems so overwhelming still. But there it is.
Normally, through all the difficulties I would have totally given up and not been too bothered about seeing that partner again. But with Robby it is different. The truth is I have some big emotions, a huge amount of fear that is even preventing any desire for a relationship – until I think about Robby. I don’t feel I want to go back to what we had – there was much wrong in how we were doing things. And sometimes, I look at other men, and I find them attractive and I know Robby has felt the same with women. Yet now even, when I do, I often think, “oh but that’s not Robby.” I know I have a ton of stuff to heal and a lot to learn about being loving in a relationship and still a lot of anger, fear and sadness about men to release. That will remain as such, until it doesn’t, but if I try to truly imagine being with someone else, I can’t. I also, don’t know how it could work with Robby, but I can’t break this feeling that he is somehow part of me.
Only time and my willingness to heal my emotions will reveal the truth of him being my soulmate or not, but in the meantime here is the punch line….
Quite separately, Robby got offered a new job and took it. I applied for a new job and took it. It turns out we are now working for the SAME team and work together every day! It is proving hard to get rid of each other… lol!
So watch this space….
I think this has been one of the most difficult posts for me to do and it happened almost accidentally. About two weeks ago, some emotions came up ( hurray!) and some realisations about my cancer, the surgery and most importantly my facade and my addictions: the part of me that exists to avoid feeling the fear, sadness, grief and other emotions: it does not want the hurt self to express itself. It is also about how incredibly good we are at self deception – how good I have been and how resistive we can be even when faced with a life-threatening disease. Crazy hey? Maybe, but true, especially when fear is your God, like it has been for me, for a very long time.
We all have a Facade Self (see my blog about this called “In Search of the Real Self: Cracking the Shell” from December 1, 2014) . It is initially caused by our parents, when they shut down our real self, by suppressing our emotions in some way and it continues to develop every time we don’t feel an emotion. As a child the Facade can play the role of protector, as we create a persona our parents are happy with and where we can avoid punishment or harm. We have created many facades to deal with many situations. As an adult we don’t need to continue with this but we do. The truth is it is not a very nice creature: it is untruthful, arrogant, condescending, arrogant, addictive, insensitive, unemotional, irresponsible, resistive and so forth. ( Jesus gives a great talk on this – I will put a link below).
So I had some realisations and I tried to journal them. I journal a lot. I always have done since I was a child, but now I do it more often and it helps me keep track of what I am learning, truths and untruths, memorable events and I now even jot down points from the talks I listen to that are very relevant to me. It can also be cathartic and enlightening because as you write you can discover things you didn’t realise before or express emotions through writing. I have written a few “letters” to God and others this way.
But that night, I could write – my hand froze, but I wanted to express myself, I wanted to talk. So I switched on my PC and made a video. It was just for me at the time, though as you will see I address to an unknown audience too. I even forget to mention my name until the very end! It is very raw and very rough. If you choose to watch it you will need you volume up maximum as I was only talking into the laptop microphone. Also, hang on in there past the first 10 minutes or so as I waffle, but I find my way a bit more as I go on. There was no plan, or no structure at the time, just feelings and thoughts. I have sat with it for the last two weeks to make sure I didn’t want to publish this in an emotional addiction of some sort. I don’t think I am, but I have been wrong about that before. But that is part of the journey – being prepared to be wrong and feeling fears, but not living in them and this is also what publishing this video is about. (It is an hour long )
The good thing is, these last few weeks have been a turning point for me and this video and what was going on for me at the time is part of it. Watching the video back has also been a useful tool and I hope it will help you as well – that is my intention in posting it. I know some of you who read my blog have been listening to Divine Truth for a few years like I have, and have been stuck and resistive to personal truth like I have. I believe my soul darkened during this time and now I finally have a desire to stop this, to choose love and to start to switch from fear as my God to the God that loves me and wants the real me to really live and be happy. So I have started doing a number of things to develop my will to love and to live more truthfully. It is a tiny start, but a start – but that is another blog, another time.
With love, Maxine.
“I have come to believe that cancer is the physical metaphor for the extreme need to grow [in love] ”
Dr Lewis Thomasgk . My add in is in brackets.
I have found this the most difficult blog to write so far. I have written and re-written and re-written a number of times. The reason is, I am writing about having cancer and it has brought up fears just in the idea of writing. Others do this everyday, but in my fears, I over analyse sometimes (sometimes? Alot!), but also I am trying to discover the truth in everything I do so I have been feeling a number of things about why I have struggled to write this particular post:
The truth is I can not guarantee it isn’t self absorbed or addictive in some way. I still have a lot of error in me in understanding what the truth is. However, there is also the desire to share to help others ( which could also be an addiction, by the way). But whatever is going on, because of the fear I decided to write and just feel those emotions. especially as fear is an emotion I struggle hugely with.
When I first started to write ideas for this blog a few weeks ago, I started going into lots of detail about what I was doing for myself, physically, to heal my cancer and also explain the positive and negatives of different medical approaches: conventional vs alternative or mix of both. I then stuck a bit about emotions on the end, but as time has gone on I realise this is not the information I need to share. There is a ton of stuff in books, videos and websites on treatments for cancer: I have accessed a number myself, but what there is hardly anything about is the true cause of cancer and what the most important thing we need to do, to heal. This also applies to any illness, not just cancer.
Before, I came across Divine truth teaching I already had the view that emotions are the cause of our illnesses and I tested this out when I had an issues with my kidneys in 2010. I used more of a technique, that Brandon Bay used and wrote about in her book “The Journey.” A friend helped me “talk” to my kidney to find the cause, which of course was an emotion, which I attempted to feel. Somehow I did enough and I recovered and didn’t need to go back to the hospital again. Though I still feel there is much more to feel in that area. I had tried Louise Hay, but even though I thought some of the causes made sense I didn’t feel the affirmations were enough. I just didn’t resonate with talking myself out of my disease.
So, when I heard Jesus say that there is an emotional cause for every illness and every accident I accepted that and so I accept that my cancer has an emotional cause. However, I am also aware I haven’t always treat my body lovingly, in fact terribly at times, and I have had food addictions since I was about 10. They are not as acute or harsh as they were years ago, but they are still there. I still use food to suppress my emotions. I also, feel that I have some disassociation with my physical body through various traumas and I notice that I refer to my body parts as “she”, as though I am not part of them. For instance, my reaction to my diagnosis included feelings towards my cervix and uterus – I felt sorry for what she had been and was going through. I was diagnosed at the beginning of September with cervical cancer and it took me three months to realise what I was doing and the day I changed the words to, “I have been through a lot,” did I feel grief come up. From that, came the desire to be as loving to my body as I can be through this process.
After a bit of research I decided to treat my cancer naturally. The conventional treatment was a radical hysterectomy where they even remove the top of your vagina. I am in the earlier stages of the disease and to me this seemed – well radical! I also took advice from intergrative medical practitioners, so as not to be irresponsible and it does include nutrition and other therapies. What I now realise is that my reasons for not wanting surgery are very mixed. Yes, I knew there was an emotional cause, but for someone, like myself who is so suppressed and terrified of most my emotions, not having surgery certainly seemed risky. But, I thought I could at least give myself some time to try. I also, had fears in me about handing myself over to the mercy of the doctors – well-meaning as they may be, I didn’t want to be powerlessness. This is a particular fear in myself, and many women. I have experienced that many times in my life, as a woman and had some very negative sexual experiences, including being raped when my drink was spiked. So maybe saying a fear is underplaying what I feel is really there – terror. From wanting to avoid feeling powerlessness, I wanted control, but this also led to a feeling of rebelliousness: “You can’t have me!” So I know many have said I am very brave to not have conventional treatment, but I don’t feel it is necessarily brave what I am doing, but driven by other emotions – some of which I have identified, some I have not.
At the start, I did have a lot of fear and I even had to feel that maybe I wanted to die. I have felt despair a lot in my life and I noticed a part of me really felt that maybe going to spirit world would be easier. Fortunately, through Divine Truth teaching, I know that that is madness and we do not escape what we need to heal by passing to spirit world and in fact if we pass in a poor condition, with lots of addictions, it is very challenging. God does not allow us to run away from the truth, even when we refuse to acknowledge it. He is always trying to bring us home to Love. So I looked at my life and I felt some sadness that I had not as yet truly lived because of the emotional damage I am still holding onto. Enough damage to have caused cancer, to threaten my life. My parents were the original cause, but boy oh boy I have piled huge amounts on top of that with my own choices that haven’t been loving. I have treated myself very, very badly and hurt many others from my wounded state. It is difficult for us to admit what we have done that hurt others and we are not aware that we are doing most of it, as our view of love is so twisted and incorrect.
When I first heard Jesus use the word ‘sin’ I recoiled as it triggered my experiences with religion. I belonged to a baptist church when I was 17/18 years old and they preached what sinners we were and hell and damnation and God being angry with us. This so connected in what I received from my parents: anger, disapproval, not feeling good enough, being a really bad person that in the end I couldn’t stand the church any more. I was already in a state of no self worth and self punishment so felt I didn’t need anymore. Having recognised what triggered me, in the end, I understand that we do sin – we do make unloving choices, action and thoughts all the time. It doesn’t define us though and that is where Jesus’ true teachings, that he is sharing again now, differ. He encourages us to face the truth of our sin – to awaken to it – but we need to do this without judgement, to really feel the truth and feel sorry for what we have done ( repentance). But he also teaches that we are all God’s children, deeply loved, are the pinnacle of God’s creation and we have the power to change things in every moment. So I am less afraid of the word sin now and less afraid to look at my own sins. How can we change things we don’t even admit are there. The truth will set us free.
But that is a whole big topic, told better, by Jesus and Mary, than myself. Not long after my diagnosis I wrote to Jesus and Mary for some feedback and they kindly sent me some information about cancer they had put together ready for some FAQs they are making about physical illness. The first day I read it and shoved it under a book – didn’t want to hear it. A week later, I picked it up again and tried to absorb what they had said. When I opened to it I could feel what they said was the truth. However, I went into a complete shut down about the specific emotions for about 2 months or so. I had become temporarily homeless, as Robby and I decided to not live together and my finances were terrible. It all happened at once and became my excuse to avoid those emotions. I felt a few other things, but I basically went into survival mode. I did the physical things I needed to do, was kindly offered a room to stay in, but just tried to survive.
I realise now, that is how I have lived a lot of my life and always afraid that my whole world was going to crumble. This is what I learnt from my childhood: survival, but not living. It was the chaos and uncertainity of my childhood that leads to my huge addiction to control everything in my life, especially my emotions. Survival mode helped when I was a child, but has created a large amount of pain in my adult life. Noticing this has increased my desire to live now – to really live, to learn what that means and what really loving means. When I felt this I decided I needed help to unlock myself. I was praying to God sometimes, but my will to feel was not and is not strong enough because of my fears. Once I admitted I needed help I was looked for a therapist who had experience with trauma and I found one really quickly then. So finally, I was beginning to be ready to deal with some emotions in a currently patchy way. I only hit the surface a lot of the time, but I have experienced some deeper feelings – often in the middle of night – when I am alone and not distracted by anything else. ( Distraction is a big addiction of mine).
I have since re-read a number of times what Jesus and Mary wrote to me explaining that those of us with cancer are very blocked to personal truth. To block that we create many addictions and we want those addictions met. We do not understand that to create cancer it means that over a long period of time we have been very out of harmony with God’s Laws of Love: love of self and love of others. We also, often continue in those unloving ways which means we are not taking responsibility for the cancer in us. In fact, we are willing to create a self-attacking life threatening illness in order to get our addictions met – which indicates a lot of anger in the adult with cancer. We have a lot of demands that everyone else responds to those demands and the our cancer. We give to others often to get something back, but can continue to believe we are altruistic when we are not. Also, we do not understand that spirits are heavily involved in the disease due to our co-dependent demands and addictions with others.
Depending on your own response to these words, you may feel a bit like I did when I read them it is pretty harsh. The truth is that sometimes the truth can feel harsh. But the truth is the truth whether we like that truth or not and Jesus and Mary have been dealing with truth for 2000yrs: I have not. They know about real Love and I do not. They are more progressed in love than I am and so I need to listen. I mentioned above, how unlovingly I have treated my body for instance and that is just one group of unloving actions in me. What I haven’t wanted to know, until lately, is how my actions and thoughts have affected others. I have acted out of my hurt and hurt others, I have done a million things to avoid feeling emotions of anger, fear, terror. Even that is unloving to myself and to others because I am not being truthful. I am wearing a facade of “being ok,” of “being good” or whatever: we wear a thousand masks I sometimes feel. The cause stems from my childhood, but I have continued to make unloving choices. I have ignored, feelings inside that helped me know what was wrong and I have put so much energy in trying to control everything in order to “feel safe” and avoid my fears.
Inside I am terrified I am unlovable, that everyone will abandon me, that I am as terrible a person as I was told by my mother. But when those feelings start to surface the fear of how big they are leads me to do anything not to feel them and these become addictions and facades. Things like distracting myself with everyday tasks, eating, facebook, calling a friend – these are the easy ones to name. They are addictions every time I use them to avoid what I really feel, every time I lie to myself and others. This suppression shrinks my soul; when my soul is full of error and negative feelings there is not enough room for the good feelings – not the pretend I am happy feelings – I mean truly happy from deep within. My control addiction is massive – I try to control my environment, my home, myself and those around me. I am demanding all sorts of things in my addictive, suppressed state: “save me, save me;” “Please make me feel loved, valuable, worthy etc;””I don’t want to feel my fear, stop me feeling my fear” – and many more. And if someone doesn’t meet that demand then I get angry. We all get angry when an addiction isn’t met – whether it’s a physical or emotional addiction and that is very unloving. So over the years I have suppressed and suppressed and done everything in power to maintain this control over my emotions so I didn’t have to feel afraid and vulnerable and sad. In the process I have created a lot of damage to myself and to others and it now culminates in cancer. Our body is our last wake up call. There have been many wake up calls – God sends them out all the time through our law of attraction – either a good law of attraction letting us know we healed the error in us or a law of attraction letting us know we still have something to heal. The damage seeps from our soul, to our spirit body and then to our physical body. And that is what my cancer is a massive wake up call or as the quote above states… “physical metaphor for the extreme need to grow [in love]. “
Cervical cancer is caused by low sexual self worth. Jesus says it is suppressed anger with the male’s desire for sexual intimacy without emotional intimacy, or your own demand for emotional intimacy without sexual intimacy. It includes the willingness to sacrifice self by pandering to men sexually or emotionally rather than emotionally resolve the situation internally. It also includes an emotional unwillingness to engage sexually, but still physically engaging in order to avoid men’s disapproval or to obtain your own sexual satisfaction.
I am not sure at what age my sexual injuries started. I remember something strange when I was a girl – it a feeling I had that something that just happened wasn’t okay and my mother’s views on sex and the body did not help. As I said above, I experienced some very unpleasant things sexually and I handed my will over, like many women do, so many times. I had sex when I didn’t want to, with people I didn’t want to and I got forced into things I didn’t want to and I did things I didn’t want to – to avoid the man’s disapproval and anger and because I didn’t have enough worth to say no. So from that I agree with everything Jesus has said: I wanted emotional intimacy when it wasn’t really available and I let men have sex with me without emotional intimacy and yes over time that made me mad and very sad. I did sacrifice myself and my true values in order to gain validation and approval and avoid anger and disapproval. I was also a hypocrite, demanding emotional intimacy when I was unwilling to give it myself. So I agree that I developed an angry demand that a partner should make me happy sexually, when I could not do that myself; that he be emotionally intimate while I was a closed book. I feel angry about the way women are treated as objects and bodies and I have a lot of shame about the things I have done and a lot of sadness about losing my innocence, and my self.
It is the anger that creates the cancer. If you look at how cancer tumours look, they are knotted, tight tissue, red, inflamed and nasty looking – in a way an image of anger. The underlying fear and grief is there too – the cause, but it is feeling and releasing of this anger that will heal my cancer. I do not find this easy AT ALL. I judge my anger as a bad emotion – so I hold it in. When I do try to express it, it can often whittle away again. I have managed some of it and when it happened I went straight into some grief which is good. But there is more, I can feel that as I write. I am the Queen of Holding On so learning to let go, to jump from the plane, as Mary once described in her blog ( a great article on fear ) is part of my journey right now.
What I feel would help me most is to receive some of God’s Love – the most powerful healing force in the universe. So looking at why I block Her Love, why I prefer my addictions to Her Love and increasing my will to love are all required. I have been talking the talk of Divine Love for a while – looking at that narrow way and thinking that sure looks good, it makes sense, I can feel it in my soul, but looking is not moving and I need to move. The fact that I had to get cancer to start being more truthful is crazy really, but that is where I am at and I can’t say if I can do this or not. God knows I can and growing my faith in the Laws she made to help us is essential and having faith in myself, and for me my biggest block is my terror of overwhelming feelings.
But what I have learnt on this path is that sometimes you can think you know something, but when you do get to feel it, you were wrong. So some of what I write today may be true for me, but when I do progress I may discover I missed a lot of crap. But I am okay with that right now. I know very little, but what I do know is that intellectually I accept that releasing my emotions will help me and in fact I have some evidence in the few times I have hit something I feel so much better. But I am aware I like to hold onto my anger – it makes me feel strong and I don’t like feeling weak – or what I perceive as weakness. I am just afraid of letting go. The irony is when I soften I feel so much lighter and so much less tense: the rock becomes the river. This just goes to show it can take a while to re-educate our hurt selves, to build faith.
For me I carry a rucksack of heavily suppressed emotions, piled on top with addictions and then the accompanying spirits who are in co-dependence with me. It is pretty yuk! But I have a little faith that can change: a tiny seed, but a seed no less. One thing I never doubt is the truth in the spiritual path I have found. So yes, being honest about our emotions will start the cure for cancer and feeling them fully ( without hurting anyone) will cure it. If we remove the toxic emotions from our soul – it will seep through to our bodies and allow our physical body to rebalance and detoxify and heal itself – just as God designed.
At my recent check up, things were looking a little better. But if these events – these effects bring me closer to God, to my self and to my soul mate then that is what matters most. It truly does as they all lead to life, and love and joy. When I truly feel this I will feel anything, any time and any place and learn what to be fully human really is in all our softness.
With huge gratitude to Mary, Jesus and all those who take part in the videos that inspire me, challenge me, give me hope and keep me going.
With love
Maxine.
“Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.”
― Susan Pease Banitt, The Trauma Tool Kit: Healing PTSD from the Inside Out
The trauma stuff is difficult… very difficult.
Lately, I have been examining all areas of my life. God’s Law of Attraction has been powerfully indicating to me how very out of harmony with love and truth I have been living. My old habit and still only fading habit is to look at myself judgementally in this – but I am gradually encouraging myself in more compassion for myself. It is very gradual, but I want to alter the harshness and pointless judgement of everything I say and do: that old, old voice that whatever I do isn’t good enough. This voice goes way back to a very young age and runs very deep, but it does not mean it is the truth. It is only what I was led to believe and I constantly have to remind myself that God does not believe this of me, in fact she believes I am able to do so much and waits patiently while I re-educate myself in her truth that I am ” the most wondrous of her creations.” * Besides, self-judgement and self blame is actually a way to avoid how powerless we feel, it cons us into thinking it is just a matter of control, of getting it “right”, then we won’t feel so bad. I notice that if I don’t judge myself, blame or shame myself I am left with a gap of “What do I do now?”
I have a long way to go before I know this in my heart, God’s truth about myself, but I feel lately I resist this truth a bit less, letting it creep very slowly into my soul. I have made mistakes, I have completely misunderstood love and what is right or wrong. Lately, I find myself without a home, little money and a body that is suffering. When are bodies are sick, we have to know that we have been missing all the other signs that our lives, our souls are misaligned and lacking in love: love for ourselves and for others. We are disconnected from our real selves, living in darkness to a certain extent, denial of our own denial, suppressed, suffering, lacking in joy, identity and love. Maybe, this is too frank for some of you, but getting frank and honest with myself, I realise is the only way forward and some of it ain’t pretty and some of it is incredibly sad.
I feel I have nothing and yet I have everything. It is strange, surreal place to be and yet a place of some fear,but also wonder. When are arms are empty, they are ready to be filled. Yet to say my cup is empty is wrong, actually as lately, I have been blessed with incredible kindness from friends and strangers. I realised a few weeks ago that I keep everyone at a very long arm’s length. I walk around with a warning sign flashing “don’t come to too close, keep back, stop!” At the same time I get angry when other’s don’t seem to care, I project my frustrations out in a unspoken demand of ” make me feel better, come on, make me feel better – NOW!” This projected anger helps me avoid the fears and terror and grief that no-one, not one soul, not even God loves me: that I am totally alone, abandoned, hung out to dry, irredeemable and unloved. It helps me avoid that feeling of powerlessness again: I can’t control people or how they feel and I want to on some level so I feel safe. Over the years, I have done so many things to avoid feeling unloved and unsafe, created many physical and emotional addictions. I have been seething with anger, frozen with fear and all hidden ( or I would like to think so) behind my “nice girl” mask. This mask is about control, not letting rip, not expressing my anger – even when alone, not feeling my fear, not breaking into a the million pieces of grief that I sometimes feel rising in my throat.
So I have created a panic button which freezes me when I feel someone is getting too close. I don’t know how to receive love because my beliefs about love are that it is conditional and that if someone “loves” me they will want something from me, take from me, use or abuse me. But, not allowing myself to express my anger, means I just fire it out silently to those who get in the firing line: damaging myself and them. It’s yukky stuff. I have tried to rant or shout or scream when alone, but it doesn’t last long so I always gave up. Now I realise, I am just going to have to practice it, same with the other emotions, practice, desire, desire, desire. And don’t live in the fear! So I have been letting people in a little and received kindness and unexpected love. Instead of ducking out of that tea with a friend, I just go and try to deal with whatever comes up for me and have a desire to be more loving, less demanding.
With all this observing of myself and my habits, my constant freezing in certain situations and sometimes flight/fright reactions I realise what a state of stress and struggle I am constantly in: no wonder my body is sick right now. So now I have to admit, that I have a lot of trauma to release from myself and I need help. I pray to God, I talk to him, I try to talk more and more to him, but still have blocks. I am looking for a trauma therapist too and a dear friend has sent me a little online trauma course. I can feel my resistance. My intellect knows I need this, a bit of my heart is crying out for it, but my fear and resistance in going there still exists. Just writing about it causes my throat to constrict a little and some desire to run a million miles away.
However, I have been doing that for far too long. I am currently blessed to be staying with new friends in a cosy home, where I have a little room and shower room. I gave some of my furniture to a charity and the rest of my stuff is in storage. But I am in a new location, in a beautiful Devon town, surrounded by green hills, currently changing into the golds and reds of autumn. I can walk out my door and be in the countryside within minutes, I can buy wonderful organic food and enjoy this friendly town, which is softer and gentler than where I was living only 2 weeks ago. To me this is a sign of my desire to be softer and gentler, to find God in this “green and pleasant land.” For a while, I will nestle here and learn more about love: loving myself, loving others and loving God…trying to get to know the truth. I pray I can truly start to heal, to stop resisting, to stop being strong and trying to control everything.
I hope I can start to peel the layers of the onion to get to that trauma place. I can feel there are dark places I don’t want to go, memories I am afraid of, truth about my family that is difficult to bear, and truth about how in my own denial, my own survival techniques, I myself have been much more unloving that I have ever liked to admit. I may have been damaged as a child, but I have continued to damage myself dreadfully over the years in every area. I currently have a huge wake up call, God is knocking loudly on my door and for that I am grateful.
The root meaning of crisis is opportunity so for me my current crisis is an opportunity: a great act of love calling me to love more in every area. I can’t say I am aware of the purity/impurity of what I write: I just write, in the hope that we all stop denying what our lives are reflecting back at us. If we are in struggle, we are not facing the truth about something, we are not allowing our feelings to be present: it means we are resistant and fearful, not trusting what God is trying to show us.
How we get so afraid to feel? It is what makes us human, our ability to feel all range of emotions, to dance in the fire and swim in the waters of our feelings. We were meant to be a river and we became rocks. The rock may be long lasting, strong, tough, solid, but it can not create water. Whereas, water can shape and alter the rock in shape and form. A rock is static, rarely moving from one place, restricted. Yet water, can move over any place, it can permeate and move through tiny places, or gush through huge ravines. It connects everything and so much life exists in it. Indeed, the human body is 70-80 percent water. Water is free, ever-changing, sparkling. I love water, whether it’s a hot shower, a wild river or the vast ocean, so it seems mad that I have chosen to be a rock for so long! A stubborn, self reliant rock! I thought it was the only way to be, the only way to survive, but all I chose was an existence, not a life, not living. So can I join the gushing river? I hope so, though my fears make me step into a gentle brook first, dipping my toes in.
God knows I could dive in, I just have to believe it myself.
I do believe that being more compassionate with myself will help me soften to the emotions I need to feel, including those layers of trauma. One of the first things in the online course I am asked to do is to sit everyday for a short period and feel my body. That is become of aware of the feelings and sensations in my body. When we have had trauma we disassociate from ourselves so much. I have lived with various physical pains for years and just become used to it, almost numb. When I did the body exercise yesterday, I became aware of hip pain, knew pain, discomfort in my lower back, thoracic spine and an awful pain in my shoulders and neck: a feeling of someone pulling down my shoulders, but it being so rigid in my neck it was very uncomfortable and stiff, then from that pains in my head. Also, I realised I wasn’t breathing a lot of the time. So I am doing a lot of holding on and the pain in my body represents suppressed emotional pain. Reconnecting with my physical body and it’s pain may be the first step and I can see the logic in it so I shall persevere.
But what I realised too it is easy to be distracted by trying to solve things externally. Yes, I can eat healthily, I can go for walks, I can receive other treatments, but it is my willingness to “dive in” that will produce results. And in fact, I do want to do this with God, not on my own. My self reliance is like a cancer in my soul and it needs a lot of work: it needs humility, a whole ton of it. In biology, cancer cells are very good at tricking the bodies inflammatory responses so that the normal immune responses don’t attack the cancer cells. Well my self reliance is the same – it is very good at tricking me and telling me there is no other way, but to help yourself: it is arrogant and rigid and I need to remind myself that it is a very good trickest and I must desire to know the real damage that is being done and to want to change it, by becoming more God reliant and more self responsible. Self responsibility is not self reliance, by the way, it is more humble and willing to face truth. Self reliance will accept anything, including lies, in order to maintain being “right.”
When I was younger, this self reliance, this toughness, probably helped me survive, and so well that I have a belief that I can not do without it. At the moment, this feels like one of my biggest battles, my biggest belief system to break down, the biggest shell to crack. But if I do, then I feel I will allow myself to feel those terrors and traumas and stop putting on the “strong” facade. May the ice queen melt! May she find a space and scream and shout and shiver and cry! Self reliance is nothing more than a big, ugly rock that needs smashing into a thousand pieces!
I know I have jumped around a bit today – trauma to tantrums, rocks to water, self reliance to surrender. It kind of symbolises my own unravelling, and that’s ok.
The quote from above about being the “most wondrous of your creations” is from the prayer that Jesus wrote. It was changed into the biblical from of the Lord’s prayer, but this is the full, unedited version ( As on the divinetruth.com website). I love it. Some of the words challenged me when I first read it, but now I love it , even when my emotions struggle with it, it reveals much and it has the power to express everything I can’t always find the words for:
My Father, Who is in Heaven , I recognise that You are All Holy and Loving and Merciful, and that I am Your child, and not the subservient, sinful, and depraved creature that false teachers would have me believe.
I know that I am the greatest of Your creations, and the most wonderful of all Your Handiworks, and the object of Your Great Soul’s Love and Tenderest Care.
I know that Your Will is that I become at-one with You and partake of Your Great Love which You have bestowed upon me through Your Mercy and Desire that I become, in truth, Your child through Love, and not through the sacrifice and death of any of Your Creatures.
I pray that You will open up my soul to the inflowing of Your Love, and that then will come to me Your Holy Spirit to bring into my soul this, Your Divine Love, in great abundance, until my soul is transformed into the very essence of Yourself; and that there will come to me faith – such faith as will cause me to realize that I truly am your child and one with You in very substance, and not in image only.
Let me have such faith, as will cause me to know that You are my Father, and the bestower of every good and perfect gift, and that, only I myself, can prevent Your Love from changing me from the mortal to the immortal.
Let me never cease to realise that Your Love is waiting for each and all of us, and, that when I come to You, in faith and earnest aspiration, Your Love will never be withheld from me.
Keep me in the shadow of Your Love every hour and moment of my life, and help me to overcome all the temptations of the flesh, and the influence of the powers of the evil ones who so constantly surround me and endeavour to turn my thoughts away from You to the pleasures and allurements of this world.
I thank you for Your Love and the privilege of receiving it, and I believe that You are my Father – the Loving Father who smiles upon me in my weakness, and is always ready to help me and take me into Your Arms of Love.
I pray this with all the earnestness and sincere longings of my soul, and, trusting in Your Love, give You all the glory and honour and love that my finite soul can give.
AMEN
AMEN!
with love
Maxine
That is how it goes: when we let go of a lie, a falsehood, a false belief, an error on a certain subject our soul can then know the truth about that same subject. Jesus teaches that a truth and an error, on a particular subject, can not exist together in our soul. If we have an error, the truth can not exist: if we have the truth then an error can not exist – and there are thousands, probably more, different subjects we either know the truth or the error about. And this is not an intellectual recognition ( that’s the easy part, from my point of view); it has to be accepted emotionally: discovering the truth and accepting error is an emotional process. One expands our soul: one shrinks it. ( Human Soul Series: Divine Truth FAQ YouTube Channel)
I was just re-looking at my blog: examining the bit “About Us” and realising that when I wrote that I felt I knew the truth of a lot of things especially about Robby and I’s relationship. I knew so little, if anything! I wrote what I wanted to believe: that we were soulmates, without actually being a hundred percent sure, emotionally. How deep our self deception and self denial goes because we don’t want to accept we don’t know. That is more arrogant than being humble enough to really tune in to our true emotions. In this case, for me, it is being afraid of NOT knowing who my soulmate is – avoiding all those feelings of grief about my soulmate and not being able to connect with him, avoiding all the emotions I have around the opposite sex and my own gender: the dozens of reasons I don’t yet know in my soul who my soulmate is for sure. I have had moments of thinking I knew Robby was: but moments aren’t certainty. Moments are whispers in the wind, not the strong gales of truth. He may be, he may not, the truth is I do not know yet and he will agree neither does he about me.
But it is not soulmates I want to write about, it is about discovering truth and that was what this blog was about in the first place. I am in the process of unlearning lots of things I thought were true and finding out the real truth. This year, I have been struggling with my progress. I have confused unloving actions for loving ones, been in denial and resistance. What happens is that we find this path, this Divine Truth and we think, “Wow, this is great stuff.” It hits something in our soul that changes the way we look at things, but it also challenges many things, if not all, we thought we knew. So we start trying to feel our emotions, to get to know God. Then we discover, that feeling all our emotions all of the time is difficult: we’re not used to it. Then we discover, we don’t actually want to know God, in fact we pretty cross at him for making it so hard (our perception). We have to constantly re-look at things, poking and digging around in long forgotten dark places we wanted to forget. We keep trying, as we get intellectually, that what Jesus/AJ is teaching makes sense: it’s logical. Then there is the Jesus stuff to work through. Did we ever imagine Jesus would actually return? Could actually return? And when he did, he would be an Aussie with a large variety of T-shirts?? So we look at our expectations and fears around that, but we keep listening to this guy and he seems so loving, so truthful we feel we know he is Jesus. Because we keep listening, we discover more truths, intellectually and a few on a soul level. The trouble with listening to truth is upsets the error and the false beliefs ( which we actually feel are true) so much it scares the living daylights out of us and because of our fear, we keep resisting, denying, letting a little emotion be felt, then misunderstand how much truth we actually know. We keep going, and these new truths, this feeling of some emotions, opens up Pandora’s box: all those emotions we have suppressed are being stirred and more fear appears. These are some of the deeper emotions we have been doing a million things for years trying to avoid or pretend they are not there: all that childhood stuff and anything we have piled on top is shaken up. At this point, many leave the Divine Love Path. Even then they don’t often know why, they don’t realise their fear is shouting. So rather than know the truth, they blame Jesus, God, others, “The Path.” They go off looking for something that makes them feel they are trying to change, but is less uncomfortable or they return to their addictions and the life they had before. Sadly, people leave just at the point they may be about to hit some life-changing emotions.
This year, I feel this happened to me. I didn’t want to leave following these teachings, I didn’t want to stop trying, but have been in huge resistance in feeling, particularly fear. So I have blamed and closed off at times. There has been some progress in following my desires, such as my art, but emotionally I have been stubborn and hard-hearted, addicted to trying to control still. But God is ever-loving, and behind all that I still prayed sometimes, with feelings. I often haven’t even found the words. But because I haven’t been feeling my emotions, my body has been in pain, everyday. What I used to be proud of to call my high pain tolerance, I have now realised is just my ability to control and not allow myself to feel. The pain is the suppression of my emotions.
As a child, expressing my emotions led to judgement, punishment and shame so little me created a strong me that became very good at holding it all in: this is turn created “good girl” facade. The facade that “protected” me from harm – and that is just one facade. We all create many facades, which we learnt to pull up in different situations – sometimes to be liked, sometimes to avoid the threat of harm, to act the way we think we are expected: whatever the reason, it has come from a childhood hurt and an avoidance of feeling mostly fear and grief, but also anger/rage. We are so used to living this way, we don’t even know we are. The real us is squashed under our hurt self, who is squashed by our facade. Our facade wants to avoid feeling our true feeling so much it creates dozens of emotional addictions and some physical. We get into addictions with ourselves and with others, creating co-dependent relationships, that can appear happy ( because we get addictions met).
Understanding all this has helped me start to see and feel the damage my addictions and facade have done. I feel that I don’t know where or who the real me is; I feel I have been much more unloving at times that I want to admit, to others and very much to myself. My facade may have kept me “safe”, but I have been very unhappy and unfulfilled. In the Australian Assistance Groups, ( see the divine truth website) Mary and Jesus talked about breaking down our facade and addictions as the toughest thing we will ever do. I have to agree; I am finding it very, very tough and I am going to need to push myself further, and desire to know myself and God more. So why go on? Why not try something else?
I can only give this analogy. When you first find Divine Truth, hear about God’s Love, it is like a number of us going on a honeymoon in Spain: the sun is shining, the sea is warm, everything feels new and fresh. As you liked it so much, you decide you want to travel further, to see the world. So you jump on trains and planes, but your journey is not as romantic as you thought: there are delays, bad accommodation, dangerous drives up mountains on the edge of dirt tracks – it is exhausting and disheartening. You try a few journeys, but it just doesn’t seem to be going your way and you can no longer see the point, even when there are promises of seeing paradise, you decide you have had enough and you are going home to a warm bed, a hot shower and a cup of tea. You leave.
But not everyone goes, a few persist, despite the setbacks, they journey on, ever curious to see more. They start to experience the highs of climbing that mountain, swimming in that lake. As they learn to survive without all their creature comforts, they discover pleasures in new things they didn’t even imagine. The journey starts to take them to incredible places, vast blue oceans, tropical jungles, vast plains with exotic animals and the most glorious beaches. They start to look forward to the tropical island they have been promised at the end of their trip and when they arrive it is beyond anything they ever imagined – so beautiful it takes their breath away: it is paradise and now they really feel the honeymoon is about to begin… and this one, this one lasts forever.
I have always been a seeker, always looking for answers and experiences of some kind and I sense my seeking has brought me on a journey like no other now. To quote Jesus from the first century:
” Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks will receive, and anyone who seeks will find, and the door will be opened to him who knocks.” (Matthew ch 7 v7-8)
So this is why I am still here, even when I am not doing so well. I have some faith in God’s vision for us and a feeling in my heart paradise exists. I want that honeymoon, where love abounds, for always.
with love
Maxine
