Today’s blog is different because it is a vlog! My first attempt and you will see that I do not have much in the way of technology and am on a steep learning curve. My laptop is now 10 years old bless her so the camera is not as sharp as it could be, but she is still going.
It’s a bit longer than I planned and to be honest I don’t know how to edit yet or have the software available. Besides, I wanted to just let it come out as it came out and you’ll see why when/if you watch it.
It is on my YouTube channel – currently just called Maxine Bell as it has a few other bits on there at the moment that I have done in the last few months, and the links to the seminars I refer to in the vlog are in the description section. If you make it to the end – well done!
A couple of months ago I was stood on train station platform at a time that I was reflecting a lot on fear and its impact in my life and the impact of fear in the world. I was looking at the advertising boards and had an image of giant posters with just the word FEAR printed on them in giant letters and I knew that in that moment that would be enough to make people afraid. That’s how big fear is in our lives – just the word can cause an emotional reaction and trigger our fear.
Since I first started reflecting and attempting to feel fear in recent months, the corona virus has hit the planet and today when I was in the supermarket the fear was palpable, but more than that were the emotions that were present to avoid the fear: panic, judgement and anger.
The root meaning of the word crisis is opportunity which I find amazing and in many ways represents to me how God created everything: there is always an opportunity and a different choice to make, even in the darkest moments. It is the Law of Attraction in play, offering us a chance to choose to feel our emotions and discover the Truth!
Last week when I sat with my fear, triggered by numerous pieces of news and social media posts about the virus and let myself feel some I felt lots of fear wrapped up in the initial feeling: fear of death because I don’t want to die in my current soul condition; fear that I haven’t been able to make my mark on the world as me, the real me; fear I haven’t done enough, been enough and more. Then it suddenly became the fear that permeated my childhood: that my mother would die and would abandon me. Her suicide attempts, the time I sat by her bed trying to wake her, trying to save her. I didn’t fully feel it, but it was good to just let myself travel down the fear for a while, which is when I realised the gift in this virus and what it may be asking us to experience emotionally. In fact, I suspect that all the unfelt fear in us has created it.
I noticed a few posts, encouraging people not to watch too much news, not to feed the fear, in fact to “stay calm” and tune into things that take your mind off of it: some of these posts were by teachers and coaches that have a lot of influence. But this is the wrong advice – dont ignore your fear, just feel it, experience and like me you may be surprised what layers are unpeeled.
I think one of the things that is happening, is that people are confusing panic with fear. It’s taken me a while to understand the difference and when Mary said that panic is an addiction to help us avoid our fear (Divine Truth Assistance Group 2014) I really had to sit with that one – it messed with my head for a while.
Panic seems like fear because it can feel awful, it can make us hyperventilate and feel extremely anxious, our heart racing, as in a panic attack. It tends to make us jump around and is frantic and grabs a lot of attention from others around us and actually ‘infects’ groups of people.
Definition of panic (dictionary.com):
A sudden overwhelming fear, with or without cause, that produces hysterical or irrational behavior, and that often spreads quickly through a group of persons or animals. (that is we act out in a way that helps us avoid fully feeling the fear)
Fear on the other hand is all encompassing and when you choose to feel it fully, you don’t think, you’re not able to run to the supermarket for toilet rolls: it has you in its grip, emotionally, in that moment. You can’t really function and at its extreme, when it is terror, you become almost blind and deaf and you shake uncontrollably. These extreme feelings of loss of control are what frighten us so much and often why we don’t want to feel fear. We have become afraid of fear itself.
The dictionary definitions of fear (dictionary.com):
a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.
I have done a lot of personal reflection on fear in recent months and a few weeks ago it came out in long verse in my journal. I have recorded it as an audio file:
It has been quite painful to see how much I have let fear lead my life; how much I have lived from fear; how many times I have made decisions from fear. That is I have wanted to avoid the experience of feeling my fears so much that I have I have made choices in addiction and in survival mode a lot of time: flight, fright or freeze.
For example, I have moved so many times and at times told myself it was a new adventure and that I didn’t fit in. I felt unhappy so I have thought that moving would improve things, but I was running and wanting to avoid the underlying grief I felt and the fear that I was truly unlovable and unacceptable as a person. I have moved at such a pace and never given myself to really feel the truth – I wanted to avoid the pain. I learnt this in my childhood, but sadly I have continued the pattern and added it too it.
I can often observe how fear impacts events in the world, but I am finding it harder to see the harm my fear has done to others around me. I am aware of some of the damage to my son, but I know I have a lot more truth to face in this area. We often play down the damage fear does. We are somewhat quicker to acknowledge the harm anger does (though even here we lack feeling the full truth of its damage) but with fear we justify it constantly: “I can’t do that, I am too afraid too,” and we often receive a lot of sympathy from others.
Many of Jesus talks include information and teaching about fear, which indicates the importance of this emotion if we don’t feel it and what can change if we do. Some talks have fear in the title, but you will also find it covered in talks about emotions, truth and other topics so I can’t list them all, but I have put a few links at the end of this post.
Some key points that Jesus said:
Fear is a False Expectation Appearing Real. It is an untruth.
Feeling fear will unlock other emotions
Fear always suppresses desire. I f you are not feeling your desires passionately, you must be afraid.
We can choose to feel fear. It is just an emotion and God created us to feel all emotions, including fear.
Fear rejects truth
Fear prevents you from being at one with God
Holding onto fear prevents truth from changing your life.
Truth and error on any one subject cannot exist in our soul at the same time so we need to release error: releasing error, including fear has to be done emotionally. It is not an intellectual process.
All fear is what causes physical pain and disease in some way.
Fear is about suppressing, denying and controlling the underlying emotions.
Fear is a life of constraint
If we act in fear there are penalties on our soul so it increases our pain and suffering.
Every time we are afraid for our children’s welfare we are no longer loving them – we’re controlling them. There is no love in fear.
If you are not feeling your fear, you are living in it.
Living in fear means you are surrounded by spirits who want you to remain afraid, often so that they can manipulate and control you. They surround and oppress a person in fear. Anything that is false can be manipulated. If you feel your fear fully you will no longer attract these spirits and you’ll start to feel you desires again.
Embrace your passions and desires, it will trigger your fear so that you can feel it and release it.
God is not afraid for you, not afraid of your choices and not afraid of what happens to you.
That last point is a big statement – it tells us a lot: our irrational our fear is, because if God is not worried for us then logically we must ultimately be safe. In the Divine Truth Assistance Groups of 2016 Jesus draws a vase or pot on the board, which represents the soul – the error in our soul we need to release. He asks the audience how much of that pot is fear and the response is that a large proportion of what we have to release is fear. But we are wrong and what is a large chunk for us is in reality just a slither in that pot. Most of what we have to release is the sin we have done in order to avoid feeling our error emotions, including of course fear. There was silence for a moment as the penny dropped. At home, watching online, I rewound the video and listened again.
Gosh we have made such a big deal of fear, we have raised it up into an insurmountable mountain when in reality it is a hill. We have justified holding onto it and living in it, growing it in our imaginations to avoid feeling our underlying grief, oppressing our hurt child. I can now see that is how I have lived most of my life – living in fear, making poor choices, not fully expressing my desires or pursuing my passions and in fact self-sabotaging and compromising myself hugely. I have not shared the gift of myself with others and have projected fear out into the world and become part of the problems fear creates: war, injustice, prejudice, anger, violence, neediness and narcissism.
I have dishonoured who God made me to be and hidden in the shadows. All this makes me feel very sad. In fear, I did not make the most of the opportunity I had in Australia last year at the Volunteer Selection Programme: choosing fear over truth.
I have felt like giving up a number of times, which is giving into fear and it’s time to stop that – it has become an addiction to live in fear and stay small. Well, I’m bored of that and I have been experimenting with my desires, looking back at little Maxine and her personality and I beginning to see and like some of it. There is a lot more to me, to all of us. Living in fear is like being in monochrome, when God made us to be in technicolour and I like colour, lots of colour!
Maxine@2020
Talks on Fear on the Divine Truth YouTube Channel or Divine Truth FAQ YouTube Channel. There is so much information on fear – this is just some of the talks:
Earth Changes, Fear and Desire parts 1 and 2:
Fear is Your Friend parts 1 and 2 ( 2008)
Fear Revisted (2009)
The Human Soul: Processing Fear (2009) Parts 1 and 2
After a few weeks of resistance and rebellion and not feeling happy at all in that space and then spending a good amount of time in nature this weekend -swimming in the sea, walking on the moors, by rivers, where despite ranting at God, when faced with such beauty I can not help but be awestruck and challenged by the different perspective that beauty and the love of it’s creation/Creator confronts me with. I am still feeling bloody-minded (there are fears I don’t want to feel), but I came across these interviews from 2011, after a friend was interested in what I was telling her about the divine truth teaching and having not seen these all the way through before, found them really good and poignant for me to feel other things beside just my resistance. Just can’t deny these teachings or these two amazing souls!
In the first video Jesus and Mary talk about their identity, why they are back on earth, who God is, why we struggle with believing in God, soulmates, and a basic summary of what they teach and demonstrate. In the second video the subjects range from the Law of Compensation, forgiveness and repentance, non-violent resistance, why Hitler came about, 9/11 and earth changes. All really interesting stuff and a good introduction (along with Secrets of the Universe talks on the Divine Truth information page on this website) – if you want to get an overview of what I talk about regularly or are just curious about the fact Jesus and Mary are back on earth. They are interviewed by Geoff Whitehouse who says he has been an atheist for 20 years or so and been reading Richard Dawson and suchlike, but meeting Jesus and Mary has made him rethink…
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.
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.
Jesus describes humility as “the passionate desire to feel ALL of our emotions.” That is every single emotion in every single moment. It is the process of tuning in, becoming sensitive, to how we feel ALL of the time, to listening and acknowledging what is going on in our soul. Our feelings are part of our soul and if felt properly tell us the truth of what is going on, what is going wrong and what is going right. Humility is an essential part of healing, our self-growth and realisation, our growth in love and truth, and if we so desire, our journey to to become at one with God by receiving his love.
So why is it so hard? I have been pondering this question tonight and see that is not the real question. The real question is:
Why am I not more humble? Why do I resist feeling all of my emotions? So why do I resist truth and keep myself from love?
It makes no sense and I have always prided myself on my common sense. I am creative, but I love logic too. I look around at the world and see so much illogical thought and action and wonder why so many don’t see it too. So logically, it makes sense to have humility, to feel, to release the error and discover truth and mostly to choose love, for myself and for others. Logically, humility is obvious, simple and powerful.
So what does humility feel like? For me, in the times when I let myself feel true emotions: rage, fear, grief; afterwards it feels soft, but strong: beautiful, and real. The harsh edges have melted, the armour dropped away. I gain a small sense of the real me. It is surrender and surrender is freeing: wings unclipped, effortless. It is as though I can rest: I don’t have to “try”, or be strong, or keep going, or pushing or pulling one way and another. Even if I am in tears, there is a huge relief, of not have to keep trying to be what others or I expect of me. The is no “should” just I am. It is amazing and yet I resist. Why?
So if I am not humble, if I am not letting myself feel my emotions, what am I doing instead? Instead, I am in a facade and I am used to the facade; I like it; I am used to it. I created it when I was young to protect me, to help me survive. My parents may have encouraged the facade, because the facade rarely upsets the status quo. The one where we are all pretending to be alive, to function, to be a family, to live some kind of life. The one where being too emotional is seen as weakness or drama, where emotions are suppressed, from the first moment our mother says, “don’t cry sweetie, ” we are told not to feel. Feelings frighten us, the truth frightens us. We fear being overwhelmed and create a desire to control and manage our life and our emotions. So this is what I have done, and so have you.
From conception, I inherited emotional injuries from my parents, and so it continued as their injuries spilled out into their parenting and my childhood. This cycle of damage perpetuates the pain and builds the facade. To make it worse, if we want to scream or cry because we feel emotional pain, we are told to be quiet, to not cry, to not express: we ingest our parents and environments beliefs about emotions. So we build more facade. This cycle shrinks us and we become masters of control: I became a master of control.
The facade is our survival technique, but the longer we hold onto it, the more damage is done. But we are in it so utterly, that we will do anything to keep it. We create emotional and physical addictions to numb the pain, to not feel too much: we drink, we eat, we take drugs, we demand to be rescued, to be saved, to look for someone to care for us, to keep us feeling good. We will do anything to feel good and avoid our pain. Over a lifetime we create thousands of addictions, so many, so ingrained we don’t even notice.
So here I am, like many of you, living in a facade to protect my heart, to keep the lid on my Pandora’s box of emotions from my childhood. I am so used to living this way, that even though I have experienced a little of the wonder of humility, my desire to NOT feel outweighs my desire to feel. Inside, I am terrified to feel overwhelmed. So many overwhelming things happened when I was a child: tsunami’s came my way and I couldn’t swim. The constant flight and fright mode, left me fighting for control, amid the chaos. And I got it, I got how to control what I could, whether it was food, feelings, my environment or people: anything to NOT feel the terror of what was going on. And I am still there, afraid of the terror and the grief inside.
So now I sit with feet in both camps. I know, intellectually, that to have humility will change everything for me. I understand it is the way to the real me, to knowing myself and my soulmate, to knowing my real Parent and yet, I stubbornly hang on to my facade and addictions: clinging to the rock face; not wanting to jump and yet knowing I must. Because without humilty I can’t progress, I can’t love or be loved and that makes me sad. I see how in my facade, I defend my point of view, I deny what I really feel to my own detriment and to the detriment of the other half of my soul. My facade hurts me and it hurts others. It is harsh, yukky, unattractive. It pushes away my soulmate, that beautiful man.It keeps me away from God and her love and from real joy.
I don’t like my facade. It has become like an old item of clothing: once a favourite – familiar and safe and yet if you really look at it, it if full of mothballs, scruffy and musty. I really need to throw it out, “thanks for you help mate, but it’s time for you to go.” It’s time for me to feel.
So it’s not humility that is hard. Being emotional is how God created us. It’s our resistance to feel,and the deep hold we let our facade and addictions have in our life. In the end we have the choice to change it, as we do with everything in life. It is our desire, our will to make it happen that creates the change. So far, I feel my desire has been half-hearted. I have made fear my God and fear weaves a web of denial and lack. Fear keeps me from love.
I am sorry, to all those who offer me love and I keep it at bay through my fear. I am sorry I do that to you and I am sorry I do it to myself. My facade has a firm hold and it cares not about Love, but about maintaining itself – at all costs. But I don’t want to give in to it: chip by chip; brick by brick; wall by wall it will come down if I really want it to. I believe in Love – not the love the world has shown me , but a love my soul understands exists somewhere. I believe in a life with so many more possibilities than the facade can ever offer us.
Humility isn’t hard, my facade is. Humility offers freedom, fear a prison. Humility takes us to truth and to love, not to pain and suffering. Humility is one of the biggest gifts we can give ourselves. It is the biggest gift I can give to myself: all of me.
