Toward the Flame
No matter how much darkness has befallen a person, there is always fire at the bottom.
There is a dimension to life, and it has many layers. Most people only touch on the most superficial layers. Not because they are less than those who go much further, but because they have less practice of opening unknown doors. But if they feel the bite of the jump start, the fire inside ignites, and off they go!
The real question is how can we get the light ignited?
Trouble can do the trick.
Shan S @Flickr
True, a fire can burn you, but how do you make it into a source of light? Getting burned, learning the lessons, and overcoming the fear that arises after being burned.
Our ancestors were able to learn to make and control fire over 300,000 years ago; that is about 200,000 years before they began to use language. We tend to think we are smarter than our ancestors. Yet there is no doubt in my mind that if we could travel back in time not that far, but only 500 years in history, most likely we would be killed or enslaved within the first few days and, if we were not, we would be severely crushed emotionally in less than a week.
Life has a way to keep burning us, it is continuously cooking us and keeping us on our toes not to get burned. So, lean into it, stop fearing getting burned; it is a basic survival skill to live. Learn with each encounter with fire what you need so you can become a master at wielding fire and bring Light into your life.
We need a story, your story.
In my life when I was in my twenties, I was like a dog that circles around a cushion to sit down, I did not seem to find the right posture; I kept going in circles without sitting. It takes a catastrophe, a death of someone close, financial ruin, a divorce, or a tragic accident for us to stop and evaluate… the probability that any or all those touch you in your lifetime is 100%.
I guess that is why I write, I am trying to arrive at the most crucial point, sift through all the trifle things in life.
Let me tell you a story about a dear friend.
A child’s coming of age before it was her time.
My dear friend I will call Mary. According to her she had married the wrong person. He was psychologically abusive and maybe a couple of times physically aggressive too. You get an idea of how abused Mary felt, when she was pregnant with her eldest, her husband would scream and shout at her. When Carla was born, the father could not talk in the nursery because the baby would begin to cry in pain. The father needed to talk softly and change his tone so the baby would not recognize his voice.
By the age of four, Carla had a baby brother and Mary fell into deep postpartum depression. The father would go to work and Mary was left in the house with a newborn and her four-year-old daughter. Mary would lay in bed with her child by her side. The baby would begin to cry, and she couldn’t tend to her. One day the four-year-old Carla came into the room while the baby cried and said to her mother who was lying in bed, the baby is hungry! And Mary answered with disdain – so am I.
Something extraordinary happened, the small child went into the kitchen, prepared a sandwich and warmed some milk in a bottle for the baby and came up and got her mother to sit on the bed and eat, and fed the baby the bottle of milk.
To top this is no easy task, but Carla did, she kept helping her mother week after week. She would get Mary out of bed and take her to the shower, she learned how to change her brother’s diapers. That year Mary summoned herself and left the house with both kids to her mother’s who lived 200 kilometers away. I am convinced she was led by her daughter’s strength.
shivaphotographyy @Pixabay
Next Christmas, when Mary’s daughter was only five, the father attempted to regain his family and invited them to spend the holidays at a beach house. He was so convincing in telling Mary at Christmas dinner he was sorry, he wanted all of them to come back home with him after the celebrations. After dinner the husband gave presents to them all. The small Carla came close to Mary while still at the table and told her softly in her mother’s ear: “mommy it is a trap, don’t listen to him.”
Kids are all potential.
When confronted with a hard blow in life, a sort of reset happens, we are in an original mode to learn a new skill and start anew, almost like kids. This is most likely why it is painful. Therefore, life’s blows are open doors to set a new direction or establish new ground.
Like Carla in the previous story, something took control of her and guided her to do what needed to be done. When an adult lives through a really tough situation, we wobble and turn. Unless we are a really centered person, it takes us a while to discern what to do. Adults need to figure out what mask to put on to act, kids can be spontaneous and just do it. Most likely because their masks haven’t been set and so they are freer.
Another way to look at it is “a hard blow is a lesson”, the map that I had of the world was not a true representation of the geography I was on… of reality. Therefore, I crashed. When we have failed, there is no sane way to go back. The only sensible way is forward through the failure, and to draw a new map.
There is a failsafe mechanism inside of us when the “reset” happens, it pushes us to go back to the start position. I wrote more extensively on this in The Heart is a Fire Organ. Mainly that is the reason why when we are lost, we go around in circles. Think about it, when a relationship goes sour, we tend to look back on another relationship that held some fascination, even though it also ended or wasn’t ideal in any real measure. We tend to go round in circles and repeat what we have not accepted and fully integrated.
Fire in the darkness
No matter how much darkness, betrayal, or malevolence you have been a victim of, inflicted on yourself or by someone, there is a way out. All of us have a Grownup inside us, he or she is calling us to lead an adventure and it depends on us to cross that door. When confronted with adversity we can step up and find out who we can become by confronting that dragon in our life.
Over eighty-years ago, one country fell under the spell of resentment and vengeance. It bounced as an ideology of race supremacy and the glorious overpowering rise of an empire that will rule over the world. The Third Reich devastated most of Europe, and in the end, over sixty-years ago, the casualties amounted to about 80 million. Yet Germany found the way to become one of the greatest economic and influential countries in the world despite their failure.
How did they do it?
Information can inform you and guide you further.
Some fifty years ago, it was believed we could only learn up to our twenties and then the brain was set, and it was difficult to create new connections and the learning process was more arduous. Science and medicine have uncovered that no matter how old we are, our brain is adaptable and malleable, it is called neuroplasticity. The brain has the capacity for change, this magnificent organ can be activated by intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli and reorganizes itself creating new connections and patterns throughout its entire productive life.
The Universe is the tension between chaos and order;
if chaos and darkness could win, there would be no life on the universe.
Life prevails, and for a while it is miraculous.
You may need to wait for extrinsic stimuli to push you into changing your life, a long time ago I chose to figure out who I was. So, I kept following the crumbs to connect the dots of how I became who I was. It was revealing, I realized I needed to grow up.
Now I am envisioning who I can become with more ease.
The big question in life.
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or to take arms against a sea of troubles
and by opposing end them.
Hamlet, W. Shakespeare (1599)
You choose: wake up or keep dreaming. No matter what you choose you will find pain and trouble. Life is surrounded by tragedy, sickness, adversity, and conflict; pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. There is no avoiding the bad in life completely, there is postponing it. But if you confront the adversity in life, you will be in a better position to face whatever befalls you.
Life is suffering. When do you want to confront the ugly truth?
In our lives we need to assume the uncomfortable to get to our aim. Therefore, you will need to eat frogs in your life, one strategy is to eat them while they are small, because they grow; and eating large frogs is really unpleasant. Not eating them is not an option.
Swimming is something we do with our bodies.
There is a time you have to stop reading books and stop seeking advice, and you just have to jump. If you want to learn to swim, there is only so much theory and understanding you can learn, at one point you need to jump in the water and get wet, and experience the uneasiness of being clumsy and unskilled in unfamiliar surroundings.
Go head on, confront whatever comes your way when it comes… push towards the flame you will develop the skills for life to shine.
Coming next Wednesday…
How can I be at peace when death comes?
ELG21 @Pixabay