Look at yourself in your daily life, in the present, in your life now. How often do you still do battle with yourself, do you condemn what rises up in you, what naturally springs up in you and wants to flow? In this state of judgement sits a criticizing energy, a coldness: “this should not be, this is wrong, this needs to go away”. Feel this energy – does it help you?
I want to now take you to a different way of looking at yourself; a place where change canoccur, but without fighting, without a heavy-handed tackling of yourself. To make this clear, let me give you an example.
Imagine something happens in your life that calls up a feeling of anger or irritation in you – whatever you want to name it. Now, you can react to that anger in different ways. If you are not used to reflecting on your emotions, and your reactions are very primary, then there is nothing there but anger – you are angry, period.
You are engulfed in it, and you identify with the anger. Often, it then happens that you put the cause of your anger outside yourself – you project the blame onto someone else. Someone else did something wrong and it is his or her fault that you feel angry. This is the most primary reaction – you are identified with your anger,you are angry.
Another possibility is what I call the second way to react. You are angry and there is immediately a voice in your head that says, “this should not happen; this is wrong; it is not good that I became angry; I must suppress this.”
It might be that suppressing your anger has been taught to you through your religious upbringing or from a societal perspective. For example: it is better, nicer, more morally upright not to show your anger to others. It certainly applies to women that it is not fitting to express anger openly – that it is not feminine.
There are all sorts of ideas you have been talked into, causing you to judge anger in yourself. Then what happens? There is anger in you, and immediately there wells up an opinion over it: “this is not allowed, this is wrong.” Your anger then becomes your shadow side because, literally, it may not come into the Light – it should not be seen.
What happens to the anger if it is suppressed in this way? It does not disappear, it goes behind your back to affect you in other ways; it may cause you to be scared and anxious. You can not utilize the power that resides in the anger, because you do not allow yourself to use it.
You may show your sweet, nice, helpful side, but not that passionate, angry side – the rebellious side of yourself. So the anger becomes locked in, and you think you are different from other people because you have these feelings, so you might even start to distance yourself from others.
In any case, this creates a bitter conflict inside yourself, and seemingly between two selves, a Light self and a Dark self. Meanwhile, you are caught in this painful game, and it hurts inside, because you can not express yourself. It is this judgement that limits you.
Do you really become a better person because of this reaction? Is suppressing your own emotions going to lead you to the ideal of a peaceful, loving human being? If I describe all this to you, you can see very clearly that this type of reaction does not work – it does not lead to real peace, to real inner balance.
Yet you do all this to yourself. Very often, you silence your emotions, because they are not good according to the morals you hold, and you do not reflect on these morals – where they come from, and by whom or by what have they been fed to you.
So this is what I recommend you do: to not think about it, but to feel it. Feel that energy that resides in the judgments you fire toward yourself, with your images of what is ideal and what you “should do”, which sometimes comes out of seemingly very high motives –let that be. You do not become enlightened by reining in your emotions and by systematically suppressing them.
There is a third way – a third way to experience your own human emotions. The first way was to totally identify with your anger, as in the previous example. The second way was to crowd it out, to suppress it and to condemn it.
The third way is to allow it – to let it be and to transcend it. That is what consciousness does. The consciousness of which I speak does not judge – it is a state of being.
It is a way of observation that is at the same time creative. Now, many spiritual traditions have said: be aware of yourself, that is sufficient. But then you wonder: how can that be? How can the mere awareness of myself bring about change in the flow of my emotions?
You have to realize that consciousness is something very powerful. It is much more than a passive registering of an emotion – consciousness is an intense creative force.
Now imagine again that something in the outside world evokes a powerful emotion in you – for example, anger. When you deal with itconsciously, you observe it fully in yourself. You do nothing about it, while at the same time you keep observing and watching.
You no longer identify with the anger, you do not lose yourself in it, you just allow the anger to be what it is. This is a state of detachment, but a detachment that takes great strength, because everything you have learned seduces you into being drawn into your moods, insidethe emotion of anger or fear. And to make it more complicated, you also get drawn into judgment about that anger or fear.
So you are being drawn in two ways and pulled away fromconsciousness, the exit I talked about in the beginning: the exit that is the road to inner peace. Your usual ways of dealing with emotions draw you away from that center point, as it were, away from that consciousness, and yet this is the only way out.
Only by silently observing the full extent of the emotion, you do not become unconscious, you remain entirely present. You do not let yourself be drawn in – neither by the emotion, nor by the judgment about the emotion. You look at it in full consciousness and with a feeling of softness: ”this is the way it is in me”.
“I see anger arise in me; I feel it course through my body”. “My stomach reacts, or my heart; my thoughts are racing to justify reasons for my emotion”. “My thoughts tell me I am right and not the other person.” All this you can see happen as you observe yourself, but you do not go along with it. You do not drown in it; you do not go under.
That is consciousness – this is clarity of mind. And in this way you bring to rest the demons in your life: the fear, the anger, the mistrust. You give them strength when you identify with them, or if you fight them with judgement – either way, you nurture them.
The only way to transcend them is to rise above them, as it were, with your consciousness – not to fight them, but simply to let them be.
What then happens to you? Consciousness is not something static; things do not remain as they are. You will notice that if you do not nourish the energy of the emotion or of your judgment about it, they will gradually dissipate. In other words, your equilibrium becomes stronger; your basic feeling becomes more one of peace and joy.
Because if there is no longer a battle in your heart and in your soul, the joy comes bubbling upward. You see life with a milder eye. You see the movement of emotions in your body and you observe them. You also observe the thoughts that start to race through your head, with a look that is soft and mild. Know that the ability to observe, and to not be swallowed up, is something very powerful and strong. This is what it is all about: this is the exit!
I want to ask you now, in this moment, to experience the power of your own consciousness – the pure being – and the liberation by way of it that allows you to feelthere is nothing you need to change in yourself. Feel the tranquility and the clarity of this consciousness: that is who you really are.
Put away the false judgments. Let the emotions flow and do not suppress them – they are part of you and some of them have a message. Ask yourself if you have an emotion that you fear, one that is bothering you, one you fight? Maybe one that has become taboo for you? Allow it now to come forward in the form of a child or an animal – to present itself; to show itself. That child might express itself completely, or it might even misbehave.
Whatever happens, it must be allowed to do everything it wants to do, and to tell you what it feels. You are the awareness that looks and says, “Yes, I want to see you; I want to hear your story, express it”. “Tell me your story, because it is your truth; it might not bethe Truth, but I want to hear your story.”
Experience your emotions that way and do not condemn them. Let them come to speak with you. Treat them with the mildness of a wise old person, and observe what that child or animal brings.
There is often hidden in a negative emotion a pure life force that wants to emerge, one that has been choked to death by all the prejudices of judgement. Let the child or animal come skipping toward you. Maybe it changes its appearance now – receive it with loving openness.
Awareness transforms – it is the major instrument for change, yet at the same time, it wants to change nothing. Awareness says, “Yes – yes to what is!” It is receptive and accepting of all that is there, and this changes everything, because it sets you free.
“Jeshua: The Third Way,” by Pamela Kribbe, July 4, 2012, athttp://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/the-path-of-awareness/jeshua-the-third-way/.