The Real Hero

Facing one’s fears takes magnanimous effort; but without self-awareness, how can we know our fears?

I was invited to dive deeper into the matrix a year ago in order to learn a very hard life lesson. After years of seeing through the matrix of life and working my way out along the fringes, I was pulled back kicking and screaming, due to a call I absolutely could not refuse. I knew what I was getting myself into. I knew the flow of time and emotional currents of water would sweep me along like a toy sailboat lost at sea. I knew I would be taking a deep breath and holding it for a very long time, but no matter how much one thinks they know, the struggle is only illusion, and illusion is life. Well, this life at least.

This life is all about experience and response. What do you experience? How do you respond? Everyone’s answer to each question is completely different no matter if they are a part of the same story, or illusion. It’s difficult for most people to accept this about reality. How can reality be illusion at the same time? How can what we see to be absolutely true and concrete right before our eyes be illusion? Simple. Everyone’s perception of truth is always unique and different to each one of us. What we see isn’t necessarily the same thing another person, say even your best friend who is “just like you,” may see. Once we can fully resolve this idea and integrate it into our view on life, I’ve found life becomes just a bit easier to ride.

Fear can be a loathsome and silent enemy or it can be the best friend one has ever made. It’s always your choice.

My role in this latest experience was that of Guide. To guide those that ask for help through the tumultuous waters of fear and the unknown. Fear can be a loathsome and silent enemy or it can be the best friend one has ever made. Its always your choice. I know that sounds a bit ridiculous. No one chooses fear to be their best friend, but hear me out before passing judgement.

My empathy sometimes overwhelms my ability to discern situations correctly. I feel The Other’s fear so deeply it feels as if I become who they are in that moment of connection. The closer I become with that other person, the more opportunity I have to connect, the longer this feeling (their feelings of fear), embeds itself within me until sometimes I can’t find the line that separates who I am from the other person. I used think this ability was a curse, preventing me from finding and keeping my own identity, but I know better now. This is a part of who I am and to know The Other is a part of what I am. It’s how I was created to experience this reality in a way different from most others. It’s a tool bestowed upon me so I can better understand and Guide those who ask me for help. This tool allows me to see the world differently than most.

My natural reaction to this world and its hardships are so different in fact, most others place a label on it and call people like me abnormal, over-sensitive, weird, emotional punching bag, doormat, too passive, etc…, ; which is fine, that’s their reality. If they choose to treat me as they so judge me that’s on them. I always have a choice to accept another’s judgement or walk away and ignore it; and depending on the person judging me, I more often than not choose to walk away and ignore. If a person can’t accept, or at the very least, respect who I choose to be they don’t deserve my emotional energy.

If a person can’t accept, or at the very least, respect who I choose to be they don’t deserve my emotional energy.

This call that couldn’t be refused was made by one of my children. Now all physical and familial bonds aside, I believe we come onto this plane of existence with a purpose; to learn and grow, and those souls who follow us and play the big roles in our lives are our Teachers (or Soul Mates). Soul Mates can be anyone who creates a pivotal or life molding response within our experiential lives (i.e., close family and friends, lost loves, current loves, and even arch enemies). They can be constant spiritual guides that we run to for advice or an easy going partner-in-crime that we decide are fun to run life experiments with together. They can also be what you consider your mirror-opposite. That one person in your life that just constantly reflects back to you all the things you hate about this reality and your role in it. What most people would consider our “enemy,” because who wants to be reminded of the things we don’t like about ourselves?

I have one of those mirror-opposites. We all do; sometimes we recognize them, sometimes we fight the recognition, but all times they are there experiencing the complete opposite of our chosen experience and responding in the complete opposite manner of our chosen responses. And these constant responses of what we consider “wrong” really hits a sore spot with us, enough to lose our own sense of self or balance. I’m sure my words are popping an image of that person for you right now in your minds-eye. It may have been only a flicker of an image, barely registered, that you ignored and said to yourself, “nahhh…,” but I highly suggest putting that knowledge in a back-pocket for now and reflecting on it at a later date, when you’re ready.

How much love does a soul have to volunteer to play such a distasteful role in another soul’s life?

Now I’m going off track here a bit, but step back with me for a moment and look from a universal perspective (as uncomfortable as the thought may seem right now), that person (that soul) in all actuality is the one soul that loves you so much, they are willing to play this kind of role in your experience so that you can learn your most valuable lesson on this plane of existence. That you yourself asked this soul to play for you, knowing in full authority yours and this other person’s choice to forget your past with one another in order to grow. How much love does a soul have to volunteer to play such a distasteful role in another soul’s life?

When I’m deep in the matrix, living out The Other, or in this instance my child’s life that I’ve been invited to Guide, feeling their roller coaster ride of emotions, I find it hard to keep perspective. The drama of The Other ensorcells me, distracting me from my neutral stance in life. This used to annoy the hell out of me because I enjoy the all-consuming peace of my neutrality. Being pulled from that peace, no matter the reason always made me react in the most unpleasant way and attack that person pulling me from my neutrality. I even admit to some degree I may have thought of myself as the better person because it was easier for me reach neutrality, or the higher path, when all others could only see one side of the path, or their own path. It took my own child doing this to me to become aware of the error and limitation in my own perspective.

I thank god for my children everyday and the lessons in life they help me to learn. Because it was a child doing this to me, my own child to boot and not a grown adult, I reacted with empathy instead of annoyance. I reacted with kindness and natural motherly instincts to nurture and soothe, instead of my own selfish habit of signing-off Others as selfish and emotionally immature; allowing myself the excuse to feel affronted by their request to pull me from my neutrality. I saw the difference immediately and put it on my tray of personal microscope slides for further self-analysis.

I expect all adults to have a certain level of emotional maturity and when they don’t meet those expectations, I blame them instead of understanding them.

This is why, when you’re emotionally clear enough to see (not allowing the fear to rule you but guide you), you see I was doing to those Others exactly what I was blaming them they were doing to me [sigh]. I finally saw the true problem in my formula of life and figured out how to solve the equation. Expectations! Again… (those pesky hidden feelings are a flipping b*word…). I finally realized that under my lingering frustration with most people I expected all adults to have a certain level of emotional maturity. When they don’t meet those expectations, I blame them and label them stubborn, foolish, or close-minded instead of understanding them. In this instance, for my child, I was blaming the person who was causing my child pain instead of understanding why the situation was happening to begin with and working with the true root problem; which was my child wasn’t the only one in pain and crying out for help.

How crazy is it to blame a child for not knowing something simply because they were never given the opportunity to learn? Crazy right? Isn’t it cruel and selfish to think this way about a child? So, why do we do this to adults? Just because they are physically older does not mean they were given more time to learn the same things we learned. They didn’t live our life. They lived their life. And maybe their life didn’t afford them the same opportunities to learn and grow as ours did. Once I came to understand that idea, that possibility, it made life so much easier to understand and even allowed me the chance to shed past hurts and effrontery through forgiveness. That was only the first step in a long-lived theme of lessons in my current life.

Thanks to my child allowing me the opportunity to help her face her fears, was I able to put into context my own fears and become clear enough to figure out my next steps in order to properly guide my child in hers. My next step was putting down my pride and allowing some ego-death to happen so I could begin my process of forgiving whom I considered to be my mirror-opposite, or arch enemy, or really the person I blamed for causing me pain through my childs pain. Yea, this emotional trauma bag gets a bit full and convuluted but its there and ripe for the picking apart. Something I really didn’t want to do, but realized not doing it was only hurting myself and my precious relationship with my child. In order to begin doing that I needed to start opening myself to further understanding that person (another thing I felt distaste towards doing). I mean come on…, when do you ever want to walk towards that person who pisses you off to high heaven? But I knew that’s what I needed to do in order to help my child. I took quite a few missteps along the way, because as I’ve mentioned before, its hard to stay neutral when embedded deep within the very depths of everyone’s emotional trauma including your own, but I don’t blame myself for those missteps. I try very hard to learn from them and keep going.

In the end, after a year-long struggle I find I’m still learning from not only my children, but this person who plays such a negative role in my life. The main lesson I learned is that I chose to place that person in a negative role. I judged them as less than savory and refused to allow them on my buffet table of life. That resistance was then felt outwards from my own energy and multiplied out into the universe (which is only natural for the universe to do), and reflected it back on me a million-fold, because that’s how things work. It didn’t matter how this person reacted to their life and affected my child’s (that’s their chosen energy to amplify which will always come back to them in their time), it only matters how I react to this person in my life.

Thankfully my long, drudging, efforts of learning to let go of my hurts and help my child at least begin to understand her own hurts won out and the result ended with more people becoming more aware than they were before. And, more importantly, positive beginning first steps were taken towards a better long-term solution for everyone involved. I am so thankful for all those involved that helped us along the way, including those on the “opposing side” because without those people to bolster (antagonize?) the need for change, change would never happen.

There are no sides to a story, there is only a story. The sides are created by the reader during their own interpretation of the story.

The real hero in this story is you. Always you, because only you can interpret this to have meaningful, positive context in your life or not. How will you choose to see? What kind of human are you?

Remember, you are loved.

Namaste

❤