At times it can be a tough pill to swallow that we’ve called in our experiences as part of our soul’s journey.
I know I’m not alone in the moments of “Are you ******* serious?” when yet another growth opportunity plunders into your life? As the **** hits the fan, life unravels around you, oxygen is sucked out of your very being and you’re left feeling lost in space. The thought, “what is the point?” crosses the mind. Alone in that I am also not.
I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the times in my life when normality has been flattened and those thoughts have crossed my mind.
What has changed, though, is my knowing that life will again change. I will again learn more about myself. Clarity will return with greater sharpness. My wisdom will deepen and my passion will return. This I know with certainty.
Overtime, this evidence has shown itself again and again. It doesn’t matter the situation or circumstances, it always happens.
The Hard Medicine of Surrender
The key is an obvious yet not easy one. Surrender. Don’t fight, argue, push, pull, resist, ignore, bury or try bypass. Surrender. To not is to delay, magnify and intensify the experience, and that is a futile exercise.
This is where the truth that we call in the experiences of our soul is important to acknowledge.
We think we have so much control over our human life, but the reality is we are one small fragment of a much larger reality.
We have no control over the journey our soul agreed to before we were born and we have many obstacles to overcome and much conditioning and patterning to undo before we even have the slightest insight into our souls journey and its purpose on this earth plane.
But it is possible and it begins with surrender. Allowing and trusting that each experience brings you closer to your souls truth and greater acceptance of the truth that your life’s experiences are for your souls experimentation – agreed to before you’re human existed.
It may seem a far-fetched ideology, but live a few years, get curious enough to question and seek a deeper understanding, and the patterns will emerge. The evidence will be obvious across your whole life.
The mind will want to make logical sense of it all and will keep digging, exploring, convincing and arguing – for forever if you let it!
But some things don’t need explanation, they merely need to be seen, acknowledged and accepted with faith. If you don’t ignore the evidence and switch off the monkey mind, you will see the obvious right under your nose.
This is the time to fully surrender and allow it to unfold with grace and trust. The more you do, the easier it becomes each time.
And there lies another tough pill. Once you open the door, there is no turning back. Your soul will continue to test you, expand you, redirect you, correct you, collapse you, rebuild you.
That is the human experience and the soul’s purpose.
When the Body Demands the Truth
So many times in my life, when I’ve been in the depths of my soul and the murkiness of my shadows, I have wanted it all to stop.
At my worst, I made myself physically ill from refusing to surrender and pushing against my reality. My body fully collapsed me before I took any notice. A heart attack and fibromyalgia stripped away my ego and ignorance and left me with no choice but to look at what I was hiding from.
It took me 7 years to listen and open myself to the truth of my soul and another 7 to know how to listen to my body, trust that wisdom will come and surrender with greater ease and grace.
Recognising early that each experience is part of my souls journey here is still work in progress. I had one such realisation tonight.
Keeping the Heart Open Through the Storm
It’s been 15 months since my life turned on it’s axis head first into a journey of grief, abandonment, betrayal and loss. Three significant losses, each three months apart of each other, flattened me in every sense. I am nowhere near the same woman I was then, today.
Despite the collapse, the panic attacks, the overwhelm, the outpouring of sadness, the exhaustion, the feeling of relentless kicks, my clarity was super sharp and my intuitive knowing almost instant. My body also spoke loud and clear.
I knew my consciousness was online despite my human not being, and I had a strange peace that all was as it should be and it couldn’t be any other way.
Here and now I can see that even clearer. And yet I find myself realising how I’ve still managed to overlook the key pattern my soul has been trying to show me.
I’ve seen many areas for growth and many patterns requiring rewiring. I’ve had tremendous understanding of what’s mine to take accountability for and what is others and their souls’ responsibility.
And yet a sadness has still been present. I knew it was there. It frustrated me a little and yet I let it stay.
I realised many months ago I had managed to keep my heart open and loving even in the midst of my grief. I saw in my grief how powerful my ability to love is, and how fortunate I was to be able to experience love to the depths I do.
I believe it true that “it is better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all”.
I saw the depth of my love and saw how I gave it easier to others than to myself. I also saw the sacrifices I made around my values to receive the love of others.
My clarity was super sharp and grief poured out at how I’d let myself down. But at the same time came gratitude that despite all the losses, I hadn’t closed my heart.
When the marriage to my son’s father ended, I closed my heart to everyone and everything except my sons. I became a recluse, a shadow of my former self and extremely unwell.
I stayed on my own for close to 10 years before I allowed another in. Seven years later and that relationship is finished.
Both were deep loves, very different but both very important relationships to me.
Both where the loves of my life at that time in my life.
Both will forever impact my life, my growth, and who I am today.
Both were harsh teachers that showed me the depth and truth of who I am as a soul.
The first closed my heart in grief, the second kept my heart open in grief.
A clear sign of how much I have grown and learned and the depth of my trust in that which I have no control – the work of my soul, and what I’m here to experience.
Abandonment and loss I’ve known for some time are part of my soul’s journey.
My soul arrived here in human form, knowing it would be abandoned at birth. Before my first breath was taken, my soul knew what lay ahead (adoption).
My life has been littered with abandonment, betrayal and loss. But only recently have I shifted the focus from those that have played that role in my life, inward to how I had lost and abandoned myself along the way.
Returning Home to Self-Love
And then a new theme entered the path. Love. Only through the sudden ending of my second significant relationship did I see the role of love and its relationship to abandonment, betrayal and loss.
I closed my heart the first time. Kept it open the second time. What lays ahead for love now?
Is it to give to myself the depth of love I’ve given others?
Or is there a chance to love again and truly break the pattern of love, loss and abandonment that my soul has chosen to journey with as its human experience in this lifetime?
Have I found the answer? The missing piece of the path. An open heart filled with love that gives fully to itself the depth of love it gives others?
Perhaps it’s never truly been about giving it to others only and was always meant to be to self first?
I don’t know what lays ahead, but I know there’s so much more to be curious about with love and I know it begins with self.
With an open heart, I am curious to explore and to fill my being with a love greater than anyone else could possibly ever give. Because all I have to overcome is the limitations I’ve placed upon myself.
