Our Higher Selves Are Forcing Us to Face Our Shadows

Someone presented this cartoon recently on one of my favorite groups. Aside from what kind of cookies we all liked to “medicate” with, our dialog went like this…

Me: That hasn’t been working for me lately. The moments I’ve been resisting or medicating in some way… they come back anyway. Higher self seems to be forcing us now to deal with the stuff we’ve been resisting all our lives (and past lives as well?).

Me: So my new commitment, in addition to remembering my joy, is to be willing to sit in the discomfort of the moment to hear the message that it’s here to bring me about myself.

Friend: What do you mean, “sit in the discomfort of the moment”?

Me: I just did a talk to a private audience yesterday on “the Undeniability of the Law of Reflection.” The bottom line is that everything outer that is a trigger of inner discomfort is a reflection of something inner that still lives in us… something we experienced that was too painful or some way we abandoned ourselves because we thought we had to. We gave our power away in order to receive love. Or we experienced something hurtful that we didn’t understand at the time, so we stored it away unprocessed.

For me, “sitting in the discomfort of the moment” means allowing those inner messages (that are triggered by outer people, places, things, and events) to fully express within me, in spite of how emotionally uncomfortable they feel. It is only by allowing myself to be fully present with myself in the midst of emotional discomfort, only then can that stored emotional contraction in my subconscious unravel and be permanently released. When we feel inner discomfort or pain, regardless of the seeming outer trigger, and we (re-)suppress it or distract ourselves from it or medicate the pain away with Tylenol or food or sex or any addiction, we are avoiding the source of it. It will return at some point later, perhaps stronger or louder.