Healing: That’s Not Truly Who I Am.
In this journey of helping myself to heal, I’m having to dig really deep into the core of one of my biggest faults. It’s something that has affected me deeply, but also those around me have been victims to it as well.
It’s defined part of our lives, and I’ve been afraid that I’ll spend the rest of my days trying to dig myself out of the hole it’s created.
And for the longest time, I feared that it would rule my life forever.
Because although I’ve been able to make a little headway, it’s not been anywhere near enough, and deep in my soul I have had the mistaken belief that this particular fault was a part of me. But this afternoon (Wednesday), I experienced at a deeper level a truth of something that I have written about before.
That the only true part of ‘us’ is our awareness. Everything else is hardware (biology) or software (psychology).
And while the two are often intermingled, neither of them are the true sense of self. In trying to understand this fault, I realized that what seemed to be inevitably joined to my soul was nothing more than an emotional virus that had been uploaded into my psyche by life, by experiences, and by the generations and society into which I was born.
Essentially, I realized that this facet of my soul is not of me, but of something else.
Which means its removal is in fact possible, and desirable. What seems like a simple realization struck me with an incredible amount of force.
I felt a shift in my very core, as though something that was desperately hanging into me lost its grip for a moment, and when it tried to hold onto me again, its strength was a great deal weaker.
And it’s scared, because know I know it is not an essential, irrevocable part of me, but something I can give up, and remove, without changing the core of who I am.
When something you thought defined you turns out to be something that impedes you, and demeans you, then you become aware that you can let it go without sustaining a moral injury to your core.
Allowing you the freedom to become the person you were always capable of being.
Because there’s nothing more destructive, more divisive and more demeaning than holding into a pathological way of behaving, believing it to be moral and ‘good’, when in fact it is destroying you and those around you.
When you honestly believe that sacrificing yourself day after day for the good of others is right, you’ll know an intense pain and heartache as you suffer and bleed in the depths of your supposed virtue.
And the conflict of your ‘self’ and your supposed virtue will burn you up inside.
But when you finally see that your supposed ‘good’ is wrong, and that the belief is not a part of you but merely an expression of your consciousness, then you can begin to lay down that behavior, and instead become a completely different person in that facet of your soul.
Because there is nothing good, or noble, or moral, about burning yourself down to keep others warm. Yes, we can serve, and yes we can give.
But to exist in a state of behavior that does not balance the exchange of energy and emotion between you is not moral, it is malignant.
And it’s wrong.
So today, I begin anew the struggle against this fault that has existed within me for so long, but now the battle will be different. For I am not fighting with ‘me’, but merely a malignant psychology that can be discarded. I don’t have to sacrifice my soul to overcome this, I just have to exist outside of it.
Knowing that the true me, the consciousness that is aware of me, is all that I have to be. Everything else is a manifestation, or an expression, and can be changed without damage to the core.
I just take the behavior, and lay it down.
It never was a part of me, it just looked like it for a long while.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings