#88 July ’16

Everything Arises From…

In the years that I have been practicing and teaching ‘clearing’ it has become increasingly obvious how all things arise, and why.

My own path has been one of healing. Perhaps ‘healing’ is the wrong word, it may be better put as my coming to understand why I have acted as I have in certain situations. In fact, why those situations arose in the first place requiring me to act as I did. Together with the understanding a freedom arises, a recognition of an underlying issue that has coloured all aspects of my life.

Everyone I work with, and I suspect everyone that I don’t! suffers from their own conditioned past.

Our past is often buried so deep we can no longer recall major points along the way, we bury it partly because we were not fully conscious when the conditioning took place – we became lost in the experience – and partly because of fear, shame, a desire to feel only ‘good’ things, to run away from pain.

For example, we have trouble relating to others. We will attract others who also have similar troubles. The real issues start when we, as a part of our conditioning, blame the other for our discomfort. Why though would we have trouble relating to others? What happened to make this so?

If we experienced significant trauma as a child when attempting to relate to others, we would spend much of our life compensating for this experience. Effectively this means that we would be controlled by our own issues when relating to others, we would ‘see’ problems that others have and want to ‘fix’ them. We externalise our own issues, projecting them onto those around us in our attempt to heal our self. We may not realise this is what we are doing at the time for we are so lost in our own drama we cannot even begin to recognise it.

We try to keep the peace, to make everyone happy failing to see we are the ones needing to be at peace, to be happy. We find our own happiness when others are happy, for then they are no longer a threat to the peace and harmony we so desperately seek for ourselves.

Out of this apparently troubled past everything arises. The way we relate to others, and those we attract with whom to relate. The ‘other’ will have their own issues, and as said earlier, while each blames the other conflict is inevitable.

But beyond this immediate effect we begin to see how all of our decisions, right down to the clothes we wear, and why we wear particular styles, the jobs we are drawn to, the very thoughts that are a constant undercurrent to our existence, all arise because of trauma, or conditioning from childhood.

Our whole life is based upon a huge misconception, a misunderstanding that arose because those around us also suffered from their own conditioned past and simply passed that past onto us without any real conscious awareness. Without stopping to question just what the heck they were doing, We do the same, we pass our own lack of true awareness onto our children and complain when the act out our own dramas.

This is not meant to condemn or criticise the past but to help make us aware that one issue, one single event, that was repeated over and over in the past, has controlled our lives, and continues to do so to this day. We are so lost in dealing with the results of that conditioning that we spend our lives trying to make sense, to create a safe place, to manipulate, to control our environment, always looking for that peace and happiness.

As a result of this constant externalising we become more radical, polarised, easily manipulated by fears that lie beneath the surface.  Following this pattern we continually fail to recognise that in order to truly find peace and happiness we must look within, to stop struggling, stop trying to control, to avoid, to dominate. We need to pause, take a breath and accept who we appear to have become and learn to stop giving energy to that which opposes our goal. Essentially, to learn to love the self and all that shows up.

Clearing, for me, has provided that safe haven, a place where I could embrace the pain and suffering without taking it personally, a place where I could learn to love the self without the need to blame others for the journey.

A place where I could see – and embrace – the truth and set myself free from a conditioned past.