Recently I had a very telling conversation with a loved one regarding my spiritual growth. My boyfriend and I had started a conversation about how each of us react to change, and I had mentioned that he gets weird when I begin to delve deep into my inner Spirit. He responded with, “well it is just you end up getting so angry”; to which I responded, “oh well I had a lot of anger as an adolescent so as I work through layers the anger would come out.” Though I also agreed with him it was not always manifested in a healthy way.
This was the system of meditation and yoga that I had always thought would happen. Like a facial when we begin to meditate or practice yoga, all the gunk begins to surface, works itself out and is gone. All the parts of ourselves that we were unhappy with, or that did not fit in the enlightened ideal, we would face and eventually let go and be free. That was until I began doing a chakra healing on myself.
I had begun reading “Chakra Therapy for Personal Growth and Healing” by Keith Sherwood. Sherwood presents a path to the Higher Self via the process of ‘integration’. Essentially we are putting all of the parts of the self to come back to the soul. He refers to these parts of ourselves that we are generally ‘trying to work though’ as little demons.
According to Sherwood, these little demons are only the parts of ourselves that have been rejected since our childhood, and because they were rejected they became dark, mischievous, and detrimental. However at their core they are just a part of who we are, and as such should be loved and nurtured by us. Further he does not refer to the ego as something that should be done away with, on the contrary he refers to it as the bridge between the material and spiritual world. It is the way in which we can both have a relationship with our Higher Selves and continue to participate in the drama of life. The ego is just as much a part of ourselves as is our Higher Self, and to deny it causes fractures in our souls, which keeps us from being whole, integrated beings.
Sherwood’s theory is that as children we become conditioned that certain parts of ourselves are not worthy, or are bad. When we do things that are undesirable we were punished with the underlying message of “that thing you did was bad, and the place it stemmed from is bad and should not be there.” This creates an unhealthy rift in us as beings that we are unworthy in some way, we need to be ‘fixed’.
This seemed like a radical ideal for me. Particularly as I am also reading an in-depth study of Patanjali’s “The Yoga Sutras” by Edwin Bryant. Here, the idea is in total to rid ourselves of the ego to let go of all things material and live in the spirit. Reading the two side by side caused me to truly take an in-depth look at myself and my spiritual reasonings.
One thing that I was aware of, is although I am a dedicated yogi, something about the way I was doing things was not working for me. I knew that the path to enlightenment was not something that was easy; but something in the message was being lost in translation. I was getting angry for a while any time I stepped my spiritual practices up a level. There was an emotional disconnect that was happening on some level and I needed to figure out what it was. Could it be that I was misinterpreting the message all along?
Here is the conclusion that I came to, we are all spiritual mutts. Yes, mutts. It is commonly accepted that there are as many ways to the Higher Self as there are living beings; and that being the case each one of us integrates new information into our spirits that resonates with us. None of us can truly follow the dogma of one person’s path and feel that it will lead us to enlightenment, on the contrary there will probably be something missing for us. So then the best we can do is to keep sharing information, learning, reading, studying and practicing everything that resonates with us on one level or another. Eventually something will break and we will be lead home – or if we are lucky enough to find a Guru they might 🙂
Practice in Peace and Love ❤
8petallotus 