Exploring your inner wounds

We distinguished four steps in the transformation from ego-based to heart-based consciousness.

1.	Being unsatisfied by what ego-based consciousness has to offer you, longing for ‘something else’: the beginning of the end.
2.	Becoming aware of your ties to ego-based consciousness, recognizing and releasing the emotions and thoughts that go with it: the middle of the end.
3.	Letting the old ego-based energies inside you die, throwing off the cocoon, becoming your new self: the end of the end.
4.	The awakening of a heart-based consciousness within you, motivated by love and freedom; helping others making the transition.

In this chapter, we will discuss step 2.

When you stop identifying yourself with the ego, you first get into a state of confusion about who you are. This confusion can be profound and very philosophical in nature. You get to ask questions about the meaning of life, about good and bad, about what you really feel and think as opposed to what others taught you to feel and think. These questions are suddenly very real to you and they have a direct bearing on life choices you make. You look at yourself and you think: is this me? Is this what I want? It is hard to make choices now, since nothing is self-evident anymore.

In fact, you are taking a step backwards now, a step into the deep: a step inward. You become aware of deeper parts of yourself, parts that are less conditioned by your upbringing and by society. You receive glimpses of who you truly are: your uniqueness, your individuality. You remember that there is a part to you that is not dependent upon anything around you, your parents, your work, your relationships, not even your body. This is when you - vaguely - sense your divinity, the part of you that is completely unbound and eternal.

In fact, you are all multidimensional beings: you can (and do) manifest yourselves in several different realities at the same time. You are not bound to a linear timeframe. Your current personality is only one aspect of the multidimensional entity you are. Whenever you realize that your current expression as a physical human being is simply one aspect of you, you go beyond it and you can get in touch with the greater Self that you are.

But before you get there, you need to heal the wounded parts within you.

Living according to the dictates and demands of the ego has created psychological wounds within you. Letting go of ego-based consciousness initially creates confusion, doubt and disorientation. After this first step, you enter a new stage: it is the stage of observing, understanding and healing your inner wounds. We will speak of this stage now.

With the ego in control, your actions and thoughts have been based on fear for a long time. In a sense, you have ruthlessly pursued your desire for power, recognition and control. In this, you have belied your own nature. Your behaviour has been based on outer standards instead of your own true needs. Also, you have not been able to really love someone else, since love is completely opposite to the need to control or dominate. This whole state of consciousness formed an attack on the integrity of your soul. The soul suffered under the reign of the ego.

When you disentangle yourself from the grip and the hold of the ego, this inner pain gets more visible to you. It is exposed to you – naked and raw – bereft of masks. You do not, however, know how to deal with this pain yet, since you still are in a state of confusion and disorientation. More often than not, you go through a stage of judging your inner wounds, because they seem to lead you to negative patterns of behavior: addiction, depression, uncontrollable mood swings, problems with communication, difficulties with –intimate– relationships.

This judgment of yourself inflicts more pain on the soul, who has just begun to turn toward the Light. She is letting go of the need for power and control, she is growing more sensitive…..and then she gets caught up in self-judgment.

Many people are wandering in this no man’s land in between the ego and the heart. They are searching for a more loving reality, but they are still in reach of the ego’s whip.

In fact, it is not your inner hurt that makes you fall prey to what you consider “negative traits” in yourself. It is your judgment of the hurt that causes the negativity. If you look at yourself with an attitude of acceptance, you do not see an addicted, or depressed, or failing persona. You just see inner pain that needs to be tended and cared for in the gentlest and kindest way possible.

The most important step in stage two of the transition from ego to heart is that you are willing to understand your inner pain: accept it, understand its origins, and allow it to be.

If you can perceive the core of fear that is inherent in all expressions of ego-centered consciousness, you have entered the reality of heart-based consciousness. However reprehensible someone’s behavior is, if you recognize the pain, the loneliness and the need for self-protection beneath, you get in touch with the soul displaying the negative behavior. As soon as you perceive the soul in fear, you are able to forgive.

This applies first and foremost with regard to yourself.

Take something in yourself that you truly detest. Something that really annoys you and you think you should have got rid of long ago. It may be insecurity, or laziness, or impatience, or an addiction: anything you feel should not be there. Now try to understand the real motive behind this trait or tendency. What compels you to feel or do this thing over and over? Can you perceive an element of fear within your motivation?

Do you notice that as soon as you realize there is fear, you grow mellow inside, feeling something like: “Oh gosh, I didn’t know you were so afraid! I will help you”. There is tolerance in your attitude now. There is love and forgiveness.

As long as you judge fear-based behavior, such as aggression, addiction, subservience, vanity (etcetera) as “bad”, “sinful” or “dumb”, you are judging. But judging is a fear-based activity itself. Have you noticed that when you judge, you go harsh inside. Something tightens, like lips pressing to each other and eyes growing cold. Why do we need to judge things? What is this urge to narrow things down to right and wrong? What is the fear beneath our need to judge? It is a fear of facing our own inner darkness. It is, essentially, a fear of living.

In letting go of ego-based consciousness, you will want to develop a whole new way of looking at things. This way of looking may be best described as neutral, meaning that it just takes notes of what is, and has no interest in how things “should be”. The causes and effects of ego-based behavior are observed, the core of fear within is recognized, and so the ego truly becomes transparent to you. Whatever is transparent to you, you can let go of if you want to.

Every human being knows fear. Every one of you knows the darkness and loneliness of being caught in fear. When fear is shown openly in the face of a child, most people react instantaneously by reaching out their hands. But when fear is shown indirectly, through masks of violence and brutality, it seems unforgivable. The more destructive and cruel the behavior is, the more difficult it is to perceive the fear and desolation behind.

Still, you are able to do so.

From the depths of your own experience of fear and desolation, you can get in touch with the deep fear in the souls of murderers, rapists, and criminals.

It is possible for you to understand their actions. And if you do, based on your own intimate experience with darkness, you can let go of it. You can let it be, without the need to judge any of it. If you truly understand fear as a power that is and that you are thoroughly acquainted with through your living experiences, you can let go of judging. Fear is neither good nor bad. Fear IS, and has a certain role to play.

In ways that are very hard to express in human concepts, fear is a blessing as well as a torture. In any case, the choice to allow fear in your reality was not made for you. You were the Gods – so to speak - that allowed fear to play a constitutive role in your reality. You did so not to torture yourself but TO CREATE, to create a reality that has more substance, more “fullness” to it than a world solely based on love. I realize this may sound unbelievable, but perhaps you can intuitively grasp what I am trying to say here.

Fear is a viable part of creation. Where fear is, love is not. Where love is not, love can be found in new and unpredictable ways. A whole range of emotions can be explored, even created, by the absence of love. The absence of love can be felt in a variety of ways. The presence of love can only be felt against the background of fear. Otherwise, it would be all pervading and you would not notice it as such.

So, by creating fear, by catapulting yourself outside of the ocean of love that surrounded you, you allowed yourself to experience love for the first time.

Do you understand?

You did not create love, but you created the experience of love. You needed an opposite, something other than love, to do this, and you used fear as an instrument. We, on the other side of the veil, can clearly see the spiritual role that fear plays in your reality. Therefore, we plead with you, again and again, not to judge. Please do not judge fear and the darkness it brings, either in yourself or in any other being. You are all created from love and to love you shall return.

When you enter stage two of the transformation process from ego to heart, you are confronted with your inner hurt, your fear, and you are invited to look at it with understanding and acceptance.

After becoming aware of the inner hurt and fear, you may go through a period of self-judgment first, in which you may display destructive behavior. It may seem that you are going backward instead of forward. At that point, you are in the danger zone, the no man’s land in between ego and heart. You know you want to get rid of the old, but you cannot yet really embrace the new, so you get caught up in self-doubt and self-judgment. The turning point is when you stop judging yourself - at least for a while.

It is only when you are prepared to look at yourself with an attitude of interest and openness, that you enter the reality of heart-based consciousness. Before that, you are merely comparing yourself to an artificial standard or ideal that, most of the time, you fall short of. You beat yourself up for this, and then you try again to force yourself into that mould that you created for yourself in your head.

This kind of perfectionism, I tell you, is a murderous weapon. It is quite the opposite of love. Love truly does not compare and, more importantly, it never wants to force you into anything or change you in any way. Love has no eye for what should be. The very category of ‘should’ is absent from the consciousness of the heart. Seen from the heart, moral categories are simply ways of interpreting or ‘dividing up’ reality. They are ideas in your head, and as you know, they may differ greatly from head to head. The very need to set standards and define the good is the forerunner to human conflict and war. It is not so much the ideas as the underlying need to control and fixate, that causes aggression and conflict.

Political, personal or spiritual ideals, standards of health, beauty and sanity, all provide you with standards of how things should be, of how you should behave. They all try to fixate and define what is GOOD.

But LOVE is not interested in defining the Good. It is not interested in ideas, but in reality. Love turns to what is real.

The heart is interested in all that is, in every actual expression of you, the destructive and the constructive ones. It simply takes note; it simply is there, encircling you with its presence, if you let it.

If you open up to the reality of love, the reality of the heart, you let go of judgment. You accept who you are at this moment. You realize that you are who you are because of a multitude of reasons, which you are now going to investigate and explore.

When this moment arrives, it is a great blessing for the soul. You are now able to heal yourself. You will fall back into self-judgment from time to time, but you now have a conscious memory of how love feels. And as soon as you have that, you will return to find it anew, for you have tasted the sweet perfume of Home again.

In the second stage of the transition from ego to heart, you get into closer contact with yourself. You are taking a closer look at your luggage from the past. You are reliving (painful) memories again. Memories from this life, perhaps memories of past lives. The psychological luggage you carry from all your lifetimes, up to the present, makes up your current identity. You may look upon this luggage as a suitcase full of clothes. You have played many roles in the past, assumed many identities, just like pieces of garment. Some roles you so strongly believed in, that you came to look upon them as part of your identity. “This is me”, you think of such roles or ‘clothes’.

When you truly investigate what these roles have to do with you, however, you will find out that you are not them. You are not the psychological roles or identities you assume. You are not your clothes. You have used these roles, from a soul-felt need for experience.

The soul takes delight in all experiences, because they are part of the learning process she committed herself to. All experiences are helpful and valuable in this respect.

When you take a closer look at your own roles or identities, you soon notice there have been painful, even traumatic experiences in your past, which still ‘stick’ to you. You seem unable to let go of them. They have become like a ‘second skin’: skin instead of mere garment.

Those are the difficult elements in your past, the pieces that now keep you from truly living and enjoying live. You have identified so much with these parts, that you think you are them. Because of this, you feel that you are a victim, and you draw negative conclusion from this about life. But these conclusions do not hold for life as such, they just hold for the traumatized parts in your soul consciousness.

It is these parts that need healing now. You do so by entering the past again, but with a consciousness that is more loving and wise than you ever had before. In the second stage of the transformation process from ego to heart, you heal episodes from the past by encircling them with your present consciousness. Through re-experiencing them in the present, from a heart-centered focus, you will let go of the traumatic parts in your past.

Trauma occurs when you experience a great loss or pain or evil, and you cannot understand why it happens. You have all experienced trauma, in many of your lives. In fact, the soul’s consciousness during the ego-stage is traumatized from the outset: there is the loss of Oneness or Home that it remembers and does not understand.

When you go back to the original traumatic event through imagination and you encircle it with the consciousness of the heart, you are changing your original response to the event. You change it from horror and disbelief, to simply taking note of what happens. In the regression, you simply take note of what happened, and this very act creates room for understanding, room for a spiritual understanding of what actually took place in this event. When this room is present, you are becoming master of your reality again. You are now able to come to an acceptance of the whole episode, since you understand from the heart that there is meaning and purpose to every thing that happens. You can sense from the heart that there is an element of free choice present in everything that occurs, and so you grow towards an acceptance of your own responsibility for the event. When you accept your own responsibility, you are free to move on.

It is only when you relate to your own past identities as an actor to his roles that you are free to go wherever you want. You are then free to enter heart-based consciousness. You no longer hold on to any aspect of what you have been in the past: victim or aggressor, male or female, black or white, poor or rich, etcetera. When you can be playful about the aspects of duality and simply use them whenever it brings you joy and creativity, you have grasped the meaning of live on earth. You will experience great happiness and a sort of homecoming. This is because you are getting in touch with the consciousness underlying the different roles and identities. You touch base with your own divine consciousness again, the realization that everything is one, in short, the reality of love.

We will close this chapter by giving you two exercises which may help you get in touch with that stream of oneness, that stream of divine consciousness that is the undercurrent of all your experiences.

Exercise 1

- Which psychological characteristics, which you consider as very much a part of you, cause you the most problems in your life? Name two such characteristics.

- Focus on the opposites of those characteristics. So if you picked ‘impatience’ or ‘insecurity’, you now focus on their counterparts: patience and self-confidence. Feel the energy of these characteristics for a moment.

- Go within and look for these energies inside of you. Name three examples from your own life in which you displayed these positive characteristics.

- Now that you are in touch with those positive characteristics, let their energy flow through you and feel how they balance you.

Exercise 2

- Relax and let your imagination travel back to a moment in which you felt very happy. Take the first thing that enters your mind. Feel the happiness again.

- Now go to a moment in which you felt extremely unhappy. Feel the essence of what you felt back then.

- Capture what is common to both experiences. Feel what is the same in both moments.

Both exercises are meant to make you aware of the underlying consciousness, the ever present “you-ness” in all of your experiences. This ever-present vessel of consciousness, the carrier of your experiences, is the divine You. It is your entrance to a reality beyond duality: the reality of the heart.

© Pamela Kribbe www.jeshua.net