September, 2007

The Hidden Blessing in Limitation by Theo

With all of the talk about abundance these days, we would like to put in a good word for limitation. The experience of limitation—whether it be around money, relationships, success, beauty, health or anything else—is not a mistake. If you are experiencing limitation, then that is the right experience for you—for now. Limitation is a fact of life in this dimension, and it will be part of your experience in various ways until you leave this dimension. It is natural to life on this plane. It serves a purpose, and that purpose is generally to evolve you in some way. Once that evolution is complete, the limitation is likely to disappear or it simply won’t be seen as a limitation anymore.

The tendency is to take an experience of limitation personally. You either feel persecuted by it or you blame yourself for it. You think you shouldn’t be having the experience you are having, and you imagine that your life would be much better without it. That is the ego’s perspective, and it will only bring suffering because it is a perspective that lacks truth. If you are having a certain experience, then you “should” be having that experience; and from the perspective of essence, your divine Self, it is not true that your life would be better without it. It is much truer to see that the experience is serving you in some way, that even that experience has some benefit. This perspective will free you up from the ego’s suffering and help you see the situation as essence sees it and learn whatever essences intends for you to learn from it.

Limitation is especially difficult for the egoic self because the ego is under the illusion that it can make life better. When faced with the sense of powerlessness over some limitation, it suffers greatly. It is ashamed and angry over not being able to manifest what it wants. So the ego’s suffering is two-fold: It suffers over not having what it wants, and it suffers a blow to its identity.

This blow to the ego is actually a good thing because it is not the wise and competent guide it claims to be. The inability to manifest what you want is actually an opportunity to experience the truth that there is something more going on than the ego’s goals, its needs, its perceptions, its beliefs, and its desires. Something else also has the power to shape life, and that is essence, or the divine within you. Essence often has intentions that contradict the ego’s plans. Essence’s intentions, unlike the ego’s, don’t relate to desire-fulfillment as much as to emotional and spiritual growth, development of talents, cultivation of love and other qualities, and experience for experience’s sake. The Divine within you is out to experience life through you, and sometimes what it wants to experience and what it intends for you to learn require difficult circumstances, challenges, and limitation.

At times, essence uses limitation to bring about lessons or development, or to encourage you to change your course or your thinking. Limitation has great value because it teaches you patience, restraint, self-reliance, and other positive qualities. Limitation develops you in ways that nothing else can. It also motivates you to develop talents and skills that you might not have developed otherwise. More importantly, limitation often drives you deeper within yourself. As a result of limitation, many begin the spiritual search or begin to study themselves. They look into emotional, psychological, and spiritual matters to try to fix their “problem.” When, because of a lack of resources, the distractions of the ego can’t be indulged in, people find other ways to be happy. They learn (hopefully) to be happy with simplicity itself—with this very simple and uncomplicated moment. Limitation and the suffering it causes wake people up out of the egoic state of consciousness. Suffering brings the ego to its knees, and that is a good thing.

Sometimes limitation is created by your negative thinking rather than by essence. In that case, that is also the right experience. The suffering that results motivates you to discover where your thinking went wrong. You eventually discover that your attitudes or beliefs are the cause of the limitation, and then you can become free of them. This kind of growth can take more than a lifetime, and often does. However, today, with all the resources for understanding the mind, psychology, and the emotions, people can move through issues and beyond negative thinking much more quickly. Evolution is highly speeded up right now because of all of the information and new healing techniques that are available.

It is when you surrender to what is limiting you that you find its gifts. The struggle against the limitation is what causes suffering, not the limitation itself. If limitation is accepted, then there is no suffering. Acceptance, however, often doesn’t come easily because there is a deep-seated belief that the limiting condition will remain if you accept it. Quite the opposite is true: Once you accept the limitation, you can learn from it, and once you learn from it, you will be free from it, or at least free from suffering over it.

Once you stop resisting the experience you are having, you begin to discover that it is not all bad, as the ego assumes. Every experience has its advantages, and you can find advantages even in an experience of limitation, although the ego is not the part of you that discovers this. Acceptance aligns you with essence, and then it is possible to experience what essence experiences, which is peace, contentment, and joy. And then, it is possible to learn what essence is trying to teach you because it will guide you through your intuition to learn what you are meant to learn or do what you are meant to do.

When you are aligned with essence, happiness can be found even in limiting circumstances. However, this can only happen when you are very present to the moment instead of to your thoughts, which will keep you from discovering the gift in the experience of limitation and any other experience. The ego is looking to have things its way, but that will never be, so it is always unhappy. But when you surrender to the way things are, you discover that life is miraculously flowing toward greater goodness, harmony, and love—and that is what you really want. To be happy no matter what is going on, you have to want growth and experience more than you want what you want. Once you do, you won’t need limitation to teach you because you will be getting what life is trying to teach you in each moment. When you pay attention to the moment instead of the mind, life unfolds quite beautifully without the struggles and suffering the ego creates.

Clearing Negative Thoughts

(Excerpted from Getting Free: How to Move Beyond Conditioning and Be Happy by Gina Lake)

Negative thoughts eventually weaken if you don’t give them your attention. The problem is that some negative thoughts are difficult to ignore. Those are most likely to involve feelings, particularly fear. Any fearful thought is quite difficult to ignore because we generally believe our fearful thoughts help keep us safe. However, when we examine this belief—that our fearful thoughts help keep us safe—we see how very little truth there is to it. Most of our fears never manifest, not because thinking about them prevented them, but because our fears are generally not grounded in reality. They are just thoughts about some future possibility.

The ego generates fears as a way of keeping us tied to it. It generates fears and then a plan to avoid those fears, which is unnecessary and useless. We can waste a lot of time and energy worrying about and planning for things that never happen. Essence has ways of protecting us from whatever we aren’t meant to experience. It protects us in moments of danger by telling us intuitively what we need to do to be safe. As for things we are meant to experience, there is little we can do about those but bring essence to them when they occur. A good rule of thumb is: If it’s a fear, it isn’t worth your attention. All fears come from the ego, and these thoughts, like so many others, are not good guides for how to live our life.

Other thoughts that can be difficult to ignore are thoughts about the past that are charged with feelings. Some investigative work might need to be done with recurring thoughts that relate to a traumatic or difficult event. But for the most part, ignoring them as best you can will cause them to arise less frequently and with less intensity. On some level, we think we can change the past by thinking about it, but thinking about the past has no value, and it takes us out of the present where all is well and all is always well.

Analyzing a troubling experience from the past can stir up more emotions and keep you tied to it. Any investigation of the past needs to done from the standpoint of a curious and accepting witness. Experiencing an event from the standpoint of a bystander can diffuse the emotions, lessen their occurrence, and heal the past, while re-experiencing an event as the victim makes it more real and keeps the emotions intact. Past-life experiences need to be worked with in the same way. If they can’t be experienced as a bystander who is able to bring compassion, acceptance, and understanding to the situation, then they shouldn’t be returned to at all.

Exercise: Clearing Negative Thoughts: Our deepest conditioning tends to come up the most. Whatever negative thoughts you think the most point to your deepest complexes, which are likely to need some investigation and healing. Make a list of the thoughts that most plague you and leave you feeling unhappy about yourself. Those are the ones that especially need healing. These negative thoughts also need ignoring. The more you are able to just let negative thoughts come and go without reacting to them emotionally (identifying with them), the weaker they will become, until there is little emotion left to them. Thoughts that are just thoughts and have no emotion attached to them are easy to ignore with a little commitment to doing that.

It isn’t necessary to analyze or go to battle with your negative thoughts. This is the mind’s way of dealing with negative thoughts. The mind can be used to unravel the mind through investigation, but it isn’t useful to argue with a negative thought or over-analyze it from the level of the mind. This brings you into greater involvement with the mind, not less involvement. The reason to do this work is to lessen your involvement with the mind, not increase it. Going to battle with conditioning ensures that it will remain strong: “What you resist persists,” as the saying goes.

The antidote to conditioning is acceptance, but the mind isn’t what can give this acceptance. Acceptance happens when you drop into essence (your true self) and notice your negative thoughts. From this place, negative thoughts are not a problem because you see that they have nothing to do with you—the real you. When you don’t identify with your negative thoughts, they have no power to stir up feelings or motivate your behavior. It’s as if they belonged to someone else. If someone else were having these thoughts, would they be a problem for you? Of course not. That’s how it is when you are identified with essence. You have compassion for the suffering such thoughts cause, but they don’t cause you to suffer. However, if you are having difficulty ignoring or being detached from a thought, then try putting your attention on something truer:

Exercise: Directing Your Attention to the Now and Away from Negativity: When it seems difficult to ignore a thought, then don’t try. Instead, turn your attention onto something beautiful or onto a sound or a sensation—onto the experience of the moment. Become very present to what is arising now in this moment, and thoughts automatically drop into the background (unless you start thinking about what you are experiencing). Thoughts take you out of the present moment into another time—into the past or the future. What about now? What’s happening now? Check it out. Experience what is happening right now. You may be surprised. Something delightful is always happening in the now. Find it and experience it.

The mind leads you to believe that you have a problem and life is troublesome and difficult. That’s the mind’s take on life in nearly every moment. The truth is much better than that—much brighter. For those who can see from essence’s eyes, there is much beauty available in every moment. Turn your attention to that, and watch your thoughts disappear into the nothingness from which they came.

 
Question from a reader: Aren't we complete within ourselves when we realize who we are? If not, then why is this battle going on for me to forget relationships? If a divine relationship is truly what I want and it is synchronized with the True Self or Me, why is it that it seems I am being blocked from having this ultimate experience?

Theo: There are different depths of realization. When you realize the Self fully, you love whatever is and say yes to it. Some realize who they are but are still identified with the ego, and so they suffer over the ego’s ideas about relationship and the ego’s desires. The idea of an ideal relationship is something the ego suffers over greatly. There is no such thing. The “ideal relationship” is whatever you are experiencing, including no relationship. Relationships can’t make you happy any more than anything else can make you happy. Happiness is a state of being, not something you can get from outside yourself.

Sometimes the ego’s desires are at odds with essence’s. Essence often blocks relationships for a time in order to help you develop in other ways, either personally, emotionally, or professionally. Many have a life purpose that requires very focused energy, and relationships are sometimes denied them for a while because they would interfere with this focus. Relationships are also often denied for a time because the solitude and suffering caused by this can bring you to the Truth.

Those who are awakened are full within themselves and don’t need a relationship to be happy. And yet, essence may intend for them to have a relationship if it serves them in some way, perhaps through offering love and support or even growth, because growth continues to happen even after awakening. The difference is that awakened people don’t enter into relationships because they need someone to make them happy; they enter into them for the joy of sharing with another, and that is truly a divine relationship.

Relationships of this nature aren’t possible from the level of ego, which forms relationships primarily out of need and on the basis of its conditioning. The ego chooses mates that fit its conditioning—its preferences, likes, desires, dreams, and fantasies. Awakened individuals, on the other hand, choose relationships that suit and support their state of consciousness, conscious lifestyle, and life purpose. Or more accurately, essence brings these people together, and the ego doesn’t interfere with this, as it often does when people are identified with the ego. Awakened people still have conditioning, but they ignore it, so it doesn’t cause problems in their relationship.

If you are meant to have a relationship, you will have the kind of relationship you are meant to have. Every relationship serves to develop and prepare you for a divine relationship. If you aren’t meant to have a relationship for the time being, you won’t. Acceptance of this is the way out of suffering. Use this time to grow, heal, and realize the Self more fully, and you will discover that you don’t need a relationship after all to be happy.

Note: Theo is a collective consciousness on the mid-causal plane and a teacher for earth.

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