Now let’s borrow from what we know of the process of paradigmatic breakthrough.
When something isn’t working and the basics of our situation are called into question, we experience cognitive dissonance. Things don’t fit. They don’t seem right. A process of paradigm breakdown begins.
Matters reach a point where the status quo can no longer be maintained. In my case, I could no longer make heads or tails out of what was driving me and yet I knew something was. I needed to know what it was before I succumbed to it.
This was the moment of breakdown, the moment of letting go of the feeling that I controlled the situation. Something was controlling me.
Immediately following it was an “Aha!” or moment of paradigmatic breakthrough and clarity. In a flash of awareness, (1) I realized that my stress was increasing because I, a hermit-monk in my own mind, have more people in my life than I’ve ever been used to managing.
I saw that I was having the equivalent of the bends, coming up too quickly. I had suddenly thrown open my acquaintanceship doors and was spinning from the increase in communication of every sort that it brought. As a hermit, I had no precedent to fall back on, no social graces to rely on.
I also saw that I add to the situation by feeling responsible for everyone and nearly collapse from the stress I create as a result of it. I saw that I needed to let go of feeling responsible for people, an issue that keeps recurring for me.
The next thing I saw was that the workload created by responding to so many emails and Skype messages was also near toppling me. I began letting people on Skype and email know how busy I am.
This problem of availability may face lightworkers generally, as small a number as we are out of seven billion. I’m just going to know more and more people so it isn’t as if this predicament will go away for me. It must be creatively resolved.
And if I don’t handle it, I’ll move from being creative to reactive. I’ll cease being the chooser and become the victim. (2) Life then begins to go downhill. I’m being transparent here about typical lightworker dilemmas.
The strangeness of relating to so many people was the hidden factor that was adding to my stress. Seeing it, I watched the majority of my stress subside. (3) The fact that release followed says that I saw more of the truth of the matter.
So what I’ve tried to illustrate here are the kinds of problems we may meet in our capacity as lightworker agents of change. Some matters that affect us will be hidden from us. Some may need to be coaxed to the surface.
As long as we don’t deal with them, we’ll feel cognitive dissonance, discomfort and stress. Once we know what they are and address them, we’ll feel relief from stress.
This may seem very basic now, but, once the busy-ness of life sets in, we’ll be asking for a checklist, handbook, and a mobile app! (Just kidding!)
Long-range weather forecast and horoscope combined: Expect no end to change in the foreseeable future. Accept that you may need to be inventive and arrive at new ways of responding to change, maybe perpetually, certainly repeatedly!
Footnotes
(1) Whether guided or not, I don’t know. Most probably guided.
(2) Right away, my mind, dyed in the color of the growth movement, remembered what John Enright said: on the Wheel of Life, I’m at “Doing it and not digging it.” Unless I change course, my next stop will be “Not doing it and digging it.”
But I don’t want to go there. I want to be at “Doing it and digging it” and so to do that I have to figure out what to let go of and what to hold on to. (See “John Enright’s Wheel of Life” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2012/04/25/john-enrights-wheel-of-life/.)
(3) The truth had set me free.