Sometimes it feels like “my Bonnie,” my good, is always over there, just out of reach, on the other side of an impassable ocean.
All of my halfhearted attempts at meditation or affirmations don’t seem to change this present moment. Other than, perhaps, changing the mental framework. Which I suppose is one purpose of meditation and affirmations.
But after that brief state of tranquility is attained, with the last affirmation echoing as a soaring harmonic above a perfect chord, what then?
Regardless of how diligently I apply myself to meditating or affirming, it still seems that I, and my immediate world, are exactly as they were before my efforts. Even my cruddy mood tends to slide back into place like a slipped cog finding its way home.
Oh, how dreary I am, and how dreary all seems. Where is that can-do Yankee spirit when I need it?
*****
By this age (mid-60s) I suspect many seekers and strivers have gone through dozens of different programs, workshops, and workbooks, and written reams of journal material, perhaps ceremoniously burning those pages to transmute whatever was written.
That was one part of a forgiveness ritual that my Reiki teacher, Carolyn, gave me nearly five years ago. Write down the person and “what they did“ and my feelings about it. And after the pink and white and black candles had guttered, set fire to the written record of those transgressions and send them to the Universe for transmutation.
My, my, there were so many people to forgive. And, as Carolyn reminded me, myself most of all. I believe she encouraged me to do one forgiveness ritual simply on myself. And I can’t even remember if I did that.
I wonder why we sometimes find the being within our own skin the most difficult to treat with love? The most impossible to forgive?
*****
For several days now I’ve been repeating one of the affirmations from the Louise Hay book, You Can Heal Your Life. “I love myself, and I approve of myself.”
The first time I said “I approve of myself,” without even looking in a mirror as suggested, a mingled sense of relief and incredulity stole over me.
I said that absurd statement out loud and didn’t immediately experience a counterargument from the unhappy, frightened part of me that always sees the worst.
I approve of myself… I approve of myself…
Not followed by, “But you can’t approve of yourself because you have done…or not done…“
This is revelatory. In my recollection, I’ve never been able to say such an affirmation with a figurative straight face. Always, the chorus of internal clowns who try to distract me from my real life pop up and start hopping around. Telling me all the reasons why the positive affirmation is a crock of you-know-what and there’s no point in trying to convince myself otherwise.
Could it be that, unrecalled, I have indeed forgiven something in myself? Because I’m quite sure that a certain level of self-forgiveness needs to be in place before anything resembling self-approval can show up.
After all, if I view my life only as a series of failures and setbacks and things that I never quite finished, that doesn’t look like much to approve of.
Part of forgiving myself means not perpetually giving more weight to the perceived failures than to the pervasive chord of peace and acceptance that underlies my life. I can tune in to that chord when I remember it’s on the preset, right next to the Doom and Gloom Channel.
Old habits of looking for the bad in every situation are still with me. My perception of the state of the world—unsettled and inimical, with every authority figure imaginable apparently striving to make our lives hell—offers limitless fodder for fear.
And yet…when I remember to repeat those eight words, that pulls the teeth from the dragon of fear.
*****
Progress on whatever personal path I’m following never seems to happen the way I want it to or the way I think it should.
When I learned Reiki in January, 2017, I was sure I’d have my life in order and I would be pain-free within three months. Six at the most. Whatever made my hip hurt was energetic in nature and I could cure it using energy healing.
Over the last five years I’ve been “promised” by certain intuitions (and also by readings with various channels) that there was nothing mechanically wrong with my hip. It wasn’t deteriorating. All would be well.
And then I get some X-rays taken and come to find out…actually that’s not true. The bone is apparently dribbling away like sand from an hourglass.
Well shoot. All this time and all that work and in fact, I’m just another old lady victimized by arthritis.
Of course, I’m an old lady who is also a Reiki master and has spent the last five years studying and experiencing spirituality, psychic senses, Ascension, the whole nine yards. I must grudgingly admit, that probably wouldn’t have happened without this pain sending me to Reiki to jumpstart my current round on the wheel of life-learning.
Nonetheless, I would much prefer to have learned all this thirty years ago and now be coming into a vibrant “old age“ with med beds to make it even better.
*****
When I say I love myself, and I approve of myself, even just in my head, there’s a little tick of release in the back of my neck and across my shoulders. It occurs to me that it might be loosening the hold of the Archon implant, or perhaps just loosening the hold of deeply embedded habit. (1)
Whatever is loosening and releasing, it feels like it’s not a moment too soon.
A perfect reminder that now is both the perfect time for everything, and the only time that is.
(1) See, for example, Vidya Frazier’s information about implants, how they affect us, and how to diminish their effect on us. “But what if you were to discover that this inner critic mechanism was never part of the original human blueprint—that it is not a natural, inherent part of us as human beings? What if you were to understand that it is a type of AI implant that was spliced into the human DNA thousands of years ago by non-friendly beings who have been controlling humanity ever since from within the lower Fourth Dimension on the planet?…And yet, there are things you can understand about this implant that can create a sense of ease in dealing with it. And there are ways to work with it that will eventually assist you to step free of its controlling force inside of you.” http://vidyafrazier.com/dismantling-inner-critic/