I am currently in London enjoying a sense of peace and freedom for the first time since I crossed the border from Canada to the United States during COVID. In fact, I had dinner last night with a 22 year old who was intuitively traveling for the same reason — whatever is percolating in the United States, from an energetic perspective, has been incredibly challenging for intuitive and sensitive souls. So in this new place of getting back into my meditation practice, I heard my inner voice tell me to re-open A New Earth. I am glad I followed my intuition.
For a large portion of this book, Tolle talks about the pain-body or the unhealed aspects of our soul that gets triggered and the energy our ego feeds off of. I have always resonated with the concept of relational spirituality that seeks to see our relationship with a higher power as an attachment relationship that influences our relationships in real life. If we see the Universe as all knowing and punishing, we are likely to have more abusive relationships in our living life. Yet, what re-reading about the pain body reminded me is that many of us are actually addicted to emotional pain.
The pain-body, which is the dark shadow cast by the ego, is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness. It is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you don’t face it, if you don’t bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it again and again.
From a scientific perspective, it all makes sense and comes full circle for me. I spent years learning how an insecure attachment style affected young children’s brain development and how this would create relationship patterns that required a lot of healing in adulthood to move past. What I did not learn in formal schooling was the spiritual aspect, or rather, that by raising our own personal level of consciousness we heal all our relationship patterns.
We are heading toward a mental health crisis not because there are not enough therapists. We are heading this way because the field of psychology has become entrenched in healing the mind without the incorporation of spirituality. At this point in my career and given what is going on in the world with an increased level of conscious awareness of the importance of relationships, I’ve realized that we are not going to CBT our way out of bad dates or our mother wounds. My clients do not heal without deciding how they want to do both their mind-body work and their spiritual work. It does mean recognizing their addiction to drama, negative energy and complaining about narcissists.
Our level of consciousness will not change until we stop complaining about others and moving to that level of consciousness requires understanding the spiritual reason for relationships AND the energetics of emotions as it related to the pain-body. For those people who are not suffering from other serious mental illness — the focus of healing needs to be more holistic and not scheduling in a therapist once every other week. It requires a real commitment to self-love and the love of your future community to do the work the world needs from you.
The number one stumbling block that I experienced and see in my clients is the focus on what the narcissist did wrong. As I wrote in my first book Toxic Insecurity, I understand this frustration and pain. It affected my life for many years but also launched a profound healing and spiritual journey. I did, however, have to surrender to my own obsession with emotional pain and getting stuck in the pain — especially when it came to my healing of my mother wound. That took a great deal of self understanding and a continued commitment to learning different tools to regulate my emotions.
And its still an ongoing process.
The breakthrough came in a plant medicine ceremony where I realized that my energy had been infiltrated by a male trickster for a number of years that took me off track and lowered my vibration. This, in combination, with energetically picking up issues from my mother lead to a profoundly painful emotional life that was immediately seen in a different context: My ancestors chose me to be a lineage breaker of narcissistic abuse and to accomplish my tasks in this lifetime meant walking through very difficult circumstances with men.
The narcissists are here for a reason. We can continue to succumb to the pain-body or remember that we are a warrior on our personal journey with the capacity to heal ourself, out ancestors and our future.
What is even more difficult to comprehend is that it often does not take much to create an anxious style of attachment. Having some inconsistency at key developmental points in your life, being born highly sensitive, and perhaps being an empath will increase the likelihood that you develop a more anxious style of relating in romantic relationships. This thereby leaves you open to being attracted to (often but not always) narcissistic or self-involved partners with an avoidant attachment style. It is the Universe’s way of telling all the insecure people that we have to work together to heal. Toxic insecurity is a spectrum, and everyone needs to work on their emotional security. — Excerpt from Toxic Insecurity
The old paradigm will not work if we are committed to raising our own level of consciousness. The choice is ours and the first step is realizing we do have a choice in our healing journey. Detaching from the blame and diving into our work is the only way we are going to energetically make it through the changes that are percolating in the world today.
—
Previously Published on Medium
—
