When you finally decide to radically alter the way you’ve been relating to your SELF, it’s scary. So scary, in fact, that most people don’t do it, unless they’ve decided that there’s no other way.
The misery of your day-to-day relationship to your SELF has to outweigh the terror of the unknown. No one chooses the unknown when the known is working just fine. The known has to be bad. Really bad.
By the time I arrived at the doorsteps of our family cottage in the winter of 2020, my known had become that bad.
My mind, the arena in which I had come to relate to my SELF, had become a vicious place. A hostile, war-torn scrap of land, sitting on the border between two opposing nations. A sterile atmosphere in which nothing green nor good had grown for years due to nonstop violence.
I had gotten used to living under piles of debris of my own making. Layers upon layers of rubble and dust. (It’s amazing what one can adapt to when SELF-destruction happens incrementally). After decades of turning against my SELF, my inner landscape had become, virtually, inhabitable.
Perhaps the saddest part is that later, several months after I decided to take the other path on the grassy knoll (see Blog 1), I discovered that the war I had been waging inside myself for all those years hadn’t even been a just war. The conflict hadn’t been between right and wrong or good verses evil. It had been between right and right, good verses good. In fact, there hadn’t even been two opposing sides. Just one side, (the side of truth), turning against itself.
But more about that later…
For now I think it’s more important to convey just how desolate my insides were, just how desperate I was, just how scary it was, at that moment in my life, to contemplate starting a whole new way of relating to my SELF.
Because when you understand this, you can begin to appreciate what a freaking miracle it was that I was able to claw my way up. That I was able to stagger out, with dust in my lungs and bricks in my eyes, and take a step towards the light, rather than remain in the dark, under the pile.
Here’s where I think divine intervention may play a role.
Because when you decide to change in this way, when you decide to do an about-face, take the less travelled path or step into the unknown, it cannot happen through willpower alone. There has to be another force present. Some surrounding element that allows you to picture something better for your SELF, even though you haven’t yet discovered your own SELF worth. There has to be another voice, (that’s not your own), patiently whispering to you to lay down your weapons and stop the war.
How else do you explain the fact that a tiny seed, when planted on scorched earth, amidst cannon fire, can still take root and grow?
M.E. Picher, PHD 