Resistance to Humility

I seriously can't believe that it has been four months since I last wrote!  Apparently I am still in huge resistance to humility.  So today I thought I would write about resistance to humility from a personal perspective.

Why do I resist humility?  Well the simple answer is FEAR! This might seem extreme but when being truly humble means that you are willing to fully feel all of your emotions as they arise, no matter where you are or who you are with, you can see how easy it could be to allow fear to dominate and shut down your true soul's desires! 

For me personally my greatest fear is fear of judgement, ridicule, condemnation and banishment.  What will people think if something they say or do brings to the surface something that makes me angry?  How will they respond if I excuse myself mid conversation and start screaming or bashing something or throw a tantrum like I was two years old?  Seriously, how would you feel if someone did that to you?

What if this emotion comes up when I am in a shopping centre?  Will they think I am mad and call the police?

Now, my experience has been that unless you are aware of the teachings of Divine Truth  www.divinetruth.com you will likely be confronted by such behaviour and have some judgement of it.  And unless you are willing to feel that, you will be projecting your denied emotions back onto the person who is allowing the expression of their emotion. And unless they are very grounded in Truth there is a high likelihood that that person will stop feeling what they need to feel in order to feel safe.

It is rare for me to allow the expression of anger as it arises when in public, mostly because I am afraid of judgement, ridicule, criticism and condemnation.  But what this really means is that I do not yet fully trust that God has my back.  That God will protect me and that God's Love and approval is all that I really need.  And that I already have that. This is a childhood fear resulting from the lack of approval from my parents when I was a child and their constant demands and projections that I be or do as they want me to in order to help them avoid their own emotions, their own fears. 

This was not always the case - there were times when I did gain their approval but that was mostly when I was being or doing whatever made them happy. In short, I was not allowed to be my real self most of the time and quickly learnt to modify my behaviour and personality to suit them.  And this has caused much grief within me - I feel that I am not good enough.  I have spent most of my life afraid to be my real self.  And so it makes sense that now that I want to challenge these errors within my soul that fear will arise whenever I attempt to be my real self - to feel what I am really feeling.  It brings back childhood memories and fears that I must now work through if I ever want to be free of these errors and learn to be my authentic self - the me that God created.

I am getting better at allowing the expression of fear, shame or grief to surface when I am with others but far too often I do not remove myself in order to allow the full expression of the emotion without harming another person.  I allow myself to touch upon and acknowledge the emotion but too often I prevent its full expression. But I rarely allow the expression of anger when I am in public or even when I am within earshot of others.

Why is this?

Well, if I am to be honest I would say that I still feel responsible for the emotions of others around me.  What if, by feeling my emotions, someone else felt bad about themselves?  This is an irrational fear I know - I am not responsible for anyone else's emotions unless they are my children.  I might trigger something in someone else that makes them feel bad, sad, angry, ashamed, fearful - but I did not create that emotion in them - I am not responsible for their emotions. 

Why then do I so often feel responsible?  The real truth of this is that I was made to feel responsible for the emotions of the adults in my world when I was a small child - especially for my parents emotions.  I had a job to do as a child (as most children do) and that was to make my parents feel better about themselves.  I did this to my own children and am now finding that following the maze of emotions back to their original cause is difficult and often confronting - especially when I am with others.  I am also experiencing great remorse as I feel how damaging this was to my child-self and how damaging it has been to my own children.

Allowing myself to be truly humble is especially confronting when I am with people who do not want to feel their own emotions - who still want me to make them feel better about themselves and help them to avoid their own pain.  But this is not my job - it never has been my job as far as God is concerned.  From God's perspective we are each responsible for every emotion within us regardless of how the error got there.

At this point it may be useful for me to explain a little about emotions and how they enter us.  From the moment of conception the pristine soul, which is extremely sensitive, begins to absorb the emotions of its environment.  This is the system that God designed for us to be able to come to know ourselves, through our emotions.  This means that we begin to absorb everything - from our parents denied emotions, to their expressed emotions (good and bad), as well as the emotions of every person they/we come in contact with, and the prevailing societal emotions in the area we are brought up in.  When a person denies their emotions they automatically project that emotion back into its environment.  This is why I can be personally responsible for or have a part in the creation of negative world events.  I am a part of this world therefore I contribute to the overall health or dis-ease of the world through my emotions - both good and bad.  Now many people will feel that this is a little far fetched but if you allow yourself to really feel into this you will soon see the logic of this system.  Science has already proven this (the butterfly effect) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

So emotions enter us from the moment of conception and continue to do so throughout our formative years.  Most emotional errors enter us by the time we are seven or eight years of age and often effect our personalities.  From about seven or eight we begin to make decisions for ourselves and by the time we are teenagers we are capable of making decisions independent of our parents.  In fact we are capable of this at a much younger age but far too often we are not given the opportunity to do so.  It is the decisions that we make based upon the emotions within us that create further damage to our souls or help us to grow in love.  Regardless of how an emotion entered me I am the only person who can release it.  I must be personally responsible for myself.  There is no magic wand. 

Emotion is in effect energy in motion.  It is a feeling and negative emotions can only be released from our souls through allowing ourselves to feel them.

This is where humility comes in.  And this is where fear so often prevents us from being truly humble.  And the definition of humility that I am using is the ability to feel all of our emotions as they arise, to be our true authentic selves - not our façade self (the self we present to the world in order to feel loved and accepted).

So, getting back to resistance to humility - I have already mentioned that fear plays a large part in resistance to humility and for me it is the most important reason why I resist true humility.  And fear, like any other emotion, is energy in motion and the only way I can overcome fear at the soul level is to feel it.  This means that I will need to learn to allow myself to shake and to breathe deeply and diaphragmatically whenever I confront fear. I want to learn to do this more openly and honestly. 

I want to challenge my fears as this is the only way that I will ever learn to be truly humble.  So if you ever seem me shaking in public please, just allow me to feel my fear.  I do not always know what it will be about but when I allow myself to get past the fear to the grief I will always learn the truth - the emotion tells me the truth as long as I do not try to control it or second-guess it (and this is another challenge with humility - allowing - trusting).  And if I suddenly excuse myself and walk away and you hear me yelling or bashing - please - be grateful that I am not projecting my anger onto you and that I am allowing myself to be  my authentic self.  And if you need to, allow yourself to feel whatever you need to feel also without blame.  This is self-responsibility.  This is love in action.  This is Humility.

Lessons from the movie The Road

Yesterday I watched the movie “The Road” in an attempt to feel into some fears around earth changes which we will likely to be soon experiencing. 

This is a movie set in post war America some time in the future where the landscape is totally annihilated.  Everything is gray, bleak, dirty and cold, including the human condition.  I thought that this movie might trigger in me emotions around surviving earth changes but I found I had very little emotional connection with the movie.  Either I have worked through a lot of these emotions from watching “The Book of Eli” or I was in total denial.  I just could not believe that the human condition would sink so low in this time in history or even at some distant time in the future.  There has no doubt been a time in history when humans did sink this low (and perhaps even lower) and as always there remain little rays of hope in even the most desolate and desperate of conditions, but for me, this scenario did not seem real nor plausible at this time. And I would like to believe that as we raise our collective condition of love, with God’s Grace, there will never again be a time in human history when we revert to the bleakness and hopelessness that this picture portrays.  I suspect that it did however portray a fairly good depiction of life in the hells of the spirit world, a place that we all no doubt want to avoid.

After the movie I allowed myself to just sit with my feelings and watch what would surface.  Fear. Disbelief. Grief. 

I asked myself - how is it that the human condition could sink this low?  What is my part in this?

Eventually I had the realization that every time I choose to live in my fear and anger I contribute to the overall degradation of the human condition, but when I choose to face my fears and feel my grief love can now flow into my soul and the power of love is infinitely greater than the power of fear.  Jesus (as AJ) has taught us many times that Fear blocks Love.  Fear and Love can not exist in the same space.

My task then is to feel my fears, with God, release my anger, shame and grief and allow Love and Truth to govern every aspect of my life. This task is easier, quicker and much more effective if I allow God to guide me in this process.  This is called self-responsibility and God-reliance. 

I recognize that no mater how an error entered my soul, I alone am responsible for how that error affects my life. I alone can feel and release these errors, but when I relax into the process and Trust God, the process is much more rewarding.

I know this.

I have experienced this on numerous occasions.

So why then do I find it so difficult still to relax into trusting God totally in every situation?  What is the error, the block that I need to work through and overcome in order for me to trust God completely in every aspect of my life?

And why am I still choosing not to go there?

How can I change this?

For now prayer and faith are all that I have.  Faith that with God’s Guidance and Grace I will one day find the courage to remove these blocks, the obstacles that prevent love from flowing freely into and out of my soul.

Father, I kneel before You, your daughter, your servant, how may I help?  Give me the courage and the willingness, I pray, to face my fears and to step more fully into love, truth and trust.  Help me to be all that I was created to be so that I might better serve You through service to my brothers and sisters and all of Your creation.

Teach me to Love.

Linda

20.01.12