The essence of the individual spiritual path is two-fold: remembering who you are and embodying that through every facet of daily living – your gaze, words, touch, action, movement, relationships, work. The totality of your being.
The second portion- the embodiment part- is what we generally call ” The Work” – which is a lifetime process of living in alignment with what you know . It is a way of living, of being, not a point of arriving somewhere.
Sometimes it looks like stripping away of falsehood, accumulation of lies designed to keep you in an inert amnesia, so that you can move more from the core of your nature. This is what we call “Shadow Work” – and it is quite literally physical ( body), mental/emotional ( mind/heart), and alchemical (spirit) in nature. One informs the other.
It happens that many of us do the shadow work before we get to that remembering of who we actually are, and it generally comes in the form of having to move past a wounding we have ( trauma, addiction etc). It is as if, the stripping away, the purification process, leaves behind the true nature, the light that we are, which nothing can dissolve, nothing can corrode, nothing can corrupt or destroy. Only cover in shadows. Once the shadow is seen for what it is, we can get to The Work.
What is happening in the world with the proliferation of knowledge is we are all quite aware now of what we are. It isn’t a stretch anymore. Gone are the days of 12 year discipleships to know God is experiencing life as human through you.
Knowledge/Power without training to wield it is a recipe of disaster.
So many people are living with the vague awareness that they are something more than what society tells them but they don’t know what the fuck to do with it. So you get a class of self-righteous people who think and act as if they are somehow superior. Religious superiority falls under this too. When you come across these kinds of people, just understand that they haven’t done the shadow work. That’s what’s happening.
NO ONE genuinely walking this path, doing the work, will ever tell you that they are superior, have some access that you can’t attain, or shame you, nor will they sugarcoat the pain on the journey that is living embodiment.
Quite the opposite. They will honor you, encourage you, celebrate you and LOVE you. They will guide you to that deep place of knowing within and offer tools that help you navigate the world, and move from that space of knowing. Embodiment. We can only truly teach/transmit what we actually embody. Not what we know, but what we embody.
Remember this when you look for teachers to guide you on the path.
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