Dearest readers,
My experiences growing up in a highly co-dependent, enmeshed family system where emotional abuse was a normal way of being led me on a path where I did not know how to love myself anymore. I had to learn to remember. The path to remembering, or putting myself back together again, was a long but ultimately successful one – unlike the nursery rhyme character Humpty Dumpty – who kept falling down, smashing himself up and couldn’t be reassembled or returned to wholeness. Since the egg is a wonderful symbol of unity and a very feminine image of rebirth and perfection of design, it is very appropriate to note that our society needs to reintegrate feeling, holism, compassion, self-love, in order to be reborn into a new paradigm.
From family insanity, where old stuff is constantly rehashed, where individual pain was never processed, just pushed off onto me – who served as a convenient scapegoat, I moved from one abusive relationship to another. I tried to be a nice person, and over and over, people took advantage of my attempts to be open and kind. It took me a very long time to realize that I had to learn to be kind to myself first. To stop accepting abuse from others. Many times, I said to myself: “Never again.” Yet the abuse (teacher) reappeared in different forms, charming me into believing it (or the person) was a different kind of person, a loving, kind, generous person.
It was not until I learned self-love that I could delete all drama from my life, choose what I really want to experience, and attract to myself the kind of life and relationships with people that I enjoy. It is a long, difficult at times, and challenging journey back to self-love for both the individual and the collective. If humanity wants to truly eliminate racism, cruelty to children and animals, and the various forms of self-abuse we call addictions – whether to substances, work, food, etc., then we need to learn to love self, embrace truth without flinching. When we can be truly honest with ourselves, we begin to take responsibility for our own lives. We begin to see that we have been afraid of our own light and power. We have been punishing ourselves, and our pain reaches out and touches so many.
Nearly every day, I receive in my mailbox heartbreaking pleas from animal rescues for donations. Horses and donkeys brutally mistreated in various heartless sports, murdered, sent to slaughter. Mares kept ceaselessly pregnant to harvest their urine for the progesterone by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals for the drug Premarin. The foals are either murdered or left to die, while their mothers stand all day in tiny stalls. Donkeys murdered by the millions in China, even imported from Africa, their skins, bones, hooves, used to make ingredients for creams and beauty products all over the world. The heartless abuse of elephants, dogs, farm animals, wild animals…it is endless and horrifying.
We live in a polarized world where many abuse and others feel compelled to save or to rescue. This is co-dependency at its “best”. We need to rise to a higher level of consciousness – out of victim and out of rescuer archetypes. It is time to take responsibility for our own pain and stop passing it onto others. It is time to stop expecting others to carry our pain or to save us from ourselves. It is time to stop numbing our pain and to look at it and realize that suffering is not the only way. Abuse is not the only way. Other people are not responsible for our pain. No human being or animal can make us happy, nor should they have to carry our pain for us. We are responsible for our own lives and our own happiness.
The truth is that human beings are covered with emotional wounds which they often do not seek to heal or do not know how to heal. Perhaps most are unaware of these wounds. They numb the pain through various addictions, or when the pain is too great, they pass on the abuse to those more vulnerable than self: to people of another ethnic or racial group, to women, to children, to animals.
The seemingly endless sea of violence in which most of the world lives today – the prejudice and racism, the child and animal abuse, domestic violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide, intolerance of difference, police violence, the treatment of our planet as if it were a resource and not family – all of this is symptomatic of a gigantic emotional wound that passes from one generation to the next.
One of my co-workers spent a lot of time in foster care and was adopted several times as a child. He spent some time in Mexico, as his last adoptive family is Mexican. He told me that in Mexico, most people are not at all aware that their behaviors are prejudiced or racist. For example, he told me that indigenous people will be routinely excluded from entrance to many clubs, and that people of European origin think nothing of this discrimination. To them, it is normal and acceptable. They have no awareness that their behavior is cruel. Cognitive dissonance is at its highest level here.
In North America, and in particular in the United States, various “classes” or groups in society have slowly become aware of the pain and suffering caused to those who have been for hundreds of years positioned in the lowest ranks of our society. Black people and indigenous peoples, as well as immigrants to a slightly lesser extent, have born the brunt of our collective inability to take responsibility for our own personal and collective destinies.
Today, those who would be the rescuers in a codependent system walk on eggshells – afraid to offend, to say something that might be inappropriate. And then you have those – especially with the anonymity of social media – who say incredibly hurtful and offensive things to rid themselves of their own poison. Police officers are not held accountable for their treatment of suspects, when, it seems to me, that public servants should be held to a higher level of accountability because of the responsibility of their positions.
While the awareness of police brutality, the inequalities and vast unfairness of the criminal justice system, the economy, and just about every aspect of our society are at last being exposed to those who bathed in the sweet insouciant cloud of cognitive dissonance for the last few hundred years is a step in the right direction, collectively, most of humanity is still living in a dysfunctional relationship with self and with the collective. People give away their power constantly without even realizing it.
Do we all want to endlessly walk on eggshells? All people – those who have been playing the victim role and those who have been the persecutors – are all responsible for the reality in which we live. We create our own reality, every moment of every day. Victims must take responsibility. Perpetrators of abuse must take responsibility for self as well. It is the only way to end abuse and to create peace. The truth will set you free. Forgiveness of self and all others – abusers and victims – is also key. The truth is the honest, non-politically correct perception of reality. And that reality is that we are each responsible for our own life, for our own reality. If everyone would stop blaming, shaming, judging, living from survival consciousness (ego), and take a step back and look clearly at self, we would see all of the generations of pain we have taken on.
We would each realize that we have been conditioned to think a certain way. That we have adopted beliefs along the way of life which are untruths and which cause us pain. Once we do the challenging work of freeing self from the lies that society teaches us from birth, and once we heal our personal emotional wounds, then we will no longer tiptoe around on eggshells around other people. Once we learn to love self and be kind to self, we will find inner peace as a natural state of being. We won’t need to blame or shame others, to make others suffer because we can’t deal with our own pain. We won’t need to convince self or others that we are right and they are wrong. We can speak our truth from the heart without fearing hurting someone else’s feelings…because they too are responsible for their own well-being. And we won’t need others (even God or Jesus) to save us, because we will finally take responsibility for our own life and happiness.
The next phase in humanity’s collective rise to a higher level of consciousness is the realization that God is inside of each of us. Jesus did come to teach this truth over 2,000 years ago, but humanity was not ready to receive it. Humanity was still engaged in living the experience of separation from self, from all that exists, from divinity. Now that experience of limitation is drawing to a close, and we have an amazing opportunity to end co-dependency, the victim-rescuer paradigm once and for all. We can now take full responsibility for self and learn mastery. Human beings are powerful artists and creators. We have mastered the art of suffering, and we have collectively created a masterpiece of pain, suffering, and horror on the planet. In fact, we have mastered this so well that we have nearly destroyed our own species and have wiped out thousands of animals species and uncountable species of plants and insects.
Mother Earth is a powerful, conscious being in her own right. She is constantly and endlessly abundant and forgiving. She is renewing herself now, cleansing her waters, creating new species. We too, as human beings, have a great opportunity to cleanse self and to create heaven on Earth – a peaceful society of human beings who take full responsibility for the dream we design for self and other beings.
We can easily end racism, abuse of self and others, addiction, cruelty to animals, by healing our emotional bodies and releasing the conditioning – the old paradigm of co-dependency – victim/savior consciousness. It has served us well. We have learned to delve into the furthest depths of our own darkness. We have explored the human foundations of cruelty, victimization, exploitation. Reality is not something that is outside of self, that happens to us.
We have seen what it is like to live in polarity, where darkness is always seen as evil, and light as beauty and goodness. Now it is time to move back into unity. To remember what it is to know that all is one. Goodness and evil are neutral aspects of energy – just different expressions of being. To remember that we always have a choice, and that we are free to choose love and kindness or fear and cruelty at any given moment. We are creators. What do you want for your life? What will you choose to create?
adamevenevenadam 