Healing and Openings

Why am I having trouble entering this Opening? I want to enter but keep running into walls.

Conditioning Can Hold Us Back

To an extent, we are the sum of our life experiences. As children, we didn’t have the agency to block or prevent negative experiences and they affected us in ways that continue into our adulthood. That’s part of our hero’s journey. To leave the “ordinary world” of our existence, release emotions and behavior resulting from these negative experiences and free ourselves.

These same negative experiences affect our attitudes and behaviors in such deeply embedded ways that we may not be conscious of them. We have to dig into these layers of conditioning to identify what they are. It can be a Herculean task to gain awareness of our conditioning. Then, we start the work of releasing our conditioning before we can find our true selves.

Our conditionings skew our perspective. If we are angry, how can we properly assess an Opening? We may see the Opening as hostile or judge whoever is involved because of our anger. If our conditioning results in our not feeling worthy, we may deem ourselves unworthy of what the Opening is offering to us. If we feel a sense of being a victim, we may resent the challenges that the Opening brings.

Entering Openings

Entering Openings asks a lot of us. Conditioning is heavy baggage that weighs us down on our journey and makes entering Openings even more difficult. The extra weight slows us down. A worthy pursuit is to start letting go of our conditionings so we can pursue Openings without their baggage. This is a monumental task in many ways and takes a lot of dedication.

As an Opening appears before us, we can become more aware of how we are reacting or responding to the Opening. What is going on in our minds and emotions as we contemplate the Opening? What do we need to do so that our conditionings do not hold us back? Are there any “triggers” that we are experiencing as we look at the Opening?

Openings move us forward and help us grow. Exposing and challenging our conditionings may be part of their magic. They then can help us shed these conditionings as we enter and move through the Opening. How? To move through the Opening, our conditionings may hold us back to the extent that we may not be able to take them with us and are forced to release them.

Healing

Healing and releasing our conditionings can be a lifetime, heroic pursuit. Why not take it on? Do we want our conditionings to weigh us down forever? Or do we want to be free of them? As we heal, our self-knowledge grows, we face our fears, we find courage we may not have known we had, we become our true selves and we let go of what has been holding us back.

One approach  to healing is to determine the qualities we need to enter Openings. Perhaps one is courage. We can ask ourselves what fears we have related to our past life experiences. What are the roots of these fears? Are these fears still real in our adult life? Can we let them go?

Another approach is to get the support of people who know the healing journey and can guide us. They may have special knowledge or be a bit further down the road than we are. Even the hero’s journey has guides and allies to help the hero along the way. Doing this is affirmative and strong (we are willing to be challenged), not at all weak or submissive.

A Clear Path

As we take on our own healing, a clearer path will emerge. As we encounter Openings our choices and our navigation through them will be easier. We are less weighed down and much more self-aware. We have begun to master ourselves and develop what we need to master the Openings we encounter.