My Personal Story of Awakening to Wholeness: The Limits of Positive Thinking
This is my personal and humbling story of awakening to wholeness.Yep, it’s a real down and dirty account of my personal transformation from a life dominated by fear, shame, struggle and limitation to a profound AWAKENING experience that was followed by supreme clarity, deep peace, purpose, and the new found ability to be fully present to life, as it is.
The essence of this liberated life for me, is a consistent state of sober-joy. This includes regular experiences of bliss, along with, at times, a slightly broken heart, yet always free and always with subtle twinge of AWE.
In my twenties and early thirties, I could have been a poster boy for the positive thinking movement. I bought into “positive thinking,” hook, line and sinker and suffered from its many limitations. I bought all the latest pop psychology books, bragged about having the largest cassette tape library that included anyone who wrote on the subject of personal growth and positive thinking. I attended countless workshops and seminars. When someone asked me how I was doing, I would say, ”Great and getting better every day”. I never allowed myself to consciously feel angry, sad, afraid or lonely. Definitely, I was never bored!
Negative-uncomfortable feelings had no place in my life. At first glance, this kind of makes sense. Doesn’t it? I was also terribly out of balance. I wanted my life to be filled with only springtime thoughts and feelings and no winter, only bright sunshiny days with no dark cloudy ones, and all expanded emotions with no contracting ones.
I was in a massive state of denial. I chronically sabotaged myself in both work and relationships. I felt disconnected from life and God. I constantly sought distractions, both healthy and not so healthy ones, to help me stay up, positive and optimistic. After all, isn’t that what happiness is all about, I asked myself? I did not have the capacity to.
You may be wondering if I’m against positive thinking. No, I’m opposed to the false optimism and shallowness that it can often lead to when used as an attempt to hide from uncomfortable feelings and core pain. I’ve discovered that when we attempt to protect ourselves from experiencing the pain and difficult feelings of life, we close our hearts at the same time. We also find it difficult to be truly intimate with another and feel disconnected with life. “So let’s find something fun to do!” This was my strategy.
The message that I most want to communicate to you is that unfelt feelings do not go away by ignoring them or trying to cover them up. They go underground into the unconscious waiting for an opportunity to be experienced and resolved. Unfelt feelings are the root cause of all mental, physical, emotional and spiritual disease as well as our collective feelings of fear and separation. Whatever we feel, heals and what we resist, persists.
Patagonia founder, Yvon Chouinard, outdoor adventurer and founder the outdoor clothing manufacturer writes, “There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, ‘Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything’ and an optimist who says, ‘Don’t bother doing anything; it’s going to turn out fine.’ Either way, nothing happens.
Mr. Positive and Always-Optimistic-Me woke up one winter morning, looked at my heart broken and pathetic self in the bathroom mirror and cried out, “Something is missing. What is wrong with me? Why do I keep screwing everything up? What am I not seeing?"
I felt like I’d lost my soul. This was a moment of great despair and great awakening. I heard in a clear, peaceful and somehow urgent voice. “You spend too much energy chasing after Spirit and not enough caring for your soul.” Whether it was a voice in my own head or Someone else, I didn’t know, but I took the message to heart.
This was the turning point for me. I stopped all chasing of Spirit or at least I attempted to stop. Instead, I felt compelled to get down to the business of caring for my soul. Although I didn’t fully know what that might look like or what was to be done, I intuitively knew two things:
I would have to slow down and stop running from the inner turmoil and anxiety that I had been desperately attempting to cover up with all of the activity and positive thinking.
I would need to find someone to help me finally face myself and work through the unresolved feelings from a physically and emotionally abusive childhood.
Throughout the years of "facing myself" I progressed, and I digressed. It often felt like moving one step forward at times, and then two steps back. Along the way I felt a deep calling to fully understand both spirituality and soulfulness and how they fit together. Growing up in church, I remember hearing references to both spirit and soul, and they seemed like the same thing. Now it's so crystal clear to me that they are very different.
Spirit is ever present, always and everywhere. It is the divine presence that animates all life, yet is itself un-manifest, or not in form. Therefore, it will always be a mystery and never understood in totality. Pure Spirit, God, is beyond concept. Soul is the part of each person that is always connected to Spirit, even if we don't always realize this. Although human beings throughout the ages have had direct and immediate experiences with this divine presence, the experience itself can’t be spoken directly because it’s beyond concept and therefore, out of the reach of language.
This awareness was a big deal for me. My connect with Spirit was not always been clear to me. I graduated high school planning to become a Baptist minister like my father and enrolled in Seminary for that purpose. But the religious teachings of my youth no longer seemed true and for a time, I considered myself an atheist.
Spirit or God can never be proven to exist logically. Logic is confined to attempting to prove God’s existence within the limits and confines of conceptual understanding. God is so much bigger. The unmanifested can only be pointed to through poetry, parable, mythology, artistic expression or some other means that bypasses the logical mind such as spiritual practice or grace.
One of the biggest problems that we witness within many of our religious institutions is not being taught to recognize that the authors of the scriptures are writing from an awareness of the divine presence and attempting to provide a pointer to this presence. They are not pointing to an historical event or an actual fact. Jesus knew this well and so spoke in parable. If we take the time to look, we realize that the other masters from every spiritual tradition understood this and used a similar means of communicating what is impossible to capture with language. As I studied the late Joseph Campbell, I began to understand that spiritual writings are connotative. They're a guide that points to the connection to Spirit within each of us.
This, if done with a certain reverence, can open one up to a dimension of reality beyond concept and to the direct recognition of radiant Spirit. The problem is that the scriptures are most often read and interpreted as facts and historical truths, by our egos. And, then we fight about these interpretations. Soul is this same divine presence that within each of us. It is the essence that animates us. Our individual souls are like cells in God’s body.
Caring for our soul is honoring and nurturing the divine presence residing deep within each one of us. Chasing our idea of a god outside us is an illusion. It’s like a farmer trying to grow crops by understanding the sun while also praising it, bargaining with it, sacrificing for it and trying to emulate it. For all of his efforts, he is neither cultivating the soil nor nurturing the seeds that would grow. Get the idea?
Understanding, embodying, living, celebrating, teaching and being a disciple of this sacred union of Spirit and Soul within us is what I dedicate my life to in my SOULutions practice. My soul's purpose is to ignite a fire in others to awaken to wholeness. In doing so, I care for my own soul.
There's a profound Wholeness that every one of us can intimately come to know. It's an experience and awareness, deep in our bones that I am simultaneously deeply at peace and radically alive. To me, it's all about moving beyond my ego's need to either suppress its core fear of not being good enough and its core desire to impress others with how special I am. I'm aware of both an expanding and more intimate relationship with Spirit and others as well as a deepening and more sensual relationship with life.
Wholeness leads towards the soul’s simple desire to express our unique gifts in service to that which is most true, loving and real. There is a sense of fulfilling a unique purpose in life that only you can fulfill, in this exact way, while knowing that nothing is required in order to be Whole. You are increasingly aware of a felt sense in your body of both depth (soul-essence) and expansion (Spirit-expression).
Today, my life is filled with peace, passion, purpose, power and presence; what I call the 5P's of Radical Wholeness. I enjoy many moments of bliss while also having a slightly broken heart. This is hard to explain in words, and can only be experienced. Every one of us who chooses this path over the functioning of the ego embarks on an individual hero’s journey. I now use the painful experiences of my early life to help others along their hero's journey.
Four Principles for Awakening and Living Wholeness
1. Feel it all, as deeply and fully as you are able.
If we give ourselves permission to be fully present to our feelings of sadness without being overwhelmed by the sadness, we will find ourselves spontaneously able to experience a greater, deeper and more expanded sense of joy in life. If we allow ourselves to be present to our own personal experience of fear, then we spontaneously notice a greater, deeper and more expanded sense of peace in our lives. If we are willing to own and embody the anger that part of us sometimes feels, then we will spontaneously be surprised with a greater, deeper and more expanded sense of authentic power.
2. Question everything with sincerity, particularly our own thoughts about ourselves, others and the way the world seems as though it should be. Our thoughts are not a reliable source for interpreting what is true about yourselves, others or reality. However, our ability to be curious, question and inquire is our mind’s most valuable resource on your path towards wholeness. Question everything!
3. Resist nothing. What ever we resist persists. Yet whatever we have the courage to fully face, feel and embrace becomes grace!
When we can find a way to stop resisting and fully accept even the most unacceptable parts of ourselves, our "inner critic" and mind chatter becomes dramatically quieter. We, then, begin to find ourselves miraculously able to, not only accept ourselves, and others, but we are also able to see, sense and feel the divine presence within in ourselves. Even what we once perceived as the most unacceptable aspects of life, we no longer resist.
4. Embrace uncertainty.
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus stated, “There is nothing permanent but change." Whenever we argue with reality, reality always wins. Reality is the ultimate teacher. When we are able to honestly observe and accept the truth that there is nothing permanent but change, we can begin to accept the impermanence of all life. Within this acceptance, we become creatively and fully alive in the present!
