CHAPTER 12
Honoring Difficulties, for They Are Here to Reestablish Balance
Message from June 5, 2005
What if adversity was in fact an opportunity created entirely by your divine spark to allow you to discover your inner unlimited potential? What if all these problems present in your life were not the cause of the imbalances you experience but rather the result of your own negligence toward yourself? Could you then consider them as gifts brought to your consciousness by your inner wisdom?
All human beings go through difficult times at one point or another. Sickness, failures, accidents, rejection or abandonment, betrayal—these are situations that pull you to the core of your inner duality. What should you do then? Resist? Fight? For many generations you have been taught to oppose anything that comes along and rocks your daily routine. Any change, any adversity is greeted as an unfortunate thing that you absolutely need to eliminate as soon as possible before it disturbs your balance in a prolonged manner.
What if the lack of balance was, in fact, the primary cause, prior to this disturbance? Generally speaking, you believe that you feel good in most areas of your life. It seems that you are in good health; that everything is going well at work; that at home, in your relationship and in your family, there are no apparent conflicts. However, one day a brick falls on your head: you lose your job, your mother gets sick, your partner leaves you, or a major problem presents itself. Of course, you may wonder: What have I done to deserve such a challenge? Whether it is small or large, any unexpected event quickly appears as a catastrophe when we feel destitute or powerless. What happens next?
Different attitudes, depending on your dominant personality type, might be adopted. Many people will first be in a state of shock, simply paralyzed and incapable of reacting, even going to the point of denying the problem: “It’s nothing; it isn’t serious; it will most probably go away by itself.” Others will react with anger: “That isn’t true. This can’t be happening to me. This is impossible.” As a consequence, some people will be burdened with sadness: “My God! This hurts so much. My heart is broken. I’ll never get out of this.” Rarer are those who immediately look for solutions without getting emotionally disturbed: “So, what solution do I have at my disposal? What are the resources available? Who could help me with this?”
Generally speaking, most of these states of mind will manifest in turn and repeatedly until the full resolution of the problem. Could another way present itself to you? Could you possibly make another choice? You may not be able to prevent your personality from reacting irrationally, but consciously, perhaps, would you be able to divert your attention to something other than the event in question?
Think about it for a moment: how many situations generate some degree of torment in you daily life while consisting of nothing but a fleeting, often harmless crisis? Most of the time, there is no reason to panic. No experience is bad in itself. Why not wait, before getting upset, to see if it is really as serious as you think? Put it in perspective, or dedramatize it through humor: “Will I die from this?” Take the time to breathe deeply and let your anxiety dissolve on its own. This will not only help you to keep a cool head but also to contact the part of you that knows why this misadventure is occurring at this precise moment in your life.
What if this crisis situation was nothing but a triggering element, an invitation to go inward to discover some unanticipated treasures? Have you ever wondered whether the suffering you feel was already present in you before the disturbing event happened? Perhaps deeply buried in your unconscious mind there was already a seed of worry, fear, or torment about similar events that left wounds in you.
This isn’t about reliving your childhood or all the misfortunes of your existence; it’s only about remembering: “Have I felt this trouble—this pain, this anger, this powerlessness, this guilt, or other trouble—within me before?” The roots of the unease are to be found within you, in your hidden frustrations and repressed dissatisfaction now as well as in the past. An old saying affirms this idea: “Everything that is not expressed gets imprinted.” Ask yourself, What emotions have I had to suppress? What call of my heart did I repress for fear of not seeing it welcomed? Liberation, healing, and most adequate solutions do not reside in the solution to the problem, but rather in the understanding of its reason for being. It has only appeared to allow you to reestablish the balance that was missing in you.
Do you believe yourself to be limited, weak, or powerless? It goes without saying that you will meet people who will appear powerful and strong to you and have access to powerful unlimited external resources. Do you believe that you are not up to the task? Some “charitable souls” will accept the task of confronting and humiliating you so that you can discover that you have everything you need within you to overcome any obstacle that arises on your path. In the big dance of life, every person you mix with at the heart of your human drama has been hired by you to play this specific role in order to help you transmute the programming and existential alienation that you entertain, unconsciously or not, within you. Nothing is left to chance.
Whatever the context, your inner wisdom is only inviting you to consider the absurdity of your self-destructive thoughts by offering challenges at the level of the capacities you have not exploited until now. No matter what difficulty presents itself in your life, tell yourself that this is nothing but a vast staging of your divine self so that you may transcend the three-dimensional illusions in which you have imprisoned yourself.
Any excess attracts excess. Extremes attract extremes. What we resist persists. Any aspect of yourself that you neglect, denigrate, devalue, or repress will need to be externalized and expressed at some point or another for your greater liberation. You are therefore invited to honor the event, the situation, or the crisis, as well as the person who triggers this obligation to reestablish balance in all the spheres of your life. No matter what the trigger is, it is simply the expression—the mirror, whether perfect or distorting—of the image that you entertain of yourself.
If you understand that this situation is present in your life to invite you to recognize who you really are, all the happiness and powerlessness you may feel will vanish on the spot. If you aim for balance rather than excess in every area of your life, peace will settle in you permanently. If you thank your inner wisdom and commit yourself to listening to it at every moment of your life by letting go of your control over external events, multiple miracles will occur in your life, including the total healing of all present and past wounds that are written in your body and soul. Don’t resist anymore: say yes to the difficulties that present themselves, and honor your own inner multidimensional power that knows how to transcend them.
It is in adversity that you have chosen to contribute to the planetary transmutation, through your own living cells and in all the aspects of your human experience. It is in the unpredictable that you are most permeable to the purifying energy that wants to radiate through you. Focus your attention no longer on the results or the resolution of your problems, but rather on the best part of yourself, as it knows how to manifest the best in you and for all that lives here below. Merge with your unlimited creative essence and taste plenitude at every moment. You will then become a lighthouse and a haven of peace at the heart of the storm for those who still believe in chaos in their lives.
—Bianca Gaia
Q = 4pE
It was Leonardo da Vinci who said, “No human research can be called true science unless it can be mathematically proved.” Imagine a single mathematical formula that could simultaneously sum up and activate the ascension process.
In 2004, while I was working on the concept of the “Welcome to the Fifth Dimension” workshop, my partner pointed out that all the notions addressed could be found in one another, were matching, and could fit together perfectly like Russian dolls. Every time we believe we have discovered a new concept or developed a new idea, another one takes form within it, completing the lineage and leading us even further and deeper into ourselves.
When I was in high school, I thought of myself as hopeless at anything to do with physics and mathematics. And then, there I was unknowingly exploring the laws of quantum physics: “as above, so below, from the microcosm to the macrocosm.” The more I progressed in what I thought to be a summary of my numerous forms of training and spiritual adventures, the more I saw the extent to which the universe is animated in perfect alignment with itself, just like a kaleidoscope reflecting a thousand and one facets of divine energy in all its forms.
The more I aspired to live in the fifth dimension, the more I noticed that everything that surrounded me came in groups of five: the five great soul families, the five geometric shapes of the light cocoon, the five dimensions of the human brain, the five ways to acquire energy, and so on.
For years and years, however, I had settled for seeing life in only three dimensions: body, mind, and spirit; reptilian, limbic, and neocortex parts of the brain; the perpetrator-victim-savior triad, and so on. I could not imagine that there were other dimensions to explore, other worlds to discover.
Once I established the connection between the defense mechanisms of James Redfield and the grieving steps of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, everything fell into place inside me. I had just crossed over to the fourth dimension. I had accepted finally setting foot on the other side of the veil, to awaken my consciousness, and in so doing to reconnect with my true soul family, the Facilitators.
In meditation I then received the vision of a pyramid, similar to the ones we see in Egypt and Central America. It was made of a shiny golden crystal. At the four corners of the base of the translucent prism were burning flames of different colors: red at the north, yellow at the south, blue at the east, and violet at the west. A ray was beaming out of each of the colored points, pointing straight toward the center of the pyramid, where the four colored beams fused into one pure column of bright light rising toward the sky.
Something immediately clicked inside me, and in a moment of pure clarity I received the revelation that transformed me forever:
The synergy of the four dimensions of being induces divine quintessence.
Q = 4pE
By integrating the four aspects of our personality, p, also called defense mechanisms, and by merging into the energy, E, of our soul family, it is possible to activate our ascension vehicle, the Merkaba, and to maintain ourselves in the perpetual state of grace that opens the doors to the fifth dimension. Hence the alchemical name “quintessence,” Q: the total immersion in our divine essence constitutes the fifth step of the ascension and can only be obtained by aligning the first four dimensions present in us.
It is a simple mathematical formula, you may say, but how difficult it is to put into practice in our daily lives.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
Fortunately, once we have access to the higher dimensions and accept receiving the beneficial help and energy of our soul family, a whole new world of possibilities opens up to us.
Right after the explanations that followed this fabulous vision of the ascension, a question covertly slipped into my mind, as probably happened for all the great masters who have preceded us: “Is a coin worth more on its tail or on its head?” Do our instinctive reactions and primary mechanisms in any way mar the divine and wonderful being that we truly are? Since they are the reflection of the parts of us that only ask to be assimilated, accepted, and fully integrated, could they possibly constitute an addition to our evolution rather than an obstacle to overcome?
What if each of the survival mechanisms represented the back of the medal, the tail of the coin, while the head side revealed to us the energy of the soul family we most needed to welcome and recognize in ourselves? Our shadow and light aspects would then represent, in real terms, two sides of the same coin.
Such is the rational explanation of the timeless yin-yang symbol:
Duality doesn’t exist. Darkness itself is nothing but an illusion. It only represents that void in us asking to be filled with light at every moment.
Our challenge is this: rather than trying to steal the energy that surrounds us on the material plain through power games and other primary mechanisms, let’s learn to create the connection with this divine particle in ourselves that knows that light is and always has been present in us for all eternity.
We simply need to take into consideration the messages our supposedly untamable personality is sending to us, and to be attentive to the cries for help emitted by our physical bodies, to measure the importance of becoming one with all the parts of ourselves.
In reality, it isn’t our ego that stops us from ascending, but rather memory loss: we have forgotten that we are pure energy and pure light. We don’t allow ourselves to radiate in all the spheres of our being. We hide from others the extraordinary and luminous being that lies dormant within us.
It is through unconditionally saying “yes” to all the dimensions present in us, through aligning the four bases or our internal pyramid, that balance finally settles in and our divine light manages to unfold in all grace, radiant and unlimited.
The Pyramid of Duality
Q = 4pE
The Pyramid of Duality
The quintessence of being, the perpetual state of grace we reach in the fifth dimension, appears as the summit of a pyramid whose base is the four inferior dimensions accepted and integrated within ourselves: the dense body (the state of our physical health), the emotional body (our moods), the mental body (our frame of mind), and the causal body (our state of consciousness).
Each of these dimensions emits specific vibrations in the form of energetic fields and specific colors. They are the same whether we deploy our energy in our human aspect through our defense mechanisms or in our divine aspects as a member of a soul family. Hence the image of the two sides of a coin having the same value is appropriate, since they are connected to each other.
1. Perpetrator versus Builder
When you do not have the courage to express your anger openly, chances are also that you may not manage to make room for the Perpetrator in you. As a consequence you deny yourself the opportunity to benefit from the virtues of the Builders soul family, and therefore you may feel difficulty in responding to your essential needs, believing in your inner potential, and materializing the projects you dream of.
Conversely, when you are a good Builder, you know how to use your born-leader charisma, leaning on your strength of character in order to contribute to a better world. However, you are also vulnerable to frustration and anger, and when all is not going the way you want it to, you run the risk of becoming a Perpetrator, using control or if need be your physical strength to force others to give you energy. This explains why the energy fields of the Perpetrator and of the Builder have the same geometric shape: the triangle.
2. Indifferent versus Visionary
When you do not succeed in maintaining distance or being cool-headed when faced with the hazards of life, it is because you do not welcome the Indifferent within you. However, the mental acuity and intellectual rigor of the Indifferent originate from his privileged connection to the Visionaries family, recognized for their clarity of mind and their quest for tools to help the evolution of all humanity.
Conversely, if you recognize your Visionary qualities, you also know that once in a while you live exclusively in your head. You therefore may have a tendency to disconnect from your emotional body and ignore unsettling situations by becoming absorbed in a deep state of denial. By becoming indifferent to what surrounds you, you lose touch with the reality of the now, and also with those who love you and just want to be close to you. In the first case as in the second, your energy is mobilized in the top of the body, and your light cocoon then takes the shape of an inverted triangle.
3. Victim versus Artisan
If you do not allow yourself to consider your sensitivity, your vulnerability, and the weaknesses that inhabit you, you are denying the Victim hidden deep inside. In doing so, you imprison your inner child and suppress your creativity, spontaneity, and originality. In brief, you clip the wings of the Artisan of Peace that dwells within you.
On the other hand, when the Artisan in you takes too much space in your existence, when you entertain an exclusively emotional relationship to the world you live in, it is a good bet that your sentimentality is regularly put to the test when so much injustice and human idiocy are at work around you. This may lead to some feelings of sadness and powerlessness in you, inciting you to adopt the Victim model, begging for others’ energy in order to survive. Your energetic field will then have the same appearance in its luminous or shady aspect, a diamond shape.
4. Savior versus Facilitator
In everyday life, when you don’t manage to find the answers and solutions to the problems that hound you, you end up believing that you will never manage to bring out the Savior, the hero within you. However, you only have to call the Facilitators family to reawaken the luminous flame that inhabits you to bring out strengths, talent, and spiritual gifts that you don’t consciously suspect you have.
On the other end of the spectrum, one who recognizes him- or herself as a Facilitator—the healer, the therapist, the shaman connected to nature and its energetic forces—runs the risk of wanting to take others on his shoulders and totally forget about himself. You may then start playing Savior, bargaining your favors while forgetting that your first mission is to live in communion with the source of all life, and to heal yourself first. Your energy cocoon may then have the same shape as the Facilitators—the square—but it will be missing the natural ovoid curve of the Sages.
5. Witness and Sage
Because the tail and head of the coin merge when we manage to recenter ourselves in the present moment, the Witness and the Sage become one in the light, for they have given up fighting for their survival and surrender to divine energy to fill any of their shortcomings or remaining inadequacies.
The energy is here, everywhere, and available. We only need to open our ruling chakra for it to reach us, instilling in us all the vitality we need to fully live and access our preferred ascension vehicle: the Merkaba.
Stabilizing the Base of the Pyramid
Imagine that up to now, we have contemplated one by one all the pieces of a huge puzzle. Here is where they finally all fall into place, revealing to us who we really are.
As we’ve seen in the previous chapters, every soul family has its role to play in the world. However, our individual mission first and foremost consists of living in unconditional love, firstly toward the self, then toward every living being.
Let’s forget for a moment this world of duality in which we live. Over the course of several lives we are attempting to overcome the illusory darkness or defects that have been inflicted upon us, to transmute them in all of our cells, but without success. Finally, could it be that what we have until now considered weaknesses were in fact strengths that were obscured by the fear of our own inner light radiating a bit too brightly around us?
The time has come to allow all these parts of us to get back to their rightful place at the heart of our daily life and to finally reestablish the base of our inner pyramid.
This base simultaneously includes the strength of manifestation of the Builders, the emotional stability of the Artisans of Peace, the mental clarity of the Visionaries, and the conscious connection to the universal energy of the Facilitators.
It is through this collaboration with all the soul families in us that it becomes possible to rise to the top of the pyramid and adopt our real light body.
Are You Sitting Tight?
Let’s go back for a moment to the metaphor of the game of musical chairs. We know that we will be allowed to occupy the king’s place in the middle only once we will have successively sat in each of the chairs in the circle.
This allegory makes even more sense when the chair on which you hesitate to settle is also the one that represents the way you do not have the courage to obtain energy from others (the lowest score in your Egogram, as calculated in Chapter 9), precisely corresponding to the soul family associated with your ruling chakra (identified during the muscle test in Chapter 3), and therefore to the energy you most need to harmonize yourself.
Are you following this concept? Darkness, karma, and duality are all stories we tell ourselves to avoid getting in touch with the parts of us that have not been welcomed by those close to us when we arrived in this life. Our incarnation contract (see Chapter 4) precisely consists of affirming and consolidating these aspects of us that we apparently neglected in previous existences.
Because we knew it would be hard for us to integrate so much light at once, a compassionate soul family volunteered to assist us on our journey and to support us if need be in our quest for a perfect energetic balance.
Unfortunately, if our present life experiences have unconsciously pushed us to cut our ties with our light family, it goes without saying that we have also created distance from the other side of the coin, or the corresponding defense mechanism.
This is why it is so hard for us to close the loop, to complete the grieving process in everyday life. We do not allow ourselves to experience the primary reaction associated with a specific control drama or aspect of our personality—exactly the one we have rejected or denied in our self. In so doing, we are preventing ourselves from reaching the absolutely indispensable step enabling us to get to unconditional and total acceptance in order to finally merge with all the parts of our self.
In light of this observation, you can choose to go voluntarily and sit in the missing chair, which is what I tried to do at the time, having no other way of getting closure for the wounds of the past. However, I now know of a simple, easy, and joyous solution that is much more in line with my principles: calling on your soul family.
Your Soul Family to the Rescue
The principle is simple: if the primary reaction inherent in the defense mechanism constitutes the back of the coin, the virtues and qualities specific to each of the soul families can allow us to access the state of grace without having to go through all the steps of grieving.
In reality, without knowing it, you already do it. A person who has managed to open up to his or her sensitivity and develop his creative talents joyfully does not need to sit in the chair of the Victim; he has learned to express his emotions as they come up and if need be to transmute his sadness into artistic creativity. The individual gifted with an analytical and critical mind does not need to be constantly indifferent to what surrounds her; she knows how to create some distance and isolate herself when she needs time on her own.
Knowing that the steps of the grieving process only exist to help you assimilate and classify new data in one of the five dimensions of your brain, it is possible, in quiet times outside a crisis period, to learn to tame the parts of yourself that usually do not dare to react or manifest themselves in daily life. In doing so, they will be better armed and more solid in the face of adversity, whatever that might be.
Deep down, you have a choice: go through denial, anger, bargaining, and sadness, or ask your soul family to transmit the energy you need to reveal yourself to yourself by discovering the qualities you don’t yet acknowledge within you.
The following chart, which is a reminder of the information in Chapter 4, will allow you to identify the qualities that would be in your best interest to develop within, according to each defense mechanism, in relation to the primary reactions you want to avoid at all costs.
For each soul family, it may be that you have already developed most of their defining virtues, but as you well know, it is precisely the virtues that you still haven’t made your own that will allow you to avoid the torturous game of musical chairs.
Transmuting Primal Reactions by Appealing to Your Soul Family
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STEP OF ACCEPTANCE, DEFENSE MECHANISM |
SOUL FAMILY, PROTECTOR |
QUALITIES AND VIRTUES WORTH INTEGRATING |
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State of Shock/Denial Indifferent |
Visionaries |
Great analytical and reasoning abilities, abilities, authenticity, sincerity, autonomy, insight, intuition, keen insight, intuition, clairvoyance, communication abilities |
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Archangel Raphael |
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Anger Perpetrator |
Builders |
Trust, strength, courage, leadership, endurance, perseverance, stability, dynamism, ease of materializing goals |
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Archangel Uriel |
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Bargaining/Guilt Savior |
Facilitators |
Enthusiasm, pep, positiveness, liveliness, predisposition to compassion, social consciousness, ability to relieve depression, gift for healing |
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Archangel Michael |
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Sadness Victim |
Artisans |
Sensitivity, creativity, artistic talents, originality, spontaneity, simplicity, kindness, generosity, helpfulness, ease in creating connections |
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Archangel Gabriel |
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Acceptance/Detachment Witness |
Sages |
Capacity to remain centered, balance oneself, harmonize oneself, live in the present, easily let go, trust life, and accept guidance from the higher self |
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Ascended Masters |
1. State of Shock/Denial
If you find it hard to create appropriate distance in life, chances are that in a crisis situation you do not allow yourself to be in a state of shock. You therefore have the choice either to get familiar with your ability to become indifferent to what surrounds you, or to call out for Archangel Raphael and the Visionaries family to instill the qualities that characterize them among those you do not yet own: great analytical and reasoning abilities, authenticity, sincerity, autonomy, keen insight, intuition, clairvoyance, and communication abilities.
2. Anger
If the domination mechanism least present in you is that of the Perpetrator, it is highly possible that you may feel resistance to getting angry. You are therefore invited to reconnect with the strengths and talents of the Builders. With the help of Archangel Uriel, affirm your trust, strength, courage, leadership, endurance, perseverance, stability, dynamism, and ability to materialize your goals.
3. Bargaining/Guilt
In order to allow the Savior in you to emerge, it is not necessary to become indispensable to those around you or to bargain your favors for a bit of recognition from them. You can simply welcome the fire of the passion particular to the Facilitators and ask Archangel Michael to bring out in you the following virtues: enthusiasm, pep, positiveness, liveliness, predisposition to compassion, social consciousness, ability to relieve depression, and the emergence of your gift for healing.
4. Sadness
If the feeling that you have the most difficulty expressing is sadness, it is because you are afraid of your own vulnerability. You are invited to open up your heart and solar plexus to welcome in the appeasing vibrations of Archangel Gabriel and the reassuring energy of the Artisans of Peace. To balance yourself, you need to explore your sensitivity, creativity, artistic talents, originality, spontaneity, simplicity, kindness, generosity, helpfulness, and ease in create connections.
5. Acceptance
Of course, everyone aspires to live in a state of detachment and unconditional acceptance. All the soul families, in particular the Sages as well as Archangel Metatron and the Ascended Masters, accompany you daily in all areas of your life. You can therefore invoke them at any time and ask them for help in remaining centered, balancing and harmonizing yourself, living in the present moment, easily letting go, trusting life, and allowing yourself to be guided by your higher self: “I am.”
Note: In no way does this exercise constitute a guarantee that you will no longer be exposed to existential crises or that you will never have to go through the steps of the grieving process again. But at least the energy of the soul family that you will have managed to develop within you will support you in your endeavors.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger; Open Up to the Message Instead
The hardest conflicts to deal with are definitely those that put us in opposition to our loved ones. However, is it possible that despite appearances they have chosen on the divine plane to intervene in our lives precisely in this admittedly clumsy way, in order to push us to overcome the limits of our human consciousness and thus to contribute to opening up the best of ourselves on the spiritual level? Could it be an invitation to defy human rationalizing in order to penetrate even deeper into the intelligence of the heart?
Imagine that a very dear friend with whom you have a slight disagreement suddenly turns against you. This could also be a relative, your partner, or a colleague at work. Regardless of the cause of the dispute or its importance, anger, disappointment, and frustration take over the depth of your mutual feelings and degenerate into a cold war or an open conflict. Once again the dance of the domination mechanisms starts. It isn’t an easy thing for anyone to go through. In such circumstances, how can one remain centered and not give in to the temptation of the game of musical chairs?
Of course, with distance, it seems obvious that everything is only a matter of perspective. Each of the parties feels wronged not because of a difference of opinion but because he or she hasn’t been welcomed according to his expectations and personal criteria for acceptance. The trigger element therefore isn’t the real cause of the conflict; the cause is all the emotions ever lived by the individuals in question, over which neither has any control but which have everything to do with their past baggage.
Clearly stated, the more you carry around a past heavy with dissatisfaction, deficiency, and unexpressed rancor, the more you will suffer when faced with a situation that generates tension. Your present pain feeds off all the previous suffering that has not been healed. And the same goes for the other person.
When the connection between you is very strong or exists for a long time, it is possible to overlook the conflict, forgive each other, and start your relationship again as before. But often some unease settles in, discomfort lingers, and a slight distance creeps between you. Even when you understand the other person’s wound and you know that you are not the direct cause of it, it nevertheless awakens your own inner wounds, bringing your own insecurities to the surface, perhaps bruising your pride and pushing you to close yourself off to the other person.
It is important to look beyond the pain and the apparent conflict. What pain is hidden behind the suffering? What internal unease nourishes and intensifies the depth of the apparent wound? How much salt do you put in your own wounds for them to be so alive and painful?
A Destructive Pain
Lorraine, a woman who suffered from serious insomnia, thought that her anxiety concerning her two preschool-age children was the cause of her sleeping problems. One of her kids had nearly been run over by a car two years earlier, and since then she feared for their lives so much that she would not let them cross the street to play in a park located just across from their house, in the middle of a residential neighborhood on a quiet little suburban street. Was her excessive and unreasonable fear for her children due to an accident that had not even happened, or was she hiding a deeper unease?
As she came to consult me over her anxiety and sleep problems, I asked her a very simple question: “How do you feel being a mother?” Beyond the current circumstances, beyond her uneasiness and symptoms, the true underlying question was, “What thoughts do you entertain toward yourself that are capable of having created this incident to attract your attention to what is going on inside you?”
It is well known that our thoughts create. While that is fine in theory, what does it mean in concrete terms in everyday life? Could it be that we actually provoke conflicts and attract misfortunes to ourselves, and that we may be the cause of our own emotional and physical diseases? What if the goal of our soul, through these events, was to make us aware of our limitations so as to encourage us to push at them even more?
Lorraine often felt overwhelmed by the scale of her tasks and responsibilities, living on her own with two young children. Even though she had never openly admitted it, at times she would have liked for her kids to disappear from her life, if only for a few hours, so that she could catch her breath. It is completely normal for a mother to be exhausted to the point of wishing she had never given birth. This doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her children; she would readily give her life for them. However, this young woman felt guilty for having entertained such desperate thoughts even briefly, for having imagined abandoning her children.
From the guilt, suffering was born, and from suffering, the need to atone for those horrendous thoughts arose; hence her excessive caution with her children. The brain hemisphere that had emitted the excessive thought—eliminating the cause of her tiredness—was immediately counteracted in its plans by the other hemisphere, which went the opposite direction into overprotectiveness and the total gift of the self—which is just as excessive and exhausting.
The true cause of this woman’s insomnia problems were therefore not her worries about her children but rather that she had not welcomed her own limitations, not being able to reconcile the two extremes by simply coming back to the present moment. Like many people confronted with a similar situation, Lorraine’s emotions took over, amplified by the accumulation of fatigue and resentment of what appeared to be unjust and exhausting constraints. She then dramatized the circumstances and exaggerated the consequences until she made herself ill.
The Other Person, My Mirror
When there is a conflict between two people, when you feel that it wasn’t you but the other person who triggered the hostility, you can ask yourself not what you may have done to attract such trouble, but rather what you may have told yourself about yourself. The thoughts that you entertain toward yourself act like magnets and attract the people who tell you out loud and to your face what you secretly tell yourself in the silence of your heart. They mirror your own unwelcome wounds and your negative perceptions of yourself. Whatever you are trying to repress and hide from others, they are here to free, purify, and in some way purge you of it.
Yet, every time you stop at the messenger rather than the message, you focus your attention on the trigger element rather than on the suffering buried deep within. You do not examine the repressed emotions this event brings up and returns to your consciousness in order to allow you to free yourself of them once and for all. By worrying only about your relationship with the other person, about his or her own wounds and grief toward you, you miss what your soul most aspires to: your own permanent healing.
The bizarre thing is that if you choose to work on yourself rather than on the other person or on the conflict that has you in opposition, unexpected miracles happen. You discover that the person with whom you are arguing seems to be afflicted with the same limiting and painful thoughts as you are. If you go beyond your apparent difference of opinion, you will notice that the challenge is the same for her as it is for you: to love yourself, to accept yourself unconditionally, and to recognize that you don’t have anything to prove to anyone.
You carry some unfulfilled expectations and entertain some old feelings of rejection or nonrecognition within you. It isn’t whether your opinions are respected or what your words or actions are that matters, but rather the way in which you feel supported or not within yourself. Snap out of your current pain for a moment, extract yourself from the context of it, and create some distance in which to consider the whole of your life up to now. Have you not always succeeded? Have you not always overcome challenges? Can you feel that beyond daily frustrations you have always been supported by the invisible hands of your soul family—for all eternity and beyond human comprehension?
Limiting thoughts imprison you in perpetual conflict. They keep you in unnecessary pain. The unique solution to get out of this is to escape from your mind and enter your heart. Accept going beyond the veil of human appearances and open yourself up to the divine and wonderful being that you truly are. You will then see your adversary for who he or she really is: a messenger from a better world, your companion on the road, a brother or sister traveling with you on the path to awakening and to unconditional acceptance.
His or her weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and frustrations are also ours because we are one, universally. By taking the time to heal those wounds in ourselves, we invite the other person to do the same thing; we provide the example. By developing compassion toward ourselves and by seeing beyond external resistance, we give ourselves one of the most beautiful gifts that exist: to free ourselves from human karma.
If the other person isn’t ready to do the same, she will simply leave your life. But if any love or sincere friendship remains between you, she will come back, knocking at your door, and you will be able to sort it out together rather than dealing with the situation each on your own. This may take weeks, even years, but be patient with others, as you should be with yourself.
The Message of My Soul
As time goes by, you will discover that you aren’t just a clumsy messenger shaken by events and interpersonal conflicts, but that it is possible for you to learn to be a genuine message of faith and light at the heart of the turmoil of our unconscious humanity.
I keep hoping that one day, as it was for the great sages and prophets of the past, conflicts will no longer have any hold on us. When we have learned to go beyond external illusions, we will know how to find in ourselves the power of transformation and ultimate healing: the full and total integration of our own divine and eternally serene quintessence.
In the meantime, I imagine that you might be interested to learn the best way to act when faced with someone who is imprisoned in their defense mechanisms. The following chart offers some basic advice that will allow you to avoid entering the awful cycle of survival reactions. Beyond the reflection of ourselves that the other mirrors back to us, through this unique experience our soul is attempting to deliver a message, a precious gift to help us free ourselves from our past limitations and wounds.
The Game of Mirrors Reinvented
|
STEP OF |
HOW TO ACT WHEN |
WHAT IS THIS PERSON |
|
Anger
|
• Do not contradict him |
I am being invited to ask myself whether I manage to affirm myself and take my rightful place. Do I have the courage to express my opinion? |
|
Sadness
|
• Do not pity her |
I am being invited to consider the sensitive and vulnerable child inside of me. Do I have the courage to ask for help and support or simply to be comforted when I need it? |
|
State of
|
• Don’t ask too many questions, but ask for his opinion |
I am being invited to create appropriate distance and to be less demanding of myself. Do I sometimes allow myself to say “no” to others? |
|
Bargaining/
|
• Don’t let him take all space or decide things for you |
I am being invited to find my own solutions and to recognize my strengths and my inner power. Do I allow myself to let the dormant hero within me emerge? |
|
Acceptance/ |
• Remain open |
I am being invited to recognize that all the wise people in my life are the reflection of my own inner light, which also aspires to shine like a thousand suns. |
1. How to Act When Faced with a Perpetrator
• Do not contradict him or her: the more you try to talk some sense into him, the more he will argue, and this may turn sour.
• Underline the points on which you agree: you don’t have to endorse everything she says, but it’s in your best interest to let her express her state of mind. Tell yourself that she is allowed to be angry, because according to her perception of things, she is right and you are wrong. In the worst case, if you do not agree with her, pretend to. You will be able to revisit the subject later when she has calmed down.
• Don’t let him intimidate you: if you become intimidated, the Perpetrator will take this opportunity to steal your energy.
• Remain firm and centered: if you remain centered and give her the right to go through her anger without being affected by it, she will not be able to touch you and drain your energy.
• If he turns violent, leave: unless you want a good slap, remember that a Perpetrator may turn violent, so don’t stay in his way when he is seeing red. If his fury explodes, step aside. You will be showing him that his anger belongs to him and that he will have to go through it on his own. Most importantly, take time to let the dust settle before returning.
What Gift Does the Perpetrator Want to Offer You?
When you find you have a tendency in life to be faced with Perpetrators on a regular basis, when you are used to putting yourself in situations where you are being denigrated or treated as worthless, then you surely have not yet managed to integrate the Builder within you. This is the message that your soul is sending you through this repetitive experience: “I am being invited to wonder whether I manage to affirm myself and take my rightful place. Do I have the courage to express my opinions and claim what I need?”
In fact, when you neglect taking care of yourself too often and answering your own needs, when you always put others before yourself, then those who are professionals in the art of taking care of themselves and putting themselves first—the Perpetrators—come to show you what their method is all about.
2. How to Act When Faced with a Victim
• Do not pity him or her: if you give her even a spark of compassion, she will hang on to you for good.
• Try to reassure him instead of offering solutions: if you propose solutions, the response you will get, is, “Yes, but …” Above all, do not tire yourself out in vain. You will only give him all your energy, which is precisely what he is aiming for.
• Underline the positive points: Try to make her aware that if she has succeeded in overcoming other difficulties to get to where she is today, she has much strength within.
• Don’t let him complain for too long: after four or five “Yes, but …” responses, leave. There is no point in trying to comfort and reassure him because he enjoys feeling sorry for himself. What the Victim wants is your attention, but if you give him the energy he needs, he will never find it within himself. Not only are you not helping him, you are exhausting yourself in vain. As a last resort, you can always remind him that he is not in danger of dying (after all, there are no tyrannosaurs around).
What Gift Does the Victim Want to Offer You?
If you have in your immediate surroundings someone who is always in trouble and who always needs you, remind yourself that you have hired him or her in your game of musical chairs because you yourself never have the courage to sit in the seat of the person who needs to be comforted.
“I am being invited to consider the sensitive and vulnerable child within me. Do I have the courage to ask for help and support or simply to be comforted when I need it?”
In turn, one of the most beautiful gifts you could give a Victim is to tell her how grateful you are for her having helped you become aware of your own needs. Ask her to hug you. Rather than remaining in her Victim state, she will automatically be brought to her heart, to her positive side, the Artisan of Peace. Your own energy will benefit from this luminous experience because you will have considered the needs of your own inner child.
3. How to Act When Faced with an Indifferent
• Don’t ask too many questions, but ask for his or her opinion: if you ask a question, even a theoretical one, he will either respond with a monosyllable or you will be stuck for hours. Choose instead to ask him for his point of view on the present situation and encourage him to involve himself in action—the steps to follow and so on.
• Give her some time to think: her reactions are secondary; she will never answer on the spot. She will never make a decision without reflection. She will weigh the pros and cons for as long as she doesn’t feel safe. If you invite her to consider her emotions and her feelings, she will react like a bar of soap in the bath and try to slip away.
• Respect his need to step aside: don’t harass him or try to follow him if he leaves. Respect his territory and the bubble that surrounds him.
• Invite her to pick the right moment for her to discuss and express her feelings: if you let her go to her cave, she will come back. If you stop her, she will find a way to get back there anyway, but she will take much longer to come out of it.
What Gift Does the Indifferent Want to Offer You?
When we are surrounded by Indifferent individuals, or people with whom it is difficult to communicate, it is often because we have a tendency to take to heart what people think or say about us. Could it be that we want to be perfect, or that we create drama for nothing, or that we let gossip affect us? The message that our soul is sending us is: “I am being invited to create some distance and to be less demanding of myself. Do I sometimes allow myself to say no to others?”
If you suffer mildly from hyperactivity or attention deficit, chances are that the mental dimension of your body might be suffering slightly or might be out of balance. It is in your best interest to take a break: let the legendary intuition of the Visionaries guide and inspire you, and allow yourself to take a break from yourself.
4. How to Act When Faced with a Savior
• Don’t let him or her take all the space or decide for you: the Savior makes a good right-hand person but can at times be very bossy. Make sure not to get seduced by her pretty words and wise advice, as you will lose your own identity within it.
• Thank him for his help and his advice, then change the subject: if he insists on knowing more about you and what you are going through, there is a catch. Don’t forget that his method of acquiring energy is to question you to make you believe you need support from him.
• Solicit her precise collaboration or help, defined in a specific time frame: when you ask a Savior for help, she will think that you need her until the end of your days.
• Show him signs of appreciation and affection: this is paramount because he doesn’t recognize who he is, only what he does. Make him understand that you love him as he is without him having to expend himself for you. Once he gets the recognition that he needs, he will stop trying to make himself worthy by helping you despite your wishes.
What Gift Does the Savior Want to Offer You?
Your soul knows that inside every human being there is a dormant superhero unaware of herself. When you are surrounded by well-meaning people who always do everything for you or pretend to know better than you do what suits you, you have lost touch with your own inner, real, and unlimited potential.
“I am being invited to find my own solutions and to recognize my strengths and my inner power. Do I allow myself to let the dormant hero within me emerge?”
Your soul is inviting you to reconnect with the spiritual dimension of your being, your higher consciousness, your cocreating power—simply stated, your divine self. Will you say “yes” to the light shining within you?
5. How to Respond to a Sage
• Remain open: make space for this amazing being in your life while remaining lucid. If he or she is still here on this Earth, it is because he hasn’t completed his path here either.
• Welcome her light and her teaching: be available to the messages she wants to transmit.
•Recognize yourself in him: “if I have managed to attract some Sages in my life, it is because I am one too.”
• Remember that we are all children of God and that no one is more important than her brothers or sisters: this is what the ascended masters, angels, archangels, extraterrestrials, intraterrestrials, and so on keep repeating to us through all the channels of the planet: we are all equal and compliment each other on our paths. All of these light beings need us as much as we need them. We are all working toward the same goal.
What Gift Does the Sage Want to Offer You?
“When the student is ready, the master appears. I am being invited to recognize that the person in front of me is the reflection of my own inner light, which also aspires to shine like a thousand suns.”
What more is there to say?
Integration: The Path of Wisdom
After years and years praying, fasting, and living in extreme poverty, a disciple humbly came before his guru.
“Master,” he said, “I am ready to know enlightenment.”
“Oh, yes?” The old sage responded, without even opening his eyes to look at who was standing before him. “Well then, tell me what is happening to you.”
“Master, in the first place, I have learned to master my body. Through yoga and relaxation I have managed to space out my breaths and slow down my heartbeat to obtain a state of inner peace and infinite calm. Hunger and the need for sleep no longer have a hold on me. I can meditate for days on end without moving a single muscle.”
“That’s all very well,” the holy man responded, “but what else?”
“I have also learned to master my impulses and my emotions. The sight of a beautiful woman no longer torments me; the world’s misery doesn’t affect me; and the cries of a child leave me completely cold. I am a witness to all that surrounds me and pray fervently for all who live on this Earth finally to be free from suffering and from the illusions of deficiency.”
“This must have demanded much renouncement on your part, my son,” said the old man with a slight smile. “Is there anything else you would like to add?”
“Yes, of course, master. I have long applied myself to quieting all my thoughts, annihilating all my desires, and having no more personal convictions on any matter. Sincerely, I believe I have managed to get rid of my ego and emptied my mind of any form of alienating thought once and for all.”
“You have given all of your life to bettering yourself relentlessly, my child, but do you believe that you have accomplished everything in your power to deserve to become a guru yourself?”
“Absolutely, master. I have followed all your teachings to the letter, religiously practiced all the exercises you have taught me, and observed all your rules of conduct without fault for many years. I am in turn ready to travel the roads to preach the way of accomplishment, just like you and the ones before you have transmitted it.”
The sage of sages let out a deep sigh. His eyelids opened slightly and a flood of sparkling light shone through his eyes. Mute with awe, the disciple fell to his knees and suddenly felt enveloped in a shimmering halo penetrating through every particle of his being. The guru stood up with dignity and approached his student. He put a hand on his shoulder, and as a warm electrical current went through the young man, he whispered in his ear:
“If you had accomplished everything you candidly claimed you had in front of me, you wouldn’t be at all surprised by this light that attempts to infiltrate your heart. You have forgotten that you are not alone in the universe and that you live, grow, and breathe with all that is. Enlightenment isn’t obtained through effort or merit, but rather through divine grace that connects you in consciousness with the whole of creation. When you have understood that, then you too will be a master.”
The disciple left sheepishly, thinking humbly that he still had a long way to go. The great sage felt even sadder, for he saw that his pupil hadn’t understood a thing and was still searching on the outside, in the appearances and illusions of this world, for what had in fact always been and would always be there deep inside him.
And you: can you see the light that shines behind your eyes? Do you feel the presence of this divine flame within you that aspires to set your entire being ablaze? Is your heart dancing with joy in communion with all that lives?
Exercise: This Light in the Mirror
More and more therapists and spiritual masters encourage those around them to take the time to look at themselves in the mirror every morning. What better way is there than to look straight into our own eyes to understand and become familiar with who we are?
Some people even learn to enter into relationships with this image of themselves there in the mirror. They say hello to themselves, tell themselves how beautiful they are, what qualities they recognize in themselves, and so on. It is a good exercise that helps both to overcome our fear of ridicule by daring to talk to ourselves out loud, and to develop our self-esteem: praising ourselves heightens our self-perception.
The ultimate challenge, however, remains managing to maintain our own gaze silently for a few minutes. It is easy to take a brief and fleeting glance at ourselves, to smile while adjusting our makeup or shaving. But it is another story to fix on the eyes of another while knowing they are our own.
It is said that the eyes are the mirror of the soul. Have you ever wondered what your soul, your divine essence, looked like? Is it possible to perceive our inner light through our own double, the pale reflection of ourselves imprisoned behind this polished surface?
Will you dare to try this experience? It is very easy: you can simply imagine that God himself is laying his gaze, filled with love, on you. He contemplates you through your own eyes, and you perceive his loving presence. It is an intimate encounter with your own divine spark in order to discover the light that shines in your eyes when you feel fully loved, accepted, and welcomed.
Those close to you, the people you love most in the world, already know this gaze of yours, filled with tenderness and plenitude. But have you ever allowed yourself to love yourself in this way, to see the cloud of goodness that characterizes you deep in your own eyes, illuminated by a flash of joy and a sparkle of indescribable happiness?
A look of sincere and lasting love toward yourself is an excellent way to taste the plenitude within, to reach the illumination of your whole being: when you discover the presence of God within you, you can never perceive yourself the same way again.
Try it for yourself, and you will see how it works.
