7/ the most beautiful work

From this burst onward, I am also reading them. You can listen to it above and on Spotify or Apple Podcast.

I found myself on a call where a friend complained about a friend of hers who kept reminding her of her ex-boyfriend and this brought back painful memories. This is a gift in disguise. Because when I put myself in a place of suffering, the suffering is there to show me what I am doing to myself. Not the suffering is the gift but what the suffering teaches me. Her friend was her gift because it showed her a wound that she is having. Her friend played the "bad guy" to point it out to her, unconsciously, just by being herself. 

I can build a life around trying to avoid the things that trigger me, that make me uncomfortable, but no matter how sophisticatedly I do that, as I keep carrying that wound with me it stays a burden because it limits my freedom and my self-expression as I constantly have to navigate life avoiding it getting touched. 

There’s no way around the work I am here to do which is to heal my wounds and thereby realise I was whole all along and that there's nothing that needs to be added for me to be complete. Rather the opposite. As Rumi said: You don’t have to seek for love but merely remove all the barriers that you have built within you against it. 

Wounds are trauma or past conflicts that we are here to heal. If someone or something brings that wound to the surface, it’s painful, but it’s a gift because it offers me an opportunity to see that wound (again) and, if I do my work, to heal it so I no longer have to suffer from it. And from that place I expand, become less constrained and freer and I don’t need to avoid that friend or tell that friend not to mention my ex. 

Wounds like these make life extremely complicated and yet that’s what we are doing all the time. I experience something I don’t like and then I try to avoid it to not have that negative experience again. Little by little I thereby constrain my life more and more and at some point, I can barely move anymore without freaking out. 

It turns out my neighbour has a cat phobia when Lexi (my cat) explored the garden and curiously entered his apartment. I didn't even know that cat phobia was a thing and upon looking into it I found there's also zoo-phobia - fear of animals in general. Can you imagine? 

These are unusual examples but it speaks to how we constrain our lives, consciously and unconsciously until we need everything to be a certain way or otherwise we get angry, frustrated, anxious, worried, annoyed, jealous, you name it. And thereby making our lives miserable. 

I cannot and am not supposed to control the world, rather I am meant to explore and flow through life just like the water in a river bed, to surrender. And when there’s an obstacle I don’t fight or try to avoid it, I notice it and just flow around it, gracefully. But the more I am trying to control the world and try hard to make sure that things are exactly how I want them, the less enjoyable my life becomes because the harder it will be for me to be pleased.

And the less open I become to explore new territory which is one of the most beautiful things and the very purpose of life, to explore, to wonder and wander around, to be full of curiosity about what might happen next, to be present, and in awe for how life surprises me with new experiences - and to expand and grow through them. 

So if I am (or she is) ready to grow then this girlfriend situation is the perfect invitation for her to visit that wound she has with her ex and to heal it, to realise she does not need to be triggered, she can just be thankful for her time and experience with him, realising that the difficult relationship showed her something she needed to learn. Relationships are always a mirror for us, to see what she needed to see, and for him to see what he needed to see. 

This is not an active act. We are all constantly showing others what they need to see by triggering them so we all can evolve. This is life. It's not to be avoided, it's to be met with humility and the willingness to see it for what it is. Because with every trigger I remove, I heal a wound and I expand, I become larger and I go through life with more love and openness creating more beauty for ourselves and allowing others to heal. 

That's why we are here. To grow, to expand and thereby to shine our light. But when I am busy licking and avoiding my wounds, my light is out, it’s dark, and I feel dark with all the negative emotions I harbour. And even if my wounds are not triggered because I have built such sophisticated mechanisms to avoid them, even then I am not shining because these mechanisms constrain me in what I can do, say and who I can be. I've built my own prison. 

We all are here to shine, expand, and most importantly be ourselves in an unconstrained way. To share with the world our uniqueness simply through who we are rather than the compromised and limited version of ourselves. 

So there’s no way around for me to do this work. It's the most important thing I can do. Because with every wound I heal, I remove some of the clay around the sculpture that is me and once I am done, there will be just the beautiful me left. And I will feel very light, in peace and shine brightly. What more beautiful work could there be?