Life is littered with moments of surrender and moments of fear.
Like Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, the second in the trilogy and, by far, the best film, I hope that this story lifts the lid on another deeper aspect of the metamorphosis of my experience of life. Should you wish to follow on your own journey of change, then please join me.
As you read, see if any of the text resonates with you, or you manage to glimpse anything close to the experiences in your life. Try to hear the missing notes between the words, as it’s very interesting to feel what comes to the surface. Spaces usually hold lots of compelling evidence. Don’t let letters and words fall between the cracks and vanish.
You see, feeling feelings is the gift. They tell you you’re alive. They are what connects you to others and the world. Without feelings, life is dull and repetitive, a treadmill that cycles in perpetuity.
The first part of any change is the realisation that change is necessary. Hence, the book, A Journey to Nowhere. The second part, this book, is the breaking down of resistance to that change, the pulling open of the chrysalis. This isn’t a zip pulling exercise where someone from the outside grabs the zip to help us climb out. This is a very solitary exercise where we have to find the energy to nip away at the thread holding the chrysalis shut. We can only do this from the inside.
Part of that thread nipping is bringing back the particles of us that we have deliberately isolated because we found those particles very challenging to look at, and to acknowledge. This happens because the people we meet decide we are deficient in some way, setting up a series of erroneous beliefs we hold onto, and these can make us very ill. Our beliefs run in the background, in our subconscious, like a computer program. The result is to cause fear to surface.
When fear rises, there’s always a reason for it. If you can make friends with the fear in that moment, it will tell you why it’s trying to get your attention. If you choose to react outwards instead of inwards, you will lose the opportunity to study its origins.
In those many fearful moments over many years, I chose to ignore and suppress my rising fear, rather than embrace it. I stuffed it all in a box under the bed, hoping never to see the box in the light again. There comes a moment where the chains holding the box shut are bulkier than its contents.
Fear brings with it important information about your belief systems, information that gives you opportunities to refocus outdated systems and rewrite them into something fit for where you are now. This is far from an easy task. Fear has many layers and nuances you must unravel. Fear comes out of the blue in the most inconvenient of moments to stop us in our tracks. It acts like a brake, slowing us so we can reconnect to something deep within.
It requires courage and a willingness to travel our inner pathways, the inner maze of the old you, to rebuild new belief systems for the you that you are now. The journey undertaken is a surrender to your history, a discovery of the hidden parts of yourself that have been sequestered because they are too painful to revisit, and sometimes even acknowledge. During and long after my pivot point year of 1994, I chose to acknowledge my pain and fears. This single act transformed my life.
The chapters that follow are simply me trying to find the parts of myself that ran away to have a party on their own. Not because they wanted to, but because I was told by so many people that those parts of me were untenable and unacceptable. Rejection was the result. Since those parts cannot be separated from me, by definition, those people were rejecting me. Consequently, the people around me were much happier than I, simply because I hid the real me from view, their happiness in exchange for my desolation.
