From my experience, we can only help others so far as we can help ourselves. And, really, this is the journey I’ve been on; exploring the depths of my emotions to find freedom, clarity and a deeper understanding of myself and the world around me.

I’ve found, like so many others, that the last few years have been transformational and terribly painful at the same time.

It’s made me come to realise that life is both wonderful and wondering simultaneously. Yes, the sages say that suffering is a choice, indeed it is, but we have much to learn before we can release the burden of suffering.

We cannot just instantaneously undo decades worth of conditioning and programming that keeps us limited, trapped and scared.

It takes a lifetime to untangle the knots that we’ve unknowingly slithered our way into; from all our choices, childhoods and challenges we’ve faced.

To free ourselves from suffering is to free the mind and let the ego gently fade into nothingness. Yet, that freedom isn’t so easily attained, there is work to be done to loosen the chains and grant us safe passage out of the fears, lacks and limitations of our self-sabotaging mind.

To free ourselves from suffering means to dissolve the ego, and for many of us, the dissolution of our personalities into the nothingness of the void, is something to be avoided at all costs.

Our comfort is knowing that it is possible. While spiritual enlightenment can be unwrapped, a gift worthy of us all but one we’re only seeing granted to a mere few, it is possible and it is there for our taking.

The pain and process of unlearning

Yet, we have so much to unlearn. We suffer because we don’t know any better and our minds are too full of false narratives that we have been force-fed throughout our lives.

To ease suffering, we have to start unlearning.

If we thought learning was hard, we had no idea how tricky and sneaky unlearning could be. Unlearning trips us up because we’re going backwards and blind into the unseen.

We don’t know what’s on the other side of unlearning, it could be pain, it could be joy, and more often than not it’s a combination of the two, for one always follows closely behind the other.

Suffering also teaches us what we have not yet healed, where we have not yet ‘done the work’.

Someone once told me that I was wrong for calling it ‘emotional work’, that the process of self-healing under the umbrella of self-awareness and self-responsibility, was not work at all.

Yet, it is work, it’s damn hard work.

Work has negative connotations in our culture. We associate it with the 9-5 that Dolly Parton belts out in a musical irony of ‘what a way to make a living’. We associate it with the trappings of materialism, the 3D reality of corporate life and the monotony of a bland, unrewarding and passionless existence.

Yet, work is rewarding and pleasurable, if we do it with grace.

Work is all about achieving a purpose and is there not great purpose to be achieved by healing the wounds that cause us to live in fear? Is there not great purpose to soothing the tangled knots that hide in the shadows, tripping up our lives and causing us to falter and stumble through our reality?

Is there not great purpose in learning the truth of who we are so we can begin to release the tension of living life in fear of constant death, forgetting that we are forever sparks of the greater life force that flows through us all?

Yes, I think there is great purpose in all of these things.

The weight and wounds of our many layers of existence

A wonderful friend, enlightened far beyond her years, recently shared her dismay at the oh-so-casual spiritual bypassing that ricochets around the new age spiritual community, causing untold damage to the esteem and souls of those who wander there.

She was told to just ‘let go and trust that she would be carried like a leaf on the wind’. How charming, how pretty and how strikingly false.

I admit, I have most certainly been guilty of telling people to just trust and let go, knowing it will come. But I don’t mind admitting when I’ve fallen into a spiritual trap, as I so often do. This is a big one to fall into.

The truth is, we cannot just float by on the spiritual laws, the worst offender being the law of attraction, being carried by nothing but blind faith.

Not yet anyway. And certainly not without comprehending the enormous weight of personal baggage that we carry with us that weighs us down and is not so easily discarded.

We carry the weight of experiences, emotional trauma and learnings. We carry the weight of societal and parental conditioning. We carry the weight of past lives, current lives and future lives in this reality, other realities, dimensions and universes.

Let’s not forget the heck of a load of karma, just waiting for us to gleefully transmute it into our gift, that hangs around too.

We carry the weight of the gaping wound of self-esteem we all lug about with us as limp from life cycle to life cycle wishing we could remember the truth of who we are and our divine nature so we could love ourselves as we deserve to be loved.

The point is, we cannot discard the baggage until we learn how to let it go.

We are here to learn. We are here to evolve. It isn't meant to be easy, because if it was, if we could just let go of suffering of the mind and ego, we would all do so instantly.

It is a beautiful level of enlightenment to reach and one that is worthy of the time it takes to discover.

Easing the suffering is a process worthy of time

Carrying out the emotional and spiritual work to ease our suffering is the only way forward and the most divine and worthwhile path one could hope to take.

For, how can we expect to be of service and ease the suffering of the world if we cannot ease the suffering within ourselves?

It all starts from within and the insides of us go far deeper that we can imagine; spanning multidimensional layers and levels of existence, that all need our attention, love and healing.

While we’re here to enjoy this wonderful world, play, love and live in joy, we’re also here on a spiritual path of evolution that will take us down paths of darkness as well as light. We live in an existence of duality and we cannot have one without the other.

Do not fear it, embrace it.

It’s ok if it’s hard, releasing these deep layers of wounds and shadows and pain isn’t meant to be a playpen of puppies. It’s not called the dark night of the soul for nothing.

Suffering is of course a part of it and learning how to ease our suffering through the mind is a powerful lesson of unlearning and learning at the same time. Not only are we unlearning what we once absorbed so fast and readily and utterly subconsciously, but we’re learning a new way of being at the same time.

It’s the most challenging part of our existence, but you’re not alone. We all feel the same.

And if there’s anyone who hasn’t embraced the deeper work, living a life seemingly free of all the turmoil that you’re going through, unaware of their emotional depths or reality, then that’s not the path of their soul this lifetime and we mustn't interfere with their own journey.

Earth is a place where our souls come to learn to feel all the emotions that are so icky, so uncomfortable, so desperate and so frustrating.

Hang in there, the more you release, more you transform, and that feels pretty good in the end, trust me.

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Carry on exploring