I have a family member who suffered horrendous abuse as a child and teenager. Not just verbal, emotional, and psychological; but physical and sexual abuse, repeated for years until they married young to escape, only to be abused by their spouse.
While I love and respect this person tremendously, staying stuck in daily torment has had the effect of semi-estrangement for us. Though they long for the days when we were able to be ‘best buds’, having conversations about our busy lives, now it’s just not possible.
In the early years, just maintaining a life was enough to keep us both busy and occupied. You would think that one day maybe, perhaps they will seek help in dealing with the emotional wounds.
Years go by, and now they are in their ‘later years’, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with their mother, living mostly in their car because smoking is not allowed in the apartment. Cigarettes and alcohol have become as important as food and shelter.
Their life has been reduced to a tiny box, with only a few family members who still relate to them due to the toxicity. A warped memory and perception, blurred by addiction, fear, pain, sorrow and blame has driven all others away.
“Healthy boundaries” is a derogatory term for them, having heard it in reference to their relationship with others.
To be clear, this person who was once stunningly beautiful, is also quite smart, charismatic, talented, generous, loving and kind. They could have been anything they wanted to be. But suffering stole this from them.
Having had numerous conversations, usually in response to desperate pleas for help and guidance during a particularly emotional drinking spell, I have finally reached the point of seeking help myself.
Next week, when I’m not so busy, I keep telling myself, I will go to that AL-ANON meeting. It’s easy to put off, not exactly an emergency. At least not yet.
This is just a thumbnail version of one person’s life. But it serves to make a point, and hopefully help others understand how the fear of facing unresolved pain can only lead to suffering and misery.
Rape and beatings that happened 50+ years ago, are still raping and beating them today, every day; even though the perpetrator has long since died.
As Dr. Phil famously said, “Time heals nothing.”
An Empowering Perspective
I have come to embrace a perspective that makes sense of life. Even the most horrible and senseless acts can be fit into a broader understanding of why things happen. Not a justification, just an explanation.
The ancient Hawaiians surmised that the only definition for “God” that makes logical sense is that God is “All-That-Is” because anything less than All-That-Is, could not possibly be God. And since we are all a part of All-That-Is, we are all ‘Divine Beings’, inextricably connected to our Source and each other.
We live a lifetime in this material plane of existence for a very short time when you consider the time spent before and after this lifetime in the ‘World of Spirit’.
The World of Spirit is where we come from and go back to; it is what contains the World of Form, the physical, material dimensional plane.
We come here for a reason.
When we come here, there is an endless variety of circumstances that we can be born into: time periods, places, parents, siblings, climates, cultures, socioeconomic and geopolitical situations are but a few of the myriad combinations of circumstances that we are plopped into the middle of when we are born.
Once here, you have parents and all those other things that make up the trajectory of your life. I would submit to you that all of those things are indeed, by design, your design.
From the World of Form perspective, you’re born, grow up, live your life, hopefully have more good experiences than bad, and then you die. The End.
From the World of Spirit perspective, you are an eternal Soul growing up to be One with All-That-Is. You have “soul lessons” to learn and many, many lifetimes to learn them and evolve vibrationally.
From the spiritual perspective of your soul’s purpose in this tiny fraction of time we spend here, you have quite specific experiences, ‘lessons’ to learn so that you can grow spiritually.
From information gathered from many ‘near-death experiences’ (NDEs); it has been conveyed time and time again that in this journey of soul growth we have a group of other souls with whom we share a common theme.
Themes run the gamut: art, politics, dance, murder, gardening, leadership, family, famine, wealth, poverty, class, knowledge and wisdom, slavery, benevolent or vicious rule, genocide, space travel, war, animals, opulence, comfort, misery, courage, survival, progress, overcoming, forgiveness; just to name a few of the endless opportunities for spiritual growth and evolution.
From this context, ALL experiences serve the purpose of adding to the cosmic storehouse of experiences.
The nature of God is Creative and Expansive and experiences our lives through us.
The ancient Hawaiians had a profound understanding of this. They grasped with great depth the World of Spirit/World of Form concept.
Relatively speaking, we’re only in the World of Form for “a blink of an eye.”
Because Form is so dense vibrationally, it allows for lower vibrational elements to exist.
These are the contrasting elements, the dark energies that can provide the backdrop for an exponential range of experiences.
The Movie Analogy
It’s just like going to a movie: there are a multitude of wide-ranging things to experience in a movie. From romance to espionage, adventure to disaster, comedy to suspense and everything in between. We can choose what we are curious to experience from the safety of our seat inside a dark theater.
When we leave the theater, we leave with the pseudo experience of all that was contained in the film.
It is the same for our lives in the World of Form. We come to this place where we can dance with dark elements and leave with not just a pseudo experience but an actual one.
Every experience of every being in every moment in every part of the World of Form All-That-Is experiences with us with Compassion. It all counts, nothing is wasted.
As the ancient Hawaiians said, “The gods (us) thirst for meaning and expression”.
We ‘thirst’ for those experiences that provide opportunity for meaning and expression that we can only have in the World of Form.
We come here from a place of pure Love and Joy; and through the process of birth, we ‘forget’ where we came from and what Love is.
Then we go through experiences that reveal the stark contrast between Love and what Love is not and derive meaning.
The way we experience forgiveness is against the backdrop of painful events.
The way we experience thrill is against the backdrop of risk-taking actions.
The way we experience harmony is against the backdrop of chaos.
And so on…
The World of Form is set up to provide literally any and every experience that can be conceived, making it the perfect place to learn our ‘soul lessons’.
Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.
Pain is built into the framework of the World of Form.
Suffering, on the other hand, is that kind of experience that is valuable in and of itself but once we learn the soul lesson, it is quite unnecessary. The duration is dependent upon our level of awareness and consciousness.
We have a choice in the matter; and indeed, that IS the lesson.
I have concluded that between the four members of my immediate family, we have traded places in who knows how many different lifetimes, on the theme of child sexual abuse. In this particular lifetime, my sister and I were the ‘victims’, our father the ‘perpetrator’ and our mother the ‘bystander’ (indirect victim).
Each of these roles have merits as unique as the experiences. Each of them contained pain. One of them contained victory. One of them contained suffering. My guess is that we have swapped these roles numerous times, perhaps until the one who is still suffering finally learns that the key to end suffering is Forgiveness… the Courage to Forgive.
Does that sound like a soul lesson?
We experience pain and we get over it. But if that pain turns into years and decades of suffering then perhaps this perspective can provide an empowering way of looking at it. We all have, at all times, the power to choose how we look at painful circumstances. With a zoomed-out view, it’s all just a short movie that we will, at some point, find interesting, educational, and perhaps even entertaining.
As one person said to me about his NDE, from the other side he looked at all those experiences, pain and all, and exclaimed, “What a hoot!”
Who you are is as big as All-That-Is, so consider letting the victim energy go and allow Love to heal.
It may have been your lesson in this life to experience exactly what you have experienced but that doesn’t mean you have to stay stuck there. You don’t.
Humility, Willingness, Courage, Forgiveness, that’s the lesson. Those are your True Qualities. Love is the Greatest Power in the Universe, and nothing is too big for Love to conquer, including your pain and suffering.
Aloha!