My 23 year old son was on a rant the other day about the state of the world. I can’t blame him for being upset about it. He holds a “you guys messed it up and left us with the bill…” feeling, for which I can’t blame him. He struggles to figure out what he personally can do about the all the problems that we face right now and it seems overwhelming.
I have a different experience, which is to believe that things are improving with the changes that are on us. Things get messier as they get better. We are bringing a lot of yuckiness out of the dark shadows and into the light of day.
And it’s not pretty, but it is healthy.
I see the same thing in my healing work. When someone goes into a deep healing cycle there is a similar pattern. Things look “ok, sorta” on the outside. You are functioning, you just are not happy, there is something missing, wrong, and lacking. When you get into the guts of the inner work, and all the hidden stuff comes to the surface, it seems as if all hell breaks lose and it looks worse than it did before.
Healers call this a healing crisis. And we look forward to this process and see it as progress.
Here is a good analogy. You want to clean your room, really deep clean it. It looks pretty good at a casual glance, the bed is made and the floor is clean. But you know there is stuff hidden away. So you haul out everything that has been shoved under the bed. And then you open the closet door and there is a closet avalanche as everything you shoved in there over the years tumbles out. Turn out your drawers, bags and boxes. Clean out all the places where you shove things and then look. It’s a lot worse, right?
Or is it?
Those things have been there all along, just hiding- shoved out of sight.
It’s the energy of the times right now to clean out the hidden places, to reveal what has been shoved away. It’s not pretty to see the truth, but it’s so much better to see our actual reality than to live in a lala land where the house looks ok on the surface but there is rot in the foundation.
I see this happening in our world on so many levels, and even though it’s messy, dirty, and yucky, I rejoice in the cleaning out process. We are all in it. The same thing happens in the Rhys Thomas Institute to our students. They worry that there is something wrong with them- “I didn’t know I was THAT messed up!” when they start shining the light of consciousness on themselves.
To heal, to make changes and to evolve, we must bring things into our conscious awareness. We must see the truth, see reality as it is in all its glory and its horror. We haul the demons out from under the bed and shine the light of consciousness on them.
Then we can heal, change, make choices and evolve.
