Fifth Pathway – Persistently Looking Inward
Self-reflection is an especially
important pathway to healing. I contend
countless people do not heal from past pain because they do not examine their
personal backgrounds and learn from them.
It is easier to ignore these lessons.
Retreating to bitterness and resentment appear more empowering than
reflecting on situations that fuel those emotions. It seems weak to consider how you might grow
because of those difficulties. People
who refuse to forgive their victimizers nurse toxic feelings believing they
retain the upper hand. Instead, those
lethal emotions poison the people who nurse them. Rather than remaining in the vicious cycle of
pain, depression and anger, you can embrace self-reflection as a means of
healing.
A friend of mine who is a psychoanalyst
had an amazing quote sketched onto the wall of her office. “The inward journey is the only one worth
taking.” She offers these encouraging
words to her clients to motivate them to dig deeply within themselves until
they achieve serene self-acceptance.
Looking honestly and persistently at yourself is ridiculously hard
work. From time to time, it becomes
discouraging as it appears extraordinarily little progress has been made. It seems easier to simply terminate, walk
away and resolve to react to whatever happens.
It is particularly disheartening when the past blindsides you. Periodically, your current circumstances enflame
the embers of anger, fear and resentment thus plunging you back into the abyss
of bewilderment, toxicity and hopelessness.
Still, persistence pays incalculable dividends as anyone who endures the
utterly painstaking process of digging within the rubble and ruins of past pain
and trauma. Utilizing biblical imagery,
it is worth traveling through “the valley of the shadow of death.” Thorough self-examination is a reliable
pathway to healing.
Alan Alda speaks of the necessity of
time in the “intuitive wilderness” where a person genuinely learns who he or
she is. That self-knowledge in turns
yields serene self-acceptance. That
ideal is attainable if individuals embrace this process. Alda specifically says, “Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no
one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into
the wilderness of your intuition. You can't get there by bus, only by hard
work, risking, and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover
will be wonderful: yourself.” He
encourages us to discard old ways of thinking.
Businesses fail because owners refuse to change and adapt to shifting
market trends. Basically, “think outside
of the box.” Wipe the canvass of your
life clean. Be willing to make bold and
creative edits to the script of your life with God’s guidance. Open the dream files stored in your mind and
heart. Dust off the latent and even
lofty ambitions of your youth that time, monotony, fear and aimlessness have
corroded. Healing and miracles are
divine creative processes which require your desire and cooperation. To live creatively, you must be bold and
imaginative. Are you willing to
entertain the smidgen of possibility that your dreams could come true? Will you pause for a moment and visualize the
prospect of living the life your
envisioned in your childhood innocence?
Imagine that you can live happily ever after in perfect, gracious and
divine self-expression.
Reminiscent of the space explorers of
the Star Trek Enterprise, persons who discover creative space land
“where no one else has ever been.”
Creativity demands fearlessness.
Personally, I err on the side of right-brain, Western, logical and
linear thinking and approaches to life.
I am not the type of person who gets in the driver’s seat without
previously researching my route or activating Google maps. I must know where I am going! Preferring efficiency of time and gasoline, I
am not content to travel aimlessly until I reach my destination. Internally and sometimes externally, I holler
if I am lost. With free and readily
available GPS software and smart phones, there is no reason for any mistakes in
traveling directly to any destination. A
wrong turn infuriates me. However,
zigzagging is very necessary when traversing internal terrain of
self-discovery, self-expression and self-acceptance. Detours and wrong turns are par for the
course. Rarely is someone able to travel
directly to this sacred and serene space.
Trial and error are necessary fuel.
Like Edison’s one thousand failures in an engineering lab and Lincoln’s
perpetual defeats in pursuit of political office, a person encounters rough
terrain and unexpected obstacles as he or she seeks to become the person whom
Almighty God created him or her to be.
Alda next insists you should leave “the
city of your comfort.” Unchallenged
childhood and formative trauma ironically become normal. It is easy to romanticize it. Unwilling to embrace the depth of pain and
innumerable feelings of hurt, victims make excuses for their “well-intentioned”
victimizers. Using literary techniques
of American folklore, people turn the horror of their personal experiences into
Horatio Alger myths. “It really wasn’t
that bad. After all, I made it through
and lived to tell the story.”
Practically and intra-psychically speaking, some people make peace with
their past pathology. Regrettably, they
surrender to fear, anger, resentment and other poisonous attributes. On an unconscious level, they make decisions
regarding love, work and other important relationships from this unfortunate
and ineffective space. Captive to
erroneous voices of the past that insist he must externally affirm his inward
desires and ambitions, a talented, intellectual and driven man allows family
members, colleagues and friends to talk him into entering a profession for which
he was not suited. The man experienced
two major “failures” within that profession before finally exiting it. Had he listened to his inner voice as God was
guiding him, this man would have trusted himself thereby sparring himself the
waste of fourteen years of his professional life. Resulting from his poor decision to defer to
other people and deeply embedded fear, this man spent twenty-five years in
anger, fear, resentment, bitterness and cynicism. His inability to live in harmony and
collegiality with other people stems from his formidable inner anger at himself
for surrendering to fear and people-pleasing.
The unacceptable fear that paralyzed him became acceptable. He began to live comfortably with it. Living with fear, anger and other venomous
emotions as normal receded into the background of his “city of comfort.” To change fundamentally and achieve inner
healing and wholeness, this man needs a wholesale paradigm shift in his daily
outlook. It is as if he became
comfortable living in “the valley of the shadow of death.”
Healing requires this man to strip
himself of all assumptions and establish a “new normal.” Leaving his “city of comfort” necessitates
openness to transforming every aspect of his life. What if this man were to ask for God’s help
in transitioning to the job of his dreams?
Finally, he would listen to himself and do what he always desired in his
heart of hearts. Perhaps, he attains a
greater sense of self-acceptance which empowers him to live peacefully with
other people. Conceivably, he discards
character defects (procrastination, debt, failure to forgive, self-righteous
indignation, etc.) that compound his pathology.
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