I’m right, you’re wrong, and f*ck you if you disagree with me!

Sound familiar?

In present-day humanity, I see the exact drama unfolding that was once my individual path in life. I unconsciously chose, over and over again, to serve myself and take the easier way out every time I was challenged.

Everything my mind whispered, I believed. There were times I felt the presence of my spirit, but I just didn’t understand what it was telling me—I was too clouded and heavy with dense, negative energies to see clearly. I didn’t understand that I could stop identifying with the horribly loud and hateful voice in my head.

I was convinced I had all the answers, and was so attached to the identity my mind was creating that I would have fought anyone who tried to tell me otherwise.

In fact, I did fight often.

I loved to argue. I loved to be right, and to prove someone wrong. This is exactly why I am so disciplined today about not getting pulled into egotistical arguing to prove my point and cling to my identity. Instead, I practice allowing others to believe what they choose, regardless of whether or not I agree.

“We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don’t like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others….Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground.”  ~ Pema Chödrön

The human mind becomes out of control when our spirit is locked away. There is no balance, no harmony, no unification of mind, body, and soul—and thus we cannot find these qualities in the outside world either.

When we are blocked from our spiritual body, we become too attached to identifying with another particular body—usually the physical/material body. We can’t see past our own limited physical or mental identity. Because of the blocks and the imbalances, we cling to the identity of our bodies or minds. We can’t see past the belief that we are only our physical form, which we fear losing because we don’t see there is so much more. We cling to our egotistical, mind-created beliefs and programming because we feel incomplete and inadequate. Our mind tells us something and we believe it as the end all, be all, the final word. We become our thoughts, and if anyone tries to tell us differently, we bristle, we are offended.

My spirit was a prisoner of my mind for a long time. For most of my life, if I’m being honest. The loud, incessant, mean, judgmental voice in my head who was running the show for all those years, was the very one that had my true spirit imprisoned inside. We can call it my inner Sith Lord. No matter what I call it, the truth is this: I was a prisoner of my own warped mind, and it was no one’s fault but mine.

If you’ve ever felt like you were doing something against your own will, knowing inherently it was against your own best interests, but doing it anyway—that’s a good example of where I am going with this.

Call the inherent knowledge whatever you want: intuition, knowing, sixth sense, gut instinct, God—it’s all the same. That little voice crying inside every time I said “f*ck it” and reached for that needle or crack pipe was what I had buried so deep, I couldn’t hear it any longer as I stumbled blindly down my path to hell. It was that very voice I was trying to drown out with my submersion into the world of drugs and alcohol—the one whispering that there was a better way to live, that I was capable of so much more than this. My mind just wouldn’t allow me to believe that. And my mind was boss.

I was tired of the battle between mind and spirit quite early on. I did believe in myself and my capabilities—my spirit was somewhere deep within and it knew I was capable and worthy of doing wonderful things. The spirit always knows this, as it is part of the divinity, the greater consciousness. The spirit knows we are of grace, and that we are pure love and light, a fracture of the great Source in a manifested human form on earth. On a deeper level, the spirit knows we chose to come to earth to have a human experience, and that we have a purpose to fulfill. It’s up to us, whether or not we choose to hear this over our own egoic, clamoring mind.

I could hear whispers of this purpose early on, as a child.

I believe we get messed up when our energies cannot flow properly. Our chakra systems get blocked, fractured and thrown off balance, and we become mired in our dense human emotions, thoughts, physical bodies, and experiences. The mind takes over to help us survive and we either intellectualize or emotionalize everything for defense. The ego forms and grows in response to trauma or pain early on in life. It starts building walls up because the ego knows that connection with the spirit and greater consciousness is a direct threat to it. Thus, it fights against any balancing force which would bring inner harmony or unity of mind, body, and soul.

The ego is like the greedy, dark, Sith Lords in Star Wars, while the spirit would be the Jedi—and there must be balance in the Force, just like there must be balance in us. The physical body suffers because of our unbalanced energy, and we are distracted by our sicknesses and dis-eases. We attach to and identify with our illnesses, using them to make an identity. We cling to our misery and our struggles.

How quickly we forget the whispering we once heard from our spirit among all this chaos. We forget it, we lose it in the noise, in the thinking, in the physical pain, but it is always still there.

This is why we need meditation and yoga. This is what we discover in solitude. When we quiet down the noise of the mind through pranayama practice, we see the truth.

Our thoughts create our realities. Our thoughts define us. But, if we don’t like the definition we find within, it can be rewritten whenever we say so.

Only we can make this change for ourselves. It starts within.

This is how we can change the world.

 

Author: Lindsay Carricarte

Image: BrunoBIB/Deviantart 

Editors: Catherine Monkman; Katarina Tavčar