As I look back my life journey, especially the past 11 years, courage has helped me to be where I am today. I can have all the good intentions, wishes, dreams and desires, but without courage, I would not be able to manifest any one of them.
It is the courage that has helped me to face my fear, doubt and insecurity. It has enabled me to follow my heart and to move onto my spiritual journey.
If someone told me that the spiritual path was not an easy journey 11 years ago, I would have laughed, as I was telling them they were wrong. I truly believed at that time that my suffering in life was because I did not follow my true path. I knew once I found my true path that my life would change for the better and everything with me would be wonderful. However, as I look back over the past 11 years of my life journey on the spiritual path, I know that this was a long way from the truth. Your Spiritual journey is not an easy path at all. It is a journey to free our soul from the control of the Self and return to our truth home in the world of Spirit.
As I go further in my life journey, I am more aware that courage is one of the most important attributes to enable my soul growth to take place. Courage is the foundation of my strength, endurance, perseverance and manifestation, as I listen to and follow my heart.
When I was just awakening spiritually 11 years ago, I was like a thirsty child who had just found a precious and delicious drink. All the sudden, the light bulb was turned on within me, and for once my life began to make sense. For the first time, I felt joy and hope. So much so that I was so excited to share my new found truth with my church friends. Unfortunately, it horrified them. They were afraid of being tempted by their Devil, known as Satan. They were terrified of God’s punishment. As a result, they began to distance themselves from me.
At that time, church was the most important part of my life. It was my temple and refuge. I only had church friends and I spent most of my spare time actively participating in church activities – prayer meeting, fellowships, bible study, Sunday worship, choir practice, and retreats, etc. It provided me a place of security and belonging. However, my new found truth of Spirituality had more meaning to me, and it freed me from my fear of God, but it was not accepted by the Church I attended.
In the summer of 2004, after I attended my 2nd Master of Metaphysical Advanced Course with Margaret/Maitreya, my life was turned completely upside down. In the span of a week, I walked away from the church and from my Christian faith. I left all my cherished and dear church friends, whom I had been so closely connected. I was forced to quit my well-paid stable job that had been providing a comfortable income for the safety and security of my daughter and me. I sold my house and had to move into a rented house and stayed there for six months alone and jobless. All of a sudden, the security and comfort I have worked so hard to build for me and my daughter was gone – income, job, house and friends. I cried every day without knowing where to go and what to do in the future. I could not get any answers in my daily meditation. I was so scared, but deep down within me, I knew that I could not go back and I just needed to summon the courage within me to keep moving forward. All I did everyday was repeat the words, “faith, trust, patience and perseverance.” It was this courage that had enabled me to go through that difficult time without falling back to the comfort zone that I no longer resonated with in my truth.
Before I began to work in the Maitreya Seattle Center in Redmond, WA, I hardly spoke English in my daily life. I was so comfortable in the Chinese community and I did not need to communicate with others in English. As I began working in the Maitreya center, I was no longer able to avoid speaking English. I was afraid that people would not be able to understand me, and I had a terrible fear that they would laugh at my broken English and Chinese accent. It was courage that gave me the inner strength to face my fear and speak English to those who came into our center. As I faced my fear, I was amazed to see that I had no problem communicating with people. They did not reject me, ridicule me or laugh at me because of my broken English, but more importantly, they sincerely appreciated the assistance I was able to provide to them. I realized that it was not the language, but the Energy from my heart that connected me to people and enabled me to serve and assist them.
I used to be a perfectionist and I took things very personally. I had a belief that my value and self worth were all dependent on other people’s approval. Because of this, I did not want others to see my flaws, faults, mistakes, errors or imperfections. I was afraid of being looked down upon, being rejected, ridiculed and most of all punished. I was always graded at the top on my job performance. I worked hard and tried hard in whatever I was doing so that people would value me, respect me and like me. If someone said something about me, or pointed out something that I did wrong, I would be very upset. I would justify myself, and blame others as an excuse. I found it very hard and difficult to blame myself. It would take a long time for me to get over any blame that I incurred. I became secretive, distrustful, private and protective. As a result, I had difficultly in expressing what I truly felt. I was afraid of confrontation and I was even fearful of being seen in public. Whenever I felt someone challenged me, I immediately closed myself off and kept my distance from that individual. They might not have had any idea why I distanced myself from them, but I would just cut off the relationship because of the hurt feeling and grudge in my heart. I kept running away from the learning. However, the Universe kept creating the same situation for me to deal with again and again. This became a pattern in my dealing with relationships. I was struggling and I was unhappy, without realizing that I actually was the culprit and I was doing this to myself.
It was the courage that prompted me to ask Margaret/Maitreya for guidance a few years ago. It was an early morning and I drove Margaret from her house to Redmond, WA to attend a BNI meeting, which we both were members of that group at that time. I asked her why I reacted negatively when I felt being challenged. Maitreya talked to me through Margaret in the car all the way to the meeting place. He pointed out that it was my pride. He taught me the tree of life on the emotional level. Among all emotions, pride was on top of them. It was the pride that my Self held onto and used to stop me from learning the life lessons I was supposed to learn. Margaret/Maitreya’s teaching was very enlightening and educating. I was finally able to see what my Self was doing to me. I was so glad that I had the courage to reach out to Margaret/Maitreya for help. Otherwise, I would still be in that endless struggle.
I then began to work on this issue. It was the courage that helped me to be totally honest and truthful with myself. It forced me to look at whatever the external situation I was in and to recognize the mirror and reflection of what the Self was hiding from me. It took courage for me to look at my own imperfection, the flaws, mistakes, wrongs and errors. For the first time in my life, I had to admit that I was not perfect. I had to admit that I made mistakes and that I could be wrong. I had to learn to sincerely say ” I am sorry” from the heart, to others. It took courage for me to be humbled and to truly open up to and listen to others and their suggestions, their point of views, and to accept their assistance of help. I am now gradually learning to open up and to express my truth, without being worried and afraid of being wrong, or being rejected, or upsetting someone. By doing so, I am gradually moving away from my self-imposed limitations and restrictions.
Spiritual development is not about anything but focusing on working on our own karma, life lessons and past life energy. All the external tools and modalities can assist us on our development, but none of them can attain the spiritual growth for us. We are the only one who is fully responsible for our own spiritual growth and soul evolution. One of the hardest tasks in attaining higher consciousness is to have the courage to fight our Self, to learn to not be controlled and manipulated by it.
As we move further on the journey of attaining higher consciousness, we will be more and more aware of our Self, and we will inevitably have to face the battle between the Self and the Higher Self. The Self part of us connects to our physical and emotional body for survival on the Earth Plane. It is the dark and manipulative energy that is the sum total of all our negative thoughts and emotions. It is deeply embedded in our survival instinct. The Self-part of us has controlled the human race and society for eons on the Earth Plane. It has become a dominant force and an inseparable part of human life on the Earth Plane both individually and collectively. It controls and manipulates our beliefs, thoughts, actions, reactions and it survives by pure emotion through our subconscious and unconscious aspects. It is the Self that has made things more difficult in our spiritual advancement on all levels, individually, collectively and globally.
The majority of society has no any idea about the Self and is simply driven by the Self. Only those who have chosen to free their soul from the Self have started to become aware of the Self part of them. Even so, it does not make their Spiritual path easier, but actually much harder. There will be times that our Self will fight us with all it has by bringing out our deepest fears and insecurities, our deeply conditioned beliefs from past lives and use our ingrained habits to hold us in its prison. It does this to block us from getting answers from our Higher Self. Most of us do not even know what our Self is doing while we are going through the battles between the Self and the Higher Self. We will be in a very dark, weak and negative state of being. We will feel so hopeless and helpless as if we are trapped in a concrete wall with no way out. We will want to give up everything completely. The deeper and further we go on our spiritual journey, the harder and more difficult it is to fight our Self.
My Self used my fear that I did something bad to others, and I was not a nice person in my past lives to stop me from taking full responsibility for my actions and choices to hold me in deep guilt, shame and self-hatred. It prevented me from letting go and forgiving myself, so that I was unable to release the past life energy and to move forward in vibration. It was easy for my Self to play a victim. It was so easier to complain and blame others for my own issues, problems and self-undoing. This way I did not need to take full responsibility for myself. Whenever I heard someone talking about a past life, my Self immediately became alert and tense. It was terrified just in case the past life had something to do with me. My Self would find all the excuses to deny it, so that I did not need to look at the issues honestly and to work through the past life energy.
It was the courage that gave me the strength to face my deep subconscious fears, doubts, insecurities, and to have the willingness to change my deeply ingrained conditioning, programming and habits. As a result, I was able to connect to a very profound past life and to work through the past life energy. This not only helped me raise my vibration, but also assisted others who were in this past life to release there past life energy also.
It is very important to understand the Self and Higher Self within each of us, and to understand the constant battle that is being waged between them. The only way to conquer our Self is to have the courage to closely look at our most scary darkest parts of ourselves from deep within our subconscious. We need to have the courage to face our own worst fears, insecurities, ingrained habits and conditioning. We need to summon the courage to face all parts of our being that we consider as bad, dark, ugly, negative and to embrace them as a necessary learning and growing experiences for our soul. We have to have the courage to rise above the illusion of the Self and to go beyond the control of the Self. By allowing ourselves to go through the dark night of the soul, to have the courage to endure spiritual testing, to continually have the faith, and trust that everything happens for a reason and everything is perfect, will gradually allow our Higher Self to come in to take control of our life. By doing this we will eventually attain “the peace that passes all understanding” and become one with the Universe. The journey is not easy, but the journey itself is the reward; the courage enables us to move forward on the journey without looking back, as we have always done in the past.