Writing as a Path to Myself
Writing about emotional subjects from my own personal experience requires a certain amount of courage, because more often than not I am entering into very deep shame or guilt that I have kept entirely to myself for a long time. When I go into such emotions and express them, a certain process begins in the body that I experience as a release of energy.
When this happens, I need to be conscious of doing something that grounds me. For example, I go out into nature, which I do very often. Sometimes I simply need to eat meat or French fries because I experience that kind of food as grounding me too. Afterwards, I feel a certain sense of relief and greater understanding, but also tiredness. That is why I can often only write slowly or a little at a time.
As I see this pattern now, I did not resolve the traumas I experienced as a child by expressing myself. Instead, my attention turned inward and up into my head. The energy went there, and I tried to think my way to a solution using all kinds of methods. In this way, I also gradually lost my grounding, and my mind went increasingly into overdrive.
If I experienced something difficult or someone hurt me, a certain process would begin in my mind. It would think the situation over and over again and repeat the same cycle 300 times or more. Even entire nights were spent allowing my mind to take over and lead me back and forth.
It was not until I began writing down on paper what my mind was going around and around with that I began to gain some control over this. I wrote and wrote everything it wanted to say, and of course eventually it came full circle. Then I could say, “Look, mind, you have already told me all of this before. Why are you going to tell me the same thing again and again?”
Doing this quiets the thoughts. It is a little like disarming the mind.
We now know that repetitive thinking can strengthen certain neural pathway patterns in the brain. In my case, my mind had literally been in training from an early age, trying to resolve difficult relationships through inner dialogue. I was very reserved and kept all kinds of pain inside me, because I had no one with whom I could express what had thrown me off balance.
That is how the thinking machine in my head got started, and gradually my attention became more focused on other people than on myself. In reality, I began to run away from what mattered. I probably had no other option at the time, or simply did not know how to deal with it in any other way.
When we constantly direct our attention up into our heads, I experience it as though the energy follows it there, while the important lower part of the body is left out. In this way, we lose our grounding.
What I often did in later years, when I finally began expressing myself about all kinds of difficult relationships, was to talk about them with other people. Then I talked and talked, and gradually I had become the greatest victim in the world. I felt that I needed to find some kind of justice by speaking badly about others, making sarcastic remarks and jabs that hurt, and even expressing what could be called hatred. I could even become jealous and feel a sense of inadequacy if someone seemed more beautiful, better, richer, or whatever it might be.
My sense of inadequacy about myself had reached the very bottom of the deepest hole.
This continued until 1999, when I came across channeled material online from a woman who was living in Australia at the time. The medium was named Margaret McElroy, and the consciousness she channeled has been called Maitreya.
These letters helped me to see life from an entirely different perspective. They presented the idea that we come into earthly life in order to deal with certain tasks and that we ourselves choose, at the soul level, certain challenges before we are born. I see it as a certain collaboration taking place between ourselves as souls and our guides, through which the birth chart and the life tasks we intend to take on during our earthly lives are put together. In this way, the birth chart becomes a kind of map of the experiences, challenges, and possibilities we have chosen for ourselves before we are born.
Sometimes we take on more than we can actually handle once we are here in a body on Earth. Then life can seem terribly unfair, and it certainly often looks that way, but according to this perspective, we ourselves have chosen certain experiences before coming here, including the difficult ones. But we also always have some kind of help, abilities, and positive aspects.
The birth chart and reading it on deeper levels were enough to open my eyes to the possibility that I could look at my own life path in a different way.
With Saturn in the first house, for example, I could imagine that on some level I had said:
“Yes, I am going to take on a difficult childhood. I am going to experience a form of bullying. I am going to have difficult teenage years. Then, as life goes on, something will begin to change. In the second half of my life, I will have the opportunity to transform all of this pain, anger, and resentment into a kind of gold or something precious.”
The wound becomes something precious because I gain an understanding of why I walked the life path that I did. It taught me so much. It helped me grow, and I am sure I still have many new things to learn about myself while I am here in earthly life.
It was also a great discovery for me to read Eckhart Tolle and his ideas about the pain-body. I understood it to mean that those who carry a great deal of pain may have the possibility of transforming it into a great deal of light when they stop feeding the pain-body in all kinds of ways and instead learn to be with the pain, feel it, and look at what lies behind it.
When I finally began practising turning towards myself whenever I became angry or irritated and asking what within me had been affected, my attention gradually shifted away from other people and towards what was simmering inside me.
All those years, my mind had kept me so occupied that I never really reached the core, the root. That did not happen until I deliberately began examining myself and expressing what I felt through written words.
In this way, I have learned so incredibly much and gained so much understanding that you would not believe it.
Writing is so precious.
That does not mean, however, that I have reached a place where my mind never takes off again and goes around in many circles if I find myself in some kind of difficult situation. It still happens. But I have learned various ways of stopping it.
For example, sometimes I say to it:
“Listen, it is nighttime now and I need to sleep. There is nothing I can do about this right at this moment anyway. Let’s just see how we can resolve this tomorrow.”
That is how I talk to my mind.