When it comes to spirituality, we live in exciting and fascinating times. Over the last few decades, there has been an explosion of knowledge and information, and a corresponding explosion of people interested in exploring these new ideas. Meetup groups flourish, online Facebook groups abound, there are webinars, books, seminars, summits and interest groups, all with amazing information and stimulating ideas. These ideas take us into new areas of understanding the world around us, seen and unseen. Some call it “the shift” and it’s an exciting concept, but it is a process that must necessarily be an individual process as well as a societal one.
This creates a problem. I recall my own early experiences of stepping outside the mainstream, conventional wisdom space: I read a mountain of amazing books that introduced me into an exciting, scintillating new world full of insights, deep truths, and “aha” moments. Each new book, each new author, opened a world never imagined, and I embraced these new truths and precious ideas like a lover, determined to create a new life together and change the world.
And then I’d return to “the real world.”
After all the new inputs and life changing ideas, I still had to deal with the “old me.” Things I’d read in a book, no matter how wonderful to behold, never really made a dent in the reality of a body, a mind, a system of beliefs that was entrenched in rusty decades of a system I was handed at birth. This system was not something read in a book – it was assimilated by years of direct, often excruciating, experience. Pain, frustration, powerful emotions of all types, shaming, guilting, propagandizing, reinforcement (both positive and negative), all pointed to a particular paradigm, and I wasn’t going to read my way out of it.
No one can.
This is what I see so often in others as well. Passionate, sincere, committed people who run right into a wall of triggers, stored pain, and self-limiting beliefs of every kind that shut them right down and leave them gasping in frustration. What they find is what I found – learning about “the shift” only teaches us how far we are from our true potential. In order to EXPERIENCE the shift on a personal, life-changing level, we MUST address that wall. We must release the triggers, the pain, the beliefs. We must silence the self-destructive inner critic. We must blow through that wall, and this can only be done on an EXPERIENTIAL level.
The hallmark of an experiential program is discomfort. Worthwhile change never happens in a comfort zone. Stepping outside a comfort zone is scary. This is in stark contrast to cuddling up with a good book. No book ever truly takes you out of your comfort zone. To create change, you are going to have to go deep, into new territory. You are going to have to face the darkness and triumph. You are going to have to release the scales and blinders and stare unblinking into the light. You are going to have to release those familiar beliefs that, although self-destructive, are still strangely comforting in their familiarity. You are going to have to choose into the new with clear intention and committed action. This is what it means to really wake up.
That wall was constructed over decades of experience; it will only fall through body-level experience. When we get out of our own way, only then will we be able to take it all to the next level. Only then will we be able to fully utilize all the new light and knowledge to actually create change in our lives and in the world. Then we can BE the shift, rather than watching it wistfully from the sidelines.
For more information on a proven, fully integrated experiential program designed to create real change, contact me.
www.inannasanctuary.com
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