We never question whether we desire to heal our body when we have an illness or an injury. We may not know how to find the proper healing method, but we recognize we want our body to function effectively. So why do we resist healing our mental, emotional or spiritual issues?
I see two basic reason for this resistance in my practice of Ancestral Lineage Clearing. The first is a belief that our distress is normal and does not need healing. The second is we do not recognize or identify the issue that is holding us back from living a full and happy life.
I heard a friend once say: ” If it was good enough for my father (mother, brother, sister, family etc. …) that it is good enough for me.” He was referring to the struggle to earn a living in a job he hated. He believed the story that if you stuck with a job for 30 years then you could retire with a good pension and life could truly start then. Meanwhile, he was willing to put up with an unfulfilling job in which he was disrespected, dishonored and underpaid in exchange for a promise of security in the future. Million of people lived this fantasy just to see their health fail, their marriages disintegrate and the company dissolve without the promised pension. They thought present unhappiness could purchase future benefits.
We absorbed many of our beliefs in what we need and deserve in our life from prior generations based on their experiences. Some of those belief were valid; some were not. So how do we know if our beliefs are hold us back in our present life? There is an easy test: simply ask yourself, “Am I happy, loved, fulfilled and living up to my full potential?
I can never remember my parents or grandparents asking themselves (or me) whether what they were doing was making them happy. Happiness was a foreign concept in my family. The questions were always whether you were achieving, making money, getting ahead, enhancing your reputation or staying out of trouble. I was expected to do things to look good to others like the family, neighbors or the community. The oft heard refrain in my family was, “What will so-and-so think?”
Certainly my parents wanted their children to have a good job, a successful marriage and adequate income but ‘happiness’ was supposed to flow from achieving these goals. It was not a goal in itself.
I have come to believe over the years that happiness is success. I had a successful career, was respected in the community, was earning a good income and was clinically depressed because I was desperately unhappy. Now, not many people know me in the community, my income is adequate for a comfortable life and my career is serving others. I am much, much happier than I was when I was trying to please everyone else in my life.
We choose our families to give us the instructions and skills we needed to learn to live in the world. However, in many instances we didn’t receive the added information we needed about discovering our purpose and mission in life and how to find and fulfill that purpose and mission.
The goal of our life and the touchstone to our success is happiness, joy and fulfillment. When we find our bliss, we know we are on track despite the expectations of others about what our lives should look like. I recently ran across a quote that expresses this concept from GoDaddy.com, the domain name site: “We’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a GOOD TIME.” That was not an idea I picked up from my relative but it certainly is my motto now.
Secondly, my clients commonly encounter difficulty in identifying the belief that is holding them back from achieving their destined happiness. Some clients have what looks like a very desirable life–they are financially secure in a long-term successful job or career, with a home, children and a partner but internally they are asking if this is ‘all there is’. Life feels meaningless, empty and useless after spending years fulfilling everyone else’s dream of a good life. Another common issue are clients stuck with the old voices of authority telling them they are not good enough, pretty or handsome enough, rich enough or successful enough.
Finding the core belief behind the unhappiness, discontent, illness or emptiness is crucial to healing. Changing the outside accoutrements of life does not change the feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness. The internal messages we absorbed in our early years must be altered in order to create permanent healing.
Core beliefs are the underlying messages we may not conscious acknowledge but such beliefs drive our actions, thoughts and physical responses to life. Dissolving these core beliefs free us to look clearly at the truths of our life and how we can fulfill our needs in this lifetime. Core beliefs can be such things as “I’m worthless”; “Life is a struggle”; “I do not trust the Universe”; Love is an illusion”; “I do not deserve happiness.”
The clear message we are receiving from the Masters, the gurus, the teachers and the Spirit within is that our destiny here on Earth in this lifetime is to experience life in its greatest form of happiness, joy and bliss. In order to achieve this level of mastery we need to see conflict, distress, illness and struggle as indication that we need to change. Without these directions, we could wander through life on various misleading paths. Learning to assess our actions against our own inner sense of truth and happiness will lead us to our destined life of love and fulfillment.
The side benefit of such healing is that as we heal ourselves, we heal our family and other around us. This is a wonderful motivator for me to heal. What about you?
Many blessings,
Ariann