What IS Faith ?
What is Faith?
I know for a fact the New Age-ers are wrong, because with the amount of pain and tough issues I have had to process (so far) I should have blown earth up at least 5 times by now.
We DO plan our life, before we get here (see Michael Newton's book Journey of the Souls; or The Education of Oversoul 7). Once we are here, we can decide to abandon the plan. We can follow the plan drunk..... Or we can (gulp) trust we made a good plan with our Guides before we got here and were on another dimension (life between lives) when we and our g\Guides and the c\Council had a bigger and better perspective than the perspective we have once incarnated in a body (filled with desires, ego, personality issues etc).
So Faith means 1) Faith in our Self to get through the life we set up for ourselves-- with all of the challenges and growth built into it along with the fun parts 2) Faith that something (not someone) higher, bigger than us exists and that we can connect with that energy to get different perspectives and different kinds of help (more than just using our teeny tiny human brain).
What does having Faith look like? For me lots of vomiting and crying at times. It is not a graceful process for me when a large leap of Faith is required. At these times, along with meditation, it is simply one foot in front of the other; sometimes tackling the day minute by minute (needed even more than the AA one day at a time slogan). It is walking blind through a fire, feeling the heat, sure I am going to die at any second......and not so happy when I don't! For smaller issues of Faith, when there is often quicker confirmation via small miracles (are any miracles really small ?!), my practice of Faith is quite graceful. But no point in writing about those-- they are easy wins. And often my ego kicks in with these as if to say, look how good I am at faith that I can conjure up these miraculous outcomes. No it is these big no light at the end of the tunnel experiences that leave me puking and covered in mud. At the end there is NO DOUBT in my mind that the miraculous resolution was not of my doing-- other than I did not jump out of the boat or run headfirst into the fire. And that in and of itself is a miracle too.
So Faith is really the ability to be not-graceful. The willingness to be scared sh*tless. Able and ready to cry and vent so that one does not blow up or get cancer because of holding in all the feelings. Letting the feelings pummel you into a new level of surrender (you did not think was possible) and the softness that comes when you let go of something you didn't even know you were hanging on to. Faith is doing the work youd learned to do, meditation, eating well, self-care, internal work, calling friends, even though in the moment it seems like there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
This is when all the hard work you have done kicks in. Your internal resources, the structures you have put in place in your life to keep you healthy and content become your guideposts as you are moved by the path of your life, by Spirit, to a new place you cannot as of yet even imagine. Transitions will challenge you to let go and grow, or turn and run back to the familiar. In AA, actually in any 12-Step program and even n therapy this turn and run back is often called a relapse. You run back to the old and familiar out of fear even if the old and familiar is destructive and painful. This is how challenging positive transformational times can become. Let go and let God (or let the Goddess, or Great Spirit, of the Universe) sounds so cool, so easy. It is not. It is the power of Yin energy, spiritual surrender. It is a warrior's journey.
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