About three and a half years ago I went through a major shift in my life that changed me forever. I was going through a rough time, work was getting to me, my relationship was on the way out, I was questioning my path, my health wasn’t what it once was, I was doubting pretty much everything around me. Knowing I wasn’t a reader, my cousin gave me a book on CD titled “The Language of Archetypes” by Caroline Myss. He told me to listen to it while I sat in traffic and let him know if I had any questions. It took me about a week to start listening to it, but once I started I couldn’t stop. I highly suggest checking it out, even for a good read, or if your like I was, for a good listen.
After that first book, you’ll never find me without something to read. Anything you could ever want to learn, is only a book store away.
Archetype (Jungian psychology): A pattern of thought, present in an individual’s unconscious, inherited from the past collective experience of humanity.
The first thing she describes is the four archetypes that we all share – child, victim, prostitute, and saboteur. When I first heard this I thought, ok, child and victim for sure, saboteur maybe, but prostitute.. no way, I don’t sell my body, that’s ridiculous. But when she described each in detail, it was the prostitute that hit home the hardest. In a nut shell, the prostitute sells a part of themselves in order to make others happy, not necessarily their body, but a part of their souls, and it was true for me. So true that when I listened to that part of the book I was on my way home, and when I got home I turned off the car and sat in my garage, listening to what she was saying, with tears pouring out of my eyes because she nailed it, I had been selling a part of my soul all this time and I didn’t even know it.
I had changed a part of who I was in order to sustain a relationship that I was afraid of losing, and it wasn’t a bad habit that I was changing, or a vice I was giving up, it was a part of me that is good and pure, that makes me who I am, the part of me that is the driving force behind this blog, my ability to connect with others on an intimate level.
Fear had made me believe that it was essential for me to do this in order to keep what I wanted, what I thought I needed in my life. And I did need it, in actuality, to open my eyes to what I was doing to myself. Not because I needed to hold onto something, that was never mine, but it was crucial I let go of something that, in reality, I never really had.
By the time I realized it, I had been sitting in my car contemplating this new understanding for over an hour. My conclusion was this, if it was meant to be then you don’t need to sacrifice any part of yourself in order to “make it work”, they will love you for who you are, not for who you might become, so just be.
Looking into ones own life is vital when trying to obtain complete happiness. One must learn the habits of the subconscious mind in order to eliminate circumstances that do not bring us closer to our own “perfect world”. For it will continue to create the situations needed in order for us to learn the lessons we need to ensure our own personal evolution, hence the phrase “history repeats itself”. It only repeats itself when you haven’t learned from it.
Ever since I listened to that book on CD I’ve been on a mission of self fulfillment and I can’t turn back now. I can’t say it’s been an easy road to travel, at times it’s not only difficult but extremely painful as well, because looking at the things you do and the reasons you do them isn’t a simple task. I’ve called up my cousin, several times, cursing him for starting me on this path, wishing I could go back to living blindly to the ways of my subconscious, life was a lot easier then. But then again, who ever said life was supposed to be easy. As a matter of fact, I find the most difficult trails to walk usually have the best views when you reach the top.
We spend our entire lives hiding from our inner truths, we even block some of them completely out of our memory. To unlock that door is hard enough, but to actually walk in that room of darkness and denial takes more courage than confronting any exterior force. However, when you do, you not only bring light into your life, you also bring it into the lives of those that surround you.
