I will be the first to admit that like so many people in the world I have sat around and waited to be saved by another person, religion or set of philosophical ideas. Well I have gone from one extreme to the other with this idea of “being saved” and I must concede to the middle ground. At many points in my life I will admit that, yes I should’ve got off my butt and engaged in my life and got the work that I needed to do started or finished. At those moments I acknowledge my accountability for my weakness and self-doubt that kept me immobilized. But… everyone has a point where they’ve let something go way too far and they can’t seem to pull themselves back from the precipice. Then all at once before they know it they’re hanging on the edge of the cliff like a dumb dumb. Of course it was my choice to take each and every single step to the edge of the cliff.
Yet, my mind was so damaged by the actions of others as well as my own that in all honesty I couldn’t accurately see the closeness of the edge. I do agree that, yes I am accountable for my choices and their repercussions on myself and others, and yet there comes a point in everyone’s life where they hit bottom. Some people hit bottom and they are utterly alone and others hit bottom with people around them. I suppose I could say that at my bottom I got up with absolutely no assistance, but that is not the truth. The reason I hit bottom goes back to young childhood traumas where I was taught that I wasn’t good enough to be loved just for myself. In order for me to get over this trauma in a timely fashion I did need another person to look at me and love me regardless of all my flaws and for some people this maybe a divine being. In my case a divine being was not an option due to the fact that my grief acted like a wall between me and them.
Most children raised correctly with a loving family structure have the benefit of growing up with a better sense of self worth and knowing how to love themselves because they themselves were loved. I on the other hand along with many other people didn’t get this luxury and so it is up to us as adults to now parent ourselves in the way that we should have been. It has taken me many years to get to this point where I am beginning to feel comfortable in my own skin and embrace my own self love. In a world where we are now expected to stand on our own two feet and do everything by ourselves I must acknowledge that a certain amount of this idea is full of bullsh*t.
In my circumstance I truly did need to have that one other person to love me in a way that I wasn’t loved as a child. It was in that moment that this person taught me the lessons of love that I didn’t learn as a child. Now the question is, “Could I have taught myself these lessons?” The answer is “yes”, but to do so totally alone would have taken me forever and frankly it was more time efficient this way. Now once I had fully understood and accepted the love of this person I found that I could embrace my own healing, which then became the catalyst to me seeing and understand the deeper meanings to my existence. It was then that I started looking past the events that had occurred in my life to see the divine patterns in the chaos and understand the point to some of these events.
All of these things that I endured have been a form of trial by fire. My Reiki Master & Teacher told me a story the last time I went to see her about her experiences with her father while blacksmithing with him. She told me that the best steel had to be hammered upon to make it strong enough for it’s purpose. That with each strike of the hammer it brought the steel closer and closer to becoming strong and useful. That as her father worked with each piece he would hammer it over and over again and work it to sharpen its edge. I love this analogy and it’s imagery inside of my mind. I have always liked to view all people as a work in progress like the steel that is being hammered into a useful tool. We are all getting hammered upon to make us strong and sharp to prepare us for the real purpose of our existence. Our lives are going to be full of trials by fire and regardless of whether we break we can find comfort in the fact that we can always be reconstructed and reformed a new.
Something to keep in mind is that even the steel needed a blacksmith, and I guess you could think of it like the blacksmith saved the steel from becoming nothing. So, if you’ve hit bottom and if the only thing you can do is ask for help then ask. There is no shame in asking and in all reality the only shame that really exists is a life’s purpose wasted. I must say that I have had many people help me whether I asked or not, or could see it or not at the time, and that this help has most definitely “saved me”. To not acknowledge this does a massive injustice to these healing and compassionate people. We are all shaped and formed by the trials in our lives and we can and have gotten help by those that know us and by strangers whether we asked or not. But, it is when we choose to start hammering out ourselves with our own conscious will that we will truly make major progress for the better. As I said before I take the middle road when it comes to the idea of “being saved”, because in all reality we never journey on our path entirely alone.
Until next time… Namaste!
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