I don’t know about you, but for me, 2020 was, in turn, bewildering, emotional, gut-wrenching, scary and thankfully dotted with peaceful, happy moments and deep growth.
I don’t think anyone hasn’t been affected in some way by the events of this year, and I think most of us are happy to say goodbye to 2020.
Now we find ourselves poised to move into a New Year that is, in many ways, as uncertain, only this time around, I think we are prepared and are mostly ready to embrace what may come.
Despite all that has happened, or maybe because of it, we can take good from 2020.
From my perspective, the most important gift we’ve been given is that we’ve been collectively prompted to awaken from our distracted, busy lives, able to be present and available to ourselves in a way that hasn’t happened in a very long time, if ever.
I wish this happened differently, but this strange window of time has allowed us to slow down enough to feel what and where our choices are bringing us and if those choices are truly what we want for our lives. More importantly, whatever those choices might be, what has become very apparent to me, is that we can no longer pretend, ignore or deny what we are doing here on earth and who we really are. We are souls, and make no mistake; we are on a soul journey, every one of us.
This blue, precious planet of ours spins around at 1,000 miles per hour, with only gravity anchoring us and allowing us to live at all. It’s a miracle, and what are we doing with our miracle?
We barely notice because we’ve come undone. We’ve forgotten who we are. We live a dream of separation, of “us and them.” We’ve become hoarders of love and energy. Anxious and fearful that what is “ours” will be taken away. We are constantly looking outside of ourselves for validation, for someone else to show us how to live and what to do. We keep hoping that someone or something will rescue us from ourselves and make things right. We are living in an upside-down world.
We’ve forgotten that we are creators. We’ve forgotten that we are souls first because our egos have slipped into the driver’s seat when we’ve been playing with shiny objects and are now driving the bus. It’s time to take back the wheel.
We did not come here to fight, to live in fear, divide ourselves from each other and the planet herself; we did not come here to numb ourselves and slice ourselves away from our hearts. We came here to grow our souls. To live our lives through the eyes, hearts and feelings of our soul. To embody and live the soul’s gifts, which are compassion, kindness, humility, respect and joy.
We must wake up.
We can’t go on like this; it has to end. It’s not working, this pushing aside of our emotions, pretending that vulnerability is not our actual superpower. This closing our eyes to the fact that our spirit is not in our body, but that our body is in our spirit. We have somehow arrived at a place where we exalt reason and trivialize feeling when feelings are the gateway to our souls. Without feelings, we are dead to ourselves; we become psychopaths, empty, broken and lost.
This blame and pointing fingers, the reacting and defending, again, it’s not working. We must change, and the change can only come from the inside, the SoulSide, out.
In fact, it’s the only route available now. We must shift from living from the perspective of “survival of the fittest” to “survival of the co-operative.” Our souls are calling us forward, asking us to become our true selves. To remember that love is a verb and not a noun.
We’ve been chasing our tails, and it’s time to stop.
The author Jeff Brown says,
“It will take more than a change of thinking; it will also require a healing of the collective heart.”
He’s right, and that means that we must feel deeply into our shadows, feel into the unhealed traumas that still reside in our bodies, because like or not, believe it or not, that unprocessed pain we want so desperately to rid of, that we throw off ourselves in a panic at the first opportunity, reverberates out and into world consciousness, wreaking havoc everywhere, turn on the news, see for yourself. Whatever it is we can’t bear to feel, whatever it is that we try to climb over, or stuff into the basement of our subconscious hoping it will magically disappear, will surface, one way or another, demanding to be felt, acknowledged and loved, because love is calling. It’s personal this call, yet ultimately global. I am you, and you are me; we all come from the same cosmic pond. If I am brave and turn toward my shadows and feel whatever it is without judgement, and let it be what it is, I will come home to myself, and so will you.
That is what 2021 is going to ask of us, doing the simplest yet most difficult thing to do, to love ourselves enough to face all of who we are, to feel all the feelings, so we can understand what it means to really be free, and what it is to live an authentic life as an embodied soul.
To allow love all the way in, to love and be loved as the heart of the Divine loves us.
SoulSide out. It’s no small feat. I can do it. You can do it. We can do it. Let’s do it.
Namaste
Elizabeth
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
