Is this real progress?
Sometimes the difference can be startling.
Yesterday I called up one of my first-ever mentors after no contact for 11 years.
Back then, over a period of 5 years, on and off, he helped me see that the way I regarded myself and my situation might not be the only way of looking at things.
I got a glimpse of this, at least.
Yesterday's conversation was wonderful, and from this place, I was struck by how far away that fear and smallness now seemed. Like suddenly bumping into Alex from 11 years ago.
Although I felt open and playful in our discussion, I could sense the pull of the habitual patterns from our old conversations; that was the level we were working at back then.
My story was "I'm not good enough", "I'll never get there", "I don't have the strength/ability to do that" etc. etc.
That was my underlying way of being, they were my sponsoring thoughts. The ones that closed down any possibility of change and growth.
Believing them so fully made me terrified of my "impossible situation". I felt I had no power or prospects at all.
As my mentor said today, "Beliefs are the bricks that you build your prison with". Those beliefs really felt solid back then.
And although those thoughts still show up sometimes, there is no longer any danger of them taking over. Because I don't believe them.
And that's because I know that who I really am is not my thoughts, my emotions or my body. They are expressions of life, and who I really am is the space before these expressions of life. And truth this sets me free.
This truth sets everyone free.
Back then, in that darkness, freedom and success were just something other people achieved. Now I know that free and successful is who we all already are. Only a thought I choose to believe can separate me from this.
The phone call gave me a taste of that self-doubt again today, and I feel so grateful to have come so far and to experience myself as so much bigger than that.
Not achieving so much as letting go of untruths.
We are not only these passing thoughts, emotions and bodies. The awareness of them remains, before and after, and this awareness teaches us all things.
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