How to Avoid Being Dragged Down the Rabbit Hole of Despair and Suffering

This is a Tale of Two Paths

Photo by Gautham Krishna on Unsplash

This is a story about a woman who eats sugar to cope.

Story one. The woman stays in separation from her essence. She grasps for acknowledgment. She never learns to love wholly while alive, but she touches unconditional love only when she passes over on her deathbed.

There is an alternative.

Story two. It has the kind of Hollywood ending we all love. The woman learns how to excavate her emotions until she discovers the love beneath them. Over time, love becomes her default. She lives Love Ever After.

Story one is tragic. I am not in the mood this lifetime for tragic ever after. So let’s go with story two. I’ll play the woman.

This is a story about Dancing on the Edge of Enlightened. In this story, I change the name of my publication because one day I realize I made it to the other side. I’m no longer on the edge. I found what I was looking for. I found peace. I found love. I found what people call Enlightenment.

I finally realize this world we live in is not the point. Love is the point. Living life through Love is the point.

I’ll know I’ve reached Enlightenment when:

My 1st response to life’s situations and people is Love, not the hamster wheel of reaction.

I’ll know I’ve reached Enlightenment when I don’t have to talk about it and seek acknowledgment in exchange. Instead, I speak from the heart because it is wide open and knows no separation. And Love becomes the currency over acknowledgment.

I’ll know I’m Enlightened when my mind doesn’t pull me off center and drag me down the rabbit hole of despair and suffering.

So how do I get “there?” How do I reach Enlightenment? I listen to my guides. They say, Be love. Practice opening to the feeling of love. This journey starts with two important ingredients: emotions and awareness.

I have to learn to alchemize my emotions until it becomes my default operating system. Sit with my emotions. Stop running from the feeling. Remove the judgment. Allow them to be there. Then tune into the story attached to the emotion. See if I can hear why I am upset. When I am in the heat of it, the story is loud and dramatic. It is easy to rant. But at some point, I have to step off the rant train and sit with the pure feeling beneath it. Only then can I witness the transformation from emotion to love energy.

The love energy is always there. I just have to excalibur it from being lodged in my false identity of old wounds.

Sometimes emotions show up in the form of cravings. Maybe I want a cookie. Or a sleeve of cookies. I feel restless until I get it. I have to dig a little deeper. I have to open a little more. I have to bring in patience. Every craving has an emotion under it. Every emotion has a story that keeps it in place. And every story has love at the core. My job is to get to the love. Always and only. As Marianne Williamson says, Return to Love.

I first heard of Lester Levenson in The Greatest Secret by Rhonda Byrne. He was a man who developed a process of letting go of trapped emotions that eventually became known as the Sedona Method. He reportedly released decades of emotional baggage in three months and healed his body of disease, including a fatal heart condition. They say he reached Enlightenment.

I think about this a lot. If I knew I could increase my chances of winning what Scott Stabile calls the Enlightenment Lottery in his book Big Love, would I do it? Could I go all in? Could I give up emotional numbing for three months? No emotional eating. No emotional scrolling. No emotional ranting. No therapy shopping, which I’m a master of in my thrift store treasure hunting, or the embarrassingly endless shelves of the grocery store. Could I choose, or rather Return to Love every time instead of choosing to numb?

I want to believe I have this kind of commitment. I think I do. I am going to give it a go. I might, as in probably will, slip. I might stop and start. It might take longer than three months. I doubt Lester had kids in the house while he was doing his emotional clearing retreat. Parenting is my excuse a lot of the time. The chaos, the noise, the bickering, the anxiety, the constant needs. It’s easy to get pulled off center. And I can’t disappear into a mountain cave. Because dinner still needs to be made and homework still needs to get done. And I have to put on my battle gear for The Great Chores Resistance in the endless saga, Mom of Thrones.

I think this is my gig. To find center in this static. To find love in an exploding kitchen. To practice inner stillness with the background symphony of kids bickering and cravings raging. Because this same human anx is happening all over the planet right now. Inside and outside our homes. And if we, especially women and men and mothers who carry so much heart, figure this out, we will ignite the world with a wave of unconditional love it will never see coming. A love so healing it will feel like falling into a ball pit of squishmallows.

And this is a worthy mission.