ISmile308 – When We Can’t Go Back

What happens when we realize that we can no longer live the way we have always lived? What happens when we stop our attempts at escape and instead face our lives fully, totally and completely? The answers to these questions are the foundations to a path that takes us deeper and deeper into the harder to reach places of the mind. This path of self-study has the potential of putting us into the heart of a divine flame that is at once glorious and painful. We begin to feel more of life as our many protective layers of behaviors and patterns are burned away. The mystery, as it turns out, is that the stuff we lose on the path to awakening is precisely what we no longer need. Having said this, exposing ourselves to this fire is neither easy nor comfortable. Often we find that it’s increasingly difficult to participate with people that we’ve come to notice as impediments to our journey. While “moving on” is a natural part of the work, it should also be noted that this doesn’t necessarily mean that we must “move away.” Sometimes we can coexist with others that aren’t on the path, other times we can’t. In either circumstance we continually get to choose whether or not we want to move forward or not. The choice is always ours to make, but at some point we see that we truly can’t return to our old ways of being. Here is where we are reborn into a place of fearlessness. Here is where we evolve into something more conscious, more awake.