Depth of Perception

Before reading the following story, remember, a persons depth of perception is reflective of how much pain and suffering they have experienced in life. The more pain and wounds a person experiences, the more emotions they have available to transmute into their inner energetic body. The more energy a person has in their body, the higher their vibration. The more pain a person has overcome, the higher their purpose within Humanity. Here's my story....

My very first childhood memory. It was dark outside. There I was, sitting next to someone I barely knew, someone that made me feel helpless. I remember my mother screaming at him. “Give him back to me! Give him back to me!”. They argued back and forth, as I cried in confusion, a scared and confused child. Eventually, this man handed me into the arms of my mother, my protector. I was three years old at the time, the man was my biological father.

A year or two later, my mother met my brothers father. He came into my life at such an early age, naturally, I began to view and accept him as my father. I loved him. However, in my heart, I always felt second best to my younger brother.

As an adult, this makes sense to me now - they were blood related. How could their bond not be stronger than the one that he shared with me? But as a child, that was a challenging concept to grasp. Nevertheless, this resulted in the creation of layers of trauma, deep inside. Layers that made me feel as if I was never good enough.

He enjoyed drinking alcohol and eventually got into the habit of becoming lost in bottle after bottle. When this caught up with him, everything changed at home. Constant arguing, fear and confusion. One day, after drinking a bit, he accidentally lost his balance and fell. It just so happens that when he fell, my younger brother was under him, a toddler at the time.

This was the last straw for our mother. She immediately asked him to leave our home and he obliged. This was the first time I had seen her heart completely broken. She absolutely loved that man, however, no amount of love for him would justify this behaviour. Never would she allow someone to put her children in danger. Her strength is always something that I would admire and respect. I was eight years old.

Now, we’re off to dad number three. A couple years later my mom began dating a new man. He was much different than the other men she had dated in the past. He showed my brother and I lots of attention and we thought he was a bad-ass because he had muscles, tattoos and worked in construction.

However, it always seemed as if he was only doing that to get with our mother. My mom and this guy had more of a party lifestyle. He is the person that signed me up for my first magazine subscriptions. Subscriptions to Playboy and Penthouse magazines, at ten years old. Yes, ten years old.

One day, my brother and I were staying the weekend at his father’s place and time was approaching for us to go back to our mom’s. I remember looking up at my brother’s father in the kitchen. He was on the phone with my mom, showing a level of concern that I had never seen before. I didn’t know what was wrong, just that something was off. Upon arriving to my mother’s home, I could see that she had been through a lot, despite her best efforts to hide it. I had come to discover that after a simple argument, the third man I called “dad”, had lost his mind.

He had decided to take a chainsaw and attempt to cut one of our family’s dogs in half. Thankfully, with surgery, the dog survived. Then he took the chainsaw to one of the large storage buildings in our back yard, cutting several horizontal lines in it, several feet in length. I believe he was attempting to cut it down. From the saw-blade marks left on the building, it seems he may have grown fatigued and stopped halfway. Those marks in that building, they were a constant reminder of what happened that day, left as a reminder for years to come.

Once this guy grew tired of the chainsaw, he decided to use his hands instead. He began to take his rage out on my mother. He backed her into a corner on our tiny bathroom and wrapped his hands around her throat in an attempt to squeeze every bit of life out of her. It was at this exact time that a miracle occurred. A neighbour was walking by, a man by mother barely knew. This man heard the commotion and ran to help, pulling this guy off of my mom, saving her life. Once dad number three left, he never came back, thankfully. I was ten years old.

This brings us to father number four. When my mom began dating this man, he was a breath of fresh air. He always treated my brother and I with such compassion. He is also responsible for my desire to be chivalrous. To me, he was larger than life. 6’2”, 220lbs of hard-working man. He was the Dad I had always wanted(even though it took me years to call him that).

I’ll never forget going to the gas station with him one Saturday morning. The person behind the counter was an old friend of his from high school or something. He introduced me as his son. I was shocked, stunned and excited. I had finally felt loved and accepted by a man. I finally had a real dad.

One Sunday morning after partying the previous night, my mother woke up and decided to change her lifestyle. She felt a monster pull to become religious. This man and the rest of the family were shocked, because it was the opposite of the lifestyle we had all grown accustomed to.

Long story short, when my mother decided to get religious, she went with the religion she was raised in. My mother’s husband decided to go with the religion that he was raised in. The names of these religions aren’t important. Just know that it’s difficult to find two religions that are more different. This led once again to a house filled with arguing and heartbreak.

Eventually father number four left our family. Another dad lost. A year later he came back. Nonetheless, I wasn’t able to call him or anyone else “dad”, ever again. I was fifteen years old.

Let’s advance forward four more years, nineteen in age. I found myself in quite the dilemma. I no longer wanted to be a part of a religion. I had grown to feel controlled, and this led to resentment. Once I decided to leave that religion, I knew my world was about to change. Knowing that when I decided to leave, I’d be disowned by almost every person I had come to know. All of my family were in the religion. The only friends I was allowed to have, were also in this religion.

This is because within it, a person is taught that people who aren’t involved in the faith, are considered “worldly”. These “worldly” people are to be shied away from. Unless, you were attempting to convert them or conducting a business transaction with them. In addition, I had also home-schooled myself. So, any people I knew my age or older, were most likely be in the religion.

Upon leaving the religion, I was disfellowshipped from the religion. The dogma here is that once a person is disfellowshipped from the religion, they are not to be talked to by anyone that’s a devout member. If they break that rule, then they also will be banished from the religion. At least that's how this religion was twenty years ago, when I was affiliated with it.

No matter how many dads would come in and out of my life, I always had one constant, my mom. Once I was banished from the religion my mother pleaded with me to come back to the religion, to earn my way back in. But at this point, my mind was made. Nothing she could have said or done would have brought me back to it. So, to say goodbye, we both sat together in my car. She gifted me with a CD by the band “Bread”. A CD full of love songs.

She told me that those songs meant the world to her. She said that they would always remind her of me. She suggested that I listen to them, to remind myself of her as well. She told me that she wouldn’t be able to communicate with me anymore. Because, it went against the will of God. I remember driving home, in a panic. A panic that was all too familiar. The panic of losing another parent, this time, the most painful of all. Walking inside my apartment that night, I felt lost and suffocated with frustration.

When you do the math of being abandoned by four dads and the only constant in my life, my mother – it is understandable that this led me to become a very co-dependent person. This also led me to develop several narcissist traits.

These toxic behaviours were learned behaviours. I wasn’t born a co-dependent or a narcissist. These are qualities that were passed down to me from my parents and childhood experiences. This is generational trauma, which often shows up in the form of guilt, manipulation and fear.

From the ages of 19-38, I had 100% completely repressed any sort of spiritual side within myself. I had taken all of that childhood pain and buried in deep within. During this 19 year period of life, less than 12 months of it was spent as “single”. I ran from relationship to relationship, constantly seeking an end from my feelings of lack, pain and fear.

I believe it was my destiny to wake up from the Illusion of life that we all call Ego, at this specific time in life. At 38 years old, I manifested a situation which would bring out all of my childhood wounds. I had attracted a narcissistic partner, someone very much like my mother. Once I was engaged to this person and then abandoned by this person, my entire world crumbled.

I spent the next two and a half years in solitude, healing and learning more and more about who I am. It took the great amount of trauma that I experienced as a child to create all of those wounds. It took another great trauma later in life to bring those wounds to surface so that I could face them and heal. By healing from these wounds, I've reclaimed the energy that was used to create the original conflict and negativity. That energy is now my driving force to help others.

Here‘s what I’ve learned, a persons Ego is how they identify in life, and when I say “identify”, I'm referring to far more than someones gender. Upon being born, a person receives a name, their gender, and is born into a family of whatever stature. Along with those titles comes certain roles to fulfill in society. Then, as we grow up we all learn the word “my”. Anything a person says followed by the word “my”, is based in their Ego. The Ego itself is created by the mind and can be very useful. However, when a person views their Ego as their identity, they have become “unconscious”.

When this happens, not only does a persons brain never seem to turn off, they also find themselves in countless repeating loops in life. In order for a person to drop the identification with their mind-created, false sense of self, they must learn to embrace both the present moment and uncertainty.

To live in the present moment, we must let our past go. We can't keep replaying mental movies of thoughts or situations from the past. Nor can we get our identity from the past, no matter how hard the Ego tries. On the flip side, we cant get fulfillment from focusing on the future, its simply our imagination. A person carries a tremendous amount of resistance within themselves when they are identified with their Ego, and that resistance is to the present moment.

There are many ways to access this “present moment” in a persons life. First comes simply taking ones attention into how they are breathing, feeling the breath flow in and out of the body. This helps because it requires a person to stop thinking and start feeling. It literally transfers a persons Consciousness(Energy), from their mind to their inner-body.

Another way to access the present moment is by spending time in silence. For some, this can seem excruciating and damn near impossible. This is because when they get to a place of silence, all repressed feelings start to emerge and they have no desire to face them. These feelings are associated with a persons emotional Pain-Body.

A person has many bodies, its just that our eyes only have the ability to see the physical body. The human eye can only see a tiny amount of the total spectrum of light. Not only do we have a physical body, we also have a mental body, an emotional body and an inner energetic body. All bodies are connected and have a purpose.

As a human goes through childhood and adolescence, they undoubtedly pick up lots of emotional wounds, building this Pain-Body. Most often this continues through the average persons life, into adulthood.

When wounds occur, we are taught that time heals all, but that simply isn't true. It's true that wounds seem to fade away and appear to be gone after a length of time. The real truth is that those wounds have left a residue of emotional pain, deep within. This pain attaches to other existing emotional pain and snowballs inside someone, until it becomes their emotional Pain-Body.

People spend a lifetime running away from their own pain and wonder why they keep manifesting the same situations in life, which happens to continue to bring up that same pain. It's because they agreed to carry out a certain destiny upon being incarnated(born). Part of that destiny was to experience emotional trauma and to then overcome it one day, transmuting those wounds(emotions), into ones inner body. The more trauma a person has experienced and overcome, the bigger their purpose in life.

We transmute emotion by bringing ourselves to a pause anytime an emotion is felt. We pause and we simply allow the emotion to be, without trying to analyze or understand it. While we're paused and allowing ourselves to fully feel the emotion, we take our attention into our inner energetic body. When a person focuses on the energy within themselves, while allowing emotion to be felt (without analyzing), they will all of a sudden notice those emotions fading away, dissolving.

In a way, the Ego and the Pain-Body are best friends, they feed one another, your mental self and your emotional self. Here's an example of how they play with one another:

Have you found yourself in the following situation? To be at home, waiting patiently for your spouse to arrive, then notice that they are late? To look at your phone to see if they've left any messages, just to find nothing? What was your response?

Well, if you're anything like the way I’ve spent most of my life, you probably thought the worst. You may have thought that they must have gotten into a traffic accident, or maybe you thought that they were sleeping with another person.

Once these thoughts take a person over, all of a sudden they notice that their heart-beat has accelerated. They begin to feel anxiety and panic within. They may begin to feel great despair or anger. They are lost in a fit of confusion and just when life feels like its ending, their spouse shows up. They find out their spouse was simply held back in traffic, and their phone had died. Wheeeew, what a relief.

Now, let’s break down exactly what has happened here.

Broadly speaking, the person waiting at home had succumbed to their Ego and Pain-Body. When their spouse didn't show up or call, the first thing that happened was thoughts, the thoughts of the spouse being hurt, led to the feelings of panic and anxiety. Without identifying with the thoughts of despair, no negative emotions would have been experienced.

Thoughts are the fuel for emotions. If we do identify with the thoughts of despair, and then decide to repress our emotions (dissociating), they will manifest as disease or illness.

People are also connected to many other Pain-Bodies, the collective human Pain-Body, the collective female Pain-Body, the Pain-Body for certain persecuted sects of society, the Pain-Body of a person’s family, it goes on and on. We’ve all inherited a ton of pain and that's part of the reason why so much dysfunction exists today.

When you think of your Ego and your Pain-Body, look at them as entities within you, they aren't actually you, you are the awareness of them. These two are best friends and completely feed off of one another, it’s a cycle. This is how it works - something happens in life that triggers a certain thought response, these thoughts then create an emotional response in the body. This emotional response then aids in creating more destructive thoughts, which in turn feeds the Pain-Body.

Feeds, yes feeds…..the Pain-Body is something that lives within you that feeds off of pain. The Ego is something that lives within you that feeds off of conflict. In order to dissolve our emotions we must remove their fuel, thoughts. In order to dissolve thoughts, we must remove the mind's fuel, Consciousness/Energy. We do this by focusing on the energy within our bodies, instead of being in our minds.

Let's examine the original story again and see exactly what happened. The person at home resisted the “present moment”, when their spouse didn't show up on time. They had built up an expectation and concept in their minds and when that expectation wasn’t met, the mind/Ego created resistance to their present moment.

This is the inherent dysfunction of the Ego. When the Ego experiences a situation that seems unfavourable, it thinks that by creating resistance(pain) within a person, the situation will change. In reality, all it does is clutter a person with emotional discomfort. It makes it much more challenging to come up with the creative solutions needed, to overcome the unfavourable situation. All of history's great creators have always had one thing in common, they all created from a place of no-thought, no-mind.

The Ego is constantly seeking control by living in the past or the future. If a person lives in the present moment, the Ego loses all power and influence. In this case, the Ego was in the future imagining scenarios that never took place. Why? Because it craves conflict. Why does it crave conflict? Because that conflict leads to emotions that feed its best friend, the Pain-Body. On and on this cycle goes….

So, how do we overcome the Ego and the Pain-Body? We must get to the root of each, the root of emotions is thought, the root of thoughts is Consciousness/Energy. The first step is to get to a place of no-mind. To some, this idea can sound ridiculous, which is simply the Ego creating conflict/resistance. To be of no-mind equals to be without thought, no little voice in your head, no-thing.

Meditation is what has proven to be most effective tool to engage in this process. It can be a struggle to quiet the mind but the more a person focuses on the energy within their inner- body, the more the mind will lose its dominion.

When a person is feeling emotional discomfort and they are actively focusing on their inner energetic body, while allowing the emotion to be, they will soon feel the emotion dissolve. This transmutes the emotion into a persons inner body. To transmute it means to convert it, it's being converted from Pain to Love.

In conclusion, I want you to know that, no matter where you are in life, no matter how low you have sunk, no matter how bleak your situation....this is not the end. I know it may be hard right now. But, if you just hang in there, stick it out and stay with me for a little while, you'll find that this tough moment will pass. If you are committed to using this pain, using it to build your character and to find a greater meaning for the pain, you will find that in time, you can turn your life around and help others going through the same struggles.

The world right now is in the middle of a mental health crisis. Its estimated that almost half of the population suffer from depression at some stage throughout life. Rather than join the cue, its important we learn why we get down and then how we can change it. Because believe it or not, we create our own negative feelings and we can also ensure that we turn our lives around and be a positive change for others

The reason anyone gets depressed always comes down to the consistent thoughts we think, and the consistent beliefs we hold. If I believe that I am fat, horrible, and unworthy of love, I will most likely become depressed or have depressive thoughts. Especially, if my thought process is “I must be in a relationship and earn X amount to be happy.

The point here is that anyone that is depressed, is so because there is an external factor that didn't materialize in their life. That they have lost something or don't have something that is out of their control. The most common reasons for depression are losing a job, relationship breakdowns, body image and comparison to others. The only way out of this is to work on yourself every day.

In school we are taught how to get a job, but no one teaches us how to live in a state of Peace, Joy or Love. No one teaches us how important our conscious and unconscious thoughts and associations are. Is our happiness not worth more that a job? Yes, it is. And before you say “Happiness wont pay my bills.”, happiness will pay your bills, when you realize you will be ten times more energized, focused, and take positive actions....when you choose to first develop yourself as a priority, and then get to all the “stuff”, of the world.

I've seen some people, who many would consider to “have it all”, end their life because they thought they weren't good enough. A thought, a belief within them told them they were not worthy. These were people that many were jealous of, many envious of.

You must value yourself enough, to take the time every single day to work on yourself. To engage in something that will ensure that you are a positive influence on the world. This of course doesn't mean life will suddenly be perfect. The same life challenges will show up, but if your mind is strong, if your mind is at peace, your reaction to the challenging times will be very different. Your reaction will be “How can I make this work?”, not “Why is this happening to me?”.

And then others will look at you, not with pity, but with hope, because your strength will become their hope, their strength. You really can be that powerful. You can ditch the victim story. You can leave the pain behind and focus on how you will respond next. How will you respond positively? By keeping your mind in a present state, every day. So that things meant to tear you down, can't. And if they do, take steps to ensure that the pain you are feeling, wont show up again. Little steps...and soon you will be on top of the stair case.

Don't give up! If your thought is your reality, then if you think you are worth it, you are worth it. You deserve to experience how great life can be. You owe it to the world to be that positive change for others, who look at people like you and say “He did it, She did it and I can do it too.”