Into the Wildwood

Here are some reflections I’ve been recently having (shared straight from my private journal):

Does a flower need to have an elaborate plan to blossom? Does a chick in an egg need to know X Y Z about the psychology behind pecking a shell or the mythology of what it means to be free of it?

No.

The endless self-improvement project of the psyche is exhausting and ego-driven and based on fear.

It’s a fear of trusting the intelligence life, a forgetting of the wisdom innate in existence.

It’s an unwillingness to let go.

It wants to hold onto as much spiritual jargon and as many trauma-informed psychological concepts as possible.

Sure those concepts can help to relax the ego self.

But these concepts and philosophies don’t DO the actual healing. If anything, they create more tiring tense work, and much of it unnecessary and self-reinforcing to the ego self (which is the very core of our suffering in the first place!).

The more we dig, the more we find.

And the thing is, life is innately traumatic in some way (and innately joyful).

There will always be another trauma to fix, another dream at night to decipher, another part of the self that has been buried that needs to be excavated.

What if all of this work could occur with a more gentle mindset, and a less aggressive fear-based one?

What if we could trust? What if we could surrender to the intelligence of life: the same intelligence that runs the galaxies, the seasons, the oceans, the rainforests, the deserts, and the infinitesimal number of micro and macro cosmos in this existence?

What if we handed things over to the Divine and relaxed a little more? “Not my will but thine be done.”

Self-improvement and the vast majority of spirituality are a metaphorical carrot dangling on a stick perpetuating a cycle of fear-based ego attachment and consumerist culture.

The more you buy into what X says or Y says or Z says, the more trapped you are. Your inner intelligence is drowned out. Your inner voice that echoes the Universe is suppressed. What they say is so convincing after all, and yes it probably has some value and merit.

But it all just tidies up the cage that you’re already in, it doesn’t free you. If self-improvement and modern spirituality did, why would these be billion dollar industries? Why would be have to keep buying more and more self-help spiritual books and courses and retreats to try and fill our inner voids and perceived inadequacies?

(By the way, I hope no one who has ever purchased any of my paid offerings has felt that way: that they need to buy something I’ve birthed to “be” better or to “fix” themselves. I try to be mindful of the wording I use and the type of energy I put into creating items — and offer the rest for free.)

Ultimately, none of us are beyond the trappings of the self-improvement industry.

Falling into the rabbit hole of endlessly pursuing, chasing, searching, grabbing and trying to find cures just leads to spiritual exhaustion (which I write about in my latest article on self-inquiry as a kind of simple but direct antidote for those seeking a dynamite spiritual practice that cuts through the BS.)

May we learn how to soften, slow down, trust the Divine Intelligence, and give our problems over to our Higher Power more.

We weren’t made to stoically suffer alone and shoulder all of our burdens by ourselves. Yes, our paths may require a certain level of solitude, but our paths also require togetherness.

Our paths require a kind of gentleness and humility where we recognise that opening and surrendering to a Greater Intelligence — be it God, Goddess, Spirit, Soul, Krishna Consciousness, or whatever — is in our best interest.

The more we dig, the more we find. What we need is ultimately NOT to clean up the cage we’re in with more pop-psychology or new age spirituality or self-improvement courses (most of us have done enough of that!), but to free us from that cage altogether. Perhaps it’s time to leave the paradigm altogether and find out true resting place, our True Home.

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