If there’s one thing I learned in our four years of RV travel in the US, it’s that people are people. They can be in total opposite corners of the country, and still have commonalities. RV parks can be a mixed bag. There are travelling retirees, contract workers living there temporarily in order to do a certain job, semi-permanent residents and families on vacation. Perhaps the most interesting aspects is the mixing of these people. Because everyone is there temporarily, tolerance is easier and therefore an acceptance and appreciation for other’s differences, without an expectation or pressure that it must be a lifelong friendship.
The phrase “we are all teachers for eachother” rings true. So many exchanges of information from individuals with such a diverse background led to higher level interaction. But there is something I notice now in myself that I did not notice before our travels… an ability to connect with a complete stranger on a common soul to soul level. Because it really breaks down to that, doesn’t it?
One commonality I saw all over the country is that no matter where it was, I met someone who was carrying some kind of unresolved pain. There were deeply buried family issues whose stories came out around a late-night campfire. There were old wounds from ex-spouses that came out during quiet chats at a picnic table. Tales of estranged children or parents found their way into casual conversation. A friend staying overnight on our pull-out couch cried herself to sleep because she hadn’t found a mate and didn’t feel lovable. Many, blamed themselves for what they perceived as failures. It was truly painful to hear these types of stories over and over. My time, my compassion, my words, only did so much to alleviate the hemorrhage. I could listen, but felt powerless to really help them.
This happened so often I had to ask myself, “what is this trying to teach me?” Being a Reiki Master, if an individual was open to it, I did offer an energy healing, but it did nothing to teach them how to heal themselves. Sometimes, something so deeply buried can only be temporarily alleviated, before the pressure builds again. What I eventually learned is to step back. Sometimes it just isn’t my place because it is that individual’s place to ask themselves the question, “what is this trying to teach me?”
One thing I can assure you is that the person who has hurt you, is acting out of their own deep pain. In that way, pain seems to be carried forward, transferred from person to person. Isn’t it time to break that cycle? Isn’t it time to stop the pain train and roll it back with understanding and forgiveness? Dr. Wayne said in his blogpost, Love your Enemy? “Harboring anger and hatred toward anyone guarantees that you remain in low energy fields where problems will continue to crop up repeatedly in your life.” And believe me, I’ve seen it many times, staying in a low energy field can lead to health issues and basically just make you a magnet for problems to find you. It behooves us to release the anger, frustration, blame and resentment. Not necessarily with medication, but with earnest inner work. My friend, Erik Medhus said in his Mom’s blog:
Erik (M): And he’s saying, he’s like, Mom, you know there are so many people that are struggling. Depression, anxiety are huge indicators that you’re not on line with your purpose. And what ends up happening, is they end up giving you drugs… And all it does is mask the problem. If people would just put the energy that they put into going and getting help…not that they don’t need to get help because a lot of people really do… he says but if they would put equal energy into spiritually aligning themselves, they would see that these conditions are fixable.
What Erik is saying is that when you decide to go inside and follow the pain to its root cause, you can look for the lesson it taught you. You can grasp the silver lining. But, Erik also says, don’t let that painful experience become your identity. You are a beautiful light-filled spirit, having a human experience. That experience is not your identity, it is just an experience you had and now you have gleaned the all-important lesson from it… and that is why you came. Over time, that wisdom will deepen and your knowledge will expand from it. Dr. Wayne, explains this beautifully in his blogpost, My Greatest Teacher. Its topic stems from his film by the same name where he dealt with his issues of blame with his own father. In it, he says,
If we must forgive, we must first have blamed. To forgive is to stop blaming and to accept with compassion that everyone is simply doing the best they can given the conditions of their life and what they have to work with at the time…Forgiveness sets you free to move past the pain and on into a life of loving and serving. The satisfying and fulfilling life you know is there for you.
If you can let yourself imagine the task of planning this life before you arrived… in order to gain higher knowledge and wisdom, you needed to understand every facet of a concept and the only way to do it was through experiencing it. You needed someone who loved you enough to play a role that would put you in the position of experiencing that which you wanted to experience. Most of us don’t remember that planning part. We just know that it sucks to feel the pain.
Go inside. Find the lesson in it. Find the wisdom you’ve gained from it. Find the silver lining. Then, find a way to forgive and let it go. If you can’t do it alone, ask God and the Universe to help find someone who can help. But do it. The time to drop our baggage is now, because new higher love energy is coming and we want to be as clear as possible when we experience it.
Dr. Wayne’s awesome 15 steps to forgiving someone who has hurt you can be found in his blogpost here.
