The Story of Awakening
article by: Jenny Schiltz
at: 22nd Aug 2017
You’re
living an ordinary life in an ordinary world. You have good times and
bad times – like everyone else – but you never really question it.
That’s just the way life is. Then one day you feel unusually restless,
and you decide on a whim to wander far from where you’ve always lived,
to see what’s on the edge of your world. And there you find a wall.
It’s not a very high wall. In fact, if
you jumped really high you could probably see over the top of it. But
you can’t jump. It’s like your insides are weighed down with concrete.
And you never even noticed it before, but suddenly you feel so heavy.
But you are so intrigued by what might be
on the other side of the wall! You wander along its length until you
find a place where there are a few holes in the stonework. There seems
to be sunlight or something like that shining through the holes. You
excitedly put your eye to the nearest hole and what you see makes you
gasp! You couldn’t even describe the sight if you tried, all you know is
that it’s magical and beautiful and it makes you feel amazing. Suddenly
you think, “Oh my God, there is so much more to this world than I
realized, I can’t believe I never knew!”
It starts getting dark so you head back
home, but the wall haunts you. The feeling you got when you peeked
through to the other side won’t leave you alone. The life you never
questioned suddenly seems bleak and flat. You can’t stop thinking that
this can’t be the ultimate destination. You lay awake all night coursing
with excitement because you suddenly wonder whether the whole purpose
of your life is to get over the wall!!! Maybe that’s what you’re here
for! And maybe you could bring more people with you, and everyone could
experience a whole new way of life in that beautiful magical land that
you glimpsed.
The next morning you call in sick for
your job – because suddenly it doesn’t seem important anymore – and you
trek back to the wall. Your excitement mounts the closer you get to it.
You find the place again where the holes are and the sight you see and
the feelings you feel bring tears to your eyes. You sit down by the wall
and you cry and cry and cry. You can’t believe that you never knew
there was more. And something about that golden light coming through the
holes feels like it’s shifting that heavy concrete inside you. It
doesn’t feel so permanent anymore. When you finally stand up you feel
just the tiniest bit lighter.
As the
days and weeks go by, the world you live in starts to feel less real,
and the world beyond the wall starts to feel realer than ever. There is
no inspiration for you in your old life. It’s like being on a treadmill,
you keep running and trying and huffing and puffing but you never get
anywhere. You start wondering why life has to be a struggle. Why does
everything have to feel heavy and hard all the time? You’ve had a
glimpse of another way and it won’t leave you alone.
You try
telling your friends and family about the wall and the paradise beyond,
but they tell you off for straying that far from your land. “What the
hell are you doing wandering out there for, you idiot! It’s dangerous,
you could have got yourself killed!”. Or else they start looking at you
with suspicious sidelong glances like you’ve come down with an unknown
illness and they are wondering if it’s contagious. They don’t want to
hear that there is more. They just want to keep living their same old
lives in their same old world.
But that
world is not yours anymore. And the more you connect with the new world,
the less you fit in. You start feeling horribly excluded and your
excitement starts to shrivel. You were all set to lead everyone to the
wall and to have a massive party together when you all made it over. But
no one wants to go. You feel very sad and alone.
Then one
morning you wake up and you make a decision. This world is not for you
and you are not for this world. It’s time to take your power back and go
with this exciting new adventure, even if you have to do it alone. You
quit your job and pack up your belongings, buy a tent and a camping
stove, and you set off for the wall for the last time.
You set
up camp where the holes in the wall are, and in the distance, you can
still see everyone else going about their days like nothing has changed.
You still feel a little bit sad but you feel detached now too. You’re
on a new mission, and you know you’re doing the right thing.
You peek
through the hole in the wall again, and the feeling is even stronger
this time! It’s like the land beyond the wall is congratulating you on
your detachment from the old world. It’s calling you and celebrating you
and suddenly you realize it KNOWS YOU and it LOVES YOU. The feeling is
so overwhelming that you start crying again, and once more you sit down
and cry your little heart out, for hours and hours. And once more you
feel a little bit lighter when you’ve finished.
And so
begins the chapter of ‘Camping at the Wall’. Every day you peek through
to the world beyond and every day the feeling gets stronger. And every
day it makes you cry – sometimes you scream and yell and wail and beat
your fists on the ground – and every day the concrete inside you lessens
its load just a little bit. You feel like everything bad that has ever
happened to you is happening again – you revisit feelings from your
childhood and teenhood and it’s excruciating… but when the storm passes
you feel better. There is pain and then there is relief. And you start
to understand the pattern and you throw yourself into it, knowing that
you are healing yourself and it is amazing.
The more you cry and lighten yourself,
the bigger the holes in the wall get! This is such an exciting
revelation, and it makes all the emotional agony worthwhile. You can see
more of the world on the other side, and it’s so incredibly beautiful.
Somehow there it feels like everything is easy and flowing. And
absolutely everything is made of love. It’s magical beyond imagination.
One day some people from the old world
come out your way and start yelling at you, telling you you’ve lost your
mind and you need help. They look at your campsite and the isolated way
you’re living and they judge you for it. They see you crying and
hugging yourself and they try to cart you off to the mental hospital.
But although it hurts, you stand strong and say, “No, leave me alone.
This is my life and what I’m doing is important – even if you don’t
understand.”
That same day you hear another voice. But
this time it’s coming from the other side of the wall!!!! Maybe there
are other people there!!! But when you stop and listen, it doesn’t seem
like a human. It’s a voice of pure light, and it’s letting you know that
you’re doing so well, and that it loves you. As the day goes by more
voices appear, all giving messages of support and love. You feel like
you’re getting closer.
One day you wake up feeling like you’ve
cleared so much concrete from your insides, and you decide to try and
jump. It takes you a couple of tries, but eventually, you jump high
enough to see over the wall!!! And it takes your breath away once again
because there are waterfalls and mountains and rainbows there that you
hadn’t seen before. It’s the most glorious sight you’ve ever seen.
But as you jump again you make a
disturbing discovery. The top of the wall is covered with tangles of
barbed wire. You hadn’t been able to see it before, and until then you
believed that all you needed to do was get to the top of the wall and
you’d be over – but now you realize you face a new challenge.
In that moment you feel so defeated, you
wonder if you’re ever going to make it. You lay on the ground and bawl
your eyes out and feel like dying. It’s no use, you’ll never be strong
enough. You’ll get tangled in the barbed wire and never make it over the
other side. You almost feel like giving up and going back to your old
life. At least there was certainly there. Depressing certainty, but
certainty nonetheless.
At that moment you hear a shout from further along the wall. “Hey! You over there – are you OK?”
It’s another person walking along the
edge of the wall towards you – and hey! He’s carrying a backpack and
camping gear too! You start crying again with the relief of seeing
someone who might understand what you’re going through, and the two of
you run towards each other and launch into a huge bear hug, laughing and
crying.
“I thought I was the only one!” the guy says.
“Me too!”
you say, and you sit down together and talk and talk and talk about
your experiences of the wall. They are remarkably similar, even though
the other guy has been in a completely different section than you. You
feel totally rejuvenated by this new connection and you know you can do
it now. You’re not the only one.
As the weeks go by, you see more and more
people doing the same work as you – lightening themselves up so they
can get over the wall. Sometimes you work together for a little while,
but a lot of the time it seems like it’s something you have to do alone.
But that’s ok, because you know now that you’re not really alone. You
are part of a team, all working for a common cause. And although the
locals from the old world still come and shout abuse and judgment at you
sometimes, mostly it doesn’t affect you. You feel strong in your new
united front. And you’re getting so light, you feel like any day now,
you will be ready to climb the wall.
The day comes, and you wake up knowing
that you’re ready. You know there are more challenges ahead, but you
feel strong and able. You know you can face it, no matter what it takes
to get through the barbed wire. There will be new methods to learn and
new lessons to complete, but the loving voices on the other side of the
wall are loud and clear now and they are cheering you on. You know you
can do it.
It takes you a couple of hours to figure
out the best footholds and handholds, and you fall back down a lot.
You’re covered in bruises but you are DETERMINED. Today is the day. You
know you’re going to get there. Finally as the sun is beginning to set,
you make it to the top of the wall. You find a place to sit amidst the
tangles of wire, and already you’re covered in cuts and scratches, but
you whoop with joy at the victory. And the VIEW! It truly is heaven on
Earth. The most glorious landscape is laid out before you, with lakes
and beaches, mountains and forests and valleys – all your favorite
things. The sunset is dazzling and there are birds and butterflies
everywhere.
And at the bottom of the wall is your
cheer squad! They are like swirling vortexes of light – sometimes taking
an almost human form, other times appearing to have wings, but most of
the time they are just these bright blazing beautiful beings of LIGHT.
And they are having a party in your honor. You can FEEL the pride
emanating off them and it makes you feel invincible.
“I’M THE KING OF THE WORLD!!!” you yell (because you always wanted to have a Titanic moment and you reckon you earned it).
The next day dawns on your new life – the
chapter of ‘The Untangling of the Wires’. As the sun rises you can see
that the new land gets more magical the further away from the wall it
goes. Directly on the other side of the wall it could almost be the old
world – the best parts of it – but as you move further forward it
becomes something else entirely. The sight is all the inspiration you
need and you set about your new task with renewed enthusiasm.
You look down at the tangles of barbed
wire, and realize that they have truly wrapped themselves around you in
the night. You suddenly realize how uncomfortable you are, the wire is
wrapped around your throat and body like a boa constrictor and it feels
HORRIBLE. After becoming free of your concrete heaviness you felt so
good, and now you feel like you’re almost back at the start once again.
You feel stuck in a new way – not from heaviness this time but from
these wire vines that cut into your skin. You sigh and try to remain
positive but everything feels bleak for a moment.
Then you bend closer to examine the
barbed wire strands. And you realize they have writing on them. Names of
people you knew in the old world. Stories of the hard times from your
old life. Sentences like “I am not worthy” and “I am ugly” or “I don’t
deserve to be happy.” Every single wire strand is covered with these
strangling statements and they all sound very familiar.
It isn’t until you really examine them
that you realize that these are the things you’d been repeating to
yourself every day in your old life. The names on the wires are all the
people who were mean to you or made you feel like it wasn’t ok for you
to be YOU. You realize in that moment that you’d ALWAYS been tangled in
these wires, it’s just that you could see them now. And you marvel at
how you’d lived your life like that – with insides full of concrete and
outsides wrapped in barbed wire. “What a way to live.” you mumble to
yourself, shaking your head. “No wonder I felt like I was never getting
anywhere.”
At that moment you hear a happy shout
from the old side of the wall. It’s a fellow Wall Traveller that you’ve
met a couple of times, who’s been working at the lightening game for a
bit less time than you.
“Oh my
God – you’re on the top of the wall!” she squeals, her face lit up with
excitement. “I wasn’t actually sure it was possible until I saw you up
there!”
“Yeah it
wasn’t actually too hard once I was light enough,” you call down to her,
feeling happy and proud. “I know you can do it too!”
“I believe it now,” she says with an ecstatic smile. “Wow I can’t wait, I’m going to go and work some more on my heaviness now!”
You and the fellow traveler say goodbye,
both of you feeling renewed by that brief encounter. And you set your
focus once again to the untangling of the wires. The more that you
examine them and the stories they tell, the more you realize that none
of the words on them are true. Or they are only true in the OLD world
and your OLD life, but not in the new one. You suddenly feel a NEW truth
beaming at you from the new world, and the more you connect with it the
more the wires loosen slightly on your skin.
“So
that’s the trick,” you say to yourself. “I’ve gotta fully let go of all
my old stories and fully connect with the NEW truth.”
And so you set about your new work,
constantly reminding yourself that you can do it, and being your own
cheerleader as well as your squad at the bottom of the wall. And some
days are just shit, and you feel more tangled and bloodied than ever,
and you just sit there and cry. But it’s ok, because the despair always
passes and you start again with renewed hope and determination.
Some days you cry again, but out of
sadness for yourself. You see how much you handed your power over to
other people and were the victim of other people’s manipulation and
attempts to bring you down. You cry as you see the way you played small
and shrank yourself to make everyone else comfortable. You see the ways
you put everyone else before you and sold yourself short. You weep as
you see how you swallowed stories about yourself that weren’t true and
stopped valuing yourself as a result. You see all the masks that you had
to wear and personas that you had to put on just to feel safe in the
old world. And all the ways that all these things echoed out into your
life and kept you invisibly stuck.
It takes a lot longer than you think it’s
going to. Because although 90% of you wants nothing more than to be
free of these wires that strangle you, 10% of you clings to them too.
Because they are all you’ve ever known. And although you can SEE the new
world before you, and how glorious it is, it is still unknown and that
is scary. So you have to gently pick out the barbs and unwrap the wire
stories because if you yank them away you create wounds.
It is slow work but so valuable, and day
by day you feel more and more free, and more and more YOURSELF. You
realize you were never truly yourself until now, and that the world
beyond the wall wants nothing more than for you to be who you really
are.
“What a
gift. What glorious freedom that is,” you think to yourself as you peel
away another wire. “I really really hope everyone gets to experience
this one day.”
Time moves on, and you feel a kind of
maturity coming over you. When you look back on your life in the old
world, you realize it was years ago that you left. You feel like you
were so young and naive that day you set out with your new camping gear,
and you smile with fondness at the memory. You feel like you’ve lived a
thousand lifetimes at the wall, and you feel ancient and wise – while
at the same time you feel you are becoming fresher and younger every
day. It is a wonderfully contrasting feeling. You start to really savour
and enjoy the journey, instead of always trying and trying to get to
the other side as fast as possible. You feel so blessed that you’ve been
able to have this experience and that you get to share it with your
fellow Travellers – who you still see every now and then.
The day finally comes when you are
sitting on the wall, totally free of the barbed wire that once
absolutely strangled you. And your team aren’t cheering this time.
They’d like to, but they’re all choked up. There is a reverential hush
over the crowd, and it seems like even the birds and animals are
silently watching with bated breath. Your team – with wobbly teary
smiles – place a ladder against the wall, and you take your first step
down the other side. Your legs are shaking, your heart is pounding, but
it feels right. You look to your right and left, and see that a small
handful of your fellow Wall Travellers are also embarking down their
respective ladders. You smile at each other and nod in mutual respect,
and slowly place your feet on the next rung, then the next, until you’re
standing on solid ground.
Then all hell breaks loose. There are
fireworks and party streamers and everyone is yelling and crying and
cheering and shouting and hugging and dancing and it’s the most joyous
mayhem. Music blasts from somewhere and food and drink appear out of
nowhere and it’s one gigantic party. The ones still tangled on top of
the wall watch it all, laughing their heads off with tears streaming
down their faces. And the ones peeking through from the other side stare
in amazement at the sight. It’s the best day of your life – no, the
best day of your entire EXISTENCE. All that hard work, all that time and
effort, it was all worth it. SO WORTH IT. And now you have this
incredible new land to explore. You can hardly believe it has finally
happened.
Over the coming weeks and months you do a
lot of exploring, and what you find is beyond your wildest dreams. You
can manifest anything you want in this new land, simply by picturing it
in your mind. And soon you’ve built the house you’ve always wanted in
the most stunning location, with a garden absolutely blooming with
flowers and plants and all sorts of yummy food. Life is a magical
fantasy but it also feels so REAL. The old world feels like the dream
now. Like you were inside a virtual reality video game for a while and
you clocked it and went home. This is HOME. This is the REAL world.
And you realize that you are still
growing and evolving. The destination beyond the wall was only the first
step, the journey continues inside you and outside of you. But now
you’re growing through joy and love, not challenge and struggle. Every
day you feel like you are the total embodiment of your most awesome self
and it just keeps getting better!
But you are still drawn to the wall.
Because the greater your new reality is, the more you wish that everyone
could escape from their bad dream and experience it. And so you devote
yourself to helping the ones who have ventured to the wall and are
struggling to get up and over it. You don’t necessarily give them the
answers, but you love and support them like your team did for you. And
you know that just them seeing you there in the new world gives them
hope and helps them know that it IS possible, and they WILL get there.
As more and more people conquer the wall,
the holes become bigger and it starts to crumble in places. You all
realize it’s getting thinner and suddenly you all collectively
understand the next step in the grand plan. The wall needs to come down,
so that everyone can see what lies beyond their restricted reality.
Everyone will still have to lighten themselves – as that concrete
heaviness cannot exist in the new world – and they will still have to
untangle themselves from their wire bonds, but it will be easier. They
will have a much smoother time of it than the Pioneers of the Wall, and
they will have a grandstand view the whole time of what the destination
is – not to mention a hell of a lot of help and support from the other
side.
The day comes when the wall is so flimsy
and crumbly, it’s almost falling down of its own accord. And by now
there is a substantial crowd of Wall Travellers in the new world, ready
to push. As you all line up to bring about the final destruction of the
wall, you realize there is a crowd on the other side too. The people of
the old world aren’t shouting anymore. They are not hurling abuse and
judgment. They are standing there, their faces etched with a mixture of
confusion, fascination and hope. You recognize the expression from the
first time you glimpsed a world on the other side of the wall. It is the
dawning realization that there is more. And that revelation changes
everything.
You shout out to your fellow Wall Travellers, who have a new name now.
“LIGHTWORKERS READY!” you yell. “And… PUSH!!!!”
The united force of all the Lightworkers
launches itself against the wall and that crumbling stone comes tumbling
down once and for all.
The new world is officially open.
