Avoiding conflict because of a fear to speak your truth will not lead to peace! You need to find out what you are afraid of. FEAR! It took me years to understand that I had anxiety. If asked if I’d ever suffered from anxiety, I would reply no. It wasn’t until I went on my journey into awareness of myself that I discovered my body manifested hypoglycemia when I was anxious! I realized that each time I had a hypoglycemic attack it was preceded by the “fear” emotion. I’d had a thought that generated fear and that released chemicals into my body then causing me to need “a solution” to my supposedly condition which I was told was hypoglycemia but in actual fact was anxiety that caused hypoglycemia.
I discovered this while travelling through Israel in the middle of the desert. We were on our motorcycle and the darkness was engulfing us as we tried to cross the desert border from Israel into Jordan and was turned away. I had not had any hypoglycemia attacks in the 14months we were away and then suddenly I had one. As I sat on the back of our bike while we rode another hour to the next border crossing, I realised I was anxious and I knew what my body needed to “feel better”. As I couldn’t get sugar, coffee etc. Some food fix, I was left with this feeling and I asked myself why am I feeling this way? The answer was,’ because you are afraid.’ It was true. I didn’t like being on the Israeli Jordanian border in the dark of the night and this put me into fear. I realised that this was true my whole life.
That in fact hypoglycemia was caused because of my fears. It was a physical manifestation of an emotional reaction. My fears created the chemical reaction in my body – if I could find out what I was afraid of then I could heal my body. Everything we think becomes a physical reaction within our bodies; this is why consciousness is so important. I had to find out what I was afraid of in my life and why? Without the awareness of our own behaviours and the understanding of why we act and react the way we do, we may think we are being peacekeepers when in actual fact we may be doing more harm than good! I believed I knew myself and I was consciously aware of my actions. I spent a lot of time analyzing and making sure that I did things for a peaceful resolution only to find out that how I had been acting was out of fear and not love most of the time. It is said that only 15% of the population of the world are truly acting from this critical conscious level of ‘Love.’
I believe when more of us step into this level of consciousness the world will begin to shift to a more peaceful place. So how do we do that? I had to learn that there is intimacy in conflict. It is in the fearlessness to speak your truth but with compassion that will bring about peace. This is key “COMPASSION” that is what has been missing in our communication with others. Compassion transforms conflict into peaceful communication. Are you aware of how you communicate? Sitting at my home computer I heard a very strong voice come from my body, it surprised me. We are all familiar with the mind chatter, voices in our heads! But the truth is, this time it didn’t feel like mine. At the time this happened I was watching a segment with Oprah and Eckhart Tolle. One of the ten part series Oprah did on Ekharts book – A New Earth. Looking back I can see that I was being held in a different space and time while watching this on my computer. I had shifted from the awareness of my house and the room I was in, into being with Oprah and Eckhart in that moment; I was present with them, locked in a time capsule. My husband walked into the doorway of our office and asked me a question, I don’t remember the question but I remember the voice in which I answered him with. It was strong and powerful. I was aware of him standing in the doorway still shocked at how I had answered him but for some reason it didn’t have any effect on me, I was caught up in this voice that spoke from my lips but didn’t feel like mine. This is when I knew I was in a portal, a gap between the worlds; some refer to it as Divine consciousness or Universal truth. In this state I was able to ask questions and receive answers freely. I went inwards “watching” asking myself, “Who was that”? the voice said, “We are not doing this anymore” when I said, “who was the we and what are we not doing anymore,” the voice went onto say, “We are no longer saying yes when we mean no” I thought to myself, I have”? it went onto say “You will use Truth as your compass but you must do this with the upmost compassion for your husband – because he will surely not understand.” I asked several other questions and I was shown how in the past I had been acting and why, I was in the now, present and shown my future too! I saw that I had not been speaking my truth for fear of conflict and a deep belief that I had to protect myself and others. This day changed my life! I saw that because of my personality, upbringing and conditioning I had grown up avoiding conflict at all cost and become a peacekeeper within my family. With this combination it showed me that I had learnt to manipulate and lie to create what I needed. Peace was my addiction and I would do anything to get it! Some might say that is a good thing but I was shown that I was not helping myself or others in any shape or form on this path, I had to change. I was not being honest or living in my truth, I was not truly happy. In not speaking my truth I was not bringing any awareness to my behaviour or that of others – in other words when I said Yes when I meant no just because I was afraid of an argument or not getting my needs met, there was no healing or resolution, usually I gave in and became resentful and a martyr! I resented things and therefore I could not truly love because resentment blocks the ability to love. I had been living my life on auto pilot! Eckhart Tolle says, “The initiation of the awakening process is an act of grace. You cannot make it happen nor can you prepare yourself for it or accumulate credits towards it. Whatever you do will be the ego trying to add awakening or enlightenment to itself as its most prized possession. So if there is nothing you can do about awakening, if it has either already happened or not yet happened, how can it be the primary purpose of your life? Only the first awakening, the first glimpse of consciousness without thought happens by grace, without any doing on your part. Once this happens the process has started and cannot be reversed, although it can be delayed by the ego. “With the Grace of awakening comes responsibility.” If my husband hadn’t interrupted my trance I was in in that moment I would not have had the conscious awareness of this inner voice, so you see that was GRACE in action, that was my moment to change. Most of us whether we remember or not have had times in our lives where we have been an observer of ourselves. Remember the times you reacted and even you were surprised by your actions, that was you observing yourself. That is consciousness. A State of being where you have become an observer of yourself. A watcher of the doer. It was time for me to step into my own truth and be responsible for my actions and choices. I became a detective in my own life. I needed to understand why I had been unable to deal with conflict and was addicted to peace. I needed to find out why I had such a fear when it came time to speak my truth. I had to be honest about my own actions and discover the truth of my behaviour; I had to become aware, this started my path towards consciousness. I could not ignore the “voice”. Like Eckhart says, “You can either try to go on as if nothing has happened or you can see its significance and recognize the arising of awareness as the most important thing that can happen to you.” This is what I decided to do! “Opening yourself to the emerging consciousness and bringing its light into this world then becomes the primary purpose of your life.” It is for this very reason that one starts down the path of becoming conscious. I often think about words and how they are perceived by all of us differently, as in the word TRUTH. Think about it – what is truth? Your truth, my truth, the truth, how do we know what the truth is? The truth is we don’t unless we are consciously aware of our thoughts and actions! I started speaking from “my truth” fearlessly, with compassion, knowing that it may not be “the” truth but how else was I going to find out my truth. I became very vulnerable and courageous. I was determined to find out why speaking my own truth was such a deep fear for me. When you become aware that your behaviour has been on auto pilot, (pre programmed) when you realize that you have lived in fear not love and not always acted towards others from a fearless, detached, compassionate place, you need to find out why. In my need for peace I was not honest. In discussions with others ie my husband, I would assess the situation and then I would decide how to respond, to get the outcome I wanted, which was peace. It didn’t matter whether it was truth, quite often it was not my truth. I didn’t have the courage to speak my truth for a deep fear of being met with anger and conflict and I must say not getting what I wanted at times either, whether that was for myself or others, I learnt to manipulate. It was a form of protection, I was keeping myself safe but also I was not taking personal responsibility for my own decisions and choices. Many of us do this especially women because this is what we watched our mother do. You may say that I was consciously thinking, but the truth is I was responding from my auto pilot settings. The ones I was taught and watched others use when I was a child. You see my father drank in the evenings. When he drank he became unconsciously unaware of his actions and it frightened us as kids. We couldn’t trust him so I learnt that when people stood up, raised their voices and generally overpowered me with their energy that I was in danger and couldn’t trust them. This became my “wounded ego” and how I acted in the world. I learnt as a child to make myself small, quiet and generally slink around so as not to wake the dragon so to speak. I handled conflict in my life exactly as I had watched people close to me handle it, ie mother and sisters, and let me tell you they were’nt exactly honest either, because we were all doing the same thing. If you don’t become a detective in your life and find out why you act the way you do you run the risk of living your whole life from your wounds of the past in either a passive or aggressive way and creating wars. Even the ones that did take the courageous road and spoke their truth and went into the conflict as children they didn’t fare well either, because it wasn’t safe. They were dealing with unconscious people too. I can assure you the results were not peace and not pretty so no wonder I learnt to avoid conflict. Even though I adored my father and we loved each other very much it didn’t matter because its what I watched as a child that moulded my beliefs. I now understood that if I want to be happy in who I am, I have to expose all my true colors and understand why I do the things I do. I had to become aware of my own behaviour. I made a choice to follow the voice and speak from my truth. This became my tool. I had to find out what my wounds from my past actually were and how was I going to heal them? I didnt have to learn my truth, I always knew what and how I wanted to say, but it was a story in my head that I was telling myself, that if I spoke my truth something bad would happen or I wouldn’t get what I needed. I would overthink, overanalyse the effects of speaking my truth and I would compromise myself. I would manipulate to get what I needed which was peace! The experiences of my life became my stories in my mind those then became my truth only not the truth. Once I became the detective in my life I figured this out and I was able to heal the stories of my childhood ie no more stories of how my communication was going to go down just in the moment truth. You see I believed that If I spoke my truth it was going to be bad but I discovered that I was wrong on most occasions. I suppose if it had always been safe for me to speak my truth then I would not have developed this programming. But because it wasn’t safe and I saw that growing up. So As an adult when I got into my own relationships, the damage had already been done. My stories in my head, my pre programming started to play out, the stories of my past and because I believed these stories to be true they became my realty. They became my wounded ego. In order to get back to truth you must use awareness to disidentify with your ego mind, your woundedness, it is not your truth; this is how the healing happens. If you believe the stories of your programming then that makes them true that then becomes your Wounded ego. Do you realize that you could be running your whole life from outdated beliefs and you may be approaching communication from completely the wrong angle and actually causing conflict, as I was! So you see being a peace keeper can actually create the very conflict you are trying to avoid. Do you know how you communicate? I have come to understand that every human being has two personalities. One being its true self and the other being its ego self. The ego self starts to develop within the child when there is a real or perceived threat to its survival. Think of it as an overprotective parent who lives in fear for that child. What happens is that as children we do not have the intelligence or understanding to deal with pain so we develop our “wounded ego’s, like an alternate personality “our big brother” that fights our battles for us. This you will see comes in the form of reaction when in communication in your life! These ego’s stay with us our whole life and determine how we act and communicate in the world. Unless we realize that we are wounded and acting from this place we will not know to change them or look at them or even realize that they exist. Unfortunately we decide that it’s just “our personality” it’s just the way we are, this is not so. If you do not have peace in your communication on either side it is because there is an unhealed wound. When we become detectives in our lives we finally understand what is going on within us, then we are on the road to happiness and peace. Once we have determined that our wounded egos are from pains of our past then and only then can we go into them and heal them so that they no longer control our lives. All too often we believe that in order for us to have a happy, peaceful life someone else needs to change, this as I discovered is not true! When you understand yourself to the level of this awareness then you will see that no one can affect you because you have become fearless to live in your own truth and this is what creates happiness and peace. You are ready to take on the full responsibility of your own life. I am a Consciousness Coach and this is my objective in my work and I’m passionate to help others discover the truth of themselves. We humans have become so codependent that it is at a dangerous level. Until we learn to live in our truth and allow others to live in theirs we will not achieve a peaceful existence and I believe if we want that in our world it needs to start with each one of us. If you ever are questioning how you are communicating just ask yourself are you coming from Love or Fear? If the answer is Fear then ask yourself, what are you afraid of? Be the detective in your own life and find out. Peaceful communication is a reality but it’s up to you! Chental Wilson-Consciousness Coach Author of – Can I Be Me without losing you? Excerpts take from A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle http://www.chentalwilson.com